Okay, so I haven’t been doing much lately. Not here, anyway. I’m occasionally on Facebook, but, mostly, I’ve been ignoring my current computer problems and playing Star Wars: The Force Unleashed…and Lego Harry Potter…and a little Arkham Asylum, because the re-release apparently requires replaying instead of accessing my previous saves. Meh.

That’s why I haven’t dumped the pictures from my camera, or said anything else about the almost-a-week my parents were out here. I’ll get back to that at some point, I’m sure.

First, in the interest of extreme procrastination, I decided to go through my feeds. I’ve been ignoring the gaming blogs, and, in clearing out GamePolitics, I came across an article about…something. A survey that was part of someone’s dissertation. I don’t know what the dissertation was about, but the survey apparently had something to do with girls and gaming.

I was going to try to find out more about it, but digging around led me to story titles like “Student study says games are too complicated for girls,” and decided that laziness was a much better idea than actual research.

You can read…whatever this is…here: Girl gaming on the rise.

Or, here’s what I got from it: girls don’t game as much as boys. They like uncomplicated, casual-type games with simple controls, silly cartoon violence, and puzzles. Also, the Wii is for girls, because, oh, they love the party games. And side missions! And collecting stuff! And playing a strong yet feminine character who gets the job done.

Seriously, why is this a fucking gender issue at all? Why am I still trapped in a society that puts technology in one part of the room, girls in the other, and erects the great wall of No Girls Allowed in the middle?

Sorry, boys, but fuck your clubhouse rules. And girls? Fuck your rules, too.

I don’t know how it averages out, but I spent more than eight hours yesterday playing The Force Unleashed. My copy of The Ultimate Sith Edition showed up, and, honestly, what else was I going to do but immerse myself in the awesome alternate storyline, prancing about in my spiffy new Sith costumes until I finally got to kill off Whineypants Skywalker Jr? And, okay, so that wasn’t actually all of the eight hours — most of it was spent desperately trying to get even partway through the Sith Master difficulty on the original game.

I suppose you could say that I pulled a total ‘girl’ and ‘gave up because it was too hard’, but it just stopped being fun three hours into the same six feet of space between save points. When killing Kota became much more enjoyable than actually trying to clear the landing platform, I decided that I should probably stop before I broke something important.

All that was after I clocked a lot of time on that game, because I found it refreshing and lovely, having a game that wasn’t based on Legos that I could enjoy. One that had some halfway decent graphics, because I likes me some graphics.

I also like using force lightning on Jawas. They make a funny noise and flop around a lot — which is actually a lot more entertaining to watch in the Storm Troopers. This is probably not what she meant when she concluded that girls like their violence to have ‘a humorous undertone’.

Let me Kanye myself for a second, because I kinda want to talk about graphics. What’d I say before? “I likes me some graphics,” I think. This is true, yet…probably not in the sense that most people mean ‘graphics’.

See, I’m a bit funny about things like ‘graphics’, and what I like. I sometimes look at the clouds during the day and think they’ve been rendered badly, or are a bit too cartoony to be believable. I actually liked the way Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker looked. And, as pathetic as it may be at this point, I thought Silent Hill was pretty damned…pretty, too.

I’ve played both of those [though I may not’ve gone all the way to 100% with Wind Waker, because that fucking camera side quest was obnoxious]. Also, Silent Hill 2 through 4, which should tell you my tolerance level for shitty controls.

Oh, hell, where was I?

Maybe a quote from another article about this article will get me back on track….

Vermeulen said boys were more interested in violent games like Call of Duty and Resident Evil, than Super Mario Bros.

That doesn’t help at all. Crap. Maybe I should’ve done an an outline or something.

For me, this whole thing is a little like those descriptions for astrological signs — if half of it applies, it’s amazing. As a Leo, I’m supposed to be a leader and the life of a party. As a girl, I’m supposed to enjoy games that…aren’t some of the games I enjoy.

I may only be a sample group of one, but, honestly, a sample group of under a thousand [gamers between the ages of 11 and 65, probably male and female] isn’t really broad enough, either. This shit can’t really be condensed into simple, news-friendly soundbytes, and it really shouldn’t be, either.

Yeah, sure, it’s convenient to split ‘gamers’ into ‘male’ and ‘female’ and be all weirdly general, but…fuck, it’s lazy, and I’m not surprised that it seems to be summed up with this statement:

‘Girls like to game, but games are not well tuned to their interests.’

Seriously? We’re going to go with that? How can that possibly be true, with the incredible range of games out there?

Here’s an idea for a ‘survey’ study. How gender-divided is this whole world of gaming, really? Let’s look into whether or not people really do identify games as being ‘for girls’, or ‘for boys’, or even just ‘for kids’. It might be a little difficult, but let’s see how many individuals of a specific gender buying a game that’s somehow supposed to be for the opposite gender get asked if they’re buying it for someone else.

I don’t remember this ever happening to me. I don’t know if that’s because I usually buy my games online, or if it’s because, when I’m in a store, Gremlin’s there with me [and usually the one buying]. Whatever it is, I don’t think I’ve ever felt that ‘no girls allowed’ thing that’s apparently only perceived by non-gamers. The guys I’ve encountered behind the counter in my various game purchases from EB/Gamestop and Gamexplosion don’t seem to suffer from the same weirdness as males in other tech-related professions.

And, before you question my counting games as ‘tech-related’, I’ll clarify that I’m using it in a very broad sense. I’m including ‘selling electronics’. Guys trying to sell a TV or a DVD player [or hook up the cable] assume that I’d try to jam the coaxial cable into the HDMI port and will willingly be conned into shit I just don’t need. The guy at the game store doesn’t seem to assume that my uterus makes me try to play Resident Evil 5 with an Atari joystick held the wrong way.

That’s not fair. If they were like that, they’d assume I wouldn’t know what an Atari controller was.

Maybe we can just…not do this inane gender-based shit? Or, at least, not talk about a summary of part of someone’s dissertation as if it’s newsworthy? It’s bad enough that there are stories about murders over consoles, and shootings done by people who once shared a public transportation system with someone who had a receipt for a game made by Rockstar partially embedded into their clothes from someone not emptying their pockets before using a community washer being related back to ‘violent video games’…fuck, what I mean is: there’s already a wedge between ‘gamers’ and ‘society’ [as if there’s really a difference between the two], and there are plenty of gaping chasms between groups of gamers, we don’t need another.

…would it help if I said please?