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Dreadwroth posted:Uhhh I think I meant biological sex, but I am probably wrong so feel free to ignore my halfassed opinions on sexuality. And yes, gently caress the patriarchy. I think most people use the word "sexuality" as a synonym for "sexual orientation", but here's a dictionary definition, so... hmm. Also, since it may be useful to the thread in general, here's what the World Health Organisation says on "sex" vs "gender".
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Jan 18, 2014 10:51
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This thread reminded me of feministfrequency's look at heavily gendered advertising aimed at children. The context is toys but the themes carry across to computer games fairly well, I think. It brings to mind the concept of 'play' in children (human or otherwise) existing in part as practice or training for adulthood. And then of course the traditional patriarchal/misogynist/etc ideal is "women raise children, men raise money", so you get toys and games aimed at reinforcing these strict gender roles. Dolls for practicing child-rearing, for example. It always seemed so weird to me. "No, you're a boy; you can't play with dolls!" (Nevermind that dolls and 'action figures' are objectively-speaking the same thing.) It's like we don't value men being good fathers.
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Jan 19, 2014 06:06
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Panzer Skank posted:But the key here is how they're balanced. There's nothing wrong with the method in itself, but the problem comes when the points you score is only a bare fraction of what you need to unlock the next improvement. Good games have a solid balance so that the player feels like they're making real progress each time they gain more points toward something. A lot of these games are specifically balanced so that it feels more and more like a hopeless grind without spending real money. It boggles my mind that this kind of 'pay money to skip gameplay' design is so popular. I mean, you're literally paying money to not play the game.
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Jan 20, 2014 08:35
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Thanks Internet posted:So I'm pretty sure that ALL the girls in that kissing game have only one arm. It's like a Jurassic Park: Trespasser crossover. gegi posted:Clearly that ought to be a game where you throw water balloons full of makeup on moving targets, changing their appearance if you hit. Yeah, I was expecting something like the makeup gun in the Simpsons.
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Jan 22, 2014 04:16
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I only discovered hidden object games in the last few years sometime... and then got sick of them pretty quickly, BUT! I did quite enjoy The Clockwork Man. I'm a bit of a sucker for Victorian and steampunk art though, so it's maybe not surprising. It fits the pattern of "female protagonist getting poo poo done" too, so that's cool. There is a sequel, but I didn't like it so much; it went too far in the point-and-click adventure game puzzles direction for me. Never liked those games.
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Jan 23, 2014 09:01
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For games that let you choose character gender, I'll usually pick male first; I think it's part of gravitating towards characters that are closer to my physical-world self. For games like this that I play more than once (likely suspects being Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout and Skyrim), I usually alternate between male and female from one playthrough to the next. Just for the sake of seeing more art, really (male/female versions of outfits), and to see if anything else in the game changes (usually it doesn't). In some games I will go female first; if the male character customisation options are lacking in some way, for example.
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Jan 24, 2014 00:44
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Gaz-L posted:and on this note, why no lady crooks in GTA? "What do you expect, flowers to womans?" But yeah, I'd bet that "Girls can wear skirts or pants, but boys can only wear pants. It's not fair." is an observation made by millions of boys... before the indoctrination has fully set in. I know I said that when I was a kid. Actually I read somewhere recently that young boys wearing skirts was considered normal until around the start of the twentieth century or something. Edit: You know what, here it is. Antistar01 fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Jan 24, 2014 |
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Jan 24, 2014 04:50
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OwlFancier posted:My take is that it's sort of unavoidable. Gotta cover them boobs otherwise you get an AO rating. Yeesh, can you imagine the furore if they didn't? That hoopla around the time of Oblivion's release when it was found that the female character models actually had nipples (for some reason) was bad enough. It was like "Holy crap if you intentionally alter the game to remove female characters' otherwise painted-on underwear, you find that women have nipples you guys! SOUND THE MORAL PANIC ALARM!" (Incidentally I imagine the moral panic alarm sounding something like this.)
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Jan 26, 2014 00:55
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DairunCates posted:You know. The funny thing is that this isn't actually entirely uncommon in animation especially in newer generation games and movies. A lot of animators and studios will actually physically model the nipples on a character, because that subtle extra bit of deformation in the skin can actually effect how a good amount of cloth clothes fall off the body. Mind you, it's not a terrible difference, but as graphical fidelity gets higher, even the most subtle of mistakes become noticeable and even a bit unnerving (See Polar Express for the worst possible example of this). So, it's a noticeable enough difference in non-stylized games and movies that it can look off to some viewers if they closely examine the character model, and it's a small easy change. Mind you, I'm not actually sure if Skyrim does this so much as it was just a texturing issue, but it does explain why the practice is common enough that they'd have a template for it. OwlFancier posted:Depending on how you model the character, you might also put the apex of the boob-sphere where the nipple goes, giving it an odd pointy look. When I did character modelling we were always encouraged to make the vertex lines flow around shapes in the character model, so finding somewhere appropriate to put the inevitable bunches of vertices is a tricky thing. Veloxyll posted:They already had suitable textures from doing male torsos (since they are able to be topless in public) so it's just a copy paste job of the textures. Plus it probably got weird doing your render tests to make sure it looks right and then have this untextured blob in the middle. These are all good explanations for this sort of thing, and would mean that leaving the (hidden but for mods) nipples on female characters was just an oversight - because really, they'd have to expect the professional hand-wringers to kick up a fuss about it. I don't think this is the case with Oblivion specifically though. From things I've heard about Bethsoft, their art pipeline was not advanced enough (at the time at least) to be using techniques like the ones DairunCates mentions. Considering the quality of the final art assets, they were doing something wrong if it was that advanced. Also characters are most often wearing rigid plate armour and whatnot, so I doubt they'd bother. No, the base female mesh in Oblivion (sans welded-on underwear) from memory looks like a smooth featureless barbie doll (as you might expect), just with nipples textured on. It wasn't a copy of the male texture, either; it was different and intentional. I'm not about to put something like "oblivion nipple comparison" into google image search to try to find supporting evidence for any of this though, considering what certain parts of the Oblivion modding community are like. ... Ugh why am I talking about Oblivion nipples? I mean I guess it's sort of interesting when you consider that way back in The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, there was full-frontal male and female nudity and I don't recall anyone caring... but it's not really what this thread is about. So, er... on the latest update; the 'Barbie Roboticist's Lament' title made me think it was going to be about that bizarre-looking Barbie game that ripped off the robot characters from the Portal games. I think someone else linked that RPS article earlier in the thread. It looks just as vapid and simplistic as these flash games, really... I wonder how much of that is a "kid games" thing and how much is a "girl games" thing.
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Jan 28, 2014 01:40
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Panzer Skank posted:
That dogcat looks like it's wearing one of the My Little Ponies' tails as a toupee.
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Jan 28, 2014 03:29
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That sure is some nightmarish imagery. It's almost as if it's a subversive attempt at putting people off these random shoehorned-in brands, rather than a cynical attempt at getting kids to go "Hey, angry birds!" *click* [+1 advertising revenue counter] Also that Bunga Bunga game 
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Jan 29, 2014 03:42
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I cracked up at the stoned fairy. That'd make another great avatar, I think. I'd never heard of Monster High before today, so this is based on only those two clips that were linked to. Ghoulia seems amazing, but the rest... hmm. It got me thinking: what are some cartoons aimed at young(er?) people that are entertaining and have not-too-terribly-hosed-up messages? Well there may be a lot, I dunno; my brain went straight to Daria and got stuck there. drat I loved that show. In the 90s I was a teenager growing up in a small country town in Australia. It's easy to forget how isolating that can be if you don't really fit in, considering for example that the Internet wasn't really much of a thing yet. So the first time that intro came on, it was like a revelation. "That's me! (Only female.) I'm not the only one like this!" I remember it being really good overall at promoting individuality and whatnot. It's been years since I've watched it, though. I wonder how well it holds up today.
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Jan 31, 2014 01:16
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Tiggum posted:Daria is an excellent show. I think the only criticism I'd have of it was that as a teenager who didn't fit in I had this belief in my own superiority, and Daria does kind of reinforce that. She does grow as a person as the series progresses, but it can feel like the show is saying "Yes, you are better than other people, just as you've always thought." I'm not sure you could really get rid of that aspect of it without making the character less realistic and relateable though. That's a good point. No danger of me specifically at the time feeling superior, though. Ha ha haaaah.  Veloxyll posted:It took me a while to figure out that you meant Daria is a female version of you. Not that you were a female Daria. Hmm; according to the 'makeup and beauty' girl-games seen in this thread, I guess a 'female Daria' would be Daria in that episode where she puts makeup on and ends up looking just like her fashion-obsessed sister.
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Jan 31, 2014 08:01
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dijon du jour posted:Heat and tropics and summer and ovens and basting and Arrgh stop it it's too drat hot!  More seriously though, that was brilliant.
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Feb 1, 2014 02:12
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The only Star Trek I've seen is the 'Picard vs the Borg' movie and the two newer movies, so I can't really comment on overall themes, but I do remember it coming up in the 'Mystical Pregnancy' episode of Tropes vs Women.
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Feb 2, 2014 04:22
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This is less about 'girl games' specifically and more about the general scarcity of women in the games industry and what effect that might have, but here are a couple of stories from when I was in the industry: It was a relatively small team (20-30 people, sans outsourced art/QA, publisher-side stuff, admin, etc) and it was all men. Our producer would sometimes comment on this and say that it was the way he thought it should be. He would qualify that with horror stories from his time at other studios with sex-starved, super-awkward male team members being weird around the one or two beleaguered women on the team. For example, going into the office of one of the women to find a male team member lying on the floor talking to her rather than working. This producer saw his 'it's better to have no women on the team' attitude as being realistic and practical, I think, but it's pretty sad that that's the case. This was around six years ago though and again - small team - so hopefully it's better in larger teams and will improve as time goes on. One of the games we made had its own suite of misogynistic problems. Once we were able to get some kind of target demographic out of the (again, all male) publishers, they basically said they wanted to target lad culture. "A game guys might want to play when they come home from the pub", to paraphrase them. And so the game (a deathmatch game in the vein of Quake 3 Arena) had things like female character models with those weird upside-down bra-cups that somehow still prevent their breasts from falling out the bottom, plus an expensive live-action video advertising campaign featuring topless women and other assorted misogynistic things. (Topless women aren't necessarily misogynistic by default of course... but trust me; in this context - it definitely was.) We on the team had no idea these ads were being made, and first saw them at the same time as everyone else, when they went public. I remember we were just gathered around the monitor with our jaws on the floor, absolutely gobsmacked. It was awful. There was one thing that really stuck with me, though. I was a level designer, but I was also drafted into doing some writing for the game. Besides random stuff for the website and other promo material, they also got me to write the player barks; taunts, when hit, when killed, when picking up weapons, etc. The publishers used a bunch of them, edited others, and added their own. I was fine with that in itself; I found writing the barks really hard, and thought I did a fairly bland job overall. However, one of the 'when killed' lines - said by female characters only - was: "I've been banged!" Again, didn't hear about this until all the voice acting was already done. I was absolutely furious, because... well, seems like a thinly veiled rape joke, of course. I complained about it to the producer, and besides seeming slightly bemused at seeing me actually angry about something, he said he'd see what he could do about the line being 'accidentally' left out when they were all hooked up to the game events. That didn't happen, for whatever reason, and the line stayed in. I had to let it go, in the end; it wasn't up to me, and we were in crunch mode by that point. Tons of other problems to deal with. Ugh.
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Feb 3, 2014 03:37
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A friend at Uni had a naturally occurring white streak just like Rogue. She had a birthmark on her scalp there and all the hair that grew out of it was white. The resemblance was... uncanny, you might say. 
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Feb 4, 2014 04:51
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Gyre posted:While looking around dressupgames.com I found the artsiest of all dress-up games: http://www.dressupgames.com/fashion/erte-elegance-5234.html This thing is gorgeous; not at all what I expected from sites like these. I've never touched one of these dress-up games before and don't know much about fashion, but here's my go at it:  Also, mascot stoned fairy is awesome.
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Feb 5, 2014 02:48
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Honorific! posted:More importantly, I have discovered that there is NO LIMIT to the amount of bows you can put on your character! UNLIMITED BOWS (and ruffles, probably) does sound like Rococo in a nutshell.
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Feb 6, 2014 03:11
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Honorific! posted:I made a new ultimate ruffle dress just for you. And added the HUGE FABULOUS HAT for Small Frozen Thing. Oh well, maybe the game's based on the 'Ruffle Drought' period of Rococo, in which demand for ruffles outstripped supply. (I am making this up.)
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Feb 7, 2014 03:17
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I was actually eating lunch while watching the latest video. Suddenly, eye surgery!  It really was a surprise. Like everyone keeps saying, who would expect something like that in amongst games mostly about putting shiny things on faces/feet? As soon as you put yellow eyes on that petulant bride in the wedding game though, my first thought was of Beth Ditto from this Gossip album cover. So that's cool.
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Feb 8, 2014 05:30
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Senerio posted:I tried to find good (for streaming) Totally Spies flash games for my Girl Games Stream #2, but the official website opens all their games in a new window in like 200x200 resolution. I don't know the specifics of what you're talking about, but maybe try ResizeEnable or something?
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Feb 11, 2014 06:40
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Dr.Smasher posted:I'm trying to imagine the audience for a Mitt Romney dress-up game. There can't be anyone on this planet that believes it was a good idea. I don't think there's enough  in the world for all the games in that video, really.I can only imagine the thought process is something like "We need some character or personality people will recognise so we get ad impressions. Something, anything! Er... Stay Puft Marshmallow Man! Okay, churn out a cookie-cutter Stay Puft Marshmallow Man dress-up game."
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Feb 18, 2014 02:39
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The Beautiful Car bit was magical. The overpowering music reminds me though; sometimes it's a bit hard to hear what you're saying over some of the music in the videos.
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Feb 20, 2014 12:48
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Ada?! Hey, it's that dog! Ada wearing that fancy red evening dress with the intention of traipsing around the Not-Spain wilderness always bothered me a possibly unreasonable amount. She had a much more sensible outfit in one of the bonus modes where you play as her.
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Feb 28, 2014 01:05
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It reminds me of this classic:  
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Mar 5, 2014 00:45
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Zoe posted:...also, holy poo poo, I just realized Amazon is selling all the old Carmen Sandiego cartoons for $7. Forget my nieces, time to go hang out with the greatest female role model from my childhood for awhile... I could never work out the Carmen Sandiego games; too complicated for me at the time I was exposed to them (primary school). No, The Oregon Trail on Apple IIe was where it was at for me back then. Ugh so old...
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Mar 9, 2014 13:30
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That adorable puppy game is just missing the part where the dog bolts outside after the bath to roll around in the grass/dirt as hard as it can.
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Mar 21, 2014 00:06
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I remembered average body temperature as being around 36.6 degrees Celsius, but apparently it varies based on a wide range of things, and the average is around 37 degrees. So that doesn't seem too bad as a kind of target in that otherwise bizarre game about reducing fever via kissing.
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Mar 27, 2014 06:15
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gnome7 posted:Holy poo poo that Reverse Makeover game is REALLY NOT OKAY. Why does that exist. Why does this exist. ARGH. Yeah, that was appalling. It reminded me of those 'games' where they get a photo of someone's face and simulate bashing them up. Not a good thing to be reminiscent of.
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Apr 15, 2014 06:11
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I usually like to think I'm at least somewhat conscious of all the horrible objectification, sexism, etc ingrained in our culture/s, but hearing it all laid out like that in the second-last video... that sort of thing always gives me this feeling of creeping horror at how insidious it all is. So thanks for that.  More seriously though, thank you for all your hard work on the LP, DeVac! I can't really imagine a better ending than that final video. That impromptu blue-paint solitary tear really was too perfect.
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Apr 19, 2014 02:10
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