[UbuntuWomen] What makes a video game "female friendly"?

[Christina Eater]

First of all, congrats/good luck with the game, and thank you for
taking the time to consider the female perspective. :)

Two things come to mind instantly, based on recent game experiences:

1. I can accept playing a male protagonist, but it's nice to have the
option of being female--but by that I mean a female character, not the
same male character in a woman-shaped 3D mesh.
An example failure on this point is Troika's Vampire: The
Masquerade--Bloodlines, in which I can play a "woman", but my
conversation options are limited to macho posturing (to male NPCs) and
really bad pick up lines (to female NPCs), and an early plot arc
revolves around the expectation that I want to see a certain female
NPC naked and will either make stupid decisions to achieve that or
else consider it a real sacrifice.
A reasonable success is Clover Studio's Okami, in which the
protagonist is an animal incarnation of a mother deity. Although there
still are moments when I want to smack the writers for not letting me
see through a sexy female NPC's thinly disguised evil plot, or for
throwing me into a penis-measuring battle against a male NPC who later
turns out to be an ally, for the most part I'm just playing a
wolf/deity whose gender is irrelevant, and that's nice.

2. I don't mind killing things in video games but I want a good reason
for doing so. V:TM and Okami (and World of Warcraft and the Final
Fantasy series and a lot of other games with an RPG focus) handle this
by allowing me to choose my battles--aside from a few unavoidable plot
points, I kill things when I want something from them, or they did
something heinous that deserved death, or I was in a bad mood and
wanted to kick monster ass.
Valve's Half-Life (the 1998 game) completely failed at this. As an
implausible and unlikable character thrown into a completely avoidable
scenario and facing aliens who have done nothing significant but pop
into existence, I'm constantly fighting for the life of a character I
don't care about and a weak, contrived save-the-world plot.
And yet, first person shooters can be fun, as in Bungee's Halo (again,
the original game) which had both an interesting storyline and
sympathetic NPCs. I felt sorry for the Covenant grunts when I killed
them, but all in all I was fine with the mindless violence and even
with the ridiculous amount of player death experienced by a casual
gamer like me.

Also good, of course, is no violence at all, just sheer skill or
mental ingenuity. I love LucasArts old adventure games (especially
Monkey Island I and II) and Portal (from Valve's Orange Box). And
Tetris. I love Tetris.

--
Christina


On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:27 AM, Thierry <psyping at gmail.com> wrote:
>  So I was hoping to find some answers here. What do you think would make a game
>  interesting for both male and female players? Or rather, what would make sure
>  that nothing stands out as only interesting for one group? And what has
>  bothered you in games so far?