Germany is getting a new gaming magazine next year targeted at the casual girl gamer. Called Play Vanilla, the magazine will focus on gaming articles with a more feminine flair and tackle important female gaming topics. I can only imagine what these topics will be, outside of "Better Than the Guys" articles and possibly "The Effects of Gaming on your Vagina," which my girlfriend assures me are negligible.

"Play vanilla will be serving an interest group that has so far been woefully neglected, a group with enormous potential and specific requirements," explains Petra Fr hlich, Editor-in-Chief of play vanilla and PC Games. "Women want to play too, but are quite different from men in the demands they place on a game. A magazine like play vanilla is inevitable with the increasing numbers of female gamers and games with specifically female appeal."

German girl gamers play vanilla [Destructoid - Thanks Jane!]

The Eye Opener has an interesting story up about gender equality in gaming. The story points out the whole 43-percent-of-gamers-are-women thing and then digs into the lack of key female industry types and gender neutral games. It's an interesting read.

Wait, what's this, you must be thinking. Did Brian give up on posting just about clothes and games today? Not by a long shot my friends. About two thirds into the story, there's this interesting tidbit:

Xaida Zyvatkauskas, a first-year humanities student at the University of Toronto, is also a member of ARRG. She is an avid player of RPG games, and acknowledges that the stereotype of the busty female lead holds true.

"I'm playing Guild Wars right now, and there seems to be a weird relationship between the quality of armour and the amount of clothes the female characters wear," she says.

The better the armour, the more scantily clad the women become. The characters feature large, perky breasts, visible nipples and a tiny waist. Male characters are also very physically fit.
"The games, the characters, are becoming more sexually suggestive, and are very much designed for male sexual fantasies," Jenkins says.

Women Save the Princess [The Eye Opener]