Talk about a comments section one should avoid…
Discussions of sex/gender in video games are often so instantly and unthinkingly toxic that I frequently can’t even tell the difference between fighting the good fight vs feeding the trolls.
I…I am poking fun at no one? What are you talking about? Why are you calling me brah?
I know a bunch of gamers too, some female, and they can also willingly select a male character in a fighting game, or pick the male pokemon trainer when given a choice of both, and I think they are very normal girls, dunno.
And “made the case for people who like to see big title games with selectable characters be more inclusive as a matter of course”? I don’t understand what you mean, I just said that videogame characters aren’t a definition of your gender, you pick whoever you like the most, guy or girl, or robot, or plant alien, and people shouldn’t be uncomfortable for playing as another gender in a videogame, because it’s a videogame. I don’t really get the point of your post or what are you implying with it.
Oh hell no, and I am kind of offended for suggesting I was talking about such a non-game.
I was talking more stuff like Touhou, which uses a female cast without any sort of sexual innuendo or lesbian relationship. I know that if you google for it you’ll see the opposite, but that’s bullshit that the fans made up, the games themselves are pretty much for all ages except for certain violent undertones since some of the characters eat people and stuff.
You can also find a bunch of indie rpgs and action games with all-female casts and without sexual tones in them. It’s not mainstream stuff, but it’s there.
I myself am a game developer. Indie, with just one game greenlighted so far on Steam, but that doesn’t make me less of one, that just means I am not famous. Anyway, all the female characters in my games and stories are remarkably proper. And the reason is that I am doing what I can to change the situation instead of just complaining about it.
I refuse to let fanservice sell my stuff, and my female characters are as capable as any other. I barely make a distinction, really, there’s a high level of gender parity in my current story, and not to couple characters with each other (I suck at writing romance so I don’t even try to aim for it). There are also characters with no gender whatsoever and work as characters equally (sentient machines who don’t look humanoid).
The thing about how I make characters is that I make them work for what they do, not for what they are. And this should be true of any other piece of work, because that’s what ultimately matters. Judging a character for being man or woman or robot or alien is beyond the point. What matters is a good character, and that’s what we actually need to solve.
As @chenille noted, did you even read past the first paragraph of that article you linked? The entire point was that there is a wage gap, where women were being paid between 8% to 65% less when you compared salaries in the same department. Impostor syndrome? Bad negotiating skills? Are game managers just dicks? Who knows, it seems like a major problem, and it certainly doesn’t encourage women to enter the game industry.
On that note, the game industry has a notoriously bad reputation for low wages, horrible work life balance, and shitty job security (meaning you probably get fired after a game is complete). Looking at those wage charts, (assuming you live in the SF bay area) they do seem low compared to what you could be making as a developer in an startup or a stable enterprise company. Not as glamorous, sure, but you do get to go home at 5.
Also, as you pointed out, the percentage of women graduating with CS degrees has gone down from 37.1% in 1984 to just 12%. So what happened? It’s not like the female population suddenly stopped being capable of programming. Certainly this suggests that something is amiss. Is it lack of exposure, or social expectations, or that the work environment is so hostile that they choose not to pursue this sort of work even though it’s great pay for not that much work?
You want more women in CS? Great! That’s fantastic. Perhaps, more gendered balanced games would help encourage them. Certainly, I wouldn’t expect all games to be balanced, and some games do have specific stories to tell. But this one? My avatar could be a shuffling toilet and I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t hurt the story at all. I’ve been playing games for a long time, but I can still count the number of games I’ve played with a woman as the sole protagonist on my hands. It’s 2014. That’s ridiculous.
She’s deliberately selecting examples of the problematic tropes for social study using that terminology, not aiming at a representative survey in Basic English. If you don’t like her sociological videos, make your own for you own chosen audience with whatever examples and language you prefer. You can even run a Kickstarter to finance it!
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