Gender Balance in Carcassonne: About as Good as it Gets

Gender Balance in Carcassonne: About as Good as it Gets

There’s something weird about the Android and Windows versions of the city-building board game Carcassonne: they feature a precisely equal number of apparently male and female playable characters.

Perhaps that shouldn’t be remarkable, but, well, it kinda is. Carcassonne’s characters are used as both user avatars and computer opponents, so they either have their own personalities or reflect the player’s. Representations of women in video games, when they exist at all, tend to be sexualized and unrealistic.

Since Carcassonne is the creation of our more enlightened cousins in Europe, it should be able to avoid those tropes.

Right?

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6 Rules for Writing NBC’s Chuck

My latest streaming TV binge: Chuck, the 2007-2012 show starring Jim-from-The-Office lookalike Zachary Levi as an underachieving computer technician in a big box electronics store who gets the CIA master database loaded into his brain.

That’s not a spoiler; it’s the series concept. Plus the show ended two and a half years ago. Spoilers are below, however.

Chuck Read more of this post