You both may, or may not remember the little piece I wrote on how Science Fiction seems to be geared more towards guys than it is towards girls. I sure do. The memory of that article hangs in my mind like a summer day. This is another such article.

I do not particularly enjoy writing articles like this and I will tell you why. If I were to write an article about, say, the end of the world by meteoric impact, by way of random example, I could go and research the nature of the meteor in question, its size, composition, the speed at which it is traveling, scientific speculation as to the destructive measure of its impact. I could present you with these facts in a well organized and thought out article. I know I don’t, but I COULD. These facts are present to be given. However, when I contrast all of men with all of women, I am taking a population of billions of individuals, each with there own worldview and opinions, and summing them up in one monstrously errant blanket statement. It’s as criminal as an activity gets without actually being illegal.

That said, here I go.

I had a conversation with a girl recently, as I find myself doing far too frequently. Its not that I have a problem with girls in general, but conversing with them doesn’t feel like a competition as it does with guys. That I am used to. Instead it feels like a standardized test. And I don’t need that kind of pressure. Anyway, this girl said to me that she was bringing a gaming system to college with her, and that perhaps this would help her make friends with the other girls there. I asked her if girls liked video games. She said not too many did. Hmmm.

Now to paraphrase my friend, also named ‘Joel’, the purpose of products is to make people pay money for them. There are plenty of products out there that entice women to give up their money in order to own them. At least half of these are things that they put on their bodies, while the other half consists largely of things that make their living spaces ‘pretty’ without making them more functional. With all this beauty being marketed toward women, it may be difficult for the video gaming industry to get a foot in the door. Especially since most women have seen through the curtain and correctly identified games for exactly what they are: a big fat waste of time and money. Us guys, however, can’t see this because, having grown up with video games we see them as an extension of our personalities: another thing to conquer and show that we do indeed have skillz. Now in the beginning video games were nicely gender neutral, featuring, for instance, two quadrilateral white things you could move up and down the screen, deflecting the little equilateral shape toward our opponent as the game moved more and more quickly until the equilateral slipped past our defenses and our opponent gained a point. And then rubbed it in our faces by much foul talk about our mothers. In an attempt to defend our mother’s honor, we picked up the next video game, a yellow blob with a mouth who ate those cursed little equilaterals while being chased by ghosts. He had a sister, too, so there was an equal-sex representation within this game. But for some reason these games never caught on with women. Why? My best guess is that, through the machinations of well-meaning parents, girls were pushed to play dress up with Barbie dolls and create things that could be eaten in their easy-bake ovens rather than pick up an Atari system or later on a Nintendo. When the gaming industry saw which way the wind blew, they stopped trying to appeal to girls and went straight for their target audience. Now I can make an attractive young woman in tight clothing flip through the air while shooting napalm at a carnivorous dinosaur. I’m a happy man.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 1st, 2004 at 12:26 am and is filed under Comics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.