Ultimately, though, I need games to have a few more girls in them because it’s just downright *weird* that they don’t. Girls are pretty much an epidemic. We get everywhere. We do all kinds of stuff. There really are an awful lot of us around. That we still run out of entries for the Great Gaming Leading Lady Pantheon before we run out of fingers – Samus, Lara, Jade, Faith, Nariko, April, Yuna, the chick from Urban Chaos… – is just plain odd…
One of the great things about ‘geek’ is that it’s a gender neutral term. The price of entry is knowledge and enthusiasm, and anyone who can pay is welcome – regardless of sex, age, race, sexuality, religion, political affiliation or haircut. It’s one of the things I love most about this industry, and one of the things that frustrates me most about the products that represent it. We’re a diverse, welcoming and non-judgmental bunch, in my experience, but our games make us look like an outreach programme for the Ayran Nation.
And if that weren’t enough for you, try this vid, which asks why more women aren’t interested in blockbuster console titles:
So, here’s what would be cool: A Grand Theft Auto game with a female lead. One where she’s not a hooker, stripper, or waitress. Can she still be a con artist? Hell yes. Can she still beat up/shoot up/blow up cops, thieves, or whoever else she wants to? Absolutely. But she has to operate in an open world where gender has consequences. That means she’ll get hit on. All the time. GTA prides itself on gritty realism, and it’s time that realism got, well, real.
Via Making Light, we have a foully erudite, fantastically observed explanation of why people still love Silent Hill 2, including why the story needed to be told via a game rather than a book, film, or zoetrope. (Wait until he mentions imperialism. Make sure your drink is well away from your keyboard.)
God, I have such a serious urge to go kick the shit out of some vomiting ghost babies, right now. Which is sad, because I’m woefully bad at playing these games — I love everything about them except how hard I suck at them. I even like the parts that Ben Croshaw hates, because the story told from game to game is a total tease that never fully explains the cyclical nature of the town’s sudden impositions on consensual reality. Unlike another famous survival horror franchise, Resident Evil, there’s no overarching goal to be met regarding the origin and ultimate destruction of the town’s threat. The series is about escaping with your life intact, if possible. That’s it. That’s the larger horror. You go to Silent Hill with a goal, you find out that your goal is a fool’s errand and you were an utter moron to even consider achieving it, and you leave with psychic wounds so big and so fresh they make your daddy issues look like a stubbed toe. It’s complete nihilism from start to finish.
Jon lay on a white leather divan, utterly unaware. The two girls who sat beside him every day in literature class were drawing on him with calligraphy brushes. They had duct taped tracked pens to each brush. A little remote infrared camera sat atop a humming portable projector. Another camera sat on a tripod beside it. On a monitor at their feet, Violet watched a digital iteration of Jon’s supine body slowly acquiring each mark, each brushstroke. The girls had made him into an infoboard, and seemed to be broadcasting the result. Both versions of Jon wore only swimming trunks.
That was inspired by Johnny Lee’s work on Wii-mote cameras. Check out what Mr. Lee is doing now:
This “vision video” indicates what Mr. Lee and his fellow designers would like to make possible with Project Natal, an extension of the Xbox technologies. He describes it better than I can:
The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost. Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera.
I post this because my friend Jerry told me he would be running into Mr. Lee Saturday evening (a fact that makes me positively green with envy), and I gave him explicit orders to corner the man and tell him that he had inspired a beginner science fiction writer. Given the publicity and utter coolness of Project Natal, I’m sure I won’t be the only one.
I’m posting this footage for Death Ray, and anyone else who’s curious about a possible followup to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, two of the most important games to come out of the PlayStation household in recent years.
...is a science fiction writer, grad student, おたく, and immigrant. She has lived on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Toronto, where she is now a member of the Cecil Street Irregulars and a contributor to both Tor.com and WorldChanging Canada. Her fiction has been published in Tesseracts, FLURB, and Nature.
