Is XBL A Breeding Ground For Sexism?

J. Paradise recently began a series over at DailyGame called Confessions of a Girl Gamer, cataloguing some of the less-fun aspects of multiplayer gaming on Xbox Live. As a female gamer, she noted some of the less pleasant behaviors of the majority of the other gamers on the system, who presumably are male, if common sense and all known statistics can be trusted.

While most of her complaints are entirely valid and each of the behaviors she describes is undoubtedly annoying, I thought there were one or two points which deserved to be responded to, given the criticism the gaming industry receives almost daily in the current political climate for promoting sex and violence. Before this and other articles get referred to in an attempt to heap the charge of promoting sexism among America's youth gets piled onto the heap, it might be worth thinking a little further on some of the topics J. Paradise raises.

Halo 3 Rumor Control, Part One

We've seen this set of rumors, supposedly coming from someone whose uncle works at Bungie (oh dear God not again--Ed.) several times in the past few days. They were even translated into French at Halo.fr.

Given that Bungie seems to be enduring some kind of self-imposed silence bordering on self-denial with regards to the very existence of Halo 3, even to the point of failing to confirm or deny the existence of the game after it was referred to by no less a personage than Microsoft chairman Bill Gates.

That, plus the fact that historically Bungie, like other game studios, usually doesn't comment on rumors, means that regardless of the particular situation right now, these rumors would no doubt spread unchecked anyway.

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