You can disagree with someone without arguing in bad faith. I think we both know that’s not the argument being put forward
If not, then the Rule 34 point is a canard put out in bad faith. Nobody is arguing that something can’t be turned into fap fuel. There IS a debate about the level of objectification going on in this iteration of Tomb Raider. If one wants to argue it isn’t sexually objectifying the protagonist, the question becomes one of how you know when it happens. The evidence has been put forward that many people believe that it DOES, in fact, do that - those people in those videos, for some. My point is that it’s not “cherry picking” to consider that objectification - many other people consider 2013’s Lara Croft to be a sexual object. The open question is how the game encourages its audience to do that.
For that, I’d turn any legitimately curious minds to the Male Gaze, and visual design in general, including film and art studies. What does the composer of this scene WANT us to look at? What’s well lit? What’s in motion? What’s in the middle of the screen, or right along the angle of eyesight?
For instance, if you follow the line of sunlight on the title screen on the last video, it illuminates Lara’s waistline. She’s standing with her body swaying to the right, so that her ass (and the elbow, to some degree) is the final thing your eyes rest on. The visual language here says “this is important: her butt.”
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I’m saying any game/media/thing with a woman in it, in any represented form, is heavily subject to Rule 34.
Games with only abstract objects, and no human forms, not as much… no. Is this really a controversial statement?
I did find this though, in about 30 seconds of google searching
I’m sorry.
You’re basically posting 4chan / MRA youtube videos as “evidence” for this position that Tomb Raider (2013) is sexualized. So in the case of “my data can beat up your data” I refer you to the many published reviews of Tomb Raider (2013) which frequently cite the positive feminist bent of the game, and often by female reviewers.
Please, examine both data sets and see for yourself. Not sure I’m too into clicking on videos with a published caption of “ass ass ass”, myself, but if that’s the data you want to bring to the table, er… OK?
Well, thank god you pixelated it.
Anyway, the fact that you can find positive reviews seems irrelevant to the point being made. You can’t categorize video games into feminist vs not - it’s not binary.
And it’s not cherry picking to find the overused tropes in a game that is otherwise quite good. If anything, it’s more significant that a game which seems to be taking deliberate steps to improve relative to earlier iterations nevertheless indulges in butt shots. The whole point of Tropes vs Women is to highlight overused tropes. If a game is included in one of these videos, that doesn’t mean it’s bad or anti-feminist. It doesn’t even mean that Sarkeesian doesn’t like it. It just means that it’s an example of the trope. And, in this case at least, it probably means that the people doing cinematics & in-game camera will at a minimum think about this video when making the next iteration
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I can definitely agree that the Mass Effect camera angle examples are super egregiously bad. I was a little embarrassed to see those.
I just wish more examples like those were chosen, rather than the ones that were distorted and incorrect. It undermines the message, for me, and has throughout all the videos – but as I said maybe that’s just my awful programmer brain talking.
Funny how people want to be programmers. I personally advise against it, because I think it slowly breaks your brain – because you work with the world’s biggest pedantic asshole all day long (the computer), you eventually become one, or think that’s normal. It rubs off. Work with a pedantic asshole all day long, for years on end, you start to think that’s normal. And computers are, bar none, and without question, the worlds biggest pedantic assholes.
Don’t become a programmer.
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too late - I program video games! not the camera, mercifully.
Basically, I would need to actually play the tomb raider game to have an opinion on whether I consider it to be a good example of the trope. And now that I’m primed to look for butts, probably butts are all that I’d see.
So you’re basically explaining why you’ve been acting the way you have throughout this thread?
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And this thread has run it’s course already so I don’t care about the derail. I actually did quite well in all the programming classes I took (even frustrated the assembly language teacher by refusing to do the extra credit cause I had a solid A and well I am lazy) but one summer internship writing code made it not fun anymore. I love troubleshooting and doing server support and will still write simple .bat/.cmd scripts. But anything beyond that I am happy to punt to guys like you. I am ever amazed that things like this BBS get coded and end up looking pretty damn good.
The use of distorted (Tomb Raider) or flat out wrong (Batman) examples is bothersome, yes, to the point that it interferes with the message for me.
I suppose the argument is
It doesn’t matter if every part of the argument is correct, because the cause is so just and right!
But. Butt. There’s a huge swath of dudes for which ignoring the distorted or wrong bits… just isn’t an option. They will fixate on the distorted/incorrect bits. And it is very frustrating to have these discussions with people who have clearly never played any of the referenced games. Also have you noticed that dudes like to argue? Like… a lot?
Understanding the mentality I am describing (and there’s a huge cross section of gamers and programmers, the mindsets are similar if not as extreme) may explain a lot of why these videos are so “controversial”, on top of the exploding tinder barrel that is gender issues in any form.
[QUOTE]You’re basically posting 4chan / MRA youtube videos as “evidence” for this
position that Tomb Raider (2013) is sexualized. So in the case of “my
data can beat up your data” I refer you to the many published reviews of
Tomb Raider (2013) which frequently cite the positive feminist bent of
the game, and often by female reviewers[/QUOTE]Your
reviews don’t invalidate Anita’s criticism. A thing can be better than
it was, and still be sexualized. A thing can be otherwise positive, and
still be sexualized. If you want to say that 2013 Lara Croft isn’t
sexualized at all, that is not the same thing as saying that she isn’t sexualized AS MUCH.
Anita is saying she is still sexualized. And you’re saying “she’s not
sexualized…as much…” These are not mutually exclusive statements.
They are both true. Is that really very difficult to understand?
[QUOTE]
I’m saying any game/media/thing with a woman in it, in any represented form, is heavily subject to Rule 34.[/QUOTE]Okay, we agree. The next step is this question: in what ways can a game dev encourage the pornifying of their protagonist, and in what ways can they discourage that? And does Tomb Raider contain ANY of the former whatsoever? Such as a title screen with an emphasis on Lara’s ass highlighted by the light there? That’s sexualization. Thus, Anita’s point: it’s sexualized ass-focus.
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Er what? This is the box art
This is the title screen
Video playthrough of beginning of the game here, I see no special emphasis on the rear end…
At some point I really wonder what it is we’re talking about. Are we talking about the same game? Are we on the same planet? I try to assume good faith in discussions.
I’m talking about the actual gameplay. About 12:30 in the video you posted.
I think it’s inevitable that, when gathering up many samples of a given trope, you’re necessarily going to include some things that are subjective enough that reasonable people may differ.
To give a less fraught example, you can look at any random page on TvTropes and you’ll find things cited as trope examples that seem iffy at best
If Tropes vs Women were confined only to entirely unambiguous and horrible examples, that would both make it seem as though the trope were less prevalent than it is, and it would also move the line - it would say that only the completely worst examples are deserving of scrutiny and all others are hunky dory. I’m fine with games that are sort of edge-cases also getting some examination.
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So an interstitial screen, 12 minutes and 30 seconds into a game that takes about 8-10 hours to complete, that is visible on screen for all of about six seconds. (I counted). And this in a game that has near universal acclaim as a high water mark in feminism in gaming, based on the data of published reviews.
If that’s the benchmark, perhaps the only way to achieve the goal is to remove all human representation from games.
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It’s one example. There’s puh-lenty of others - that’s why I posted those videos. They show examples of where she is the most sexualized, where the pornification is the strongest. It’s not an accident that these are (1) from YouTube, so no nudity/sex (unlike your Tetris bricks) and (2) culled from in-game scenes.
You keep missing this point and I just don’t know how much more clearly I can spell it out: there isn’t a benchmark to pass, it’s a continual process of analysis and improvement. You are never free of criticism, you’ve never done enough to not examine it, and the lioness is ALWAYS hungry for another antelope when it stumbles and does something foolish.
You can be both a high water mark, and have an occasional ass fixation. It’s not a binary pass/fail purity test.
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Ok, but this is a non-statement. “No matter how good you are, there’s always room for improvement!” We could make this statement about a peanut butter sandwich and it would be equally true. The idea of the video series is to focus on the problems, yes? The specific ways to move forward and get better?
If the best data set you can come up is 4chan/MRA videos to pit against my data set of dozens of published reviews of the game, from women, from feminist gaming sites, from respectable, well known organizations that review videogames “professionally”, for whatever that’s worth…
Well. With all due respect, I do believe my data set can beat up your data set.
Agree to disagree?
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You’ve got that right. This board has more in common with a lynch mob than an actual forum of debate.
“Those game developers are Nazis for making what people buy! Shame! Shame!”
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It’s important to be clear on the goals. The goals are not to be good enough. It is to be better. This is a very important distinction because the convo keeps drifting into people imagining that a game is either all or nothing and that is usually a strategy used to dismiss the critics: “We’ll NEVER be good enough to appease you!” is a disingenuous argument.
One way it could be better that Anita points out: not having visual language that focuses on the ass of a protagonist (as Tomb Raider 2013 occasionally indulges in).
You’re not looking at the material - it’s mostly actual stuff from the games themselves. The last video is a Let’s Play. This isn’t really someone making porn out of the game, it’s what the game itself presents, that is considered sexy.
I think we need to agree that Tomb Raider 2013 does have examples of the trope. If we can’t agree on that, you don’t understand what I’m talking about, so I can’t agree to disagree, since you don’t understand what you’re disagreeing with.
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There’s zero evidence that this is the case in Tomb Raider (2013), short of a rule that cameras can never face the rear of the female protagonist.
The example you cited was a six second interstitial, 12 minutes and 30 seconds into a 6 to 8 hour game. And as tiny as that was, I don’t even agree that it inappropriately highlights the rear. Let’s compare.
This is on screen for literally six seconds. Count for yourself in the original source video.
This is on screen for (apparently) the entire length of a dialog tree:
These seem to be radically different examples, so much so the former is barely an example at all.
And that, to me at least, undermines the credibility of the person doing the arguing. A lot. Like… a lot a lot. Maybe opinions vary, I dunno. Maybe the goal is so important that it doesn’t matter if the examples chosen to support that goal are sometimes contrived, exaggerated or even flat out wrong. Make up your own mind.
