Webcomic artist Aaron Diaz has a talent for many things. Okay, like I guess primarily drawing, but also for making great comics about philosophy and science, and also for fun, really well informed redesigns of things like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings. This week, inspired by Anita Sarkeesian‘s Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, he tackled Zelda, which is to say, he’s produced a number of character and item designs (as well as expository background) for a hypothetical and, frankly, likely very welcome installment of the Zelda franchise that features the titular character as the player character, rather than Link. I mean, we all like Link, but come on. Even Dixie Kong has starred in her own game.

Warner Bros. has been quietly marshaling its forces to create the next installment of the Arkham franchise, and its domain name registrations have not gone unnoticed. But today the company officially announced Batman: Arkham Origins. The good news is there’s a new game. The bad news is it’s a prequel, so it won’t be delivering on any of the loose ends left wafting at the end of Arkham City. Also for a moment there I entertained the notion that since it was a prequel, it might actually involve Barbara Gordon when she was Batgirl and not Oracle, but the devs are saying it’s a “young Batman” meeting some of his enemies for the first time, so I doubt there will be a lot of Batfamily shenanigans, unfortunately. But with eight assassins descending on Gotham City on Christmas Eve to compete over who can kill Batman first, there’s a good chance of say, Lady Shiva, Cheshire, White Canary, or, if they wanted to pull from the Batman Beyond universe, Curare. Either way, Warner Bros. Games Montreal has some big Rocksteady Games shoes to fill. (And the DC Universe really needs some lady hitpersons who aren’t Asian ninja-types, sheesh.)

Previously in Batman

If a lot of the pushback against feminist critique of video games, or even the simple assertion that women enjoy playing games and so maybe a studio should consider them to be a valuable demographic, contains a core misconception, it is that the people calling for better representation in the games industry and in the female characters in games think that every man in the industry is an evil women-hating jerk. I mean, come on, those guys have mothers, wives, sisters, and female friends! They don’t hate women!

In fact, if the folks who were responsible for problematic portrayals of female characters or poor representation of real women in games industry were doing it all purely deliberately, it’d probably be a lot easier to fix. The reality is that a lot of this stuff is far more subtle than that, and the sad fact remains that all of us are capable of having noble or even neutral intentions while still overlooking the subtle ways in which we’re contributing to a stereotype, operating on a false assumption, or missing out on a different but important perspective. Case in point, some of the things the creators of The Last of Us have mentioned lately.

A month ago we featured some Zelda bracelets that were a subtle way to pay homage to the music of The Legend of Zelda and particularly Ocarina of Time, where playing music is one of the vital ways in which Link interacts with the world. Peregrine Studios on Etsy has a smaller, more expensive solution for your Zelda music jewelry needs.

The BioShock games, says creative director Ken Levine, are a Rorschach test. What you see will depend on who you are and what you believe. There are no right answers. When I look at BioShock Infinite, I see three things. I see a masterpiece of video game storytelling. I see a woman who needs rescuing, and who challenges my expectations of what that means. And I see a risky, disturbing exploration of American racism, which led me to acknowledge how ill-equipped I am to say anything on that front at all.

I don’t know how to write about BioShock Infinite. The first two things, yes, I can muddle about those just fine. The third, however, is not a matter I have ever written on, and I doubt that I am the right person for the job. But to leave that aspect out of any discussion of this game would be missing the point entirely. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from BioShock Infinite, it’s that trying to avoid mistakes never ends well. So here goes.

(Minor spoilers ahead.)

Borderhouse has a revelatory post up containing a number of graphs from Game Developer Magazine detailing salary breakdowns over experience in the industry and gender, revealing some extreme disparities between the compensation men and women receive for working the same kinds of jobs in the video games industry. According to these statistics, women generally paid between 20% and 30% less than their male counterparts, with a few outliers of 8.3% and a whopping 65%. Only in one field, programming, do women make slightly more than men: programmers, at 4.5% more.

Borderhouse makes the good point that some of these numbers may result from the lack of women in the industry: many of those who are in may have come to it recently, and therefore have less seniority and commensurately less compensation, a relationship not highlighted by GDM. I’ve highlighted QA testers here because the job’s notorious reputation for having high turnover and poor working conditions make it more likely to be exempt from such an explanation, but this is definitely a pattern that’s worth more research. You can see all the numbers here.

Previously in Gender

The nerdy jewelry fix is a powerful one. And once you’ve gotten a few hits of Triforce pins and 1-up pendants, the popular stuff just doesn’t do it for you anymore. You need something rarer. Obscurity is the best high. Well it doesn’t get more video game connoisseur than wearing a glow in the dark replica of the special spot that all the colossi in Team ICO’s Shadow of the Colossus get morally ambiguously stabbed in. Just watch out for tiny men on tiny horses with tiny magical swords.

Here’s what it looks like in the dark:

Tom Hardy and a tiny Bane, making people all over the world want to have babies. Some of them with Tom Hardy. (Digital Spy)

Who else would the creators of Star Trek: The Video Game get for their spokesperson than William Shatner? Although the likenesses of Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto are used in the game, we all know this pairing makes for comedy gold.

(via The Hollywood Reporter)

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Last week, the Penny Arcade Report interviewed Jean-Max Morris, creative director of the upcoming female-led game Remember Me. After going into the game’s cyberpunk roots, Morris discussed the publishers who wanted nothing to do with a female protagonist. “We don’t want to publish it because that’s not going to succeed,” he paraphrased. “You can’t have a female character in games. It has to be a male character, simple as that.”

As the article made the rounds, I couldn’t help but notice what gamers were getting excited about elsewhere. Tomb Raider had just slipped to number two in the UK sales charts, after two weeks at number one. StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm had already sold 1.1 million copies in its first two days. Indie developer Supergiant Games, the folks behind Bastion, announced their new action RPG, Transistor, which features a leading lady. Their booth enjoyed two hour lines at PAX all weekend. I’m told that the lines for Remember Me were comparable.

I don’t think it’s gamers who have a problem with female protagonists.