By Wesley Wong
Online games have progressed significantly over the last few years.
We started with text-based role-playing games and now anyone can easily
log on to Yahoo! and play full-color chess or mahjong against opponents
in another time zone. The latest in online game technology comes in
the form of Shockwave games. These games are usually played in a small
pop-up window, and their primary feature is that they provide decent
game play with minimal loading time. The graphics are acceptable for
Internet games, and often they include some degree of both action
and strategy.
SISSY FIGHT 2000 is a shockwave game where players each control a
character, a young girl, and they gather in a playground to take part
in a sissy fight. When you log on, you create a character, and can
customize their appearance. Then you choose one of three schools to
enter, and within each school there are several playgrounds you can
enter to take part in a fight with other characters. Fights involve
anywhere from 3 to 6 girls, and are turn-based. Each turn, you can
choose from a variety of actions including grabbing, teasing or scratching
another player, licking a lollipop to regain health, cowering to dodge
an attack, or tattling on everyone. Some of the actions, such as teasing,
only work if more than one character gangs up one another. In fact,
after playing several games, it appears you can only succeed if you
team up with other players. In my first game, I played with 5 other
girls, 3 of which worked as a team and quickly eliminated the rest
of us. However, there is no private message feature, so any chatting
you do is public, which makes ganging up difficult as you need to
guess who is on your side. The game play is fun initially, but it
is virtually impossible to defeat a "3-team", as they are
called by players. After a few rounds, however, the game gets boring.
You essentially repeat the same strategies over and over. The game
would benefit from additional features such as private messaging,
and greater player customization so that you can have different skill
dimensions.
SISSY FIGHT sets out to mimic the popular image of the grade school
playground where girls gang up to tease the awkward, unpopular loners.
I chatted with some of the players, and found that they are am extremely
diverse bunch, ranging from 15 to 45 in age, with males and females
equally represented. Clearly, this idea of revisiting the grade school
social ladder is appealing to all sorts of people. The trend of Internet
users assuming the identities and roles of people and characters they
are either too afraid to assume, or simply cannot assume is both creepy
and strangely delightful. When presented in a format of a simple game,
it is the latter. However, as these games develop in sophistication
and realism, the ability to be whoever you want to becomes possible,
and raises a whole series of disturbing issues.