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PC Games (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

A Call for Expandable Codpieces In MMORPGs 67

Posted by simoniker from the bigger-is-better dept.
Staci Krause writes "The Core for Entertainment and Gaming has an editorial on the growing trend in MMORPGs to to make every area of a woman's anatomy customizable. The female writer of the editorial doesn't mind this at all, but would like to see the same applied to a man's anatomy as well, suggesting: 'Is it so wrong of me to want to see a well endowed man online to run around and battle hideous monsters with?'"
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A Call for Expandable Codpieces In MMORPGs More

A Call for Expandable Codpieces In MMORPGs

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  • After looking through five stores I can not find a suitable sized cod piece!

    Also MUD mariages should be able to be consumated. If not, what kind of marriage is it?


    Let there be shiney black fuck off metal cod pieces!


    Have fun!
    holepit [holepit.com]

  • Random Musings (Score:5, Funny)

    by fuzzybunny ( 112938 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @07:22AM (#7327046) Homepage Journal

    1 - "Gnome with a DDD cup" is not exactly an attribute that comes to mind when I think of attractive women. "Hey, lookit the ta-tas on that female gnome!"

    2 - "Expandable codpieces"? Give me a break. Women are beautiful. The female body is one of the most elegant things (at least in some incarnations) created by nature. Men, well, I dunno, naked guys not being my cup of tea, but "partially decorated christmas tree" comes to mind. "Goofy-lookin" is another adjective.

    3 - I always thought that women were a bit less physical than guys? Correct me if I'm wrong, I know that my female friends often look after a guy they think is attractive (male companion: *snort* "he's probably gay") but at least I figured that girls were at least a bit less apt to wolf-whistle at nice-looking men (unless they're 40-ish and desperate.) I know it's a bit stereotypical of me to say so, but I can't remember the last time I heard "hey, nice trouser snake!". But then again, maybe that's just because it's me....

    4 - Girls with guns and swords and jet fighters and kung fu moves are just sexy, period. Maybe it's that I find assertive (not bitchy or dominant) women attractive, but I've heard similar statements from lots of male friends. The idea of h0t Ch1x that can blow things up, do gymnastics, and ride speedbikes (Lara Croft, anyone?) is just appealing. I've yet to see a woman get weak-kneed over Conan or Dirty Harry.

    5 - If you're really into esoteric codpieces, may I suggest renting some Blackadder [geocities.com] DVDs. Black, his codpiece made of metal....

    That said, I'm all for equal rights in games. If someone wants to customize their 35th level troll barbarian in any and every aspect, great. Frankly, it'd be sort of funny to see what the 13 year old pimply gamer set comes up with--although I can't see having a Rogue constantly tripping over the enormous 5 foot schlong dragging from his left trouser leg having an enormous advantage in combat.

    • Why do you assume only women would be interested in seeing bulging codpieces? Not everyone with an interest in the male form is female ...

      • a) I know no gay gamers.

        b) I have several homosexual friends--they're stylish, smart people who're usually to be found at the latest bar opening or party or whatever. They have a life, unlike me. And yes, to a man they're significantly less boorish about ogling members of your preferred sex than most of my straight acquaintances :)

        So, assumption by anecdote, true, but it holds regardless.
        • a) I know plenty of gay gamers.
          b) OTOH, they generally prefer the real thing to polygons. ;)
        • i've met several gay male gamers, they're often just not "out" in gaming, especially online gaming which is so str8-male dominated and socially dependant

        • Re:Random Musings (Score:3, Interesting)

          by 0x0d0a ( 568518 )
          I know no gay gamers

          As another poster said, you might be surprised. I know a TF player that's gay, though I didn't know that he was gay for ages.

          FWIW, a typical TF match conversation not infrequently involves something like "Sniping me from there is so fucking cheap. It was gay as hell." or someone spamming the message systemw. Besides being a semi-hostile environment, there's just not much *point* in most games in someone coming out. I mean, what the heck would you expect -- "gg" "gg" "gg" "Hey, eve


          • It's a not unreasonable guess that it's because they've gone through enough sexuality-related emotional stress that they know what it's like, and aren't going to push it on someone else.

            Nah, they're just gentlemen. We're pretty cool about each others' preferences. I don't catcall women either.

            But as you said, there's generally not much point pushing your sexual preference on people. Who cares? I just don't find it to be an issue. And you're correct, it's just pretty irrelevant in games.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • 4. Girls might not admit to liking Conan and Dirty Harry, but the Dirty Harry attitude will get you alot of pussy, just as the big pectorial muscles of Conan and a foreign accent will.

      Yes, girls love that stuff.

    • Interesting, but some points have to be qualified. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Inoshiro ( 71693 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @02:26PM (#7330308) Homepage
      The male body is as beautiful as the female body; the notion that it's not attractive is as silly as the notion that women have a lower sex drive. As guys, we usually don't go around checking other guys out -- but we are subconciously rating ourselves in to our competition. Women do this too, they just do it a lot more conciously that guys. They're willing to tell you about it ;) Plus, because of how the media works, there is a lower ratio of attractive guys to attractive girls in most things.

      Women do tend to look at more of the full meal deal when talking about how attractive a guy is, but that's only natural since they get to be pregnant. If guys were the ones who became pregnant after a night of sex, I'm sure we'd all be thinking more of the long-term when looking at women. Most guys start to look at the long-term anynays, once they're past the high school relationship phase.
      • I'm constantly hearing women say they think penises are not particularly attractive, look silly, and things like that. Gay guys, too. These aren't women I'm dating, so it's not meant as a hint. ;)

        Sure, women drool over mens' bodies. Just not genetalia as much as men drool over womens'.
        • Honestly, I'm sure the ratio of men after nothing but vagina equals the women after nothing but penis.

          Most women and men view the body as a whole. It's not just the penises that they're talking about here, it's that women (in general in MMOs) have all their measurements and sizes configurable in a way that isn't possible on the male models.

  • Game Over (Score:5, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @07:40AM (#7327090) Homepage Journal
    "So how'd you die?"

    "Fell off a cliff."

    "How'd you manage that?"

    "Pushed."

    "He pushed you off a cliff?"

    "Well.. maybe not pushed.. more like jousted."

    "Jousted?!"

    "You jousted with him near a cliff?"

    "Yep."

    "Uh.. but you didn't have a staff."

    "Well, no, not one I bought at the store..."

    "???"

    "It's a guy thing, alright?"

    "... So he jousted you off the cliff with his.."

    "Well, no, not exactly. I yelled his name and challenged him to joust, and he just.. turned around. Next thing I know there's a cartoonesque hole in the ground."

  • hmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Khyl'Dran ( 673292 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @08:00AM (#7327134)

    Well, with some parts of the male anatomy, it would be pointless to give players the ability to customize. Everyone would just use the maximum setting anyways ;)
    • I'm not entirely certain of that.

      If you gave female characters the ability to set breast size, would it always be maximum?

      It's a benefit to enhance sexual attributes normally. But in this case, if everyone's already doing it...well, I'm reminded of Snow Crash. To roughly paraphrase, anyone can be a six-foot talking penis. It's a bit harder to make a realistic human being that looks like you in real life.
    • Actually the game could develop penalties for size increases. For women archery and social interaction (meaningful) should be greatly decreased.

      Men should be unable to sit confortably when they pad that much. This (like being male in the first place) should decrease our ability to learn new skills as quickly.

  • Perhaps when developers begin to create online worlds more suited to the 10% of their market who are female, we'll see this sort of thing. Until then, keep on dreaming!

    • what makes you so sure that all guys don't want to see realistic male physique?
      • Realistic male physique for gamers: 1. Beer/coke/mt.dew belly, man-boobs, too much hair in all the wrong places. 2. Malnourished skeletal body (from always playing MMORPGs, and thus not having time to seek nourishment) with green tinted skin (CRT tan).

        Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't wanna see that.
  • Don't you read your email? These kind of 'upgrades' are already available!

    -Adam

  • second life (Score:4, Funny)

    by IIRCAFAIKIANAL ( 572786 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @08:41AM (#7327248) Journal
    In second life, you can pretty much customize anything about your appearance. A friend and I tried it out one day - he went completely nuts customizing his body. In the end, he didn't look human. Huge feet, tiny waste, green skin, gigantic nose and eyes - it was quite surreal.

    This is one of those days I wish we could post pictures in Slashdot threads - not that I can find the pictures I took of him in the game.

    Too bad the game was too clunky. Good idea, bad implementation.

  • Insert standard joke (Score:3, Funny)

    by rf0 ( 159958 ) <rghf@fsck.me.uk> on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @08:45AM (#7327256) Homepage
    Replace metal sword with pork sword etc..

    Rus

  • When in Doubt, Compensate (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What, take away the major reason to buy bigger weapons in game?
  • My only problem with this is 14 year olds all running around with huge tents in their pants. Talk about compensating...

  • Only If... (Score:3, Funny)

    by GeckoX ( 259575 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @09:14AM (#7327360)
    'Is it so wrong of me to want to see a well endowed man online to run around and battle hideous monsters with?'
    Only if I don't have to see it too ;-)
  • Men make it... men play it...men pick. ;)

  • It's not the size of your cod... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @09:35AM (#7327484)
    ...it's what you do with it

    (sorry had to be said, /me ducks)

  • Slashdot Quote Humor (Score:5, Funny)

    by lpp ( 115405 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @09:47AM (#7327563) Homepage Journal
    Am I the only one who found the quote below to be humorously appropriate to the topic?
    It is far more impressive when others discover your good qualities without your help. -- Miss Manners

  • Only fair? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @10:13AM (#7327725)
    If you really want to make it fair, the equivalent of female breasts is the male pectorals. It's not a sexual organ. Now if you want to go about customizing codpiece size, then how about allowing the ability to customize female avatars with attributes like pubic mound size, degree of camel toe, clitoral projection, etc. Do you want your avatar's clitoris to poke out through the labia, or to remain hidden within the labia?

    Want to have more customization? Bring it on!

  • "Size doesn't matter."

    (Freud would have a field day with reading things into customizable MMORPGs options)
  • This is somewhat interesting. I would have thought that a muscular appearance, being easier to see, would be the parallel that the writer would come up with. Instead, she chose to ask that the male characters be allowed to modify their penis size.
  • The other extreme would be funny. Imagine roleplaying a under-endowed wookie who's always trying to compensate? I'm all for the extra customizing, like another poster said, just make it apply to the female anatomy too. I look foward to seeing "hungbacca" and "Camel Toe Organa" in Star Wars Galaxies soon.
  • When they say that women are a significant portion of gamers they have to include things like card games...those crappy little things they have on MSN and so forth. Besides, even if women were an important demographic in the real computer game world, the article's puerile suggestions aren't what they would find appealing anyways. Drivel.

  • Arms race (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @11:58AM (#7328710) Homepage Journal
    The problem here is the mentality of males in general and male gamers in
    particular. If one guy has a sixteen-inch thingy, all the other guys will
    want their character to have an eighteen-incher, and if you allow that, it
    won't be many more iterations of one-upmanship before you see guys running
    around with, effectively, three legs, and I'm not sure it would stop there.

    The only way this could be practical at all would be if the game company
    charged on an exponential scale for the extra size. Then you'd be able to
    tell who had the most money to blow on their character, but apart from that
    things could be kept mostly in check, with most of the characters having
    proportions only abnormal in the normal "more than reality" way of such
    games, rather than making Salvador Dali look sane.

    • Re:Arms race (Score:3, Funny)

      by JavaLord ( 680960 )
      f one guy has a sixteen-inch thingy, all the other guys will want their character to have an eighteen-incher, and if you allow that, it won't be many more iterations of one-upmanship before you see guys running around with, effectively, three legs, and I'm not sure it would stop there.

      This is the perfect way to make leveling more fun in RPGs. You think dorkmar the barbarian is working his balls off now for level 60, just imagine if he could ad another half inch to his 5 foot "manhood"?

  • Thank You (Score:3, Funny)

    by Micro$will ( 592938 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @12:16PM (#7328893) Homepage Journal
    Now maybe the ladies won't laugh as much while I run around the West Commons naked looking for my corpse.
  • I'm sure if this was actually implemented, that the developers would at least have some sort of limit to things...

    You know, things like gravity and such have to still apply. There has to be a reason why in Real Life (TM) people aren't running around with larger-than-life proportions.

    Granted it's a game, but still at what point does the psuedo-reality become a complete unreality?

  • looks (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ggwood ( 70369 ) on Tuesday October 28, 2003 @02:59PM (#7330714) Homepage Journal
    Having played Everquest for a while, I am surpriesed that there has not been more freedom to dress your character in more or less suggestive attire as desired. I jokingly refer to this as the /slutty option which you can turn on or off. Actually, I think there is room for a few options: just give people a few (say 3) different looks: encased in steel (most conservative), encased in steel...but with curves in the right places, and revealing...which I will leave to your imagination.

    Essentially, the same could be done for male characters, and the details of which I will leave up to your imagination.

    None of this has to involve more graphics. Currently it can all be done via "hiding" certain pieces of armor, to reveal the default clothes underneeth. Many of us in Everquest want a /hidehelm option since we are allowed to do pretty nice customization to our faces with the /pickface command - but then *no one can see it* because we ware these giant helms.

    I know people who intentionally pick "crown" type helms which do not show up just so that people can see their customization. This is particularly important to women, in my experience. They want to look nice in game - and *all* female character models which don't look like monsters having huge breasts annoys them.

    I think game designers would garner way more female and casual player interest with three things:
    (1) a large degree of avatar customization (Everquest does okay, but there are problems - see above). Give people the option to dress as flirty or elegent or conservative as they want, and obviously allow them to change from one to another.
    (2) cooperative gameplay (Everquest is great at this: you gain so much benefit from cooperation with others in groups and in guilds and there really is no emphasis on player killing except on specific servers)
    (3) downtime. I know downtime is unpopular, but if you have no time to pause and rest up a bit you will never get to know anything about anyone you are playing with because you will have no time to chat. All MMORPGs probably have great chat tools, but if you have no time to use them... Of course, too much downtime is really bad - its just going to get boring.

    Originally I thought GM events and dynamic content would keep me coming back to Everquest, but ultimately it is the players themselves. They have helped me out in the past so I want to help them out in the future, and together a great group of friends makes the game both much easier and more pleasent.
    Face it: gameplay is always going to be better in single player games but after playing a MMORPG, I really can't bring myself to play normal offline games much. So I can build a great city in Simcity or conquer the galaxy in Masters of Orion...so what? If I have a positive interaction with someone in Eq, its far, far more rewarding.

    It is the casual players, the players who bring their girlfriends/boyfriends etc. which will continue to grow the market for these games. Hard core gamers will always be there, but (1) there are not too many of them and (2) people who commit to play (with their guild for example) every night for 4-8 hours are just plain scary - as a game designer, you are not getting any more money from these people but you are going to get alot more problems from them.

    ________________________________________________ __
    • downtime. I know downtime is unpopular, but if you have no time to pause and rest up a bit you will never get to know anything about anyone you are playing with because you will have no time to chat.

      Do you think some (many?) players don't want to be bothered chatting in a MMO and that might be some of what turns the mainstream players off?
      • Do you think some (many?) players don't want to be bothered chatting in a MMO and that might be some of what turns the mainstream players off?

        Yes, you are absolutely right JavaLord. Some people will be turned off by the downtime. Some people just don't want to meet new people, either. I actually think the inherently repetitive gameplay has a lot of turn off value, too.

        But from what I have heard, all these other MMORPG's after Eq, such as Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online and/or DAoC or others tried to mi
        • Some people will be turned off by the downtime. Some people just don't want to meet new people, either. I actually think the inherently repetitive gameplay has a lot of turn off value, too....

          which at first sounds great but eventually you realize you are playing a single player game, it is not really a great game, and you are paying $15/month to play it. Not really a stunning deal.

          I know for myself, sure I like to run into someone once in awhile and chat but I hate forced interaction and downtime. T
    • Oh, you are so right - we need to have RPGs with sensibly dressed women.

      I mean, I was replaying Neverwinter Nights the other day, and I cringed every time I saw Aribeth. Doesn't the poor woman have enough problems without having to wear what appears to be a carefully designed nipple-chafer?
      • Oh, you are so right - we need to have RPGs with sensibly dressed women.

        Ya I think at least you should have a choice - and that you should be able to change from day to day. In Everquest, you kind of choose how you dress by picking your race when you make a character and its not so easy to go back and change that after having spent perhaps 100s of hours. There are ways to manipulate your image through using equipment, but really you want use the best equipment you can get. Sacrificing gear quality for
  • Obviously theres the whole one upmanship in this case, but seriously, do we really wanna have a bunch of anti-social 14 year olds gathering in a pub arguing over whos more endowed? Let alone have those same kids talk about which female's breasts are bigger, Gina the Mage's or Betty the Warrior's?

    I think we all know this is hilarious on paper, funny for the first fifteen minutes, sick for the next 6 months and repulsive for the rest of gaming history.

    • This is how you do it, and this would be a sort of interesting study to boot:

      During character generation, most online RPGs use a point allocation system. Players must strike a balance between the characters abilities. Just add a stat for "bust size" or "package rating". These stats have no effect on game play, all it does is effect how massive the, well junk or chest of the character will be rendered.

      Now my question is, how many gamers will actually short change their other stats just so they can be b

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