Dixavd

I'm 19 and JRPG's are still my favourite genre. As for people younger than me, I don't have any younger siblings so I don't know many people younger than me (the rule of school basically limiting a lot of people to friends within a year or so of them holds true for me). The odd thing for me though is the number of people I know who don't play any games whatsoever. Of those I've met who do play games, a surprisingly significant number of them like JRPGs (or at least have fond memories of specific titles). But the majority of people I meet barely know what a game is. To a lot of them it seems to be something they do when they're bored on a phone or something.

That said, my older sister is a manga artist and so goes to a lot of art, anime/manga and gaming conventions (usually with her own stall there so she meets a lot of the people who go there). She finds that age ranges are very broad from around 10 to people in there 50's but the usual is earlier 20s. She has lots of friends who play JRPG's (she's just under two years older than me, 21) so the fact that I know so few might imply that those younger than me might be even less - or they are rare in general and my Sister just happens to spend a lot of her working time where they would go.

Nonetheless, the most asked for art-style for my Sister to draw portraits in (She does anything from Marvel-Comic drawing to manga to detailed real drawings) is pokemon style (including whoever their favourite pokemon is). So take that how you will.

Who needs E3 presentations when we have message boards and time on our hands.

I don't like it when people bring up appearance in general whether or not the implied sub-text is positive or negative (fin instance, "skinny" can be a good or a bad thing depending on the person). I'm generally okay with being brought up if the person has clearly done something different (like try on an outfit that's a completely new style or changed their hair-cut) or if the two haven't seen each other in a very long time so they look strikingly different from what they remember. Otherwise, it just seems too prone to hit on social issues that you might not have even noticed yet (especially with the increased rates of eating disorders). I don't want any of my comments, no matter how positive or unimportant, to possibly go towards making someone not feel welcome or feel insecure.

What are we talking makes a game sexist here? Because on some level, everything can be taken as sexist if you remove the option of "creative freedom" or "cultural biases". If something is either sexist or it isn't without taking into account all the other ways in which something could have been created or the idea could be inferred, then at some point everything is sexist.

Asking people to find you games that clearly aren't is an impossible tasks because the line for you will be a very personal one.

For some, the option to dress a character in skimpy outfits might go over the line regardless of anything else in the game, whereas others might require the implication of one gender being lesser than the other.

It would probably have been better to have phrased in the form of an aesthetic question: just as people look for games that don't use pixel art, you might want games that don't involve provocative clothing.

For instance, when I played Lightning Returns, I certainly found some of the costumes to go a little too far, however it was easily possible for me to play the entire thing with her fully clothed or even as far as being the epitome of a knight for it (ignoring the part in the game where you have to wear a dress - but it's not even a provocative dress). My character of Lightning was a knight through-and-through. she was incredibly cool and killed monsters with ease. Someone elses could easily have been a beach-party-girl throughout. Meanwhile another could have dressed her as a clown. The fact these options are there doesn't change my relation the character that I was playing as.

I would have had a problem if it was unavoidable, or if it was an issue that plagued the entire world (e.g. all women wear skimpy outfits), but since it wasn't then it never bothered me. It's why it's so hard to recommend games, since for me Lightning Returns is all about a strong female character (heck, its biggest problem in story-telling is not about her being a beautiful woman, but that she's basically portrayed as the messiah), but does the fact that the player has the option to go against that and dress her in a revealing way make her a less strong-character? I'd say that the fact that characters treat you exactly the same whatever you're wearing makes the game less sexist than if you had to make her conservatively dressed.

As far as I'm concerned, Final Fantasy X/X-2 HD has been the best release for me in years. It's my favourite game of all time and as such, since I've started to play it again I can't stop thinking about it (especially the order in which I'm going to max out my characters to then take on the Dark Aeons!). That said, even Lightning Returns Final Fantasy XIII was a better game for me than anything that was released last year. And as for things coming up, it looks like my most played games are going to be from Nintendo.

Makes me realise that, bar Dark Souls II, I'm probably only going to use my gaming PC to play Hearthstone.

I love all these snarky comments. It's threads like these that have made waiting for the PC version so much fun.

Have you tried one of those services that allow you to log the calories you use and gain each week/day. My mum and sister seem to find them helpful and pointed out misconceptions they had (they use some free app on iOS). It may be that you're eating more than you think you are (or using up more calories than you think you are). Ultimately weight loss/gain is a conservation of energy trick - if you use more energy than you intake, you'll lose weight; and if you take in more energy than you use, then you'll gain weight. Your likely in the middle (using as much energy as your taking in). You may have then found a diet that's perfect for you but you happen to have reached it at a weight that you aren't comfortable with. Could be a case where you go a little further than your comfortable with (Either excess exercise or much stricter on what you eat) for a couple weeks and then return to your current diet when your happier to plateau at that point.

Also, you probably know this, but the easiest way to use a little more energy each day with the same routine is to simply replace when you sit down with standing up. It doesn't make a drastic difference, but when you're at a point where every little bit is very difficult, it can be very significant.

II think I'd go out and commit a completely audacious crime (something that hurt no one, but would be extremely over-the-top, to the point of seeming ludicrous). Then I'd go to prison and see if I could help anyone on the inside.

Their aim didn't seem to be the thing itself, it seems to be a retort to a lot of other studies that boil down all the possible aggression to a single variable (violence) rather than the game part. Also, like that study that proved that alcohol makes people think they are better-looking, a lot of studies aren't about finding something new but proving whether a held idea is true (and those of you who've looked into a lot of social psychology papers will know that a lot of things we think are common sence and obvious are in fact totally inaccurate illusions).

Found this through a BBC article, though here's a link to the University of Rochester's write-up, about a study (from the UK's Oxford Internet Institute* in associate with the University of Rochester in the US) that looked into whether they could make players aggressive in a game that they've removed the violence from but instead varied whether mechanics were explained. Basically they showed that the frustration caused by badly explained mechanics or just a high difficulty could cause an increase in aggression irrespective as to whether the game had violent content or not.

It probably seems like an obvious thing to many of us, but it's good to finally see a study into it (and cool to think they modded a game to do it - though it's interesting to point out the difference in emphasis between the BBC and Rochester's account on this).

I don't have access to the full study (neither having clearance to just see it, nor the money to pay to see it) so if any of you do, feel free to talk more about it (I'd like to know a bit more on how it was carried out). If you do want to try looking yourself, it was published in "The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology".

It should be noted that like most studies, it was taken on college undergraduate students (so keep that in mind).

*Sadly I couldn't find a link on the OII website, but I did find this upcoming event for next monday on how difficult it is to test aggression - maybe they are related (the event seems to be focusing on a standard process in aggression research that is miss-used, saying that testing aggression is a lot more complex that it seems - makes you wonder if their own study fell foul of it).