Why are people upset about no females in Brink, but not COD, Battlefield, or MoH

[Shaoken]

*sigh*

For fuck's sake people, the crux of the arguement is that Brink boasted from the fucking mountain tops about it's character customisation, and failed to deliever.

Meanwhile every other game mentioned in this thread customisation was never promised and in most cases was non-existant. So it's not an issue of people having a double standard for the genre.

The issue is when you compare Brink to every other game out there that puts character customisation as a selling point. You get male and female characters in all of them. That's what people expect when you bring up the words "full character custimisation." That's the criteria here.

 

[Brian Hendershot]

In all seriousness though, I think this is being blown out of proportion. Brink, which in my opinion, is a fun but problematic shooter that mixes up the first person genre that has enough problems of its own. It doesn't need sexists added to the list of its flaws, good grief.

Nobody added anything to its flaws, except the designers themselves. If they didn't want to be criticised for sexism, they shouldn't have made a sexist decision.

Okay first off, I want to thank you for just quoting part of what I said. That was really nice and totally didn't make me look bad.

I mean seriously? You are getting mad at one game? Jesus Christ. Alright, let me try it. I am Asian. Were are my properly portrayed Asian characters in video games? Were are the main Asian characters that don't just fight with their fist and talk in a stereotypical voice? Were are they? Now I am angry! Asians are not being properly portrayed in my video games!!! This is an outrage! Video games are racist! I refuse to play good games that don't have the choice for Asian characters and I will baseless hate all of them. Forever. Because they are racist.

Seriously, pick your battles feminists. There are better places to advance the female cause then video games.

EDIT: Sorry, I messed up on editing the post. But you get were the conversation was going. Anyhow, I see were you are coming from, I really do. You are just going about it all the wrong way.

 

[Brian Hendershot]

Whoops. Double post. Sorry about that people.

 

[loodmoney]

In all seriousness though, I think this is being blown out of proportion. Brink, which in my opinion, is a fun but problematic shooter that mixes up the first person genre that has enough problems of its own. It doesn't need sexists added to the list of its flaws, good grief.

Nobody added anything to its flaws, except the designers themselves. If they didn't want to be criticised for sexism, they shouldn't have made a sexist decision.

Okay first off, I want to thank you for just quoting part of what I said. That was really nice and totally didn't make me look bad.

I mean seriously? You are getting mad at one game? Jesus Christ. Alright, let me try it. I am Asian. Were are my properly portrayed Asian characters in video games? Were are the main Asian characters that don't just fight with their fist and talk in a stereotypical voice? Were are they? Now I am angry! Asians are not being properly portrayed in my video games!!! This is an outrage! Video games are racist! I refuse to play good games that don't have the choice for Asian characters and I will baseless hate all of them. Forever. Because they are racist.

Seriously, pick your battles feminists. There are better places to advance the female cause then video games.

EDIT: Sorry, I messed up on editing the post. But you get were the conversation was going. Anyhow, I see were you are coming from, I really do. You are just going about it all the wrong way.

Sorry if I wasn't fair in quoting you the way I did, but the post was getting long enough as it was.

Thing is, it is not just this one game that feminists are angry about. The anger is at sexism in general, which means anger at sexism in games, which means anger at sexism in FPSs, which means anger at Brink. This game is just one of many that feminists take issue with; it also happens to be a particularly bad one in that it is so obvious what is wrong with it (of course not everybody agrees on this, but if I wanted to convince someone that sexism is a problem in games and had to chose just one anecdote, "102 quadrillion customisation options for men, no women" is pretty high up there).

As for whether it is worthwhile fighting sexism in videogames, I'll elaborate on what I said earlier, through the medium of slogans.

"Sexism does not happen in a vacuum". Lack of representation and misrepresentation of women in games makes actual proper bad stuff--disempowerment, treating women as second class citizens, &c.--more likely. If someone does not find a lack of women in a video game to be conspicuous, they are less likely to find it conspicuous in the workplace. If someone consumes a lot of media in which women exist primarily through sexist tropes, that person will be more likely to view women in real life according to those same tropes. So there is a connection between sexism in video games and sexism elsewhere. This makes video games a worthwhile place as any to advance the cause, as you put it.

Thus: "Fight it where you find it." I play video games. I also study philosophy with a view to getting into academia. Now video games and academic philosophy [http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/] happen to be two areas which often maintain the white men's club mentality. So if I want to do something about sexism, it's going to be most effective if I do something about it in these areas. That is me picking my battles.

 

[Brian Hendershot]

In all seriousness though, I think this is being blown out of proportion. Brink, which in my opinion, is a fun but problematic shooter that mixes up the first person genre that has enough problems of its own. It doesn't need sexists added to the list of its flaws, good grief.

Nobody added anything to its flaws, except the designers themselves. If they didn't want to be criticised for sexism, they shouldn't have made a sexist decision.

Okay first off, I want to thank you for just quoting part of what I said. That was really nice and totally didn't make me look bad.

I mean seriously? You are getting mad at one game? Jesus Christ. Alright, let me try it. I am Asian. Were are my properly portrayed Asian characters in video games? Were are the main Asian characters that don't just fight with their fist and talk in a stereotypical voice? Were are they? Now I am angry! Asians are not being properly portrayed in my video games!!! This is an outrage! Video games are racist! I refuse to play good games that don't have the choice for Asian characters and I will baseless hate all of them. Forever. Because they are racist.

Seriously, pick your battles feminists. There are better places to advance the female cause then video games.

EDIT: Sorry, I messed up on editing the post. But you get were the conversation was going. Anyhow, I see were you are coming from, I really do. You are just going about it all the wrong way.

Sorry if I wasn't fair in quoting you the way I did, but the post was getting long enough as it was.

Thing is, it is not just this one game that feminists are angry about. The anger is at sexism in general, which means anger at sexism in games, which means anger at sexism in FPSs, which means anger at Brink. This game is just one of many that feminists take issue with; it also happens to be a particularly bad one in that it is so obvious what is wrong with it (of course not everybody agrees on this, but if I wanted to convince someone that sexism is a problem in games and had to chose just one anecdote, "102 quadrillion customisation options for men, no women" is pretty high up there).

As for whether it is worthwhile fighting sexism in videogames, I'll elaborate on what I said earlier, through the medium of slogans.

"Sexism does not happen in a vacuum". Lack of representation and misrepresentation of women in games makes actual proper bad stuff--disempowerment, treating women as second class citizens, &c.--more likely. If someone does not find a lack of women in a video game to be conspicuous, they are less likely to find it conspicuous in the workplace. If someone consumes a lot of media in which women exist primarily through sexist tropes, that person will be more likely to view women in real life according to those same tropes. So there is a connection between sexism in video games and sexism elsewhere. This makes video games a worthwhile place as any to advance the cause, as you put it.

Thus: "Fight it where you find it." I play video games. I also study philosophy with a view to getting into academia. Now video games and academic philosophy [http://beingawomaninphilosophy.wordpress.com/] happen to be two areas which often maintain the white men's club mentality. So if I want to do something about sexism, it's going to be most effective if I do something about it in these areas. That is me picking my battles.

Hey cool...I am also studying Philosophy (and religion) with intent to go into academia. Anyhow, if that's what you want to do that by all means do it. I just feel Brink is not the best video game to advance your feminist cause. Obviously if video games is your thing than advance your cause there. But how about you pick a video game that is more well known and has less technical flaws. To an outsider like me it just seems like you are being nit-picky when you call out Brink for being feminist.

But hey that's just a fellow minority in a 'white man's club". What could I possibly know.

 

[DaJoW]

Edit: Also, New Zealand, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Serbia, Sweden and Switzerland allow women to serve in the frontlines according to Wikipedia, so it isn't unheard of.

Must resist urge to pick on New Zealand's military.

Feel free to pick on Swedens, our government sure seems to.

 

[Xanadu84]

"...if you think about it, it makes LESS sense for there to be no women in CoD, BF:BC2, and MoH. Brink is a game that is heavily designed around character customization, so they focused on one sex, (Male, the FPS default) and created a large system around that. If they had tried to do women as well, it would have just been too large and time consuming (and god only knows they could have spent more time on other parts of the game)."

I think your twisting facts facts to suit your hypothesis. If a game focuses heavily on customization, the option of a female versus male model should be the FIRST thing you focus on. Even if it is complicated to do, I can think of no more significant aesthetic choice imaginable. In theory, lack of female models in a game that focuses on customization would be like making a new Portal game and focusing entirely on the paint and faith plates while ignoring the, well, Portals, because they are hard to code. But I don't think that this is main reason why people take issue, though I suppose it is probably a part of it


"(I personally subscribe to the philosophy that if I'm going to spend the majority of time look at a butt on screen, it might as well be an ATTRACTIVE butt)."

I have said this myself, pretty nearly to the letter.

"So why the double standard?"

My opinion is that it is because of the nature of the setting. In those other games listed, you are ostensibly basing your design off of reality, and in reality, women are much rarer faces in front line combat. So all male models are basically just a nod to the reality that has been brought about by a complex interworking of social factors. But in Brink, you have a more fantastical setting, and a game where you are trying to settle into a self-defined role, not settling into a pre-established character. The game could easily have been inclusive of both genders without an ounce of explanation, and it would not have hurt the game. Instead they limited there customization choices in order to make a male-only world when they didn't have to. Now I'm not offended, I'm sure there was an innocent reason for this, but it is just a tad odd.

 

[alandavidson]

Last time I checked, You couldn't play a female character in CoD, you couldn't play a female character in Battlefield Bad Company 2 (and it doesn't look like there will be females in BF3 either), and you can't play a female in Medal of Honor.

Because COD, Bad Company, and MOH are all based off of real combat units, which don't allow females in their ranks.

I don't see Brink as being ANY different. Certainly not the Ark Security anyway.

Brink is fictional. Ark Security exists in an imagined world that deals with rebels and police forces, a world which the idea of females on the front lines would not be out of the question.
The US Army Special Operations (Represented in CoD), 1st Cavalry Division (Bad Company), and Air Force Combat Control (MoH) are all REAL WORLD, ALL MALE units.

This is the difference of something created in the mind of someone, versus someone basing a game off of something that already exists.

 

[Souplex]

I think it's because Brink offers character creation, whereas those others do no.
In the others, you're playing pre-defined characters.
However, limiting your character creation so half of the planet isn't represented seems kind of weird.

 

[Nickompoop]

(I personally subscribe to the philosophy that if I'm going to spend the majority of time look at a butt on screen, it might as well be an ATTRACTIVE butt)

Wait, so you're upset about the lack of sexual diversity because you can't look an attractive butt (BTW, Brink's an FPS. You don't see your butt)? It seems that, even though you talk about why sexism is bad, all you want is some eye candy. And that right there is very sexist.

As to the actual question, it's because no one cares about the cardboard cutouts that pass for characters in COD. There's only two basic game mechanics: shoot people, and fly a drone. People aren't worried about the lack of females in COD because there's no character customization mechanic, and even if there were, I heavily doubt the homophobic, racist 12 year-old that plays COD would notice.

 

[Elamdri]

(I personally subscribe to the philosophy that if I'm going to spend the majority of time look at a butt on screen, it might as well be an ATTRACTIVE butt)

Wait, so you're upset about the lack of sexual diversity because you can't look an attractive butt (BTW, Brink's an FPS. You don't see your butt)? It seems that, even though you talk about why sexism is bad, all you want is some eye candy. And that right there is very sexist.

It was a joke Captain No-Fun

 

[Faux Furry]

As many a person has mentioned and will likely mention again in the future, it's a matter of realism versus fantasy settings with highly customizable player characters.

In games in realistic settings, the player takes the "No Girls Allowed" policies of many real-world military groups for granted, whether it is sexist or not is simply not an issue.

In an anything goes crazy bang-bang shoot 'em up where guys not wearing shirts can totally shrug of a few slugs to the torso, that excuse doesn't exist. Why not have women whose fat deposits can deflect bullets in the game, too?

 

[MasterV]

Theres yer women in the army punk

From your lack of reading skills and your apparent bad articulation I'll wager you're not older than 15-16 years old, so I'll be polite. If you read carefully what I wrote, you'd understand thatI was talking about army DEPICTION in MAINSTREAM MEDIA. Caps so you can see it now.

 

[steampunk42]

Theres yer women in the army punk

From your lack of reading skills and your apparent bad articulation I'll wager you're not older than 15-16 years old, so I'll be polite. If you read carefully what I wrote, you'd understand thatI was talking about army DEPICTION in MAINSTREAM MEDIA. Caps so you can see it now.

im 20 years old and forgive me if i get a little ticked off to write something free of errors. i apologize for miss-reading your full comment. so why don't i be the first in this argument to apologize for behavior un-becoming a history teacher in training.

 

[MasterV]

I apologize for miss-reading your full comment. so why don't i be the first in this argument to apologize for behavior un-becoming a history teacher in training.

No problem my friend, all's well that ends well. I also apologise for the slightly patronizing tone of my reply. I wish you the best on your future as a history teacher as well!

 

[steampunk42]

I apologize for miss-reading your full comment. so why don't i be the first in this argument to apologize for behavior un-becoming a history teacher in training.

No problem my friend, all's well that ends well. I also apologise for the slightly patronizing tone of my reply. I wish you the best on your future as a history teacher as well!

no problem! this is the internet, where everyone acts like a jerk from time to time...none are safe from it