Marleigh Norton was attending a technical lecture on software architecture in video games last year when the presenter, an established game designer in his late 30s, clicked on a PowerPoint slide innocuously entitled “Dialogue Trees in CRPGs.” She found herself staring at a close-up of a voluptuous female buttocks.
For Norton, cofounder of and game developer at the Cambridge-based Green Door Labs, the slide and snickers that rippled through the predominantly male audience were reminders of the “boys locker room” mentality that permeates much of the video game business.
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Pretty far down on the list of things that keep me awake at night.
One of the trademarks of a sociapath is an inability to empathize with others. Too bad you're completely devoid of charm.
“None of the outfits the guys created were very appealing,” Bisceglia, 25, recalled. “When you build games for a male and female audience, you need men and women working on the games.”
This is also a pretty sexist interpretation of what women can bring to a gaming company. : /
Thank you, HarryRPitts, for your dismissive comment. Really helps to put things in perspective.
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This is an "industry" that shouldn't exist, yets is worth BILLIONS of dollars. it is a brain-and-body wasting dump. Couldn't these people find something better to do with their talent?
I don't understand your comment at all. I enjoy thrillers, detective stories too. Do you? If yes, then why is the Tex Murphy and the Still Life series (another series with a great female lead FYI) any more brain wasing than thriller novels and detective movies? Why is this particular media a dump when it is delivering precisely the same kind of material but in a different way ie via interactive story telling, which requires problems solving and immerses you in beautiful visuals? Do you like Tolkien-esque novels? Then what's the matter with Dragon Age? Do you like Sci-Fi? Then I would suggest to you that the game, Blade Runner, is deeper and requires much much more brain power than the film by the same name or the story that inspired both. I suspect you too are not informed about the very thing you're commenting on.
Off the top of my head, jsut a few of the female characters in games who are not sexualized - Jade from Beyond Good and Evil; Grace from the Gabriel Knight games; Erica Reed from the Erica Reed games; Sam from Gray Matter; Morleen Corley from Full Throttle; the lead character in Mirror's Edge; Samus the lead in the Metroid games; Alyx Vance from the Half-Life 2 series -- and the list goes on and on. These are just the ones I can think of quickly off the top of my head. The writer is not sufficiently informed on the topic to publish an article about it. This is just a case of a person who is not familiar with the subject spewing common misinformation.
Then there's Ellen Page starring in the soon to be released Two Souls, the lead character of every Blackwell game, of Emerald City Confidential, the female characters in Jade Empire, and the ability in any decent RPG to create a female avatar who looks any way you like including like a Mac Truck if the player is so inclined. I could sit here all day listing well rounded non-sexualized female characters in games, but I have other things I've got to do this afternoon.
Get a grip. Does anyone really believe this is a serious problem?
So we now allow Women to be in front-line combat positions in the U.S. Military, but the women in the video game industry are so fragile and weak that they simply wilt in the face of that male oriented culture. C'mon ladies, which on is it?