gaming

I don't go looking to video games for entirely accurate depictions of reality. It is an escapist hobby for a reason, as I think it is for most people. I enjoy getting away into a world of possibility and imagination. It probably explains my tendency towards RPGs. I want to enjoy myself. I want to be immersed in a story. Sometimes I want to be the hero. Sometimes I want to raze the ground behind me. Sometimes I want to slay the dragon. Sometimes I want my revenge on the character who really pissed me off.

here has been a quiet roster of characters from the annals of video games who have done the woman gamer crowd fairly well. If we are going to be stuck in the gender binary for characterization we might as well be looking for the best ones we can find. For every five or six tropes and hypersexualized characters we have, there are a few that shine for various reasons.

When I was a wee sprite of a thing, I remember changing my idea of what I would be "when I grew up" frequently. I wanted to be a fisherman like my Papa and uncles at one point. I believe I spent some time thinking that being a firefighter sounded cool because the hose truck looked like fun. I am sure there may have been some time where I thought that baby-sitting or raising kittens might have been fun as a career choice. I never imagined my choices were limited, because no one ever told me they were. The Imagine line of games from Ubisoft, however, almost seems to be telling young girl gamers that they have limited wants, indeed.

I'm a gamer, and a parent. Most people I know would never imagine that those two parts of my life could fit together so well.

When the Nintendo Wii introduced the balance board I was over the moon with excitement at the thought of bringing exercise into my own home. I brought the thing home and happily plugged it in. Home gyms are expensive, and gaming is a pricey hobby. Two in one! How could I go wrong?

I had the wonderful pleasure of talking with Ashley Soriano, professional gamer, future game designer, and all-around swell gal. It was an interview that was so awesome I had to cut it in half and hope I will have time to post the rest in the future. Enjoy!

Ashley Soriano is a multiple-title first-person shooter competitive gamer. A frequent competitor within the Major League Gaming Pro Circuit, she started her competitive career as a professional coach for the Shadowrun team Secret Weapon. After two years later within the Halo 3 and Halo: Reach circuit, she moves on to compete within Call of Duty: Black Ops this MLG season. In addition to national gaming competitions, she produces videos under partnership with Machinima and writes for a gaming blog Partybomb.net. Currently living in Los Angeles, she majors in Interactive Entertainment at the University of Southern California

Transcript after the jump!!

Now that I have showered some well-deserved praise on BioWare for Dragon Age II, and also engaged in the almost 60 hours that it took me to get to the bitter and mind-wrenchingly disturbing end, I have a few thoughts. For all of my waxing poetic about how fabulously progressive BioWare has been with their slick political messages and wiggling new ideas into the way we consume and play video games, there was this thing tugging at me as I took my Hawke faffing about Kirkwall.

Please take note Gentle Readers: This post contains some fairly significant end-game plot spoilers for Dragon Age II. If you do not want to have this roller coaster ride ruined for you, please consider moving on. You have been warned.

One of the most interesting panels I went to at SXSW was E-Race: Avatars, Anonymity, and Visualization of Identity on the Internet. It included Lisa Nakamura, Director of Asian-American Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign and author of Digitizing Race; James Au, who literally wrote the book on the avatar universe of Second Life; and Jeff Yang, who writes the column Asian Pop for the San Francisco Chronicle. I heard about generational divides in avatar usage and anecdotes about role-playing games that I don't know much about to begin with, but when Lisa Nakamura took the mic, the conversation really began.

The Dragon Age games are some of my favorites, and while they are not without flaw, I have played my money's worth of them for sure. Part of what has endeared them to me is the progressive feel of the character interaction and the way that they smartly raise political issues within story lines. Attentiveness to QUILTBAG issues is, in my mind, a welcome and refreshing thing to see and hear from the industry.

Gaming is interactive, and I would like to hit the pause menu and turn back to all of you, the faithful who have come 'round to engage me in these discussions (don't worry, I won't let the Deamons' Souls get you, this pause works, go answer your phone!). Consider this the cut scene before Act II or whatever.