I think there should be more routes through games. Some games go on about there being loads of routes to completion but they almost always involve dominating and destroying your foe at all costs.

SUre you may do a bit of sneaking first, or maybe you’ll charm some enemies so they fight your other enemies…but there’s a lack of real variety.

More newness and strangeness please.

“It’s the old thing, that always bothers me, about female characters being empowered because they get to act like men. Rather than assuming equality and difference as being acceptable…it says ‘don’t worry ladies…you can be just like men in these worlds…you can’t complain about being unequal…for you are now as good as men….doesn’t that feel nice?’

It always pisses me off.”

It pisses me off as well. Not only does it still assume that men are better, but it means that some people (women and men) can be damn near forced away from what they want to do because it’s considered ‘feminine’ and therefore ‘beneath them’. I actually did an essay on it, although it wasn’t very good.

I also see your point about different stats. I like the idea of different stats by gender - there’s actually more than an aesthetic motivation behind the choice. I personally think that, in general, women are more attractive, but having an attractiveness stat seems weird. Everyone has different tastes.

Incidently, my b/f is capable of pointing out when other men are attractive.

No such thing.

And the fact that women are often minorities in fiction (literature and audio-visual media) really gets on my nerves. 51% of the population gets maybe 33% representation, how does this make sense? Women are not a minority group.

Look at any major TV show for example. There will be one or two women in the main cast, even fewer female side-characters. And anything which has even approaching realistic proprtions of women will be seen as too female-orientated.

I might post about this, but I just made a post about Princess Tutu (get an lj account, all the best stuff is f-locked (by ‘best stuff’ I mean anime I obtain illegally and personal things (gratuitous parentheses within parentheses within parentheses))) and I don’t want to spam.

I always make a point of commenting when I think men are attractive, even though I am rarely attracted to them. Still…it risks being that thing (which I tried to talk about) of creating equality by demeaning both genders equally.

Which is silly.

Stats for attractiveness are silly, it simply can’t be an arbitrary intrinsic quality. I think I talked about this before when talking about photogenic people.

I’m spending too long thinking about this one maybe.

Quelle surprise.

That’s what we call heteronormativity in the social sciences.

As for attractiveness, I think you’ll find that even most women will say that women are more attractive than men in general.

Part of that is that women can say they think other women are attractive without it being a threat to their heterosexuality, and part of that is how society represents beauty and what is beautiful - the male gaze that feminists are always talking about is prevalent here.

So. Not attractive in the sense that they are attracted to other women, but they accept the idea of attractiveness that they are presented. This does bring up questions of how much of what we find attractive is personal preference, and how much is cultural.