I’ve had plenty of discussions in the past about games that suck. Still, there are plenty of marvelous titles out there that make up for the hailstorm of crap that lands on my plate each year. And where do I find most of them?

Online, baby!

Yet, each time I browse through a site’s game selection, I’m greeted with a flash of DayGlo flowers, a heinous assortment of “cute” animals with obscenely large and teary eyes, and dozens of bobble-headed cartoon damsels sporting an over-abundance of makeup and jewelery, going total ape-shit over the promise of yet another shopping binge.

Oh, and pink ponies with hearts tattooed on their ass. I see a lot of those, too.

So what’s wrong with these games?

They’re horribly sexist and need to be destroyed, is what. They’re disgusting in every sense of the word, and are the epitome of all that is bad in the Universe.

Not to mention most of them are about as gaudy and nauseating as a Lisa Frank product.

Perpetuating countless primitive and archaic stereotypes, all they’re really good for is leveling a ­table with a gimp leg. I’d recommend against this, however, as the explosion of color radiating from the packaging of many of these “girly games” is certain to blind anyone careless enough to gaze upon it, resulting in something similar to this:

And that’s putting it mildly.

These games—and I use the term “games” loosely, mind you—demand girl gamers to play “dress up” with their characters, work some fabulous career path (read: fashion designer, housewife, babysitter, etc.) in order to earn money to buy snazzy new outfits, and even have them planning weddings or caring for children.

Of course, all women absolutely love doing these things. And we all know that the fairer sex only exists to serve their superior male counterparts and look pretty while popping out a kid every now and again. Why would any woman want to play a game that extends beyond such a steadfast, glorious tradition? It’s baffling, it is.

In an effort to get my head around the concept behind some of these absurdly awful titles, I took notice to a number of overarching themes. I present you with Perry Piekarski’s Comprehensive List of the Thematic Elements in a Typical Girly Game:

• Ponies
• Pets/animals
• Movie Stars
• Singing
• A playhouse and/or playing house
• More ponies
• Shopping
• A diary
• Babysitting
• Solving mysteries
• Even more ponies
• Marriage and/or raising children
• Fashion
• Multi-packs offering several games that, according to some schmuck, are acceptable playing material for girls
• And most importantly—ponies

If I missed anything, please let me know. It’s in the name of science, people!

Now, in my 20+ years of gaming, I’ve not once seen a variety pack offering “Gamez 4 Boyz”. I tried searching on Amazon, but “Games for Boys” yielded no results and instead presented me with the usual batch of generic, license-based titles you’ll find when you put any old query into a game vendor’s search engine.

“Games for Girls”, on the other hand, presented me with this.

No fair. If there can be a variety pack for the ladies, why can’t guys have one too? Oh, wait. Video games are apparently already a guy thing, so I imagine it’d be pretty redundant to make a Games for Boys bundle, wouldn’t it?

But it’s more than just the cliched, repetitive themes offered by these good-for-nothing games that make them sexist. It’s the very gameplay itself.

These games are seldom difficult, offering players a set of remedial tasks completed through bland play mechanics that treat female gamers as though they couldn’t handle something a bit more demanding. Watering down the gameplay to appeal to a female demographic? Genius! We all know women hate a challenge and are incapable of learning and growing as they experience things, so developers are hitting it right on the money with this one.

Then again, I guess it really doesn’t matter in the first place. I mean, women are things, after all. Right, Lee Majors?

Now, I understand a lot of these games are geared towards younger audiences, but that doesn’t make the production of such garbage acceptable. Hell, no. Not only does such filth infect young girls with a perplexing infatuation with the color fuchsia. Games such as these insist upon convincing yet another generation of women that this is the best they’ll get, leading to an inevitable confusion when they grow up and realize “Oh, shit. Resident Evil 5 is actually fun. But am I allowed to play it?”

I know a lot of girls who love to play video games. Hell, I’ve talked to a many of them about it, and most wouldn’t be caught dead playing this smut. Instead, they’d rather play normal games like Guitar Hero, Halo, The Legend of Zelda, and even Street Fighter IV (read: good games). These titles offer a challenge, are fun, and like it or not, are genderless, appealing to people as a whole—not just men or women (and yes, this includes Zelda).

Not to mention loads of action-based games boasting a female lead role already exist, often offering a female protagonist that kicks ass with the best of them. Okami has Amaterasu. Heavenly Sword has that red-headed chick, Nariko. Tomb Raider has Lara Croft. Metroid has Samus. And they’re all badass as hell. Fuck, man. Samus is a freakin’ bounty hunter. If I were a girl, those are the games I’d want my parents to get me for Christmas. Not this My Little Pony bullshit.

Of course, these clown-car colored explosions are just as sexist towards men as they are women. Allow me to explain. If a guy ever got caught playing one of these titles, he’d likely get shot, bludgeoned, or stabbed—most likely by one of his friends. It’d be a mercy killing, but even still, it just goes to show how dreadful these games really are. Am I saying Pinkie Pie’s Party is the catalyst of a number of unconfirmed, video game related killings? Probably. But let’s not go there.

Getting back on track, there really isn’t any reason to have games aimed at a strictly female audience in the first place.

This brings me to my main point: said games perpetuate three distinct ideologies.

I present you with Perry Piekarski’s Three-Part Theory on How Certain Figures in the Gaming Industry Perceive Women.

1. Video games are exclusively a guy thing, and therefore, if girls want to play too, they should play separately from the boys.
2. Girls aren’t good at video games, and therefore, they need an easier game so they can actually beat one.
3. Girls fuckin’ love the color pink. And ponies. Combine them, and you’ve got gaming gold.

These statements are obviously utter bullshit. Girl gamers can possess the same talents as any guy gamer if she wants. You know why? Because just as a guy has to work to develop skills at any game, so do women. How about that?

You see, the first time anyone plays a game, they’re likely to suck at it. Games take practice, time, and effort to learn and master, so a woman is really just as capable as any man. It’s as though certain developers are saying “Hmm, video games are a guy thing, but let’s get girls on this too. But we want to keep them separate. Let us encapsulate them in a cell lined with magenta walls and a Hanna Montana comforter.” I shudder to think of it.

Of course, in saying this, I’m also saying that any girl who thinks she’s hot shit just because she can beat a guy at a game despite her “biological disability” that can only be mentioned when she does something better than a man is full of crap.

So you won? Good for you. Being a girl isn’t some fucking handicap, so don’t think “Oh, holy damn! I just beat a guy in Gears of War. I’m fucking amazing. Girl power, baby! Girl power!” Beating a guy at a game isn’t some political statement. It just means you were able to curb stomp some sap’s sorry ass more times than he could stomp yours.

Really, the concept of making games geared towards a specific gender sickens me. A lot of people will argue that war-based games are aimed to appeal to men, but that’s nonsense. Women can enlist in the military too, you know. And just because there’s a lot of blood and gore doesn’t mean all females should advert their eyes, because God forbid a woman be exposed to graphic violence, something that’s been around since the beginning of fucking time.

Playing girly games doesn’t make a woman any more feminine either. A woman can still be feminine and without obsessing over shopping, marriage, and red Stilettos. Believe it or not, a woman can still be feminine and love zombie games like Left 4 Dead too. Yes, it is possible; I know because I’ve seen it.

Personally, I can only think of a handful of games that could be considered “guy games”. And you know what? Most of them are lame, pathetic attempts at grabbing male gamers by the libido (Ha ha! Dangly parts.).

One such title is Leisure Suit Larry, a franchise which has suffered a serious decline in quality with the passing of each sequel. Then there’s The Guy Game, a skeevy piece of shoe-shit that does little more than offer the player a slab of eye-candy for answering a series of mundane trivia questions, or more often, predicting whether a girl with booze for brains knows the answer to a simple trivia question (which oftentimes, she doesn’t). And even then, it doesn’t show anything, instead opting to flash the game’s logo over her unmentionables. WTF?!

A girl shouldn’t be chastised for playing a game because she enjoys it any more than a guy should. That’s what true feminism’s about. Not female superiority, but equality. If someone sucks at a game, it’s because they suck. Not because they’re female. And it goes both ways.

What I’m saying is simple: don’t heckle someone on Xbox Live or on the PSN just because she’s a girl. Instead, play the fucking game with her. What, are you afraid that more women players means less game for you? Or are you worried that you might meet someone intelligent of the opposite sex who shares a similar interest with you? Or perhaps you enjoyed the sausage fest gaming was years back when the ratio of girl to guy gamers was much wider than it is today. Whatever floats your boat, man.

And ladies, don’t be afraid to play games you like. If someone gives you shit for it, give ‘em hell. But don’t bring gender into it. Show them you’re good at a game because you’ve got skills. By shouting “You just got beat by a girl,” you’re only playing into the same shit that’s keeping female gamers from getting the respect they deserve.

So crush the games like Imagine: Babyz and Bratz: Forever Diamondz. They’re junk, and should be buried deep within the confines of an abandoned coal mine, never to be played again.

Or perhaps we could burn them in a massive bonfire—though the onlookers would likely get high from the burning plastic and start seeing shit like this.

Um, maybe a bonfire’s not such a good idea after all…

Popularity: unranked [?]