Women in Games
My new HP desktop came loaded with game demos, most of which I will never play, but I got curious about them last week and started clicking around, which is when I found Diner Dash, which is the happy story of a woman who was so frazzled by her ordinary office job that she had to run away from corporate life and wait tables for a living.
That sound you hear is my forehead, hitting my desk.
I am not sure where the ‘fun’ is in this game - I waitressed and bartended to pay my way through undergrad, and restaurant jobs are generally hard, thankless, and low-pay, filled with unreasonable customers, numerous burns, cuts, and abrasions, and general abuse. How is this a game, exactly? In this one, your tip decreases if you don’t clear the tables fast enough, or take orders in a timely manner, or when the customers have to wait too long for a table. I like an element of realism in my games, but this is ridiculous.
But what really bothers me is the premise - that a woman cannot hack it in corporate life, so she she goes off to run a sleazy diner, because serving other people is what women do best, right? Pushing paper and making a corporate salary is no life for a woman! Give her an apron and let customers heap abuse on her! There are 20+ games preloaded onto this computer, and three feature women as main characters: Diner Dash, with its ‘mommy’ archetype, Super Granny, the ‘crone’ archetype, and Fairies, which is filled with hypersexualized, tiny women trapped in glass jars, and yeah, I will let you draw your own conclusions on the myriad of feminist issues surrounding THAT game.
Diner Dash! A great way to reinforce gender stereotype via game play. Two thumbs up.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Yeah, we ran into this issue when we got the kids a new desktop to share and it came loaded with games. Naturally, that is what they went to first, and Deb and I were both a little shocked when we walked by and saw them playing the Fairies game. Deb scrubbed all the games, and now they can load tetris and chuzzle and non-gendered, non-chauvinistic games. And Civ, of course.