The Most Dangerous Woman in Videogames - Anita Sarkeesian

[Arkynomicon]

I'm rather sick of the whole genus debate because a lot of people seems to think that someone needs to be punished on both ends. I have no sympathy for obnoxious people with an agenda because they don't have a shred of humility.

All I see in these videogame debates is people that are throwing a tantrum that they are not being panderd to.

It just infuriates me that people are wasting so much time and energy on telling people that they are having fun the wrong way.

Forcing your own opinion and ideology on someone else is frankly fascist.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

Thats something that comes up a lot, for example in the GTAV review in Gamespot, its like they just ignored all the exaggeration to everyone else and only focused on the women, in that game everyone is a fucking stereotype and yet the women stereotype is the only one that matters, isnt that what being sexist is? Like, you can make fun of one gender and not the other? The game treats both genders with the same amount of disrespect but somehow it should only be applied to men to make it not sexist according to them.

The problem is that male characters are the only ones with any agency in the game. Sure, the game does make fun of male stereotypes, but at least you can play as one. The women in the game are presented nothing more than one-note jokes. (Of course, it is GTA, so it has a sense of humour and literacy of a 12-year-old, so not that surprising.)

Even the male protagonists who are ridiculed, are also shown to have complex and interesting lives as you play the game. Michael's mid-life crisis, Trevor's mother issues and schizophrenia, Franklin's battle between loyalty to his roots and freeing himself from them. There's nothing remotely like that for the female characters, the only female character development I recall was from an NPC, when Michael's wife decides to ditch the yoga instructor and stay with Michael - but even that's pretty shallow and revolves around the needs of the male player character.

 

[Icehearted]

I'd agree with this sentiment; though more broadly than just the Escapist.
Looking back, the entire "gaming world" is more unstable and polarized than it has ever been.

People are flipping the fuck out and generating fake controversy just to grab attention.
Sarkeesian herself could never have attained the level of support she has without the controversy and backlash. *shrugs*

Actually people are flipping out at this point because hell now it's actually changing things. Mass effect 3 got an new ending, TB got his video back up strike removed, Dota2 is getting diretide. While not everything is in right intentions people now NEED to yell back because hell what if something changes that they didn't want to change but since other people yelled it's going to, I.E. stanley parable self censoring and removing that song from LBP or something from the map in COD come to mind.

I think that's a gross overstatement about Mass Effect 3. I would also actually argue that changes to anything are not necessarily reflective of gaming movements as a whole but decisions made by a developer or studio on an individual basis. Definitely not reflective of a trend, not of anything changing, and none of this is exactly new. Hell I can remember when Mortal Kombat was censored on consoles, then changed due to fan backlash for the SNES, and that's just off the top of my head. Some studios fold, some do not, this is nothing new.

 

[Karadalis]

I keep seeing this. "Anita is grossly misinformed." However, I've yet to see someone follow that up with a referenced example of how. It's as if it's become the thing to say; it's just assumed to be right because it's repeated. Yet, here we are, another post, another use of it and still no actual demonstration of how she is "grossly misinformed".

This is from you yes?

There exists tons of evidence that shows shes "missinformed"

Thought that would mean that she accidentialy got it wrong to wich i say.. no she didnt.. she fabricated her "evidence" to fit her cause wich can be observed by just looking how she talked about planet of the dinosaurs aka Starfox adventures before it became starfox adventures. She claimed it was suposed to be Krystals game... not mentioning that the game was allways suposed to feature a male character and that gameplay would be split between the two. All she did mentioned was that the game featured 2 characters/players. She actually claimed that the game was changed to make fox mcloud the main character because he was male. While in truth it was simply a marketing decision to put a familiar character to replace the unknown male char that was suposed to be in the game in the first place to one that had a certain fan apeal and most importantly was part of an allready well established franchise.

Also she is the only one that strips characters of all personality and reduces them to objects. When princess peach gets kidnapped the whole mushroom kingdom is at risk, wich if you think about it means that peach is the only capable regent in the mushroom kingdom... so the only person who can run the place is a woman... mario certainly does not simply take over and rule in her stead.

So while she isnt an ass kicking super women she actually has traits that arnita herselfe deems as positive.. that peach prefers peace over conflict, that she prefers cooperation and not fighting.

What do you think happens when such a person meets up with a tyrant like bowser? Ofcourse they get kidnapped (or worse but this is after all a mario game) because they are a pacifist.

So in short following her own words princess peach is sexist because she doesnt fight for herself and has to be rescued... but if she fought back she would still be sexist because she would just be a female character that picks up masculine traits.

What exactly is her bloody point here?

Thats why people say she is grossly misinformed.. its just a nice way to say that she has no bloody clue what shes actually talking about in the first place.

 

[Karadalis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONuIvX21VYU

-Anita post fan-fiction of violence against real people and endorses it.

I wish this were some bullshit headline but that is actually the summary.

Edit: Oh just to prove hypocrisy as she post a murder-fiction of a real person on her own site and endorses it.

For all those people who think she got so many "threats".

So wait...

She actually promotes the idea of killing a real life person? Even if only in a work of fiction?

That she got the threats is a real thing that happened.. how it came to be and that she actually profitted from it has allready been established.

But i didnt knew that she is not above applauding these things if they are not directed against her...

Quite telling about her character come to think of it.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

As for the agency, that's the point of gameplay, you are essentially the main force, the main character driving the narrative that is written for you to experience. So you are going to be given the character or characters with the highest amount of agency compared to that of supporting characters that will have set roles to perform. So it would make sense for all those thousands of npcs in los santos to have little to zero agency in the game.

Right. But when you are casting three protagonists, would it be that difficult for one of them to be female? And I don't just mean inserting one for Political Correctness, or for token reasons - I think it would have made the game much more interesting and compelling if it were well written. It just seems extremely unbalanced toward the male fantasy end of the spectrum.

That is what makes part of this whole discussion difficult. Because developers are only going to give the agency to you the player through a character or characters. The rest is the supporting cast.

But even among the supporting cast in Los Santos, the male NPCs have much more character development than any female characters. Like I said, all the female characters are one-note. Hell, even among the extremely minor characters who only appear via their voice on the car's radio the male characters tend to be of much more significance and more fully fleshed-out.

It's not like I don't enjoy GTA (although this latest release was rather dull) or in-your-face humor, it's that this one had no bite, and just seemed spectacularly unbalanced. It seemed less like satire of a materialistic and bigoted culture than a direct reflection of the industry's misogyny.

EDIT:

Just a footnote that Franklin isn't really well developed as a character. I had to struggle to think of what his actual character arc is, other than "dude from the hood gets rich". He's essentially there as the token black guy, and his story is little more than the lyrics of a rap song (it's actually less complex than the lyrics of some good rap songs).

None of which helps the game's problems. Maybe it is a good thing that the developers didn't add a female character, because she probably would have been horribly written. What I really don't understand is why Rockstar can't hire some decent writers. They certainly have enough money to do so.

 

[Aardvaarkman]

She got threats from 4chan, and presumably because she went there and kicked up the hornets nest on launching her video..

Why do you presume this?

4chan is a hotbed of trolling - so why would you presume it was Sarkeesian herself going there, rather than one of the 4chan trolls trolling the other 4chan trolls?