Signa said:
Saying dumb things is different than telling an offensive joke. I laugh at dead baby jokes, but the are admittedly tasteless. I understand anyone calling someone an idiot for telling those jokes, but it should be up to the recipient to just ignore them instead of critiquing them. Now if we're talking about creationist theory, that's another matter entirely.
Sometimes ignoring things is the best option, true. Especially when we are talking about dead baby jokes or other things that are meant to be offending.
Then complaining that it's offensive is a moot point, that's the point of it.
But I'm talking more about instances where the person telling the joke doesn't necessarily understand it's offensive. And of course it should be ok to criticise the context of the joke, for example if those dead baby jokes were really out of place with the rest of the tone of the game/movie/etc, or in something aimed at children, for example.
Signa said:
You're a girl, right? Tell me how you think that culture has expressed that you shouldn't enjoy yourself because you have boobs? Gaming can be an universal unifier. People love to have fun and compete, sometimes in a cooperative setting. I say "people" because I mean everyone. Yet women around me don't have that interest. There's a few that do, and I fully commend them, but I've have friends who's wives will leave the room and go do her own thing not because it's "guy time" but because she doesn't give a damn about the things we find fun. This saddens me, yet it's their choices that have formed my opinion on this matter.
Well, I come from a different culture than you, presumably, and among other things got bullied at school for liking video-games and the colour blue (because those are boy-things), but looking at video-games themselves, which is a cultural aspect we mostly share, there's less female protagonists, the design of the female characters is often sillier (even if you have some choice in designing your character, the boobs for example are huge, and the outfits skimpy.)...
Not to mention, if there's not many female gamers, people automatically think gaming is a guy-thing, so girls and women assume that as well, and conform to the expectations, without even thinking about it. Groups we hang out in reinforce our behaviour. For example, a group of boys and a group of girls hang out. The boys play video-games, because that's just something you do. So even the boys naturally get involved in the games.
There's also the image of childishness that's still attached to video-games.
When people say a video-game is 'mature', they will probably mean it has boobs and guns. Which isn't exactly that mature. But culture might be more inclined to allow men to be childish like that, and cater to that demographic.
I don't know how representative of women in general this is, but looking at the people I grew up with, both girls and boys played video-games. But at some point girls started to consider them childish, and moved to other things.
Signa said:
Bah, fuck Chell. Chell is a blank slate that doesn't do anything for either gender.
That was my point. Chell's gender doesn't matter, at all. She just happens to be female. But way too often the asumption is that making a character male is the neutral thing to do, so characters whose gender doesn't matter tend to end up male.
Signa said:
The only counterpoint I can make is the characters needs to be part of the setting of the game, and forcing females into those settings might not work right. I'm talking about competitive (using the word loosely here) games like TF2, CoD, or Tribes: Ascend. Every one of those games features a setting involving waring factions that women likely wouldn't be a part of, and if they were, probably would end up as targets for looking different and standing out.
I don't play those kinds of games much, but looking at TF2 characters, for example, it's not like they went for realism there. Many games don't, and there are female soldiers as well.
