you mean “The Last of Us: Has evil feminism ruined the zombie apocalypse?”
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I can’t really disagree with much of anything she said, except that here she’s cherrypicking the types of games where objectification of women is part of of the context of the game universe — criminal underworlds, lawless frontiers, anarchic postapocalypses. You make a Sopranos game, you have to have the Bada Bing as a main location.
(Also, in the 70s, everything in advertising was draped with scantily-clad women. Arcade games, sports cars, lawnmowers, breakfast cereals…)
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Mod edit: Imma gonna dragonsplain something to you, arguing about terminology is completely off topic and makes this into a discussion about men and not women. Get back on topic.
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I think the toaster in this metaphor is the woman within the game who was designed to be exploited, not the game as a whole. This only applies to some games, but most NPCs are designed to be killable, while only certain female characters are designed to be rapeable or purchasable. I like your metaphor for the whole game though. While some of the examples she gives are taking something that you can do to anyone and just focusing on where it’s done to women, it shouldn’t be too much to expect games to push back against rape culture and objectivising women rather than marketing it. Games can be very imaginative. They should be used more often to imagine societies that are interesting but not sexist. In that sense I don’t think Portal and Minecraft are good examples, as they don’t show a full society. We should be able to imagine a rich, interesting culture with plenty of interaction that isn’t fundamentally exploitative.
Going back to the ‘not all men’ idea, it’s worth highlighting what Anita said later in the video. (This isn’t so much a response to your comment, just general thoughts). Patriarchy and misogyny are parts of our culture to a greater or lesser extent, and affect both men and women’s thinking about what we should expect from interactions with each other or what our value is as members of society. In this way, the fact that someone reflects the values that they are given (or doesn’t explicitly condemn them) doesn’t necessarily make them a bad person, although the culture and the assumptions do need to be changed. The fact that she references games from way back isn’t because she’s struggling to find examples, but it fairly convincingly shows that this isn’t just taking a couple of games out of context: games have been and are being marketed to men by objectivising women’s bodies both in the game and in advertising. This is such a banal statement that it’s surprising it’s so controversial. 15+ years ago I used to subscribe to PC Gamer magazine with two of my brothers, who were also teenagers at the time. It was obvious that sexist depictions of women were being used to sell the games and the magazine and you’d regularly get characters like Lara Croft in pin-up poses. One of the female readers complained that the magazine was becoming like a “lads’ magazine” because it was just getting so blatant. The editor responded that most gamers were men and gaming magazines were in effect already lads’ magazines, so her argument was invalid. Although it was getting kind of obvious anyway, that was one of the points that made it clear that the gaming culture was not just reflecting sexism, but perpetuating it; we cancelled our subscription shortly afterwards.
Plenty of people play games that involve sexism because they’re good games and not because of the sexism. When they hear this sort of criticism, they respond in much the same way that I’ve seen religious people do when faced with criticism of a popular leader. That’s not what they’re about, you have to acknowledge the good parts, you don’t understand because you’re not in the group etc. Games have plenty to like about them, so it’s important to point out that removing casual acceptance of sexism in games won’t take all the fun out of the game. If that’s what makes the game fun for someone, maybe they should sit down and think about their lives.
I guess I do have some sort of negative reaction to the word ‘mansplaining’, but mainly because it just sounds like the kind of word a 5 year old would make up. I think the concept is pretty sound on the whole and ‘explaining away a woman’s lived experience of gender stereotyping to them from the vantage point of privilege’ is going to happen a lot more from men, so it’s not overly necessary to remove the gendered element of the word (providing it is understood that this only refers to a statistically significant subset of men).
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Hey, that women in the screenshot is obviously decorating the foreground!
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funny how you become actuarial only when it suits you.
I guess i’m just very ignorant… I only see the things she’s saying are actually “a thing” simply because people like her are saying it. Does that make sense? Surely I’m not the only one that sees games for what they are rather than what someone else might think they mean.
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you mean you view video games as nothing more than highly specialized computer programs, with no aesthetic or social context at all? whoa…
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I thought I was safe from this argument when I swore off playing any game but Space Invaders. Then someone pointed out how the “aliens” were all female, looking for a place to land to lay their eggs, and my shooter was just an angry penis spewing hate at them. :o(
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I’d say Mass Effect works well on at least one level: you can make the main character male or female and it changes only one tiny aspect of the games. The only difference between the characters is that a female version can sleep with more of the NPCs than a male can, and sleeping with anyone is totally optional.
But then there’s the sexy blue ladies who like to pole dance but they’re not really ladies because they’re agender and just LOOK like ladies. Yeah, those are a bit problematic.
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I would give your comment many more likes if I could. I think the perspective of a gay man is something that these discussions have been missing. The entrenched opinions denying there could possibly be a problem don’t seem to be getting budged by reasonable female or reasonable, non-sexist male voices. So, thank you.
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I have to say, I was disappointed that Watch Dogs took the easy way out by shoving a female relative of the protagonist straight into the refrigerator. So much buzz about the original plot and they stick that tired old trope right at the beginning. And she’s his juvenile niece, how would the story have been any different if it was his young nephew that was killed? I bet they didn’t even consider it, because it’s the default reaction to have the hero avenging the death of “his women”.
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I think it’s the difference between “a nice guy” and Nice Guys ™. There are people who game, and then there are Gamers. My spouse and most of my friends work in that industry. They often say “ugh, I hate Gamers” referring to a particular flavor of “this game does not cater to my every whim therefore you suck, it sucks, and everyone you ever knew sucks too.”
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How many games can you think of where you play a man seeking revenge for the death of (or trying to rescue) his wife/girlfriend/wife and children?
How many can you think of where you play as a woman seeking revenge for the death of (or trying to rescue) her husband/children/boyfriend?
One of those is a cliched industry story in game after game. I’m hard-pressed to come up with more than one or two examples for the other.
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I think you hit the nail on the head there, but it actually goes a couple levels deeper once you factor in just how differently men and women think, and just how much of a blind spot it creates.
The best metaphor I can come up with is actually a political one: 
The thing about that illustration is that it accurately represents both positions- EVERYONE wants people to be treated fairly, they just have radically different ideas about what that MEANS.
Mens’ fantasies and womens’ fantasies are VERY different things. Our coping skills, our problem solving methods, our defense mechanisms, and our communication patterns are different. I think that in order for feminism to get much further, women need to understand exactly why guys operate the way they do, and men need to understand just how subject we are to our own biases.
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To be fair to the gamemaker, you’re comparing stealth suits to front line assault armor. A better comparison would be a suit of plate armor that when on a male avatar is a huge chunk of steel, but when on a female avatar is a fancy steel/fur bikini.
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The issue isn’t comparing stealth suits with assault armor- It’s that the female character defaults to the slinky stealthy suit, while the male defaults to the tank with arms.
Is there any point in the game where we see a male saboteur in a form fitting bodysuit alongside a female from the armored infantry?
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If you follow the link I posted to the previous conversation you’ll see we discussed that point at length as well.
I won’t rehash the whole thing but the short version is that’s the pretext for depicting all the female characters in ass-hugging tights and the males in hulkbuster-armor-on-steroids, but the real reason is that the mostly-male game developers and their presumed mostly-male audience like seeing them that way.
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I just watched the first video and am ignoring the second, because ¿¿¿3 hours for a second set of comments about a video???
In many ways, it doesn’t matter that she doesn’t seem to have spent much time playing games before she started writing about them. Are her points valid or not? Where values and perceptions carry on into real life, they need to be examined and they can be critiqued by people they affect, even if that person is not a gamer. In this case and judging by the vitriolic response she’s had, it’s hard to argue that they aren’t influencing people’s perceptions.
The claim that she should have used the term “sex workers” rather than “prostituted women” could be respected in some cases, but at the end of the day, these are fictional representations that have been placed in the game, usually by men and for men. Do they depict sex work that values the woman as a human being and not just as an object? Is it in any way likely that the fictional representations of sex workers shown in the video lack a sense of agency and are therefore reinforcing the ‘feminist’ stereotype? (For example, in at least a couple of the examples she gives of brothels, they are explicitly shown to be owned by men. In many of the examples, it is very obvious that the women are looked down on for their work. Where’s his criticism of that?) Sex work by people lacking agency is real and damaging, so a clear line should be drawn in games disassociating themselves from promoting actions that harm women. For example:
Could the fact that this guy is a foreign soldier carrying a gun have any influence on the power dynamic? Is this actually depicted as an issue in the game itself? How about where the women are depicted as having basically no other option due to poverty, and are there to be exploited by a rich foreigner? Is this even seen as problematic? Where people are referred to as bitches and ho’s and are bought and sold, can we use the term “prostituted women”? How many sexual therapists can you point to in major games, if the broader term should be used?
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Check out Mirror’s Edge as well. One of the few games where you’re playing a female character by default (there’s no option to pick male or female), she’s capable and skilled without weapons, and she’s not sexualized.
