Discrete Mathematics, or How I Learned To Love The Pain

Well, I'm back in college for a very specific purpose, and that is to pass a class that I've already failed once before. It is a foreign language class (basically), in that the math involved is a totally foreign language to me.

Regardless, my updates for the time being are going to become sporadic, as I find the free time that I ought to have is quickly eaten up by hours of studying something that I understand less day by day.

I'll try to post at least once a week for the time being, and hopefully can get a few extra posts in here and there, depending on my relative sanity and emotional energy.

'til then, game on! (I want to live vicariously through you.)

Females as portrayed in video games

In general, I have often disdainfully viewed the glorified versions of women as portrayed in almost any video game containing a female character. I find them to be terribly stereotypical and extremely unrealistic, to the point of distracting me from immersion in the gameworld. Not actually being interested in Bayonetta, I dismissed the character that I repeatedly saw as part of the pre-release hype, assuming she was yet another bit of eye candy designed to cater to the generic "male nerd" gamer.

However, Penny Arcade directed me to a blog written by Leigh Alexander as part of the GamePro website, and she has a completely different view that has given me a whole new point of view on the issue.

I still maintain that the vast majority of female characters in video games are grossly unrealistic and detract from the overall experience due to their innate (and out of place) sexuality, but overall I can buy Leigh's premise that in the context of Bayonetta it is a stylistic choice in the same vein of glorified male characters that tend to dominate video games.

One reason that I think video games remains as a male-dominated hobby is the simple fact that most games condition young men of questionable social skill to view women as sex objects, there for their visual pleasure, and that there is nothing wrong with this attitude. What I would like to see in games is more than one female body-type, and an overall use of female characters as characters, and not as eye candy or for some sexual hype to help sales.

The question, I wonder, is if this is a realistic thing to hope for in an industry that is (at least currently) dominated by males?

Corporate Currencies

Well, my unannounced New Year's hiatus is over. I've relocated to my old college town to finish up a degree, and am feeling pretty glad to finally be getting this over with.

A while back, I saw an article on Kotaku about yet another corporate currency, this time Sony's Crysta. Many companies have switched to this model of artificial currencies that you first buy with your real money, and then later spend on games. I believe that by removing real currency one step from your actual purchases, they hope that you are distanced from what you're paying and they can sell you more stuff at a more expensive price.

In my opinion, this is never a good thing for the consumer, and never done with the consumer's interest in mind. I would choose to not buy a game rather than be forced to go through the process of dealing with one of these bullshit corporate currencies.

My great grandfather was a coal miner in the Appalachian Mountains. He grew up working in the coal camps, with his family living in company housing. His pay came in company script, which was not real currency, and could only be spent in the company store. Naturally, the company store was making a profit by price gouging, and this whole twisted system was designed to keep the workers basically as slaves.

An extreme example, yes, but this to me is a cautionary tale of how anytime we willingly embrace the idea of a corporate currency, or the idea that a corporation has the regular peoples' interests at heart, we are toying with fire.

What can we as consumers do, though? I'm not a huge console gamer, as I've said before. As a result, I don't know how much of a stranglehold Microsoft has on you with the 360. I do know that if I have to buy Microsoft Points in order to fully enjoy the 360, I never will purchase one.

What do you think? Do you use corporate currencies regularly? What is your experience with the whole situation?