La Belle Dame Sans Culottes
November 2007 Issue
Features
- From the Editors
- Craft Check: Gamer Soap
- Gaming in the Media: Fallen Guitar Heroes
- Market to Me: Using sex to sell
- Gamer vs Gamer: The Virtue of Reality?
Interviews
- Industry Interview: Shelly Mazzanoble [Author, Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress]
Articles
- Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Into the Tavern, Part II
Author: Samara Hayley Steele
- Sims vs. Playboy: Sex and Relationships in the Dark Ages of Video Games
Author: Cherie Thomason
- Another Rape In Cyberspace
Author: Pat Miller
- Immaculate Reception
Author: Latoya Peterson
In this ongoing series, Samara shares her experiences as a female LARPer in a male-dominated LARP Organization.
Cherie discusses the portrayal of sex in console video games.
The trauma of a sexual assault is not limited to physical hurt. Pat discusses the violation of virtual bodies as analogous to that of real bodies, and wonders how it can be stopped.
Latoya discusses the lack of sex in mainstream video games and critiques the interplay between hyper-sexualized characters and their chaste actions.
Gamer Stories
Reviews
Odds 'n Ends
I don’t identify myself as a gamer, or at least it’s not how I’d describe myself, but I’ve been playing games on computers since I could reach the keyboard. Frogger, Pitfall, various games where the map was represented by the surplus ASCII characters, text based adventures–I dipped my toes in everything. I’m fairly certain that the first game I ever played where I got to choose my avatar was King’s Bounty. It had a barbarian, a knight, a paladin, and a sorceress. The game-play guide recommended that new players start with the knight (I seem to remember) and, the perennial newb, I did. I never graduated from the knight. I never finished the game. But I never felt the least curiosity about the sorceress.
The next game I remember where I got to choose my character class was Diablo (the first one). Diablo presented three characters to choose from, and this time the one meant for beginners was the warrior, and I chose it without any argument. When I got my hands on Diablo II, I chose the barbarian.
Eventually, I noticed that I never chose to play a female character. It sort of bothered me: wasn’t I proud of being a woman? Wasn’t I satisfied in my gender? I gamed a couple times with female characters in an attempt to prove something to myself, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I mostly gave up gaming, for a while.
Then a friend set me down in front of his World of Warcraft account, and I fell face first into it like a Charlie Chaplin comic pratfall. Designing my character was fun; I’d never met such a customizable character before; you could make the horns go any direction! Make the fur varicolored or plain! I chose the gigantic Tauren race, for the exotic experience of playing a large and muscular character. (In meat-space, I can body-double for a capuchin monkey.) My character was a jock, and she could look down on all the puny humans. Yeah, that’s right, she. I realized I’d broken from my normal custom and chosen a female character, eventually, when I tired of loping around being immense and making cow-girl jokes loudly at my friend, who’d grown bored and left the room.
Something which bears mentioning: I had taken a fair amount of convincing to give WoW a try because I’m nervous about multi-player games. What if someone talks to me? What will they say? What do I say? What if I say the wrong thing and then they kill me? The early training bits of WoW were stress free, all collecting wolf-kidneys and interacting with NPCs, but eventually I got to Thunderbluff, where there were more players than NPCs. Imagine an eight-foot Tauren trying to sneak about surreptitiously, in mortal fear that someone may speak to her.
Unfortunately, someone did; some social outcast was trying to start a guild and was importuning passers-by to sign his petition. As I could think of nothing I would like less than joining his guild, I declined, and then again, when he insisted. I still remember the nasty jolt I felt when he called me a bitch: not because it’s vocabulary that has much of an impact on me, but because I had thought I was safe inside my gigantic cow-girl. How dare he call me that, when he didn’t even know I was a girl behind the keyboard? This was not the end of my WoW career, which I mention because I am about to abruptly leave it behind. Farewell, giant cow-girl!
I will spare you a recitation of every character I ever played, but I was twenty-four before I realized that I didn’t dislike playing female characters, I disliked, as I once put it, “playing characters without pants.” But it’s more than that; I do enjoy playing a character who presents as female. I don’t like playing a character who presents as sexual. Don’t get me wrong, I have my moments of sexuality, and of presenting that way. But when I’m playing la belle dame sans culottes, I’m at 100% sexy, 100% of the time. It feels like eating twelve pounds of fudge. It feels like being told your work uniform is a mini-skirt.
The game I am most likely to be wasting my time on right now is DragonFable, an online Flash game. This is my avatar. She wears pants.
