A belated look at gamer Valentines: the good, the questionable, the pathetic

Okay, so I know I'm about two weeks late with this. Since I'm including stuff from previous years' Valentine's Days, I'll call this a retrospective and pretend that I meant to be late. (Actually, I didn't start looking for most of this stuff until after I stumbled across a truly awful Valentine's Day feature on the FilePlanet FileBlog. That got me looking for other examples of gamer Valentines and Valentine's Day features on major gaming sites.)

What I found was a pretty mixed bag. There's a lot of genuinely funny stuff out there to be found. Then again, there's some pretty tasteless stuff too.

The good/funny

First up we have some Street Fighter valentines. These were done as a promo for last year's release of Street IV and were posted along with a trailer of Cammy, Juri, and Chun Li. And while the trailer is exactly what you'd expect for a promo trailer featuring fighting game women (SO MANY PANTY SHOTS), the valentines are actually pretty good:

I appreciate that "I'm head over heels for you" shows Juri knocking out Kratos, and that the pose isn't blatantly fanservice-y. (Considering that Juri wears a square of fabric strapped to her chest, it's impossible to avoid completely...) I also enjoy the number of male/male pairings. I realize that given how vastly the women in Street Fighter are outnumbered by the men, it's probably a function of not many women to choose from. But still, I'd like to think that they meant to have valentines with non-straight pairings. (I'd root for female/female pairings too, only that wouldn't end well given the design of all of the Street Fighter women.)

Valve got in on the act as well with a few different Valentine's themed promos for Portal 2. In particular, I loved the video that they produced as a message from Aperture Laboratories with Valetine's day "tips" like "women love diamonds for their wide variety of industrial applications. It was humorous and did a pretty good job of turning a few stereotypes on their head, albeit in bizarre fashion.

They also released a few more traditional valentines like these:

Overall I'm a fan, but I have to say I have mixed feelings about the first one. It seems like they might be using this as a chance to promote Chell's new design in the upcoming release. Chell in the first game was female, yes, but definitely was not a traditionally slutty female heroine. I'm a bit worried by the decision to glam her up. Here's hoping that we don't start seeing disgusting Chell fanart pop up like we did with post-Zero Suit Samus.

I also stumbled across this gem by the producers of The Misadventures of P. B. Winterbottom:

I love the retro styling, but what I love even more is the instruction at the bottom that starts with: "should feelings of love or desire overcome you, this clever card can be used to fan away such salacious vapors." It's always nice to see game studios treat gender stereotypes, even outdated ones, satirically. Lord knows it's far oftener the case that game studios are PERPETUATING gender stereotypes, yes even the outdated ones, rather than mocking them.

Some other gems I found that aren't gender/sexism related are:
* some Left4Dead valentines by the hugely talented Alexandria Neonakis (aka Beavotron).
* gamer valentines on IGN, including one by a horny Elcor (if you play Mass Effect it's hilarious, trust me)
* these NES valentines

They're worth checking out for a few chuckles at least.

The questionable

This is going back quite a while... Lion's Head, the studio behind the Fable series put out this Valentine in 2007:

Now, I'll admit that the one thing I have been arguing for here is a diversity of female body types in game art. That said, I think this is more of a negative than a positive. This woman is being presented as an object of ridicule, not as an object of beauty. She is clearly designed to disgust the intended male viewer, which is sad. It wouldn't have taken much to present such a character as beautiful, but clearly Lion's Head just wanted to get some cheap laughs.

Richard Mitchell, the author of the feature that ran this valentine on Joystiq, ended the piece by saying:

We're sure she has a great personality. Hopefully, this has nothing to do with the secret Fable 2 feature that Peter Molyneux will reveal at GDC.

Even more depressing are the comments left on the Joystiq feature:

Ew. Just ew. I wouldn't touch that chick with a 110 ft. pole.

Hard nipples...going to give me nightmares!

I'd hit it.
Yea, with a baseball bat :)

That's about what I expected. Still... yuck.

Then there's this valentine of questionable taste from Kotaku:

I dunno. I guess it's kind of funny. But then, it's yet another example of puerile sex humor coming out of Kotaku. What a shock! Not sure what to think of it, so in the end I'll roll my eyes and move onto this valentine from Destructoid:

Okay. This is actually pretty cute, and doesn't have some cleavagey piece of fanservice like I half expected from Destructoid. But they couldn't leave it there, could they? I mean, then they wouldn't be the Destructoid we know and... um... love.

Anyway, the feature ended with: "Now who's going to make a Destructoid card for Steak and BJ Day?"

...charming, guys. Real charming. So nice of you to "throw us women a bone" every once in a while. Now do you think you could refrain from practically in the same breath demanding that us women give you blow jobs? Christ.

The pathetic: FilePlanet's FileBlog

Surprisingly, Kotaku and Destructoid put in pretty half-hearted attempts to offend this year. But have no fear - FilePlanet has come to the rescue! Apparently this year is the third year that they have posted a selection of nude mods for Valentine's Day in a charming feature they call Valentine's Nudity.

Because really, what better way is there to celebrate Valentine's Day than by hacking video games to remove the clothes of video game women? That'll show those uppity bitches. How dare they have "empowerment" and "character arcs". Fuck character arcs - tits or gtfo, bitches!

And then of course there's the comments:

No males? All female. That’s refreshing.

Where did i stick my vaseline?

AVG Detected a virus in a file needed for the Mass Effect 2 nude skin to work. Oh well the miranda nude mod is better anyway

I liek wen day showda boobays

Wow… might consider making a lesbein sim just to take advantage of this…

So yet another example of how a subset of male gamers are determined to systematically dis-empower any female character who might have some degree of strength or agency. What kind of sick entitlement causes this sort of shit, anyway? Why can't they just do what normal people do and go find porn on the internet? God knows there's enough free porn out there that going to this much effort shouldn't be appealing.

So I guess thanks go to FilePlanet for making even Kotaku and Destructoid seem appealing. Then again, I guess they'll be needing the nude mods since some of those guys probably couldn't NOT offend a woman if their lives depended on it.

Apologetic linkspam: Have some WTF, and also some win

Okay, folks. As promised, here's a bit of extra WTF to carry you through the weekend. I resolve to fail less starting next week, but as I've discovered I need my weekends. Those two days to detox from all the icky shit I look at during the week in the name of research for this blog are important. Srsly. You don't even want to know some of the shit I stumbled across by accident while researching "clothing damage". Brr.

Anyway. Here's some WTF to console yourself with.

WTF the first: yet more creepy shit from Japan

So. There's this thing in Japan called a hostess club, where lonely young men go to spend time with women who are employed by the club, and by spend time I mean just that. Some of them will have board games, others will just have coffee... whatever. Anyhow, I stumbled across this article about a Japanese romance game centering around young women who work at a particular hostess club.

...yeah. Because stalking women home from work is totally romantic.

Anyway. No idea on if it's being translated - these screens are all in Japanese. But here's a taste:

If you want to see more, you can see the full article with lots, and lots, and LOTS of creeptastic screens here. Just don't say I didn't warn you. (And don't get caught reading it at work.)

WTF the second: dear Nukezilla, I heart you

Okay, this isn't so much WTF as an awesome repudiation of WTF. So remember the fail-tastic IGN Gamer Girl Christmas Gift Guide? If you haven't seen it, please do go glance through it. Don't bother reading the text if you're in a hurry - just check out the photos. Go ahead. I'll wait.

... yuck, right? I mean, I'm pretty sure anyone who would attach a photo like this to an article supposedly about gifts for "girl gamers"...

Okay, why is she making Seductive Face at SACKBOY? That's just creeping me out.

...has never really talked to a woman that games. (And yelling 'tits or GTFO' over XBox Live doesn't count, fellas. Neither does sending ASCII penises in chat.)

Anyway. John Kershaw over at NukeZilla wrote this amazing rant about how horrific that feature was. It starts off with "girls, meat, what's the difference?" and gets better from there.

John Kershaw, I don't know you, but you are my new hero.

WTF the third: The Bayonetta creator said something misogynist? NO! SAY IT ISN'T SO!

So everyone is familiar with Bayonetta, right? I have to say that she's hands down one of the best female characters to come out of the gaming industry in the last few years. She's strong, well rounded, not sexualized and... okay even I can't maintain the sarcasm.

Anyway. She's inspired a fair amount of controversy, which isn't too surprising since one of her main attacks involves spreading her impossibly long legs to kill things with her ladybits sword.

Bayonetta. Feminist icon and role model.

Anyway, Hideki Kamiya - the creator of Bayonetta - apparently thinks that all women view each other as enemies. Which begs the question... He designed a title with a female lead... why?

Oh right! The tits. I mean, sorry - the ass. Almost forgot. Kamiya is clearly an ass man.


...okay, that's enough fail. So here, have some win:

Troll data analysis

Blogger Kirbybits got involved in that whole Penny Arcade internets fiasco and got a lot of internet traffic to her blog. Interestingly, she decided to analyze comments to see what sort of trends troll comments display. The results are super-interesting! You can read the post here, but be warned there's lots of super-graphic language involving threats of rape.


And that's all I have time for today. I'll check in a few times this weekend just to make sure people aren't setting themselves (or each other) on fire in the comment threads, but otherwise I'll see you Monday!

WTF: The where the hell did my week go? edition

Holy shit, folks. This week kind of got away from me. I apologize for the radio silence - this week is a week of pure and utter madness. I've also been working on some things that require a bit more research to pull together. Next week, things return to normality, so I'll be returning to a more normal posting schedule.

Some of the stuff you can look forward to is a rant about why Jim Sterling of Destructoid is a despicable human being, a look at recent M:TG art, and, uh... this:

And worse, sadly.

Anyhow, I don't come completely empty-handed. I have some WTF for you, aside from the above.

WTF the first

David Jaffe, the director of the ever female-friendly God of War series, compared the new Sony handheld to a "fresh vagina". Unsurprisingly, game "journalists" have fallen all over themselves to repeat this in the name of "journalism", proving once again that game journalists really are incompetent fuckwits.

WTF the second

I've heard of several "virtual girlfriend" apps for the iPhone, which... okay. Whatever. A lot of them are based on the popular dating sim genre common in Japanese games. But what I really love is when North American men who don't even have a cultural excuse to fall back on wax enthusiastic about these games. Like this review of Virtual Girlfriend in which the title image is captioned:

The beauty is, when she starts getting bitchy, you just start over!

/facepalm

WTF the third

NOOOOOO!!! Samus! What have they done to you?? Curse you, internets! Curse yooooouuuuuu!!!

So. Okay. I want to point out that the file name of this picture is "waifu1". For those of you not familiar with Japanese, that's a Japanese rendering of "wife". There are many things that I can picture Samus doing. Being a housewife is not one of them.

For more housewife Samus fail, check out these photos here.

WTF: The tired Friday edition

Okay, folks. My schedule is kicking my ass this week, and my ass will be kicked even harder next week. So instead of giving you three real posts this week, you get two and a half. This might happen next week, depending on how much brainpower I have left after tech weekend for the show I'm in... But after that, I promise that I'll be returning to normal levels of snark.

Anyhow, I couldn't leave you empty-handed, so here's some miscellaneous pictures that I haven't found a home rant for yet.

I've forgotten what game this comes from, since I forgot to include the game's name in the file name when I saved it. I think that says a lot, don't you? I think I'm becoming a bit too blase about crotch floss as armor.

Okay, does anyone think it's a coincidence that "GROWING" is right over this poor woman's boobs? Neither did I. Though I'll admit the mental image of growing boobs made me think of DragonBall, which was an amusing mental non-sequiter. "AAAAAAAAAA!" "SHE'S REACHED BOOB LEVEL 9000!" "IMPOSSIBLE!"

...no? Just me then. Moving on... How about this?

WHAT. THE. FUCK. Seize power? Fine. Seize glory? Sure, if you think people really give a shit about your performance in a shitty knock-off browser-based game. Seize WOMEN? BECAUSE THEY'RE YOURS? AAARG. I know that the Chinese export a lot of translated games, Caesary being one of many, but I'd prefer that they didn't export their misogyny as well.

This is from an ad campaign in Europe - thank God not in North America. This fails on multiple levels.

Once again proving that the default of anything is male, and that female is always "special" or "distinct". Even, apparently, with puzzle games. I hope those of you with iPhones refrain from purchasing either version of what looks to be an uninspired Tetris clone.

I can't decide what I hate more. The cleavagey outfits, the interchangeable faces, the nauseating levels of pink, or the actual words. MISS BIMBO? There's a game out there called MISS BIMBO? Do they honestly think that making their ad pink will make the title any less revolting? Also, advertisers who perpetuate "bored of" should go die, like, right now. This makes my inner grammarian want to stab my eyes out.

A bit of visual WTF to tide you over

Hey, folks. Thanks to a concerted campaign of vitamin C and lots of sleep, I'm getting my brain power back. It's still going to be a few days before I post anything substantial, but that's because I'm working on a series of posts about World of Warcraft that will probably be posted in three chunks. It's substantial enough that it's going to take me a non-trivial amount of time to put together, and since I'm busy all weekend I thought I'd put up some things for your, er, amusement in the mean time:

Hey look! Perfect world wants to get in on the act too! Lesbians!

GOD DAMMIT SONY. Just. Just. ARG.

To be fair, I don't believe that this is official art - I'm pretty sure it's fanart. But still. What the f*ck? Did Perfect World's Random Upskirt Tiger start some kind of "sex with tigers" trend?

This, too, I'm pretty sure is fanart. What makes me sad is that the artist who drew this has a pretty good grasp of anatomy. They're just choosing to ignore it.

d00d, what is it with sci-fi games and ass cleavage? Mass Effect 2 has Miranda and her ridiculously cavernous ass cleavage. Was Blizzard jealous? Srsly. Come on. Spandex just doesn't work that way, peeps.


Thanks for being patient, folks. I promise the new posts will be worth the wait.

For Boxing Day, I got you some WTF!

Hi, folks! I'm having a wonderful holiday, so I thought I'd share some festivus cheer with you all! Today's WTF is decidedly frisky, but since it's a long weekend that shouldn't be a problem. (Or at least I hope it's not a problem. If you're at work while you're reading this, you have my sympathies.)

WTF the first

A Street Fighter Condom! Obviously not sanctioned by Capcom, image very NSFW. So, okay - I'll admit that this one is actually pretty humorous - and I'm actually kind of impressed that Ryu's the naked one and not Chun Li (that's pretty unusual for that sort of thing). Mostly, the bothersome thing is that the link from Destructoid pretty much assumes that anyone looking at this is a dude by opening up with:

Have you been looking for a way to combine your love of uppercutting people with your love of sticking your penis in things? Do you like not having to pay child support to illegitimate children? Are you frustrated that there isn't a contraceptive device available that shows Ryu's testicles?

Sure, it's funny. But can't I appreciate the absurdity of a Street Fighter condom without having a penis? Or is that not an option?

WTF the second

I was scarred when I found out this exists and had to share the pain: behold the Pokebra.

I got nothin'.

WTF the third

According to RPG Geek, there is an actual d20/OGL product for 3.0 D&D called Chainmail Bikini. The blurb on RPG Geek's product info starts out:

From the company that brought you Bride of Portable Hole: The Book of Neurotic Fantasy, and the author who really wanted a feat called Bondage Attack in E.N. Arsenal - Whips, comes a product that brings the superficiality and vapidity of pop culture into the realm of heroic fantasy roleplaying.

Wow. That sounds really classy. I mean, this sounds exactly what I've been missing in my search for material to support strong female characters in fantasy gaming. (/sarcasm)

Okay, seriously? Anyone who got this for me would find them in about as deep a shit as if they got me a vacuum cleaner or a carpet steamer.

Another daily dose of WTF

Hi, folks. Things are going to slow down a bit as we approach Christmas, and I apologize for that. To make up for not getting three posts in this week, I thought I'd post a couple of links to tide you over.

1up.com isn't as huge a bucket of fail as places like Kotaku and Destructoid, but it's user-generated content can still be... problematic. As witness by the Club o' Cleavage hosted on their site. Because heaven forbid these guys should leave the house and talk with real girls.

And then we have this picture of a Games For Girls display at a GameStop in California. Seriously? It's almost enough to make me want to stop shopping there, but it'll never happen because I'm cheap and I hate paying $60 for games.

Lastly we have Pillow Fight for the iPhone, in which buxom bikini-clad women engage in a pillow fight. Classy.

Blame NaNoWriMo

Hey, folks. Sorry for the radio silence. American Thanksgiving, birthday celebrations, a wedding, and the end of NaNoWriMo all conspired to make sure that any time spent at my computer since last Thursday has been time in which I have been prying my daily words out of my brain in an increasingly desperate attempt to make it to the finish line. But look! I finished!

Yes I use a spreadsheet to track my words. I'm a giant nerd.

So now that that's over with, I can now reclaim the mental bandwidth that was being consumed by NaNoWriMo. Hooray! I've been doing lots of research in the last little while and I promise I have lots of interesting stuff to rant about, including body customization, sexist webcomic ads, and Paizo.

In the mean time, I don't want to leave you empty handed. So here, gentle reader, is your daily dose of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

WTF the first:

Fair warning, unbelievably NSFW! Orgasm Girl - a flash game on New Grounds about a lesbian who goes around giving girls orgasms in their sleep. Apparently successful enough that it warranted a sequel, because there's also an Orgasm Girl 2.

I'm afraid that I've spent a little too much time dragging prose out of my brain to mock this in a sufficiently scathing and intelligent manner. I'll leave that task to you.

WTF the second:

How Fat Princess is blatantly better than feminism - a column on Destructoid by Jim Sterling.

This is seriously one of the most offensive and disgusting anti-feminist screeds that I have read since I started the research that wound up to me starting this blog. Among other things, he claims that feminism is bad for women as well as perpetuates the stereotype that feminists are humorless trolls who have no chance of finding a man. And then at the very end, he turns around and says surprise! This was all a joke! If you're offended, clearly it just proves that everything men say about humorless feminists is true! Clearly that makes them blameless, right?

Well, except for the comments where readers fall all over themselves to say OMG THIS IS SO TRUE. Consider yourself on notice Jim Sterling - I'm adding you to my Google Alerts.

WTF the third:

(NSFW!!) Video Game Girls DB - proof that in every stereotype there is at least a small grain of truth.

Perhaps the creepiest masturbation aid I've ever encountered, this site lets you sort by hair color, eye color, measurements, breast size, and bounciness - among many other factors. Seriously? Yuck. Just... yuck.