Dhruin
SasqWatch
Mike Doolittle at GameCritics follows up on the recent article on gender roles in Mass Effect and other games with a counter view:
More information.Consistently, I find myself disagreeing with Alex in her views about the sexual representation of females. In her article about Mass Effect, she suggests that the Rachni (a sentient insectoid species in the game) queen's purpose of "breed[ing] lots of children" is patriarchal, as if bees, ants, or any other species of insect could be accused of being patriarchal simply because they've evolved such that the female does exactly that. Nor was I persuaded by the questionable "commodity model" of sexuality that Alex references in her article on Alpha Protocol, a model which I feel greatly oversimplifies the evolutionary and cognitive roots of human behavior (being an enthusiast of evolutionary psychology I'd love to expound, but that would be an editorial unto itself).