Why is it a “step in the right direction” to portray women as physically aggressive or violent?

I think it’s pretty amusing that you seem to be bashing on Princess Peach and Zelda. If you ask me to choose which is worse between Faith and the former characters, I will most definitely take Princess Peach or Zelda over Faith in an instant, sorry to say. And while I’d be happy to pile some derision over Lara Croft, it’s not like women are uniquely portrayed in idealized ways in games. In most other respects Faith strikes me as very, very similar to Lara Croft. I think the distinction being made here is largely one devised to market Mirror’s Edge as some sort of progressive element, when it’s really the same ole’ thing.

What is worse, Faith being a strong (albeit, unrealistic) protagonist or female characters in video games that are merely the “prizes” for successful princes/warriors/adventurers? Here we have a character that has a sense of reality compared to female characters like Laura Croft who are physically unproportional, and runs around the Artic in shorts and a flimsy fur coat.

I tend to object to in-game advertisement of add-ons because, well… When you’re in a game you’re far more likely to make an impulse purchase than you are if you are sitting at your computer, browsing Amazon.com for the latest DLC/Expansion pack. Context does matter, but you’ve got a captive audience in a product that’s already been sold — Trying to sell more within that is just off-putting to me. Dragon Age had this, and I thought it was pretty tacky. Portal 2′s store is also very tacky to me, even if it’s not front and center. Naturally I tend to avoid games that are worse with this behavior, but they definitely exist. League of Legends isn’t necessarily in-your-face about its advertising, but it’s definitely a constant presence in the client and their business model is definitely on the seedy side of the scale, for my tastes.

You mention that they don’t beat the money out of you, so in theory game companies can do whatever they want. I don’t disagree. That’s the status quo we live in. I just think that it’d be better if there were a stronger consumer advocacy voice (or voices) for gamers. That doesn’t really exist now, outside of individual voices like mine, yours, Shamus’… But no one takes these thousands of individual voices seriously.

But I do play Minecraft, and when the beta rolled around, notch announced that the thing he had said about alpha users never having to pay for add-on content, doesn’t apply for new registrants. This doesn’t even apply directly to me… but I actually like to play this game with friends, so it would actually STILL dick me over if they were missing access to content I wanted to use. Luckily this hasn’t happened yet, although he got pretty specific about how he intends to do it when working on an actual modding API for his game (way too late to see a humongous modding community simply decompiling and changing the game’s java code): “We want to buy and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them ourselves.”, http://notch.tumblr.com/post/4955141617/the-plan-for-mods It’d be pretty much *necessary* to jump ship to one of the up-and-coming open source minecraft clones at that point, just to avoid complete community fragmentation. (This point isn’t a real issue for single-player games, of course, but being expected to pay again, for anything less than another full-sized game, is rather bullshit)

It’s hard to say that these things are unethical, though, because people can do whatever the hell they want. They never beat money out of you, they just encourage you to give it to them. I do think it’s unethical when you advertise something and then later pull it out from under your customers. Probably the biggest example in the world is Sony removing OtherOS from the ps3, and I think that when Valve started adding unlockables to Team Fortress 2, that could be considered a dick move to any players who thought they were playing a legitimate arena shooter and not some half-assed MMO bullshit. But likewise, I also don’t think it’s unethical to simply share information when you want to. Copyright law is not a fundamental human right like whiny game devs would have you believe. Essentially, it’s law that was originally written simply to protect people against others *selling* their work for a *profit*, which lobbyists for information-related industries have managed to get it ret-conned into a way to prop up various fake business models.

It’s not my responsibility to support their fake business of selling software, although I *will* buy a reasonably priced and worthwhile game, the same way I’d donate to an open source project that I wanted to see succeed. So if you realize that Valve is being a dick to their customers, you should vote with your wallet by exercising your right as a consumer to either not play the game, or torrent it (you can find no-steam copies of Portal 2 that run out of a directory and don’t require internet access! it’s win-win!)

But, well, this reminds me of the other, more famous quote from him…

For me, pretending that every new Unreal or UT game should be just UT or UT2004 running on the newer engine it’s just stupid puritanism.