Musing: Gender Locked Classes: The New Sexism

I hate games that do this. I thought this world was becoming more progressive. Certainly doesn’t FEEL that way when you still got games that do this. This is ass backwards and as far as I’m concerned there is no feasible excuse for it. Mothers tell their little girls that when they grow up they can be ANYTHING they want and yet they can’t even get on a good deal of games and be what they want. Maybe little Susie doesn’t want to play a Priestess. Little Susie wants to go Xena on people and be a warrior. She finds out that only boys can be Warriors. Susie gets disappointed and uninstalls the game since girls can’t be warriors. Sure, the game LOOKED good, but she just can’t stand the gender barrier.

The problem also hits the male set too. Maybe little Timmy wants to be a Priest instead of a Warrior. He wants to play a boy Priest, but apparently only girls can be Priests. Timmy also uninstalls since he can’t be what he wants to be. Both Susie and Timmy think the developers are unfair and stupid for this choice, and so are a bunch of people. I had a talk with my mother that this was a practice in certain games and she was mortified. Sure, she doesn’t play any MMOs, but the very thought of this Gender Locking made her (figuratively) sick to her stomach. ALL THE CRAP women take and such a misogynistic practice not being halted in the virtual world. It could be a case of short sightedness on the developer’s part, but let’s face it…it looks pretty fucking sexist. The only time such a practice should ever be permitted is if the race only has ONE GENDER or you’re playing a premade character from the ground up like in Rusty Hearts. If it’s not a One Gender Race or a pre-made character then it can be argued that the person in charge of these things is either a wife beating man or some crazed man hating woman.

This sort of thing has stopped me from even checking out Aika, Prius and a few others that escape my memory at the moment. Why do people think this is good? Why aren’t people yelling at the development teams about these issues? Why are publishers agreeing to host games like this? WHERE IS THE MASS OUTRAGE!? Are people just so passive that they don’t think they can make an impact? Are these games really so good that anyone can just look past the underlying unfortunate implications of this? I know this sounds crazy to some of you, but I believe that more impressionable people will be left to believe that this kind of gender bias is actually an acceptable practice, and that frightens me to no end. I was hoping that sometime in my lifetime that we would be nearly finished sweeping gender bias off a cliff for good. This is just unacceptable.

I’m not going to go around chasing people off games that have gender locked classes, but I would at least want them to take notice of these issues. Even if I can get them to reconsider (no matter how briefly) supporting games with this “feature” I’ve done my job. This practice needs to stop. People need to spam the hell out of the inboxes of the developers and publishers of such games. Even if the publishers cannot do anything about it, you can be assured that they’ll get on the developers about it if enough people scream at them and keep screaming until it’s corrected.

I’ve heard some people reason that this is because they don’t want variety in classes is to ease up on the lag of the servers. I declare that these developers are lazy and cheap (you expect me to give you money and you can’t bother to give me a good amount of customizable options?), but that’s an issue for another time.

Tell me. What’s your stance on this?

P.S. I'll be starting this topic on as many places as I can think of to get some scope on this.