The Pizza gal seems very inappropriate

Regarding the rescue dialog, he's really talking to himself more than you there. The conversation would probably have gone the same if you were a potted plant.

'Why am I asking you? You're a ficus.'

 

Better a ficus than a bowl of petunias.

"Oh no. Not again."

 

I need to name my next team Wisteria, Kudzu, and Honeysuckle. Kudzu is definitely the Dwarf.

 

Seems reasonable, though it makes me think of Kimono's Townhouse.

And, I speculate that if we knew why the petunias thought that we'd know a lot more about the universe than we do now.

 

You can see these cackling...

 

+1 reference points.

 

I know that Django said that he's leaving, and I know that I'm a bit behind the time on this thread, but I wanted to comment on this. You say half the avid gamers you know are women, and that's awesome. The hobby has changed a great deal, become more inclusive. If we consider the game, we know of 3 defined characters who are gamers (Gary, Melvin, and Karen). So you've got 1/3 female, and the other two are brothers so they can't be women. The one defined female character is smart, clever, funny, and sociable, arguably the most positive portrayal of any character in the game. She's the Alex Vance of Card Hunter. There's definitely a need for a discussion of female characters in games, but I don't think this game.

As to the gender of "you" in the game, I think it's irrelevant. If you want to consider yourself female, I don't think it changes Gary's actions. Gary isn't reacting to Karen the way he is because she's a girl. It's because she's a girl who he has the hots for.

 

I think the point made by OP is rather self-explanatory. But, here: The narrator character in this game has absolutely no idea how to interact with an attractive female. The implication is that the player couldn't possibly be an attractive female, or else the narrator character would have previous experience interacting with one.

 

No, no, no.

First off, the way you phrased that looks really bad. I'm very sure you didn't mean that as it reads, so you may wish to consider editing it.

Second, being unsure of yourself in the context of someone you find attractive is NOT equivalent to being unsure of yourself with the entirety of the opposite sex.

 

Re: Isotope: Sorry, I was late to the party too. Let me clarify a bit and explain why I don't agree with your interpretation. Gary's reaction to Karen is based on her appearance. Whatever he sees in her is purely superficial. That makes it pretty safe to assume that for purposes of story, Player is not as attractive as Karen. I can see where there might be a little bit of room for debate here, but that's the simplest and most plausible explanation for the events in the game: Player is assumed not to be an attractive girl.

 

As I said:

If Gary was comfortable with one attractive female, regardless of her role in his life, it is difficult to imagine that he would be at a complete loss around some other attractive female. Let me simplify further:

If Gary is playing with someone that's like Karen, he wouldn't be embarrassed to share his interest in the game with Karen. Therefore, it stands to reason that Player is assumed to be dissimilar to Karen (for purposes of the story.)

I'm sure hoping it wasn't intentional, and it's not the worst oversight that's ever been made, but it does come off as a tad bit sexist.

 

Karen seems to be one of 3 (well.. 4, 5 if you count the PC) characters in the story. You don't have any basis for establishing how Gary acts around other women (classmates, for example), pretty or otherwise. You're taking his reaction to one woman he finds attractive and making that all-encompassing. Then, based off of that, you've made assumptions that you just can't support.

What you've got here is an example of the problem of induction. I'm going to borrow wikipedia's line here, since it explains it better than my memories do:
The problem of induction is the philosophical question of whether inductive reasoning leads to knowledge understood in the classic philosophical sense, since it focuses on the lack of justification for either:

1. Generalizing about the properties of a class of objects based on some number of observations of particular instances of that class (for example, the inference that "all swans we have seen are white, and therefore all swans are white", before the discovery of black swans) or
2. Presupposing that a sequence of events in the future will occur as it always has in the past (for example, that the laws of physics will hold as they have always been observed to hold).

In the case of swans, at the least one had backing from millions of examples to assume all swans were white. It doesn't change the fact that black swans do in fact exist, making that assumption invalid, but there was some basis for it. "The millions of swans that we've seen are white, therefore all swans are white." Here, you've got "This single interaction between Gary and an attractive woman occurred in this manner, therefore all other interactions between Gary and an attractive woman will occur in the same way." Any way you slice it, that's a pretty weak stance to take.

 

@Kathayla: You know that argument doesn't apply to a fictional world, right? I hope I don't explain this badly, but Karen IS the basis for establishing how Gary acts around women. It is the only instance in which we can be 100% certain that he is interacting with a woman. It was written that way by the author, specifically to describe the character of Gary.

Any time you read a work of fiction, you have all of the information which you can use to make any logical deduction presented to you. Anything else is mere speculation, so saying "perhaps Gary is only like this around Karen" has little value.

If you read a book and all the swans in that book are white, then that's it. There's no black swan hiding between the pages.

 

I'm 100% certain he is interacting with a woman, every time he talks to me.

But seriously, this whole experience is actually quite authentic, for me. I had a lot of male friends when I was a teenager, and it was not unusual for them to be so obsessed with some other girl that they didn't even notice I was a girl. It's not that I was chopped liver at all -- I just wasn't *** The One ***. I was someone they talked to about nerdy stuff -- not someone you would go on dates with. That would be weird.

 

Are you serious?

A well written character is a person, not a two dimensional cutout. They treat each person individually. Trying to argue against that with 'that's how fiction works' (it doesn't by the by, at least good fiction doesn't) is absurd.

If you were dealing with Gary being terrified whenever a wombat came into the room, and then using that to say the PC can't be a wombat or he'd be freaking out, you might have something. As is, not so much.

 

From personal experience in my gaming groups - it's all a matter of context. I've played with in groups who've had many attractive people in them. But they were my friends and people I felt comfortable interacting with. Were they attractive? Many of them, yes. It was easy for me to talk to them and hang out with them.

How would I respond when it was a girl I actually had a crush on? Especially at that age? Completely differently (and often hilarious to my friends).

 

Just as a side-note: Whatever my feelings about Gary and Karen may be, I am really glad to see that folks are concerned about sexism in games, and I am grateful that this has been a safe place to have this kind of conversation. You folks really are the best community!