There was a pretty popular post by atheistium about two weeks back and although this is a bit late, I still feel the need to respond to it.

Atheistium brings up a couple of points in her post, namely:

1) Attractive women are gaming simply because they get attention quite easily.

2) Being attractive is more important than being actually good at your job when it comes to the gaming industry.

And her general thesis:

T) Women who exploit sex in combination with gaming are holding back females as a whole when it comes to gaming.


It's easy to agree with her here, but I think Atheistium isn't seeing the forest that's behind those trees she is looking at.

There's two sides to this here; the casual side (as she puts it, "having photo shoots and websites dedicated to your photos, posing around with a Nintendo controllers on your nipples") and a professional side (which she illustrates using the example of Jessica Chobit licking a PSP).

Now sexyhalogrrl69. She's got a blog, and it's popular because each day thousands of guys check her new pictures, because last time they almost caught a nipple. She's got eleven guys giving her hundreds of gold a week on Warcraft, and she signs every message she sends with a ;).

She is not holding you back.

There are always going to be girls like that, trapping stupid boys with computers into thinking they've found a gaming goddess, when in actuality all they've found is someone with an ego to feed. They've existed on the internet since the beginning, first on BBSs, now on MySpace.

Do guys like them? Of course! But again, they're not some unique phenomenon with video games. The fact that they maybe occasionally game is simply two things they have in common with you. The fact they have a trait that you find negative doesn't reflect on gaming as a whole. The vast majority of females who play games (and according to recent figures, they comprise 41% of the total gaming population) are not posting pictures of themselves for sexual consumption on the internet.

I shouldn't have the point out that sex sells. Sex sells really well. You can sell anything with sex; there's a reason companies pay models to dress up in skimpy outfits to promote their product at gaming conventions. There are plenty of attractive women in the industry who receive tons of hits from horny male games because they look good in a small t-shirt.

This is nothing unique to gaming.

Models and pretty girls sell everything in some form or another. Be it body soap, tennis, cars, inflatable pools, etc. We have a news program in the world which features women who deliver the news while slowly stripping naked. The news!

I say this not to try and diminish the effect of sexuality when it's so deeply ingrained into our culture, but instead to point out that blaming Jessica Chobot for licking a PSP is like blaming bullets for killing people. You're not necessarily wrong (and from what I've read from the comments of atheistium's post, Chobot did call her on it, and rightfully so), you just miss the entire social and economic problems that are behind each bullet (or each .jpg file in this case) when you blame the messenger.

And don't get me wrong, I'm not saying to put up with this. There should be change. Attacking the sexyhalogrrls of the internet however is the wrong target. Women should (and thankfully, have) demanded better games from the publishers. The problem is that the industry is still not taking women 100% seriously. They don't know how to communicate effectively with women, and most importantly, they don't know how to make a game that men and women can play together without gender popping up (anything that has come out, even the MMO giants like WoW, are more then likely a happy accident).

So keep fighting girls! I want you to succeed. Just stop blaming the blonde with the nice rack, the Yoshi tattoo, and a webcam. Defeating her won't get you any of the respect you deserve.

- Eddie