Am I A Terrible Person For Not Caring?

[lord.jeff]

There are millions of issues in the world to fix not caring about a few doesn't make you a bad person, as long as you aren't one of those idiots who pretends the problem doesn't exist because it doesn't effect you.

 

[lord.jeff]

Snip

Raising awareness is action it shouldn't be the only action but it still helps the course. Plus I'm pretty sure the people complaining about wanting more female protagonists do buy games that have them, so voting with your wallet.

 

[matrix3509]

If there were as many people actually writing and making women protagonists in game, as there were complaining about it, we'd have the opposite problem.

This is the age of the internet, where everyone complains, but no one actually gets off their lazy asses to make changes. Don't have the time or inclination? Tough shit. Why not vote with your wallet instead? But of course they won't. They are just as spineless as the rest of the gaming community: All talk, no walk.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. As soon as devs and publishers judge that its more harmful to their bottom-line to NOT include women protagonists, then things will change.

 

[Eve Charm]

I'm really done caring, The gender/race/sexually ratio in a game is not going to be what decides if I buy a video game or not and if anyone lets that then it's beyond pettiness.

You can't look at any list on steam without being buried in a mountain of games with White male protagonists But somehow games like transistor, the walking dead, tomb raider, have still been able to be Best sellers highly reviewed and acclaimed by the MAJORITY of gamers that are suppose to be the boys only club.

So the problem doesn't seem to lie with the majority of gamers here because they seem to be fine leaving their gender/racially and looking at some of the indie and kickstarters sexual comfort zones for a good game. If you can't well then be happy with the few you can fine and stop crying about you won't play something that isn't your picture perfect representation of what you like, it's not like you can play all the games anyway.

 

[Vault101]

If there were as many people actually writing and making women protagonists in game, as there were complaining about it, we'd have the opposite problem.

This is the age of the internet, where everyone complains, but no one actually gets off their lazy asses to make changes. Don't have the time or inclination? Tough shit. Why not vote with your wallet instead? But of course they won't. They are just as spineless as the rest of the gaming community: All talk, no walk.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. As soon as devs and publishers judge that its more harmful to their bottom-line to NOT include women protagonists, then things will change.

you know this is all good and well untill you realise NO ONE pulls that "do your own" card in regards to anything else

only this...interestingly

If you can't well then be happy with the few you can fine and stop crying about you won't play something that isn't your picture perfect representation of what you like, it's not like you can play all the games anyway.

how about...no

here's something I really love..I really love when people who are USUALLY (but not always) the demographic being catered too, THEY are the ones telling ME I'm being unreasonable

I mean the lack of self awareness is just baffling

 

[Eve Charm]

If you can't well then be happy with the few you can fine and stop crying about you won't play something that isn't your picture perfect representation of what you like, it's not like you can play all the games anyway.

how about...no

here's something I really love..I really love when people who are USUALLY (but not always) the demographic being catered too, THEY are the ones telling ME I'm being unreasonable

I mean the lack of self awareness is just baffling

The lack of self awareness to which being catered to? Do you mean to tell me a good portion of games this year "ONLY" catered to one demographic or are you seeing how homogenized it's getting that right about now, gamers in general regardless of a lot of things are becoming that Demographic that usually gets catered to.

 

[Vault101]

The lack of self awareness to which being catered to? Do you mean to tell me a good portion of games this year "ONLY" catered to one demographic or are you seeing how homogenized it's getting that right about now, gamers in general regardless of a lot of things are becoming that Demographic that usually gets catered to.

wut?

my point is those "complaining" are the ones getting left by the wayside..and becially getting the metaphorical middle finger when Ubisoft says "its too hard"

and those who for whatever reason decide they find such complaining distastful and want everyone else to shut up, they are [i/]usually[/i] part of the straight white male demographic...most things are deigned to appeal to them [footnote/]weather or not those things are ACTUALLY appealing is a different matter...[/footnote]
theyre the ones acting like group A are somethow unreasonable

yet anything else (like PC ports and frameraates) is srs buisness

 

[Azure23]

ak93]It seems that everyday people make a big deal out of gender equality in games.

Is it bad that I don't really care?

I didn't finish Mass Effect and think "Man, that game would have been better had there been more females".

Or play a chapter of The Walking Dead thinking "This would be better if Lee was Lea."

My point being, do people actually find a lack of female characters (playable and non) in games off putting?

Should I?

I'm not a girl, maybe that's part of the problem. Perhaps I would notice it more if I was.

I play a game for the game. The characters that come up in the game are part of that experience. Male and female. Do we really need a quota for either?

Definitely not a terrible person at least. On the other hand, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation so as far as the debate is concerned you aren't really anything. My problem with the lions share of protagonists these days is that they're so damned devoid of anything interesting. I started playing watch dogs the other day and Aiden was so fucking bland I started wishing his sister was the main character, seriously. She's a way deeper, better adjusted person fhan grim voice mcsquarejaw.
I find bad writing off putting. However you'd really have to be obtuse or willfully blind to see that there's not exactly a dearth of well written, memorable, female characters in gaming. Sure, anyone responding to this could probably pull ten or so out of their ass, but it's a question of proportion, for every one female you'll have ten (if not more so) bland white guys.

It's fine to "play the game for the game," I'm certainly not doing anything else. However the characters and narrative are part of the game too, mainstream gaming hasn't been completely abut gameplay for over a decade. Context is important to, and the push for more female characters in gaming has never simply been about "filling a quota." Some games aim to reflect life in a semi realistic manner, like Tomodachi Life, its billed as the world- but yours. Now the real world has homosexual people, Tomodachi Life does not. People got angry because its a game that claims to represent life but doesn't represent them. Now the tacit statement behind that is that they don't exist in Nintendo's world. Of course that wasn't Nintendo's intent, but it's still the statement they ended up making.

I'd imagine it's much the same for women who feel unrepresented in gaming. It's not about shoehorning a character or gender select screen into every game, thats dumb. It's about creating characters that act like people, men and women. Women aren't all vapid and shallow, with sex appeal being their primary personality trait, in fact I'd say that most women aren't. So why is it that most female characters are? It's just lazy writing and casual sexism. Social issues exist everywhere whether people like it or not, that's why we call them social issues, because they occur in the broad context of society. Movies, radio, any entertainment medium that got big had to put up with these same debates before they could be taken seriously. However, gaming has become so big so fast (proportionally) that fans hear these accusations leveled against gaming and feel like they're being blindsided, responding defensively.

I don't know, I feel like the conversation is an important one, thats worth having. Because what are people afraid of really? That there'll be some actual quota for female character sin games? That "fun" will be squished under some socially progressive agenda? Ridiculous, if film can have its citizen Kane's and it's American pies, why not gaming? If developers and writers actually listen to us on this you'll get one thing, better characters. That doesn't mean there won't still be your dumb, fun, burly man games like Gears or whatever, just that you'll see a variety of perspectives on display. Not just the male one. And for fucks sake we'll have more choices, thats always a good thing right?

Oh and to all the people saying "women should just get jobs in the industry"; hey, it's a boys club right now. Of course it'd help if there were more women in development positions. There are plenty of shitty, douchebaggy reasons why thats not the case. So unless you want to talk root causes (sexism inherent in the industry) then you can fuck off the edge of my dick.

Too long, no one will read

 

[Dalisclock]

I kind of feel the same way the OP does. On some level, yes, I find it annoying that AC:Unity is pulling the "We can't do female assassins because it's too hard" card, which rings pretty hollow because 1.) They had female assassins in several of the previous games(Revelations and Brotherhood in paticular) and 2.) Ubisoft is a massive company which spends YEARS developing their games.

OTOH, it's hardly going to affect my decision to purchase the game one way or the other. I really like the idea of the French Revolution as a setting, but on the other hand, AC3 hasn't wowed me enough for me to actually buy it(I've heard plenty of bad things about it as well), so I'm kind of keeping a cautious eye on it. There's also the fact I'm really, really "meh" on the whole "4 player co-op" thing(and the fact they're ALL Arno just seems kind of stupid to boot). Then again, I'm really "meh" on co-op in general(it would probably help if I had 3 friends who played the AC games).

There's also the fact that "Has proper character diversity" is pretty far down my list of reason I do or do not buy a game. "Is it fun?", "Is it interesting?", "It is atmospheric?", "Is it cathartic?", "Is it funny?", "does it play well?" "Are the characters well developed?" all influence my decision to buy a game more then "Is X/Y/Z properly represented in the cast?"

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

It is not white male privaledge; that is an uncalled for, knee-jerk reaction. You don't need to take personal offence.

Actually, it IS male privilege (I never said "white") when men are allowed to do anything they want with their lives without having to think about how it feels to be marginalized by a medium that they enjoy. Then you turn around and say that we women need to change our life paths to receive the type of treatment that men get by default? Again, that's privilege talking. You get to tell us to walk the extra 10 miles that you don't have to.

(To further clarify, "white" privilege in this situation is the luxury of not having to think about the fact that an extremely vast majority of protagonists are W.A.S.P.s. This whole argument about non-representation of women easily translates to an argument about the lack of non-caucasian protagonists. And yet, you don't see a wave of people telling non-caucasians that the only solution to their valid issue is that they need to break into the industry themselves, regardless of the cost to their livelihoods.)

You may not be part of the solution but the issue is that women en masse *choose*, of their own free will, to study humanities subjects, geography, literature, and dominate fields like nursing, primary education, midwifery, clerical/administrative and care roles. To blame men for this phenomenon is ludicrous. We as a gender have so much power that we dictate and control women's choices of career paths?

So what field did YOU study in school? Did you study in mathematics, science, engineering, or CIS? Or did you study in another field that could land you a job in the video game industry, an industry that you obviously care about? If not, then why didn't you? What compelled you to study something else? Were you simply interested in something else, or did a woman hold you back from pursing a gaming-related field of study?

Yeah, that paragraph I just wrote was intentionally ridiculous hyperbole. In no way do I expect you to answer any of those questions. But equally ridiculous is the notion that we women think that men are holding us back, forcing us to continue studying in "woman" fields. I never once said nor implied such an untruth in any of my posts, and neither have any of the women posting in this thread. We're not victims and we don't see ourselves as such. We have our lives - lives that WE chose - and we also enjoy a hobby that sometimes makes us feel like we don't exist or, perhaps worse, that our existence is profit poison and therefore needs to be removed (or, at least, covered up) in the products that our hobby's producers peddle to us.

Another thing - a lot of us women who ARE of an age where we could be in the industry grew up in times when the industry was a mere fledgling and industry-specific educational opportunities didn't exist. People laughed at you (men and women, laughing at both men and women) if you wanted to study it. During my college years, there was only a single quality video game development degree program in which one could enroll: Full Sail. However, in my college years, I was already studying film and I never heard of Full Sail until about five years after I graduated. I should also add that Avid had the only digital film editing tool at the time and it was so expensive that I learned to edit actual film. Back then, you couldn't find digital tools (gaming or otherwise) at most colleges due to cost.

I spent years of my childhood in arcades with my mom, back when Pac Man, Tron, Zaxxon, Q-Bert, and Burgertime were all the rage. Dragon's Lair was pretty cool but DAY-UM was it an expensive machine to play! She and I also battled it out many times on our Atari 2600. I got a copy of the ET game for Christmas 1982 and I loved it because I didn't know any better (I still have a soft spot in my heart for that game and my copy still works).

That also means that my parents and I lived through, and actually remember, the great video game crash. Part of my childhood coincided with the years when video games were officially declared a dead medium. Atari was in dire straights and the Famicom was months away - YEARS away for the Nintendo Entertainment System. The Commodore 64 was new, but too prohibitively expensive for most households so it wasn't much of an Atari successor. With the exception of an Atari 7800 and the whopping two games I owned for it, we were a game-free household until we got a PC in 1989 and then an SNES in '93. With only a CGA graphics card, I didn't have many games for the PC, and so I got back into gaming with the SNES when I was already halfway through high school. With video games absent for most of my childhood (both in my home and culturally) I didn't grow up with a desire to create them and, coincidentally, didn't pursue a degree that would get me into that industry... actually, I grew up wanting to create monsters for horror movies. True story.

So what am I getting at here? I'm saying that it's not as simple as "pick up your lives and switch your careers" or "you shouldn't have made the mistake of getting a degree in something that didn't get you into the video game industry." Blaming us for the current state of things is incredibly disingenuous because it doesn't take into consideration the lives we women led and what caused us to make the decisions we did. So now we do what we can to take a stand against something we feel isn't right. None of us can change our pasts or predict the future, so don't blame us for our inability to preemptively stop a problem that seems to have gotten worse in the last 10 years.

I'm just tired of the debate.

This issue has been done to death and I'm tired of it.

The solution to this is easy: stop reading about it, stop commenting on it, and leave it to those of us who DO care because it affects us directly.

 

[Vault101]

[snip

I'm talking on a smaller scope

if I were to make a thread raging over Ubisofts bullshit treatment of PC gamers count how many people would say my problems are insignificant, that I should shut up and that the problem is PC gamers should make their own games

 

[Vault101]

This issue has been done to death and I'm tired of it.
.

but youre not

you've got an axe to grind, I've got an axe to grind, the OP had an axe to grind

if you truly were you know what you'd do? you'd go and actually do something fun and productive, instead because you find this topic distasteful you INSIST on stomping into a debate on it and telling everone to shut up anf go away, its not even an argument, fuck I could respect an argument

I cannot respect those who cannot fathom why "the otherside" has an issue..and not only that but tells THEM their the entitles unreasonable ones...it fucking blows my mind it really does somone who has spend most of their life having most media with THEM in mind first and foremost telling others to stop whining and go away (not nessicaryly directed at you as I don't know your demographic)

people who don't care don't drag things out...people who find a topic benith their energy don't SPEND energy trying to convince others their "problems don't real"

so ok you give us advice? thats great..heres mine

stay out of gender threads if they upset you that much and go do something fun

see? I just saved you a hell of a headache didn't I?

 

[mecegirl]

(To further clarify, "white" privilege in this situation is the luxury of not having to think about the fact that an extremely vast majority of protagonists are W.A.S.P.s. This whole argument about non-representation of women easily translates to an argument about the lack of non-caucasian protagonists. And yet, you don't see a wave of people telling non-caucasians that the only solution to their valid issue is that they need to break into the industry themselves, regardless of the cost to their livelihoods.)

Just breaking in here, yes. Yes, people use the exact same rhetoric with people who are not White. It's just that the topic isn't about protagonists that are not White this time. I've also seen people say that shit to folks who want better representation for sexual minorities.

 

[Ten Foot Bunny]

(To further clarify, "white" privilege in this situation is the luxury of not having to think about the fact that an extremely vast majority of protagonists are W.A.S.P.s. This whole argument about non-representation of women easily translates to an argument about the lack of non-caucasian protagonists. And yet, you don't see a wave of people telling non-caucasians that the only solution to their valid issue is that they need to break into the industry themselves, regardless of the cost to their livelihoods.)

Just breaking in here, yes. Yes, people use the exact same rhetoric with people who are not White. It's just that the topic isn't about protagonists that are not White this time. I've also seen people say that shit to folks who want better representation for sexual minorities.

You got me, big time. I've never seen (or didn't notice) that argument levied at non-white individuals in regard to video games, which is a perfect example of my own white privilege. Thanks for the clarification and an opportunity for self-enlightenment!

 

[Strazdas]

ak93]
My point being, do people actually find a lack of female characters (playable and non) in games off putting?

they dont. if they did these games wouldnt sell.