This album is forgotten

According to a recent BBC article, Nottingham is the second worst city in the UK for illegal downloads. the most shared artist in my fair city is Ed Sheeran. In fact, the entirety of the UK seem to think that they can't last without Sheeran in their lives, so they've decided to illegally download his album instead. I could go on about how I dislike Ed and his novelty micro-acoustic guitar, his beige demeanor, his MOR, milquetoast, pointless, translucent music, and his fan-base, who mistook his rendition of Wish You Were Here for a 'new track' of his at the Olympic Closing Ceremony (there is a special kind of stupid happening there, and it probably needs an entire post to get to the bottom of) but really I just wanted to use the article as a jumping off point for a bit of spiel.

A step away from misogyny

Games are for men, or more specifically they are for teenage boys. Despite surveys that tell us that the average gamer is around 30 years old and that 47 per cent of them are female the demographic that the majority of releases, be they triple A or bargain bucket, are aiming for a predominantly male teenage audience. With this week's furore over John Hemingway casually calling Borderlands 2's easy to co-op skilltree 'girlfriend mode', to the immature and frequently frightening responses in June to Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs Women Kickstarter project, it is clear that attitudes in the gaming world, including reluctance to address a female audience combined with the casual misogyny slowly bubbling away in male-dominated studios and awareness of these issues are causing focus to be more frequently placed on these subjects.

Whilst reactions remain varied from the audience, these community wide missteps have been covered extensively by other more prolific writers and I shall leave their deconstructions of the holistic issues aside to instead concentrate on a few of the games out there, those that can be viewed as partly progressive, and potentially even gender neutral, and how even a developer who gets it right can subsequently mess it up.

It's all to easy to simply lay blame equally across all titles and genres and point the finger indiscriminately, but there are titles that appear to have grasped the concept of gender neutrality, if only where it matters most: the player's avatar.

Whilst Walking

The other day I was walking home and I got cussed by a teenager in a wheelchair. The other day is a poor quantifier, it was last week actually, on a particularly sunny day. I walk past the Aspley Neurodisability Centre twice everyday. Once to work, and once on the way back. I have a vague history that faintly links me with the place but that is just something I smile about every now and then, and hardly very interesting. I also walk past an All Girls School, so my walk home is rife with chances for faux pas as it is, without being cussed by a teenager who I think it is safe to assume had some neurological disability. I don't even know if that is the correct terminology, if that is the right thing to say in the world of "Politcal Correctness gone mad" even though political correctness isn't mad at all bar a few exemplary cases, and is in fact a pretty good thing as it stops us all walking around sounding like paragraphs in articles written by Richard Littlejohn or Aidan Burley.

So, I was cussed by this teenager in a wheelchair, and it was fairly surreal. I walk everywhere, and if I can't walk somewhere I take the bus or I get a friend or family member to drive me there. I am absolutely confident that I should never be let loose behind the wheel of a car, but I can't say for certain that I will never end up in charge of one of those metal boxes hurtling down a road near you, in the future. I take a kind of fantastical pleasure out of being driven around by other people, even on the bus, where I like to think it is because I am simply to important to drive myself, but that isn't the case. As established, I was listening to some music, which music isn't important, but it was sunny so it was unlikely to have been anything that you could stick under the 'dance' or 'electronica' labels, so you can rule them out, with certainty. I had my headphones in, and I noticed a group of teenagers or 'youths' all amassed on the little wall in front of the building and instantly realied that, as the sole other occupant of this pocket universe, I was going to be noticed.

And lo, I was noticed.