I've known two transgender women over the years, and they've often had difficult times and plenty of prejudice to deal with. When I was told by the first, it was a surprise - but I later did some research to understand the area. As a tiny minority they're rarely encountered (or if you do, you may not know) and so are often misunderstood thanks to various misconceptions and shear ignorance...mainly thanks to the lack of understanding of the difference between sex and gender. More people need to understand...at least games like this at least acknowledge their existence. It's a start, I suppose.
Funnily enough, I was blogging separately about gamers' conservatism when it comes to what they buy...and boobs... With gamer conservatism comes developer conservatism as people buy the same thing time after time. Why risk a new title when a new version of an old title is going to sell millions? Good business, but bad creativity. Consumers might take more risks, but with games coming in at £30-£40, many aren't willing to do so. Mainstream console and PC games are pricing themselves out of the creativity sphere, the cheap as chips mobile app is where the risks can pay off - people are more willing to risk a 80p or £1 and not be too bothered if the "Great Idea" turns out to be rubbish.
My eyes just couldn't handle the hacking games in Alpha Protocol, while very specific, that mini-game was just trying too hard to be authentic in its approach. But I've had decent fun with "middling" games like Transformers: WFC (although I found the controls too clunky) and NFS: The Run and grew to hate much-lauded games like Dragon Age: Origins and Battlefield 3. A game may define its genre, but it doesn't mean everyone is going to like it (or with the 6.0s, hate it!).
The Duke's schtick is controversy. The media (usually the right wing sort) gets easily manipulated and then goes on the hunt for some like-minded politicians to put the boot in; it's also what happened with the earlier entries in the GTA series (until alien sex in Mass Effect became more interesting). The parody/stereotype is deliberately ignored for headlines...which is just what the PR boys want. Only as media scepticism reduces as more journalists will have played controversial games (either recently or when they were younger) will games become "just another" medium like TV or cinema.
@deepbluekarz - "Women are stereotyped into doing girly things generally, but if you can look past that, women are just as capable as men when gaming." I wouldn't say this is a matter of capability (as you rightly point out), but as an industry gaming is focused on entertaining boys rather than girls and as an industry trains and recruits more men than women. From a technical point of view, girls/women are usually scoring higher in education at most levels and in most subjects (including ICT/Computing), yet this isn't compelling younger generations to take up the subject in larger numbers (quite often the opposite is happening for both boys and girls). The talent is clearly there, it's just that few make it into the industry (gender identity, social context and parental influence all playing a role). And from a gaming/user point of view, women are an obvious market to exploit - while devs don't have to make overtly "girly" games to please women (as snap-dragon points out), a bit of research could yield higher revenues with a slightly different strategy (in theory, "gender neutral", but even that has negative connotations). It's harder to bring women into some genres (Miltary shooters; CoD, MoH, for example), but certainly not impossible.
I'm currently writing and researching a paper that covers gender and ICT in a UK school, which sees a similar imbalance where boys are more common in the subject. Computers (and science & engineering in general) have come to be constructed as a very masculine tool, and often girls consider themselves as less confident users and are considered to be more vulnerable users by parents. You see some degree of equality happening, particularly in RPGs (DA, ME et al), but even then the character in all the marketing is generally male (as an aside, my first playthrough of DA2 was as a female Hawke - I'm a guy for the record ;) ). We're seeing some stronger female characters, but the industry seems to be "playing safe" with lead roles being male. The support casts often contain some excellent female characters, but perhaps what gaming really needs is more Samus Arans up front leading the way in the big budget, high entertainment games. However, with so many publishers and developers playing safe with CoD clones and "male-oriented" games (as the largest audience), that may take a while to come to fruition.
Kerrigan and Mengsk from SCII share a great symbiotic "evil" - if it weren't for his betrayal and lust for power, there would be no Queen of Blades to threaten the sector (or him); and without the Queen of Blades Mengsk would not be able to use the threat of her/the Zerg (i.e. Kerrigan's revenge) to keep the population in line.
The obvious problem is that you're comparing modern PC hardware with what is now 2-3 year old consoles. While graphics tend to get better on any console across its lifespan, the PC can be easily upgraded to always outstrip its console cousins. You want ultimate performance, you get a PC. While consoles are less costly (TV included or not), they are always a compromise to some degree; consoles have accessibility on their side which makes them fair more suitable for the 'average' game who doesn't have the time, ability or money to construct a true gaming rig. So to the "CONSOLES RULE!!11!1!" crowd, I say: Yes they do, for a given value of quality (and accessibility is their thing). To the "PCs are best" group I say: Yes, we do. When 'we' know what we have to do to construct a suitable system in the first place. (I am a Wii user as well as a PC gamer. Wiis are divertingly fun without having to be hardcore :D)
I've been using Vista x64 since its release, and don't have a problem with it. Vista may not have been the great revolution that MS wanted it to be, but it has many useful improvements over XP, even in the area of stability. Vista is still an OS for the next few years, just like XP was around 5 years ago (when 512MB RAM was the max for a lot of people). It takes a while for the hardware to catch up.
LordRork's comments