Girl-on-Girl Gaming

Does Microsoft pay Joystiq by the post for all the favorable mentions of XBOX Live?

Awesome about the diversity. If/when I get the X360 and XLive, I hope the opportunity exists to play against/with good people no matter their background... it would be a shame to lose the chance of playing with different groups because some ignorant kids have a poor upbringing.

And you know, this might be the first time I heard somthing good about xbox live as far as the people go... seems all I hear about it the 'snot nosed brats'.

(after just skimming through the article.....) A couple weeks ago there was a post about girl gamers, now lesbian gamers, WTF???? No matter race/sex/creed/sexual preferance/whatever why can't we just be gamers?

Yeah, Bonnie's great -- she also wrote this story, "I'm the Pink One: Women on Xbox Live," for GameGal.com.

Here's a link: http://www.gamegal.com/news/newsscript.cgi?record=26

I agree with post #3, it's a stupid label, I mean soon we will have:
- Black woman gamers
- Black lesbian woman gamers
- White woman gamers
- White lesbian woman gamers
- handicaped woman gamers
- Gothic woman gamers
- ...

And some games somewhere will be racist or bad against they religion, sexual preferences, whatever.

WTF being lesbian or gay change anything when you play a frigging game in front of your TV or computer, geesh talk about a worthless articles.

Today, a friend on a blog wrote an excellent article about "labels", worth the read really.

http://stickycrows.blogspot.com/2005/09/ditch-labels.html

I don't understand why a lesbian gamer would avoid the image posted with your article...

@post #6, check the article: it's explained there, in the paragraph next to the same pic.

well, that didn't take long to turn into a gamefaqs-esque level of maturity.

So wait, the answer to the lesbian gaming community is to segregate them, then hope they will eventually fit into the greater group?

The idea is moronic. The problem here is that gays and lesbians are treated as "different" from the normal populace. Herding them into a group isn't going to fix that, it's going to just strengthen the "freak" mentality amongst the rest of the populace.

I am totally out of the loop here and have never been on LIVE. Although I do plan to be by the end of the year. I do hear horror stories about racist and gays and whatever but I don't understand how someone can discover your sexual preferance on LIVE. Or nationality for that matter. How does that work? Why segregate lesbians? How do people find out? do they open their mouths and tell people over LIVE? Is it on their gamertag? This may sound stupid to some people I know but since I never been on LIVE I dont understand it all. Can someone tell me?

@7, you mean to tell me that lesbians don't like watching lesbians?

In a perfect world, there would be nothing but lesbian gamers playing massively-multiplayer games involving lesbian-ninja-warlord-pirates.
But that's just my opinion as a deviant minority I guess. I mean, hardly any guy likes ninjas or pirates, much less lesbians, right? I guess my game idea would flop. I feel so alone.

gimbal, i whole-heartedly agree

Strippers, you forgot strippers...

either way, who cares??

forget about them they're dumb

@10, It's more like you'll be playing a nice game of Halo2 on Live, and then someone will call you a derogatory term. It has nothing to do with blatantly parading your sexuality, and everything to do with blind intolerance in the gaming community. HOWEVER. I personally have never had this happen to me, aside from the occasional 'fag' tossed around on Live. But that's Halo for you, I expected no better. My real life gamer friends are much more tolerable of me (I'm a bisexual female gamer. Woo! Minority!), and I've had a blast at gaming cons like E3.

*sigh*

My personal favorite is #5:
[snip]
- Black woman gamers
- Black lesbian woman gamers
- White woman gamers
- White lesbian woman gamers
[snip]

Yes, Carl, there are indeed multiple facets of identities that people hold for themselves. And, believe it or not, it *does* matter when you're not in the majority in *any* part of that - for instance, being a black heterosexual male doesn't afford the same mean income as a white heterosexual male. Likewise, a lesbian gamer is ostracized in ways you can't even begin to understand, even more so (or in different ways) than a gay male gamer - because it really comes down to a Venn Diagram.

The argument that goes something like: "Separating people into groups just makes them isolated. Don't form groups with like-minded minorities because you'll be left out of normal society," is particularly dimwitted, as I'm sure anyone who has taken a social, women's or black history class will know - "normal" does not mean white male heterosexual living in a representative democracy.

Yes, I'm a lesbian. I also work in a rape crisis response and sexual assault prevention center. I am also gender queer. In what ways should these facets of my identity nearly guarantee offensive jokes, inadequate representation, unrealistic portrayals or scarcity of role models in video games and other media in general? If any answer exists in the positive, it can only be through bigotry.

Re #3:
"A couple weeks ago there was a post about girl gamers, now lesbian gamers, WTF????"

So sorry, Zachary, to intrude on your Gentleman's club. Maybe you can enlighten me whether you think it's bearable to let black people on Joystiq? Or are they not to your liking, as well?

I was reading these posts again for the fourth time when all of this clicked into my head.

I don't have a huge deep explanation to give you, but all this is is a big mess of segregation - as you've already seen. Either that, or useless attempts to create a suitable gamer audience (is that even possible?) or, in the case of XBOX Live, to make oneself feel better.

Again, it is silly. Although I am a heterosexual male, I do have several friends who are either bisexual or homosexual. Does that matter to me? No. I believe it's a simple part of life that simply must be put into play the correct way - or rather, placed in the right spot, if you know what I mean.