Fail.

Some may recall a blog I posted a little while back about girls and gaming. You might also recall that I mentioned that female gamers seem to be fewer in number, and are sometimes treated as oddities by their male counterparts. To upset the balance further, a company called GameCrush has decided to try and make things even more polarized by offering a service where you can PAY to play games with sexy girls. Because, you know, no sexy girls would want to play games with you unless they’re paid to do so.

From IGN.com’s article:

On GameCrush, guys are Players and girls are PlayDates. Players pay to play and PlayDates get paid to play. Guys can browse PlayDate profiles (there are currently around 1,200), view photos, and even chat with girls for free. Publicityhazard’s turn ons include vibrating controllers, for instance, and is turned off by three red lights. Once you find a gal you fancy you send her a game invite and if she accepts you get six to ten minutes of one-on-one gaming time. PlayDates have the ability to block any guy they want for any reason. When the service launches tomorrow it will only support the Xbox 360 and a few casual games hosted on the GameCrush website, but there are plans to add PlayStation 3, Wii, and World of Warcraft support as soon as possible.

How sad is that? As the subhead on TechRadar’s article reads:

Buying girls’ attention? Isn’t there a word for that?

I also have a few more words for it: eww, eww and eww with a side of eww for dipping.

Of course we all know this service will turn a profit. Then again, so does prostitution and stripping. (The chicks joining this service are just trying to pay their way through college too, right?)

According to IGN, GameCrush’s payment system was calculated to be about the price of buying a girl a drink at a bar ($8.25). This price translates to about 10 minutes of game play. The girls on this system get to keep about 60 percent of the cash they bring in, and can store it in their virtual g-string. (So I made that last part up, what’re you going to do about it?)

After completing a gaming, er, session…players can rate their “PlayDate” on things like gaming skill, hotness and flirtiness. Those with the highest ratings will receive preferred placement on the site. Remind me again how this system isn’t just a computerized pimp? All it needs is a fuzzy hat and a mean backhand.

I know no one is forcing these girls to join in, but I still find the whole thing extremely creepy and pathetic not only for the girls, but for the guys using this service. Maybe you should get off your lazy butt and go to a strip club or something, at least that way you’d be getting exercise for more than your right hand.

No women allowed?

A friend of mine posted a link to this article earlier, and boy does it make me want to kill something. (Though, according to some people quoted in that post, I’d rather be playing with babies and gossiping with the neighbours.)

It really comes as no surprise that gender bias is still alive and well in the nerd world, but there’s really no excuse for it. I cringe at the idea that some guys think all we female gamers are good for are acting as healers or filling an empty raid slot.

All of this reminds me of yet another discussion I read on a message board where a guy was asking how to make a D&D game that appealed to women. (He was bringing in not one, but TWO girls and wanted to make sure they didn’t get scared away.) A lot of the advice given was essentially that he should dumb it down and that the encounter mechanics would be too confusing for us poor little ladies to comprehend. Yeah, screw you people.

It’s true that a lot of women who do game tend to utilize more casual systems such as the DS and the Wii. I suppose both could be seen as a little less intimidating, but I also think it could be considered the “gateway drug” of gaming were the other systems made a little more gender neutral. There’s no denying that the 360 and PS3 marketing is targeted towards men as are the games available. I’m not suggesting that either the system or the games should be dumbed down, but it would be nice to see a wider array of non-boobified titles available that aren’t things like “Cooking Can Be Fun!” or “Super Animal Fun Time”. (Don’t Google those, I made them up.)

I know I’m in the minority of women who favour the 360 as their gaming system of choice. I’m also not one to be bothered or intimidated by bouncing, bosom-laden fantasy chicks romping across the game screen. (I was the one that picked out the pinup calendar in our computer room that my husband gets blamed for.) However, I can see how these sorts of games might count as a pretty big deterrent to other women.

A large part of the problem (as has been pointed out numerous times across the interweb) is not only caused by men, but by other women. As I noted in an earlier blog post, some girls think that other girls that game are aberrations. They have been given the mindset that games are not for them. It’s a lot like the idea that power-tools are for men and we women-folk are too petite and helpless to do so much as change a light bulb. Better stick to baking.

We have not evolved as much over the decades as we would like to think.

Unfortunately, there’s no one all-encompassing fix for this. Marketing needs to change and perceptions need to change; neither of these tasks can be accomplished easily. If game companies want to invite women to the table they need to do some more strategizing. If men want women to game, they need to be a little more inviting and less patronizing. If women want to game, they need to jump in there, flip everyone the bird, and show them how it’s done. Trust me guys, we can kick your ass.