- Share This Post
- submit
- 9
-
Sparkle (0)
What do you do when you have five minutes to kill, or an hour or two in the evening? If your answer is "I blow stuff up," or "I build little pixilated cities," then you and I have something in common. My development as a child went as follows: crawl, walk, kindergarten, Nintendo thumb, damn!
Sometimes I want to blow up new things, or build a pixilated mongoose farm instead of a normal, boring city, so I go to the Giant Electronics Store and peruse the shelves. Hmm. First-person shooter. Not my scene. Elves with giant boobies. Pass, although I'll take a moment to wonder if her outfit is held in place by fairy dust or double-sided tape. A game that was obviously designed to pander to the "elusive" female gamer audience. (Supposedly there are a metric butt ton of female gamers, but we are still elusive. Pow! Ninja skillz.) Finally, we come to the really redonkulous stuff, like simulation games for girls…about taking care of babies. My eyes, they bleed.
I'm not going to get into the tired male-versus-female-gamers thing, because it's been proven that while there are trends, everyone plays a little differently. Occasionally, my non-violent game loving self will absolutely fall in love with something out of my normal genre, like Dungeon Keeper. What I am going to get into is, what's out there? What's good? I decided to look around and see what other women thought about the games I play, and to check out their advice before I hit the game shelves and get overwhelmed or just disgusted. One thing I was interested to discover is that it seems like the majority of female-written and centered gaming blogs that I found (in my very random survey) had a deliberate feminist bent.
Mighty Ponygirl's Feminist Gamers is just what it sounds like: a blog written by three women who enjoy video gaming and approach the pastime with a feminist perspective, with an active community of commenters. FG is very friendly and casual, and the writers are often flip and clever. The only thing better than feminist gamers is funny feminist gamers. You have to laugh a little about the elf boobage, right?
Another cool blog is GameGirlAdvance, which has been running since 2002. In addition to reviews and articles, the editor and contributors talk about other aspects of "geek culture" such as video game cakes, which look potentially-tastier than Martha's Wired Wii, in my opinion.
I know next nothing about MMORPGs, except anecdotally, but I am also enjoying the voyeuristic peep offered by Liz into World of Warcraft. Lost in Azeroth is the writer's linguistic class project, and it looks like she may have put it down, but it is an interesting read, especially Being a Female Gamer for Profit.
Other Gaming Blogs Worth Peeping:
Girl In the Machine, a group gaming blog, is sometimes serious, with good analysis of current issues in the industry, and sometimes just very, very, lulzy, like today's article on EA's views on female gamers.
Guilded Lilies reviews games, as well as discusses hardware and other websites that focus on gaming.
Play Girlz reviews games, and discusses video games in popular culture, such as games being turned into movies. A little heavy on console gaming for my tastes, but still worth a look.
And I couldn't resist this...an interview with the developer of Centipede, the first game I utterly pwned all over the place. Sometimes I still have dreams that those little scorpions are skittering around. Who knew it was created by a woman?
So here's a place to jump into the pool of female gamers, and what they think about what's new in the world of games. Now, if only I could find someone who would guarantee Spore will be released in my lifetime, I will be content. Which women gaming blogs do you read, if any?
************
Your Pop Culture Librarian gets thumb cramps at I, Asshole almost daily.
