I love this blog! I just stumbled across it...

This post is so true. I had to giggle when my other half spent 3 hours dressing his man for the 'Tiger Woods' golf game. I mean seriously.

When they change clothes though, they call it "gear."
And boys don't play with "dolls." They play with "action figures."

One of the cool things about a lot of the Tony Hawk skateboarding games is that they have decent female avatars.

When my stepson got one of them, he spent quite some time trying to generate a character that looked like me. "Would you wear this? What about this?" His attempt to draw me into his fun worked, and I ended up hanging out for the better part of a couple of hours watching a skate-rat version of myself wreaking havoc.

The Sims does the same thing, only more -- you can spend HOURS molding various aspects of the character's face to make it look like whoever you want. There's an editor you can get that lets you create skin colors (so, you can have a purple alien with spots if you want), eye colors, hair colors, and clothing designs. If I'm not mistaken, I think there are plenty of boys who play Sims.

I think it's funny how they leave out DOA Volleyball, where boys were dressing up girls - including the accessories. Granted, they were playing the game for the T&A, but I've never seen my hubby so concerned about getting a flowery hairpiece for one of his characters before. ;)

snobographer beat me to it but I was having a conversation just yesterday about how boys don't play with "doll" but "action figures". I really don't see the difference, seeing as both sets of toys lack a penis;). But it is interesting how guys are basically doing the same thing as women but because they call is something different it's somehow better and less superficial than when women do it. Spend 300 bucks on Minolos, you're shallow, spend 300 bucks on Air Force Ones you're hip.

I like Guitar Hero b/c there are awesome women characters. I love video games but it's so hard to find ones with interesting women characters that aren't just there for T&A or as assistants to the menz.
Mostly, I play Guitar Hero, Tomb Raider, the Harry Potter games (Except Goblet of Fire which was dreadful), & Beyond Good & Evil.

My ex and our college (guy) friends used to play this wrestling game on Playstation. I found it hilarious because they would spend more time trying to get the characters faces and hair and clothes just right than they would actually doing the wrestling part.

LOL, penguinlady. Your comment made me flash back to my male roommates angsting over not being able to find the right color nail polish to go with their favorite swimsuits.

...and I won't even go into how crushed they were when the other girls rejected their gifts and refused to team with them.

For giving me the chance to see that, I completely forgave them for the gratuitious T&A.

The new Godfather game for Wii and PS3 has a "dress up" feature too. You can unlock fedoras and pinstripe suits and such for your mobster. The game is crap when it comes to female characters though. My husband actually stopped playing becuase he was uncomfortable with the violence against women and innocent people that is encouraged along with the generally corrupt behavior.

The "Create-A-Wrestler" mode is absolutely the best part of those wrestling games. So much of the message board discussion is devoted to making unique or otherwise interesting character designs. (A friend of mine used it to make Santa Claus and various characters from other video games.) The actual wrestling is just to have something to do with the designs you make.

I like Guitar Hero b/c there are awesome women characters. I love video games but it's so hard to find ones with interesting women characters that aren't just there for T&A or as assistants to the menz.
Mostly, I play Guitar Hero, Tomb Raider, the Harry Potter games (Except Goblet of Fire which was dreadful), & Beyond Good & Evil.

Care for a few recommendations? I know video & computer games pretty well; here are a few that I thought featured some strong female characters. I'm an RPG fan, so this list will be skewed towards that genre.

In the order that I thought of them:
Final Fantasy X (PS2)
The Longest Journey (PC)
Xenosaga Episode 1 (PS2)
Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (PS2)
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords (XBOX, PC)
Final Fantasy VI Advance (GBA)
Metroid Prime (GameCube)

The Longest Journey is the roxxorz. April Ryan is a great lead, and the game is amazingly well done.

Doug S., to that list I would add straightforward RPGs like Neverwinter Nights. Aside from the fact that you can make the hero either sex, and both sexes can become equally talented in combat and equally strong, many of the main NPCs (as well as some of the companions) are strong females as well.

Also Fallout. Which has the added benefit of being pretty damn hilarious at times.

My 17 yr old son plays World of Warcraft and (given the amount of time he spends on it) his favourite part is dressing his characters. He often calls me over to get my opinion on 'fabrics' and colours, we bond over armour choices . He also used to love dressing up his Action Man (UK male doll, like GI Joe) when he was little. Oh, and I'm pretty sure he is actually straight - the gorgeous model girlfriend seems to imply that. BTW, there is nothing like have having a willowy-thin, perfect-skinned, stunningly pretty 17 yr model wafting round the house to make a woman feel fat, old and generally past it .

"Care for a few recommendations? I know video & computer games pretty well; here are a few that I thought featured some strong female characters. I'm an RPG fan, so this list will be skewed towards that genre."

If you have a Super Nintendo or an emulator, I'd also recommend Final Fantasy 6 (a.k.a. Final Fantasy 3 in the U.S.). You don't get to make up characters, but the main character and some of the strong supporting characters are female.

GTA and the like not being my choice of game, guess why, I asked a male friend about that, he was aware of the fact but added something that shows the difference. Characters could get thin or fat depending how they ate.

Now try to imagine that Lara Croft is allowed to get fat. Heavens falling, etc.

Second Life too - it's all about playing with dolls.

DOA Volleyball is not just gratuitous T&A - it's actually a really fun game, and you don't have to dress up in tiny tiny bikinis - there's plenty of other options including shorts and t-shirt outfits. It's also much deeper than just clothing and gifts, it's one of the best volleyball games made ever, and it's really fun. It also has a pretty good casino in it. I haven't played the second game, since I don't have a 360, but it has even more things you can do, like waterski and stuff. Just cuz some dumb boys just think "boobies!" when they see that game doesn't mean that's all it is. You guys should try it.

City of Heroes (and its companion game, City of Villains) is famous for its multitudes of character generation options. Some of the costume options have to be unlocked or given as rewards for finishing missions, but most of them are available from level 1, and each character can have up to four or five costumes. People with a lot of "inf" (the game's play money) hold big costume contests regularly in the game's central areas. A friend of mine, after I'd stopped at one of the tailor establisments that make bespoke leotards to tweak a few details on my character, said, "You're just like a girl with Barbies," to which my response was, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful."

That brings up another interesting fact: the players that I hang out in Paragon City with tend to be more mature, and also tend to play a mixture of male and female characters, regardless of their real gender, which is also split about 50/50. There are also several openly gay and lesbian players, and in fact they recently had a Rainbow Prom in a virtual nightclub on one of the game servers. It's generally considered gauche and immature to a/s/l (ask the real age, sex, and location) another player. (This situation is in stark contrast to the general situation in World of Warcraft.) That doesn't mean that it doesn't happen, though, and several other male players and I have been sexually harassed, for the first time in our lives, while playing female characters in the game.