The strongest indicator of a melt down is when someone begins talking like a politician. When someone’s life is all going smooth, the person tends to mind their own business. But when someone’s life becomes frustrated, the person tends to find fault with the world and suddenly has a need to take on a ’cause’.
Rob Fahey’s latest column is a very good example of this. The column actually has nothing to do with Duke Nukem slapping female buttocks or the plight of women or the Game Industry. The column is entirely about Rob Fahey. It is all about him.
When a person is in this state of mind, it is impossible to have rational discussion. The person is too hungry to stave off whatever frustration is eating away at him by declaring his enlightenment, his goodness, his morality, his vision, his whatever at the world. As one commentator wryly noted, the column is incoherent. It starts at saying most games do not have women in mind. And then it focuses on one game that women may (or may not) find sexist.
Reader, should you ever discover yourself talking like a politician, that is reason enough to examine yourself. “What is wrong with me?” “Why do I have this urge to sound like I am a legislator?” “Oh heaven, how can I cure my affliction?”
But let’s leave Fahey’s personal frustrations to himself to deal with. I want to ask two questions to the reader.
Here is the first question. Get your noggin ready, reader!
“If certain video games offend women, then how is it that women make up half the video game market?”
It’s not driving their business away. But let’s say a sexually explicit video game was placed on a video game console. Suddenly, you would find families and the mass market abandoning the game console. This is why no console manufacturer will ever allow X rated games on their system.
This is one of the reasons why I found Fahey’s column to be more a reaction to some personal frustration in his life as opposed to a column of reason. His column contradicts itself. If women are offended by video games, then how can they make up 60% of the market?
Here is the second question:
“Who decides what is good taste in a video game?”
Is it a legislature? Is it the game company? Is it Rob Fahey? Is it the Pope? Who decides what is tasteful in a video game or not?
It is the audience. Who else could it be?
And again we come to a contradiction. If women make up 60% of the audience, then how is it that these ‘offensive’ games keep selling so well? If they didn’t sell, then game companies wouldn’t keep making them.
There was a video game called Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball that came out on the Xbox.
One of the more amazing reactions to this game was that many of the customers for the game were women. Now why did women want to buy such a game? I’ll leave that to the imagination of the reader.
As I said in the prior post, men do not understand women. So how can a man know what actually offends women? And more importantly, why not allow the women to declare what is offensive to them? It would be ridiculous for a woman to declare what is offensive to men (as men would rather state it themselves). Wouldn’t the respectful thing to do would be to allow women to speak for themselves instead of putting words, such as a column, in their mouths?
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