Lemmibl said:
Can we just take a moment to appreciate how well Gearbox are representing females in their Borderlands games? I didn't play BL1, but both BL2 and BL:TPS are amazing at this. Everyone is an actual person with personal goals, motivations, flaws and personalities. They're people. Not constrained by their gender.
Okay, so there's pretty much only two female body types, but I'd say the same goes for the guys, and it's a modelling/rigging/time constraint/resources issue that is acceptable imo.
It's honestly a little sad that some of the least serious videogames with gratuitous toilet humor and plenty of violent gore are still one of the best at representing women fairly in the AAA industry.
Also: they also represent sexual orientation really well. Everyone's super fine with a character being gay or whatever (Jamie Springs for example), it's not made into a big deal at all.
You're confusing developer preferences for character preferences. A gay developer could create a game featuring genocide against homosexuals and that wouldn't be a mark against the game. Any developer can produce any content.
If your argument is - well *I* wouldn't enjoy such a game then - why not? Maybe you would learn something about genocide, about the way societies go about selecting their genocidal target, and/or about the basis for heterosexuals to hate homosexuals.
In terms of how the Borderlands series treats it's characters, the most prominent distinction is in whether or not a character can be "killed" (in quotes since all enemies respawn) by the protagonist. The "upper class" of characters are the ones who get special intros and cannot be killed, the "middle class" of characters are boss enemies who get special intros and can (and must with respect to plot progress) be killed, and finally the "lower class" of characters are regular enemies who get no special intro and who are genocided for experience, loot, and to progress through the game.
Your "actual person" remark - you're really comparing these cardboard characters to living human beings in the real world? After the dandified special intro introducing them as Super Stylish these characters do nothing but have occasional basic dialogue (these games are no Planescape: Torment), give out quests and rewards, and stand there.
I agree for the most part that the characters in the Borderlands series aren't constrained by their *gender*. They are constrained largely by the Saving the World, One Corpse at a Time game design philosophy which sets the protagonist off on a long-term murder spree that only ends when the game ends, when the Big Bad is dead.
As the Bee Gees can tell you, a man on a mission has no time to talk. As Roddy Piper can tell you - I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum, and I'm all out of bubblegum. Video game characters make The Terminator seem like a bastion of tolerance and restraint in comparison.
When we examine the chauvinism in game design we need to look at the "man on a mission", the "Hero's Journey", the saving the world, one corpse at a time. It's about the game design underpinnings of genocide and the Dungeons and Dragons conceit of empowering oneself through cleansing the world of "evil creatures", nevermind that the "heroes" are always the ones invading foreign lands and not surprisingly receiving a cold welcome as they emerge brandishing swords and deadly spells and talking about "phat loot". Then in "self defense", Stand Your Ground in other words, they go all George Zimmerman on the "monsters". Don't worry though - unlike George Zimmerman the "heroes" don't leave witnesses, just a dungeon full of corpses.
Why is the world always in need of saving? Why is there never time to talk? Why are creatures pushed to the margins of society genocided in order to further empower the "surface dwellers"?
It's funny. When Hitler demonized Jews and others and "leveled up" and gained "phat loot" by exterminating them we critically examine and reject his concept of his victims as "monsters". But when Dungeons and Dragons tells you monsters are monsters, well then, Dungeons and Dragons must be correct. The argument is that "it's correct because it's fictional" or "it's correct because killing monsters is fun". But why aren't the statements "it's incorrect because it's anti-thesis is also fictional" or "um, why is killing monsters so fun?" just as relevant?
If we claim that the "monsters" in Dungeons and Dragons are actually just metaphors for marginalized humans, that doesn't change the fact that the creatures, whatever they are, are still fictional. So this brings us to our desired effect upon these fictional creatures.
The protagonist could have any relationship at all to fictional creatures in a work of art. This begs the question then of why in video games the "hero's journey" nearly always involves mass murder as a response to marginalized creatures? Is that the modern definition of a hero - one who is willing to do anything, up to and especially including mass murder, in order to "preserve society"?
During the Vietnam War the United States military tortured Vietcong and civilians, ostensibly to benefit the "American way of life". This was shocking because the US had never officially sanctioned torture previously. The self-delusion of the American public led to "surprise" regarding Dick Cheney's "We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side" and Abu Ghraib, as if these were new things. To people obsessed with maintaining positive self-image to the point of willed amnesia, they *were* new.
Video games as well as Dungeons and Dragons, culturally and temporaneously, also emerged out of the Vietnam War, the time when what it means to be a Western hero defending Western civilization changed from John Wayne to Arnold Schwarzenegger. What America lacked in the Vietnam War was enough muscle to crush their enemies, so Conan the Barbarian emerged to squash the moral decay of the snake-like James Earl Jones, and "action heroes" from Charles Bronson to Clint Eastwood to Chuck Norris to Mr. Schwarzenegger taught us that steely resolve, a condescending glinting eye and moral aloofness, a flurry of bullets, and an unending quest for maximum muscle were the solutions America needed to continue to be-straddle a subject world. Fallout from this model has produced the Bro culture of today.
But none of these bastions of Western domination could ever contemplate the brutality and ruthlessness of a Dungeons and Dragons hero or video game protagonist, who demonize their victims, consider them not just sub-human but monsters devoid of receiving any shred of empathy, and who exist solely to provide not just XP and loot, but the ever-valued thing called "fun" to a Western population which is losing control of the world and fears for their future.
