Flex and Frooms Flex and Fromes.
This is the Flex and Frooms catch up podcast.
It's Flex and Frooms on Kada. I have a confession to make, one that I'm not sure that people want to hear, but I think it's important that I present a very clear image of who I am as a person. I flex mummy, government name, am a gamer, and you know what, I feel like, I really didn't want to claim the title because I just don't like the connotation of being a gamer.
It's giving mountain doo, sloth, mummies, basement luton, doritos.
Dorito dust, cheesy fingers, directionless, Yes, all of the above, which is not the case at all. Like with most things that require skill and you haven't done them, you think that it's easy, like going to the gym. I was like, the gym is very simple. No, it's all maths and brain work and lifting. It's very difficult. However, last year you might recall that I spent I don't know, six weeks sourcing a PS five. It was when I say sourcing, it was that it was kind of like
arc curation. I was like, Okay, we gotta go here, we have timers on I was intended with my best friend. We both needed one, like, oh, this one's a physical concept, we need a digital one. The whole thing finally got the PS five, and much to my surprise, I could not play it because there was nothing for me to play. And by nothing I meant that of all the games in the catalog, maybe there's like a thousand every single No, not every single game. I'm sorry, I'm a liar. Too.
Many of the games extreme violence, extreme violence, and gore shooting, shooting, shooting, murder, murder, killing, killing just not chill thing. I don't want to do that in my spare time. I don't want to be high strung and anxious, and so initially I was like, okay, let me just let me just suppress my bodily needs and just play these games. And what happened. I got anxious. Mmmmm corso, I got anxious, couldn't sleep well, found myself
being really jumpy. Didn't take it seriously. So about a year has gone by, I have managed to find more games to play that do contain violence. It has happened, but in protests, I made a little Instagram post, as one does, don't go straight to the source, don't go to mister peers five or miss them. So I said, petition for the gaming overlords to make some non violent adventure games that are chill and involve activities, quests, character evolution,
realistic avatars, and pretty outfits. Oh that feels so simple what I was really saying. If I want to be chill, chill, she makes some games for adult chicks. It's not every day toddlers who want to play Mario car It's not everyday cod Killing three. Sometimes adult women want to play games that involve.
Not baking and.
Not much every day baking and fish.
You know what I would love? What I would love a sex in the city game. This is this is why you pick her out, like you go to Manalo blanks, Like are you.
For your game? Come on? This is what I'm talking about. And so I post the question why aren't there more video games catered to women? I'm saying what I'm saying, And we've got an expert on the line. Yes we do. We've got doctor Chess in the building. Government name literally, not an alias. Doctor Chess is an Associate professor of Entertainment and Media Studies at the University of Georgia. Her emphasis is on gender and gaming. She knows what she's
talking about. She's also an author. She got a book called Play Like a Feminist. Sounds a bit of me. It's all about why video games need feminism and why all of us should make space and we'll play in our lives. Get doctor Chess on the line, please produce a Brookie. Hi Ah, it's flex and rooms. Thanks for picking up. How are you fantastic? But we want to get to the bottom of an issue in the gaming industry.
As an avid gamer myself, I like to get involved, but unfortunately there's too much violence and I can't seem to find a game that I will enjoy that's not just about baking and cooking or isn't extremely violent. So ofs the jump it. Why do you think there seems to be more video games targeted towards men than women, and why are so many of them violent?
I don't actually think that there are more video games targeted to men that are violent. I think those are the ones that get more attention. There are absolutely a lot of games out there that aren't violent or about cooking, and I can list off a bunch for you and for your listeners. For sure. First of all, about half of all people playing video games identify as women, but only a smaller fraction of the video game industry is actually,
you know, I actually identifies as women. So there's sort of this disconnect where a lot of time it's primarily men making games for women, which builds a lot of the sum in about what women might want. But also at the same time, there are there's a lot of innovation in games in the last few decades and certainly
in the last decade. So for example, at Purna Games makes a lot of artful, kind of literary type games that are not at all shooty and that are not at all violent, and that aren't really gender exclusive either. They're not like four Women, They're not sort of these patronizing games that are meant for women. They're games that are just meant for humans that want to play interesting games.
Can you give me an example of one of those games that is gender neutral and what happens in it?
So, Janet County is a gleadful game, and it's a game where you play as a hole in the ground and you're the thing that you are doing is sucking up everything around you and sort of having it all fall into the hole. And there's a storyline that goes with it. I'm not going to spoil the storyline, but it makes sense within the context of the story. And it's a really like fun and engaging game. You can play it on mobile devices and you can play it
on a lot of consoles as well. It has cute, funny characters, cute fun dialogue, and it's in no way meant for men or women. It's just meant for humans.
It's meant for holes.
Shut up playing holes, which is, by the way, throughout our whole point. From my understanding of it, you are a whole.
This is incredible. I'm finding that the current games I'm playing Cyberpunk and Horizon Forbidden West, which are like GTA but with like a few more robots, Grand Theft Order, and then I'm playing things like The SIMS, which I've played since I was a young a young Gremlin, and I really really do enjoy those games. But it feels like it's the only one. And for a concept that is so popular, why aren't we seeing more similar simulation games like Frem's made a good point, She'd love to
see a simulation Sex and the City game. You wake up put on an outfit, buy some Minolo's. You know, you gotta pick which boy you want to be with that'll direct with your friends. Soul's mystery, you know what? Where was that? And is the problem always going back to this.
Future and describes Kim Kardashi in Hollywood. Oh, there are definitely games like the SIMS, but I think also the SIMS sort of has the market on that. I will say that Sturdy Valley has taken a lot of sort of that kind of Simms love. So Stardy Valley is a game where it is agrarian. You are you're farming for a lot of the game, but you're doing a lot of other things that it has sort of like all of these different storylines of different characters in the game.
You can marry different characters and different outcomes will happen depending on which characters you marry. But there are all kinds of games that they're The problem is is that in general, when we talk about video games, people automatically jump to violent games. And so when people say, you know, I don't play video games, they're too violent. My first question is always with games, which games are you talking about?
Can you tell us you've written a book called play Like a Feminist that focuses on why video games need feminism. I think you touched on that before. How you say that a lot of the people that make the games are men.
What is the book about?
So Play Like a Feminist was It was a follow up to my previous book, which was Ready Player Too. And part of why I wrote Play Like a Feminist was that after I wrote Ready Player Too, a lot of I went in that I knew that I encountered out in the wild, or that that you know, we're
friends or friends of friends. I would recommend games to them and they would come back to me and they would say things like I didn't know the games like that existed, And I was like, huh, well, that's interesting because a lot of these games that I've listened off to you kind of have like this insider baseball to them, right, Like, people in the industry know that there are these games out there, but there isn't sort of this common understanding
that games are more than just like the violent games that are out there, that there are all of these artful, literary games that people can can really get amazing experiences out of. And so I wrote the book in largely to sort of broach the topic because I thought that it was important that if we want to change the video game industry, we need to be buying in. We need to be playing more games. Nobody's going to make
games for us if we're not playing already. So the only way to buy in is to be playing.
Yeah, one final little question, did you go into your career because your last name is Chess? Like?
Was that that was an odd coincidence?
Okay, because I'm thinking of changing my last name to rich and place is going to be doctor cash. But thank you so much for your time. So I guess our listeners can find play like a feminist.
And what was your first book.
Called Ready Player Too, Amazed, Ready Player Too?
Or sometimes someone by Ernest Klent.
Okay, doctor Chess, thanks so much for your time.
Thank you so much to take care. You've been listening to the Flex and Firms Daily podcast.
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