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Rahonavis posted:Or an actress who must play different characters and wear setting-appropriate costumes. Or -goodness- a field biologist who needs to dress for different environs and gather the appropriate equipment. And any of these could be the first level of a more elaborate game (spy interacts with different people and gathers information, actress memorizes her lines and discusses the process of making the movie with the other filmmakers on set, scientist explores the environment taking photos and asking questions and observing. Crap, I just made myself want to play every one of these!) I think we totally played that game too, and it was called Storybook Weaver? There was also another weird game called Wiggins in Storyland, with minigames and also a story mode that worked in similar ways but was more limited than Storybook Weaver. My sister just reminded me that you could also force-feed Wiggins fruit juice until he barfed, so that there's my girl gaming history. I had a similar mindset growing up where I decided to reject all girly things, out of a combination of not liking to be stereotyped into them and the idea that they also were sucky because they were girly. Now I like many girly things! And do not give two shits about many others. It can be hard, though, to not get defensive about the things I am girly about. It feels like you're giving up the fight and giving into weakness if you want to just look pretty. Also girly things are presented as being terrible and inferior, and it's hard to not internalize that to some extent. Like I love playing the Sims, and spend hours and hours on it. I'll get super into dressing them in their little outfits and setting up their houses just so. It makes me feel ashamed to admit it, though, because it's got a reputation for being a stereotypical dame game, all with articles and poo poo being like wow why is this game so appealing for women?? I guess because clothes and things??? I know intellectually it's just a straight up popular game across all genders because it's fun, and that also I think that dame games are perfectly fine things to exist. But that doesn't really stop the knee-jerk stupid gamer shame when I go to Steam and see my hours played on Sims Medieval are catching up with my hours played on Skyrim.
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Jan 18, 2014 04:54
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Tiggum posted:I played a lot of The Sims, but I feel like the expansions and sequels lost sight of the whole point, which was that it was a dollhouse with animated dolls. When it started getting to be more of a game, with goals and challenges, than a toy, where you can do whatever you want, I lost interest. I want my dolls to like who and what I tell them to, not dictate their desires to me. Yeaaah, I think part of my discomfort with playing Sims is also that they're getting increasingly half-assed, and I kind of hate throwing money at them for that. ALSO, it's less fun because the clothes in Sims 3 are largely weird and tacky as hell. And yeah, they don't really seem to get what actually made it fun. It's like they're going but... where the game in this game? The dressup and customization aspects are what drive most of appeal of the game, which is hard to get, because it's hard to point at it as actual gameplay as we're seeing here. I guess it depends on how much a game has to be giving you a goal to work towards, or if it counts if it just enables you to find your own goal and work towards it. These dressup games pretty much only have the second kind of goal, which feels like it should but also feels like it shouldn't be a game. I mean, when I'm playing a dressup game I have fun doing it, and it feels like gameplay in that I'm working towards a goal even if it's one I made up. But it does feel kind of hollow at the end when my reward is to just kinda stare at the outfit and be like "Yup. I like that," and the game doesn't give two shits either way. But at the same time, dressup games that do give me goals start to get kind of annoying. I want to be free to decide what looks good or not, game! But also read my mind and reward me for what I think looks good, I guess! The kinds of goals these dressup games specifically are assuming you want to be working towards are also all kind of terrible, which doesn't help to keep people from dismissing dressup games as a whole entirely. The Ivy League Roomates one was actually not half-bad about its implicit goals. It had a little bit of story going on in that you could decide on the roomates' personalities a little through their dress and not just dress them for maximum pretty. The major issue it had is that it's like "These girls are in an ivy league school! Most importantly, though, what are they wearing?" I mean, they probably just wanted a vaguely interesting setting for your dressup - there's only so many proms you can go to. But when everything else a woman does is judged in parallel to how she looks doing it, and that's the only game that has any ivy league context, it comes across as more of the same.
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Jan 18, 2014 20:22
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