Pixie Trix Comix & Hiveworks Community

Bloody Vikings wrote:So, a recent survey found that 45% of all gamers are female.

Just thought it relevant to the strip's storyline, as well as some of the forum discussion.

That survey is probably accurate but I'm wondering if the majority of male and female gamers are casual gamers these days and that the hardcore gamers are actually the minority for both genders.

Quite possibly. I don't pretend to have carefully vetted the polling used here. Still, I thought it was interesting and a stark contrast to an alleged 2% figure that was bandied about earlier.

We're approaching parity at a respectable pace, then. I wonder what the new equilibrium will be? Probably very close to the population's tally, as many of the stigmas to playing at least casual video games are greatly reduced.

Yes, it's still something that needs a lot of work, but it's definitely been getting better. there are still throwback attitudes that will sometimes make themselves painfully apparent, much like Mr. Foot-in-Mouth here in the comic, but generally video game producers are starting to realize that people outside the 15-24 straight white male demographic play videogames.

Didn't Lucas or someone declare that there are no gay characters in the Star wars universe at some point? Something silly like that.
And I don't really do MMOs; the only one I really came to enjoy was fairly friendly to "family," but sadly shut down not too long ago. It still is one of the best character creators I've ever seen. I sometimes still use it for designing outfits for tabletop gaming.

Okay. I don't pretend to be a huge follower of the Expanded Universe or any of that. I like the original trilogy, and KOTOR was fun, but otherwise I am fine not paying too much attention. Although now that I thin about it, you could have a romance option with one female companion as a lady sith in KOTOR, couldn't you?

I assume that the specific problem in videogames is that designers reckon that gamers will identify closely with their playing piece, and so will be confused and uncomfortable if that playing piece is too "weird" by their personal standards. So, if they assume most players are male, and otherwise tend to the population mode, they make female characters into fantasy sex objects (bonus points if they can invoke the Lesbian Stripper Ninja principle). Putting characters into any kind of minority sexuality would certainly seem just too risky for them, even if they accept that they can get plenty of female players.

The obvious workround being to allow highly configurable player-characters (as tabletop games have managed fine for decades). But that adds to the setup workload for players, and hits problems if you're viewing the game as a novel rather than a sandbox.