First of all can I just say I MADE THE VIDEOS IN THIS BLOGPOST, that is, I chopped them up and edited them and uploaded them to youtube. I am well chuffed with myself and this opens up a whole new world of me making videos and putting stupid music over them and subjecting forcing my friends, family, loved ones and blog viewers to them. So this weekend I went to Bristol. I love Bristol, I love the accent, I love the shops there, I like how people are non threatening, I like the style of clothes people seem to wear there, I like how cheap it is compared to London. I got a huge gaga fringe, leopard print dress and black acrylic nails. I booked a hotel and was all ready to hit the town, except, I wasn't. My boyfriend and I had agreed to go visit our friends to watch Blizzcon 2010. Now I really really promised not to talk about WoW in this blog, as I have a separate WoW blog that I have kind of abandoned. However I will give a brief run down of what this is and how it relates.
I play world of warcraft. Yeah, I'll admit this. It all started out when my partner got addicted in 2006, and I played to socialise with him see him, then I got addicted then I got quite good at it, and now I am guild leader to a 200 player strong guild that had it's second birthday last week. So blizzcon is a convention for all the games that blizzard make, mainly world of warcraft, but also starcraft and diablo to name a few, and they announce awesome things about the game, and show you cool unobtainable things and people ask geeky questions, and they have a costume competition and a dance off. Now unless you were one of the lucky few who managed to buy a ticket this this in California in the 2 mili seconds the tickets were on sale, you had to buy a virtual ticket for £20. Our friend bought one, and we went to his house to crowd round his huge monitor and drink cider from the can and sours straight from the bottle and watch the geekiest thing that there ever was.
We watched the costume competition, which I must advise was one of the funniest things I have ever watched in my life, and then we watched a few player vs player live fights and then we got to the open question and answers forum. This interested me the most because I like to see how the creators of this 11 million world wide player base game, handled questions, as to work for Blizzard as far as I can make out, you must be a geeky boy with no social skills as a prerequisite. There were a few standard questions from people that looked a bit like serial killers, and then this question from a woman, I assume to be in her middle twenties, not overly geeky in her appearance asking the question, of which I have posted in the above video .
"hi there, i love what you guys have done with world of warcraft, i love the fact that you have a lot of very strong female characters, however, i was wondering if we could have some that don't look like they've stepped out of a Victoria's secret catalogue." <girls in audience whooping> <followed by male booing>
"What do you mean? which catalogue would you want them to step out of? could you see slyvanas looking any other way? we feel ya, and we want to vary our female characters, absolutely, yeah so, we'll pick different catalogues" <laughter from panel>
Well, I nearly spat my cider out and had to smoke an emergency fem rage fag. I have made another post on how the "strong female leads" are not actually that strong and massively flawed, in this post here. Beware, it is really warcraft orientated, but to surmise, it basically points out that the female leads have all been lead astray by men who turned out to be massive taking over the world mentals, or have had to become grossly mutilated to be taken seriously. World of Warcraft is a fantasy world, I get this, and I don't expect that people want to see ~real women~ or real people for that matter portrayed in a realistic manner, but it would be nice to see strong female characters not in scantily clad outfits! It isn't just world of warcraft, over the years there have been many scantily clad virtual women in games, Lara Croft the "big titted bitch" as Simon Pegg fondly called her in spaced is the first the comes to mind. But as it is widely documented, the gaming world isn't so male dominated anymore.
scantily clad female Draenei, blood elf, Haris Pilton and human warcraft characters
The fact that the panel had nothing to say, other than to take the blatant piss out of the girl, was humiliating and offensive. All she could do was smile and shrug it off. I believe that further in the convention, it was mentioned how there were hardly any women involved in the cinematic and animation process either. I cannot remember seeing a female on any of the panels that I watched, absolutely no female representation at all, from this frankly MASSIVE organisation. I felt for the first time in a long time, very singled out in a room full of men, who simply just could not understand how misrepresented I felt and why I felt that, that woman had been so unfairly treated.
What made it worse was immediately after this question, another female member of the audience asked a question about when a particular class was going to have a female format, and she finished this off by suggesting "you could make the moonkin more curvier with boobs, i'm just saying" which was met with huge applause. In my opinion Blizzard have just shown and re enforced how male centric their gaming world is and how unimportant a female opinion, and how females are portrayed unless looking like a Victoria secrets model are to them. Good Job Blizzard, I can only guess you are trying to recreate the unobtainable women you were unable to date in your youth or in some cases even now.
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