Are girl games as offensive as Grand Theft Auto?
Heartless Doll writes: “I spent a good portion of my early undergraduate years playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. My then-boyfriend was a pretty dedicated gamer, and I liked the story of GTA a heck of a lot better than the obstacle course that was whatever Tony Hawk game we were playing at the time. Still, I did get the creeps when I realized that my boyf’s pre-teen brother was also a huge GTA fan. I mean, we gotta protect the kiddos, right? No, I don’t think that video games make kids go out and kill people, but I do think that they’re yet another medium through which kids learn about the world and get ideas about how to live in it. I know this because games–and music, and movies, and what have you–affect how I see the world, and I reckon I’m at least as impressionable as a teenager. And like every other mass-marketed thing on the planet, games are gendered. While boys are being taught about prostitutes and guns, Wired reports today on how tween and teen girl-marketed video games
