Has anyone thought to ask women gamers whether or not they're offended? Anecdotally, my wife isn't, and her favorite game is God of War, a game that doesn't lack either class of objectification. Heck, when she found the mini-game on the boat, she played it for a half hour, giggling like a maniac the whole time. And on a wider scale, according to the ESA, 44% of gamers are women. That certainly doesn't sound like women are being driven away in droves.
-Robert Myers
To the Editor: Re: "OMG Girlz Don't Exist on teh Intraweb!!!1" I'm a gay video gaymer who plays online all the time. I've had to put up with holding my tongue in raids and matches, and understand the hassle outing yourself can involve.
I've always understood that female gamers have a hard time too, but until reading your article today I've never really made the connection in my head. It's almost surreal people's reactions when they find out who they're playing with, but it's also frustrating when all you want to do is have a fun match with your friends. From now on I'm going to do my best to support the women gamers I meet; maybe one day we'll look back on stories like this and laugh at how different the times were, however I think that day is still far off. If you ever want to have a pride event supporting women in games please let me know, as I would happily support it.
Keep up the great work, and I love your site design!
-Mark Bennett
To the Editor: Whitney Butts' excellent article on her very existence should be required reading for every manager, marketing team member and developer of Internet-savvy games. Here's a list of her qualities I could discern - which one should a game company be working on? She is: Intelligent (she can write); a subscriber (to at least WoW); community-oriented (frequenting IRC channels dedicated to the game); and incredibly annoyed with her fellow customers.
I've recently read articles about whether or not the MMOG market is saturating, well, it appears it will miss an entire 51% of the population of any area if it can't manage to not utterly alienate every XX chromosome-owner. Game communities need to do more to avoid reducing their market by half. Every business school in the USA will teach you women are more brand loyal than men - the first MMOG to realize this and make a great game that doesn't compel its best customers to confront "zomg send me pix pls thx" is going to win.
-Jeb Adams
To the Editor: At the end of the article (which was both amusing and disheartening), I noticed the following:
Whitney Butts is the "woman behind the curtain" at The Escapist. Her existence revolves around the fact that Mathematics is the key to the universe, and that she alone is the square root of all evil.
As someone with an interest both in morality and mathematics (among other things), this is quite an interesting statement. Is Whitney Butts the embodiment of an imaginary moral system (and unique to boot)? If so, what does such a system look like? My meager mind has trouble rotating any moral system 90 degrees to an imaginary axis.
Also, this seems to support her theory that she doesn't actually exist, since she is the embodiment of something imaginary (which implies, perhaps, having both a corporeal nature and not having one at the same time*). Puzzling and illuminating at the same time: puzzluminating, if you will.
-Matthew
* Perhaps she's like Schroedinger's cat - without the vial of poison (of course). Sometimes she's there, sometimes she isn't. This perhaps explains her ability to play WoW without seeming to be on the internet, and her ability to shock her fellow guild-mates by spontaneously popping into existence.
To the Editor: I was introduced to your magazine about two months ago and have thus far enjoyed it immensely - that is, until, I read "Regarding Women Monsters and Monstrous Women." Somewhere between being told that I, as a male gamer, seek to control and subvert any female in any video game, and then summarily rebuked for considering not only female gamers, but any intelligent female, to be a monstrosity, I began to question what the piece was trying to accomplish in the first place.
