Question, If Anita Sarkeesian is Right, why is Jack Thompson Wrong?

[gargantual]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cut-scenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die."

Now com April in the old Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness in captivity. Simpler game, simpler drive. Another example, For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a CoD/Tom Clancy trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if there's a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

 

[Netrigan]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cutscenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die".

Now com April in the Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness. Simpler game, simpler drive. For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a military CoD trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if theres a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

Really, the only reason I even talk the sexism angle is we're in a Sarkeesian thread. And I see a lot of the same types of problems as she does, but I put them in a different context. She's striking the blow against institutional sexism... while I crave new and interesting ways to experience stories. In my life-time, I've found the best writers to be very aware of the cliches of the genres they work in and actively subvert them.

That they're also casting off sexist/racist/homophobic tropes is almost besides the point. To channel Johnny Rotten for a moment, sexism is boring. I don't want any barrier between me and good stuff. When someone pulls out the damsel trope, I'm put off; not because it's sexist, it's because there's nothing interesting about watching a woman hang about waiting to be saved. You one of two choices. You can either pump up the tension by making the bad guy even worse (and the problem is tension can be easily broken if you push it too far) or you make her reaction to capture entertaining, which is the must smarter decision in the long run because you can come up with infinite minor varieties on it without undermining the scenario.

And this is largely the fight actresses had in the late 70s and early 80s. They had no interest in playing the damsel, and by giving them more to do you not only made the actresses happy, but you made their adventures much more entertaining in the process.

I was actually down for Modern Warfare through the first two installments. First one is genuinely well-written, while the second one has some entertaining set pieces and the Epic Mustache Guy is entertaining. The third one, made by a different Infinity Ward, was just crap. Oh, no, Soap is dead... remind me again which one Soap was... Tommy from Trainspotting... wait, Kevin McKid was in this game... why didn't you tell me."

 

[gargantual]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cutscenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die".

Now com April in the Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness. Simpler game, simpler drive. For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a military CoD trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if theres a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

Really, the only reason I even talk the sexism angle is we're in a Sarkeesian thread. And I see a lot of the same types of problems as she does, but I put them in a different context. She's striking the blow against institutional sexism... while I crave new and interesting ways to experience stories. In my life-time, I've found the best writers to be very aware of the cliches of the genres they work in and actively subvert them.

That they're also casting off sexist/racist/homophobic tropes is almost besides the point. To channel Johnny Rotten for a moment, sexism is boring. I don't want any barrier between me and good stuff. When someone pulls out the damsel trope, I'm put off; not because it's sexist, it's because there's nothing interesting about watching a woman hang about waiting to be saved. You one of two choices. You can either pump up the tension by making the bad guy even worse (and the problem is tension can be easily broken if you push it too far) or you make her reaction to capture entertaining, which is the must smarter decision in the long run because you can come up with infinite minor varieties on it without undermining the scenario.

And this is largely the fight actresses had in the late 70s and early 80s. They had no interest in playing the damsel, and by giving them more to do you not only made the actresses happy, but you made their adventures much more entertaining in the process.

I was actually down for Modern Warfare through the first two installments. First one is genuinely well-written, while the second one has some entertaining set pieces and the Epic Mustache Guy is entertaining. The third one, made by a different Infinity Ward, was just crap. Oh, no, Soap is dead... remind me again which one Soap was... Tommy from Trainspotting... wait, Kevin McKid was in this game... why didn't you tell me."

Sure I get that. Less helpless idiots'll be good for some fictional stories. Its the same annoyance one gets with dumb co-eds in horror flicks. You wonder whose going to demonstrate intelligence and attempt to solve their problems for once to increase the tension.

But for me its like some will make the equivocation because DiD is overused, that for example Holly Mc Clane in Die Hard suxxorx. And I'm thinking, ignore the cliche, watch the context. There were all sorts of male and female victims in that tower. I do believe trope subversion will help bring about fresher stories, but I can't always just give brownie points for doing so, because cultural messaging and the politics of representation won't necessarily save a narrative work, (even if good things happened to marginalized folks in it) if the context and substance does not inform or jibe with the whole piece.

B-Mask from Cheshire Cat Studioes says it better.

I think it?s worth noting something about subversion, or more specifically, subversion of a trope. It?s easy to get caught up in the notion that by virtue of undercutting an existing trope, you will somehow be a better storyteller. I agree with the notion that certain ideas are lazily parroted and diversity within films, is an important part of expanding creative horizons.

However the problem with tropes is that they don?t exist in a vacuum- they exist within the context of the piece and within the eye of the audience, the reaction differing from person to person. Juliet and Cleopatra both commit suicide over love, for example, but it is the context and execution of their individual stories that matters more than the straight up semantics of how and why they kill themselves.

 

[MysticSlayer]

That being said, expanding what Rape is and eroding due process is not the acceptable way of correcting that. Rape Panic resulted in strictly shameful acts like "Dear Colleague" letter which basically ensures that if a male student gets accused of raping another person his academic career is done. It has led to student council being allowed to peruse what is strictly criminal justice jurisdiction.

Unfortunately, rape is one of the hardest crimes to define and keep people pleased with the definition. If you emphasize the forced intercourse, it often leads to including "penetration" in the definition, which is taken as just targeting men and/or as diminishing what some people have experienced. If you emphasize the lack of consent, then you risk including things like "consent while intoxicated", which is often criticized as overextending the definition and sometimes seen as further targeting men. However, if you don't use such a broad definition, then how do we deal with those who get drunk at a party and then "consent" in a situation they wouldn't have if they were sober? Should we accuse the offender of exploiting the situation, even though he might have been too drunk himself to really conspire on that level; or do we say that the victim should have remained sober, which gets dangerously close to the victim blaming that is already too prevalent in completely clear cases of rape.

And I'm not saying this to justify the judicial problems surrounding rape. I'm just pointing out how tough it is to just define, and how what one person may call "expanding what rape is" could be taken by others as the all-encompassing definition of rape and that more traditional definitions are restricting what rape actually is.

And than we have Feminist Movement with their own agenda that scew it even further with restricting Rape as something that only men can do and other ridiculous policies and fallacies.

Actually, the paper I linked earlier sort of goes into this. It openly recognizes that women can commit rape even against men, but it then explains that 99% of rapes committed on campus are committed by men. In a broader sense, and from a victim standpoint, men account for only 9% of the victims of rape and sexual assault in the United States [http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf] (see page 3). In fact, as noted in that link, there's even too little data to fully work with when coming up with victimization reports on men, which is why so many focus exclusively women. As another study put it:

Though the vast majority of violent sex offending involves males assaulting female victims, females account for a small percentage of known offenders, and males account for a small percentage of victims.
Source (end of the first column of the Forward on page iii) [http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF]

In other words, yes, women can commit rape and men can be victims, but that doesn't mean there is suddenly a 50/50 split between them in both regards. A vast majority of victims are female and vast majority of the victims are male. This isn't to say that we should just ignore situations that don't fit into the standard male-on-female paradigm of rape and sexual assault, and I agree that we should be willing to address issues that don't fit the vast majority of cases. However, it also isn't entirely unreasonable that the discussion is normally about male-on-female cases, considering that normally is what rape and sexual assault are.

And no, feminists as a whole don't just act like all rape is male-on-female. Yes, feminists have a tendency to overly ignore the fact that men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, which is why we articles like this [http://feministing.com/2013/01/31/the-dangers-of-a-gender-essentialist-approach-to-sexual-violence/] one. At the same time, though, it isn't like feminism as a whole tries to act like men are the only ones who can rape.

I, myself, won't say one word, just give you an example
[video removed for space]
You are welcome

So a video from a guy who completely misreads a chart[footnote]Add up all three "yes" rows under female and you get approximately 1.2 million. The third "yes" row is not a total of the first two, which you can see if you add the first two up.[/footnote] is supposed to show that feminists completely ignore the possibility that men can be victims of domestic abuse.

But as one example of feminists who aren't saying men can't be victims:

Of those victimized by an intimate partner, 85% are women and 15% are men. In other words, women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
Source [http://www.feminist.org/911/crisis_facts.html]

Again, it is matter of what can occur versus what normally does occur. Yes, women (at least worldwide) are normally victimized in this type of violence, so it is likely to take up comparatively more of the discussion. However, that does not mean that feminists are just acting like men are never victimized.

Like I've already stated, we don't need to characterize every NPC. There are times to do it and times to not do it, but I'd say when games spend their time sexualizing female NPCs and letting us commit violence against them without giving much, if any, effort to characterizing them or other female NPCs, then the game is starting to deliver some (likely unintentional) disturbing messages about women's place in society.

But, by that very logic, every time you beat up men that shows off you are sending disturbing messages. Your logic doesn't hold up unless you treat women as special snowflake which is what whole Anita's shtick is based upon.

But how often are we actually playing as a female protagonist in a game with sexualized men that we can commit violence against while the male cast, if there are any male characters of note, is given the thinnest of characterization at best? Outside of maybe a few obscure indie titles, that just doesn't happen.

Yes, if it happens, it is wrong. I never said it wasn't wrong. But if we're going to talk about those instances, we actually need something to talk about.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Note: Sorry if this is a double post, but you made your comment while I was responding to someone else.

As I said rather than deliver an unintentional message it just needs to make it clear what the intentional message actually is, the idea of the captured person choosing the one rescuing her as such.

OK. I guess I just sort of see the two as the same, since making the intentional message clear removes most, if not all, possibility to send off an unintended interpretation to anyone actually paying attention. At worst, it will just come across as contradictory, but I don't think this is a place to have a discussion on ludonarrative dissonance, which itself may be less of an issue than some journalists make it appear.

Except that's the problem Dishonoured has realistically a handful of people and locations to deal with. The Scope of a 60 hour epic could be far larger covering what 6 times the locations and characters that dishonoured had. It's simply an issue of the shear scope of the games not allowing for the size and fleshing out so many characters.

I just want to clarify that I don't think every game needs the depth of a good 60 hour epic or Dishonored. It's nice when it happens, but I understand that the scope is sometimes just too large. All I really want is for games to do what they can, even if they ultimately end up have little more depth and characterization than your average Mario game.

 

[Netrigan]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cutscenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die".

Now com April in the Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness. Simpler game, simpler drive. For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a military CoD trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if theres a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

Really, the only reason I even talk the sexism angle is we're in a Sarkeesian thread. And I see a lot of the same types of problems as she does, but I put them in a different context. She's striking the blow against institutional sexism... while I crave new and interesting ways to experience stories. In my life-time, I've found the best writers to be very aware of the cliches of the genres they work in and actively subvert them.

That they're also casting off sexist/racist/homophobic tropes is almost besides the point. To channel Johnny Rotten for a moment, sexism is boring. I don't want any barrier between me and good stuff. When someone pulls out the damsel trope, I'm put off; not because it's sexist, it's because there's nothing interesting about watching a woman hang about waiting to be saved. You one of two choices. You can either pump up the tension by making the bad guy even worse (and the problem is tension can be easily broken if you push it too far) or you make her reaction to capture entertaining, which is the must smarter decision in the long run because you can come up with infinite minor varieties on it without undermining the scenario.

And this is largely the fight actresses had in the late 70s and early 80s. They had no interest in playing the damsel, and by giving them more to do you not only made the actresses happy, but you made their adventures much more entertaining in the process.

I was actually down for Modern Warfare through the first two installments. First one is genuinely well-written, while the second one has some entertaining set pieces and the Epic Mustache Guy is entertaining. The third one, made by a different Infinity Ward, was just crap. Oh, no, Soap is dead... remind me again which one Soap was... Tommy from Trainspotting... wait, Kevin McKid was in this game... why didn't you tell me."

Sure I get that. Less helpless idiots'll be good for some fictional stories. Its the same annoyance one gets with dumb co-eds in horror flicks. You wonder whose going to demonstrate intelligence and attempt to solve their problems for once to increase the tension.

But for me its like some will make the equivocation because DiD is overused, that for example Holly Mc Clane in Die Hard suxxorx. And I'm thinking, ignore the cliche, watch the context. There were all sorts of male and female victims in that tower. I do believe trope subversion will help bring about fresher stories, but I can't always just give brownie points for doing so, because cultural messaging and the politics of representation won't necessarily save a narrative work, (even if good things happened to marginalized folks in it) if the context and substance does not inform or jibe with the whole piece.

B-Mask from Cheshire Cat Studioes says it better.

I think it?s worth noting something about subversion, or more specifically, subversion of a trope. It?s easy to get caught up in the notion that by virtue of undercutting an existing trope, you will somehow be a better storyteller. I agree with the notion that certain ideas are lazily parroted and diversity within films, is an important part of expanding creative horizons.

However the problem with tropes is that they don?t exist in a vacuum- they exist within the context of the piece and within the eye of the audience, the reaction differing from person to person. Juliet and Cleopatra both commit suicide over love, for example, but it is the context and execution of their individual stories that matters more than the straight up semantics of how and why they kill themselves.

I was kind of assuming that a major part of good writing was in fact good writing. Recognizing when something isn't working is part of that. It's not unusual for a writer to hang onto an idea for years trying to figure out how best to approach it.

Writing a check your butt can't cash is more of a problem in serial fiction where you can toss out some random idea without any idea how to resolve it... then find yourself painted into a corner several months down the line when you're forced to deal with it. If you're writing Batman, you have to be careful not to take out any load bearing tropes. But if you're writing Watchmen, then you don't have to worry about issue #13.

I liken it to a magic trick. You have to play on people's perceptions, making them look in the wrong direction, make them think they know what's going to happen, and most of all, surprise them. If they know how you're doing your tricks, if you don't amaze them by adding some unexpected wrinkle to your performance, then you've failed. The audience is constantly learning and changing and you have to learn and change right along with them.

This is ultimately the tragedy of big budget entertainment. Things have gotten so expensive, they have to play it very safe. It's exceedingly rare someone is going to bet the farm on a wild idea and the world is poorer for the lack of experimentation. Sometimes you need to take a chance and utterly fail.

 

[carnex]

Unfortunately, rape is one of the hardest crimes to define and keep people pleased with the definition. If you emphasize the forced intercourse, it often leads to including "penetration" in the definition, which is taken as just targeting men and/or as diminishing what some people have experienced. If you emphasize the lack of consent, then you risk including things like "consent while intoxicated", which is often criticized as overextending the definition and sometimes seen as further targeting men. However, if you don't use such a broad definition, then how do we deal with those who get drunk at a party and then "consent" in a situation they wouldn't have if they were sober? Should we accuse the offender of exploiting the situation, even though he might have been too drunk himself to really conspire on that level; or do we say that the victim should have remained sober, which gets dangerously close to the victim blaming that is already too prevalent in completely clear cases of rape.

And I'm not saying this to justify the judicial problems surrounding rape. I'm just pointing out how tough it is to just define, and how what one person may call "expanding what rape is" could be taken by others as the all-encompassing definition of rape and that more traditional definitions are restricting what rape actually is.

I wouldn't say it's hard to define and be just. Define to everyone's satisfaction is impossible but to be just is rather easy.

Prosecution on the other hand is so damn hard that it's from that spot all the troubles come. That combined wit real psychological effects combined with social pressures. But I already wrote on that topic.

And drunk consent... seriously. If you are sober enough to decide should you steal or start a fight you are sober enough to consensually take part in sexual activity. Getting someone under intoxicating influence, especially with goal of abuse of that person, is already covered in law.

Actually, the paper I linked earlier sort of goes into this. It openly recognizes that women can commit rape even against men, but it then explains that 99% of rapes committed on campus are committed by men. In a broader sense, and from a victim standpoint, men account for only 9% of the victims of rape and sexual assault in the United States [http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/fvsv9410.pdf] (see page 3). In fact, as noted in that link, there's even too little data to fully work with when coming up with victimization reports on men, which is why so many focus exclusively women. As another study put it:

Though the vast majority of violent sex offending involves males assaulting female victims, females account for a small percentage of known offenders, and males account for a small percentage of victims.
Source (end of the first column of the Forward on page iii) [http://bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/SOO.PDF]

In other words, yes, women can commit rape and men can be victims, but that doesn't mean there is suddenly a 50/50 split between them in both regards. A vast majority of victims are female and vast majority of the victims are male. This isn't to say that we should just ignore situations that don't fit into the standard male-on-female paradigm of rape and sexual assault, and I agree that we should be willing to address issues that don't fit the vast majority of cases. However, it also isn't entirely unreasonable that the discussion is normally about male-on-female cases, considering that normally is what rape and sexual assault are.

And no, feminists as a whole don't just act like all rape is male-on-female. Yes, feminists have a tendency to overly ignore the fact that men can be victims and women can be perpetrators, which is why we articles like this [http://feministing.com/2013/01/31/the-dangers-of-a-gender-essentialist-approach-to-sexual-violence/] one. At the same time, though, it isn't like feminism as a whole tries to act like men are the only ones who can rape.

Problem it that while some feminists don't say that only men can rape, those whose words count and end up in laws and official policies do. that's how we ended up with "Dear Colleague" letter and other frankly embarrassing practices.

So a video from a guy who completely misreads a chart[footnote]Add up all three "yes" rows under female and you get approximately 1.2 million. The third "yes" row is not a total of the first two, which you can see if you add the first two up.[/footnote] is supposed to show that feminists completely ignore the possibility that men can be victims of domestic abuse.

But as one example of feminists who aren't saying men can't be victims:

Of those victimized by an intimate partner, 85% are women and 15% are men. In other words, women are 5 to 8 times more likely than men to be victimized by an intimate partner.
Source [http://www.feminist.org/911/crisis_facts.html]

Again, it is matter of what can occur versus what normally does occur. Yes, women (at least worldwide) are normally victimized in this type of violence, so it is likely to take up comparatively more of the discussion. However, that does not mean that feminists are just acting like men are never victimized.

Of all surveys done in western world ratio of victims was actually much closer than 5 or 8 to 1. Bigest difference actually was 62 to 38 percent while that particular study done in Canada was closer do 55-45 percent. Even that feminist is giving wrong data. And that data is probably based on official police investigations that are conducted under "Predominant aggressor policy" which tells officers to, before any other action is took, take into account relative size, strength and level of distress of intimate partners/members of a household. Now who is in great majority of cases smaller, weaker and appears in greater distress?

And how is that guy misreading article. Study is given as a source of data. Study says "that many men and that many women reported themselves as victims of domestic or intimate partner abuse". Article takes total number and writes "that many women were victimized". How is that misreading on video creators part?

Oh, you think first one? First table makes me wonder are columns mutually excluding and if they are not you could be right. However i didn't really think about that one since isolating what is nearly one half of victims leads to ridiculous domestic abuse help policies we have today.

Never the less, you are right about that one and I have to admit that neither clip creator nor I did present case exactly honestly.

But how often are we actually playing as a female protagonist in a game with sexualized men that we can commit violence against while the male cast, if there are any male characters of note, is given the thinnest of characterization at best? Outside of maybe a few obscure indie titles, that just doesn't happen.

Yes, if it happens, it is wrong. I never said it wasn't wrong. But if we're going to talk about those instances, we actually need something to talk about.

My point is that, unless there is something done to make that instance special. To make that act special or make otherwise positive character do something that would be seen as bad message thus potentially confuse children who shoudn't be able to play those games in fist place, than we have something to talk about.

If I can bash her skull while she is getting oil massage in micro bikini and my character is a positive character than we have something to talk about. But if I play assassin which has next to no morals when contract is question and I'm discouraged to strangle/maim/kill two strippers, we do not. Message clearly is not "this is OK" or "FUN" or event "not utterly disgustingly abominable thing to do"

If Anita ever manages to present cohesive and reasonable work I will pay attention to it and, like it or not, concede to what is empirically proven. It would not be the first time. Until than, I will tear her works into shreds whenever someone tries to put her on some pedestal of enlightenment. She already get far more attention, not only that she deserves, but that healthy discussion on topics she touches can stand without polarizing most of participants into two oposing armies hell bent on turning others insides into outsides.

 

[gargantual]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cutscenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die".

Now com April in the Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness. Simpler game, simpler drive. For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a military CoD trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if theres a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

Really, the only reason I even talk the sexism angle is we're in a Sarkeesian thread. And I see a lot of the same types of problems as she does, but I put them in a different context. She's striking the blow against institutional sexism... while I crave new and interesting ways to experience stories. In my life-time, I've found the best writers to be very aware of the cliches of the genres they work in and actively subvert them.

That they're also casting off sexist/racist/homophobic tropes is almost besides the point. To channel Johnny Rotten for a moment, sexism is boring. I don't want any barrier between me and good stuff. When someone pulls out the damsel trope, I'm put off; not because it's sexist, it's because there's nothing interesting about watching a woman hang about waiting to be saved. You one of two choices. You can either pump up the tension by making the bad guy even worse (and the problem is tension can be easily broken if you push it too far) or you make her reaction to capture entertaining, which is the must smarter decision in the long run because you can come up with infinite minor varieties on it without undermining the scenario.

And this is largely the fight actresses had in the late 70s and early 80s. They had no interest in playing the damsel, and by giving them more to do you not only made the actresses happy, but you made their adventures much more entertaining in the process.

I was actually down for Modern Warfare through the first two installments. First one is genuinely well-written, while the second one has some entertaining set pieces and the Epic Mustache Guy is entertaining. The third one, made by a different Infinity Ward, was just crap. Oh, no, Soap is dead... remind me again which one Soap was... Tommy from Trainspotting... wait, Kevin McKid was in this game... why didn't you tell me."

Sure I get that. Less helpless idiots'll be good for some fictional stories. Its the same annoyance one gets with dumb co-eds in horror flicks. You wonder whose going to demonstrate intelligence and attempt to solve their problems for once to increase the tension.

But for me its like some will make the equivocation because DiD is overused, that for example Holly Mc Clane in Die Hard suxxorx. And I'm thinking, ignore the cliche, watch the context. There were all sorts of male and female victims in that tower. I do believe trope subversion will help bring about fresher stories, but I can't always just give brownie points for doing so, because cultural messaging and the politics of representation won't necessarily save a narrative work, (even if good things happened to marginalized folks in it) if the context and substance does not inform or jibe with the whole piece.

B-Mask from Cheshire Cat Studioes says it better.

I think it?s worth noting something about subversion, or more specifically, subversion of a trope. It?s easy to get caught up in the notion that by virtue of undercutting an existing trope, you will somehow be a better storyteller. I agree with the notion that certain ideas are lazily parroted and diversity within films, is an important part of expanding creative horizons.

However the problem with tropes is that they don?t exist in a vacuum- they exist within the context of the piece and within the eye of the audience, the reaction differing from person to person. Juliet and Cleopatra both commit suicide over love, for example, but it is the context and execution of their individual stories that matters more than the straight up semantics of how and why they kill themselves.

I was kind of assuming that a major part of good writing was in fact good writing. Recognizing when something isn't working is part of that. It's not unusual for a writer to hang onto an idea for years trying to figure out how best to approach it.

Writing a check your butt can't cash is more of a problem in serial fiction where you can toss out some random idea without any idea how to resolve it... then find yourself painted into a corner several months down the line when you're forced to deal with it. If you're writing Batman, you have to be careful not to take out any load bearing tropes. But if you're writing Watchmen, then you don't have to worry about issue #13.

I liken it to a magic trick. You have to play on people's perceptions, making them look in the wrong direction, make them think they know what's going to happen, and most of all, surprise them. If they know how you're doing your tricks, if you don't amaze them by adding some unexpected wrinkle to your performance, then you've failed. The audience is constantly learning and changing and you have to learn and change right along with them.

This is ultimately the tragedy of big budget entertainment. Things have gotten so expensive, they have to play it very safe. It's exceedingly rare someone is going to bet the farm on a wild idea and the world is poorer for the lack of experimentation. Sometimes you need to take a chance and utterly fail.

Oh yeah I strongly advocate for creators in popular fiction to consider the importance of a device to the overall story rather than, because it'll sell. I tend to give someone a little benefit of the doubt with a cliche until I find they're NOT going to do anything interesting or mildly relevant with it, rather than raise a yellow card simply for a writer entertaining those ideas to begin with is all.

largely it is a case of modern commericalism oversaturating our entertainment past-times, and making base presumptions about diverse audiences instead of working to make people fall in love with worlds and characters. That is a problem and in gaming it gives cynical advertisers power over studioes. When people can't even make effective commercials that are about the products anymore, but instead 'shake their moneymaker of spectacle' to wait for a response.

Its like we wanna say to pop entertainment...

"Of course I'm gonna look out of curiosity, but that doesn't mean I'm giving you a 9/10. What are we evaluating here anyways? Don't tell me that's all you've got if you want me to be invested. Have SOME substance or purpose."

So for me I've become very, 'does what it says on the tin' with media. And asked what standards does a game set for itself, rather than what wider social barometers does this media have to safely satisfy to be considered relevant. Hence Bioshock Infinite can feel mmm...okay I spose.. and Resident Evil 4 or 3: Nemesis feels better because those games knew what they were in narrative and content.

Another example for me (I know I'm pulling these out of my ass, bear with me) would be the film "Battle: Los Angeles" It knew what it was as a simple summer action flick. The characters were hopelessly two dimensional, but I was drawn to watching it, because Aaron Eckhart on the Daily Show talked about fixing the hollywood mishaps with how it depicts army troop efficiency, and when I saw the action, I was thoroughly satisfied. The tension, the quick thinking of characters...I completely got what I came for.

On magic tricks. Oh yeah I know whatcha mean. A good employment of them'd be Brandon Sanderson from his Mistborn books and standalones like Warbreaker, and Elantris. He does misdirection perfectly in his high fantasy fiction. Leave it to a college english teacher to show people "how its done."

makes you focus on all the drama tween opposing entities, politics or well developed characters and shady types. The real bastards are always hiding in plain sight, its not built exactly like a mystery, but its has the same type of red herring. The drama tween the focused characters is established so strongly you'll rarely bother to look over your shoulder at what the 'ordinary' folks are doing, so when the book hits the climax, and they reveal themselves and all the overlooked or glossed over hints to their antagonism from earlier, you'll still feel like you've been had every time. Its foolproof, and the ruse doesn't need a GoT level of casting in order to work which makes it all the better, because you'll think you could've caught on if you opened your eyes a little more to everyone. But nope. weren't meant to...

 

[Aurion]

snip

Eh...the fact that they aren't positing the same thing (the games industry is sexist v. games will make you violent) is a good place to start when dissecting the differences between the two. It's entirely possible for one person to be right and another wrong when they aren't arguing the same thing.

Tactics and goals are pretty important to look at as well.

I think personally the whole Sarkeesian thing is overblown by both her supporters and detractors, and that this thread is a part of it- for heaven's sake, for a while there Thompson was trying to mount a legal crusade against the entire industry. It's just not comparable.

 

[Netrigan]

SNIPITY-SNIP

Not a superhero comic reader (Yuck...) but last I checked it was called "Green Lantern", not "Fridge Girl. Oh, and that tit in the green tights...".

But you know what? Gonna write a story. No plot developed yet, but it will feature ladies getting done in, bodies from floor to ceiling and a fridge when there's no more room, if I can fit that in somewhere. That one is to offend you, because you look for things to be offended by. I like that. The second feature will be gorgeous gogo-boys dancing in their underwear for the sexual gratification of other men (Note to self: Research Sebastian Young, thoroughly...<3). That one is just to confuse you.

How I'll get those two to fit together in a lovely little package will eat at me for days...

So in the scene you just described, I totally see the context you're seeing... but I can also see the frustration many women have with yet another female character being thrown on the fire for male character development.

Those frustrated women are mostly middle-class with very few problems that aren't emotional. Maybe folks can't live without a few "problems" in their lives. Maybe if they join a cause, regardless of how irrational, they think it gives them a personality. Maybe it's hard to sympathise with folks who think this is a "problem" to be concerned about. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Boring is boring. I'm a guy and I get annoyed when really interesting female characters get tossed aside to try to develop these lost causes. If they start offing properly good characters in a feeble attempt to make him slightly less boring, I'll probably move on.

As for Green Lantern, fridging the only decent character in the book was the latest (and for me, final) sin in a desperate attempt to make the book edgy. Just a few issues earlier they made the beloved previous star of the book evil and killed off dozens of popular characters... all in the service of setting up this lame Gen X Spider-Man wannabe who had to get his own, edgy "with great responsibility..." moment. Oh, woe with me, for my inability to be a proper super-hero has cost me my one and only decent supporting character... I shall declare vengeance on the man who killed her (a lame-o reject from the cancelled Captain Atom book, because we suck that hard) but at the last minute I shall wuss out and let the guy live because we can't be *that* edgy.

So, yeah, I'm kind of pissed they killed her off... and Kilowog... and fucked up Guy Gardner's on-going book... and wiped out the Guardians... and set off an entire fanbase whining about the shockingly stupid treatment of Hal Jordan... and just about everything else that particular writer did either on his own or at the behest of DC Editorial which couldn't find it with both hands, a flash-light, and a detailed map of their backside.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Let me talk to you about one of my favorite game series. Metroid.

So you can imagine I was pissed with other M right?

Well... Not so much.

You see unlike other so called Metroid fans here or so claimed, I knew the backstory of her parents, and Ridley before other M. It was portrayed in a comic series in Nintendo Power back when Super Metroid came out.

So she was raised by the Fedaration, under a figure she regarded as a father. And people said "they destroyed our lifeless non existent character who only served to be a woman in essentially every former game!" When really the story had been layed out nearly a decade before to be exactly like that.

What people whined about was that Samus didn't live up to their ideals. Ignoring that she was still the same badass but had incorporated a storyline already written for her nearly a decade before hand.

The US audience essentially refused to see the character I already knew was there because of my love for the franchise.

They wanted to make Samus their own ideal, as opposed to the ideal Nintendo wrote for her.

She had her vulnerabilities, her weaknesses like all good characters have. But she was still strong, able, and came out on top at the end of the day despite all odds.

But she wasn't good enough because she didn't meet their ideals.

In the least she wasn't the generic hardass asshole male character every other character is and actually seemed potentially human, but hell didn't meet their standards.

I am bitter to the Anti other M communities to this day, for being so damned blind to the actual history of Samus.

Not a Metroid fan, but I am a bit aware of the controversy over attempts to flesh out her character.

I think this is more a case of Fan Expectation than anything else. If you leave something hanging out there long enough, fans claim it and you run afoul of their expectations... every single time.

If Valve decided to actually develop Gordon Freeman's personality instead of just making him a mute crowbar, then you can bet that fans would be outraged that said personality is a complete betrayal of everything Gordon stands for... which, in reality, is absolutely nothing.

Samus strikes me as another similarly empty vessel protagonist which fans filled with their own experience, and nothing could possibly compare to that.

But I should point out, this isn't what I'm talking about when I talk about interesting characters. Half-Life is beloved because the game filled the universe (well, starting with 2) with a bunch of interesting characters, most importantly your female side-kick whose life does not revolve around Gordon Freeman. You're an important part of her life, but she's got all sorts of stuff going on and you're frequently drafted to take care of her personal business.

Tf00t made his example with double dragon saying you had 7 seconds to introduce a character as someone needing protection. Perhaps were not as limited by technology nowadays, but DiD depends on the project and its context to everything else. Not that one can't use other brief symbolic indicators to frame the importance of a character outside of being damseled but i'd say it depends on the circumstances.

As for samus, there are things you can imply about a character, even if they don't appear to be completely developed. Thats why so many fans of Metroid were averse to and dissapointed by Other M, because Samus's earlier depiction suggested a character with adventurous spirit and independence.

Another example of making a character significant within shorter frames of time (it certainly has been demonstrated before). Think about Health Ledger's Joker as opposed to Jack Nicholson's in Batman. You didn't get the origin story and buildup of becoming the Joker in the Dark Knight, but his character was fully realized in his mannerisms. where a viewer could easily infer about what fueled his nature. His tellings of his abuse when he held the knife to Rachel, his misanthropy and spite for the world, his looking to have a death wish, his dismissive looking away from people when he killed them, and his goal to pit society against each other and bring down their ideals (misery loves company). All of those are tell tale signs, that don't take as long to employ as a series of dedicated sympathetic character build up scenes.


The Last of Us and Buffy have the advantage of being more long form media. So it depends on how the story is framed. Is it a simple story that takes off and focuses on action and chase? Or is it a more in depth character drama? Depends on the plot and how the creator is framing desperation. Any character can be made to feel sympathetic for when they are lost or in distress. Such as when Tifa had to rescue Cloud, but it takes character development to do so.

So it like...should the rule universally be for popular fiction that no one gets kidnapped or in distress until we've been given a good few hour in to sympathize with them? Or maybe how everyone handles distress should evenly show people fighting for agency or submitting based on their personality, and not their appearance.

What if they demonstrate intelligence, agency, control and subversion despite their captivity like Holly McClane in Die Hard? I think What should be improved or more honed in upon with character in games is not defining character simply by their circumstances, but what they do, or are likely to do while in those circumstances.

I really should pair this quote down to the relevant bit, but lazy

I mentioned The Last of Us for its ability to get me completely committed to a doomed character in a very small amount of time. I'm absolutely floored by the connection I had with his daughter in the prologue. That has never happened before. I spent a handful of minutes playing as this character and I just fell in love with her.

It probably wouldn't work as well in a movie, because her character is pretty thin; but simply putting me in control of her for a short time created a bond. It's a great writing trick only video games can use.

I only just met Ellie, so I've not made any connection with her. I just got the game and need to run some errands later and am trying hard not to get sucked in before those are completed... or else they're mysteriously not be completed while I dedicate my day to this game.

I really don't want to get into older games where story was an after-thought at best. My judgment starts with fully acted cutscenes. A game like Prey spent more than enough time with the girlfriend to get me to care... it just failed to draw me in.

Yeah I see what you're saying. People use different tools to convey different things. The Last of Us opener, uses nervousness and limited agency in Sarah to communicate the depth of the outbreak, the loss of what was in the world before, and its a very powerful method for that opener. I still think the solider who shot her was outright stupid, should've switched off his mic and used his head. So that part threw me off a little bit. I'm going into the story like.."well she didn't necessarily have to die".

Now com April in the Ninja turtles side scroller just uses contrast and presumed innocence from the images of her in light contrasting to shredder's darkness. Simpler game, simpler drive. For me Leon saving Ada kinda worked in its cheesiness in Resident Evil 2 because it looked like he was just being dutiful and responsible, and she was struggling with the fact she worked for Umbrella and had to dump him eventually, but kept getting herself into sticky situations, that you felt Leon was more contextually equipped for because you were conditioned to play through it all as him. The information context isn't divorced from the game even though you're not as often playing through the perspective of the vulnerable, and usually when you are, its in duty of other characters in an injured or vulnerable state. Same contrast with Claire and Sherry. (though Sherry at least knew when to put her head down.)

Won't be a motivator for all players, but I'd say the TRUE WORST example of using death or distress in an attempt to make players care is Battlefield 3. Unequivocally...

There's no foundation or motivation to the story at all because the fact you're supposed to stop people with nukes is withheld for so long, and you're just shooting or listening to unmotivated faces, until significant plot details finally emerge, and you only know people because their name hovers. HAH! It's not all that ironic, but kinda funny, A game whose plot was actually made 10 times worse by attempting to withhold and subvert a military CoD trope rather than embracing it from the very beginning and going from there.

But those characters are LITERALLY the definition of empty vessels, because you can't imply anything significant about them from even their appearance, or momentary actions. So one of them dying from a shot or next to a rocket explosion feels no different than any of the other faceless mook enemies you gun down. Even 2D lady victims can emote more of an mildly interested player reaction than them.

So for me, I guess the precedent of those tropes ain't bad. What I'm primarily concerned about is how a game employs them. For me, I look more at the individual rather than judge at face value, while aware of negative connotations in tropes I tend to dig and see if theres a little more beneath the surface or some kind of reasoning.

Really, the only reason I even talk the sexism angle is we're in a Sarkeesian thread. And I see a lot of the same types of problems as she does, but I put them in a different context. She's striking the blow against institutional sexism... while I crave new and interesting ways to experience stories. In my life-time, I've found the best writers to be very aware of the cliches of the genres they work in and actively subvert them.

That they're also casting off sexist/racist/homophobic tropes is almost besides the point. To channel Johnny Rotten for a moment, sexism is boring. I don't want any barrier between me and good stuff. When someone pulls out the damsel trope, I'm put off; not because it's sexist, it's because there's nothing interesting about watching a woman hang about waiting to be saved. You one of two choices. You can either pump up the tension by making the bad guy even worse (and the problem is tension can be easily broken if you push it too far) or you make her reaction to capture entertaining, which is the must smarter decision in the long run because you can come up with infinite minor varieties on it without undermining the scenario.

And this is largely the fight actresses had in the late 70s and early 80s. They had no interest in playing the damsel, and by giving them more to do you not only made the actresses happy, but you made their adventures much more entertaining in the process.

I was actually down for Modern Warfare through the first two installments. First one is genuinely well-written, while the second one has some entertaining set pieces and the Epic Mustache Guy is entertaining. The third one, made by a different Infinity Ward, was just crap. Oh, no, Soap is dead... remind me again which one Soap was... Tommy from Trainspotting... wait, Kevin McKid was in this game... why didn't you tell me."

Sure I get that. Less helpless idiots'll be good for some fictional stories. Its the same annoyance one gets with dumb co-eds in horror flicks. You wonder whose going to demonstrate intelligence and attempt to solve their problems for once to increase the tension.

But for me its like some will make the equivocation because DiD is overused, that for example Holly Mc Clane in Die Hard suxxorx. And I'm thinking, ignore the cliche, watch the context. There were all sorts of male and female victims in that tower. I do believe trope subversion will help bring about fresher stories, but I can't always just give brownie points for doing so, because cultural messaging and the politics of representation won't necessarily save a narrative work, (even if good things happened to marginalized folks in it) if the context and substance does not inform or jibe with the whole piece.

B-Mask from Cheshire Cat Studioes says it better.

I think it?s worth noting something about subversion, or more specifically, subversion of a trope. It?s easy to get caught up in the notion that by virtue of undercutting an existing trope, you will somehow be a better storyteller. I agree with the notion that certain ideas are lazily parroted and diversity within films, is an important part of expanding creative horizons.

However the problem with tropes is that they don?t exist in a vacuum- they exist within the context of the piece and within the eye of the audience, the reaction differing from person to person. Juliet and Cleopatra both commit suicide over love, for example, but it is the context and execution of their individual stories that matters more than the straight up semantics of how and why they kill themselves.

I was kind of assuming that a major part of good writing was in fact good writing. Recognizing when something isn't working is part of that. It's not unusual for a writer to hang onto an idea for years trying to figure out how best to approach it.

Writing a check your butt can't cash is more of a problem in serial fiction where you can toss out some random idea without any idea how to resolve it... then find yourself painted into a corner several months down the line when you're forced to deal with it. If you're writing Batman, you have to be careful not to take out any load bearing tropes. But if you're writing Watchmen, then you don't have to worry about issue #13.

I liken it to a magic trick. You have to play on people's perceptions, making them look in the wrong direction, make them think they know what's going to happen, and most of all, surprise them. If they know how you're doing your tricks, if you don't amaze them by adding some unexpected wrinkle to your performance, then you've failed. The audience is constantly learning and changing and you have to learn and change right along with them.

This is ultimately the tragedy of big budget entertainment. Things have gotten so expensive, they have to play it very safe. It's exceedingly rare someone is going to bet the farm on a wild idea and the world is poorer for the lack of experimentation. Sometimes you need to take a chance and utterly fail.

Oh yeah I strongly advocate for creators in popular fiction to consider the importance of a device to the overall story rather than, because it'll sell. I tend to give someone a little benefit of the doubt with a cliche until I find they're NOT going to do anything interesting or mildly relevant with it, rather than raise a yellow card simply for a writer entertaining those ideas to begin with is all.

largely it is a case of modern commericalism oversaturating our entertainment past-times, and making base presumptions about diverse audiences instead of working to make people fall in love with worlds and characters. That is a problem and in gaming it gives cynical advertisers power over studioes. When people can't even make effective commercials that are about the products anymore, but instead 'shake their moneymaker of spectacle' to wait for a response.

Its like we wanna say to pop entertainment...

"Of course I'm gonna look out of curiosity, but that doesn't mean I'm giving you a 9/10. What are we evaluating here anyways? Don't tell me that's all you've got if you want me to be invested. Have SOME substance or purpose."

So for me I've become very, 'does what it says on the tin' with media. And asked what standards does a game set for itself, rather than what wider social barometers does this media have to safely satisfy to be considered relevant. Hence Bioshock Infinite can feel mmm...okay I spose.. and Resident Evil 4 or 3: Nemesis feels better because those games knew what they were in narrative and content.

Another example for me (I know I'm pulling these out of my ass, bear with me) would be the film "Battle: Los Angeles" It knew what it was as a simple summer action flick. The characters were hopelessly two dimensional, but I was drawn to watching it, because Aaron Eckhart on the Daily Show talked about fixing the hollywood mishaps with how it depicts army troop efficiency, and when I saw the action, I was thoroughly satisfied. The tension, the quick thinking of characters...I completely got what I came for.

On magic tricks. Oh yeah I know whatcha mean. A good employment of them'd be Brandon Sanderson from his Mistborn books and standalones like Warbreaker, and Elantris. He does misdirection perfectly in his high fantasy fiction. Leave it to a college english teacher to show people "how its done."

makes you focus on all the drama tween opposing entities, politics or well developed characters and shady types. The real bastards are always hiding in plain sight, its not built exactly like a mystery, but its has the same type of red herring. The drama tween the focused characters is established so strongly you'll rarely bother to look over your shoulder at what the 'ordinary' folks are doing, so when the book hits the climax, and they reveal themselves and all the overlooked or glossed over hints to their antagonism from earlier, you'll still feel like you've been had every time. Its foolproof, and the ruse doesn't need a GoT level of casting in order to work which makes it all the better, because you'll think you could've caught on if you opened your eyes a little more to everyone. But nope. weren't meant to...

The aspiring writer in me wishes I had discovered Doctor Who back in late 80s and early 90s when I was still young enough to be a bad writer and think I was good I might have actually figured out how to write fiction properly.

The fun of Doctor Who is it loves messing with everything. That's not a monster, that's a guy in a poorly made monster suit... come on, Romana, how could you not tell the difference?

There's just something wonderful and free about the whole thing, basically letting you use, deconstruct, subvert every trope and cliche in existence. Even if you're not adding anything new to the tool box, there's a real spirit of the story could bounce any number of ways and you were encouraged to put an odd spin on the ball just to see what happened. And the bad guys invading the base are (rolls plot dice) only trying to protect their nest and the Doctor (rolls plot dice) fails to save them and is upset about failing. The head of the base (roll plot dice) was initially distrustful of the Doctor and (roll plot dice) was driven mad by the events and (rolls plot dice) activates the base self-destruct. The Doctor (roll plot dice) manages to save a handful of human survivors (rolls plot dice) with the help of one of the dying aliens.

Maybe in there you notice a weird left turn you can take and you take it just because you want to see what happens if the invading aliens actually take the Doctor up on his offer to help them find another world to colonize. Does it become a story of the Doctor trying to protect the invading aliens from humans previously defending their homeland? Hey, that could be cool, let's try that. If it doesn't work, we can always write a big bloody Dalek adventure next week.

It's kind of what Alan Moore did. He spent a few years writing shorts for 2000AD, just tossing random ideas out and figuring out what worked and what didn't. Before getting his big break on a barely not-cancelled Swamp Thing and wowing us Americans with his ability to play around with common tropes.

 

[MysticSlayer]

And drunk consent... seriously. If you are sober enough to decide should you steal or start a fight you are sober enough to consensually take part in sexual activity. Getting someone under intoxicating influence, especially with goal of abuse of that person, is already covered in law.

So now we're comparing a woman's consent to sex with crimes?

Problem it that while some feminists don't say that only men can rape, those whose words count and end up in laws and official policies do. that's how we ended up with "Dear Colleague" letter and other frankly embarrassing practices.

For starters, that's really just your theory, not an established fact.

Second, let's actually look through the "Dear Colleague letter" [http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/dear_colleague_sexual_violence.pdf] that I'd imagine is the one in question:

For starters, we have this quote:

The report also found that 6.1 percent of males were victims of completed or attempted sexual assault during college.

(That's from page 2)

In other words, it very clearly states that women aren't the only victims of sexual assault. Furthermore, it doesn't actually specify a gender for the offender. In fact, Page 16 clearly states that the perpetrator may be a man or a woman. Simply put, it isn't targeting men specifically as offenders, nor is it targeting women specifically as victims.

So no, it does not seem like this is some incident of feminists who believe women can't rape trying to influence policy. If anything, this goes against your assertion that the feminists saying women can't rape are the ones in power.

Of all surveys done in western world ratio of victims was actually much closer than 5 or 8 to 1. Bigest difference actually was 62 to 38 percent while that particular study done in Canada was closer do 55-45 percent. Even that feminist is giving wrong data. And that data is probably based on official police investigations that are conducted under "Predominant aggressor policy" which tells officers to, before any other action is took, take into account relative size, strength and level of distress of intimate partners/members of a household. Now who is in great majority of cases smaller, weaker and appears in greater distress?

Actually, it isn't hard to find many [http://www.thehotline.org/is-this-abuse/statistics/] other [http://www.americanbar.org/groups/domestic_violence/resources/statistics.html] studies [http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4984] that have shown women are the victims in over 75% of cases, many times over 80%. I'm not sure what it is like in Canada, but given that these are from the United States, your assertion of "all surveys done in the western world" still doesn't hold up. Sorry, but if you're going to incorrectly assert that "all" other surveys are nowhere near the same levels, you need to back it up or at least not dismiss one set of statistics as "lies" just because they're inconvenient.

Furthermore, has anyone actually been able to show that predominant aggressor policy is significantly affecting these outcomes? Yeah, I understand that we have surveys that go to a 60/40 split, but is this due to any changes in accounting for predominant aggressor policy, or is it due to other factors, such as surveying different countries? Even then, we're still sort of getting into the territory that the gender stereotype of women being the weak, helpless ones while men are the strong, assertive ones is problematic to both genders. This is, believe it or not, a feminist position. I believe links I've given already have gone into how these issues affect people of all genders, and I'm pretty sure even I've said enough in this thread that this isn't just about women. It just happens that women are disproportionately more negatively affected, so the discussion will be much more centered around how it affects them, but gender stereotypes do, in many ways, harm everyone.

Never the less, you are right about that one and I have to admit that neither clip creator nor I did present case exactly honestly.

It's OK. I mean, there is a case to be made that it was just a coincidence that both came to approximately 1.2 million, but the way in which the guy has addressed people that brought this up to him sort of shows that he was misreading the table.

My point is that, unless there is something done to make that instance special. To make that act special or make otherwise positive character do something that would be seen as bad message thus potentially confuse children who shoudn't be able to play those games in fist place, than we have something to talk about.

If I can bash her skull while she is getting oil massage in micro bikini and my character is a positive character than we have something to talk about. But if I play assassin which has next to no morals when contract is question and I'm discouraged to strangle/maim/kill two strippers, we do not. Message clearly is not "this is OK" or "FUN" or event "not utterly disgustingly abominable thing to do"

I really don't think this is an issue about children. I'm also not saying that, in some way, men will suddenly become misogynists from playing the game. It's not even about potentially sending a message that it is OK to beat a woman to death simply because she isn't dressed properly. It's the idea that every woman in the world exists for the man. They simply exist as eye candy, cannon fodder, and any other means to an end for the likely male protagonist and likely male player. Now, having NPCs for which this is the case isn't necessarily the problem in itself, but when there's nothing else in the game, such as female characters who actually exist outside of these norms, then the game begins to show signs of (likely unintentionally) conveying that message.

And before there's any confusion, yes, this lazy writing can affect more than just female characters, but that isn't the discussion being had here.

 

[Shodanbot]

We exist on a board where people seem to think game endings, DLC, Call of Duty multi-player, and Anita Sarkeesian are "problems". This kind of thing ranks quite a bit higher on the list of First World Problems than just about everything which is regularly complained about here.

I "exist" on this board by happenstance. Here for Yahtzee (bless him) and Jimbo. Usually don't like moralising, but Jim has irony on his side.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Understood the context perfectly. It's still the Green Lantern on title. Guessing it's also a tragedy not a comedy.

Since I love tossing out examples of the greater pop culture, the somewhat disappointing SyFy show and MMO, Defiance. The show isn't bad, with a sizable cast of characters who grow more interesting with every passing episode. It's the kind of show that promises to be quite good once they figure out how all the pieces fit together. The biggest exception to the rule would happen to be the boring white guy "rogue with a heart of gold" character at its center. The show has a huge Boring White Guy Problem and he's the star of the show.

Never seen or heard of Defiance, but I'd agree somewhat with you. "Rogue with a heart of gold" is a little stale for me (until it's not), I prefer a lead with a few emotional and sexual problems. It's not likeable but it's relatable, unfortunately relatable isn't marketable to a broad audience. Film is commerce, not art.

Back to our First World Problems.

One of the reasons I asked for examples was because I try to understand why people are expressing frustration. I just rewatched her second Damsels video and what came out loud and clear was her on-going frustration with a lack of interesting female characters in most of these games (a frustration I very much share). In an interview, she expanded her thoughts on Dishonored where she talked about how they set up a potentially interesting character with the Empress... then killed her off to start the story of a male character. She enjoyed the game, is hoping for a sequel, but her experience with the game is tinged with disappointment as there's no attempt to craft any interesting female characters other than the dead one.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Only watched her latest video. Didn't expect it to be 30-odd minutes.

It's not the content of her videos that puts a smile on my face. It's her dismissive reaction to her critics and the criticism of her video's content. And as far as I'm aware, she has not agreed to any formal debate. Any her public appearances has been under her control.

she'd be terrifying, if she wasn't so obvious.

So the problem isn't so much with Gears of War having Dom mercy killing his wife, but with women being relegated to a very thin strip of a male character's often-repeated story arc. Female characters are often important only in their absence, rather than their active participation within the narrative. That they can complete their duties while dead is offered up as proof of how limited their contribution is.

Videogames get a pass on story for me. Can't deny that gaming is an interesting story telling medium, but I'm concerned with whether the game is fun or whether it is not. Wouldn't be a stretch to think that's a primary concern for a sizable majority of gamers. Example: In the past two years, the only games I've been playing are DoomRL and Xenonauts. You could fit the plot of both of those games on a single post-it note.

Don't know if you read books, but do know you read comics. The only comic I've read, after some hesitation, was From Hell. It surprised me. It's actually literature. OK, women getting killed is an issue for you, but I'd still recommend it to you if you're after "interesting" characters.

Anyways, must dash, have a few messages to read. I'll keep you posted on that story of mine. Not being facetious at all.

 

[Netrigan]

Saints Row - offers other ways to make money besides these missions and with the exception
of maybe one occurence in 4 games they are not main story missions required to
progress in the main narrative.

In the interest of focusing on the weakest part of your argument while ignoring just about everything else

Look, I'm about to head into The Last Of Us, I make no excuses.

This is a fairly decent example of where you and I part company. This is a mode that is in the game... three games to be exact. You get bonuses for completing it. It's part of 100% completion. While it's not essential to completing the game, the game is damn well encouraging you to do it. It's not there by accident. Someone at Volition thought this was a cool idea for a game mode.

That it's stupid irritating at high levels thanks to stupid AI which is confused by how car doors operate... unless you're temporarily tossed out of a car in which case they instantly know how to get out of a car even though you really don't want them to because it's going to take 30 seconds for them to figure out how to get back in. But that's beside the point.

Anyway, it's part of the game. Employees of the company worked for untold hours perfecting this thing. A lot of time and effort went into making this turd of a game mode. To me, that makes it fair game for criticism.

Keep in mind, this is one small part of a game and it doesn't IMO tip the game over to the Dark Side. And if the caveat during the Damsel video is in effect, she's saying much the same thing. She went to great pains to point out that her criticism of those particular scenes didn't invalidate the over-all experience. That good games can have elements which could and should be criticized.

So to me, that parade of examples isn't "all of these games are dreadful things which no right thinking person should play", it's about saying "this are aspects which are troubling". I happily defend the Saints Row series. But there's bits and pieces I happily criticize. I'm right there with everyone complaining about the extended tutorial that is Saints Row The Third, even though I love playing that game. It shouldn't be passing off side activities as main missions to pad out its run time. That's bullshit.

So if someone wants to criticize the POS that is Snatch for being sexist... well, I honestly can't come up with a reason why it isn't. I can't even defend it on the basis of fun. Truth be told, I'm responding to this bit just to say "thank god it's not in part IV"

It still doesn't change that Saints Row is surprisingly female-friendly even with the cheeky attitude toward strippers and prostitutes. And there's a decent chance many of those female fans wouldn't have a problem with Snatch because it fits in with that cheeky fun.

And I don't want to suggest anything about any of your other examples. I'm happy to let those points stand without further comment. I don't really want to get in the game of attacking all your examples. Just using this one to illustrate how I see the situation differently.

 

[Netrigan]

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Understood the context perfectly. It's still the Green Lantern on title. Guessing it's also a tragedy not a comedy.

I keep coming around to the idea of Good Writing, so I'll respond in this spirit.

Killing off his girlfriend was just bad writing. It served very little purpose besides taking away the most enjoyable part of the book.

It's like the opposite of the Omar Problem in The Wire. If you've not watched the show, Omar was the best character on that show. He was a gay gangster who robbed drug dealers and there was nothing stereotypically gay about him. He's still a bit of an oddity. But him being gay is only a small part of why he was so damn cool.

And The Wire kept him around long past there being a point to his presence... but that was kind of cool because Omar. Sometimes you just keep those type of characters around because they make your show more enjoyable.

So here's this really cool character in Green Lantern who, unlike the guy who is Green Lantern, sees just how cool and awesome being Green Lantern is. It's been ages since I read it, but I don't remember any other character quite like that before. She was a bit of a cheerleader for Kyle, but she lit up the page unlike her slacker boyfriend.

And the writer pissed that away to go for angst. Boring fucking angst which was in every freakin' book at the time. Bah.

 

[Netrigan]

After typing that up, I re-watched her second Damsel video (and read an interview she did with IGN).

I'm pretty sure her conclusion is pretty close to my own, although she hits the "violence against women" angle a lot harder than I do. With only a few exceptions, she doesn't seem to be calling out any particular example as bad. She even points out that most of these examples stand up within the in-game logic.

Except she then claims that it doesn't matter because of the prevalence of violence against women in society then it's sending out the message it is fine.

She is essentially saying context doesn't matter.

As I said I can understand not wanting to show Constantine doing some cool super fight then going "I need a smoke" "Ah that was good". However Constantine having a cigarette then nearly coughing up a damn lung, that's not glamorising it.

Again it's the Stan Lee and the Comics code authority approach of a blanket ban rather than merely saying don't encourage the activity.

The problem is more with the repetition of the idea at the expense of presenting more interesting female characters. There seems to be an attempt to drive this home with spamming various character's motivations to show how similar they are to one another. After his wife is brutally murdered he must save his daughter, after his wife is brutally murdered he must save his daughter, after his wife is brutally murdered he must save his daughter, etc.

Again Tropes are used for a reason.
The common reason for that trope is simply said person loved their wife and their daughter is a reminder because of their time together.

It's hard to comment on most of these because I've not played the game, but Prototype 2 did it and straight up did not earn whatever emotion they were going for.

It's a classic show, don't tell moment. If you're going to use love as the motivation factor, then telling me they love the character isn't enough. To use an example from Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, there's a scene after they restore the power and you hear Gary Oldman's iPad power up.

He runs over to it and brings up pictures of his dead son and you can see the joy and anguish washing over his face as he gazes upon the face of his dead son for the first time in a very long time.

It's a beautiful little scene which says everything it needs to say in seconds.

Prototype 2 spent way longer setting up his wife and daughter without capturing an ounce of genuine emotion.

I would play the game slightly differently.

Such as, name an interesting female character from the studio Rockstar.

I'm waiting...

I think the closest is Marston's wife in Red Dead Redemption, who in her all-too-brief appearances seems the type of feisty woman we should see more of in the RDR Universe. So, of course, she's left at home.

What about Bonnie MacFarlane ?

Bonnie strikes me a lot like the love interest in GTA IV. Rockstar seemed to have been a bit stung by criticism when they made GTA IV and RDR and both game feature a strong anti-violence message and good girls as sex-less love interests... been forever since I played RDR, but I remember her being interested in him and he wasn't.

So, I'll accept your answer, but with the caveat that I talking more about the kind of women who fit in with the tale of violence being told, and they exist as a counter-point.

Whereas I could ask "name an interesting female character in the Saints Row series" and come back with a dozen entries.

We're talking about two very similar games, but one embraces the idea of interesting female characters and the other seems to go out of their way to avoid anything even potentially interesting. Why is it the bigger studio comes up so short on this?

Assassin's Creed is pretty good at it, Dishonored was crap. Borderlands 2 is good at it, Mafia 2 was not.

It's not about the complete absence, it's about how many games don't put any effort at all into it. Granted, many of the companies have a problem creating *any* interesting characters in their games (see Watch Dogs and Prototype, both really fun games with zero personality), so it might just be a writing problem and not a sexism problem.

Oh come on the first prototype was pretty good I mean Elizabeth Greene has an amazing bit of plot behind her.

Been a very long while since I played it. None of the characters really left an impression on me. I do have a better memory of the first Prototype than the second despite the second being more recent in my mind.

But generally speaking good minority or female characters tend to come about by the writers making a point of creating some. When Doctor Who producer, Russell T. Davies, took Primeval to task for not having any minority actors in their main cast, the reaction from Primeval was "oh, my god, you're right" and they made immediate steps to correct that oversight. When Doctor Who producer, Stephen Moffat, was called out for not including any gay characters in his first season as show runner, his reaction of "oh, my god, you're right" and made a point of putting gay characters into the show. And I wish a series like Grand Theft Auto would do the same. We're saying "you're not including any interesting female criminals" and there response seems to be "look, you can touch the strippers now."

And fuck them for that. In a video game environment where Shandi and Tiny Tina exist, that's just lazy... and I hate lazy writing.

Ok let me name the three good characters held up by 90% of the present branch of feminists leading this debate.

Faith, Mirrors Edge
Jade, Beyond good and Evil
Chell, Portal


So here's something about them in terms of characters.


Faith - brooding yet motivated person living outside of the system trying to subvert it and in doing so ends up having to help her system from going down because despite working in the system someone in it is setting her up.

Jade - Female journalist who uncovers a giant global conspiracy to subjugate people and after she starts to reveal it the system takes revenge by kidnapping her friends. The Male characters present are a big mechanic who's fairly bumbling and a Knight who is also bumbling and generally solves problems by smashing his head into them in his suit of armour. Oh and she is an orphan who's grown up at the orphanage.

Chell - a Mute who is constantly facing fat jibes / comments on her looks.

Why they are mostly loved is non violence present. Seriously beyond that they aren't that greatly developed as characters. Aside from the odd grunt and "I hate the system, the system hates me" Faith is pretty much Gordon Freeman. Even Jade isn't fleshed out that much in terms of backstory. Also can anyone else see a pattern here as far as the whole "Oppression of the people" and Systems designed to subjugate and overthrowing them. I mean it's almost too easy to point to that as another possible reason why they are held up. Especially combined with the "I want a character like me" attitude that seems pretty prevalent in said group advocating these as the best examples of good female characters.

I wouldn't count any of them as particularly interesting. They're all alright. Good competent leads, but there's far more interesting characters out there.

Also as you brought up Defiance I should probably say there's a lot more to Nolan than you'd think, beyond Rogue with a heart of gold. Unfortunately the show handles it pretty badly and some of the important stuff hasn't been revealed on the show (yeh they put major plot points about the backstory in the video game).

Backstory time

Nolan was actually part of an elite commando unit in the Pale wars. Nolan during this time gained the nick name "No Man Nolan" due to his brutal approach and morality of "Kill everyone, leave no-one standing and let God decide whos good or bad and who should be condemned and saved etc" Even as an Athiest I found that quite a good motivation as at least he has his convictions. multiple times his squad were pulled up for unorthodox actions and excessive use of force however they were used as a kill squad. They were essentially the ultimate Black ops kill squad sent in to kill all aliens then leave the place empty.

During one mission however they interrupt cultists doing some ritual on a young Irathient girl. Nolan rescued her and then acted as a father figure to her.

During a subsequent mission his squad went to defiance. A "freak accident" occured and a terraforming energy blast thingy (it's not too specific what it really is beyond a blast) hits the nearby town decimating the town harming many civilians along with the Voltans and human armies fighting there. When the Defiant few arrived shortly after the blast both the voltans who arrived and Nolan's squad threw down their arms and worked together to free trapped civilians and the soliders of both sides, not caring if they were human or Voltan everyone helping everyone else. What's not told in the TV show is Nolan's squad were responsible. The entire even which triggered the end of the Pale Wars was a deliberate action and not a freak accident. Nolan and his squad sacrificed both human and voltan lives in the hopes that it would lead to the cease fire. They took the approach of sacrificing lives to save more.


Nolan left to become and Arkhunter in an attempt to avoid the Earth Military Coalition , not wanting to be dragged back in and wanting to be able to raise Irisa. Doing what he can to try and make sure Irisa and least has some kind of a stable life.

It's not quite the rogue with a heart of gold so much as a story of someone attempting to redeem themselves for their past actions having realised how wrong they were in the past. Very similar to the story of doc in the show who

Spoiler

was part of the development division responsible for making new and more deadly experimental voltan weaponry including weapons of mass destruction and even creating sleeper agents in human disguise using genetic modification

I'm aware of the back story and I see them make weak stabs at making him a bit edgier than he has been so far... but he's your dad's idea of Han Solo in execution. He could be a fascinating character if they played to his back story and made him feel dangerous, but they want him to be the voice of reason more often than not and he never feels like a dangerous character.

A better actor could probably sell it, but the guy who plays him is all kinds of generic.

 

[Netrigan]

In the interest of focusing on the weakest part of your argument while ignoring just about everything else .................Snip

Except Saints Row for the most part is a deliberate parody of crime games. It's totally over the top and knows it in pretty much every aspect. This is a game series with some damn strong female characters of it's own such as Kenzie and even Shaundi however both would probably face plenty of flak because they are characters who are seen as sex positive. I mean the whole thing with Shaundi initially is her approach of "So I've slept with people, does it matter who and how many unless they're trying to kill us ?"

So how was Snatch a parody of... anything?

Sorry man, I just don't like the activity on any level. Insurance Fraud usually annoys me because I suck so hard at it, but god it makes me laugh so I love it. Snatch isn't fun and doesn't make me laugh.

And perhaps you missed a bit of the context of my remarks. Why should an *ahem* interesting female character be thrown under the bus for the service of a *ahem* boring male character.

Understood the context perfectly. It's still the Green Lantern on title. Guessing it's also a tragedy not a comedy.

I keep coming around to the idea of Good Writing, so I'll respond in this spirit.

Killing off his girlfriend was just bad writing. It served very little purpose besides taking away the most enjoyable part of the book.

It was a trigger the cause he to go after the villain.

If it's bad writing then Shakespeare was terrible, I mean killing off an innocent character merely to push along the plot. How dare her kill Mercutio which in turn triggers Romeo to kill Tybalt in revenge and leads to him being banished. It sets in motion the main story elements off the back of this one event. Mercutio wasn't that fleshed out as a character.

If it were a self-contained story, then maybe. Although the revenge angle was pretty much crap so it didn't really work as a story either IMO.

But we're dealing with an on-going series. You don't throw away your good stuff unless you can replace it with better stuff. You've got to think long-term when you're doing a series and I think her death was classic short-term thinking.