Tuesday, March 6, 2012

I'm Pretty Excited

To play Mass Effect 3, which is being released today. (For non-gamers in the audience, this is an action role-playing game available on Xbox).

I've long been a fan of Bioware, the company that develops the Mass Effect series, among other games I like. Not only because they create fun games with female protagonists and same-sex romance options, but because they stand by those choices in the face of raging, seething, entitled hetero male gamers who want to hoard their boy-games in their homosocial boys-only treehouses and stop those games from catering to any other demographic so they DON'T GET RUINED BY THE GIRLS AND THE STUPID GAY GIRLY THINGS!

Or something.

Take the recent misogynistic shit-storm they invoked on Twitter in reaction to Bioware writer Jenny Hepler, who has the temerity to be a woman with a job in the game industry.

In some male gamers, we see the longing of boys and men for all-male spaces where they don't have to compete with women as equals. Where the best way to ensure that competition doesn't happen is if they make those spaces hostile enough so boys/men can continue operating under the myth that they're just naturally better at/more fit for participation in such spaces than are girls and women. And where, if women dare try to compete as equals, they are viciously attacked and accused of ruining something Very Special. (See also sports, the military, male-dominated religions, and "man-caves").

I will be supporting Bioware today by buying and playing Mass Effect 3 while female. It's hard work, but somebody's gotta do it.

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