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Rosettas posted:I never realized how bizarre and out there some of these "girl games" come out to be. I'm not even quite sure what kind of a message "go find your blankie by shooting at animals with a crossbow" game is really trying to send What message does 'win girls by jumping on mushrooms and killing turtles' send?
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Jan 17, 2014 22:55
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Psychedelic Eyeball posted:Are there any girl games that aren't there to remind you that if you're a girl, you're utterly screwed and must spend 500 dollars in beauty products every day? Sure, there are plenty of them, but they're not purchased by the company that runs the big "games for girls" site network. Back when I looked into this sort of thing for business reasons, those search terms were dominated by a handful of sites all owned by the same people, all cross-linking to each other to build up their ranking. The economy of flash games for ad views is something separate from standard indie game development that I don't really understand. It comes down to: what do you define as a girl game? If the criteria are looking exactly like one of these games, then of course they're all terrible, but that's because you've used terrible as the definition, if you see what I mean.
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Jan 17, 2014 23:17
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Rahonavis posted:The saddest part is that they are all basically the same. Like there is literally nothing else the programmers can imagine a girl would ever want to pretend to do other than wash her face and put on clothes. Further back in the distant reaches of the internet before this particular network of sites came to prominence, I recall these dress-up things being more commonly called dollmakers. Not games. People made them for fun, there were webrings (anyone remember webrings?) and collection sites to help you navigate to more and more dollmakers, because people who found these things fun tended to want more of them to play with. At the time it wasn't even particularly young girls that were expected to be the audience. That's the niche that these companies went into. They really heavily pushed the term 'girl games' to dominate the search engine results for it and to strongly associate it with these things in people's minds. And because these flash dollmakers are so cheap they could easily pay people to make loads and loads of them. They want people to come to their site and click absently through these games. They want people to come back and see what new ones have been added. And they want them to be slightly unfulfilled and bored so that they'll click on advertising. It's not so much that the programmers can't think of anything else girls would like to do, it's that they've been given the brief of "$500 for every dressup game". (I forget the exact prices, but I talked to a few people who did this sort of thing in the past. For that matter some of them were artists who licensed the code and then could produce games with identical features but different art and get paid for each set they produced.) It's all about the money. Ubisoft's Imagine line, on the other hand, has an entirely different set of problems. Some of those games are okay, some of them are terrifyingly bad, but they're not operating on the same model as free flash website games. Terrible retail games often focus their efforts on being cheap and bright and right in the reach of a parent who doesn't know anything about games and just wants something to make their child happy.
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Jan 17, 2014 23:57
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Aces High posted:
Because there are people who don't want to play full RPGs and just want to play with a dollmaker for a few minutes? I hate to put myself in the position of looking like the 'defender' of these crappy flash things, but I want to nudge the critique into being against the actual negative parts of the game and not just against pink and sparkly things existing. There are some actual games based around fashion, most of which I haven't played but some of which are considered to be pretty good games in the casual market. They're nothing like these little flash things, of course. They do still tend to have the same problem of restricting all body types to the same ridiculous cartoon model of being impossibly skinny, exaggeratedly curvy, and Sassy Hip Thrusting all at the same time. However, they have clear rules and gameplay and put the player in a more professional position. You're not just trying to make "yourself" up, you're running a shop or a fashion show or something. As for otome games, they are yet again made for a totally different audience, and are highly varied. There are only a tiny number of originally-Japanese games available on the PSP, whose names were already stated, but there are a LOT of them for mobile phones. Again, the market affects the nature of the game. Phone games tend to let you buy one character's story at a time (because phone games need low price points and multiple purchases, that's how that market works), and usually guarantee at least a halfway happy ending because they don't want people to be angry about the money they've just spent to buy that character. Most English-language otome games on PC are written by westerners and tend to have more active protagonists but honestly there are Japanese-written ones with active protagonists as well. There's all kinds of things to say about them but they're very different from the sort of kid's toy we're talking about above.
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Jan 18, 2014 13:37
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For a dressing-up game that I can recommend as actually being fun (and a game), I present: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDkcm7T3ssA I played this during a time period when I was checking out a lot of 'casual' games and did not expect much out of it, but when I started playing it, it was surprisingly compelling. Also successful enough that it spawned a whole series, but I never played any of the others. Not sure how well the concept comes through from the video if you've never played it, but you basically have to assemble outfits to various requirements and bonus requirements and get scored on how well you do, with timers and powerups and other complications being thrown at you. Since the lineup of what items you have available at any moment is semi-random and refreshes as you use things, you can make strategic choices about building up part of a 'perfect' outfit and sending the other models on stage while you wait in the hope that the rest of the perfect outfit will spawn, and so on.
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Jan 18, 2014 18:45
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If you're going to do any sort of study on girl games you really need to figure out what definition of them you're using first rather than randomly cherry-picking titles. I mean, you could compare Metroid to Let's Date Justin Bieber and draw all sorts of crazy conclusions about how "games for girls used to be awesome compared to now!" and that would just be silly as the two games are not even slightly targeted to the same audience. The earliest games specifically targeted at girls that I can personally remember are the Cabbage Patch Kids games on the Colecovision (Coleco owned the doll line at that point in time) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZBntuRi9MU I did not own that, but I did own this weird thing called Cabbage Patch Kids Picture Show where you could assemble and record little ugly animations of your own. Of course there wasn't really any way to SHARE them with anyone, given 80's technology... Pre-Nintendo, though, video games tended to be more gender-neutral. This was family entertainment. The pushing of games as a rad boy thing in marketing came later.
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Jan 18, 2014 19:17
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Veloxyll posted:
It's an interesting game and it certainly touches on gender elements (and I never got past the first big case myself) but it's certainly not a free flash game, not covered in pink, and not sold to a young girl market. Or even the casual market (which is stereotypically older women). It got banned from the casual market entirely because people objected to the mechanics, thinking it sounded like the 'dangerous' girls were promoting bullying. As for the phone otome games, the two most interesting ones I know about are the one that starts out with the protagonist recently married to a man who's mysteriously ignoring her, then discovering he's having an affair. Drama! (You can choose to win him over, or find COMFORT ROMANCE in the arms of another while still married, or get a divorce right away and find a rebound) and the one that starts out with the protagonist plotting murder. Yes really! gegi fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jan 19, 2014 |
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Jan 19, 2014 13:13
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Midnight Voyager posted:I would expect it to get banned for the PLOT TWEEST near the ending, but... well. I guess they didn't play that far. As I recall, the sort of people who kneejerk scream for bannings are not usually the sort of people who give a game a thorough playthrough first. The plot issue didn't get brought up until the fight was already ongoing and I honestly don't think that was the reason it got pulled, but it probably didn't help. Anyway, nowadays it's sold on Steam as a quirky indie thing instead of trying to push into casual circles.
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Jan 19, 2014 18:54
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TK-31 posted:What I'm trying to say here is that all these 'girl games' that only have dressup options could stand to make boatloads of money just by adding a mediocre but still fun game on top of that. But it seems that no, even that would be trying too hard for them. Building an entire online marketplace with multiplayer and online trading is not exactly a simple snap-of-the-fingers job (especially if you're specifically aiming at very young people, in which case various protective laws come into play with signing up for accounts and making transactions). The major flash network behind these things isn't trying to sell games, just to get ad views. Totally different business model. My Candy Love would be an example of an online 'game' that has somewhat more game elements (although it's a dating sim, which some people still think isn't gamey enough) alongside the dressup, and makes money as far as I know, although they make it by doling out the advancement through the plot. I don't think they have any method of paying specifically to get more hats and other character options. How does Gaia Online work? I know there are people who make money doing Gaia-related commissions somehow or other, but I'm not sure if you can actually create items to go into the game. I have the impression that the Gaia audience skews female and does enjoy dressing up their avatars but I've never played the game myself.
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Jan 19, 2014 21:00
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MisterFuzzles posted:Alas this is what the marketing has become They carefully gathered a whole bunch of little girl focus groups and asked them what they wanted and experimented with ideas to try and find something that the kids would be happy with so that girls would buy LEGOs again instead of ignoring them. What did they get for it? Mockery. Offensive cartoons written about the board of directors (representing them all as old fat white men, disregarding the actual gender balance of the panel in question). Demands that the LEGO friends line be pulled from stores. Yelling that any parent who buys them is a terrible person. What message can kids take from this? "You should be horribly ashamed if you like cute girly things. Cute girly things are inferior. Never show them to anyone." Disclaimer - I love the 1981 lego ad, it's adorable! And one thing that bothers me about the lego friends line is that the lego friends minifigs, while cuter, don't really play well with the original minifigs, and that really works against the strength of LEGO in general. The real benefit to these things is that while nowadays they make most of their money from selling individual kits (blame capitalism - these kits sell an awful lot better than basic blocks do), you CAN still buy lots of different things and mix and match them to build whatever you want. Making them less interconnectable is a bad thing.
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Jan 20, 2014 23:29
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Six Of Spades posted:I'm super happy this thread exists. I've played one or two GIRL GAMES in my time - during the DS' lifespan, Ubisoft published all these 'Imagine' games, where you took on a job that was stereotypically female, babysitter, chef, vet, etc. They were so popular they made an absolute fuckton of them, and there were even copycat series. The Imagine series is an interesting case because strictly speaking they aren't a series at all - at least, some of them aren't. Several of those games are pre-existing foreign-language games that were licensed and rebranded, their origins disguised. Others were made in-house by one of the Ubisoft studios. As I understand it, some of them are okay games and some really are hilariously bad, but it's hard to get a decent rundown of what's what - who made which game, which games are worth playing for a laugh and which should be avoided entirely, etc. The only one I own is the first Imagine Ice Skating game, which I had to give up on because of the terrible voice acting. I don't know if it was that bad in the original Japanese, but in the English version, the skating sections were ruined by a high-pitched voice going 'WHEE! WHEE! YIPPEE! YAY! WOOHOO!' practically without pause for breath. and it's kind of rhythm-based gameplay so if you turn off the sound you're missing the point. At least, that's how I remember it. It was a while ago. I know for certain that one was originally Japanese but about Journalist I have no idea.
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Jan 22, 2014 01:01
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dijon du jour posted:
Clearly that ought to be a game where you throw water balloons full of makeup on moving targets, changing their appearance if you hit.
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Jan 22, 2014 02:33
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KataraniSword posted:For that matter, would the whole Diner Dash ripoff genre count? I know casual gaming in general is in a weird place, as a lot of it seems to be marketed directly to not just women, but the elusive "soccer mom" demographic that is assumed to only be allowed on the computer in between child wrangling. Generally called "Time Management Games" in casual development circles. Time Management was never really my thing though so rather than talk about any of them myself, some articles by Emily Short of interactive fiction fame talking about narrative development in Miss Management and Emily's Holiday Season I personally prefer casual strategy games (where you build stuff and gather resources - Westward was a big name in that category) over the work simulators. It's been a while since I've played a new one but looking around BFG at the moment I was amused to discover there's a game out now called Save The Prince. Always good to have a few princes to rescue now and then right?
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Jan 22, 2014 14:53
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Choco1980 posted:I'm not sure how convinced I am that the hidden object games are really "girl" games over that coveted. "Whole family" grabber. From the business side of things, they are intentionally targeting an older female market. They're certainly happy to have other people playing them as well, but that's the visualised consumer used for making decisions, just as "teenage boy" is the primary market of a lot of triple-A gaming. Along with the normal sorts of restrictions on violence/blood/religion that you might expect in a more 'family' market, developers in the casual industry are also specifically advised to avoid themes that are considered bad matches for adult women, which means sports, modern military, and science fiction / robots.
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Jan 22, 2014 20:38
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GoneWithTheTornado posted:This thread reminded of this Rock Paper Shotgun article about a Barbie game where Barbie and three of her friends get trapped by a malevolent GLaDOS inspired robot AI called Closet that lives in Barbies wardrobe, and forces the girls to complete minigames really similar to what we've seen until now in this thread. It's really... something. The barbie webisode featuring the evil closet is actually surprisingly funny and full of geek references. (I got linked to it when the game launched on Steam.) Sounds like the game isn't anywhere near as entertaining, though. If they'd released the game on Steam at a much lower pricepoint it would have been snapped up by two different groups of people, one just expecting it to be terrible so they could gag-gift their friends, and one expecting it to be intentionally subversive.
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Jan 23, 2014 01:38
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Endorph posted:Well, I definitely didn't write about throbbing orc manhoods with them. ERP is the ultimate in safe sex. No diseases, no pregnancy, and an excellent opportunity to learn how to negotiate for your desires and figure out the kinds of things other possible partners might like in an environment with limited consequences. Schools should encourage teenagers to write about throbbing orc manhoods with each other, while separated by a distance of at least several miles. ... Now try to figure out just how serious I am.
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Jan 24, 2014 15:06
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MiracleFlare posted:I don't know if these sites are officially affiliated with each other or are just grabbing whatever they want -- I'm pretty sure I saw one site just offer up some games for anyone to put on their own site It's both. There is a network of sites that are owned by the same people and cross-linking from one site to the other in order to boost their search engine rank, and they also offer up their games to other people to try and lure more visitors into that network. Of course by this point there may be multiple networks run by separate individuals, each containing a set of sites...
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Jan 24, 2014 23:56
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DialTheDude posted:Holy hell that's despicable. Is there an option to hook up with him again? Are the other guys that the female lead can date even aware of what she's doing? It's the whole soap opera storyline where you're not allowed to tell the amnesiac anything he doesn't remember, so the girl is specifically banned from telling her boyfriend that they were ever a couple, while at the same time his ex-girlfriend (who he does remember) shows up and moves in on him. I don't know if all the other love interests know the whole story. I think one of them is the doctor treating him. He might have an ulterior motive.
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Jan 27, 2014 01:22
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That did have the benefit of looking like real code and thus being briefly amusing the first few times you were frantically scanning for a match. I don't see anything wrong with using a random matching game with 1s and 0s, but it would be more fun in my book if you had to create specific kinds of matches to send specific signals to your robot dog. That still wouldn't be much like actual programming but it would make some connection between what you were doing and the concept of commanding a robot to do what you wanted. Little scrolling screen on the side with the dog wandering around in an environment, and you put together matches to make him move, jump, and dig in specific spots?
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Jan 28, 2014 13:01
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for nerd points: I believe that was actually a leftover script from the proposed Trek series before TNG that didn't take off. So it's even earlier than early TNG, in principle anyway. However as a little girl I liked Troi for the shallowest of reasons: she had pretty hair.
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Feb 2, 2014 02:33
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Hokuto posted:The typical Otome Game format is that you play as a girl and go through a prologue. Then you choose the boy whose story you want to see. And it is a story. There are choices, but they offer the illusion of interaction without any meaningful alteration to the flowchart. A typical choice will go as follows: This is the typical format for a few certain brands of otome games (almost entirely made by Voltage and Solmare) delivered on mobile phones, not for otome as a whole. 'Otome game' just means a story-based game with a female protagonist aimed at a female player. Dating sims with more stat-managing elements, puzzles, or RPG battles still count as otome. Otome games on PC/PSP/PS2 (the primary consoles for otome games, as far as I know... I think there are one or two on the DS? but not many) are far more likely to have branching plotlines and meaningful choices. Lead characters still tend to be a bit passive, but there is a lot of variation. Some are very much the movers and shakers of the plot. Some are action girls. Bad endings (and REALLY bad endings - some of these games include all sorts of abuse and end up with everyone dead!) definitely exist, and guaranteed happy endings are not the norm at all outside the phone market as far as I can tell. Even with mobile phone games there are some that don't just have Happy and Super Happy endings (I think that's a Voltage trait, isn't it?). However, the format makes a big difference in the way the games are designed. Because they're working in either a free-to-play model or a buy-this-character's-storyline model, the phone games are much more about instant rewards and always leading to a happy outcome. If you've just paid for the chance to romance bachelor #3, you don't want it to turn out badly... Or at least, that seems to be the thinking. I don't have a smartphone so I haven't played them myself but I've read several playthroughs of these games on a different forum. Some are really, really dull. Some are at least somewhat entertaining. The best of this type I've seen so far seem to be 'In Your Arms Tonight' (aka 'the one with the divorce') and 'Kiss Of Revenge' (aka 'the one with the murder plot') quote:I have spent the past several years translating these games for a living, and even when I tried to download one from Google Play to see how the finished product turned out, I just couldn't play it. The interface was clunky, and I wasn't ready to pay actual money to get past the prologue. ... I don't suppose you're willing to freelance translate some better games? No? Alas.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:49
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For me personally a lot of it boils down to don't be a jerk, or at least don't be a jerk unless you mean it. Most of us are aware of what things are considered important Christian iconography. Artists often intentionally misuse them to make a point, sometimes just to be shocking and claim that it's deeply meaningful, othertimes as a form of protest. I'm very much against censorship, so I don't think people should be prevented from making their offensive art, but if they just splash it around at random without realising the offense they're invoking that's pretty dumb. On the other hand I think that sort of protection has to be tightly limited to prevent restricting creative expression. I wear certain kinds of crosses solely because they are goth/punk jewelry and not to invoke my potential deep belief in Christianity. I wouldn't wear a crucifix or certain other kinds of crosses (like the really simple gold ones) that I would expect to be taken as a serious protestation of faith, because that's not the statement I want to make. But I don't want to shut out the huge range of possibilities of interesting designs that are a bit cross-like. Replicating a specific bit of regalia is a statement of challenge, or will at least be read that way by many people. As a woman, making a replica of the pope's costume and going out in public for it is not going to be taken as a sign of my deep respect for Catholicism no matter how much I say that their faith is spiritual and moving to me - it's going to come across as a protest against the lack of female priests. Making random stuff up vaguely inspired by another culture and then promoting it as if it were part of that culture is wrong on more than one level. That's simultaneously failing to treat the source with respect AND trying to benefit from the respect afforded to that culture by others. This is where some of the really horrible dress up games can come in, to me. They're playing off "Ooo, Culture J is so cool!" while not actually having anything to do with Culture J, and potentially making it less cool by association. Making random stuff up vaguely inspired by another culture is completely fine in my book, though, as long as you call it something else and don't pretend that it's authentic. Being inspired by each other and coming up with new ideas based on what we've seen is a critical part of how the world moves forward. Culture evolves, culture is shared and becomes new culture. I don't want to try and restrict ideas. So I guess for me there's a lot of factors at work.
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Mar 14, 2014 22:05
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Bacchante posted:The lack of games for grown women might be an issue for another time. Almost the entire casual games industry. (And adventure games, but they're a much smaller niche, and not seen as being only/primarily for women in the same way, although they definitely are expecting an older audience of mixed gender rather than aiming straight at teenage boys.) There are many games designed for adult women, the issue there is that they are seen as 'lesser' games because they have different design principles than the hardcore AAA shooting market, and many people will refuse to count them as video games at all, solely because they are targeted at a different market: if they're not for boys they must not be real games. For some people 'Casual' gets thrown around like an insult. Anyway, those games have their own range of issues to examine that don't really blend into the themes of this thread so I won't talk about them at length, but it's important not to brush them aside. They do exist and have had financial success.
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Mar 16, 2014 12:53
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Tiggum posted:How is that even the same game? "Yeah, I love this game concept you've come up with, everything is great, except one little thing... how about instead of playing as an assassin you play as an undercover cop? Keep everything else though, that's great." It wasn't just changing one thing, the game went through a lot of being pushed around by management. At least, according to the giantbomb game blurb. http://www.giantbomb.com/sleeping-dogs/3030-29441/ The female protagonist bit is true, but that was several iterations away from what became the final game. I don't know if there's any information available about what the original plot was.
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Mar 17, 2014 04:13
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ThatPazuzu posted:In our culture at least, it can be empowering for little girls but it's always associated with frilly pinkness. Xena: Warrior Princess. It does have that association in general but there have been counterexamples. Even Disney Princesses aren't that frilly and pink anymore.
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Mar 30, 2014 17:54
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You know I'm fairly sure there's quite a large payscale/hierarchy difference between 'chef' and 'dishwasher'. Or maybe I've been watching too many YES CHEF! television shows.
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Apr 13, 2014 11:23
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Mastigophoran posted:I guess part of me also worries that, if girl games as a genre were not all so incredibly loathsome - a point all can agree on We can only 'all agree' on this point because we've decided that any game which isn't so incredibly loathsome isn't a girl game and doesn't count. These games are terrible, and deserve to be called out for being terrible. Perhaps the safety tip for a parent here is to engage with your child and share things with him/her rather than turning him/her loose onto the wilds of the internet where you might find nothing but terrible flash games as your entertainment?
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Apr 20, 2014 16:38
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