Forget violent male gamers, little girls are the psychopaths

Aha. You don’t say ? I’m scared. I’m really scared. F.E.A.R. has given me a healthy respect for these girls-of-death, and now The Telegraph has given me a real-world reason to lose all faith in humanity. Little girls aren’t supposed to be about killing pregnant women because they’re more bother to keep alive ! They’re not about taking away the ladder to see how long it’ll take the sims to die !

Or are they ?

It is the accepted wisdom in the video gaming world that boys gun stuff down, and what girls do play video games are either simming it up in lovable fashion, or else they’re playing MMORPG’s. Over half of all Sims players are girls, compared to 25% in the rest of the industry. Up until now we had all presumed that it was because The Sims can be a more paternal and nice game for the cute little girls to play in lieu of Barbie.

Well, umm, maybe not ? Maybe we can ascribe a new theory to why little girls play games like The Sims, while the little boys play Prey - the little girls just enjoy a different sort of natural selection and violence. They’re the cunning ones. Hand me a knife and I’ll stick it in your throat. Hand an 11 year old girl a knife and she’ll charm you, pretend to chop an apple and then, when you’re not looking, stick it in your back and twist.

When you see a young lad playing a violent video game you can get Jack T on the phone and kick off the legislative gun battles. When you see a little girl playing a non-violent game like The Sims, which can still be pretty darn sick and twisted, you think to yourself "Aaaaawwwwww." Maybe it’s time we chucked this motif out on its head, for better or for worse ?

For better it just goes to show that girls and boys, men and women, are more alike than one might think, even though we have subtle differences (well, maybe not so subtle in places.) If a little girl can be trusted to spend six hours of a day playing The Sims and it’s considered a positive thing then maybe the little boy doing the same thing on Half-Life 2 ain’t so bad either ?

For the worse, as far as the video game industry is concerned, this means that nothing is safe. If legislators and knee-jerk reactionaries were to actually bother to sit down and take a look at The Sims then I daresay no game would ever be safe from being branded "dangerous to society." Of course, I wonder if the same could be said about Barbie & Co ? I’ve never played with dolls, so I can’t comment irrefutably, but maybe ole Barbie has met some gruesome ends herself ? Imaginatively, of course. I’ve never seen too many girls trying to melt their Barbie’s, as so many action men have met their demise, but who knows what the girls could be cooking up ?

Let’s lose this craphat idea that little boys are the only sick puppies in the video game world, and acknowledge instead that we may just have cracked one of the secrets of how to make the female of the species enjoy video gaming a little more - make some really sick and twisted psychological games and let them run loose.