Tropes vs Women in Video Games pt 1 is out.

[weemadando]

[Vendetta]

I can't watch it at work, is it more indepth than the original Tropes vs. Women videos and is there a prescription for how to do better in future and/or comparison with good examples in other media or is it just complaining? (The old series very much felt like shallow complaining without saying "and here is how I would actually like it to be done").

[Questor]

That's an excellent video.

I'm going through the back catalog now.

[JLTucker]

I can't watch it at work, is it more indepth than the original Tropes vs. Women videos and is there a prescription for how to do better in future and/or comparison with good examples in other media or is it just complaining? (The old series very much felt like shallow complaining without saying "and here is how I would actually like it to be done").

Why should they include how to fix it if they aren't game developers themselves? It's not shallow if their arguments against the current norms are coherent and sound.

[salm]

I can't watch it at work, is it more indepth than the original Tropes vs. Women videos and is there a prescription for how to do better in future and/or comparison with good examples in other media or is it just complaining? (The old series very much felt like shallow complaining without saying "and here is how I would actually like it to be done").

Why should they include how to fix it if they aren't game developers themselves? It's not shallow if their arguments against the current norms are coherent and sound.

True, but properly done improvement suggestions can add a lot of value.

[Vendetta]

I can't watch it at work, is it more indepth than the original Tropes vs. Women videos and is there a prescription for how to do better in future and/or comparison with good examples in other media or is it just complaining? (The old series very much felt like shallow complaining without saying "and here is how I would actually like it to be done").

Why should they include how to fix it if they aren't game developers themselves? It's not shallow if their arguments against the current norms are coherent and sound.

Step one in not getting what you want: Make sure no-one knows what you actually want. If your criticism is "that's rubbish I don't like it (and my market demographic agrees)", no matter how detailed your argument about the things you don't like in it is, but you never actually say what you would like instead then even if anyone does engage with your criticism there's no guarantee that you'll like what they then produce. (And there's no guarantee that they will engage with you, because they already have a market demographic that buys their product, and you've given them no roadmap to appeal to your demographic)

If, however, you say "I don't like this, but I would like this instead (and my market demographic agrees)" not only have you made your argument with more force to begin with, you've also produced a roadmap that leads to a wider demographic.

Criticising failure is only useful if the criticism contains a roadmap to success.

TL;DR: This (and the linked related articles) is a more useful feminist critique of female characters than this video series is likely to be It's not "damsel in distress is disempowering", to which the only useful response is "no shit", it's "what would be empowering". (NB: writing bad female characters isn't just bad for women, it's bad for men because they are invariably accompanied by bad male characters and exist in bad stories).

[Starglider]

I agree with Vendetta; sure there's lots of raw ignorant sexism in game fans / online gaming, but for game developers the problem is much more 'we don't know how to write good female characters' rather than 'we want to write sexist stereotypes'. At least as hard is convincing publishers and executives that games with female protagonists and/or non-sexualised female characters will sell as well as typical games. Finally discussion of how games should be written is (potentially) far more interesting and original; everyone in the industry has been well aware of the basic problems for at least a decade.

[Flagg]

Latest God of War game gives you a trophy for stomping on a females head and gived the tag "Bro's Before Ho's". They aren't even trying.

[Vendetta]

Latest God of War game gives you a trophy for stomping on a females head and gived the tag "Bro's Before Ho's". They aren't even trying.

God of War isn't. That's not to say that no-one is.

But a lot of the ones that do try get it wrong, and that could be avoided if the criticism had more indepth discussion of what right would be.

For instance, one of the commonly touted "good" female characters in videogames is Alyx Vance, but that appears to be solely on the basis that she wears sensible clothes and fires a gun sometimes. Alyx is actually a terrible character, she's instantly and sycophantically smitten with the player's avatar and by extension the player for no reason ever explored by the game (barring him being Science Jesus), and furthermore that's just about the extent of the character development she gets. Now, Alyx was originally designed to be "better" than the common shallow female fanservice character, but it turns out that all that means is "wears sensible clothes" because that's what a lot of criticism focuses on, the shallowness is all still there, it's just better dressed.

[Stark]

When people complain about this issue without a clear vision toward a better situation, I think this is often because they do not believe a better situation can exist. I don't agree, but it is easy to look at games famous for writing and stories and making lots of money and conclude that there simply is no market for games not entirely predicated on boys own adventure fantasy actualisation. 'Big titty lady says stop the bad man pew pew'. And lets face it, going the extra step from 'I don't like it' to '...because it isn't necessary' is beyond people who just take what they're given and protest in joystiq comments.

However, useless videos like this aren't useless because they don't speak to devs and decision makers. I don't think they're even trying. They're trying to shift the attitudes of players (which I imagine they believe will eventually influence decisions) by reacting to the extremely loud reaction against even the suggestion of institutionalised sexism in gaming and by 'gamers'. Don't view it as trying to save gaming from those nasty bad developers or writers - they're (maybe) trying to shift the population of gamers from massively, hugely sexist and bigoted rape fantasists to .... Not that.

[Vendetta]

That's possibly the case, although I'm not sure as you can do that by pointing out that if you happen to have lost a princess recently, Shigeru Miyamoto's basement is a good place to start looking. There's certainly an argument for raising awareness, but the internet shitstorm surrounding even the announcement of these videos did that better than the contents of the videos ever will, so why not use the content for something more productive?

[Stark]

That might assume too much competence, if they saw the enormous knee-jerk response and said 'hey, lets make a more substantial statement since we already have everyone's attention'.

[Ford Prefect]

I think it's worth remembering is that Sarkeesian's videos are aimed at her own particular audience, as opposed to 'the industry' or 'literally everyone in the universe'. It's another entry in her Feminist Frequency stuff.

[weemadando]

Here's a nice collection of why it's necessary.

“@ShawnElliott Who says @femfreq is unnecessary? Let's look: http://i.imgur.com/QBT0YYC.png , http://i.imgur.com/2RDWDM1.png , http://i.imgur.com/1TMtMgG.png”

[Vendetta]

Here's a nice collection of why it's necessary.

Anita Sarkeesian could get the same reaction by posting a video of her looking at the camera for fifteen minutes. And no, just drawing the unreconstructed fuckwits out of the woodwork doesn't validate the video series in itself, because especially since the shitfest around the kickstarter for this there's actually been a lot more visibility of gender issues in gaming, and the same unreconstructed fuckwits have been shitting all over those discussions on a regular basis.

We know about the problem now, we know that the internet is part of the problem, the best thing to do now is to shift the discussion to how to fix it.

[Covenant]

I think this expanded video series is presenting the problems with the representation of women in games in a more coherent fashion that makes it clear what solutions will be. From what was said here, much more research was done, and the next videos seem to be following a trajectory of "This is what was done in the past, this is the current trend, and here's some things we can do further from those current trends," as the next one is mentioning flipping the Damsel Dilemma around a bit.

Honestly though, I don't know why she needs to even go that far into explaining the solutions, since the solution is and always has been "Find ways to represent Good Guys in different ways, and of those different ways, show a cross section of individual human permutations (color, sex, gender, body type, age) rather than monotypes or stereotypes."

The solution is so obvious, so basic, and so simple that it really doesn't need extensive discussion. If we're talking about getting more women into the game industry, that's a more complex subject, but there's nothing keeping game developers from making simple choices to include characters from a vast cross-spectrum of identities and treat them as equal participants in heroism. Basically, if you made a video game and then threw a some darts at some dartboards to figure out who this character is, that'd do half of what needs to be done. More than anything, it isn't that women have been Damsels in Distress before, or will be in the future, it's that women have nearly only been Damsels in Distress and when female characters are features prominently they spend a good part of that time identified as a Damsel (or a badguy, or undermined by being drawn as a sex object). The instances of the opposite are so rare that they stand out.

If we shake it up to the point that seeing female protagonists in any given type of game is no longer "remarkable" then you're going to have a generation of gamers growing up feeling like they belong, and that's like... that's really a big part of this. It isn't that you can never use a Damsel in Distress, but that when you look at every game you're going to see these themes appearing an awful lot, and if you're someone who already feels like you're only partially belonging then every egregious example is going to stick out way, way more.

Not every game needs to be a deep, philosophical take on what it means to be a woman in an action game. In fact, that would be bad. Voyager may have sucked as a show, but a lot of women liked how Janeway wasn't criticized on the basis of her sex, and having games where the fact that the character is female (and that this doesn't matter much) would be perfectly fine in a game too. If we could just accept that as a positive goal, and stop treating the same general cookie-cut of buzz-cut white male protagonists to the best roles in games... well, then we can tackle other issues. But throwing the doors open is the first step. We can tackle gamer sexism once we have an army of female gamers to make it an even fight.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I would dearly like to see how we're even going to attempt to make a dent in something that is endemic to ALL of society, not just gaming. As the razor sharp minds behind those YouTube comments point out, these attitudes have literally been around since the ancient times and while people may have given a shit, they clearly didn't to any real extent until the 20th century.

Trying to turnaround the misogynistic cock-fest that is modern gaming would be a feat in itself. Given the MRAs you read about daily in the likes of Man Boobz blog or Reddit and other social groups online, I feel you'd have to implement some massive social engineering programme to get any real results. It's not the games developers after all, it's the society they are raised in where any strong willed woman is seen as a threat or trying too hard.

I see the same sentiment within the sciences and technology sector in general. Even though I work with predominantly female colleagues in my lab, the general industry is geared more towards men and this is in one of the areas where women are better represented (biotech) than others (physics, computing).

[Stark]

I don't agree at all, beyond the changing social attitudes we already see. Games are a niche and the audience is particularly sexist; both of those things can change. Like cov says it's not like games have to be a lighthouse of equality in opportunity and archetype - but we can hope they become less the mastubatory fantasies of lonely women hating nerds.

[Admiral Valdemar]

Oh, I don't mean not to try. Certainly do that because, let's face it, gaming is a mess when it comes to this kind of thing anyway (I'm reminded of a piece on Ars Technica which caused much rage, when a father reprogrammed a Zelda game to treat Link as female).

I just think that it's far more of an uphill struggle when you're basically surrounded by this crap from all other walks of life. Gaming seems to be more concentrated, but still, maybe if they can change the status quo there, we can expand. Popular media tends to be where a lot of social conventions are manifested in people now.

[TheFeniX]

Latest God of War game gives you a trophy for stomping on a females head and gived the tag "Bro's Before Ho's". They aren't even trying.

I saw some twitter post from the devs saying that achievement was thought up by a female employee. Not justifying it, just saying.

For instance, one of the commonly touted "good" female characters in videogames is Alyx Vance, but that appears to be solely on the basis that she wears sensible clothes and fires a gun sometimes. Alyx is actually a terrible character, she's instantly and sycophantically smitten with the player's avatar and by extension the player for no reason ever explored by the game (barring him being Science Jesus), and furthermore that's just about the extent of the character development she gets. Now, Alyx was originally designed to be "better" than the common shallow female fanservice character, but it turns out that all that means is "wears sensible clothes" because that's what a lot of criticism focuses on, the shallowness is all still there, it's just better dressed.

Alyx Vance is a terrible example of a bad female character. Freeman is basically an absent folk-hero and everyone is immediately fawning over him the second he reappears (which is basically every fucking game ever). Alyx has likely been told a thousand stories about him from Eli and other tie-in characters. And it's easy to see why a woman would be smitten with the guy saving the world when it's stated in-game that the "no sex field" (whatever) has gone down and they should be feeling the effects. The worst bit you can say about Alyx is that she just follows you around, but that's a gameplay decision as stated by the devs. Early builds had her taking the lead, but playtesters didn't like it because it was boring.

I need to watch the video tonight, but the big problem I see is that there is no pleasing this group of people so devs won't try. Bad characters are bad characters. But there's this idea that bad female characters are sexist (and some really are). But I can line up multiple brick-shithouse, shaved head, hoorah, male characters and we all call that for what it is: stupid character design and development and we move on with our lives.

[Stark]

Yes yes, lets equate sexism against men and women, how 1971.

It's interesting to me that this sort of thing is becoming more of an issue for normal cretin folk now, when arguably it's been an extraordinarily bad time for women in gaming. Even putting aside Bioware games, we have FC3 and Tomb Raider Rape Escape. But can this change? Gaming is certainly more broad nowadays (maybe not PC gaming) but AAA titles are if anything more offensively sexist than ever before.

[Admiral Valdemar]

It does seem that the MRAs get ever more aggressive and louder when this issue is even raised. Even if only as a "Hey, guys. This is a bit sexist, no?". They see it as an outright attack on their gender because... she-devils. Or something.

What's worse are the kinds of moron who then have the gall to point out how men have it so hard in this feminist dystopia we call the modern age. It'd be hilarious, were these people confined to cells and not allowed out to spout such bullshit publicly and garner actual praise for fighting The (Wo)Man.

[Vendetta]

Honestly though, I don't know why she needs to even go that far into explaining the solutions, since the solution is and always has been "Find ways to represent Good Guys in different ways, and of those different ways, show a cross section of individual human permutations (color, sex, gender, body type, age) rather than monotypes or stereotypes."

Because, frankly, the industry is quite homogenous and one of the driving engines of it is corporate safety.

The people who make videogames are overwhelmingly male, and operating from a limited set of perspectives, some of which are harmful, but they don't actually realise why they are harmful or what they can do to fix it. Male videogame designers largely don't know what women want, they do know what men want, so they produce that.

The people who pay for videogames only care about the gender of the character in as much as it will sell more copies. That's why all videogames have the same guy in them, you know, the white guy with brown hair, probably in his early thirties, that one. They're all that guy because from a sales perspective he's the safest bank. (The video even starts off with an example of this, Dinosaur Planet didn't have the Starfox license bolted on to it because Shigsy can't deal with a female lead and had to kidnap that princess right damn now, but because he thought it would sell more copies. By that he may have meant "any at all", becuase Starfox Adventures was a rubbish Zelda clone that literally no-one would care about without the Starfox license)


We need an indepth discussion of what 50% of the potential audience actually wants in a representation of their gender, and what would attract them to a game or gaming, because the people who make the games don't know, and the people who pay for the games don't think 50% of the potential audience exists at all. Pointing out what 50% of the potential audience doesn't want doesn't help, we know what the majority of women don't want in videogames, it's all the things that are in videogames, and we know they don't want it because they're overwhelmingly not buying them, and the games that women do buy (or play online) tend to be the ones where those issues are absent because there are no characters in puzzle games or Farmville or because they're MMOs (which aren't cheese like Tera) and therefore they can create reasonable characters of their own.

[Vendetta]

I'd also add, from the perspective of "this is important because the most vocal gamers are also the worst representatives of their species", the way to address that is to address it head on, not talk about sexism within games, because sexism within games is probably not what creates sexist gamers, and it's not the same type of mouth breathing adversarial sexism that gamers frequently display (and not only when challenged about it, or when someone reminds them that women actually exist for real and not on their jizz stained monitors) that leads to poor representation of women in games (usually, Yoshio Sakamoto excepted). The two are actually seperate issues with a common root.

If the point was to address the culture of sexism among gamers, address the culture of sexism among gamers.

[Thanas]

The video would have been better had it focused on current examples instead of stuff that happened several decades ago.