Do you? All I know is that you’ve presented three pictures from one game. How prevalent is this? You’re the one making the argument; why is it on me to support your argument, anyway? Am I just supposed to blindly accept the argument, bereft of proof, because you’ve made an impassioned argument?
Because that’s a terrible way to make an argument. That’s what’s led us to have people scramble to try to ban guns and video games to curb violence, despite thefactthat violence is dropping and has been dropping for years, and that the causes of violence aren’t even being addressed.
If that blatant sexism in gaming is still rampant, then by all means let’s call on game manufacturers to do better. But a single set of images from one game…c’mon. I always see qualitative analysis, see rebuttals, see impassioned arguments about why it’s bad anyway, but never see quantitative analysis of the gaming world. Not that it changes the fact that studios need to do a better job of this, and stop assuming that their audience is a bunch of lonely, horny dudes, but I’d just like to know the magnitude of the problem, and will happily accept whatever outcome, given decent methodology.
But there is more variation within the sexes than between them in almost every arena. Video games are designed to cater to the “male” imagination and the “male” gaze but by that they mean a very limited idea of what men want. Just look at what @euchronos said above. Every time someone talks about “what men want” they are pretending there are no gay men. But that’s just the most obvious part. We all know that as well as a “man” and a “woman” box there are also “gay” and “straight” boxes. Well, what about other boxes? Maybe people don’t easily fit into boxes.
We all know there are differences between men and women. Men are taller than women. But a woman who is one standard deviation up from average is taller than a man who is one standard deviation down. Even in such an obvious, undeniable difference between the sexes if you pick a man and woman complete at random, the odds that the man is taller is only about 70%. I just don’t think the huge gulf in how men and women see the world is there.
But this is just ad hominem. Maybe she collected 150 grand in a kickstarter, laughed all the way to the bank and then cranked out these videos at the cost of $50 a piece, she could still be right. So why are we talking about it?
I just want to say that this conversation was the first time I was aware that “mansplaining” referred to a particular bad behaviour. I recognize the bad behaviour, I certainly recognize that it seems to be a thing that men do, but I’ve apparently managed to go quite a while without connecting it to that word because the word so obviously (to at least me, but I think to many) simply means, “men should shut up.” I’ve always simply backed away from conversations whenever someone said it.
If you’d actually followed the conversation I linked to you’d know that I didn’t cite StarCraft as proof that sexism in gaming is widespread and pervasive. I used it as an example of how some people refuse to acknowledge even the most blatant examples of sexist depictions in games by rationalizing them away through false equivalencies and outright delusion.
In said conversation, some guys were passionately arguing that the women of StarCraft are NOT inherently more sexualized than the men despite all evidence to the contrary. Maybe you’re smart enough to realize that’s a load of baloney, but there were plenty of other guys who seemed to believe it. Those were the men I was arguing with, and I assume they weren’t made of straw.
It’s a bad name, but at least it has the excuse of being a product of 19th century France. It’s a lot harder to convince people to stop using something with 150+ years of acceptance.
Ok, so I finally got to watch the video. She has some valid points. I guess in one way I feel like I don’t have a horse in this fight because of all those games she mentioned, I haven’t played any of them. The last game I played within memory that had this sort of trope was Deadpool, but it was pretty mild compared to her examples.
It seems like something that perhaps started as a novelty or included for shock value has become a more or less mindless schtick that doesn’t even add to the experience much. Then again, when you have games that involve and glorify the violent underworld such scene and characters seem… eh… hate to use the word… appropriate? That is if I am out running around trying to be a crime boss I’d expect to run into/deal with prostitutes, vs say running around as a Jedi or something.
So it seems there is clearly a genre that definitely reflects and validates her complaints, and honestly seemed a little over the top in some examples (I must be getting old). I dunno what the solution is. Maybe like some games where you can turn off the blood, have an option to turn off the sex?
Goat Simulator plays into male power fantasies, allowing you to commit violence against women by picking up various weapons with your extremely long tongue (obviously a substitute for the penis). The player-controlled character can then use these barbaric weapons to savagely attack female NPCs. The creators of the game didn’t bother to instill these female NPCs with any agency, instead they passively wait for you to commit violence against them, thereby fulfilling their role as playthings.
Since the question did come up, and I found an answer while (oddly) hunting for the Counting to 10,000 game going on elsewhere on the bbs, I thought I’d just note this (trying to not go off topic, but provide some good info):
People aren’t only concerned about the ways in which video games affect men’s socialization toward women. They’re also concerned about race, not just generalized violence, and they are studying it. A recent study that made news came from Ohio State University. It makes the first direct link between avatar race and later aggression. Here’s one article about the two-part study. Both male and female gamers were tested and both showed later aggression.
Unfortunately, the study in full requires subscription, but here is the location for the abstract and download from the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. (A peer-reviewed journal.)
The font on that link is atrocious. I skimmed it as best I could before I became dizzy.
It looks like the avatars weren’t chosen by the participants; I would be curious what links they could find if they allowed them to choose the avatar and the goal before and then after the game commences.
This is a decent side track into how stereotypes of females both affect the female and the male, and create a conjugate pair of horribleness externally/internally.
Um, you do realize that I didn’t write or format it, right?
That kinda makes telling me that useless (or just snotty).
I posted it for content, not good design. Considering that this is the first time anyone’s made a direct link between the two ideas, there’s not a lot out there. I just happened to find it while searching for something wholly unrelated.
If you’re really interested in that alternate idea, I’ll make the same suggestion people frequently make to women who want better games, “Go do it yourself.” After all, in this case, they had a hypothesis to test, and did so. Your hypothesis is different, so maybe you should test it yourself - or at least write to them and suggest it as a future experiment.
I started off by saying that I only posted this because I chanced on it, and knew the question had come up on here. I didn’t want to start a new thread on it, and just wanted to get it posted before I forgot about it. I really haven’t bothered to post on this thread because it’s already a mess. I can only hope it gets redirected, and was not trying to start an alternate topic.
If you watched the video, you’ll already know that Sarkeesian does talk about women being affected by games. She points out that negative female stereotypes within games affect both male and female players. She discusses the ways in which women are affected by the commodification and sexualization of women in games in their real lives. I promise it’s in there. You just have to watch it.
No, it’s basically a disclaim: “I skimmed the article because reading the font hurt my head.”
It’s basically asking if you wish to correct anything in the following. But anyway, I’m not on your verbal train, i merely wanted to enjoy this side track.
I would have put up a better formatted article if one with as much content existed. Of the ones I read, that one has the clearest description of the trials. Because the journal requires subscription (only the abstract can be viewed) I was relying on the article for the explanation of the experiment.
Yeah, as I denoted, sometimes form and function are deeply intertwined. If we go even further on the sidetrack of the sidetrack, this debate would be much easier if there were more open access to some of the pschological/developmental studies out there that try to at least associate/disassociate how gender stereotypes affect men and women.
As I see it, there’s three interactions which equal a feedback loop. I refuse to name these interactions due to the inability to create neutral binary pairs, because of ordinal bias.
Suffice it to say, this is a ground breaking theory that no one will understand, ever.
More of an observation: there are a lot of games which use prostitution to add a male-targeted reward to the game. And that doesn’t get mentioned by the advertising or the reviews, There’s a weakness in the argument of the video: is it possible to succeed in the games without having these experiences? So, have the reviewers missed a path through the game, or not played through it, or just seen the bikini-clad babes on the beach? It’s the beach babes you see in the GTA5 adverts, and GTA4 is at least partly the story of a rather desperate immigrant making his way in America. You can see some similarities to The Godfather II there.
But the women on display seem to be a bit more than ordinary scenery. If you steal a woman’s auto, or shoot her in the crossfire of a battle with the cops, it needs something more to be sexist. Ask where the men are. But so many are presented as a reward for the player, and I wonder what that teaches. Are the reviewers not getting into the places where they can see such things, or have they already been turned to the Dark Side?
Some franchises have improved. Lara Croft has developed at lot. But that story and the history make Larry Croft a little unlikely. But if we’re not being told what is there, how can we make choice?
If you are looking for action-games/FPS-ish games, I can only recommend Borderlands 2. They are actually doing a pretty great job at portraying women as people and even poke some fun at mysoginistic gamer attitudes here and there.
