No, I meant it as an across the board thing. No specific person intended. And I still mean it. If the same amount of energy that has gone into this thread went into giving useful feedback on female-locked stories it could make a big difference to the authors producing them and get them into the stores sooner/make them more attractive for writers to produce. There is no mandate that says anyone has to beta test, much less support one kind of game over the other, but the more attention they get, the more likely they are to be produced. (Look at the number of superhero games at the moment, they’re popular, so they’re being written, finished and making it to the stores.)
I never intended it that way, however it was a completed game that was female locked and seems to have unfortunatley got comparatively little attention. It will be the first one on the stores of it’s type and I do think it is a shame that it didn’t get more interest at the time it was a WIP. (I have beta tested for Mayday in the past and like the stories he produces. They’re unusual and often quite different to what the average HG story is like. Unfortunately I currently only have a couple of games I’ve been testing of late due to serious time constraints otherwise I’d take on more. In saying that, not everyone likes the same thing otherwise this would be a boring world.) It was more more that it has been stated in this thread that no one is wanting to complete female locked games, and if you (used loosely here to encompass anyone interested, not you specifically) look under the female locked tags, there are actually several I am fairly sure will make it to the stores since they’re moving across at a good pace and are often being produced by authors with pre-existing books and games. They are out there and being written.
That’s fine. As I said earlier, I don’t love the implication that has been brought up in this thread that being that everyone who writes something genderlocked is doing that due to being sexist or doesn’t care about half their readers as I can assure you that is not always the case. (I have seen WIP’s where it has, and if they’re written gender locked on either side simply to perpetuate sterotypes I’m not a fan, but that doesn’t mean it’s always that way. It has been pointed out, mine has strong female characters. I wrote it that way deliberately and don’t believe my work is sexist in nature.)
As someone quite acutely aware of sexism, having experienced varying levels of it more times than I could count (yes I am female), and having against my good judgement deciding to explain my point of view here, it seems there is no way to make myself understood and I really need to leave the thread is it only ends up making me upset.
I understand why others are upset as well, but that doesn’t mean that the insinuation needs to be there that the source comes explicity from sexism. That does tend to offend. A positive supportive message (aka- we really want to see non-male locked games! Please write them. We’ll be super supportive.) is sometimes better than a negative one (Why are male-locked games being produced? It must be because those authors don’t care about us/are sexist/are lazy.) That is what I was getting at: honey vs vinegar. If anything this thread has made me less keen to write something female locked to avoid drama.
I really don’t want to argue this further at this point. I’ve got a relatively thick skin when I put my mind to it, and am not offended by anyone in particular, and I hope no one has taken offense to anything I’ve said as it’s not aimed at anyone in particular. I was just stepping back into this thread to clarify that at no point am I specifically targeting anyone, my comments have been largely general and observational in nature unless stated otherwise. I understand where people are coming from and agree, I’d like to see a range of games and viewpoints on the stores. I also believe that to achieve that, it needs to come from support rather than critisism.