Archive for the 'Women and Gaming' Category

Lame Women in Games: Maria of Castlevania

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on November 25, 2008
in Women and Gaming
. Comments

Here’s a clip of a lame woman in a video game. Her sole quest in life is to increase her breast size. Do you know what ALL lame women in gaming have in common? They were probably created by men.  Whether its a game that ignores our ability to think beyond babies and marriage or a game that reduces a woman (like Maria of Castlevania) to a brainless boob chaser without a serious story line. We can count on some dude chasing dollar signs to give us a good laugh. That’s the only saving grace of the video clip below. It made me laugh. Poor Maria.

This is why we need more women designing video games. Do you think a woman with power was present during the brainstorming session around this character?

[Via - Destructoid]

Pac-Man Invades London Fashion Week

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on October 6, 2008
in The Pixel Life and Women and Gaming
. Comments

Pac-man inspired head gear made the rounds at London Fashion week. Fashion designer, Giles, obviously had Pac-man on the brain when he concocted these looks. I happen to think they’re rather cute. I like the yellow head and pink dress combination.

The dress below threw me for a loop. Perhaps Pac-Man is the culprit behind the rail thin models at Fashion Week?

 

How to Use Google as a Personal Time Machine

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on October 1, 2008
in The Pixel Life and Women and Gaming
. Comments

How I Started Writing About Technology and Gaming

I started an e-zine with my best friend Jennifer. We were both teenagers who were hooked on our AOL accounts. We spent hours on AOL Instant Messenger chatting about homework, gaming and anime. Jennifer introduced me to the thriving world of e-zines. We both loved to write so we decided to start our own.

Pro tip: An e-zine is simply an online publication or magazine. Back then (Am I dating myself?) they were distributed via e-mail.

We each took on pen names to write under back then.  Since our AOL screen names were so awesome (Jennifer was Misty22782 while I was Neptunekix) we decided to use them when we were brainstorming about the project. And so the e-zine was affectionately named, Misty and Neptune.

How to Use Google as a Personal Time MachineOld School Google Logo

This was more than 10 years ago. Since then I haven’t been able to find any remnants of the ezine in Google. That is…until now! Google brought back their 2001 archive:

In honor of our 10th birthday, we’ve brought back our oldest available index. Take a look back at Google in January 2001. [Google]

I’m a vain woman so the first search I did was for my name. Nothing relevant came up. The next search I conducted was for Misty and Neptune. And this is what I found:

My fellow blogger, Noah Brier, found the domain for his now defunct web development company and an old student project. You’ll be amazed at the stuff that’s still out there. Check out the link and have Google jog your memory.

Misty & Neptune: A Slice of Ms. Pixel’s History

With Misty and Neptune we wanted to provide young girls with a source of fresh articles on fashion and entertainment. We dreamt of becoming the online version of YM or Seventeen magazine. But our content landed outside of the mainstream. We loved anime and we were hooked on Nintendo and Sega. Our passions were reflected in our content. YM and Seventeen were glossy mags about the girls we thought we wanted to be. Misty and Neptune helped us become more comfortable with who we were. We were passionate about games, anime and sugary advice columns. As hundreds of girls signed up for our subscriber list we discovered we weren’t alone.

Can you imagine two 14 year old girls writing anime fan fiction and games? Were we ahead of the curve? I don’t think so. We ran into a bunch of young female editors like us who loved online publishing and were completely obsessed with e-zines.

How Misty and Neptune Prepared me for Business

Looking back on it now I’m surprised at how ambitious we were. We managed to snag two companies as sponsors: Oop! Juice and Gwen’s Jewelry. Both provided us with products to use in contests and giveaways. It was a perfect match between the interests of our readers and the products they had to share.

We did the e-zine for a while releasing monthly issues via email. And then Jennifer and I went off to college and sort of forgot about it. Until now.

Thank you Google!

I want to thank Google for doing this. A lot of the details surrounding the ezine have honestly slipped my mind until now.  I forgot that we had the gumption to land sponsors, recruit other writers and even set up our own webpages.

I penned some articles for my local paper as an intern but Misty and Neptune is where I really started to write about my passions. And now I remember it more clearly. Thanks Google!

[Via - Noah Brier]

Get a Cute Bag with a DS to Match

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on September 17, 2008
in Gaming News, The Pixel Life and Women and Gaming
. Comments

Some of the bags (pictured here) retail for over $1000 a pop. I think it makes more sense to drop that money on a new gaming system and 10 games . It makes even more sense to save that money given our current economic crisis.

But if you’re still yearning for one of these bags you can try FromBagsToRiches. Female gamers with a handbag addiction will love their current promotion. The company says that a Nintendo DS would be a stylish addition to any woman’s purse. And I have to admit that the Black DS looks awesome with that Prada purse. That’s why the high end handbag rental service is offering a complimentary Nintendo DS and game along with some of their handbag rentals.  Some of the games available include, Nintendogs, Brain Age and New Super Mario Bros.

One Man’s Reaction to Ivy’s Boobs

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on September 6, 2008
in Women and Gaming
. Comments

You all know that I’m a fan of the Soul Calibur series. But I can’t support the desperate marketing scheme that is “Ivy’s bosom”. It’s a shame that female fans of the series have to deal with these awkward balloons of failure from the developers of the game.  I thought I was alone in thinking this. Well it turns out that I’m not alone. And I found a MAN that agrees with me! Woot! Below you’ll find Matt Brett’s thoughts on Ivy and Soul Calibur 4.

Soulcalibur IV - Ivy

Holy Tits Batman!

Let’s get Ivy out of the way right off the bat. Someone got a little carried away with the boobs on that girl, and not in a good way. Like the next guy, I’m all for boobs. But there’s a limit, and Ivy crossed it 10 times over. It’s just not right. Not even in a funny sort of way. Ridiculous, is probably the best word to describe Ivy. But unfortunately, Ivy isn’t the only culprit in the gigantic tits department. Like most Japanese games that involve females, they’re all sporting what appear to be huge sacks of liquid, awkwardly tacked on their torso. Again, it’s just not right.

Matt Brett rocks.

So what do you think about Ivy’s body proportions? Should developers quit acting like over-eager 12 year olds and stop shoving this nonsense at us? Or do you think that I’m being a typical ‘Feminist-gamer-girl’ by over-reacting?

You can read the rest of Matt’s review here. It’s a great read. Check it out.

Introducing Spore to the Mainstream

Published
by
Bukola Ekundayo
on September 4, 2008
in Gaming News and Women and Gaming
. Comments

EA’s evolution game drops in four days and the expectations are high. Colin Sebastian, Lazard Capital Markets senior VP, says that he expects Spore to sell 2 million units in September.

EA is betting on the gaming industry’s hot new girlfriend, the casual audience. To build buzz for the game (and to entice causal and hard core gamers alike) EA released Creature Creator, a free, downloadable ‘demo’ that allows anyone to create their own creature and upload it to a shareable database known as Sporepedia. Over 2 million people downloaded it after it’s release in June, so expectation that it’ll move 2 million units this month isn’t far fetched.

Blitzing the Mainstream

The people of New York were taken with the splashy images of prostitutes that appeared ahead of Grand Theft Auto 4’s release. The imagery tempted self-identified gamers and non-gamers alike to take a look and play around the gritty world of Liberty City. The makers of Spore are also hoping to capture the imaginations of the mainstream with murals and ads that aim to launch the Spore universe into our pop culture lexicon. The ads are yet another example of video games infiltrating public spaces to nudge their way into mainstream discussion.

Oh Look! Celebrities like Spore too!

Sporevote.com is a gallery that displays a smorgasbord of celebs and some folks you’ve never heard of sporting their Spore creations. I think the gallery ranks how many views each personality/creature receives on the site. So far Philip of the Philip DeFranco show is leading the pack with 113, 140 likes and 137,207 views. You’ll also find Stan Lee and Masi Oka’s creations. Check out Sporevote for more.

But … Where are the Girls?

To its credit SporeVote features a couple of well known women who played the game and showed off theircreature creating chops. Some of the women featured include Melissa Joan Hart, Margaret Cho and Katy Perry. But of the 63 celebrities featured only 11of them are women. I appreciate the effort but it’s not enough. According to the International Game Developers Association, women represent 40 percent of all gamers. The Entertainment Software Association cites a similar number at 38 percent. They also found that the average female gamer plays games 7.4 hours per week. We’re gaming addicts too!

Spore has the potential to engage a ton of female players. It would’ve been awesome to see more women represent on SporeVote. Ideally that number should be around 25. I guess you could call it a ‘female gamer’ quota. And if you did, I wouldn’t care. The industry could benefit from more women in ads and in-game.

Overall, I think Spore is doing a good job of reaching out to the mainstream audience. We’ll see who ends up dropping 50 bucks on the game: The hardcore set, the casual folks or a nice mixture of the two. Who do you think will end up getting the game?

Share and Send

Have you seen any Spore ads on a billboard, sidewalk or dark alley near you? If so, send them over to bukola [at] mspixel [dot] com and I’ll add them to this post.