George Pringle is really something though. Thanks for that.

He’s missed the most obvious one: Salutations via a bouquet of resplendent virtual bullets. Also, teabagging.

Can you get Herr Web Developer to add a small (0.5 second delay) or something, so that I never have to see it again?

Depictions of women (and male for that matter, but I think it’s still pertienent to focus on representations of women) in media need to be challenged when they repeat these stereotypes. Idealising and repeating these stereotypes helps no one, and just serves to perpetuate unltimately discriminatory (or, at least, exclusionary) norms.

That being said, I quite like Soul Calibur, it’s one of my favourite beat ‘em ups, and, though it makes me uncomfortable, it’s not that I don’t think Ivy and her ilk shouldn’t look like that – that would be censorship, which also helps no one. Ideally, what I’d like to see are people generating (more) alternatives (strong lead characters in games which don’t rely upon nonsense heterosexual body fantasies) so that these depictions are diluted, and allowing them to be taken for what they should be – a bit of knowing fun, rather than what they still are, which are reinforcements for said exclusionary ideals.

Also, speaking of dialogue systems in RPG’s, Vince (remember him?) had a pretty decent article about that over at Iron Tower’s forums. Can’t say I see the great promise in going back to keywords again, but maybe he’s going to prove me wrong some day.

Personally I think the answer is in better text parsers. At some point AI is bound to get good enough that you can use it to understand language and generate responses on the fly. It’ll probably be a decade or two though, sadly.

KG