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HTC Rhyme with Sense 3.5 hands-on (video)
We're here at HTC's swank New York City press event where the mood lighting and floral centerpieces are as unabashedly girly as the Rhyme, its newest handset for lady folk. We just spent a few minutes wrapping our hands around the device, exploring the ports (not that there are many) and poking around the latest version of Sense (v3.5). Do you like purple? Are you a person of style? Sure you are. So what are you waiting for? Meet us after the break where we'll run down our first impressions and see what this thing has to offer beside that cute design. %Gallery-134392%
Nintendo launching 'Misty Pink' 3DS handheld on October 20th
You heard right -- The Big N's own Satoru Iwata just announced that a "Misty Pink" Nintendo 3DS console would be shipping (at least in Japan) on October 20th. Funnily enough, that was just after showing a chart proving that right around half of all DS gamers are ladies. (But Iwata -- what if the dudes dig pink, too?) At any rate, no specific price was mentioned, giving us some level of certainty that no premium will be attached. %Gallery-133313% %Gallery-133315%
Drama Mamas: Raiding while female
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. I love that song and the way it makes me want to join a conga line around New York City. But just because I wanna have fun, doesn't mean I can't get serious as necessary. Duh. There are more male raiders than female, just like there are more male gamers than female. That gap is becoming smaller by the year, however. It's a numbers game; it's not about skill. Does anyone really think top raiding guilds shouldn't have females anymore? Tell me. I want to know and I want to know why. But first, read about Raider Girl after the break.
EVE Online contest asks how CCP could make the game more appealing to female gamers
In co-operation with CCP Games, our friends at CrazyKinux's Musing are running an interesting contest. In the latest edition of CrazyKinux's monthly EVE Blog Banter, he's asking players to write blog posts on ideas to make EVE Online more appealing to female gamers. The best ideas will win EVE store credit, with a total of $200 up for grabs. First place will receive $75 worth of store credit to spend on EVE merchandise and second place wins $50 of credit. The next three runner-up entries will win $25 of credit each, giving everyone a total of five chances to win. Entrants have until Monday April 26th to make their thoughts on the issue known. EVE Online is something of an oddity in the MMO scene, with an almost entirely male playerbase. While some MMOs have a roughly 40% female playerbase and others are closer to 16%, less than 5% of EVE Online players are female. With Incarna set to introduce more avenues for social gaming, now might be a good time to start finding out what barriers prevent girls from signing up to EVE. Whatever the reason for EVE's 95% male-dominated playerbase, CCP seem interested in balancing that figure by drawing in more female gamers. If you have an idea that you think would help, enter it in the EVE Blog Banter for a chance to win some EVE swag.
Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoid-F humanoid mimics Earthlings, is definitely the beginning of the end (video)
Hiroshi Ishiguro (or his evil android twin, one) is back in business, and nearly four years after his Geminoid HI-1 startled youngsters everywhere, the Geminoid-F has arrived to consternate the grown-ups. Shown off this weekend in Osaka, Japan, the lifelike lady you see above (pictured left, just in case you were wondering) was designed to mimic human facial expressions that are fed in to its internal computer. The rubberized face has a rather insane amount of flexibility, enabling it to pull off subtle gestures that have thus far been impossible to replicate on a robot. Sly grins, angry glares and totally-fake smiles are all possible now, with developers hoping to have these in hospitals and the like in the not-too-distant future. Currently, copies of the humanoid are expected to sell for around ¥10,000,000 ($105,780), though it'll likely be robotics research organizations doing the majority of the buying. Hop on past the break for a video that's guaranteed to leave you stunned -- and while we're not fluent in Japanese, we're pretty sure someone asks if they "can rock that bad Larry on their dome."
Diablo 3's female Monk designs revealed on The Jace Hall Show
In a recent segment on The Jace Hall Show, the typically secretive Blizzard dev team gave the towering host/television producer/Monolith founder a sneak peek at some of the concept art for the female iteration of Diablo 3's Monk class. While she doesn't embody what we normally imagine when we think of devout martial arts experts, she looks supremely badass. You can check out a few screengrabs from the clip on fan site BlizzPlanet, or simply watch the video posted after the jump (the segment starts at the 6:44 mark). [Via VG247]
All the World's a Stage: Anonymosity
All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles. Roleplaying is a journey of trust you take with strangers. You may now and then start out with a group of people you know in real life, but for the most part, the people you roleplay with have no idea who you really are, or why you are sitting here at the computer. You can tell them if you want to, but most people don't ask. Roleplayers tend to keep personal details private, and don't intrude on one another's space. Besides, other roleplayers don't necessarily care that much about who you "really are" either. They're there to get to know your character, not you as a person, unless your character first makes a very good impression and they decide that they actually want to be friends as real people. Even though you respect each other as people who share the same interest, there's still a distance between you which either (or both) of you may wish to maintain. And yet, the relationship you have is one of trust. It's not at all at the same level as a best friend of course, but you still have to trust one another in a very creative sense -- you rely on each other to create interesting things for your characters to share with one another. You're not just buying a shirt from a salesperson or holding the door for a passerby -- you're exchanging behavior and language in an unpredictable and totally interconnected way. Any little surprise a stranger brings to an interaction may completely alter the whole game session and stick in your mind as one of your most memorable gaming experiences. Roleplayers have to trust other roleplayers to help make those experiences positive, even without knowing anything at all about one another. Sometimes two characters can even become very close friends, even though the real people behind them do not.
Gender differences in armor
A few readers sent us this post over at Border House that has laid bare (heh) the oft-mentioned differences in armor between the genders in World of Warcraft. While there are some exceptions, in most cases, the exact same set of armor (like this chestplate above) shows up as much more skimpy on female characters than it does on male characters. To the point of absurdity in some places -- even plate leggings, designed to serve as solid protection to the legs, appear to be more like plate thong underwear on the ladies. As Border House points out, this isn't just WoW's problem. Fantasy and sci-fi in general have been the domain of boys in the past (even if that is changing quickly), and the sexual depictions in the genre have reflected that, for both traditional and financial reasons. As I pointed out the other day, all of Blizzard's luminaries thus far have been men -- is it any surprise that the game is designed from a mostly male perspective? And as BH also says, fortunately, WoW has lots of different gear. If you don't like what your character is wearing, then you can find something else.
15 Minutes of Fame: Amazon grace, how sweet these guilds
15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about. Why would players want to play only with others just like themselves? Members of special interest guilds tell us their groups allow them to play away from others who either inadvertently or purposely seek to harass or offend. GLBT guilds, Christian guilds (scroll down to Recruiting) and similar groups offer a haven for players seeking a peaceful place to hang out with like-minded souls. This week, we look at a new group that offers not one, not two, but three special interest guilds. The Goddess guilds of Nesingwary and Winterhoof, along with a brother guild also on Nesingwary, welcomes females - actual, physical females, not female characters - with a friendly, events-focused environment. We visited with long-time gamer and Goddess guilds founder Myredd to find out why so many women appreciate playing in a females-only environment.
Nintendo Wii has lion's share of female console gamers
Nintendo's been doing a bit of digging and it turns out it's already won the console wars. If we're only talking about the ladies, that is. A whopping 80% of American female primary gamers (the person who primarily uses the console rather than the occasional dabblers) do their thing on the Wii, which we see as a clear indication to the graphics-obsessed Xbox 360 and PS3 developers that women prefer their games to be fun to play, rather than just look at. Maybe if we also stopped dressing female characters in swimsuits, they'd find non-Wii games relatable too -- that's just a guess though, probably wrong.
Anti-Aliased: Boobs and you
Well Happy Turkey Day everyone! It's Thanksgiving Thursday, but it's also that time of the week again -- the time where Sera gets to rant in her opinion column to her heart's content. Yes, that's right, it's time for Anti-Aliased.This week's topic is one that's near and dear to my heart. Well, it's near to my heart, at least, and I mean that quite literally. It's also a perfect topic for today's holiday! I mean, who doesn't like to talk about large breasts on Thanksgiving? (Score one for the terrible synonym.)During last week's column on Blade & Soul, the main topic that came up time and time again in the comments wasn't the game's combat, or the game's engine, or anything really related to the game at large. No, it seems that many of you were turned off of the game by the fact that the screenshot I used had a woman with huge boobs. That was the deal breaker for the game.
Nintendo: 80 percent of female console gamers prefer Wii
[Source: Kotaku] Nintendo's resident name jotter-downer and kiester-kicker recently divulged to BMO Capital Markets attendees that the Wii is outperforming its rivals when it comes to female gamers. According to its estimates (via Kotaku), 80 percent of the female console gaming crowd prefers Wii over the alternatives. With an estimated 11.7 million female console gamers in the Americas -- it's important to note this data of Nintendo's doesn't take into account DS owners or PC users -- the figure comes out to roughly nine million ladies waggling their way into the fun zone.
Drama Mamas: Time to man up
Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com. Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we pretend to be a gender we're not. When we discussed boys playing girl characters before, we all pretty much agreed that it was cool as long as there was no deception involved. Roleplaying = yay. Experimentation = good. Hiding your true identity in a non-roleplaying environment = uh oh. Unfortunately, for One Big Liar, what began as experimentation and a wee bit of roleplaying evolved into a full-scale reputation for being a "real girl." Uh oh, indeed.
Patch 3.2.2: The clucking draenei (and the levitating tree)
I've talked here before about just how wacky Blizzard's coding is -- they are obviously great programmers (even with all of the 180,000 bugs), but man, when things go wrong in this game, they go wrong in the weirdest, strangest ways. Take the bug above, spotted in patch 3.2.2 by xella over on Livejournal: the female dreanei /train emote is bugged like crazy, but instead of not playing or playing a random sound like you might expect it to do as a software bug, it instead plays a cacophony of the strangest sounds, including a slice of the original sound and then a female blood elf /chicken noise instead. This will surely be fixed soon (and as a few people in the comments over there say, it's probably a bit of file corruption on Blizzard's part), but what a weird bug.Fortunately, as granular and strange as Blizzard's bugs are, their fixes are just as minute: tree druids will be happy to see that, since patch 3.2, their treeform now actually moves correctly after Levitate is cast on it. It's a small change, sure, but every little bit helps with immersion. Maybe someday we'll see mounts do it, too.
Drama Mamas: Don't feed the trolls
Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.When is a troll not a troll? We can't answer that one for you (when he's a Goblin, instead? /shrug) – but we can definitely tell you when a non-troll actually is a troll: more often than you may oh-so-righteously imagine. Only two weeks ago, the Drama Mamas were reminding readers that you cannot "fix" other people. This week, we must add on to this principle: You may neither "fix" your fellow players, nor may you "beat" them. In fact, when you try to beat 'em, you join 'em. The Drama Mamas explain why.
Nielsen: WoW is most played core game by 25-54 females
Here's an interesting bit of info from the Nielsen folks: over 400,000 women are playing World of Warcraft in the US, which means it's the most-played "core" game for that gender. And even more interesting, females 25 years or older make up the largest block of PC game players overall, and they account for 54.6% of all gameplay minutes in December of last year. Girls don't just play WoW -- they're quickly becoming one of it's main demographics.You can read the report in PDF form over here -- the chart above might be the most interesting piece of information, as it shows that though males still make up a huge part of the PC gaming audience, many of them have now moved on to consoles, and women (especially older women, over 25), during the last month of last year, are making up a huge audience for PC games. Later in the report, you can see what kinds of games women are really playing: Solitare, Freecell, Minesweeper, and all of those other little attention grabbers on every PC. But among those widespread casual games is our own World of Warcraft. And while the 25-52 male audience of 675, 713 for that game still remains larger than the female audience in the same demo, the ladies aren't far behind.Neilsen also calculated some base stats for WoW, including the fact that 1.8 million unique people played the game, and the average time of gameplay per week was 744 minutes, just over 12 hours (slightly up from last year's average). Additionally, of those who play World of Warcraft, their second most-played game was Solitaire, followed by Warcraft III. Fascinating stuff. Remember that these are statistics, so they are more general trends than anything else, but it's definitely true World of Warcraft and PC gaming in general is no longer only the domain of the male demographic.
Bandai's latest handheld helps women "understand" men
For the longest time now, we were under the impression that it was men looking for miraculous ways of understanding woman. Clearly, we've had the whole thing backwards. Bandai has apparently polled thousands of opinionated males in order to fill its latest handheld with data that woman aged 20 to 30 will pay ¥2,499 ($28) to know. In all seriousness, we can't imagine this thing having a very good search mechanism, so its actual usefulness is definitely questionable. One thing's for sure, though -- handing one of these to your SO / ex-lover with a smirk is guaranteed to get a rise.[Via ShinyShiny]
Ubisoft says Wii a 'female-driven platform'
Gaming is becoming more and more popular, thanks to ever-increasing sales of the DS and Wii, and that means new gamers. A large portion of these gamers are of the female variety, and Ubisoft says a lot of them are flocking to the Wii and DS. "What's driving the Wii sales is the use of Wii by women, girls and families," said Ubisoft's senior brand manager, Ann Hamilton. Hamilton says that the number of girls who game has significantly increased over the past two years, jumping from 50% in 2006 to 57% in 2008. But are they solely responsible for the Wii's success? We'd say not, but it's important to note that female gamers probably take up a notable chunk of the overall casual audience that has been so responsive to the Wii. In our experience, however, we've found that a game's ability to be fun to play overcomes all obstacles, including the huge chasm between us boys and the fair sex. [Via Endsights]
Breakfast Topic: To re-customize or not
Paid customization has come to the game, and with it, some big decisions for a lot of players. We've asked for a long time to be able to change our gender or look in the game, and now that we can, we have to decide if we will or not.Personally, I'm torn -- way back when I first started the game, I created a female Night Elf Hunter, thinking along the old classic lines of "if I'm going to stare at someone's backside for hours and hours, it might as well be a woman." But since then, I've gotten a lot of flak for being a dude playing a female character, and since I've played all male characters since then, I think I better identify with male characters anyway, even if the view isn't as good.But on the other hand, I'm used to my Hunter now -- she's looked the same for almost 80 levels, and it would be weird to suddenly see a Night Elf guy on the screen in her place. So I'm torn -- change my character to a male and make being social in game much easier, or stay the same and keep my character familiar to me?What do you all think? Are you facing the same situation or is the choice easier (or even harder) for you?
UC Irvine studies differences between Chinese and US players
Our good friends at the OC (don't call it that) Register have an article up about how the University of California at Irvine has received a grant to study the differences between US and Chinese players of World of Warcraft. And the differences are fairly interesting: apparently US players use many more UI mods and addons than Chinese players do. Additionally, more Chinese players play the "more challenging version of the game" (seems like they mean PvP servers to us, though that may change with yesterday's big news), and Chinese players, say the researcher, tend to talk more about color schemes and architecture than American players. Finally, the demographics are fairly different -- here in the states, women make up 20 percent of the playing audience, and in China that number is almost halved. And while people here may play with parents or even grandparents, in China, the older generation isn't interested in the game at all.These observations seem more to be based on anecdotal evidence of Chinese players in cafes more than anything else, but the study is just getting started, so maybe with some more research they can come up with some more solid numbers (or even more reasons) showing why this is the case. But it's interesting that inspecting how people play this game in two different countries can reveal something about the cultural differences between each.
