You want one where monsters fear the path you tread? How about Wizardry 4? There you can suck at the game *and* have monsters fear the path you tread!

Back in the day, I used to read about how hard-core the Wizardry games were and stayed away out of fear that I wouldn't get past the opening bits.

Move to Australia, the men are men, the pretty women are always the ones storefront and what can be considered monsters fear the path we lay tread; and every other critter that crosses our poorly maintained roads.

Wizardry 4 is interesting because you are an evil wizard who summons monsters. If you are bad at that game, I would argue that the monsters would dread being summoned by you.

Of course, you probably wouldn't get past the first room without a hint.

Of note, Wizardry 4 feels more like an adventure game than an RPG in many respects, and therefore it might be best to treat it as one. (Of course, there are still RPG encounters, but once the fight starts, there isn't much you can do to influence the outcome, because you don't get to control the summoned monsters.)

Wizardry 4 is so different from other Wizardries that, when discussing the early Wizardry games (1-5), I often need to say "except Wizardry 4".

Note that there is one part you won't know the answer to unless you've reached the final dungeon level of Wizardry 1.

You must have indeed missed the meeting, not to mention the entire history of videogaming, and the sales charts (we're talking the West here, just so we're clear). Mind you, this is not me saying that gamers are a white male monolith, or that the demographics haven't been changing. They aren't, and they have indeed. Doesn't change who's the majority, though, nor does it signal a paradigm shift in thinking and game development, and it most certainly does not make "diversity" mandatory or the hallmark of a good game. You're engaging in sophistry. We're discussing what demographic can be considered the "default" in a given society, in this case, the West, and I was addressing your absurd claim that it isn't White by default. No, it would be presumptuous globalist wishful thinking and discriminatory, like I said. No need to be in such a rush to use the word "racist". And there's also no need for nitpicking, unless you'd also like me to refer all the White ethnicities at every sentence (although, to be fair, it's fairly common practice to specify "East Asians" and "South Asians"). The only news here is that people can't interpret statistics. Unless you're deviating from the topic at hand and conflating things...? No, but you're clearly starting to doze off right now and leaning against those goalposts, judging by the way they're moving. No, that point is that games not exclusively featuring white males are "diverse", and that it happens because actual thought was put into it, as if a) developers who develop games with male characters somehow don't put thought into their games, and b) the gender or race of the character had any bearing at all on the game's quality, originality or fun. Which is nonsensical. A game featuring, say, a woman is not "diverse", nor is anyone here arguing against it or saying they'd never play it or that games featuring women are the bane of modern gaming. It's not even a strawman you're arguing against, you're just running this thread through that peculiar worldview of yours and almost talking to yourself. You do, apparently, judging by your impulse to brand those games as "diverse" just because they have female protagonists.

Thanks. Post duly edited.

I'll bite here.

When making a game with a female protagonist, the developers are commonly seen as having made a conscious decision to have a female protagonist.

When making a game with a male protagonist, said decision is typically not regarded as a decision in the first place.

One case in point: In Ultima 8's development, they decided that they didn't have enough resources to have both male and female avatar options, so they ended up going with the male one. The fact that they chose the male one implies that the developers (likely unconsciously) treated male as the default option here.

There is a similar issue with jokes. Can you think of any good jokes that:
1. have female characters, and
2. the fact that said characters are female is not relevant to the joke's punchline?

"Dumb Blonde" jokes. Often told with a woman as the blonde, but many don't really have to be:

http://www.blonde-jokes.co.uk/top-10-dumb-blonde-jokes.php

9, 8, 7, 4, 3, and 1 could use males instead. The rest don't indicate male or female, but could - and it wouldn't change the outcome or punchline if they did.

Most "Yo Mama" jokes I've heard don't rely on the female sex for the joke, but "Yo Daddy so fat..." just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Here's one that relies on the woman but is picking on the man:

Wealthy man gets stranded at sea and winds up on a little patch of sand with a palm tree. After a few days he's wondering how he's going to get out of this mess, and then sees a person snorkling in toward the island. Once the person arrives, he discovers it's a very attractive woman in a wet suit.

"Been here long?"

"Few days. Could use a drink."

She unzips the top a bit and pulls out a flask with some whisky.

"Thanks! Don't suppose you have a cigar in there?"

She unzips further - showing her still-wet glistening cleavage - pulls out a cigar and hands it to him.

As he's enjoying the cigar and whisky, she unzips further and further and asks, "Would you like to play around?"

"What?!? You have golf clubs in there, too?!?"

So, uh, yeah.

I'll follow.
Ultima 8 doesn't look like good example. If developers wanted to include both male and female options, but have to choose only one, the final choice was hardly subconscious. I see thinking that "we can lose more players by omitting male avatar than the female one" as more likely explanation. I don't judge here if they were right or no, that's another question.
Example of at least partly subconscious "sticking to default" is another game, when first concept of game protagonist - adventurer archaeologist - raised reactions "and where he lost his whip and fedora?". Next step was deliberately steer as far from Indy Jones archetype as possible.
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Lara Croft.

Sense of humor is individual and subjective matter. You can counter every example by saying "but these jokes are not good"
Also, what you accept as "relevant to the punchline" is up to you.

You are not playing fair here, you know? (but I am sure that's completely subconscious :-))

No need to apologize. Just be appreciative that you're learning new words and terms that aren't loaded and spent like those that come to your mind in knee-jerk fashion when discussing complex issues. So affirmative action pertaining to race is racist, as opposed to merely discriminatory? That's what ethnic identifiers do, in the English language, at least. You can rail against it all you want, but all you'd be doing is going off on another tangent. You keep jumping from the US to the West, and from the gaming market to demographic composition, which makes it difficult to pin things down, and dovetails into the goalposts part, below. Let's try Ockham's razor, then. Western games are and have been, as a rule, a) made with white male protagonists, b) marketed in the form of white male protagonists even when there's a possibility to pick your gender and race, c) developed by white males and d) obsessed over and competitively played by white males. Yet you assume that those responsible are just being reactionary idiots and purposefully losing money by only catering to what you insist is no longer a majority or more likely end customer, but some sort of lowest common creative denominator.

It's pretty simple, really. If you're a male Pakistani game developer, your default main character is likely to be a male Punjabi or of another South Asian persuasion, even if for no other reason than the maxim "write what you know", for the same reason that, if you're a white female novelist, the default main character of your books is likely to be a white female. If there were a South Asian gaming industry, I'm sure people would rightfully shake their heads at others clamoring for "diverse" protagonists and attempting to shame developers into using other ethnicities just because, and we all know how much men complain about the stock male characters in the multi-million chick-lit and otherwise female-targeted literary industry, and how it needs more "diversity" (hint: They don't). The ones that make it hard to understand what it is you're actually standing or arguing for, as you go from attempting to deny what demographic is the default target market and end consumer in gaming in the West, to equating "diverse" to "not with a white male", to the quizzical attempt at a "gotcha!" when facetiously implying that 40% female gamers means that 40% should be targeted at them. Completely missing the point that, even taking those conflated statistics at face value (to pretend some sort of utopic parity has been achieved, now that gaming has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry), it means anything other than people will also readily consume things that are not specifically targeted at them.

And I do like the word "sophistry", but not its prevalence in today's discourse. Just don't slight the excellent "sleight of hand" by misspelling it, please. Other than your egregious discriminatory stance, it's this presumptuous arrogance of pretending you know better than those people who are actually making stuff, that which makes it hard to lend any credence to your points. And I can give you another example with respect to system configuration, screen resolution, or the like, but, as I said, it'd just be splitting hairs, which we already have enough of here.

I haven't learnt any new words. I knew those already. I guess I'm just more of the school of not using 3 long words where 1 would suffice. Yours sounded pretty loaded, though...

...wut? Claiming that white males aren't the default in western society is neither affirmative action, nor racism. Again, going back, I used the term in the context of giving YOUR (very weird) argument a label. But you seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing, and drawing things out that aren't even relevant. What on earth does affirmative action have to do with this?

Hahahahahahah....what? YOU linked statistics related to the US. I pointed out that they do not support your argument, and then you say that I'm jumping around? Either way, I've been quite focused on the Americas the whole time- The three biggest video game industry regions are China, the US and Japan, so it is meaningless to talk about "the West" outside that context. If you're going to talk about the US marketing outside of the North America, it certainly doesn't focus purely on Europe, so your arguments make even less sense. I've not made any jumps at all.

I don't think you've been paying attention at all. I assume that they're being lazy writers who don't think about the story, and thus just go automatically.

So women only write about women, black people write about black people, men only write about men? Yeah, that seems totally true :D.
But yeah, since I have developed a small number of games (nothing sold, though), lets run through my main characters: A male of indeterminate origin who's aesthetic was built from a smiley emoticon, an alien, a blind character where race and gender was never mentioned, a male-female team of unknown and central asian origin respectively. As far as Pakistani game development in general, while it is a pretty small industry right now, of the games I can think of that are designed locally and aren't multi-character based (RTSes, Cricket games, etc.), it is not stereotypical at all- a blue-skinned female in an endless runner, for example. Nobody is shaking their heads or complaining about diversity.

Even if I didn't make games, that would be a pretty stupid argument- "Only the people who make games have a right to complain!". Anyhow, This has devolved from a discussion into a sort of low-level debate, something I'm absolutely uninterested in here. So with a thanks for this correction:
I think we're done, unless you have something new to add!

Then you have even less of an excuse to force incorrect, loaded terms into a discussion that has nothing to do with them ("racist"). Let's see:
- You claimed that the West isn't White by default.
- I said you wouldn't dare make such statements about any other society (X country's Y majority isn't X's default)
- You made the leap that I'd consider it racist if you did so
- I said that no, it'd merely be discriminatory.
- You made the leap that being discriminatory towards another race means racist by default (that word again)
- I asked you if affirmative action (i.e., discrimination based on race) is racist.
- You lost the plot.

So yeah, nice try at attempting to reverse the roles, but no cigar. You most certainly haven't, as even a cursory glance at your posts can attest to. You only "focused" on the Americas when I presented the statistic, and then you began to ping-pong between mischaracterizations of the West's ethnic makeup and the specifics of the US market as pertains to the male/female divide. What an extraordinarily parochial, myopic thing to say. So, say, the biggest video game consumer demographic is male, so it's meaningless to talk about white males? You're not making jumps, you're just digging yourself further down. Which is even more ludicrous than claiming they're reactionary idiots and purposefully losing money. It's arrogance of Dunning-Kruger proportions. You're not paying attention. Women are likely to write about women, black people are likely to write about black people, and men are likely to write about men. Which is why, for all the "diversity" crowd's caterwauling, there have always been Western games with characters that aren't white males, even if the majority are. You put your money where your mouth is. I'll take your word for it, and can respect that. How does "don't act like you know better than people who actually do stuff" equate to "you have no right to complain"? It's almost like you're running a scripted performance based on the default (ha) answers you get when discussing topics like these with others. Do try to read what you're responding to. You did start off reasonably well from a purely rhetorical standpoint, but then began to lose your composure, using juvenile invectives and smileys, beginning to mix things up, glossing over or ignoring points and showing an inability to refrain from letting ideology trump facts.

Until the next time, then, I guess.