The Post-PAX Awards

This year, from September 4-6, I attended my very first Penny Arcade Expo up in Seattle. I didn’t really know what to expect, so I did my research, looked up videos, read articles about the past years’ conventions, but I still was like, “oh my god, there are gonna be 60,000 other nerds there, this is going to be a MADHOUSE.” Of course, because I’m prescient (superpowers, yo), I was right, and it was a madhouse, but it was also AWESOME.

Basically, for those of you who have never been or don’t care about PAX but are still reading this, the Penny Arcade Expo is a ridiculous video game convention, where companies bring their sweet new stuff to show it off, and gamers get super psyched about it and get free t-shirts and posters and buttons and various other swag. It’s a great opportunity for game developers and their fans to actually interact with each other.

PAX was a blast and I had the chance to see some awesome games that will be coming out, some sooner than others – any word on a release date yet, Star Wars: The Old Republic? :) But everything at PAX succeeded in different ways, and it’s the right thing to do to recognize that our differences make us special. So I have decided, on this occasion of my recovering from PAX Pox (Swine Flu), and in the spirit of the VMAs being tonight, to present the awesome companies who made such great showings at the Penny Arcade Expo with some awards that I have so cleverly come up with. (I don’t think I need to remind everything that this is my opinion, and therefore no one can argue with it. Obviously.)

Best at having an insanely long line that takes forever to get through

Tie – Left 4 Dead 2 and Dragon Age. I got in the Dragon Age line pretty much first thing on Friday, and it took me an hour and a half to get through. It was 12 360s and everyone got to play for half an hour. Game was awesome, line was brutal. It got worse Sunday – I’d say two or three times as long as the line I waited through. I also really wanted to try out Left 4 Dead 2, but the line was always nuts for not many available consoles, and I was never patient enough to wait through it.

Best swag for beating your roommates about the head without permanently disfiguring them

Inflatable swords. My roommates and I have had far more swordfights than girls our age probably should, but it’s been awesome, so thanks, Dragon Age and Divinity II! There have been some epic battles in our apartment and it is awesome.

Best way to entertain the long lines in the main Queue Room

Beach balls. Before one Main Theater event that I was in line for (and I’m sure before others as well), the entire crowd started counting each time someone hit the beach ball back up in the air. I believe we got up to 30ish several times before it fell, to many “boooooo!”s and disappointed “ohhhhh!”s.

Best at having ridiculous gratuitous booth babes

Grats, City of Heroes. Your booth babe was gorgeous, and her superhero costume was awesome, but it would’ve been nice if it covered her butt a little better. I don’t know how she sits down in that costume. Sure, the “hot chicks” will draw the lonely nerd contingent to your booth and maybe to your game, but you know what else will? Making a good game that people want to play.

Best free shirt that makes you look like a huge dork but also like a badass

Star Wars: The Old Republic armor shirts. The TOR/BioWare people either didn’t bring enough of these shirts or their booth was insanely popular, or both!, because I think they were gone the first day of PAX. Not only did they come in girl-cut, not just unisex, props to TOR for remembering that girls like having shirts that fit right, but they also look super cool. The image on the shirt makes it look like whoever is wearing it has on the armor of two classes that have been announced for TOR – I believe the boy shirts were Jedi armor, and girls’ were bounty hunters.

Best surprisingly awesome trailer we all thought was going to be super lame

Fairy Tale Fights. While waiting in the Main Queue Room before the Expo hall opened Friday morning, whoever was in charge of the big screen typed that they were going to show a trailer for an upcoming game. The trailer started out cartoony, cute, happy, puppies flowers rainbows, you know the deal. Everyone rolls their eyes. Then these sweet little characters get out swords and start lopping each other’s heads off and blood is spurting and going everywhere, and the crowd cracks up. So congrats on your sneakily badass trailer, Fairy Tale Fights!

Best shirt that makes me laugh way harder than it should

A piece of cake saying “I am nutritious.” with text underneath, “The cake is a liar.” Why do I laugh so hard? Why?

Best way to distract the entire audience listening at the Saturday night concert

Playing Minesweeper on your mac and holding it up so the cameras can show it to everyone else. One thing I learned at PAX is that, during slow songs, we don’t hold up cell phones to replace lighters – we hold up Nintendo DSes to replace cell phones to replace lighters. One person near the front even took it a step further, booting up his Mac laptop (I’ll refrain from judging) and holding that up instead. He then started playing Minesweeper. One of the many moving cameras focused on it, and the entire crowd was enraptured.

Best introduction for a special guest

Wil Wheaton, in his “official capacity as the Secretary of Geek Affairs,” presented Jonathan Coulton with the Presidential d20 of Geekdom and listed off his many accomplishments and contributions to geek culture by using lines from his songs. Among my personal favorites: “whereas Jonathan Coulton is not unreasonable and will not eat our eyes,” “whereas Jonathan Coulton is so into us, though he’s way too smart for us,” and “whereas Jonathan Coulton makes the first of May extra special.” You can watch the entire video here:

Best game at all of PAX, don’t doubt me, not even joking

Skee Ball. The Omegathon, a six-round elimination tournament with twenty gamers all competing to win a trip to the Tokyo Game Festival and $5,000, I am told always culminates in a surprise game that they don’t think anyone will have practiced in advance. This year, the game of choice was Skee Ball, and even if the machine itself was a little old, and had to be reset after every game, and they actually had to insert quarters to play it, Skee Ball is the best.

"You know, for tweens!"

It's weird, sometimes, being a girl who plays video games, as evidenced every time I join a Vent server on WoW and decide to talk. Most common reactions are, "Are you hot?" "Do you play with your boyfriend or something?" "Oh great. Don't screw this up." or just creepy giggling, which is why I usually keep myself muted. I know that WoW players aren't exactly the most normal or well-adjusted people around (and that includes myself of course), but the fact is that we girls are definitely in the minority in the video game biz.

When I Googled trying to find the latest statistics on the numbers of males vs females that people estimate play games, one of the first results was "List of video games with female protagonists." How interesting! I bet all the Bioware games will be on there since you can be either gender, then Tomb Raider and Metroid and Beyond Good & Evil, let's just see-














Oh. :(

The fact is, it's boys who do most of the game playing. One article, "The New Gender Divide," conducted a survey that said 22% of freshman boys in 2006 played video/computer games more than six hours a week, while only 3% of freshman girls did. Is it that surprising that so many games cater to teenage/20s boys? No. Is it disappointing to see that games are either "crazy violence explosions boobs!" or "let's play with the pretty pixel ponies!"? Absolutely.

I may be exaggerating a bit, but really when I go into a video game store and I can immediately pick out the games for girls because the hot pink burns my retinas, I feel like there's a problem. One article I found put it really well -

"In my experience, the marketing departments of the gaming industry seem to be slow to adapting to genderless marketing," says Schwimmer critically. "They seem to be stuck in the idea that, if you make it pink, then girls will buy it - which is actually insulting."
Hannah Guy, PC World Canada

Though that article is from 2007, the trend is continuing. I watched a lot of the E3 coverage this year live on Gamespot, including Sony's two-hour press conference. I'm not a big Sony person, but I like to be informed about what they're up to anyway, and I sure was glad I watched it after I saw this monstrosity:














That's right. It's a purple PSP. Why is it purple? Because of the new Hannah Montana games, obviously! Again, I have no problem with purple or PSPs or even Hannah Montana for god's sake, it's just the fact that APPARENTLY girls just can't possibly stand to play games on black PSPs. Nope, they need a completely new color. Sony had this to say about it:

"As girls spend as much time listening to music, taking and editing photos, watching movies, chatting with Skype, surfing the net and playing games with their friends as boys do," says Isabelle Tomatis, European Marketing Manager, SCEE, "we thought it was about time that they had their own colour of PSP and we've styled this one up just for them."
-"Hannah Montana comes with a lilac-purple PSP-3000"

They "styled it up" for us? How generous. The Gamespot article that included the announcement said this new color is "targeting the 'tween demographic" with its "female-friendly-hued hardware" and includes"Disney Interactive's Hannah Montana PSP game, ... a UMD disc containing a variety of episodes from the Hannah Montana TV show, a 2GB Memory Stick Pro Duo, and stickers."

Oh boy! STICKERS! And purple is clearly female friendly, because we just can't deal with using the same color PSP as boys. I hear they have cooties, C/D?

Sony's E3 press conference, where they announced this new color, first started talking about other games for the PSP, including, "Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Star Wars Battlefront, Madden NFL '09, and of course God of War: Chains of Olympus." The packs they've offered before included Rock Band Unplugged, City of Final Fantasy, and Assassin's Creed: Bloodlines. I hate to generalize, but all these are pretty much "boy games." I'd have a hard time talking most girls into playing something like God of War or Assassin's Creed.

But instead of doing a more neutral game, they decided that games either have to be ALL BOY or ALL GIRL. He talks about releasing PSPs for "our younger, more diverse demographic, and further appeal[ing] to teen and tween girls," because making games for girls means they get to call themselves "diverse." When he announced the lilac Hannah Montana bundle, the other developers seemed to think it was a hilarious joke. With the rest of the announcements focusing on shooters and Final Fantasy(s), the little purple PSP got ironic cheers whenever it was mentioned. Even the announcer laughed at the cheering. "I think we just sold a few right there!"

As much as I want to blame the developers for laughing at it, I can't blame them, because I did too. They put that image up on the screen, and I think my exact words were, "Oh Christ." They managed to make a female gamer annoyed with their female-friendly product. Well done, Sony.

Sony is not the only guilty party, even though I'm picking on them. Plenty of games either turn women into nothing but sex objects or make them badasses, but hot, so boys don't mind playing as them. This blog post from 2005 talks about how Lara Croft's boobs were taken down a cup size "to make her more realistic and appealing to females." Even better, Lara Croft's Breast Timeline: In Pictures! Even my beloved Bioware is falling prey. Check out this screencap of a character in Mass Effect 2:


















Give this woman a bra, MY GOD.

So why don't girls play games? One article had this to say:

Riedl said that the company informally surveyed girls who didn't play games and asked why they don't play them. The company found a variety of different answers. A lack of purpose in most games on the market was high on the list, with women preferring the emotional draw of a story. A lot of women who didn't play games said that they didn't because the UI was cumbersome for a lot of titles, and they just wanted to jump straight in and play.
He said he found that women also prefer their games to be more grounded in reality. He said, "A lot of the plot and settings for games are quite fantastic, and they wanted something that could happen in real life." Another, well-documented reason is that girls were turned off by meaningless violence.
Riedl said, "I'm not saying that women are nonviolent...But I think women have a different propensity for violence. Men like big explosions and blowing things up, but women show their anger in different ways. For example, with aspects of social violence... creating and destroying relationships."
The most important aspects of gameplay for women were the story, characters, and narrative elements. What he found was not important was winning.
Emma Boyes, Gamespot UK

I think this article is really interesting and more game companies ought to take it into account. Honestly, speaking totally from a personal standpoint here, I agree with most of it. I don't want to "win," I want a plot. I want to care about the other characters and get involved in their stories. And no lie, as crude as it was, the Influence system in KotOR2 was really cool. Whether you went light or dark side, you were able to talk to your party members and convince them to follow you, whether to good or evil. It looks like Mass Effect 2 is going to be incorporating that kind of thing as well (with their "Loyalty" system).

The part of the article about violence I thought was really interesting too. I am the first one to suggest seeing a stupid, senselessly violent movie, but in my games, I can only kill things mindlessly for so long before I just don't care anymore. That's one reason I've never really been able to get in to Grand Theft Auto. I'll steal some cars, do some drive-bys, but then... nothing. Me doing those things in the game has no effect on the setting. I like to feel like I can influence the story or the world of the game in some way while I play.

To wrap things up, I'm not surprised that more girls don't play games, as disappointing as it is. If they don't like ridiculous violence like I do, their choices are pretty much Hannah Montana, Barbie Island Princess, or PetZ (why is there a "z." I don't understand). Maybe once companies start thinking about girls older than twelve and design games for them, we gamer girls won't be quite such oddities.

Obsessed? Never.

That is an outright lie. There's one thing in video games I love more than everything else (and I do love a lot of things about them), and that is a story. And nobody does a great story better than Bioware. (That's right, I said it. Suck it, SquareEnix.) So to celebrate and break in this shiny new blog, I thought I'd start off by talking a little bit about the game I'm most looking forward to in the next... ever: Mass Effect 2. Warning - spoilers for ME1 and all the videos released for ME2 ahead.

I'll leave my thoughts about Mass Effect the First for another post (probably a review, better late than never!), but suffice it to say that there isn't much that I didn't adore about it, and my undying love for Raphael Sbarge's voice (Carth from KotOR and Kaidan in Mass Effect) had nothing to do with it. Okay, maybe a little to do with it.

Anyway, Bioware promised when the game came out that this would be a trilogy where we'd play the same character the whole way through. Badass!, thought I. Now instead of just overidentifying and getting way too attached to characters for one game, I can do the same over the course of three! So long, normal social life!

That promise and my attachment to Shepard did me no favors when Bioware started releasing the first trailers for Mass Effect 2, where they told us that Shepard was dead, wreaking havoc on my emotional well-being. Jerks.




Fortunately, any interviewer EVER who talked to the lead guys about it afterward pointed out that they'd already promised to let us play as Shepard for all three games, and the Bioware people did the best they could to skirt around that issue. Even better, by the time E3 rolled around, they didn't have to deny it anymore - Shepard was NOT dead, but that didn't mean she wouldn't BE dead if we didn't get things done in Mass Effect 2.





Constant threat of death if we try to do too much (save too many people in a dangerous situation) or too little (don't recruit enough badasses before going off to the final planet or wherever). Love it.

The other thing that is gonna be amazing about Mass Effect 2 is the fact you can import your Shepard from ME1 into ME2. Not only that, you're not just playing the Shepard you imported, you're playing all the decisions you made, good or bad. Let some of your party members die? They're not magically coming back - they are GONE. I assume the decision about whether to commit genocide on the Rachni is going to be a big influence on the game, too, and maybe whatever sidequests we did, too.

According to Casey Hudson, one of the exec producers on ME2,

"The Mass Effect savegame doesn’t just contain a couple of your big choices. It contains countless decisions you’ve made, both large and small. These things could each potentially carry forward and affect your story in Mass Effect 2. This has never been done before on this scale, and it means you’re actually continuing your own story from exactly where you left off."
-http://blogs.ign.com/BW_MassEffect/2009/06/17/123208/

I don't know what decisions are going to carry over - how "small" are they talking here? If I convinced that random lady and her brother in law on the Citadel not to do genetic manipulation on her kid, is that going to play into the game? Somehow I doubt it. All I know is, now I have to go back through the game again and make sure every single decision I make is absolutely the one I want to stick with for Mass Effect 2. Darn, I have to play through it again. Shucks.

Ok, the last thing I'm going to discuss for now. When I was younger I used to love Choose Your Own Adventure books, but it was always annoying to me that most of the decisions were "oh, too bad you picked a legitimate option but we arbitrarily decided it's a bad one, you die, go back to the page you were at and pick the other choice, dummy." In Mass Effect, yeah maybe some of those decisions you make WILL be an insta-death, go reload and hope you saved recently. But in the final battle, there's a chance that not only you will die, but your party members as well. My roommate can attest to the fact that I was a mess at the end of the Virmire scene, and I didn't even like Ashley that much.

"Part of what makes the final mission dangerous in a more profound way is that each squad member could potentially die a real, story-based death during that mission as well. You might have an ending where Shepard’s entire team survives, or where the entire mission is a bloodbath and everyone (including Shepard) is killed, or anything in between. And for all characters, death in Mass Effect 2 means they won’t show up in Mass Effect 3."
-http://blogs.ign.com/BW_MassEffect/2009/06/17/123208/

Not like I wasn't going to do every sidequest ever anyway, but now I have to or I will let down my poor, helpless party members.

Speaking of party members, I guess not all of the ones from ME1 will be on your squad in ME2. As sad as this makes me (Kaidan! I need you with me!), it does make sense. Tali can go back to the Quarians, and maybe if we're out by the Flotilla we can help her out and she can join up with us for a little bit. Garrus is probably going to either be a Spectre or go back to C-Sec. Maybe Kaidan will be working with Anderson or something, but at least he's not going on this suicide mission with me, there is no way I could ever let him die. That would kill me. At least Joker is sticking around, but I'm wary about getting too attached to the characters now that I know Bioware is totally cool with killing them off. Seriously, emotionally attached, guys. You're killin me here.

To wrap this up, Mass Effect 2 looks awesome. Gamestop even said it was the best RPG shown at E3. (Duh.)

Want more info on Mass Effect 2?

Mass Effect 2's official website
Bioware's twitter
Mass Effect 2's twitter
Gamestop's E3 Editor's Choice Awards
Casey Hudson's post about ME2 "Just the Facts, Man"
Great video review of ME2's new trailer at IGN
Another great article about ME2 at E3