This article, however, coming out of the London Times Online doesn’t do justice to this demographic. Hailing instead towards a rather poorly researched eye on one aspect of the effect of housewives playing MMOs. It spins a story with little evidence to talk about how countries like Korea sees it as a stigma, potentially a social disorder, that some housewives display an addiction to online gaming.

Although relatively new to online gaming compared with their counterparts in South Korea, Japanese women have taken to the genre with zeal. Sometimes they play flint-hearted assassins, sometimes fluffy animals. Often — bizarrely — they play housewives. Classic online combat titles such as World of Warcraft are popular, but much more so are games that broadly emulate real life.

In many cases, the housewives’ devotion to the virtual world has caused miseries in the real one: slipped discs and severe eye damage, say researchers of the phenomenon, are becoming the offline battle scars of the online women warriors.

Okay, us voces say, some people have also been addicted to Twitter, cell phone conversations, BINGO. If housewives in Nippon are looking to MMOs for better socialization perhaps there’s an underlying issue with their social bearings in the first place

As it says, Nippon’s government doesn’t really have a good idea of what’s going on. Of course, they’re the best in the position to determine why people look for their social networks in these highly social games. Also, it would be interesting to see what sort of social strata are affected by this in Korea, Japan, and China.

We’ll be looking forward to an article that actually has some sort of substance on this issue.

Link, via London Online Times

It’s no secret that females in video games are typically blatantly, sexualized byproducts of perverted character design. Between their skimpy attire and grossly exaggerated anatomy, most ladies featured in video games look more like prostitutes than crime-fighting, evil-slaying heroes. While games like Dead or Alive,Ninja Gaiden and Soulcalibur continue to perpetuate the demeaning myth that girls should dress like whores to sell games and kick ass, there are those leading ladies that have striven to break the stereotype.

So here are ten, completely badass video game ladies who are more concerned with messing up faces and ending lives than posing as pin-up girls for a nerdy version of Playboy. It was difficult to make this list; to qualify, entries had to be female, appropriately and modestly dressed for the majority of the game, and capable of totally kicking ass. Suffice to say, this excluded some of the most defining female characters in gaming history. But what good is a list if it doesn’t discriminate and judge?

Not to ruin the experience for anyone, but here’s the first few you can expect:

Zoey (Left 4 Dead), Faith (Mirror’s Edge), Jennifer Mui (Mercenaries), Princess Peach (Super Mario RPG) … To see the rest, you will have to follow the link.

Link, via The Game Reviews dot com.