Dear Video Game Devs: If a species doesn’t lactate, you can’t give the females boobs. Mammals only.

— Minerva Zimmerman (@grumpymartian) November 14, 2012

Earlier today, I tweeted this. This actually garnered some comments about my “boobist” thinking.

I just want to set the record straight.

Boobs are awesome. They can be a pain (literally) to tote around one’s self, but I am firmly (perhaps jiggly?) in the pro-boob camp.

My complaint has to do with bad science and boredom. I am not suggesting we take out all boobs in games. I’d love to see more variety of boobs in games, sexualized male characters, and gender-neutral characters in games. I think sexy has its time and place, and I have no wish to do away with it. I am not a fan of games where stuff is done TO female characters rather than BY them, so I don’t play them. Likewise, if someone makes a sexy male vampire who gets nearly naked every time he transforms and the camera lovingly pans across his muscular thighs, I am not going to force brodudes to play it at gunpoint.

Much the way that most gamers want realistic physics in their games, I tend to want realistic biology even in mythical or alien species. There is a biological reason for boobs. That biology doesn’t make them less awesome, but there’s world-logic to them. If you break the world-logic by giving an avian species breasts, I want an in-game reason for it. Does that species undergo body modification for fun or profit because the universe is human-centric? That’s an interesting reason for non-mammalian species to have breasts.  There is a whole gigantic non-human world of species out there to draw upon for ideas.To simply make “breasts” the default for “female” is boring, not to mention LAZY game design.

 

 

Well, yes. There are reasons for this– some good, some pretty dumb. The main one was I went from “how am I going to die this week” to “I… really don’t want to kill myself even fictionally right now,” which I think is a pretty good reason not to write something like that. If you ever find yourself arguing “Well, I really SHOULD kill myself off” it’s probably not a good thing, no matter the context. The other was when I erased my fictional self and broke the 4th wall, I felt like it was a good place to change what I was doing. No matter what I did I couldn’t really bring my fictional self back in the next episode, but I wasn’t quite sure what I should do instead. Once I figured it out, I was in the middle of a major deadline push and didn’t have the energy to do anything about it. I then pushed past burnout and got dangerously close to burn up.

For the months of November and December I’m taking a break from writing deadlines and doing stuff that helps me recharge. A little writing vacation. I’m playing video games (something I never do when I have writing projects), working through my to-read stack, cleaning the house (holy crap, deadlines sure breed dust bunnies), and getting around to stuff I haven’t done. *clears away cobwebs off this blog* Which writing here happens to be one of. I’m not going to claim to write here on any schedule (we all know that isn’t going to happen) but I do have several things about writing and research I’ve been meaning to post. Eventually I will even write the conclusion to Museum Mishaps where Intern Tilly goes in search of the now entirely missing Minerva.

I also have some other fiction I want to post, but I haven’t decided if a blog entry or a downloadable pdf would be best for. Any thoughts?

To sum up: Contrary to what it might appear, I did not actually really real die.