Frantik Girl
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
Regrets
I examine my body and I realize that I’m mortal. As youth slips away, I’m faced with the fact that I’m not in the best shape, my skin is soft, and not made out of bullet proof Kevlar/Teflon mesh, my blood is curiously exposed in easily accessible vessels that if breached, could cause me no end of trouble. I neglected to have adamantium grafted onto my skeleton during my last checkup, and now I don’t have insurance. If I lose a limb, I can’t replace it. In short, I’m going to die.
Knowing that I’m going to die someday soon… in the next fifty to eighty years… leads me to think wistfully about all the things I’ll never get a chance to do with my life:
I’ll never get to walk on the surface of Mars. I’ll never be president of the United States. I’ll never sing Cole Porter tunes at Carnegie Hall. I won’t see the Sun run out of nuclear fuel and implode. I’ll never kiss Marilyn Monroe (or if I did, she won’t kiss me back). I’ll never get to see what the center of the Earth looks like. I’ll never be a Samurai. I’ll never read every book printed. I’ll never found a royal dynasty that rules the planet for millennia. I’ll never float on the event horizon of a black hole and watch time stand still. I’ll never photosynthesize. I’ll never be The Chosen One. I’ll never pilot a giant robot through the streets of Tokyo. I’ll never travel back in time and become my own great grandmother. I’ll never have a tail.
It’s hard not to become sad when I think about all the things I’ll never do.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Lesbians in Video Games: A Rant
As much as I hate to admit it, my favorite hobby, along with being inherently anti-social, isolating and juvenile, is mostly a pursuit of geeky, immature boys with no socialization or exposure to a wider, more diverse world. Video games are created by man-children, for man-children. This is true for games developed in the US, and seems doubly true for those made in Japan, where the depiction of women is sometimes cause for teeth rattling shudders, and the depiction of blacks is either non-existent, or seems to be a combination of Dennis Rodman (remember him?) and Jim Crow.
Those of you who don’t follow video games probably never noticed the industry or its trends until recently, when it has become impossible not to; and today, it can be rightly said that Lara Croft is Angelina Jolie is Tomb Raider is the highest profile video game franchise in the world. It happens to star a female lead; something that years ago, before the Tomb Raider franchise, was almost unheard of in games. Back then, a male dominated industry assumed that boys would refuse to be girls… perhaps underestimating the appeal of watching Lara’s attributes jump and run across the screen.
As video games have grown (I won’t use the word ‘matured’), the audience has grown, and the see no evil attitude of the industry, that ‘girls don’t play games’ has softened. Some game franchises, such as The Sims, are bought and played by a majority of women, and increasingly women are showing up places where they’re not expected (and often not welcomed) like hard core combat games.
Game makers are beginning to see the advantage of marketing to women. This goes beyond including female characters. Some of my male gamer friends are happy to admit that they prefer to play female characters because as they put it: “if they’re gonna spend hours looking at someone’s ass, it might as well be a cute girl’s.” Game designers are beginning to understand that aside from eye candy, appealing to a more feminine sensibility is good for the games.
I’m thinking about this because of the one game that has ruled my life for the past two weeks: Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. I have found it so involving only partly because of the innovative game play and graphics. Mostly I love it because it draws me in on a personal level. Foremost, is the ability to create an avatar that I can customize sufficiently for me to identify with; and then (and here’s the kicker) to have to ability to simply talk to the other characters, ask them about the things they feel are important in their lives, joke with them, comfort them when they’re sad (or kick them while they’re down… if you’re on the dark side) and form virtual friendships. Aside from how pathetic virtual friendships must seem, all these things have created the same sort of personal investment that I feel when I read a really good book… although as an author, I have to qualify that the experience is entirely different and less artistically valid. Still, I love it.
All of which brings me to my point: if I am allowed unprecedented amounts of customization and control over how my character acts, feels, looks, thinks… why can’t I play a lesbian? God knows, the last thing I want is a Will and Grace video game, I despise ‘art’ that is gayer than gay just for the sake of being gay. What I want is the same option to bed a T’wilek slave girl that the male characters get. If I have to fend off the clumsy advances of the wanna-be male love interest, then I want to be able to express my undying love for my beautiful, yet troubled Jedi companion.
What bothers me is that these options are not just absent, they are conspicuously so. As in the slave girl example, the little ho simply tells you that your needs would be better served by a male (there are, by the way… no male slaves available). Crude yet offensive moral finger-waving, and entirely arbitrary. Hell, if you feel so strongly about it, give my character dark side points for being a muff diver… but let my poor girl have sex. It’s the least they could do after she’s put in so much hard work saving the galaxy.
To my knowledge, there are only two game franchises that allow you to play gay. One is the deadly dull and sophomoric, Fear Effect and the other is The Sims. Fear Effect uses lesbianism in the same way as girl on girl porn… it’s not Pride day material. And of course The Sims lets you play gay to your heart’s content, because the game is built to allow for all sorts of personal relationships.
The games that promote themselves as highly adaptable and customizable, should allow for a fuller range of sexuality. Dare I say it? A more mature attitude toward sex and homosexuality. If I’m running around with a rocket launcher blowing up aliens, I don’t give a shit about my character’s personal habits. But as games become more interactive and we begin to have choices about how our character’s personal lives unfold, then we should have all the options that human beings have.
