Eccentric Flower:199810/milk women and Klingons

nineteen october ninety eight two p m

milk, women, and klingons

Duh!

The adorable Ranjit writes to tell me that the reason sterile-pack milk is kept in the refrigerated section may be a very obvious one: Whether it requires it or not, people like their milk cold.

Rhonda, though, agrees with me about people being able/not able to find it. Maybe both have some basis. I'm still bopping myself on the head for missing the first one.

- - -

I was bad today. After I paid the bills last night I had a small surplus (above and beyond what I need to buy minor necessities, like food, for the rest of the month).

I walked to the mall at lunch today - for other reasons, honest! I was sick of the fast food around my office and wanted some different fast food. I passed by the game store and I wasn't going to buy anything, really I wasn't. But then I saw this game: Klingon Honor Guard.

Now, this is a first-person shooter. Think of it as a guerrilla mission. You go in and accomplish your objectives and probably (all right, definitely) kill a lot of things along the way which want to kill you. I love these games. They generally don't demand much thought but they're my form of mindless depletion (as opposed to TV, which I barely watch).

This one not only uses the Unreal engine, the best shooter engine I've seen yet, but also has Klingons - such an obvious idea for a game like this, I'm surprised it took so long. How could I resist?

- - -

Most of these shooters let you play as either a male or female character, these days. When you're playing alone, it doesn't matter much, since all you see of yourself is your hands holding a weapon. Minor cosmetic differences, like the sounds you make, and that's it.

But when you're playing a network game against other humans, it's very important, because they can see you (and in some cases, like team games, have to be able to pick you out visually in a big hurry).

The reason game companies started building in support for both a male and female set of "skins" (as they're called) was not because of their liberated minds or anything like that - it was simply audience demand. You see, there are - surprise surprise! - quite a few women who play these games. "Clans" of players (who organize to find network opponents and form tourney ladders) are all over the web, and there are quite a few prominent (and vocal) groups of female players, like the Quake-PMS clan.

The female players said to the game designers: We don't like playing these games looking like boys. Well, not all of us do.

The game design world is still pretty sexist, with some noted exceptions. The view of most people who create and market games - especially shooters - is that the games are designed by and for boys, and girls never NEVER like to kill things, not even as stress release. These are the same people who, for example, made Lara Croft, she of the gravity-defying breasts and impractical field clothing, a female ... because "they figured the player would rather stare at a female butt all the time than a male one."

(Tomb Raider is a third-person game instead of a first-person one - you can see yourself while playing, and usually you see yourself from the back because the camera follows you.)

With Unreal - and now I don't mean the engine, I mean the original game which used it - I noticed something odd, though. Normally one of the first things I do is change the player's appearance to female (and the player's name to Columbine, of course). When I opened that menu in Unreal, I was already female. Unreal is the only game I've seen of its kind which uses a female player by default.

It's a minor thing and probably not worth the charge I got out of it.

- - -

I'm not a big Star Trek fan, and I'm certainly not into the Klingon mystique the way some others are (they're brutes, all of them, although some manage to overcome it - I don't believe in the myth of the "noble warrior.")

Nonetheless, if you're going to have a culture that believes in honorable combat, I think it's meet and just that the women are allowed to be warriors too, and are taken seriously as such.

I'm looking forward to playing a female Klingon.

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