Elamdri said:
Sure it does. Did they want to put the time and effort into going through and creating two in-depth customization models that not only look good by themselves, but also together?
Your comment was about the character design. If you accept that they had the concept art for females, then they already had the character design. Ergo, poor excuse.
loodmoney said:
Re: female heavy: use your imagination. "[W]omen generally don't come six feet tall, barrel chested, and rippling with muscles." Are we talking generally? Because last time I checked, neither did a third of all men. "[W]ouldn't make sense to have that kind of character in their world." Why not? Seriously, I cannot think why you would believe this. What part of Brink's story does "Big woman picks up gun and shoots people" clash with?
With regards to I think Aesthetically it would not make sense. Does this play off stereotypes? Yes. But not acknowledging that would be denying reality. Brink is a romanticized FPS. Big Manly Men bound by Honor and Duty to fight for Freedom. It's just like any other action game/movie out there, and they all follow certain tropes. One of those is that it's the big hulking MAN that wields the big machine guns and whatnot. Could a woman do it? Sure. But they chose not to go that route, and that's a design choice.
Okay, let's, for the sake of argument, allow that Splash Damage could not make a female heavy work. What about medium and light females? I don't think that there's any trope of meduim or light men. There is nothing in this argument that rules out a second-best solution of having two female models.
loodmoney said:
Here's the thing about calling Brink sexist. The designers had the opportunity to include women, but they chose to spend what resourses they had on a range of fancy suits for men. Whatever their intentions were, those priorities are sexist. (Note in this regard that sexism does not require misogyny; nobody is claiming that there was a sexist "conspiracy", nor does such a conspiracy need to exist for the game to be sexist.) Furthermore, those priorities were "actually" sexist: women are less important than clothes; women do not exist in the same way men do; an incredible level of customisation that allows your avatar to look the way you want--unless you happen to want a woman... The implications of this design choice are sexist because they de-value women. They are less by virtue of their gender.
No, it does not make the game SEXIST to not have women in it. Most likely they didn't have women in it, because they did market research and determined that they would not sell considerably more games to women if they put women in the game, at least not enough to offset the cost of doing so. That's not sexist.
Market research and sexism are not incompatible. Furthermore, the fact that they had initial plans to include women, and that they are suggesting that a sequel might well include them, makes this another excuse that doesn't even get off the ground.
Nor would it in fact be sexist for them to say "You know what, it doesn't make sense for us to put women in Brink, we don't think it fits with what we're trying to do." That's something that always seems to confuse me, is this view that unless there is a completely perfect distribution of gender and race, then something is sexist or racist.
This I somewhat agree with. If it doesn't make sense for women to be in a game, then it is not necessarily sexist if that game doesn't have women. This is why games that depict, say, American soldiers at war (your
Call of Dutys &c.) are not sexist in that regard. If it makes sense for the story you are trying to tell, then by all means make the players all men.
Of course, the converse holds: if your story doesn't require that there only be men, then that is a good prima facie reason to include women. There is no reason that
Brink should not have women. In fact, and especially on the resistance side, there are reasons that it should have had women. There is nothing to convey a desparate struggle to survive as women with guns (at least to an audience that is familiar with the 'fairer sex' trope).
Here's my thing about Feminism. I think that women having equal rights, not being treated like property, not being paid as much as men, not having the same career opportunities as men, not being viewed as just sex objects, being able to vote, all those things? Those are fantastic.
But this stuff here, where women don't get 100% equal representation in a product that's marketed primarily to men? No, that's a crock of S***. When we get to this level where we say stupid stuff like "Oh there are no women in Brink, so it's sexist" we've really just perverted what it means to be truly sexist. Products, and especially artistic products, can be primarily for only one gender. In fact, some are DESIGNED for only one gender! Are Pads sexist? I don't see any manpons when I go to the local store.
So you weren't even talking about
Brink at all then, but a much,
much more general concern about what you think feminists should take issue with? It would have been nice if you had made that clear at the beginning.
Nevertheless, you actually answer your own question, and prove my point, with that last sentence. The reason why the lack of manpons is not an issue is that men don't have periods. Having periods is something that is pretty much decided by one's sex. Enjoying shooting people in a videogame, on the other hand, is not. To run with your analogy, if men did in fact have periods, then the fact that companies made tampons for women only
would be sexist. And these companies could not be defended by saying "well, tampons are marketed primarily for women, so men shouldn't complain." If some tampons were made for men, but they were fairly hit-and-miss, and one company released a product that allowed a huge degree of customisation for your tampon, implying that you could have a tampon that was unique to you alone, people would be right to criticise it for catering to women only.
You get the picture.
As for what is "truly sexist", you don't get to define that the way you want. All sexism is true sexism. Even if you want to consider feminism/anti-sexism as primarily about "women having equal rights, not being treated like property, not being paid as much as men, not having the same career opportunities as men, not being viewed as just sex objects, being able to vote", you would have to look at things like lack of representation in video games. If women are treated as less than men in one area (coming behind "lots of clothes" on a games to-do list) this makes it easier to treat them as less than men in another (being paid less for the same job. Sexism does not happen in a vacuum, as the saying goes; once you think of sexism as a social problem rather than an individual one ("ingrained bias" rather than "conspiracy theory") it makes perfect sense to criticise anything that exhibits a sexist viewpoint, or in this case, as sexist set of priorities.
'Fight it where you find it' is the mentality behind this sort of criticism. The fact that people have found it in a game that
you don't think is as bad as others, does not mean that you can defend said game by pointing to said others, nor does it mean that people are being inconsistent in said criticising .
Personally, I don't see a major flaw in having some confidence in one's argument. If you're not going to stand by what you say, why say it?
