The other day my Political Science professor was talking about types of leaders, and heuristic devices. Inevitably she stumbled upon the million dollar question: can women be leaders as well as men?

We’ve heard both sides, probably. We’ve heard there would be no wars if females were president and we’ve also heard that females should learn to stay in the kitchen and mind their own business. Politically, I could just point you to Margaret Thatcher of the UK and her reign as prime minister or Hilary Clinton’s upcoming run for the 2008 presidency. I mean, they’re leaders, right? But while GDG has feminist tendencies, it’s not a political blog; it’s merely a blog about video games by gamers who just so happen to be women. And as such, the million dollar question becomes more intrinsic to us when posed like this: can women be leaders in video games as well as men?

Unfortunately, the answer to this question is a quagmire that makes Iraq look simple.

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“LOG OFF, NOW!”

You may recognize this as the climactic line of the television previews for last Wednesday’s episode of CBS prime time series CSI New York. In the short preview, it lends the scary impression to the viewer that its resident video game murderer can somehow kill one directly through the computer. Pretty climactic indeed.

I wonder now about how safe gamers, particularly females, feel online in the game realm. How seriously do we take privacy?

The question should really start as: Do we even consider it at all?

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I recently tried out the upcoming MMORPG Tabula Rasa’s beta. For all the game’s flaws, and there were a lot, there was an absolutely stunning system for character customization. Nearly every feature of a character could be molded to your choosing, down to the color of sunglasses. This got me thinking—in this day and age, how much does character customization matter? How much of online video games are about aesthetics and how much is the actual gameplay?

In the past, customization wasn’t really offered to the gamer for various reasons, technology limitations being the biggest factor. Instead, it was all about gameplay and the storyline. In example, I implore you to look at Blizzard’s hit Diablo II. D2 offered no customization whatsoever; the game was about killing monsters, and having fun while doing so. Along the same vein, Counter-strike didn’t even have many options in terms of what your terrorist or counter-terrorist looked like.

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The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is good. If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been, it’s gallivanting around Seattle from location to location while playing this game. I probably wouldn’t have had time to play the game had it not been a portable title and thus the genius of Zelda on handheld systems is undeniable. I mean, we all know Zelda’s good, but Zelda that fits in your backpack is way better. While in the past the series has sacrificed graphics and gameplay to make Link portable, the advent of the Nintendo DS means this sacrifice is no longer necessary. The end result is a quirky game that manages to mix the old charm of Zelda with the high paced world of today relatively seamlessly.

And yes, I know that sounded pretty lame.

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