Storytelling in games is pretty lazy all around. But not all the responsibility for this lies on the writer. Most of it is on the gamer (or reader, more broadly) If the trick didn’t work, writers couldn’t use it anymore.
To defuse this a little bit, let’s look at the “kick the dog trope” if you want make someone a bad guy (or girl) in a hurry, the fastest way to do it is to have them hurt an animal. Guy kicks a dog, yup, he’s bad.
If games were novels, then you’d want to know why the bad guy kicked the dog. You could peek into their head a little bit. But maybe that’s not important to the story. Maybe it has nothing to with story you want to tell. You need a bad guy and you’ve got precious little time or space make a character bad.
Take Little Brother for instance. When the heroes are detained, I remember the bad guys being very one-dimensional. That’s what the story calls for. It’s not a story about how someone winds up as an Authority Stooge, or even why/how someone could think it was good and noble work. (Seriously, how does anybody work for the TSA?) The story is about the kids, not the guards.
To bring it all back around, I don’t see how you can have it both ways. Violence against women can’t be a flash-point for readers and not work as a kick the dog trope.
It’s not a trope on women if it happens to both genders or if you specifically have to leverage an open in-game world to produce situations you find disturbing.
There was a good link to an example about this posted earlier, but it was removed.
I have a single issue with the video. She seems to imply the solution is for the writers to simply have 100% male cast in their muderhobo games. In general she continues to take a safe line, but she at least showed an example of a similar topic in video games being treated extremely well instead of just say “developers are doing it wrong”.
I did groan when she said removing exploitative aspects of game would “[subvert] the dominate paradigm in our collective consciousness”.
Why are you refusing to acknowledge how it happens DIFFERENTLY to female characters? As she repeatedly points out, they’re hypersexualized in order to titilate the mostly young, white male players, while male characters are not. That IS a trope on women.
(This sentence is a badly dated, cliché mishmash of academic and biz speak. It made me groan, too, and I’m in roughly 99% agreement with Sarkeesian’s general point and approach.)
The bit in Hitman: Absolution in the strip club? Here’s the relevant part of Anita’s video.
She says “The player cannot help but treat these female bodies as things to be acted upon because they were designed, constructed, and placed in the environment for that singular purpose.” while Agent 47 drags the unconscious body of a stripper around a room. The flaw in her logic is that attacking them drops your score. You can attack them, but they’re there to be an obstacle. If they notice you in their dressing room and you’re not wearing an appropriate disguise, they’ll alert nearby guards. Thunderf00t (the guy who created the response video) points out that he watched a lot of playthroughs of that level to see if anyone did what Anita’s video showed. No one attacked the women.
This has some differences from Sin City - for very good reasons.
While Sin City does suffer “drop dead gorgeous” - it’s for storytelling. That dead “beauty” has a purpose. In the first Sin City, it’s Goldie’s death that drives some of the action to come and she’s placed beautifully into a heart-shaped bed with red satin sheets. Her lover has been framed for her death. She has to die for the story, and it’s a classic film noir set up. Later in the movie we meet other females with much stronger roles to play. Because Sin City is film noir, some women in it will play to certain classic types, but for its time, film noir was actually a really progressive film genre for the characterization of women. Here’s an article.
Sin City is an example of modernized film noir. In it, just like the classics, a lot of men get into trouble just because they care about women. Some male characters only have stories that focus on women (almost the reverse of the Bechdel test). Here’s an example from Sin City 2 - spoiler: The police officer gives up his career, wife, and eventually life all for an obsession over the film’s femme fatale.
Then there are the women who handle themselves. Sin City’s Old Town is run by the hookers and dancers. Many have known backstories and are important to driving the main story. Spoiler from Sin City 2: Some of Miho’s history with another character is reveled in flashback at an important juncture. It’s important they have a history.
Female characters in Sin City typically are sexualized (so are many men) but not always to make them weak. In Sin City, they may use sexuality as it was classically used in film noir - to make them formidable. Spoiler from Sin City 2: Gail distracts a guard by taunting him sexually so she can get a few other girls out of a car trunk. This doesn’t end well for the guard.
I’ve written before that I’m not opposed to sexuality. After all, I’m an adult. For me the question isn’t “does sexuality exist” but “is sexuality being used to make women weak”? - and a lot of the time it is. Sin City isn’t one of those examples. In Sin City, you’re just as likely to die if you’re a man or a woman, and you’re also just as likely to get a speaking role.
[quote=“milliefink, post:59, topic:39860”]
Why did you groan? What’s wrong with subverting abusive dominant paradigms in our collective consciousness?
[/quote]It’s a smart sounding sentence without substance. There’s no message saying “if games present a non-violent non-gender-abusive world traditionalists would have less stuff to point at” but using the method and language she uses in her closing statement she implies that there is a deeper meaning to something anyone would accept at face value before the video started. She, in fact, subverted her messages paradigm.
Like I said, I don’t have a problem with sexualization of either sex, and that’s not what Sarkeesian is complaining about with the “Women as Background” trope either. She’s complaining about the dehumanization of women, and that’s a very different thing.
I cannot agree with you. The dehumanization of women in video games, as in mainstream entertainment and culture generally, happens not only via the casual and nearly ubiquitous brutalization of female characters (and of actual girls and women), but ALSO through their hypersexualization. Agan, the implicit male viewer is pandered to with hypersexualization of female characters, and very little sexualization of the male ones. That contrast, and the way the viewer is implicitly a bearer of (to use another old but useful term) the male gaze, IS dehumanizing.
What? Who are these “traditionalists” pointing at “stuff”?
And no, she does not imply that there is a deeper meaning to something “anyone whould accept at face value before the video started.” That there IS a deeper meaning to her whole video, a meaning that that MANY people certainly do not accept at face value, and that there certainly is an abusive dominant paradigm which her message successfully identifies as deserving subversion, is displayed, just for starters, by many of the commenters in this very thread. Maybe even by you.
A direct translation to human-talk may be impossible. Here are some options that at least get at her gist, I think (in decreasing order of formality):
“Subtly alter entrenched expectations.”
“Present variety as normal.”
“Shake shit up a bit.”
Sarkeesian wants to preach to more than her existing choir, I assume. I know that as a casual video game player, I personally come away from her videos with new concerns and higher standards regarding what I consume. But she lapses into a form of communication – at times – that is stilted and probably doesn’t help her case with many audiences outside of a certain education/theory bubble.
Less memo, more manifesto, is I guess what I’m saying.
Thanks. I guess it’s a question of audience. Her target audience may well not include someone as already-well-informed as you, so your grimace at her occasional academia-speak may just be a matter of your personal taste. I’m not sure that those who need to hear her message more than you do (people who have heard little to no academia-speak, but also people who are likely to still understand it), and those who already agree with her message but also appreciate her skillful articulation and evidence-gathering for it, would also grimace at that line. As a member of the latter group, I certainly didn’t.
The surprising part of this video, was how many games she’s able to draw on that I’ve never played. When she got to Bioshock, though, I remembered vividly the sequence she talks about. Yeah, it fit within the larger game, we’re supposed to feel uneasy in the game… And I guess that’s why I don’t play more games like this.
I’ve taken to heart her disclaimer reminding me I’m not a bad person for enjoying these games, but it does make me want to bleach my brain with something wholesome for a while afterwards, like Eden or Flower.
Not really related, but kinda: Spore was a really enjoyable, guiltless pleasure for me, until I advanced to the (optional) missions to commit war crimes. That just felt like a betrayal, and I never picked it up afterwards. Yes, I take the authors point that it might not be a nice place out there in the galaxy, but I had to remind myself that these games are amusements, they are sold to be fun. And if the fun of the game consists of committing deeply antisocial acts, what the hell are we doing here, anyway?
Saint’s Row the Third got it right, I think, in portraying the antisocial behaviour in such an outrageous, over the top way that there’s no questioning the real agenda. I wouldn’t call it progressive at all, but It was a guiltless pleasure for me to play, and I’m not surprised that it’s absent from her review.
