Cliff Bleszinski (a.k.a. Cliffy B.) of Epic Games spoke to Wired about Gears of War 2, and how they’re planning to make it more “girlfriend-friendly.” Here’s the full quote:

How do you make a game girlfriend-friendly?

You do jump-in, jump-out co-op. You have configurable difficulty settings for the other player. You have very cool and bad-ass main characters that have a very human side. And you make sure that the female characters in your game don’t have ginormous tits and aren’t bad stereotypes.

Yes, stereotypes are annoying, but I have a feeling that’s not what is keeping your girlfriends from playing GoW. Because frankly, I think we’re all a little desensitized to stereotypes in video games: play 10 minutes of (the absolutely stellar) GTA4 to see what I’m talking about.

Let me preface this by saying that I’m probably not typical. However, I think there’s a decently-sized segment of the female gamer population that feels the same way. It’s nothing in-game that would ever keep me from playing GoW2. You could make the female characters mostly naked and baking cookies in the cut scenes for all I care (OK, that was a joke). I played through the entire story mode of GoW, and the last thing on my mind was the outfits. No, it’s the online play experience that I can’t tolerate. As a woman who has attempted to play against random people on various shooters, I can say with certainty that anonymous jerkwads who have never known the touch of a woman are the reason I won’t try it again. Half the time you’re better off pretending to be a 14-year old boy with a high voice than admit to being a girl.

In an excellently-written article on Gamasutra, Bill Fulton (who developed the online social aspects of Shadowrun) wrote:

Of all the ways I spend my free time, playing games online is the only one I would describe as “frequently barbaric”. Insults of all kinds, including racist and homophobic slurs, are commonplace.

The women I know who play online avoid anything that would identify them as female — including voice communication — in order to avoid the unwanted, and frequently negative, attention.
…
Why do I care? Some gamers might be thinking “If he’s so thin-skinned that he can’t take the online banter, maybe he shouldn’t play online.” Unfortunately, many people do just that — they stop playing online.

Is it a reality of online gaming, particularly on Xbox Live, something that we just have to put up with? Sure, you can mute them, but it unless the game has it built directly into their interface, you’ll be wasting valuable playing time digging around in their gamer card. The rating system is also a joke, since it won’t really keep people out of your lobby. Every game should have an easy way to mute and block certain players when you’re playing online, and it seems that not many do.

If that were fixed, it would certainly make me want to play more online. I appreciate that Cliffy B. is thinking about making the game “girlfriend-friendly” but I don’t know if that’s really at the heart of the matter. What does that even mean anyway? Would a girlfriend that was considering playing a game like GoW2 really be the kind of girl to change her mind because of a few tight outfits? That’s another blog post, I guess.