About a week ago Dragon Age 2 player Bastal posted an impassioned plea on the official Bioware forums asking the developers to think of the poor straight male gamer. Basically, Bastal feels that Bioware games in the past been have “designed for the [straight] male gamer in mind” and that this trend should be continued indefinitely. Bastal senses that he is not the only target market for DA2 and is quite put out about it, going so far as asking for a “No Homosexuality” toggle.
A few different responses come to mind:
1) There are no options for straight males in DA2?! One of the potential companions is Isabella, a hot busty rogue chick in a thong. It’s hard to get more direct than that! Bastal dismisses her as being “exotic”, which sounds suspiciously close to “not white enough”.
2) DA2 is a role playing game. I am entirely straight in real life, for example, but in-game my female Hawke is knockin’ boots with Isabella because that’s what I imagined her character would do. A role-playing game does not have to reflect real-life preferences.
3) I am utterly confused by Bastal picking DA2 of all things as his masculinity hill to die on. Anecdotally, 90% of the people I know who bought the game are women! Bioware knows their market better than I do, but Dragon Age (and Mass Effect, for that matter) has always struck me as a franchise that would heavily appeal to a wider array of gamers than usual.
In short, in an industry where the vast, vast, vast majority of products are catered to the interests of one group, it’s insulting to complain that you don’t have 100% of that market’s attention.
Of course, DA2 Head Writer David Gaider answered Bastal better than I can, particularly with this bit:
“You can write it off as “political correctness” if you wish, but the truth is that privilege always lies with the majority. They’re so used to being catered to that they see the lack of catering as an imbalance. They don’t see anything wrong with having things set up to suit them, what’s everyone’s fuss all about? That’s the way it should be, any everyone else should be used to not getting what they want.”
My favorite response, though, has to be this snarky one posted in a MetaFilter thread on the subject: “I’m not a gamer, but it sounds like pretending to be straight is hard when there are other options.”
Hollywood is making a live action version of the anime classic Akira? Well, um.. okay. I can’t really imagine how that will work, but I guess I’m willing to wait and see.
Wait, Hollywood is making a live action version of the anime classic Akira with the leads being played by pretty white guys? And Robert Pattinson is short-listed for Tetsuo? Oh.. well I’m willing.. to.. wait.. and.. AHHHHHHHHHHH. WHYYYYYYYYYYY.
I believe this YouTube video shows some rushes from the new production. *cough*
But seriously though, female players please keep away from threads [asking for larger breasts on player characters] like this, nobody asks you. Don’t mean to be rude, but, here it is. Your opinion is totally irrelevant to the subject because you’re.. well… A female. You THINK that this breast size is okay.
— Dude on the RIFT forums (I guess we're biased by dint of owning a pair?)I actually defended the original dickwolves comic to people who were upset by it. The core of the joke as I saw it — that MMO players have a callous disregard for anything not listed in their quest — was funny and true, even if I’m kind of leery of jokes about rape. The follow-up comic, the blog posts, and the t-shirt, though, have really put it over the line for me.
Gamer culture has been INCREDIBLY homogeneous for many years, and the guys behind Penny Arcade in particular have been quite vociferous about helping to invite others to the gamer table. Regardless of what they think they’re doing, their reaction to the “dickwolf” controversy and particularly those shirts are just going to alienate more women from a community that they really have only just started to participate in fully.
The welcoming of women, non-whites, and non-straights to the gaming scene is still pretty fragile and should be handled with care, and the PA guys should have the sense to put that over defending their own egos.
There were about a million points they could have backed away from this. Like, the second comic, or telling the commenters on Shakesville that they were being silly, or drawing a dickwolf at a popular panel and having a good laugh at anyone who was uncomfortable with it, or making those ridiculous t-shirts. The PA guys repeatedly and with great intention poked this hornets’ nest, and now they’re claiming that it was all just a big misunderstanding which I think is disingenuous at best.
Basically Penny Arcade, the organization behind the great Child’s Play charity and the PAX gamer con, sided with the Internet dickwads on this one, which is kind of confusing and really disappointing.
Anyway, whether you have an opinion on the Penny Arcade “dickwolves” mess or just want to learn about it, the Debacle Timeline is a pretty good source. It mostly stays out of picking a side and just links to various relevant posts and resources as they happened.
And also on this topic: Fat Ugly or Slutty. Contains a lot of NSFW language, most of it by jerkwad young men who can’t handle being beaten by a woman in a video game.