Video games need to be more female friendly

I've been playing the new Spelunky game on Xbox that was released this morning and as much fun as I'm having wandering through the levels, my favorite moment so far has been the options menu.

Spelunky pays homage to Indiana Jones-style pulp stories and one essential part of the game is the blonde-haired red dress-wearing damsels in distress that give you a kiss after a successful rescue. I was happy to see that the four playable characters includes a woman, but I thought the helpless damsel would rub lady gamers the wrong way and push them away.

That is, until I saw the options menus.

After the sound level adjustments there is an option for "Damsel Style." The helpless blonde can be replaced with a beefy blond guy wearing a red bow tie and speedo.If neither of those are your thing, the damsel can take the form of a pug. The choice of damsel is independent from the choice of playable character, so if you want to play as a dude who kisses other dudes, you can. Spelunky doesn't care.

Well played, Spelunky designers, well played.

This isn't the norm, of course. Female gamers are often forced to play as a male protagonist, and that knocks down the immersion factor a few notches. There are some wonderful exceptions, of course, like modern role-playing games that let you build your character from scratch.

I don't think Gears of War 3 gets enough credit for its presentation of racial and gender diversity. There are important characters from every major nationality in the plot and there are multiple playable female characters - with no ridiculous bikini armor. Both genders have the same amount of protection.

I usually play as the blond-haired Damon Baird in Gears multiplayer because I want a character that somewhat resembles me. In far too many cases, female players are hopelessly out of luck and can't even select a character of the same gender, let alone race or hair color. Maybe this is too nuanced to be listed as a male privilege, but it is inherently unfair.

I understand that story-focused games often don't have the luxury of making the protagonist moldable. Grand Theft Auto IV was a masterpiece of storytelling and the protagonist had to be a man from Eastern Europe. That's the way the plot was written.

Some games aren't as story focused and there's no reason the game designers can't provide a female option the way Spelunky did. We shouldn't expect anything less.

I realize I'm not usually on the same side of feminists on a lot of contemporary issues, but when it comes to the culture of video games, there's a lot of room for improvement. This includes both the way women are portrayed in games, such as the bikini babe warrior archetype that is so absurd it's an insult to players' intelligence, to the terrible way some cretins treat female players online.I'm glad to see Spelunky is taking a step in the right direction.
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Pretty pretend guns are not a right

Lately my fellow bloggers have been writing about the importance of rights, like the right to a trial in relation to the safety of the public over at Congress Shall Make No Law, and fictional rights that fools cherish, such as the right not to be offended as Popehat and For The Sake of Science both did a great job of hammering out.

So with that in mind, I'm going to tackle the issue that really matters to me - the false claim that Gears of War 3 players have a natural right to pretty guns.

Gears of War 3 is an Xbox game that retails for $60. In some online multiplayer modes, there are some purely aesthetic customizations one can make to their character, the relevant one here being "weapon skins," where the guns players uses can have different paint jobs or animated graphics to make their pretend guns dazzle. Some of these weapon skins are unlocked by completing specific tasks in the game, but a set of 22 was made that players have to pay real money to use.

For $3, you can unlock a static paint scheme like tiger stripes or a flower pattern for all five starting weapons. For $4, you get an animated graphic, like an ocean ripple, for all five. For $15, you can unlock all 22 skins for one of the five weapons, and for a poorly-spent $45 you can unlock each and every one of them.

Predictably, there has been a lot of complaints on the Internet, most of it whiny. The best articulated criticism I have seen is from a level-headed competitive player named K.L. who made a very reasonable video saying this isn't the end of the world, but he doesn't like the policy of incorporating money-making tactics normally reserved for freemium games into a retail game. He hit all the normal points, such as making people pay to use content on the disc, something I don't have a problem with.

Let me start by saying K.L., or "arCtyC" as he likes to be called, has hit upon a gut feeling I share. There is something disappointing about having to pay to use these fun weapon skins. He also does a good job of stressing that this is an entirely voluntary transaction.

Paying to make your pretend guns prettier goes beyond voluntary and satisfies all of the criteria of Michael Munger's "euvoluntary" or "truly voluntary" criteria. Epic Games created the skins, has the legal right to sell them and customers know what they're getting. The weapons skins have no impact on weapon performance, and there are still zero-dollar unlockable weapon skins, so players are not punished for failing to buy them. There is no coercion vaguely associated with this transaction.

So that leaves one criteria to be considered euvolunary. How terrible is the Best Alternative To A Negotiated Agreement, or BATNA? If not buying a product will result in the death of a consumer, the BATNA differential is said to be very large.

I have trouble imaging a smaller BATNA than not being able to use a pretty pretend gun without paying $3. Sure, it's foolish for most people to pay $45, and I imagine most people chose not to, but a lot of people paid an extra $90 to have their copy of the game bundled with a cheap desk statue, a few trinkets, fake documents and a few different weapon skins and aesthetic downloads. For some reason, offering special editions of games and movies to consumers doesn't draw the same complaints, but the same elements are all there.

I gave it some thought and paid $3 to have the pretty flower imagine at the start of this post put on some of my pretend guns. This small price acts as a barrier, preventing every other player from having an obnoxious arsenal, and as a result I haven't run into anyone else with the same pretty guns.

There is no way to know if Epic Games planned to include the weapon skins, and later decided to charge for them, or were simply looking for another source of revenue and put a little bit of work into creating these for-pay paint jobs. The intent is irrelevant. The weapon skins are a fun addition to the game that I was happy to pay a small amount of money for, and in result, I received exactly what I wanted.
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Moral hazard in Gears of War 3

Horde mode in Gears of War 3 is slated to feature a new hazard - the moral hazard.

In Gears 2, horde mode is an endurance match where waves of enemies swarm a small squad of up to five players. It uses the games multiplayer deathmatch maps as arenas and players “win” after completing 50 waves of increasingly difficult monsters.

If you die in horde mode, you don’t come back until the next wave. A wave fails the moment the last player dies, so staying alive is very important.

But that’s going to change in Gears 3 horde mode. Players will win currency to purchase fortification (to be fair, horde mode was unbeatable without using shields as improvised barriers), traps, weapons and - get ready for it - resurrections for dead teammates.

Now this isn’t going to be the cliche “how dare they make changes in the new version” post that nerdblogs are so prone to include. It’s entirely possible this will be more fun, and I look forward to having randomly-selected bosses every 10 waves instead of a pack of bloodmounts each time.

Instead, I want to make a prediction - more players will die stupid, risky deaths because the permanent buzzkill of an in-game death will be gone.

I tend to only play horde mode with friends, and I imagine that will be become an official policy when horde 2.0 matches feature reckless players looking to rack up more kills kamikazing into packs of enemies, then demanding in squeaky voices that I spend hard-earned currency to bring them back so they can do it all over again.

I theorize that a no-rez policy may make some groups more successful on average, as players will see their risk and reward curves bend, take less chances, and have more money leftover to buy explosive-tipped arrows.
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