Home for spring break and determined to get none of that ?exercise? BS, I found myself patrolling the scarcly stocked selves of my local Blockbuster. It?d been a while since my last visit and I had been cryptically warned that the setup had changed.
This was not a pleasant visit. Aside from being bombarded on all sides by Twilight displays I found that a lot of the games that I SWORE I had seen there were gone. But that wasn't the biggest issue, hooo-no....
In the center of the middle game aisle there was a shelf decked in bright pink with the label ?games for girls!? in a sickening flowery ?you-go-girl!? type font. And what was on the shelf? Wii Fit, some random veterinarian game, The Sims, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Cooking Mama (I wish I was kidding about this.) That was it.
Needless to say as a female gamer I was more than a little miffed. I know we?ve always gotten the short end of the stick (I remember how excited I was to find out that in Pokemon Crystal you could play as a girl and thus would no longer be forced to name my male characters ?Hannah? and pretend she was just a very butch collection of pixels) and while SSBB is still one of my favorite games to kick ass at it always upsets me when Samus emerges from her suit after a final smash ready to strike the sexiest pose possible in her more-than-skin-tight lack of suit.
So here?s my question, girls do you ever feel like I do? That we as gamers are a misunderstood minority whose skills are always in question and tastes are also misrepresented? And guys, what do you think when you see a chick with a DS in her back pocket or when you find out the dude you?ve been losing is actually a girl? Why is sexism running so rampant in the gaming world?
This was not a pleasant visit. Aside from being bombarded on all sides by Twilight displays I found that a lot of the games that I SWORE I had seen there were gone. But that wasn't the biggest issue, hooo-no....
In the center of the middle game aisle there was a shelf decked in bright pink with the label ?games for girls!? in a sickening flowery ?you-go-girl!? type font. And what was on the shelf? Wii Fit, some random veterinarian game, The Sims, Nintendogs, Animal Crossing, and Cooking Mama (I wish I was kidding about this.) That was it.
Needless to say as a female gamer I was more than a little miffed. I know we?ve always gotten the short end of the stick (I remember how excited I was to find out that in Pokemon Crystal you could play as a girl and thus would no longer be forced to name my male characters ?Hannah? and pretend she was just a very butch collection of pixels) and while SSBB is still one of my favorite games to kick ass at it always upsets me when Samus emerges from her suit after a final smash ready to strike the sexiest pose possible in her more-than-skin-tight lack of suit.
So here?s my question, girls do you ever feel like I do? That we as gamers are a misunderstood minority whose skills are always in question and tastes are also misrepresented? And guys, what do you think when you see a chick with a DS in her back pocket or when you find out the dude you?ve been losing is actually a girl? Why is sexism running so rampant in the gaming world?
