Gamertell

The field of video game journalism places writers in opinionated positions. They write the same types of stories as newspaper journalists - news, features, opinions and reviews - but also must entertain their audience.

In addition, the news stories are often regurgitated press releases. Take a six or seven paragraph press release and condense it down to three or four. This gives writers a bit of freedom as to how to handle their articles.

Especially if said video game journalists are working at a blog, much like this one. They are often called upon to be witty, to provide information and entertainment that 20 or 30 other sites aren’t to get more web traffic.

However, some blog writers are willing to go too far by isolating and insulting a portion of their audience in order to appeal to the largest - males age 13-27 - demographic…

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One young lady over at Destructoid has posted a rant about “girl gamers.“  Besides the usual grumblings about how girl gamer “stars” like the FragDolls look like models first and gamers second, she raises some good points about the atmosphere of gaming culture:

“Sometimes you can’t really trust if your actually liked or if you’ve only got popular because you have tits. For example, myself. I managed to get number 1 blog on 1up.com for a few weeks. I was on the front page for a number of weeks also. Now was it because people actually liked my writing, or because I am female? I am not really a great writer. And some of my 1up messages are all “omg your hot” or “omg girl gamer.“ I usually introduce myself as a female gamer. I’m 20 years old, I am not a girl any more.“

When the industry tries to cater to girls with That’s So Raven and Bratz games, you know something is awry.  I’ve known many girls who play the same games as most guys.  My girlfriend is working on Odin Sphere as we speak, though I often remind her that she’s not just controlling the camera when we play Gears of War over Xbox Live.  And I’ve noticed a sudden surge over hearing little girls meandering over how much they love Zelda.

It just seems like something the industry doesn’t want to move on just yet.  They just keep making their games to the 18-34 male crowd and girls can either bite that particular wax tadpole or get left out to dry.  I just wonder how far we are from games made in the vein of romance novels.  One shudders to think what it’d be like for a local game retailer to have the same clientele as any Barnes and Noble book store.  One shudders twice to think of the profits, since all of those games would be largely derivative, just like their paperback counterparts.  One shudders thrice because lists of three have better rhythm than lists of two.

Site [Destructoid]

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