Women in Video Games: women as background decoration

boing
41

The problem I have with “mansplaining” is that even if the behavior it describes is more common in men, it linguistically implies it is a behavior intrinsic to men, and not to women.

Clearly that’s absurd. Assuming someone else lacks knowledge of a topic for arbitrary reasons and in spite of evidence to the contrary is in no way limited to one sex or the other - nor even to one motivation or another.

A misogynist has no more monopoly on this behavior than anyone else. A racial supremacist can discount a person’s intelligence and education merely on the basis of their race. A religious zealot can do the same merely on the basis of difference of faith and doctrine. A political extremist can falsely convince themselves of the ignorance of others merely on the basis of party affiliation.

The key aspect of the behavior - the discounting of a person’s intelligence, knowledge, and education - is not solely the product of misogyny. It can just as easily by the product any variety of intolerance you care to name.

It can even be the product of mere absentmindedness and thoughtlessness. Despite having someone introduced to you as a biologist, that particular fact might escape you and after a bit of conversation you might find yourself explaining something to with biology to them as if they were a layperson with no knowledge whatsoever. It doesn’t have to be grounded in malice or intolerance at all - it can simply be accidental. We even have terms for this sort of thing, like “preaching to the choir”.

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42

Oh, I’m very much arguing that it is the product of absentmindedess and thoughtlessness. Men talk over women all the time and I don’t think it’s out of malice at all. It’s that men are encouraged to be forthright and straightforward and women are encouraged to be submissive and deferential. Men are much more likely to be know-it-alls.

Mansplaining is that very particular flavour of lecturing that men in particular do, very much out of cluelessness. And I think at this point, maybe we ought to have a little less patience with clueless dudes who really ought to learn a bit before they wade into discussions they know less about than they think they do.

But, ugh, let’s not get into a argument over definitions. :slight_smile: Best to just call people out for trying to derail the discussion, rather than derailing it even further with unconstructive jargon!

Edit to add: Just to make sure, I am absolutely not accusing you of that. :smile:

Also: Why in the hell does a ) smiley have the same mouth as a D smiley?

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43

Anita’s toaster argument was weak, but it was pointed in the right direction.

I believe that video games mainly resemble architecture. Much like a building’s entrance, stairs and elevators, games are made up of areas everyone must access to proceed. Like hallways, there are a limited number of paths, and like offices, shops and apartments, there are places of limited or restricted access. With rare exception, you’d be hard pressed to find a game that doesn’t resemble architecture in one form or another.

Imagine if architects felt forced to build strip clubs, brothels or rape dungeons into buildings or the buildings wouldn’t sell. Sure, sometimes you wouldn’t have to visit those areas, but more often then not, there’s a sign, or a scantily clad women outside the entrance. Even if you can’t see the evidence, you still know that this sort of behaviour is happening somewhere in the building. How would that make you feel?

That’s the point she’s making. It doesn’t matter if exploitative content is buried deep inside a work. The fact remains that it’s there.

That brings me to the really big question. If the elimination of injustice is so important to us in the real world, why not eliminate injustice in video game worlds? Games use injustice as a means to motivate the player. Get rid of injustice in a game world and you get rid of one of the most potent tools to get a player to start playing.

The issue is that video games often don’t give us enough substance to truly understand our actions in a real-world context. Most video game characters, sexualized or not, are talking dolls with a few lines of dialogue, and don’t develop no matter the player’s interaction. A prostitute in a game isn’t a real person, neither is the policeman that chases you or the countless thugs you gun down. Interactions are mostly short loops, dead ends, or incremental steps towards the end-game.

In addition, games are frequently poorly written and shallow. The characters do not convince us that their bodies, personalities and lives have intrinsic value. Characters act as unconscious toys to be observed and acted upon as the player sees fit. More often than not, a game involves players exploiting simulated beings for his or her own pleasure.

What Anita argues is that the sexualization of the female characters in a game makes them special somehow. I’m not sure I agree with this. Male characters in games are frequently the enemy and are treated as highly disposable. Would it seem like a rational argument to point out the disposability of men as a negative feature in games? The same goes for the treatment of power, status and narcissistic behaviour.

So what is to be done? I propose equal exploitation. Expand video games from straight male fantasy into a generalized fantasy, where everyone can find something to exploit and take pleasure in.

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44

Cory, can you please be a little less strident and more careful when reporting these things?
I take offense in particular to this statement:
“Gamers are insanely (and I mean that literally) threatened by Sarkeesian’s analysis”
I am a white, male gamer, and I personally love what Anita’s doing and hope that it makes developers think twice before continuing with the status quo.
Anita’s fighting against generalisation and stereotypes, and she doesn’t need someone who is prone to either to defend her.

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45

‘#NotAllGamers’

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46

Citation, please.

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47

Men constantly mainsplain to each other. Men, myself included, will aggressively argue issues to the point of exhaustion and beyond. Far, far, farrr beyond.
 
 
No, keep going.
 
 
 
 
 
A bit further still…
 
 
 
 
 
 
Yeah, pretty far.

Maybe this is why “Let it Go” became so popular. Frozen was a coded message to all us dudes. Women seem to be able to make their points in discussion and walk away reasonably well… men, not so much.

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48

If the aforementioned games were actually addressing the issues sex workers face, if they were really discussing the problems of injustice, we might not be having this conversation. But let’s not kid ourselves here. Developers are including brothels and strip clubs for a bit of cheap atmosphere and to show off some big shiny CG norks for the lads.

And maybe that would be fine if, like you suggested, we had equal amounts of eye candy for the ladies. I’d certainly advocate for some of that; see my argument above for using that next-gen arse technology for beautiful men too. Honestly I would love to be a beautiful man with a gorgeous behind, as it’s as much of a fantasy for me as having a gunsword and saving the world.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah.

Games are pretending to be “mature” but all they’re doing is appealing to 15-year-olds instead of 10-year-olds. Even the best AAA games we have to offer are still slipping up badly by including stuff they simply don’t need to. There are other kinds of exploitation, real or fictional, that you can make stories about. Use those! Actually tie it into your gameplay, there’s a crazy idea.

For the record: yeah. But women get to be disposable and sexualised, and that ain’t right.

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49

My point is that just because men do engage in that form of lecturing doesn’t mean that the term needs to imply the behavior exclusivity to males.

“Jerksplaining” or something similar would be fine. It doesn’t have to lack teeth to it, it just has to be fair about who it directs them at. The tendency to jerksplain might be colossally more applicable to men than women in many situations, but at least the term “jerksplain” doesn’t inherently make sexist assumptions through it’s very linguistic formation and structure.

50

I think that’s a great thing, and easily the #1 way to improve the current situation in games. Just offer both male and female playable avatars.

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52

That’s actually pretty much the industry standard in games where you play an indefinite character that hasn’t been predefined for you.

In fact, the tradition of games giving you the choice of a male or female avatar in situations where the identity of the player doesn’t matter to the narrative stretches back quite a ways. There are notable exceptions, of course, but they get fewer and fewer all the time.

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53

Yeah but I ain’t a jerk and I still catch myself doing it sometimes. Cause I am a man and that is how I was taught to behave in social situations. As a man. And as a man I think it’s really important I be conscious about the social privileges I have and how they shape my (male) behaviour.

I see where you’re coming from, but by trying to soften it you’ve robbed it of any rhetorical power.

Edit: Oh god it IS turning into an argument over definitions. OK, I’m gonna go take a break.

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54

Mansplaining is an appropriate term, because it is in fact 90% dudes. We argue aggressively. We are more aggressive. We are aggressively aggressive in so many facets of life. It’s simple science.

On a related note, I frequently have to intervene on my Twitter because some dude replies like literally five times to some comment or retweet I made from a woman with excruciating detail about an argument. Example:

Look at the six replies there from Alexey Volkov, all based on my single retweet. That’s just like today.

Having opinions is fine. But can we limit it to one twitter reply instead of, y’know, six?

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55

The same applies to women as well. It applies to everyone, regardless of sex. Yet it’s never framed in that light, for some reason.

My complaint is that the term has an obvious sexist implications - that “mansplaining” is something only men do, and is something that all men do. This is clearly not true, even if men perform the negative action with greater frequency than women.

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56

I’m gay. I’ve never enjoyed the representation of women as sex objects in games. When I was younger I was very much in denial about my sexual orientation. I had internalized a lot of negative feeling about being gay, and deeply hated myself. In order to survive through a lot of emotional suffering and self-hatred, I turned to video games. It was a bit of escapism, yes, but it was also a survival mechanism. School was a nightmare. Life was hell. Games were the only egress I had from myself and the caustic world I lived in.

But when I encountered the ubiquitous presence of sexualized women in games, it only served to remind me of my own inability to conform to the heterosexual norm. This reminder (in aggregate) was, in fact, traumatic. I tried, for years, to have any kind of attraction to women. And here, in the throes of denial, closeted, and profoundly depressed, my only mechanism of release was reminding me again that I was different, inadequate, and – in some deeply constituted way – broken.

Now I am openly gay and quite happy, but I still find the way women are depicted to be insufferable. I just don’t understand it. I don’t see what value it adds. Is it really pleasurable to witness women depicted as sex objects? Can a heterosexual man jump in and explain it to me? I’m not being deliberately naive here. I genuinely do not understand the appeal. Why is this even an argument? Why is this a thing we have to continue to argue to preserve? It’s awful. We know it is a problem. We know it sucks for everyone. So why are we still defending it?

There is a tremendous diversity of human experience. We owe it to ourselves to explore new narratives. This is not a weakness or a sacrifice. It is a gift. Tropes do not empower us: they are crutches and shorthand in place of actual creativity and imagination. I see nothing at stake here except the reluctance of a community to trade something old and familiar for something new and unknown. But let me tell you, sometimes change is good.

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57

I disagree. In my experience, men frequently talk over women, and women rarely talk over men. I said that men do this unconsciously – as in, I’m called out on it, now and then, and fairly so, even though it’s something I’m conscious that I want to avoid doing. As codinghorror mentioned above, men mansplain to other men – which isn’t great, either, but the dynamics are somewhat different.

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58

You don’t behave that way in social situations because you are a man, however. And there are women who behave that way despite not being men.

I’m not trying to soften anything. (Hence why I picked “jerk”, but it could really be anything you please.) All I’m attempting to do is remove the latent sexualization of the term.

Calling this behavior “mansplaining” is, to my eyes, comparable to saying to an upset woman that “it must be that time of the month”. It takes a particular behavior and casts it in a specific editorialized sexual context as if that was the only possible explanation for the behavior being exhibited.

Being upset is not intrinsic and exclusive to women, nor even to menstruation, and it need not be irrational or without merit. Likewise, failing to respect a person’s intelligence, knowledge, and education while speaking to them is not intrinsic and exclusive to men, nor even to situations where someone is speaking to a woman, and it need not be based in misogyny or even ill intent.

Sexist terminology is sexist no matter which side of the fence you’re on. “Mansplaining” is inherently, undeniably sexist. How people who are fighting for equality in issues of sex and gender can possibly not see the hypocrisy of employing such a term is beyond me.

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59

You must be really unhappy about the term “Feminism”, then. Not saying I’m a huge fan of either term, but naming is hard and stuff.

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60

The Last of Us has very well written, strong female (and male) protagonists and is a good example for how this improves the story and makes you engage with it on a deeper level than cliché cartoon characters.

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I personally found this video too disturbing to watch all the way through, what sort of message are these sort of game giving impressionable kids?