I challenged my players to a scavenger hunt a few days ago, and asked them to find a screenshot of two avatars flirting. This is what one them came up with:
I watched it until my boss told me to go shut the door so he could make phone calls without listening to my hysterical giggles.
Look, I wasn’t going to jump into the PAX East/ Dickwolves fray, but the ever-awesome Genevieve Valentine called me out on it.
It all began with a mediocre joke from a nerd comic that I find pretty hit-or-miss in general. But dickwolves isn’t a one-off mediocre joke. It’s the next example in a long line of game-related content that starts with the assumption that gamers are angry young men, and goes on to make sure that games appeal only to angry young men. (The original joke also says something about rinse-and-repeat MMO quests. Or I might be thinking about work.) This was followed by a backwards sort of apology, which acknowledged that the joke was mediocre, without acknowledging the reasons it was upsetting.
There was the inevitable blog fray, but I couldn’t really connect to either side. I was infuriated by the willfully-inconsiderate mentality that rape’s just a word, that somehow the user of words isn’t responsible for how the reader feels about those words. (Seriously, is there a reason to share words that doesn’t take the reader into account?) That somehow calling it a joke makes the offensive attitudes and assumptions behind it acceptable.
But I also didn’t connect to the stridently PC backlash, which seemed to be saying that all creativity needs to be bunnies and kitties and topics that will never ever make anyone upset. Or that one needs, somehow, to be a rape survivor in order to take offense.
And I’m shocked and saddened by the huge embrace of the word Dickwolves on gaming blogs and on T-shirts. It’s not, as some have claimed, a pro-rape sentiment, but it’s still offensively anti-woman. The guys embracing it are, I think, trying to say that it’s stupid to get worked up over the whole thing. The attitude is “Don’t be so uptight! It’s just a joke! In a webcomic! Get over it!”
I’m annoyed that somehow saying that I don’t find horrible things to be all that funny means I’m uptight, and I’m really annoyed that this kind of joke can still find an audience in the games industry, in a field I love. I expect better than this in a field that should be focused on fun and creativity.
So, I’m adding dickwolf to my vocabulary. Not to mean comic strip rape, but to mean the type of bro who wants to keep gaming the he-man women-haters clubhouse.
via Persona
The CNN photo project at SxSW invited people to take a picture and show what they’re carrying, creating a snapshot of a SxSW day. My essentials are headphones, friends’ business cards, Allison’s house keys (on a Five College Credit Union bottle opener, no less), a Beijing transit card (because you never know when you might be in Beijing and want to take the subway), my phone, spearmint gum, eyeliner and lipstick, MetroCard, embarrassingly strong sunglasses.
If you’re not fascinated by the contents of my purse, check out what other (famous) people were carrying at SxSW.
This is worse than that time Pandora had the nerve to contaminate my Britney Spears/Lady Gaga station with Backstreet Boys.
Allison and I were lying on the living room couches talking. Or maybe we were sitting at the kitchen table talking. Or sprawled on the upstairs couch talking. Whatever. We spent most of this week talking, and that’s what we were doing when her husband, J, shouted in from the other room. “Honey, why’s our Wii blinking blue?”
“If it’s our alien overlords making first contact,” Allison shouted back, “then I for one will greet them with open arms.”
look like rockstar, by Simpson’s Paradox
A rock star with a fondness for tea and computer games, but still!
From the LiveShare / CoolIris booth at the SxSW trade show. I cannot stop laughing at this!
Hey, did you know that South By Southwest isn’t actually the compass direction? If your sister were a sailor, like mine is, you’d know that it should be Southwest By South.
Anyway, I’m in Austin for SxSWi, which is pretty fantastic. The interactive track has had a bunch of great social media speakers and panels, which have led to great chats afterward. I’m lucky enough to have this amazing job in new media and community management, but to most people I meet, I do something or other with the internet. It’s great to talk with folks who are also doing jobs that didn’t exist a few years ago.
The indie section at Screenburn is stunning, with a great bunch of developers. The indiePub pavilion hits my indie checklist for both an indie game that looks and plays like a AAA title and an indie game that’s mind-blowingly weird.
And early-spring Austin is just gorgeous.
Plus I’m staying at Allison’s house! Allison and I became friends my freshman year of college, when our then-boyfriends, Eric and J, were roommates. Allison and J got married a few years ago, and now they’re expecting a baby! (Eric and I didn’t exactly work out romantically, but he’d still be my speed dial one, if phones still had speed dial.) It’s great to be with Allison again, whether she’s taking me on the tour of Austin hotspots or we’re sitting in her kitchen in the middle of the night.
I flew into San Antonio yesterday to drive to Allison‘s house in Austin for SxSW. If I were a superhero, my archenemies would be driving and paperwork, so I was already pretty thrilled with myself for defeating them and getting this rental. Then I came out of the Enterprise kiosk, and saw that my car for the next week is a white punchbuggy! I guess the universe reads my blog.
This got slightly less fun when I got on the highway and discovered that every other car in Texas is either a truck or an SUV, but even being as high as the next guy’s wheelwell can’t dim the awesome of driving through cacti and scrub bushes in a punchbuggy.
