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Comment by cwal37 | Hacker News Reader

Way to take a quote out of context (literally cutting off part of a word). Here's the surrounding sentence:

"Some of the most original games in recent years have been made by women. Kim Swift was the lead designer for Portal, which one game critic called the first nonphallic first-person shooter."

Oh look, the full quote is appreciating a female game pioneer, and your mangled phrase was from a singular game critic. Also, it makes sense. Instead of shooting bullets, you're shooting portals. Seems pretty non-phallic to me.

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> Instead of shooting bullets, you're shooting portals. Seems pretty non-phallic to me.

What's phallic about bullets?

Are women not allowed to be interested in small arms? The Soviet Union deployed women as snipers to great effect in World War II, and the idea that only men could be violent and warlike is itself gender-biased to those who look at history.

I can't tell if you're serious. Do you really not see the distinction between bullets and portals in a phallic vs, non-phallic context? You are literally shooting phallus-shaped objects with the intent to penetrate your target. On the other hand, you are shooting oval openings into which things enter.

This isn't very complicated or contentious from any angle I can imagine. Unless you're coming in with an agenda, and take offense to the idea that certain types of games might be traditionally male-oriented.

> "On the other hand, you are shooting weird milky looking things out of a phallic object, then thrusting your player into a rather vaginal opening."

If bullets are "phallic" (despite rarely even having in-game models) then portals are "vaginal" and the primary game mechanic is to have your player "penetrate" them.

In reality, all of this is just pseudo-intellectual Freudian bullshit.

"non-phallic" implies all other first-person shooters are phallic. The word phallic implies many things.

Yeah, the phrase is from someone else, but it certainly wasn't included by accident.

Certainly not out-of-context.

The phrase isn't wrong, though. The vast majority of FPSes involve you playing a man, shooting other men. Sometimes it'll include a woman, but only if she's very, very scantily clad.

Reducing men to the physical expression of their sex is more sexist than anything else mentioned in the article. I will grant you "masculine," "macho," or even "puerile," but "phallic" is simply offensive.

I'm struggling to think of a scantily clad female FPS character, but it's not really my genre of choice. Can you give some examples?

I always thought of it as more of a fantasy/RPG issue.

Some (http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120212153603/quake/imag...) but not all (http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120215221555/quake/imag...) of the female characters in Q3A are scantily clad.

(Similarly unrealistically proportioned male character with armor missing on stomach: http://img3.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20120215221956/quake/imag...)

>The vast majority of FPSes involve you playing a man, shooting other men.

Which has nothing substantial to do with a "phallus" of any kind.

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