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September 04, 2005
Where are the games?
Diversity is an important issue in video games. There have been excellent books written on the topic, including one from Sheri-Graner Ray called "Gender Inclusive Game Design" which focuses specifically on women players, their barriers to entry into video games and what we, as developers can do about that.
While searching for future "Links of the Day", I'm surprised how difficult it is to find anything targeted at something other than the Straight White Man (SWM). Most online sex games even feature Straight White Women (or two women together for the purposes of male entertainment).
Doing a google search for "virtual woman, game" gives me nothing but sex links. Doing a google search for "virtual man, game" gives me more links on PacMan than I ever needed. Even adding "gay" to my search gives up no games.
Posted by BrendaBrathwaite at September 4, 2005 08:00 AM | Discuss this post on our forums
Comments
virtual women game brings up the art of love, seems to be quite on topic :-)
Posted by: hans at September 5, 2005 04:42 AM
hans, I think the point was that the games listed under both "woman" and "man" are only interesting to straight men. For example, from the art of love, you get a favorable review of the SomaDolls sight (which *did* appear promising but on further inspection the little games are just "poke-the-virtual-blow-up-doll" things and I don't think many women or gay men would be enticed to "molest models" on a "casting couch" game). There is a big lack of diversity in the sex in games AO market right now. But art of love is a neat site :)
Posted by: kellyrued at September 5, 2005 12:16 PM