Girl Gamers and “Nude Raider”
Fascinated by Rehak’s article on “the Bit Girl,” I attempted to visit one of the websites he had mentioned- gamegrrzls.com. To save anyone else interested in this topic from the trouble, this site is no longer up. In its place are a number of interesting blogs written by hard-core (female) gamers, some of which you can reach by going here and here. The gaming landscape for women, however, appears rather bleak. Performing an internet search for “gamers” and “girls” yielded such completely useless results as playing a “makeover” game with clothes and accessories, or yet worse, games involving those ubiqitous and disturbing Bratz dolls.
Even more discouraging was an article from Forbes.com that I found on women who play games. The first words of the article are completely misleading- “It turns out that women do play computer games. And do they ever”- words that imply that the male-dominated playing field of gaming is being balanced with these hordes of female consumers now buying games. Further reading reveals, though, that women are considered “casual gamers,” which is different from the “hard-core” (typically male) gamers who play time-consuming games like WoW. Game companies are producing games for women like “Diner Dash” or “Wedding Dash” and these games are much cheaper and quicker to make because the companies don’t bother with making cutting-edge graphics for women like they do for their hard-core gaming male demographic. The obvious gendered connotations of a game title like “Wedding Dash” aside, it’s insulting that these companies don’t think that women are sophisticated enough gamers to appreciate good graphics and a well-made game.
Branching out in another direction, I also couldn’t resist googling “Nude Raider” to see what popped up. Going against the grain of Rehak’s argument that Lara Croft fans never creatively produce anything not already condoned by the game’s producers, an article from BBC News points out that the game company threatened legal action against sites posting nude pics of its famous female avatar. The patch-making software that Rehak spoke of appears to be an urban legend, at least according to various game blogs. The nudie Croft pics still proliferate, but no one seems to know if the patch codes really worked (i.e. let you play Tomb Raider with a naked Croft). There was a web site, Nuderaider.com, but it was one of the first to shut down after the legal pressure from Eidos and Core Design.
wedding dash? dinner dash?
i could not be more repulsed. give me 007 over that crap any day.
ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.
Oh that Forbes article. Ha ha. They spend so much money trying to tell people what girls should play, or over analyzing things. Yeah, you saw your mom playing diner dash once, that doesn’t constitute all female gamers out there.
Such wasted money.
But funny story about nude raiders. One time we were doing SSC and we hear one of our healing paladin guys say in vent, “Okay, how do I turn off this nude mod?”
We laughed for days.
Thanks for linking us by the way.