pinkelephant said:
But as I said, there aren't any half-naked men running around are there?
Have you noticed that if you are in a female character's body, you don't get treated any different? What I mean is that I've gone into that dancing-nude place (which incidentally the girls don't dance nude in, she's in underwear) and you talk to the guy up the front, and he says "Hey dude, just pick a booth. You've got the finest ladies in Omikron dancing nude just for you" (not exact words). Bit weird...
I guess the way games are made has changed a fair bit in the last six years. While I agree it's odd that the NPCs do not react to you according to your gender, I think it's probably more a reflection of a less interactive dialog model in general, rather than a specific male target audience. For example, no matter how you talk to people in the game, you also get the same responses, it's all pre-scripted with little to no flexibility. This could be blamed on any number of things, the lack of storage space for differing character speech, limited production emphasis placed on this flexibility, deadlines, etc.
As for the pseudo-nude dancer content, again I'd suggest that that's probably more of an element which the production team felt added to the experience than a specific male-centric effort. If they wanted to get little boys fired up over pixels why would they have bothered with such an otherwise elaborate game? It'd be much easier for them to make something with far less effort put into plot and atmosphere (DoA, Tomb Raider, whatever). Of course, the fact that they didn't think to add partially nude males again could be blamed on failing to realise that females would play the game, the predominance of males in the industry or pretty much anything. Again though, I doubt it's a deliberate effort to exclude and alienate a female audience.
A lot of the time things like these come up initially it does look like the games are geared specifically at a male audience, but more often than not (With obvious exceptions), I think it's more just a failure to realise that female gamers actually exist. Like we've talked about before though, it's definitely getting better, albeit slowly