Gross. I threw up in my mouth. The worst of all is the browsers/women comparison... and the degrading Game Boy ad. Whoever came up with those, need some serious help.

When I was 13 I remember sitting w/ my buddies and comparing girls we knew to cars; who's the Corvette, who'se the muscle car, etc. Later a female friend did the same thing with us but with animals.

That was way back when. The idea that grown men would trade this kind of adolescent stuff shows how immature they are.

I'm reminded of Sync magazine which had half-naked women and gadgets in a classic (?) layout http://www.portigal.com/blog/ziff-davis-plans-to-close-sync-magazine/

Also, do you know about Moe anthropomorphism and it's subgenre (?) fursonification, here's a Firefox example http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/index.php/Firefox-ko and various OSs - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan

My lover used to adore playing Diner Dash and other games in that resource/flow-management style. She's a female, but who knows if that's in any way relevant.

I'm compassionate to the complaints about games marketed to girls reinforcing traditional gender roles, but I'm not sure the most likely alternative, ignoring girls completely as a target market, is any better. At least games like Diner Dash are about topics other than blowing stuff up and killing people (not that there's anything wrong with blowing stuff up and killing people).

Oh, here's something you'll love. It's a parody, but still.

In terms of associating gender and gendered characteristics to technology, you haven't seen anything till you've seen OS-Tan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS-tan): diminutive anime-like characters representing the dominant operating systems of the world.

@Joshua
Apologies if the point came across poorly.
What I was trying to say:
We women want to play these games too. By including sexist, misogynistic, and objectifying material in their games and ads, videogame companies are not only insulting us by the inclusion of such material, but by the implication that we have no interest in playing these games.
By then creating these other games, which market only at very restrictive female stereotypes, featuring hugely gendered promotional material, they are further insulting us.

By dismissing my entire argument and simply addressing me with "Well, you're wrong because this one phrase here is semantically contradictory!" You were insulting me.

The 'Chrome' image was photoshopped to look like that for thinspiration communities. It is just one of many photos of seemingly shockingly thin models who aren't actually that skinny in real life. They are created for young women to worship and aspire to. It is an area I would be interested in seeing you cover, actually.

I'm not sure what the PS3 ad is doing in there. Especially since I think it's a pretty good ad obviously aimed at people who play video games, and it's not trying to seduce anyone who doesn't already like games. Not to mention, I can tell you right here, right now, I've made every single one of those faces and more while playing video games. (I'm not sure this matters or not, but I'm a girl. Although I will say that I like games that I would consider to be unisex like Super Mario Galaxy, Mario Kart, Legend of Zelda, and Okami.)

What I think is good about that one is that for every guy that they show, they also show a girl playing.

'Time Management' games are a kind of neutered subclass of *resource* management games. I've written a few reviews of these, and I find it interesting that these games are a) almost uniformly marketed as 'girl games' and b) remove any sort of significant *decision making* regarding money, company development, sourcing or marketing etc. and concentrate on the daily tasks of a low-level service employee or franchise store manager at best. Almost as if designers don't believe women could be or would be interested in upper management.

Also, as an androgynous crossdressing gothboy, I read about the cell phone sceen that turns into a mirror and immediately thought 'OMG that would be so useful'. They're missing an untapped market.

The art director of Virtual Villagers and Virtual Families is a woman. Also, VF and VV are not time management games, they are sandbox-style simulation games, like the Sims. Also, in those games, male and female characters can take on dozens of roles, with males able to take on tasks that have been often portrayed as the role of women traditionally (house cleaning, child rearing) and women taking on tasks that are often portrayed as masculine masculine (research, construction).

So exactly what is your point? I know what my point is, that you owe Last Day Of Work an apology for throwing their games in with misogynistic advertisements, while not taking five minutes to understand a thing about them.

There's a game where you "Create a Mall?" Now that sounds exciting! Do players need to get virtual environmental impact statements before they can break ground, or attend rezoning hearings? What's next, a game where the player is supposed to create an avatar and maneuver it through the Dept. of Motor Vehicles and renew its virtual car tags? Now THAT would be a challenging game involving time management, resource management, AND first-person shooter action (lines get long, tempers get short, gunfire erupts, it's the all-new DMV: Renew or Die!").

"Create a Mall" is even worse than Pac-Man (and of course Ms. Pac-Man, lol), which was a game that awarded points for 'consuming' and, well, that's all it did (though I guess being a consumer-bot training device may have been unintentional and a function of technical limitations at the time). But "Create a Mall" (among other games) doesn't get such a pass; it's a baldfaced propaganda tool for buying more crap. Go to a mall, buy a bunch of crap (and that game), go home and create a virtual mall where you can pretend to buy more crap, and then lemme guess: Suddenly you have a great idea; to go to the mall and buy more crap!

I have no comment on the gender/tech issue, but games that blatantly encourage such shallow consumerism can't be good for individuals or society even if gender stereotypes are totally absent.

In response to the original blogger, A) Virtual Villagers is a sandbox game, so people can play it however they like. If someone wants to min-max the game (look up the term) by designating women as "breeders" for purposes of efficiency, that's how they want to play the game. I don't choose to play the game that way, personally.

There's also ways in the Sims to wall up your virtual women in inescapable traps until they starve, go insane, and die. Does that mean Maxis and Will Wright are misognyist? Or did they just create an open-ended simulation where people can do what they like within the bounds of the simulation?

B) adding new features to game logic is difficult, and can create new problems. Especially for a small self-funded development team and a game development cycle of a matter of months. As I understand it, the balance of the game is that there's a risk vs. reward for having children. You're increasing your population, but there are "lean" times where you have a full time parent, and thus, one less able hand to research and gather food. The solution the developers came up with is designating the female parent as the caregiver, so they're unable to contribute to gathering resources. That's a very specific game balance decision. In game development, each feature needs a good reason to exist, because features complicate development, and create new problems.

Being able to dynamically choose parents, or hand the child off in real time would be nice for the shining beacon of egalitarianism, but it would likely complicate the hell out of the balance of population growth and resource management in the game, and require a lot more game logic to address. Also, it'd be far easier to exploit as a player. And that's what we're playing, a game. An abstraction for purposes of amusement. Built by a very small company with limited resources. Not a political statement. ;-)

Shodan:

Wow, take it easy on the Adderall.

I was really amused by discovering exactly what I thought I'd find if I googled your nym; "Shodan" is an AI character in a game, so I guess you take this issue personally (I'm assuming that in this context your nym doesn't refer to the restaurant in Montreal). A quote from her character at the top of its wikipedia page was beautiful: "Look at you, hacker. A pathetic creature of meat and bone, panting and sweating as you run through my corridors. How can you challenge a perfect, immortal machine?"

Well, how about by unplugging her? Or maybe waving a big magnet at her? And there's always thermite. How did they defeat the MCP in Tron?(Shodan sounds close enough to Tron for copyright issues) I also like how she is "...characterized by her megalomania and chaotic, discordant speech." Good choice! ;)

And despite your disapproval of my leisure activities, something tells me I’ve created a lot more for this world than you have.

I assume you are referring to your ego? Truly, I am awed by its majesty. I'd go so far as to say it's nearly on par with my own, which must be why you're so glad I'm here. In fact, back when I was in my early twenties I would probably have written about exactly what you did in your various posts. Then some interesting stuff happened and my perspective changed, like yours or anyone's has and will along the way (well, ideally).

Since you say you're 33, I need to revise an earlier statement to read "Let's talk again in 10 years" instead of 20. Anyway, back when I was 33 (yes, back), I had just returned to semi-urban (but not suburban) life after living in the woods with no electricity or indoor bathroom for 8 years and also practicing so-called primitive skills I'd been learning; the goal was living entirely off the land with no man-made tools (besides the ones I made) for longer and longer stretches of time. It was pure screaming hell. At first. But once I overcame the inertia of my suburban background, got my bearings, and practiced a bit I realized I could walk into any wilderness area and obtain shelter, fire, water, and food for myself for weeks on end without bringing so much as a knife (haven't tried a full four seasons yet). To me, that felt like a kind of freedom and gave me a level of confidence I spent most of my life not even knowing was possible (I had to take a bunch of classes first, lol). I never got anywhere near that feeling playing a game, though games can certainly make learning some things more enjoyable. By definition, a "game" is a trivial matter so I wouldn't expect such startling results from them anyhow. And I know the patronizing cheap shots you'll take at what I wrote above will be; I could write them myself, but it is what it is and when the power goes out or a big solar flare screws up the 'net for a while or my computer gets stolen I expect the world I can touch to still be here.

And as long as we haven't spent so much time in man-made universes that we'll feel lost when they vanish, we'll be fine.

Anyway, I’m in Portland, Oregon. Where, yes, people do in fact exchange US currency for goods and services. I’ve heard paper money is a pretty efficient way to do so! Perhaps you live on a barter system and grow your own vegetables?...

...Everyone who sells games wants to sell more games. Everyone who sells books wants to sell more books, and everyone who sells newspapers wants to sell more newspapers.

Now that was just fatuous and fails as any kind of response to my point and you're smart enough to damn well know it but you were too busy amusing yourself with being patronizing to care, I suppose. And for what it's worth, I do happen to use bartering as much as I can and grow about 3/4 of the vegetables I eat. We're still physical beings, so we can't eat sim veggies all the time. I hope you have some kind of relationship with soil, too. There's philosophy in the dirt, and working with it will bring it to you. I know, I know, you're a master gardener too and know all about that already, correct? Hydroponics doesn't count, btw.

But you were shocked by the mere presence of a “tycoon” game, something that is as common in PC gaming as romances are in the checkout line at Safeway.

No, I wasn't. I remarked about a game where the player creates a mall as as sign of the banality of e-life.

Why not fly a real F-14? Why not drive a real Ferrari 355? Why not be a real secret agent? Why not build a real space station? It’s a childish line of reasoning, and it doesn’t deserve any further attention.

Or heck, why not have sex with a real live person? (Sorry, couldn't resist)

Anyway, I'm an idiot so I'm giving it more attention... How exactly did we get from soccer to flying an F-14? Semantic games and straw men do not an argument make, unless it's really just about hearing yourself type (which it probably is, like it still sometimes is for me) . And it wasn't a line of reasoning, either. It was a question. So, why not play real soccer? Go play a game about flying a fighter jet or shooting hookers if no one will let you fly a real jet or shoot a real hooker, but virtual soccer and lemonade stands, fer chrissakes? Someone might prefer a video soccer game, but could that perhaps be a preference that's influenced at least somewhat by the inertia of physical exertion? That is, people at rest tend to stay at rest and people in action tend to stay in action, so a sedentary individual will have to overcome the inertia of inactivity before playing real soccer becomes enjoyable. At first, it will be painful and discouraging. Likewise, it's just as painful to transition from active to passive, so the inertia offers resistance works both ways.

It's also incredibly disingenuous to act like there's no difference between reading, pretending, imagining, or even dreaming and watching an electronic screen. Or looking at a painting, or reading Shakespeare. Whence cometh thine imagery, feelings, and thoughts when thou doth readeth some Shakespeare, or gazeth long at a Van Gogh? Methinks it comes from the place that's got more pixels than any computer; our mind. Computer games (and television) feed us imagery and lead us through thought-tunnels someone else designed instead, and it has a decidedly lower resolution in every literal and metaphoric sense of the word. After all, a painting is a painting, but a painting on your screen is really just coarse pixels that your mind calls "a painting" out of convenience.

Since this thread got a little cosmological, you're probably aware that all universes are fake, especially the real one. But some are bigger, deeper, and more interesting than others. As in any universe, 'big,' 'deep,' and 'interesting' are entirely subjective, but that's all we got so all I'm really doing is advocating spending most of our time in the biggest, deepest, and most interesting universe we can find (usually called 'reality,' but not always). When I dig deeper into reality (go down the rabbit hole, as it were) it gets curiouser and curiouser and curiouser still. When I dig deeper into virtual reality I quickly get to ones and zeros. Dig deeper than that and I'm back in reality because I'm dealing with hardware and electrons at that point. So, virtual universes clearly have their limits, and they're not very far away in my estimation. Although it might seem like games are only limited by our imaginations, they still must operate within the constraints of the medium and the power has to be on. Incidentally, I had to leave my computer off most of the day due to a series of strong storms. I've had various things fried by lightning before and seen blue sparks shoot out of my phone jack during a nearby strike, so I don't take any chances or trust surge protectors.

(it’s pretty hard for a social worker to be socially inept, but I appreciate your very serious concern!)

Not in my experience. Not by a long shot, actually. But that's another topic.

Interestingly, judging by the music and a couple of the shots in it, that Independent Erotic Animation Festival video appears to be a riff on Aphex Twin's "Windowlicker" video, which is itself a parody (though unfortunately one of those "parodies" that spends a lot of time uncritically portraying the thing it purports to criticize).

A few more examples of the assumption that the only audience for anything remotely "tech" related is male (and hates women):

http://css-tricks.com/examples/MovingBoxes/

http://css-tricks.com/css-is-like/

In response to the female web-browser comparison, I give you this:
http://community.livejournal.com/mac_hearts_pc/
Turning computers/web-browsers/electronics, and so on into people isn't something that only happens with women. I wonder, though, if men are chosen to represent this because the women who write the fiction don't have another outlet? Female-gaze?
Just thought I'd throw the link into the air, anyway.

Talking about sexism sure brings out the kooks.

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