Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pxtl | Hacker News Reader

That was really freaking long.

I can't help but notice the recurring theme that the actual game designers are trying to make fun gender-neutral products but the marketing and leadership is the source of misogyny. I mean, when they start talking about the PS1 era their examples are WipeOut (the only "gendered" thing in the game is the announcer) Tomb Raider (Croft has somewhat absurd proportions but she's a far cry from the kind of exploitative stuff you see in the Dead or Alive games and whatnot) and Gran Turismo (masculine only by the technicality that it's about cars).

I'm a guy, so this is obviously a "check my privilege" thing, but I feel like the misogyny of the gaming industry (and geek culture at large) didn't really take hold until console gaming went online and the collective sea of poop-throwing 4channers got their he-man-woman-haters club into games. The games were targeted at boys well before then, and the themes got heavily masculine in the mid-'90s with the FPS revolution... but the active You Are Not Welcome thing seemed to take hold later.

I mean, obviously geek culture was a bit unsettling for women before then because the combined awkward sexual frustration of a zillion nerds isn't exactly comfortable to be around, but I don't think the outright hatred of women had taken hold.

It seems like the door was open... not so much, anymore.

Funny, I don't think of it as misogyny as much as wasted potential in the industry. I greatly enjoy many of the male-targeted games today and have zero interest in a game like The Sims, but looking back I realize that many of my all-time favorites were fairly gender neutral. This wasn't because of any political correctness or some great social mission as much as simply games that were made to be fun without targeting to a specific demographic.

Thankfully, the PC indie game market seems to be recapturing much of that lost innocence in the industry (partly due to lack of marketing budgets which means they have to focus on the game being fun, first and foremost). I find myself playing a lot more indie games than AAA titles lately.

What articles like this completely ignore is that toy stores are not divided into a blue boy's section and a pink girl's section. There's the "girl's section", and then there's "everything else".

They are taking the fact that some things are marketed explicitly to women as evidence that everything else is marketed to men. It's absurd, but that's feminist navelgazing for you. Same reason they blame men for women's beauty standards, even though it's women and women's magazines who enforce them. Things marketed to women by women as being for women.

And then something like Goldieblox comes around that's like shitty pink meccano with dumb girlie stories attached to each box set, and behold! It's somehow going to set girls free of the pink tyranny... by being stereotypically aimed at girls.

Or you could just buy them ordinary gender-neutral LEGO. The one that boys and girls alike can enjoy.

Lego now makes a tonne of girly product, actually, starting with Disney Princess branded Duplo, and following into Lego Friends for the older girls. They do seem to avoid just slathering everything in pink, though, so that's something.

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