sophiaserpentia | (no subject)

In light of Activision-Blizzard's RealIDFail, it's dawned on me that there is a sizable void.

There are lots of women who play games. There are no developers catering to them.

Gaming has been historically extremely male-centered. The stereotypical gamer is a teen boy in his parents' basement hunched over an XBox or a Nintendo. The stereotypical game designer is a man who, ten years ago, was that boy. Game designers target boys' and men's idea of fun. Game advertisers target the interests of boys and men. And, as RealIDFail demonstrates quite clearly, game developers have little interest in the specific concerns of women online, where those concerns differ from men's, or in the specific ways in which women use social networks differently from men.

I'm cherry-picking my examples here for emphasis, but as anyone in the wide world of woman-gamer blogging can tell you, dealing with misogyny -- as well as racism, homophobia, and transphobia -- in the gamer universe or in game advertising or content is an everyday thing.

So... why should we? Make that trade-off to play games we enjoy, I mean?

If there are any development studios with an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-'phobic perspective, I want to find out who and where they are. A very cursory google search does not reveal the names of any studios developing from this perspective.

If there aren't... I want to play a role in founding one. Anyone else interested?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

This Realid thing is just atrocious and I don't think the corporate privateers at Activision will respond to anything short of mass-account cancellations. I know for people like me, it means that I never, ever post on their forums again once it comes in.

Yes, this is an atrocious mess.

I've seen some hints that it could be sort of forced on them by new laws in South Korea requiring people to use their real names when posting to massive forums, and China requiring people to game under their real name.

But, yeah, if they thought they could write code aimed at those markets and then turn around and present it to Americans as some great new thing and be well-loved for it, they missed the mark.

Where A-B messed up on this is that we know, we *know*, this whole thing about using real names to discourage forum trolls is a total red herring. If they won't be upfront about the reasons why they're doing this, how can we trust that other currently-optional aspects of RealID will always remain optional?

I've seen some discussion that Real ID is likely to cause legal problems in Europe too, over EU privacy laws.

I think they've actually been careful enough to avoid breaking laws yet, because so far everything is "optional." At some point, though, they are going to spring a new TOS on us -- maybe even without announcing it -- that we click to sign, implying our consent to have our IDs shared with other gamers and, as you've said, "trusted partners" who will offer special deals.

It appears we revolting peasants have forced Activision to retreat. For the moment.

And yes, the smokescreen claims around protecting the forums from trolls were dismissed early and just fueled more and more rage, especially when the blue posters refused to respond to anyone except by deleting all threads but one.