Her report of the situation is the result of players playing games for the story or the immersion and not for a gameplay. They push the demand for this kind of tropes.
Well, I certainly play games for the immersion and ascapism they offer.
Not for what you call "gameplay", though game mechanics of course provide a necessary foundation for the actual content. And, while being male myself, I certainly don't push for, or even approve of, this kind of tropes.
When you play a game for gaming, the avatar's skin does not matter at all. It can be a monkey, a squid alien, anything. Game mechanics prevail.
Yes, but who plays like that? Sure,
some basic games, like Tetris, are like that. But this is an RPG site, and no RPG is anything like that. No matter how you define the genre, role playing is about immersion, about playing a role. If you focus on the numbers, rather than their context, you might be
playing, but not
role playing. It doesn't matter whether your character is gloriously rendered in HD3D or merely described in words. Who this character is in the game world is front and center. The mechanics have no other function than to support that.
You dont care about the justification used to introduce a new stage. You could go after a damsel in distress or your lost marbles, it is the same. It just introduces the new stage and its gameplay.
Do you actually believe that? I would like to mention that ever better graphics has been the main drive in the evolution of computer and video games, and rest my case, because the way you reason, graphics wouldn't matter.
It is when you demand story or immersion you need to be able to relate to the various NPCs etc as you need to associate closely to the decorum.
And I believe that most RPG players demand story and immersion. Bad game mechanics can break a game for sure, but good mechanics don't make a game.
It is a totally different dimension from gaming.
But not all of us care about "gaming". I consider myself a hardcore gamer, because I spend an inordinate ammount of time and money on games, but I don't even like "gaming".