Everything I have read in this thread posted by either Angseth or Senyin
Pretty much sums up my views on the matter
I’d like to see female characters not being left out again
Obviously at this stage we have been told they won’t be included
Infact someone even mentioned transgender dress…
Sounds like even more character creation fun to me 
First off, this is a video game. If it has differing stats for your body type, then female characters would not all need to be 20% less everything. (A muscle-bound meathead would be just as unlikely to outrun a slim female as the female would be to lift 400 pounds of dead-weight.) And if you think video games ought to reflect reality (or your version of it at any rate), then one bullet should put you on the ground. Nevermind that every single man is NOT 20% better better than every single female.
Oh…and to top that off, when male and female runners have the same percentage of body fat and the same amount of oxygenated blood, the results in running are pretty much the same. http://www.pponline.co.uk/encyc/0240.htm And if you look at one of the last paragraphs, it takes into account stride length, which evens out performance just as easily. In other words, your running speed is dependent on body fat, height and hormone levels (more testosterone = slightly better oxygenated blood). Given the vast difference between individuals, setting all female stat values to -20% compared to the males makes no logical sense.
Personally, I prefer my ‘games don’t hold true to real-world values’ argument.
As for customization, as a female gamer, I’d prefer the option of at least one female character. The Proteus Effect has a few things to say about avatars. (And is an objective ‘reason’ to have female avatars present.) Personally, though it’s not a logical and thought-out decision, I tend to buy and play games longer when I have the option of a female avatar. I played Mirror’s Edge longer than Killzone 2 (and can’t wait for the ME sequel). It’s not merely gameplay, as I greatly prefer multiplayer games to single player campaign games (ME has none). There’s a disconnect when playing a male avatar for some reason. Too bad this game doesn’t have gender-neutral aliens. 
So yeah, I understand the reasoning behind male-only avatars, but it doesn’t make me happy. If you’re going to offer unnecessary-to-gameplay avatar customization, but make it male-only…then it’s just a detraction from the game. Better to have no customization at all.
Personally, I don’t care how the avatars walk. Just skin a male avatar with with a chick face and boobs. It’ll be fine. They’ll look like drag kings, but that’s ok by me. But without any female avatars, and with the knowledge of my gaming habits, I’ll be renting Brink first to see if I like it instead of buying it on the first day. Which means if I do buy it, it’ll probably be on ebay by then. But I’m the only one, I’m sure. 
Minus: one sale
Then it won’t seem out of place that there’s no women to be seen right? Because this is a video game and all the virtual women are off cheating on their husbands while they’re defending their rights. Not to mention that all women are born without legs and can’t participate. Wait why not make the game world not have women at all, everyone can reproduce asexually. Hell they don’t even need to reproduce at all. Don’t ask don’t tell. I mean it’s a game after all. it doesn’t need to make sense or be logical or any of that funny buissness.
Oh…and to top that off, when male and female runners have the same percentage of body fat and the same amount of oxygenated blood, the results in running are pretty much the same.
But that never happens, due to men being bigger, stronger, able to carry more oxygen in their blood. A turtle could run as fast as a horse if it had legs and muscle structure comparable to a horse’s, but I hardly see that as an arguement for them being equal. Put all the lipstick you want on that pig, it’s still a pig.
Remember the time some of us said that splash damage would definitely have enough research and resources for the next game after ETQW to make female characters? So what gives?
But although females can pretty much do whatever males can do in society, anatomically and physiologically, men and women are still different.
Try getting the strongest woman in the world to go up against the strongest man.
Try getting a man to do splits and have his balls touch the ground.
Why in anthropometrics, that people measure the lowest height as 5th percentile females and 95th percentile males, which shows that on average, males are taller than females?
Also why are females intellectually more superior than males?
Also do you know any females who like barbecue and men who go out to buy clothes and shoes?
Also when you see a home design duo on TV, do you ever see the female as the builder and the male as a designer in which the male does not sound as if he was gay?
This shows that the brains are different too, as shown by the twins from somewhere in Manitoba where one of the twins got his genitals castrated because of some accident, so that his wanker is completely destroyed. They decided to treat him like a female, but that in itself was a utter disaster. Why? Because his brain is a male’s brain. You can’t change a male’s brain into a female no matter how much you try. It is just impossible.
Therefore I rest my case.
I know that there are men who do girly stuff and women who do manly stuff, but those are the minority, and I have never seen those types of people more often than the men who do men stuff and women who do women stuff, where men stuff is all about strength, and women stuff are all about nursing and all that stuff. It happens to all animals and it is no different to humans.
Just pretend the Ark is on a distant planet, and the resistance and security are all genderless aliens.
I find it odd that some female gamers get bent out of shape for having no female characters but the majority of male gamers don’t even care that the only character they play as in other games is female. Just don’t get it.
Also another thing I don’t get. Alien species in mass effect and pretty much most of the other sci-fi stuff. Why does the female version of that species have to have physical characteristics like a human’s? This goes for fantasy as well. Why does the torso region have to have “boobs”? Fish don’t have them, reptiles don’t have them, insects don’t have them, but when I see games like WoW, the tauren who are bull people have boobs, while real domestic female bulls, I mean cows don’t have the pair like humans but just one udder thing. How about mass effect? Same thing there. How come most of the alien species have to look like humans? There is an imaginary world out there and some alien species the tasks for each gender may be backwards, or interchangable. So what gives?
But to SD, make the skinnies female. The fat and medium builds can be males. Therefore everyone is happy. That is, depending on if the fat person, medium person, and skinny person all have the same animation, then forget about it. But if they each have their own animation, change the skinny people into females just to make the I want female characters gamers happy.
If Splash Damage just put tits and lipstick on a model, the critics would kill them on the lack of female body movement and physical characteristics. They’d be called sloppy and doing their female fans a disservice, it’s not about what you’d be happy with (mod it all you want), Splash Damage has to say it put the same time and effort in all the parts of the game, they have to do it right, a lot of people have their lives invested in this game. They’ve already said it takes twice the time, effort, and memory footprint to double the character models, I think that’s a pretty big favour to ask just for a few people to have tits on their character. To me, my character is a gun platform, I never see it. I’d be just as happy if it looked like “My Little Pony ©” as long as I could carry weapons.
but I’m saying that would it be any different if ALL the skinny body types are female? I guess if one kind of gamer who wants females in the game is happy, then the female gamer who can’t think of shooting females would be unhappy, and you can’t really satisfy both.
Also for the skinny, medium, and fat, those are only 3 character models right? So if we replaced the skinnies with females instead, then it would look more normal than having scrawny malnourished males right?
And for you people who want female characters. If they happen to look ugly, then just take it or leave it. You wanted it, and if SD gives it to you, then you have to go with what you got. No complaining about it. If you complain about it, then it shows that SD has every right NOT to make any female characters.
If you play fighting games or any games where there are a bunch of characters and you pick them based on gender and not on physical characteristics, let’s say you keep on picking chun li or sonya, then that’s just tragic, and you don’t deserve to have female characters in the game.
Looking at a game that is all about parkour, I don’t think females do parkour anyway, looks kind of out of place. At least in this game anyway.
that’s cause deep down, your answer was always no.
I’m serious. If those pro uber want female models people are whining so badly, then let them have it, regardless if the female models look ugly or not. If the won’t appreciate what Splash Damage gives them, then SD has every right to never make female characters ever again.
Like in the splitscreen thread, I gave them a alternate way to play Brink in splitscreen, and if they don’t like my way, then they don’t deserve splitscreen.
So if those I want female character models don’t appreciate what SD gives them, that is, flat chested females on steroids, then SD has every right not to include female models in their future titles which show that these gamers are super picky.
Missing the point. Not all men are faster/stronger/whatever than ALL women. It’s not a “well, five percent of women are faster than such-and-such percent of men.” It’s down to individual differences which is further compounded by lifestyle. I’m not arguing for physical equality across genders (which according to latest studies, puts the idea of only male and female sexes being the norm firmly in the past - so we’re not even dealing with strict gender lines anyway), I’m saying that a random sampling of a population would produce a number of women ‘better’ than many of the men in the same group. The bottom performances would still be led by women, but there’d be men there, too. Get it?
signofzeta, there is no such thing as a ‘male’ brain. You’re reading old articles if you’ve caught that. The sexes are varied across a stratum (the SA runner is just a more famous example) and so are the biologies inherent. I know people have issues accepting shades of gray, but that’s life for you. Yes, there is an average for female and male genders, but it’s a cobbling of all the gray.
As for the home improvement and shopping arguments…seriously. Learn about cultural imprinting. We do things that are ‘acceptable’ according to our cultural upbringing. Girls play with ponies and dolls, boys play with racecars and guns.
And frankly, I don’t really care that you want gender performance inequality in a game where there are hit points instead of instant death. And where you never have to eat or drink water. And where energy constantly replenishes during a game in which you never sleep or ‘rest’ beyond not sprinting. Human biology in a video game? How cute. Go play Sims.
But that’s also not why I was arguing for female avatars (I was just pointing out that the females-are-less argument is stupid in the context of video games). The Proteus Effect is, in a roundabout way, the way human beings see themselves as their avatar, enough that is effects behavior. So when I’m playing a game that is all-male instead of mixed (this is hardly to say I’d always choose a female avatar), I loose interest faster. I don’t identify as the avatar, so whatever in-game accomplishments exist cease to matter eventually. I find it easier to identify with an avatar that is a genderless monster. Kinda prefer it, actually. So yeah, I’d rather have no gender in the game at all than have to imagine myself as a dude for customization (and let’s face it, if customization is there, you’re going to use it).
And as of yet, I have never seen a game (beyond games full of bikinis) where all choices of avatar customization were female. The day that becomes as common as an all-male customization spread, is the day this argument becomes null and void. But until then, using Lara Croft in this argument can be dealt with by listing the massive amount of games with a male central character (do I really have to do that?).
Frankly, for an industry looking for new ways to attract the other half of the human species, you’d think consistently leaving women off as an ‘unnecessary’ and ‘expensive’ addition to a game would be rather…backwards. If the video game industry wants to sell to women, start marketing video games to them. And what better way than showing female avatars in a game doing the same thing the men do. Shoot an opponent, snark about what noob they are.
(Marketing is the whole bloody reason we have gendered toys in the first place. Male and female children used to be treated the same - boy children even wore gowns early in life, just like the girls. Now we have a cultural expectation of gendered toys, and a cultural idea of what women should and should not be doing with their time. - Market towards women well enough, and you’ll have female customers. Cultural norms shift, but not without a little work.)
So while I’m not “bent out of shape” about the whole thing, having long since become accustomed to it, I’m also going to put my money where my mouth is.
No female customization where male customization exists = no money from me.
I’m all for female customization…but not ‘out of the box.’ Keep males only in-game like they are now. Use the resources available for only males. Then release females as a DLC, or included in a patch. This way they can use whatever resources they need to have a lot of customization for both sexes, rather than squeeze them both in at launch, and have less options for both. I could even see this as a free DLC, since their would be no achievements or anything.
Another option could be to put them both in at launch, and release a content update for both.
[QUOTE=Profane;205216]Missing the point. Not all men are faster/stronger/whatever than ALL women. It’s not a “well, five percent of women are faster than such-and-such percent of men.” It’s down to individual differences which is further compounded by lifestyle. I’m not arguing for physical equality across genders (which according to latest studies, puts the idea of only male and female sexes being the norm firmly in the past - so we’re not even dealing with strict gender lines anyway), I’m saying that a random sampling of a population would produce a number of women ‘better’ than many of the men in the same group. The bottom performances would still be led by women, but there’d be men there, too. Get it?
signofzeta, there is no such thing as a ‘male’ brain. You’re reading old articles if you’ve caught that. The sexes are varied across a stratum (the SA runner is just a more famous example) and so are the biologies inherent. I know people have issues accepting shades of gray, but that’s life for you. Yes, there is an average for female and male genders, but it’s a cobbling of all the gray.
As for the home improvement and shopping arguments…seriously. Learn about cultural imprinting. We do things that are ‘acceptable’ according to our cultural upbringing. Girls play with ponies and dolls, boys play with racecars and guns.
And frankly, I don’t really care that you want gender performance inequality in a game where there are hit points instead of instant death. And where you never have to eat or drink water. And where energy constantly replenishes during a game in which you never sleep or ‘rest’ beyond not sprinting. Human biology in a video game? How cute. Go play Sims.
But that’s also not why I was arguing for female avatars (I was just pointing out that the females-are-less argument is stupid in the context of video games). The Proteus Effect is, in a roundabout way, the way human beings see themselves as their avatar, enough that is effects behavior. So when I’m playing a game that is all-male instead of mixed (this is hardly to say I’d always choose a female avatar), I loose interest faster. I don’t identify as the avatar, so whatever in-game accomplishments exist cease to matter eventually. I find it easier to identify with an avatar that is a genderless monster. Kinda prefer it, actually. So yeah, I’d rather have no gender in the game at all than have to imagine myself as a dude for customization (and let’s face it, if customization is there, you’re going to use it).
And as of yet, I have never seen a game (beyond games full of bikinis) where all choices of avatar customization were female. The day that becomes as common as an all-male customization spread, is the day this argument becomes null and void. But until then, using Lara Croft in this argument can be dealt with by listing the massive amount of games with a male central character (do I really have to do that?).
Frankly, for an industry looking for new ways to attract the other half of the human species, you’d think consistently leaving women off as an ‘unnecessary’ and ‘expensive’ addition to a game would be rather…backwards. If the video game industry wants to sell to women, start marketing video games to them. And what better way than showing female avatars in a game doing the same thing the men do. Shoot an opponent, snark about what noob they are.
(Marketing is the whole bloody reason we have gendered toys in the first place. Male and female children used to be treated the same - boy children even wore gowns early in life, just like the girls. Now we have a cultural expectation of gendered toys, and a cultural idea of what women should and should not be doing with their time. - Market towards women well enough, and you’ll have female customers. Cultural norms shift, but not without a little work.)
So while I’m not “bent out of shape” about the whole thing, having long since become accustomed to it, I’m also going to put my money where my mouth is.
No female customization where male customization exists = no money from me.[/QUOTE]
sorry, but you are wrong. The male and female brains are different and the gender identity has been established since birth, unless that person would grow up to be a homosexual.
If you have this proteus effect, or something like that, then you are playing too much. When I play, I pick female and male avatars equally, provided what their stats really are. If you heard of the game You Don’t Know Jack 5th dementia, you get to choose between 2 male faces or 2 female faces as icons. For me, I choose the one depending on which of the 4 has the funniest blurb that is underneath it, nothing to do with the fact that I’m a male.
Also, if you have never heard of the John Money, and the Reimer twins, take a look at that. One of them was castrated at birth and his penis got destroyed somehow. They tried to treat him like a female, but that didn’t work out because his brain has imprinted male stuff. Learned it in first year psychology class, and maybe you should take some psychology.
Ok, if you can name any female who from birth started playing video games, especially FPS games, without any prior exposure to video games, that is no cousins or brothers, and only hung out with girls when she was a kid, then I’m wrong and you are right. As of now, if any female does not hang out with males or her family isn’t exposed to video games in general, then there is absolutely no way that she would even play video games in the first place. Males are more likely to play video games on their own and females are more likely to play because someone else likes that hobby, or they are surrounded by video games.
As for the SA runner, that is only one exception. You need more than that too convince the others that males and females think similarly, but as of right now, they don’t.
There would be some overlap between what males and females would become after birth, but there is no such male who acts like a female from birth and will never do what extreme females do, and vice versa.
And as for leaving half of the gaming population out, which in fact is a quarter or probably a fifth since half of the gamers aren’t female, and let’s make that one twentieth females who play FPS games, and let’s make that one hundredths who actually give a damn about female avatars.
So making it for 50% of gamers eh? Make that 0.01% of female gamers who give a crap about female avatars. Although I’m making numbers up, Splash Damage won’t lose on 50% of the world’s population, since more males play video games in the first place, and there those, male and female who don’t play video games. Like I said, you can’t make a girl out there who is into fashion and shoes to play video games. That’s just simply not done.
You sound like as if there is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001%, that makes all the difference, but from what I have seen, around 5 or 6 of you support the idea of having female avatars, and how many gamers are there? In the world of Anthropometrics, we only strive for the low end of 5th percentile females and the high end of 95th percentile males. If we made it 0.000000000001th percentile female and 99.999999999th percentile males, then doorways would be extremely tall, and engineering designs would be too extreme for the majority of users. Those who are extremely tall accept the fact that they can’t fit through doorways, and they must crouch. Why can’t you accept the fact that there are only a few of you who want female avatars, and the rest of the female gamers, although they would like to have female avatars, just don’t even care at the moment? If they cared, they would have posted something here, but they didn’t.
This game is designed as a shooter, and males are more likely to play shooters than females. Also there would be more of a chance that males would give a crap for being a female than a female being a male, so it was designed with this in mind. If you think that because one or 2 of you like shooters, just think of the anthropometrics and the percentiles thing. It is a similar concept and that the extremes or minorities are usually left out. Just think why extremely obese people don’t have as much privileges as “normal” people? Same thing there. If it takes way more money to double the animations than there are a minority of gamers who want female avatars who can make a sale to SD for the cash they lost in developing female avatars and animations, then no, there is no reason to make female avatars.
No money from you is way more worth it than spending way more money to make female avatars and animations anyway.
But I would suggest the thin build should be a female model just to put a pacifier on those I really want a female avatar people’s mouth. This is provided that each of the 3 builds, skinny, medium, fat, each have different animations that aren’t even remotely similar. If they are similar, then making the skinny a female avatar would take an extra set of animations anyway.
If you want to contribute to SD an X amount of dollars to make female avatars and animations, then go ahead, but right now, they aren’t going to risk a loss of money just to satisfy 0.000001% of gamers.
Also telling the developers to make female avatars when the game is close to being released is a bad idea since they have already put effort into making the male avatars and animations in the first place. If you would have told them when they announced the title, then they might would have put female avatars, but right now, when they started making female avatars, they thought that those people who wanted female avatars are a very minor minority, and should be left out.
I told the gamers who wanted female avatars in quake wars to tell Splash Damage to find a way female avatars even before they started modeling and animating the characters, you people didn’t, and now it is too late. Oh well, I guess you have to remember to tell SD when they make their NEXT GAME.
so, tits on a model you never see makes you feel better, works for me, lets have female models
I myself would like to have female models just to make the population of avatars itself look more real, where the skinnies are female and the mediums and fats are males. And also to shut the whiners who wanted it so badly.
But right now, I simply don’t care, and I don’t want Splash Damage to waste their resources to redo something they already did.
But these people want what you describe, to be that female when they can’t even see them. The skinnies have lanky arms anyway, they look like girly arms.
To those I want female avatars people, all it takes is imagination. I can imagine duke nukem from DN3d wearing a dinosaur suit where his arms are coming out of looks normal, and why can’t you? I guess that when you play games, you are too immersed into the character that you have lost the reality in things. Think of why this Chinese guy, or was it Korean guy? died playing WoW?
With my imagination, I can imagine the strogg from ETQW as good guys, or at least some of them being freed from the nexus’s control because during stroggification, something wrong happened, and they look like and eat like strogg, but they are still technically working for the GDF. Imagination right there. Now if you imagine those lanky arms from the skinnies belong to a female instead of a male, although you are fighting a bunch of male avatars anyway, who cares, those male avatars are all male gamers behind them, well the majority anyway.
Another thing is, what would you “I want female avatar” gamers want? A female avatar, or kids harassing gamers who use female avatars? Huh? It is normal to think just because anyone uses a female avatar, whether they be a guy or a girl, that the gamer behind the female avatar is a girl. Also, don’t you think that when you don’t talk during a session, and that there aren’t kids harassing you is because you are using a male avatar? Would you want any kids harassing you when they see a female avatar? I think not.
On xbox live, from youtube videos I have seen, where there are a lot of harassers, once these kids hear a high pitched girly like voice from a male avatar, they start to harass that female gamer. Same with older gamers harassing younger gamers. Once they hear a 12 year old male’s pre pubescent voice, they treat them more harshly, regardless if the 12 year old is nice or not.
Case in point? Me using a female avatar in Playstation Home. I purposely made it look like a beautiful female, and what do I get? Messages from people to invite me over to their virtual home to make whoopie, although I am technically male. I also have another avatar that looks like my real life self, and I use that more often anyway, but either avatar, if I feel like being a girl or feel like messing with people, I use the female avatar. If I feel like being my normal self, I use the avatar that looks like my real life self.
Also nail, Have you heard of the reimer twins and the gender identity shenanigans? The twins were actually born in Winnipeg in the 60’s, and when I was in psychology class, and we were talking about that case anyway. And what did that story, which is a REAL LIVE CASE, told us? Males and females are born with distinct brains. Thus Boys have male brains, and Girls have female brains. It has been like this since we and chimps were the same species, and the chimpman and the gorrila have been the same species. It is just hard to convince SOME PEOPLE that males and females can never be equal anatomically and psychologically. They can be equal, but that is from an outside influence, or from birth defects. The South African runner was a female who did male stuff only because she was probably brought up in such a way that she did male stuff, or that she had something wrong with her hormones, I don’t know.
The only way for human males and females is sociologically, and NOT anatomically and psychologically. Well if you are in the supposed grey area, I’m afraid to say, no offense to homosexuals, that you are gay, well at least from what I have heard, males who act like female tend to be gay anyway and vice versa. If I’m wrong about the whole gay thing, tell me, because I have never seen an extreme hardcore male who is actually gay. Also people aren’t born gay. So that takes out the anatomical and psychological aspects. Without sociological aspects, and environmental influence, that supposed “grey” area does not exist.
I myself am nearing this grey area, maybe because of the crowd I hang out with, but from birth, I was all man.
If any of you can tell me a person of one gender who acted like the opposite gender from birth to death, and never had any depressing thoughts or thoughts of suicide, then I’m wrong and you are right, but as of now, Male and Female brains are distinct from birth and are only shaped from environmental and sociological influences. Right now, there is too much of a minority of female gamers wanting female avatars, so it isn’t worth it to redo everything. Also there isn’t enough females exposed to the correct environmental and sociological influence to even accept that minority as enough to make the cash back from the “gender reassignment” process. This is why male gamers outnumber female gamers. Males like machines and stuff, while females like taking care of things. This is why there are more male construction workers and the engineering field is dominated by males, except biosystems in the U of M. Also this is why in my anatomy class, there were more females than males because most of them are going to Nursing. If this kind of thing is happening at the university that I go to, it proves that males and females think differently and have different goals on average, but with those female engineers and male nurses, those chose to go to that field not because they are, I hate saying it, gay, but because they wanted to do it. But within those jobs, male nurses tend to be more rough on patients, and do the heavy lifting of equipment, while female engineers are usually better at organizing the team activities and the males are left with the design and machine work.
Talking to Profane here, if you have studied Genetics and Psychology, then I will believe you, but from what you say, I take your words as a grain of salt. Brains are like play-doh. The brain can be shaped to whatever it is depending on the sociological and environmental effects. But in the end, the male who is dubbed to be to feminine still has a male brain, and the play-doh started looking like a square that changed into a circle still comes from that same play-doh.
So Nail is right and Profane is wrong, because males are still superior in strength, and looking beyond the percentiles and that grey area does not count, because it is better to look at averages than to look at the minority of females who seem to beat those wimpy males in a strength competition. Also to Profane, have you taken human factors engineering? If you did, maybe I can take your comments seriously.
BUT, I would LIKE to have female characters in the game, BUT, it isn’t like it is going to be the end of the world if there isn’t. Makes the “things” I fight a little more diverse.
In all fairness, the character customization is on the features I am really looking forward to. So if I was a player that was stoked about wanting to create a female character, and then finding out I couldn’t, I would be bummed too. It doesn’t matter that we can’t see our characters when we play. We still pick our ethnicity, our face, our outfits, head gear, body types, faces, abilities, etc. we still ‘create’ a character. And those who are stoked about the customization and even the ones who aren’t, who would like to create a girl and then find out they can’t, it really takes a lot out of the game for them.
And save me the, “this is an FPS,” speech. The game has RPG elements. The game has character customization. It’s going to attract more than just the hardcore shooter crowd.
If this game had customizable female characters, then that would be a bonus. If it doesn’t, then whatever, playing it regardless. I still think the thin male build is out of place, makes the thin male look like a weakling. But that is only me. Just to be fair to both sides of the story anyway. I also find it hard to imagine a female game character in the Brink world. I find it too odd. That is also just me.
[I]Case in point? Me using a female avatar in Playstation Home. I also have another avatar that looks like my real life self, and I use that more often anyway, but either avatar, if I feel like being a girl or feel like messing with people, I use the female avatar.
If I feel like being my normal self, I use the avatar that looks like my real life self.[/I]
So would you say you use the ‘real life self’ avatar 90% of the time?
Also people aren’t born gay.
Eh…you are kidding right?
Also HORSE has a good point.