The Penny Arcade Expo (
PAX) was held 2 days ago, they were running several tournaments of various games (some hadn't even come out) and one of the groups that entered were called the 'Frag Dolls' (pictured below). As if them entering weren't odd enough in itself, but the lasses managed to win both the Halo 2 and Rainbow 6: Black Arrow tournaments. You can read about it on
Bungie's Website.
Now this would be cool if they were just casual gamers that naturally kicked ass but what I believe has happened (and this has been confirmed by members of the group) is that Ubisoft have hired them to play the games (online and obviously at expo's like PAX) to "break the stereotype of a typical female gamer" and I presume draw more females into gaming, which would be awesome because as we all know, there's next to none out there. Unfortunately there's a lot of controversy of whether it's ethically right to do something like that, I personally don't have a problem with it, but a particular thread on the Penny Arcade forum shows a bit of anger from your average gamer:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=74772 - The Frag Dolls reply several times throughout the post (they're names always end with 'FD' in case you're wondering who they are).
Now I'm just interested to hear other people's thoughts on this, mainly, do you think it will work? Will more of the opposite sex start playing games simply because the FD exist? I have my doubts, I think the problem stems from deeper down, females simply don't find games as fun as we do and it's not really a 'social' thing that drives them away from this sort of entertainment. You never know though. Also, I wonder how much they're being paid...
Oh, and check out the girls' blog at:
http://fragdolls.blogspot.com/
"Computers are useless they can only give you answers."