Tropes vs Women SECOND VIDEO - "Damsel in Distress: Part 2"

[Schadrach]

WHen she compared violence to videogames to violence against women IRL, it just made me sick.
Like, that's a low blow.

Violence in video games creates or encourages violence IRL. Didn't Jack Thompson teach you anything?

Or, to be more along the lines of what she probably believes, violence in which victims are female is special and influenced by media in a way that simply doesn't apply to other forms of violence because reasons. Ultimately the same logic as to why we have a "rape culture" but not a "murder culture" or "assault culture", which usually ends up resting on the idea that the chosen form of violence is "special" in some way -- I've heard the argument referred to as the "rape is magic" argument -- the idea that rape is a crime whose portrayal, discussion, or humor regarding has some magical effect that doesn't apply to any other crime.

To me its just another part of the age old "Friend gets corrupted so you must defeat/kill them" trope. This happens to both male and female characters and therefore I don't think it's misogynistic. Unless of course this happens with more female characters than male ones, but the video doesn't bring any numbers regarding that.

Of course it doesn't bring any numbers into it -- if numbers were brought in, there'd be something to argue against, and there'd be the counter argument that she can claim to be talking about "gaming" in general while heavily restricting what games we're allowed to use as counter-arguments. There are some posters in this very thread who've claimed we're not allowed to consider huge swaths of gaming when talking about the frequency of this particular trope.

I also disagree with the loss of masculinity or possession part. Unless a relationship between a guy and a girl is defined as "Girl belongs to guy", which I don't really think it is. And while I get how she frames it as "weakness to perform his patriarchal duty", I see it more as "Weakness to protect those that the character cared about". It's a perspective issue.

There's a particular flavor of feminism (one to which I suspect Anita subscribes) that paints literally every relationship between men and women that isn't explicitly demonstrated to be otherwise to be "girl belongs to guy."

Also, I will never understand the people who want to censor what she has to say... Just, what the hell?

Who is censoring what she has to say? Are you referring to the whole 4chan trolling thing, or to this video getting falsely flagged?

The former is 4chan being 4chan and being provoked, and actually going pretty light compared to what they've done to some people (look up Alex Wuori [sp?] or Chris-chan for examples that literally went on for years and weren't limited to the internet), the latter is a bit more interesting. Apparently some YouTube feminist channel went around reporting some MRA channel for video responses in which he played clips of them and then commented on each clip, and actually got some kind of temporary account suspension against him or some such (ThosePeskyDames and Snake-something, I think? I'd never heard of either before). Given that Anita engages in the same kind of video structure, this could be a response to that, or even a demonstration of bias from YouTube (rather like how Kickstarter loves projects that appear to be pushing feminist points even if they break TOS and will cancel projects without notice if an online feminist attack campaign goes after it even if they don't break TOS -- Kickstarter is really pretty bad about uneven TOS enforcement [for example, Penny Arcade and 9-year old RPG both obviously break TOS, Tentacle Bento obviously didn't]).

Joan totally counts, since she wouldn't get burned until the Epilogue,

If we were to be historically realistic it'd piss off a bunch of the same people who would really *want* a Jeanne d'Arc game. Mostly because she wasn't punished for being a female soldier, she was charged with heresy for political reasons (French succession, what the Hundred Years' War was over), and the courts were bribed to find her guilty (though she did brilliantly defend herself against questions designed specifically to trip people into admitting heresy -- for example " Do you know whether or not you are in God's grace?" which under the theology of the time was impossible to know so answering either yes or no was heresy [she answered "If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me. I should be the saddest creature in the world if I knew I were not in His grace."]).

So far my main issue with her is still a lack of context in the examples. I realize that she admitted that she did not accurately represent the context for many of the games, but that still does not really excuse misrepresenting them to that degree. And Im not sure if it's my own hang ups about her and the series, but I actually felt like the discussion of male portrayals was a little accusatory.

I don't understand how she can, as someone with a degree in media studies who is a self-proclaimed pop culture critic, continue to present her arguments while blithely ignoring the entire historical context of the genre of entertainment she's professing to criticize.

But, context is irrelevant in a creative work, right? At least Anita seems to think so when it comes to trying to demonstrate her point.

And yes, problems do need to be fixed, and the fix to this particular problem is education. That's what Anita is doing (and what I try my best to do as well), to educate others on why she thinks this or that is a problem, and how it can be solved.

No, she's flashed a bunch of examples of a given trope, devoid of context, and the rest of her monologue could essentially be Mr Mackey from South Park talking about drugs or memes FWIW. She very *certainly* doesn't talk about solving it, outside of "Tropes are bad, don't do tropes, 'mkay."

The point I'm making is that this "general expectation" shouldn't factor into the a story to the extent it does - as long as a women is capable of being physically strong, there is no reason for a writer to disclude her as a protagonist or character in an action based game. We should be seeing plenty more of these women coming up in games - but if anything, the opposite is true. Women make up only a tiny fraction of video game characters, more than outnumbered by male characters in practically every major title. As for females as protagonists, they make up a tiny minority.

Just please don't post that demotivator image of video game protagonists. It's ridiculous, especially because one could make one with all female protagonists, or female protagonists with unnatural hair colors, or of non-humanoid protagonists.

I don't really disagree with what you say in this quote about female characters being *able* to be protagonists, but really that comes down to the writers. Personally, I'm looking forward to Remember Me coming out tomorrow and plan to remote into my home machine from work to make sure Steam has it installed before I get home. Though I hope I can find time to tear through it, since The Last of Us isn't far off.

So the problem lies in the fact that the "segment" (which is wide enough to accommodate most major titles released in this day and age) is dominated by men, or rather, that game designers expect it to be and make no effort to accommodate anyone who isn't a man.

I always find this interesting -- in more or less anything one has to make special effort to "accommodate" women or women are "excluded", yet men can only be "excluded" if they are explicitly not allowed to participate, and even then it's often seen as a good and/or necessary thing. If someone runs a publicly accessible but men only LAN party they are misogynist assholes who want to keep women out of gaming, if someone runs a women's only brunch at the same time as a con and advertise it as being for female con-goers on the con's board; that's just awesome -- go girl power! and all that.

As for why some people want tropes to be gender-equal, well, because it maximises diversity and avoids any unfortunate implications. If the portrayal of people being rescued and people doing the rescuing is gender equal, there are no implications that one gender is the protector and one gender is to be protected. It allows people to play the one they like (so if you like the traditional idea, it's still an option) while allowing everyone else to have fun as well. They point is not "stop using this trope", but "it would be nice if it was applied equally", so that everyone is free to be portrayed in every role. Everyone gets a turn being rescued and doing the rescuing, everyone gets to experience the full spectrum of human emotion and, well, experience, regardless of their gender.

Here's a distinction -- are you saying the market is there and it would be a smart move to tap it, or are you demanding diversity in every example, market be damned? Because there's a big difference there, and in one case, a few games tapping that marketshare will make it very evident -- in the other, you get things like the D&D handbooks. Some people complained about the exclsuive use of "he" as a pronoun in the early D&D handbooks. The 2nd edition AD&D handbooks had a "Note on gender" at the beginning detailing which style and grammar guides they were using and that said guides specified the use of "he" when the gender of the person described is unknown, and that this was not, in fact an attempt to exclude women from role playing games -- this got an even worse reaction, mostly from people *who weren't players in the first place*. When 3rd edition rolled around, they had an editing pass to ensure pronoun gender balance -- each single character example must alternate gender from the previous one, all multiple player examples must be split 50/50, with any odd-persons-out alternating, and non-examples alternate gender each paragraph. That last one makes certain parts of the rules slightly more confusing than necessary. In 4E, they tried to temper the confusion by simply using "you" when not in a specific example.

Here's my question for you: How many women do you expect picked up 3E D&D because of the elaborate pronoun balancing done? Did those people avoid 2E D&D for not doing said pronoun balancing? Was that number worth the time and money spent on doing it? The answer to that last question is the answer to whether or not it was a wise choice from a business perspective.

Choice of pronouns in rules text has very little to do with gender in the game the rules represent, though. I'm running a Pathfinder game right now (and honestly couldn't answer how they handled pronouns offhand), converted from 3.5 in which the main antagonists are a cabal of spellcasters of varying stripes, with a 6/4 gender split [rolled their gender 50/50 odds] one of whom is a lesbian [rolled sexuality, 87% chance straight, 10% chance homosexual, 2% chance bisexual, 1% chance other, ended up with 9 straight and one of the women as homosexual -- this had little game effect so far other than changing what sort of clothes were in a wardrobe in one of her old homes -- two different sizes of women's clothing rather than women's clothing and men's and noting that one player who tries to seduce every female he encounters was doomed to failure outright].

Oh boy. She disabled comments on this one too. Now, yet again, the douche bags will be spreading to every video on youtube that has anything to do with feminism to rage about how not being able to throw rape and death threats at her infringes on their freedom speech.... or, in this case, freedom to terrorize people into silence.

It's the internet -- anyone who presents a contentious opinion gets death threats. Anyone who angers 4chan gets death threats. She's both of those. Anyone who expresses certain positions regarding WoW class balance gets death threats. I've been that guy. Death threats are how the internet says hello, once you step away from the cuddly and heavily moderated parts of it. The beauty of online death threats and trolls is that you can make them go away by pressing "ignore" (I had to for all the Shaman making alts on my server to threaten me back in LK).

Video games are largely by, for and about male concerns today in large part because for the entire history of the medium it has been a mostly male market. It was a gendered form of entertainment. As gendered as something like romance novels or soap operas. I agree completely that this needs to change, but to examine current games without that context is bizarre.

Clearly this means we need a campaign to demand that soap operas and romance novels change to "accommodate" men because men are excluded from those types of media. Amusingly, you could argue that soap operas did, we just call them pro wrestling.

Also she seems to be unaware that every character male OR female who is not the protagonist in a video game is /explicitly/ created as an object to serve the protagonist in some way. To flatter their ego, to provide some quest or motivation, to get the gamer to move from point A to point B. Unlike novels or movies, video games simply don't have the resources or ability to provide rich deep characterization to every minor character along the way because these things cost money. You have to write/animate/voice/localize them. It's not just the cost of a few extra pages of typeface.

You make it sound like everyone outside of the player character in a video generally lacks agency to some degree while the player character(s) have a significant degree of hyperagency.

I have several questions about the "What about the male victims?" thing. It keeps coming up in discussions like this and it boggles my mind.

Why aren't men speaking out about this?

They do, but when they do it is either simply ignored, or gets turned around with the argument from primal misogyny ("Your men's problem is really about misogyny, and is therefore really a women's problem. So why are you talking about men's problems when we're discussing women's problems here?").

Or rather, why do men wait until a woman speaks up about what she feels is distasteful before voicing their own complaints?

Because those discussions on related (or sometimes even ultimately the same) issues don't get ignored because reasons?

Why should it be a feminists job to speak about it? As a feminist her main concern will be women, anyway. Yes she may dabble in how the situations that "harm" women can negatively effect men but...she's a feminist. To be female centric is in the name.

But but but, I thought "feminism" was about gender equality in all forms, and not merely about women? That's what they usually claim anyways.

There are enough examples to warrant an entire page on TV Tropes [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DamselInDistress/VideoGames]:

There's a TVTropes page for literally every trope ever used, and the pages tend to be extremely thorough in documenting uses, often without reference to context. Ignoring the subversions, lampshades, and inversions how many are listed in comparison to how many video games that exist?

Duke Nukem is a pop culture parody. You are not supposed to take him or his world seriously. The game's purpose is to take every trope and push it to its limit. This involves the "aliens taking our women" trope. Duke is a walking joke. How this fact completely eludes Sarkeesian is beyond me.

I don't think it does, I think this is just part of her whole "ignoring context when context is inconvenient" thing.

I still think the solution to this is easier than people give it credit for. Don't write female characters. Write Human beings. Come up with a person's personality, character traits, backstory etc before you put things like gender in, unless their gender directly ties into their character arc. Gender IS a part of who we are, but it doesn't define us. Heck, it's pretty easy to make a balanced cast of genders in my opinion.

http://s3.photobucket.com/user/neko-hime-cfi/media/FROMASHES2-1.png.html?filters[user]=3916024&filters[recent]=1&filters[publicOnly]=1&sort=1&o=41

She has a video planned about exactly that later on in her series -- the "Man With Boobs" trope. I'd actually love to have Anita write a game at some point, if only so we could see what she considers a *good* female character.

Bastion is one of the best experiences I've had in media in a long time. Annita really dropped the ball on that one when she insulted it. I cried in that game, and it was just full of amazing moments.

You mean this one?

On the indie side of things, I really enjoyed Bastion, but the only female character in the game doesn?t have any depth (to put it mildly); basically, her whole characterization was "The Female."

Which suggests an almost necessarily willful ignorance of the game she is talking about? It's not like "The Female" was named (Zia, I think?) and frankly had as much if not more characterization as anyone else, but the protagonist is literally only ever referred to as "the Kid" and gets the least characterization of them all.

I did roll my eyes a bit when she mentioned Borderlands 2, since to mention her as such and point out what happens to her ignores the entire context of her character and her role in the plot, especially as a thematic contrast to both Lilith and Maya, particularly the former as an NPC in the second.

You make it sound like she literally had to completely disregard major overarching themes throughout the game to focus in on the single plot element that suits her argument or something? Or that Angel's death was literally an act of defiance against a patriarchal villain who had been using her as a literal tool, and turns around to do the same thing to Lilith when Angel dies (shortly after killing a major male character to provide additional motive and pathos for the protagonists -- would he be a soldier-in-the-refrigerator?).

So basically only men can be brutalized in games because when women die or get hurt it's a way for would-be wife beaters to realize they want to violate all women? That sounds like the default retarded politician who wants to ban games M.O. I think even Jack Thompson wouldn't be that stupid, not to mention that's not promoting equality at all just rambling about violent games influencing real world actions which no research can even suggest is a possibility to begin with.

Jack Thompson -- another person that it's too damned easy to makes comparisons between her and.

 

[magicmonkeybars]

Reading through this thread I think we can in part conclude that we're going to learn more about who Anita Sarkeesian is and how she views video-games (and popular culture)than how video-games represent women.

She has an undeniable bias and isn't interested in criticism or an open discussion of ideas, her own or anyone else's.
She just cites examples that suit her views but doesn't provide any analysis on them or the characters they contain.
In the end all we get from her is her opinion, in which she complains a lot and doesn't explain how she arrived at her conclusions.

Yes, some video-games have problems representing women but those aren't the only video-games on offer.
Video-games like many other forms of media contain a wide spectrum of stories, some good, some bad, some mediocre.
Selectively presenting video-games to cast them in a certain light is intellectually dishonest and invites censorship through of misrepresentation.

But don't just listen to me, make up your own mind and consider how honest that opinion is.

 

[Tien Shen]

EDIT: Oh nevermind someone went and made a whole thread on it.

 

[saruman31]

Never trust anybody who goes on a public forum(youtube) and doesen`t have the guts to enable comments/ratings.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I have an aversion to smug faces on thumbnails. Don't wanna click 'em. I'll hand it to her though, she knows how to get people's attention. Kudos to Anita for upsetting half the internet.

 

[Eman5805]

The world Anita lives in is quite frightening. An act of mercy, saving a woman from a fate worse than death has been turned into something that demeans the woman it's happening to? And trying to draw a parallel from that to domestic violence where physical violence is justified if a woman is acting out of line, because games don't exist in a vacuum.

Then violence in games period should be done away with. Because the cultural ramifications of violence in general don't exist in a vacuum either, right?

I mean, she said games that use mercy kills trivialize women's suffering.

I guess the suffering of the person that has to kill them is even more trivial because that's beneath mention either. I mean. Pfft. It's not like it's an act of love or anything.

Not that Anita apparently knows anything about love...

Bad guys killing someone's girlfriend isn't about taking someone's precious loved one away. It's about stealing a possession.