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I followed this link from Sivacracy.
http://utopianhell.com/blog/hot-girl-on-girl-action

I completely see the point. For an industry that is purporting to attract female gamers, there sure isn’t equality in video games. I’m not just talking Rockstar, here… I thought it odd that World of Warcraft’s succubus didn’t offer an incubus counterpart, and apparently Everquest 2 has a similar problem.

In some games, you don’t even get the option to play a female character. In others, you’re given the option, but when given the chance to have sex with some other character, the character is female.

The reason? The bulk of game-playing America are homophobic, socially challenged men with very vivid fantasies about playing females who get to have sex with other females. Even when female characters are added to the game, they aren’t added with equal importance, nor are they added with the thought that maybe, just maybe, a woman might be playing that female character.

Completely accurate criticism. Vampire: Bloodlines, a game I played to (un)death, slightly moved in that direction, at least- there were men you could only use seduction (a skill) on while playing a male and women you couldn’t use seduction on when playing a female- but for the most part it followed that same trend. (The seduction skill was one of the dialog options used for a couple of purposes. It was one of the options available along with intimidation and persuasion to convince someone to give you information or other benefit, and it was also the option used to “seduce” people in bars and clubs to be able to feed on them without attracting attention.) Come to think of it, although I used the plural in the previous sentence, it should be amended: there was a man that could only be seduced by a man, and a woman that couldn’t be seduced by a woman. For the most part it followed the same traditional game roles noted in the article. The “people” I mentioned in the parenthetical line above were always women.

It was a start, but the gaming industry has a ways to go.

New Copyright Law Lets Photographers Register Unfinished Work

“It’s one step removed from registering an idea,” says photographer John Harrington.

Disturbing…

I’ve returned from DC from the ALA copyright scholar program… there will be some big changes at the Library Copyright web site soon, and I think it will be a more useful resource soon. I got to meet a group of great people, all interested in copyright, and the ALA Washington Office staff, who were very cool.

Scrivener’s Error has some very interesting analysis the “plot patent” proposed by a very strange person. There’s some discussion on Groklaw as well, including a reply from the creator of this patent. Ugh.

According to news.com, the US Department of Justice is pushing for stronger copyright laws and really appears to have completely ignored the public interest entirely (perhaps “sold out the public,” but I’d have to learn more than is in the article) in it’s rush to create new types of copyright law and create greater penalties. What is considering “attempting to infringe?” The penalties are already ridiculous, and I view this move with a great deal of suspicion. It’s certainly not a positive development for the public. I doubt it’s a positive development for the industries that are supporting it, either. Many of the artists they represent are already testing the bounds of the existing law, and I suspect there will be more artists who are at cross purposes with their publishers and representative groups as time passes and the law leans more towards a maximalist society. This type of move serves to stifle creativity, and whatever deterrence to piracy (and their definition of piracy and others’ definitions of piracy are certainly different) is certainly not worth the outrageous harm they are proposing to the Constitutional basis for copyright law, promoting the progress of science and useful arts…