None of which would be a thing if Lara Croft had not been designed the way she was by — drum roll, please — the developers.
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Serious question, honest: are there any critiques of Sarkeesian or her work which are not fundamentally asinine?
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I have found Sarkeesian’s analysis to be overly simplistic and erring too far on the side of the media effects model but I completely agree with her on this. Melonie Mac’s analysis paints a picture of either/or when it can be both. This has been acknowledged for a long time. For example: Game Studies - Lara Croft: Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis
http://www.opensorcery.net/lara2.html
Further, Mac’s citation of one of Tomb Raiders creators is not convincing because he fails to recognize that emphasizing muscles on men and mammary glands on women are not the same thing.
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Look up Liana Kerzner.
Asinine means stupid and foolish.
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Pixels are not Polygons.
This is not even technically correct. Yes, they are.
Edited to add: darn it, I got it backwards. Polygons are pixels, although your point is still invalid.
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Nope, you had it right. Each pixel is a small square or rectangle, a type of polygon.
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Damn it. You’re right that I was right, and that I didn’t get it wrong.
I still feel wrong, but in a good way.
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But storytelling is storytelling, and gameplay rules are gameplay rules. That holds true whether we’re talking about pixels or polygons or whatever comes next. You brought up limited technology as a general concept, and if you think splitting hairs after the fact will change the flaw in your position you’re very much mistaken.
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Beyond the worth of her feminist game criticism (which, I have to say, as a game developer, was spot-on and much needed, and for which I’m grateful as both a developer and gamer), it was interesting how her work revealed other things, too.
Such as: how many people have no fucking clue what “media criticism” is. The percentage of people who heard the word “criticism” and thought it meant “attack” really shocked me. (The number of people who thought her analysis was intended as a proscription was even more shocking.)
The other thing that was significant was the revelation of the wide overlap between the alt-right and those who self-identified as “gamers.” I knew “gamers” were toxic misogynists, but until that point, I didn’t know they were also neo-Nazis.
I remember when Anne-Marie was doing research for that essay. She asked a series of innocuous questions on gamers’ forums about the relationship players had with the character. She was coming at it herself as a Tomb Raider player, feeling generally positive about Lara Croft even as she recognized the complexity of her relationship with the character. The response from gamers was, to me at the time, shocking. They made all sorts of assumptions about her “agenda” in asking the questions, and vociferously attacked her for it. So I wasn’t all that surprised to see how Anita was treated.
Well, yeah, why would she?
First of all, they’re fucking hard to find, to the point of being nonexistent when she started doing her videos. Traditionally, sexuality in video games was, in a word, gross. Leering, misogynistic, 100% about the male gaze, etc. In the last seven years, games which are better in that regard have come out, but they’re generally not the mainstream releases, but small indie games, and not necessarily involving female characters, either.
Second of all, and more importantly, that’s not what her videos are about. They’re about representations of, and tropes around, women in games. She does talk about non-problematic female characters in games, but if she’s talking about sexuality in a game, it’s because it’s related to a problematic way a female character is represented. So as a complaint, that’s just saying that her videos aren’t about the things that are outside the scope of her discussion. Duh.
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I clearly remember the moment I started to question whether or not I actually wanted to make it as an artist in the video games industry, like I was trying to do (spoilers: I didn’t). It was when I saw concept art from Duke Nukem Forever, and realized that “work up some designs for an alien rape machine, but like, sexy” was a thing I could legitimately be asked to do as a professional, and refusing or making the designs not sexy enough would potentially damage my entire foreseeable career.
Whether or not individuals could be said to have a choice, the industry as a whole does—and it chooses to be actively hostile to women and minorities 90% of the time.
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I remember a kid down the street had the “Custer’s Revenge” cartridge (I think he stole it from his dad) and we had an adolescent excitement to see what all the fuss was about.
It wasn’t fun, it wasn’t even titillating (and we were going through puberty with our hormones on the rise), and we felt ripped off-- it’s like we debased ourselves and got nothing in return.
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Oh my god I just looked it up and I just… did that make it into the final game? What the fuck?
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I’ll bet if the same game came out today with full XBox One graphics and you were an adolescent you’d still end up disappointed, because the storytelling is toxic and the gameplay is crappy.
I mean, did any 13 year old get titillated by having sex with hookers in GTA IV or think that was the most fun part of the game? And yet there it is, dumped into the game.
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Came here hoping to see this exact gif. Thanks @Melz2!
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Yeah, but we didn’t know any better. We thought “oooooo. . .this game has sex, we must see this”, it was a selling point for clueless kids, not for adults who had access to the real thing.
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Agreed. I remember when the shit storm started people were talking about one of her videos and I watched it and thought it was a really mild critique. Said so much about the people worked up than it did her.
There are also a lot of people acting as if her work is some sort of mathematical proof and their one counter example somehow totally invalidates her whole argument.
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What I find depressing about our current state is people like Anita Sarkeesian, the Parkland students, climate justice teens and every other person putting forth a new set of ideas and re-framing the debate have to constantly fight these rearguard actions against attacks, instead of pursuing their work the have to fight off the abuse. They will be great in spite of the effort required to fight off the assholes but jeez, it must be tiring.
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I looked up her Wiki bio.
In 2014, Kerzner faced criticism after admitting at an International Game Developers Association event in Toronto that she inflated game scores in her reviews so those developers could receive certain bonuses and rewards. Liana K later attributed her statements to her “comedic technique.”
According to Kerzner she also previously worked as a convention “booth babe”.
She may sincerely self-identify as a sex-positive feminist, but she’s not exactly someone I’d consider an authority on “ethics in games journalism” (the purported concern of Sarkeesian’s opponents) or ethics in game marketing.
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