A response to some arguments in anita sarkeesians interview.

[kayo of the Well]

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[Bvenged]

Good read, I enjoyed that. I think it shows that the industry is a lot more gender-equal than first appears to the eye. It still holds up to male-oriented gamers though, especially in places like FPS's, but it's certainly a lot less sexist than it used to be.

 

[Hjalmar Fryklund]

That's the problem. The context of the conversation is grounded in trash. If it were unrelated to Sarkeesian's hackjob, it might (though I doubt it) accomplish some good. As it is, it only gives her validation she doesn't deserve, and pins the discussion in a place where, quite literally, no good can be accomplished.

There was a time not too long ago when discussing the idea of sexism in video games would have been squashed by a bunch of sweaty neckbeards insisting that it's not an issue we need to concern ourselves with. But in the aftermath of the Kickstart debacle, we have a ton of threads popping up on the subject, and though a lot of them descend eventually into obnoxious fuckery, there are some good ones. People are talking about the issue itself moreso than Sarkeesian herself. So hey, progress!

Those gender threads had been a trend here for a while before the Sarkeesian Youtube incident. It would be more accurate to say that the incident was the culmination of it all, rather than the beginning.

I will say this, though: We haven't been this levelheaded (in general) before when it comes to these topics.

 

[targren]

Gotta start somewhere.

Maybe, but I'm not sure 'here' is the right place. Like I said, the dearth of women in game development may not, as is often declared, be a cause of lack of female interest in gaming, but rather a symptom.

I will say this, though: We haven't been this levelheaded (in general) before when it comes to these topics.

The banhammer's been falling rather liberally among these threads. Coincidence?

 

[Hjalmar Fryklund]

Gotta start somewhere.

Maybe, but I'm not sure 'here' is the right place. Like I said, the dearth of women in game development may not, as is often declared, be a cause of lack of female interest in gaming, but rather a symptom.

I will say this, though: We haven't been this levelheaded (in general) before when it comes to these topics.

The banhammer's been falling rather liberally among these threads. Coincidence?

Dunno about that. Maybe I hang out in wrong threads to often, but I don't see that much mod wrath in them. Also, I remember the rape threads in early last year. Now those were depressing. For everyone.

 

[Dogstile]

"but these other characters aren't fleshed-out either."

Sorry but yes this is a good argument, when a character is just as fleshed out as all the other characters, you cannot single that character out for being underdeveloped due to gender, which is what Sarkeesian did.

Wait, so we're now saying that Bastion has no characters to speak of? Because I seem to recall that back when people were gushing over it they had great things to say about some of the characters. Incidentally, I don't recall Zia being one of those characters they were gushing over.

Just jumping in because I really doubt this has been clarified. They gushed over the narrators smooth as all hell voice. That was it. His character was still "old man, narrates game".

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Are you saying that the 18% playthroughs mean that only 18% of the Mass Effect audience is women? What are you implying?

While Bioware didn't release enough information to derive a definitive empirical answer to the amount of female players, the very fact that the players collectively chose to play as male Shepard in 82% of their playthroughs means that it is a fairly safe bet that the number of women playing the game was fairly small. And certainly a much smaller percentage then the often quoted industry figures released by the ESA.

Like Kevin Costner's character in Field of Dreams some of you seem to be operating under the mentality that if you build it, they will come. Yet even when existing developers such as Bioware reach out to female consumers, the results of the effort expended are not really all that spectacular and certainly not worth castrating an entire artistic medium so that a few ladies who enjoy role-playing female Shepard won't have to share cultural landscape with guys who enjoy the Soul Series and characters like Ivy Valentine.

 

[targren]

Is that what this is about? You're worried that trying to be more inclusive is going to take away your improbably huge digital knockers? Dude, there's free porn on the internet. If you have fewer games with jiggle physics, you can still download pictures and videos of the real thing.

And why is that attitude acceptable when "if women don't like jiggle physics, they can play the many, many games that don't have them" is not?

 

[Cheesepower5]

I personally think the best solution posited so far is simply to encourage more women to get into game development. And that's sort of relying on other people, for the most part.

What other ideas that came up do you like?

That's the thing. Women are going to be discouraged from getting into the industry unless we start talking about things like this. I don't believe that the majority of employers consciously discriminate against women. But the boys' club atmosphere tends to take hold on an unconscious level.

So the first step is to start talking about what gaming as a medium is doing wrong and what we would like to see done differently and how. If we keep the discourse going, new blood will be rotated in to change things.

And that's totally fair. I'd personally rather someone more charismatic or intelligent than Anita Sarkeesian did it, at least from what I gather watching her other videos.

But, beggars can't be choosers.

And why is that attitude acceptable when "if women don't like jiggle physics, they can play the many, many games that don't have them" is not?

Women aren't coming from a position of privilege for one thing. For another, the idea that women want to take all the sexiness out of games is patently absurd and anyone using it as an argument needs to be slapped. Since when does the desire for a little bit more variety translate into a ban on a bunch of neckbeards' favorite boner-making machines?

Yeah, they kind of do. If you're playing games, you're probably at least a little privileged.

Paris Hilton? She's one privileged ************. You can't cast the privilege net over whole groups like that, not having to Hunt/Gather is a fucking privilege.

 

[Cheesepower5]

Paris Hilton? She's one privileged ************.

That's a bit like saying that because Morgan Freeman is rich, I'm not allowed to say that black people still face problems.

Black people face problems? Nonsense! Blasphemy!

 

[Paradoxrifts]

the very fact that the players collectively chose to play as male Shepard in 82% of their playthroughs means that it is a fairly safe bet that the number of women playing the game was fairly small.

That's not necessarily true. My sister has 4 different Shepards. Two of them are male. My guess is that you have never once played as a female Shepard and are thus assuming that no one with a Y chromosome would ever want to either.

You are grasping at straws. We both know that the majority of people more often play their own gender when given the opportunity, and writing off a 64% percent lead in gender selection would require that nearly all the statistical biases that are inherent in the data fall in the direction of showing more female players.

castrating an entire artistic medium

I'm sorry, what?

I like provocative language. But that is essentially what happens when something that once held to have a particular gender bias gets rendered gender-neutral, right?

An effective castration of the medium.

Is that what this is about? You're worried that trying to be more inclusive is going to take away your improbably huge digital knockers? Dude, there's free porn on the internet. If you have fewer games with jiggle physics, you can still download pictures and videos of the real thing.

Lets stop discussing the disappearance of jiggle physics as something that might actually happen. The South Korean and Japanese video gaming industries are more likely to fade off into oblivion as the demographical populations which support them grow old, wither and die. Nothing short of legislation or a total shutdown of the market will stop eastern developers chasing easy profits dumping their product over here.

So what is this about? What, indeed!

Specifically I am sick of the following complaints..

-Complaining about women being depicted in metal underwear, whenever the battle attire for her male counterpart consists of a studded leather jockstrap and edible canola oil. The irony here is that the concept of the metal bikini was originally created as a form of self-censorship for the artwork for novels in which the characters, both male and female, ran around in far less.

-Anyone holding up examples of Korean games like Lineage II or the more recently released Tera as to why the video game industry is sexist misogynistic wasteland. No, all those examples really prove is that the Korean video game industry has those problems, and that possibly it might be a poor parenting choice to leave the developers in charge of your children if you want to go out to the movies.

-Going after older established intellectual properties that were created thirty years ago like Mario or Zelda for example, which manage to exist still scratching out a living by appealing to the nostalgia of older gamers. It feels like such a honest cheap shot. I'm also troubled by the implication that if a woman can't rescue herself from trouble, then nobody should send help because she isn't worth the trouble. Although now that I think about it, maybe that's not such a bad idea to be teaching people. Social Darwinism, I choose you!

At this point, I'm prepared to have statistics join feminism in the list of things you obviously know nothing about. Oh yes, I remember that. I asked you twice to explain where you got your grossly ignorant opinions on feminism from, and you disappeared immediately.

The answer was self apparent. People just like you have taught me everything I know about the sort of modern feminism that spends its time and energy navel gazing at popular culture.

You speak of entitlement in terms of feminist jargon. Well, I speak of entitlement in the original sense of the word.

This is a market driven industry, so you will receive the demographical representation which you pay for. In this day and age of high internet penetration, where the video game industry is more keenly aware than ever of the demographical constitution of their audience, you perpetuate a myth that companies making triple-A titles that exist to make profits are either willfully ignoring or deliberately suppressing some vast hidden reservoir of potential female gamers.

I look at examples such as the Fallout franchise, and I largely approve of the progressive changes that have been made in New Vegas (2011) and the classy way in which issues of gender and sexuality are resolved, in comparison to to Fallout 2(1998) wherein playing a female character largely boiled down to having more opportunities to knock boots for money. Changes like these have occurred for several reasons, partly due to increased media scrutiny but the most important is that RPGs are one of the gaming genres that women have a higher degree of audience representation. A much higher degree of representation than the other gaming genres that are typically vilified in these threads.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

*SNIP*

Why on earth would I want to do that?

I've already pointed out at great length, just exactly why your nigh pathological desire to quell any competition to feminist doctrine in popular media is a failed crusade. The very fact that the only weaponry you've ever had has essentially been shame tactics, employed on people who simply don't recognise your philosophy as a source of moral authority shows that succinctly.

Sure, you might win some battles, earn some concessions but so long as you cannot provide an alternative market that reliably fronts up with the cash, then your cause is dead before it even got off the blocks. It would certainly be nice if the overall numbers of gamers increased and the ratio of gender involvement in the Triple-A industry narrowed on both sides of the consumer and production sides of the industry, because it would mean even more games to choose from. But it isn't terribly likely to occur, so I stand by the idea that people should get what they pay for and that while the industry should make allowances for fringe audiences it shouldn't do it at the expense of it's core demographic.

You seem to think one demographic is entitled to have the run of a product, which has been paid for by the most part by an entirely different demographic. Now that's a sense of unwarranted entitlement!

 

[crazyrabbits]

The original kickstarter video left me with little faith that she's going to be able to produce anything worth watching, this seems to back me up. I dunno, how are her other videos? Worth watching?

As I said in one of the Destructoid articles covering this thing, she seems incredibly predisposed to highlighting negative aspects of female characters, to the detriment of many positive portrayals of females in games. She does to the point that she's stretching to make leaps of logic in justifying how certain characters are negative, even if there's nothing in their character that indicates otherwise.

It should tell you something when she only added a "Positive Portrayals of Female Characters" video, that would only be produced if she made over $15,000. I don't agree with her series, I certainly don't agree with the blatant cashgrab (her video indicates she already has a ton of video game systems and an HD camera, and she's finding most of her information through "research" online) - has she even played any of these games? A frame of reference would be much appreciated.

 

[targren]

..snip..

-Anyone holding up examples of Korean games like Lineage II or the more recently released Tera as to why the video game industry is sexist misogynistic wasteland. No, all those examples really prove is that the Korean video game industry has those problems, and that possibly it might be a poor parenting choice to leave the developers in charge of your children if you want to go out to the movies.

Wow, people bringing up current titles in order to be topical. What rat bastard does that?

When they're cherry-picking to find outliers like Tera (which a huge cross-sections of gamers of both sexes found to be downright creepy), that would be "rat bastards with an agenda to push."