Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
Anna Anthropology, or auntie pixelante, designed a computer game called “dys4ia” to help people understand a trans person’s experience of decided to go on hormones. It takes no skill, and is more the kind of interactive art you might find in some installations.
Still, I thought it was kind of cool.
She’s also got a cool post about how not to write about a trans person, AND has a book coming out on 7 Stories called Rise of the Videogame Zinesters.
Here’s a cool article about women being sports fans AND consumers. The way she describes things is exactly the way I feel, as a musichead, reading something like Rolling Stone, which is still aimed at the guys.
It becomes a vicious circle: you have female fans of whatever sport/band/computer game, but when they go online & try to find more information, or community, they’re smacked down with some incredibly sexist image of women that puts them off. So they don’t join the forums, and the only woman who got past the stupid sexist image of women on the main page feels like she’s the only one around.
I’ve been Simming for nine years – played TOS (The Original Sims), Sims 2, & now Sims 3. I was even one of those people who test-piloted TSO (The Sims Online) because they apparently had my name on a list of people who really freaking loved the game. Betty & Bob Newbie and Mortimer & Bella Goth are all familiar names in our house.
& While I have reasonably successfully ignored Will Wright’s being a BOR (Big Old Republican), recently EA has just been teh suck when it comes to women.
I’m not even that offended by the “booth babe” idea, but what DOES offend me is the lack of recognition that someone might prefer a “booth boy” or that any of the people who might want to post with a “booth babe” might be women.
& All this while GLAAD is trying to get a conversation started about homophobia in gaming.
I am, sadly, setting aside my Sims playing until EA gets its shit together.
What bothers me even more about all this is that Wright is a right-winger of the Libertarian bent who should have no patience for this kind of heterosexist & sexist crap. As a capitalist, which I’m sure he is, he shouldn’t want to estrange any market. Sims always had the same-sex “woohoo.” Civil unions were in the first release of Sims 2, which came out in 2004, & they stayed put even through the great nudity scandal of 2005. Same sex marriage is possible in Sims 3… all of which all gave me the idea that this trans amorous het dyke was, um, welcome in the Sims community. Apparently not.
Will Wright, it’s time to issue a real apology to women, and to the LGBT communities, for encouraging this kind of bullshit. (& Yes, he’ll be sent a copy of this.)
(You can follow #EAfail on Twitter, too.)