It is a shame that a "realistic female" is the exception to the rule. Right now I'm playing Mirror's Edge and really enjoying Faith. She doesn't play like a girl, or a guy, but a real person reacting to various situations, and I like that.

 Reply

Women are as violent as men. It's just that the culture and history always put men doing violent stuff like going to war, hunting, and stuff. And it has something to do with the undisputed power that men had. And this has changed. Women have status now, they are leading some important roles on society and while this is good it also brings up their "violent" side.

Speaking of games, my girlfriend is way more violent than me. She is the one who wanted to buy Manhunt, she is the one who plays GTA only to screw the bitches and run over them to get their money back, she is obsessed with fatalities on MK, etc.

I guess seeing girls as "holy pacifist human beings" is just part of our old men sexism.

 Reply

To address games like Fallout, I am going to posit that they can't count. They fall much under the category of Metroid, where the main character is, by-and-large, voiceless and somewhat faceless (they have faces, but you rarely see them). The association between gender and actions is nearly irrelevant in such a case, because the character stands as more of a shell to represent the player rather than a personality that can be readily identified as male or female.

I will also say that the worst fights I have seen have been between women. Not necessarily the bloodiest fights, but the most vicious (and I would attribute this to the damage-dealing capacity of men vs. women). It's purely anecdotal, I admit, but animosity seems to run far less deep between males who get into fisticuffs, and usually seems to pass by the time the fight's over. That said, the frequency of male fighting is greater (again, just anecdotal). It does, however, raise the question of quantity over quality.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that children will be less likely to report an abusive mother than an abusive father, just from having watched kids. An abusive father tends to seem to become emotionally detached, relying instead on physical domination. An abusive mother seems to use emotional attachment as an additional weapon. I saw this particularly in the case of a girl my old room mate was interested in, and her mother. There was physical abuse, though not on the level of what a man can inflict. It was coupled with heavy emotional trauma, however, and that connection could be used as a guilt trip into preventing a child from reporting it.

I don't think this is a case of the article getting lost in its own cleverness, as someone stated above. I think there are points that are obscured by the fact that it's a video game article, and the fact that it's little over a page long. There is simply not enough room in that sort of space to give such a topic the attention it necessitates.

That said, I'm not trying to invoke anyone's wrath with this post. I would rather that it raised some points of discussion. This is a touchy subject, and people get very defensive when it comes to gender identity and admitting what they are capable of doing. I think we've all met a girl at some point who believed there would be no war if women ran everything. Of course, we've also all met that guy who thinks men do everything best. They're both wrong, but I think somewhere in all of us there is at least a fragment of that mindset we have to subdue in order to properly analyze a situation like this.

 Reply

This article is a freaking stretch, lost in it's own 'clever' prose, and ultimately failing to make points of any significance.

 Reply

And there's Bloodrayne - as female as you can get, while merrily slaying vampires.

So I personally can't see a specific expectation that female characters necessarily have to be non-violent/passive.

 Reply

There's Thi Barrett and Lorelei Ni from Rise of the Triad, Generic Females from GTA1, and Catalina in GTA:SA. I know there's more, but that's all that comes to mind at the moment.

 Reply