Can it not just be that this is the story that they chose to tell with this game?
edit: or even “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
Yea, and by the time they are playing the game and realized you half-assed it you already have their money!!!
There is one famous example of this in gaming: Metroid.
Players did not discover that Samus was a woman until they were good enough at the game to beat it in under 2 hours.
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You didn’t mention the Siren’s B1 skills “Venom” or “Enforcer”, The Sirens are all female and have elemental magic powers, but I think that the elemental stuff is their special trait, not their femaleness.
In B1, there is only one playable female character, the Siren. There is a significant number of important and very individualized story-critical female NPCs and they are very individualized capable people, not 50% but way beyond tokenism. There are also plenty of significant female characters in Borderlands 2, including 2/5 of the playable characters. I think if you asked a Borderlands player to describe any of them, femaleness would not be on the top of the list of characteristics for any of them but Moxxi.
B1 has a chunk of game missions in the stronghold of a gang of gay guys. The leader was a little too campy for my comfort, but the gang members were as capable as the rest of the bandits. B2 has a lot of references to same-sex lovers and spouses, including two of the most story-prominent NPCs. (Gearbox backed off on having one of the playable characters be bi to avoid controversy.)
In the Borderlands world, you could make more of a case for a Negroette, since there is apparently only one dark person on the planet, one of the playable male characters in B1. There are Hispanic playable characters in both B1 and B2, but the playable POC from B1 is effectively replaced by a vaguely-gendered alien who speaks in Haiku in B2.
tl;dr Gearbox put the effort into making interesting individuals of different sorts in both games, moreso in B2. The playable characters each have their own voices and animations. Once you commit to interesting individual characters instead of reskinned generic types, you are most of the way there.
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That’s funny and telling at the same time!
The writer of the article is actually arguing for stupidity for choosing to tell this tale which omits women!
And its a good point. You can disagree with her conclusions, but you are not actually disagreeing with the premise.
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Sounds like the future.
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Stealth editing, now, are we?
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The only way it would look like that is if you don’t pay attention to anything else. All sorts of media are critiqued constantly, and the relatively poor representation of women is something brought up in books, comics, television, and movies as well as games. Have you ever heard of the Bechdel test, for instance, one of the best-known takes on the problem? It was explicitly about movies.
But I do think it provides an important comparison here, because failing the Bechdel test does not necessarily mean there is something wrong with a movie. What is wrong is that nearly all of them do, even ones with no particular reason, and that shows so many people never think to make characters female unless they absolutely need to.
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Can it not just be that this is the story that they chose to tell with this game?
didn’t you just say:
I’m not about to second guess the wit and whims of writers influenced by factors outside of my knowledge or experience.
Believe it or not, when you state what you wouldn’t do, a moment before you do it, you come across as being here in less than good faith.
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but maybe its a story that cant be told (or would not be as interesting if told) from a woman’s perspective. Some kind of father/son thing maybe. Without knowing the story, no one can say.
For clarity, again, I’m arguing devil’s advocate here. I fully expect the finished game to be boring and these excuses to be more or less invalid, but right here, right now, I’m making the point that in a narrative, men and women play and supply different roles and perspectives.
So supremely unlikely that it barely bears consideration. Story-telling is far more malleable than that, esp. to the teller. & yeah, sure, devil’s advocate. all along. uh-huh. (snicker)
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I did say “somewhat.” The examples I gave stood out in particular to me, as none of the male characters had skills called “Stud Muffin” or “Brosplosion” or whatever, so there’s definitely some asymmetry there.
The very first thing we see about Lilith is Marcus using a tired sexist trope to mock her, after mocking one the other characters and semi-mocking the other two. (“What’s your story, young lady? What can you do? Perhaps you can bake us all a wonderful cake!”) Granted, Marcus is supposed to be kind of an asshole, but we’re also supposed to think the line is funny.
In the General Knoxx expansion, there’s a bi NPC and his lover, but they’re in a prison and it’s played for laughs. There are a couple of other mentions of gay/lesbian relationships that are less problematic though.
I’m not saying Borderlands is the most sexist game out there by any means, but I also don’t think it’s quite up to the standard we should be holding games to.
That would be a valid argument if 50% of playable characters were female, and 50% were male. I’d have no problem if like… half the time when a game had a single gender protagonist, I had to play as a guy. Heck, I’d even take 60%.
But that is so not the ratio. And what’s more, we don’t know why. People say female-led games don’t sell well, but analysis of the marketing and dev budgets on those games show that they also don’t get nearly as much marketing and ad support - and when they do, they do as well or better than male-only games. So that is, for real, a chicken-egg problem.
I’m lucky enough to have spent the last eight years working in parts of the industry where having both male and female player characters has been the standard since time immemorial, It can be done, and once it becomes the standard, it’s really difficult to make an argument against it.
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Choose to believe me or don’t, but there’s no need to resort to childishness. and now i guess youre going to criticise me for being childish, let me save you the effort, I’m not so sure i care what you think “bro”
Don’t you have a bridge to sit under FunkDaddy?
It is obviously true that gender (and race and sexuality) can be a critical element to a story and that one or the other gender may have trouble fitting into various roles in a particular setting.
Most (as in the overwhelmingly vast majority of) video game stories are shallow enough that this isn’t terribly relevant, but wouldn’t it be nice if the stories were better and the characters thus less arbitary.
This particular devil is already over-represented.
Every single time there is an article anywhere online about sexism in the game industry, the “devil’s advocates” and the “boys will be boys” arguments and the “nobody wants to hear this anymore” line come out of the woodwork.
And the old favorite “it’s just a game” (as opposed to a multi-billion dollar industry that, in many cases, absolutely everyone on the site has a serious interest in).
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seemingly, not in this thread
She wrote this:
Doesn’t this look exactly like the sort of thing you really wanted to play until a few minutes ago when Capcom virtually ordered you back to the kitchen?
My guess is that it’s exactly the opposite, this game doesn’t bring anything new to the table, I’d rather be randomly wandering skyrim with no more pending quests.
But this small piece of controversy will suddenly make this puny game the most desired thing by every green blooded feminazi.
Also, this:
In Fallout 3 you don’t need DLC to play a female character, you can do it from moment one.
Such a fun time though, New Vegas is a super fun world, I had a great time.
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Oh yeah, pose one example that can’t be made-over via voiceover. I’m telling you that Oedipus can be made female in a video game with little to-do about it. So could damn near any other protagonist in any other story with few exceptions. The reverse is true too, for female protagonists.
At the worst is some occasional sexual ambiguity, not on the part of the gender played but of a sexual preference of, maybe. But a talented writer need not even let that happen & really, how critical is it in this context, the story in a video game? Barely if at all?
Negligible impact, since selecting the gender the original was written from would allow the precise vision of the maker despite other options being also available.
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