So yesterday, I participated in the Nokia Amazing Everyday Lumia hunt, and drove to Port Elizabeth in order to track down one of four Lumia 800 handsets being handed out to the first person who arrived at the secret location. By the time the competition was 15 minutes in I had figured out three clues and begged my mom for the use of her car. Forty minutes later I was out of the gate and off to PE.
Important-looking people with jumbles of mostly inscrutable letters appended to their names would have us believe that, generally speaking at least, women are much more inclined to playing co-operative games. Whether it’s social conditioning and/or some evolutionarily determined byproduct of biology and/or prevailing ratios of red blood cells to double chocolate ice-cream, women are simply not as competitive as men when it comes to just about everything except maybe shoe sales*.
Whatever the reason then**, I do love me a good co-op game, and – the evidence would seem to show – so do most of my double-breasted sister-brethren***. Now, statistically, almost half of all gamers these days fall into this category, so why is it, I wonder, that good co-op games are so few and far between?
For reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with unconfirmed rumour and speculation that I may or may not have maxed out my credit card with a new TV, I didn’t fly up from Cape Town for rAge last weekend. I’m sure all those people who lined up outside the Coca-Cola Dome, waiting to punch me in the ovaries for slagging off Duke Nukem Forever were tremendously disappointed, especially after they had been working on that clever kitchen joke for months already.
Hypothetically, of course, the TV is totally worth surviving on boiled dust for the next six months or so, but I’m also rather sad to have missed out on the continent’s second-biggest gaming event of the year. Which sort of got me thinking about the entire concept of big gaming events, and how a phrase like “big gaming event” didn’t even exist in our sociocultural lexicon until just a few years ago.
Yes yes, the evidence points to the contrary. I know, having the CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company currently sitting at the top of the consumer computing industry declare that a very valuable asset they just bought out for $1.2 billion the other day is now going to be trashed is pretty much the nail in the coffin for most people. I, on the other hand, haven’t been able to snag an HP Touchpad for $100 and firmly believe that WeboS will stay alive and HP is just pulling your socks.
Let’s rewind to the beginning in April last year, when HP had just bought the defunct Palm OS and announced that they would be re-entering the mobile and tablet market with a new product line that would knock the socks off iOS and the then-unfinished Windows Phone. HP bought out Treo and Handspring for pocket change, and everyone everywhere began to expect good things. Fast-forward to MWC 2011 in February, the ill-fated month for Nokia’s Symbian OS, and WebOS shone like a brightly polished gem. The UI was well-thought out, worked smoothly, showed promise and above all enabled users to switch comfortably between the Touchpad and HP’s companion devices, the HP Veer and Pre 3, both stunning handsets in their own right and the Veer in particular a definate inspiration for the HTC Cha Cha.
So Friday’s big news in the gaming industry came via a bit of Dead Island’s code, excavated by a Steam forum user, that temporarily named an in-game skill granting a female character a bonus against males as “feminist whore”. See, it’s not just a clever recursive title this week, even if the context is subtly different on each side of the colon.
Predictably enough, of course, the internet instantly exploded in a great, shuddering paroxysm of “DUZZNT CARE LOL WIMMIN R HAWS NEWAY”, without any discernible evidence of irony, while dev Techland’s damage control amounted to nothing much more than a limp apology about a misunderstood “crunch-time joke”. The only funny thing about that, I’d imagine, is that both responses really only substantiate an uncomfortable reality nobody actually wants to own up to – that the gaming industry* is pretty sexist.
“Video gaming.” It’s a phrase that’s tripped over the murky precipice of obscurity and into the neon-lit chasm of mainstream culture, but quite in spite of its new-found distinction – or perhaps by way of its downward vector – it’s not quite managed to discard some of its more contemptible hangers-on.
More simply (or more obviously, perhaps, because it’s what I was really getting at), if that precipice were a sphincter, and the chasm a toilet bowl, video gaming would be the clotted skidmark all the way down, before slithering – behemoth-like, and smelling of murder – into the waters below*.
It’s the console wars. It’s the PC Gaming Defence Force. It’s the cheating. It’s the racism, the misogyny, and the homophobia. It’s piracy, and the vapid proselytising and self-entitlement that comes with it. It’s the entire MOBA community. It’s the apocalyptic pronouncements about the advent of so-called “casual” gaming, like the whole industry didn’t actually start with games about dots blasting dots with dots or something.
"Do you smell something?"
