Passionate storytelling

Another Must-watch ted talk. This one from author Isabelle Allende.

The content of her talk, about the oppression of women and the need for change around the world is compelling. I can't add anything else to the topic other than to urge you to watch it.

I do think that there are also lessons here for presenters to take away.

(1) Passion. She discusses it in her talk, and she clearly has it. This is a great example of how someone that has passion for their topic can engage an audience and infect them with kind of passion.

(2) Story-telling. She effectively uses story-telling to not just make a point, but to make it come up and hit you like a hammer.

(3) Use of humor. Wow. She can go from making the audience laugh, to making them gasp at stories of child rape, to making them laugh again, in the space of a few moments. She weilds humor like a katana. In less skilled hands, someone could kill themselves trying to do this, but in her skilled hands, it make the dreadfull 'lows' in her stories that much deeper. Like a roller coaster's high peaks making the deep valleys that much more terrifying.

(4) No slides. Just goes to show you; Imagery can help, but it is almost entirely about the speaker.

Gaming Blogs of the Fairer Sex

It may just be proportional to the growth of the blogosphere, but I've noted a fair number of gaming blogs by and for the fairer sex. These have certainly been around a while (I've been a reader of Jane's site for a while, for example), but there do seem to be more of them cropping up.

My list of feeds includes:
Feminist Gamers (along with the associated Cerise 'zine)
GameGirlz (go Canada!)
New Game Plus
Heroine Next Door
Guilded Lillies

Just to name a few examples.

Anyhow, a new one came to my attention, Girl in the Machine. And with reviews/editorials like this one of Super Princess Peach, and posts with titles like Lara Croft's Ten Year Mam Jam, I have a new favorite feminist gamer blog!

Casual gamers are PEOPLE!

[OK, the image isn't contextually relevant to the post, but Kim's #7 Rule of Blogging is that 'When presented with an opportunity to include references to a Charleton Heston movie, one should do so, regardless of how far a stretch it may be to make relevant'. We now return you to regularly scheduled programming]

Lots of people have been quoting this report that states that women constitute a majority of the US internet population. (saving you the click, it's about 52% women, 48% men).

My point is this:

The casual games industry has spent a lot of time talking about how there are more women playing casual games than men. Stats go anywhere from 55% to 70% depending how you slice it and which site stats you look at. These numbers get dampened somewhat when normalized to take into account the general internet usage gender split.

Having said that, perhaps we're better off looking at casual gamers as just "people".