Anita Sarkeesian is a national treasure, and IMHO a war hero at this point.
I’ve never listened to her podcast but did watch her videos. I’m still as conflicted now by her discussions as I was when I first watched them.
I like sexuality in video games. Real life has sex, so storytelling needs it, too. I’ve hated for a long time that it’s been one type of “man-gaze” sexuality in video games (but not just games, this has been true for a LONG time in TV and Movieland, too, but the transformation has begun there, while it really hasn’t in games).
It was never Ms. Sarkeesian’s responsiblity to provide alternatives. But the disappointment to me is that the gaming industry as a whole really hasn’t, either - and that means their “fix” so far seems to just be “less sexuality”. There’s an argument that this is a net positive - better no sexuality than a bunch of misogynistic versions of sexuality - but that’s not really true for the long-term.
I think as @hawkeward mentions above, greater female representation in the industry will naturally help correct this trend over the longterm, but I can’t help but think that “more women will fix it” is really just absolving the men of responsibility here, and sexuality in gaming is going to suffer for a long time until we reach gender equilibrium as a result.
I hope I’m wrong about that, and I hope that the industry as a whole (that means you too, men!) can step up and really think about sexuality in gaming before that point and try to actually do something about it. Because I feel like the gamergate crowd is just going to change narrative from “sex in games isn’t an issue” to “now there’s no sex in games, our medium is moving backwards” instead, instead of the much more desirable outcome of their becoming utterly irrelevant because games have evolved to have inclusive sexuality.
Porn informs a lot of this. The younger, single male developers probably live on it, not knowing it’s just a simulacrum of the real thing. The older executives who know better just see it as the cash cow it is for marketing to a core audience of adolescent boys who share the developers’ callow misconceptions. This goes back a long time; note that “Custer’s Revenge” was branded with Swedish Erotica, a major porn studio in the 1980s.
To be clear, this isn’t a puritan screed against porn, which has its place. But in the video game industry the mainstream porn sensibility crowds out other, more nuanced and fun and enthusiastically consensual portrayals of sex in the storytelling.
The real fix is for the industry to gets its act together and stop thinking that everything is about catering to nerdy adolescent males. The geeks have won, the Millenials are in their 30s, gaming is mainstream, and they’re missing a business opportunity by not trying to appeal to adults and women.
I think of it not so much as “women will (are obligated to be the ones to) fix this” as “(cis, straight, white, able-bodied and neurotypical) men need to step up and make the industry one that welcomes and supports women, people of color, members of the LGBT+ community, and disabled people at all levels of the creative process.” All of us with varying kinds of privilege are, by nature, not great at recognizing our own blind spots in a vacuum–the more people of widely varying backgrounds and viewpoints there are at the table, being given equal voice, the easier it is to correct those blind spots and the better the resulting art will be.
That will require aggressive culture change on the creation side of the medium (it’s good to see an assessment that voices like Anita’s are tangibly spurring on that change)–and possibly some change on the consumption side, though personally I think the gators and their ilk are seriously overestimating their own power and influence on economic reality–but also sweeping, progressive changes to the way the industry operates on a basic level. Currently, video game production is an exploitative industry staffed by people who are able to suffer being exploited in particular ways–i.e. mostly young, white men. The working conditions of the industry are inherently unfriendly to anyone burdened with caregiving, expectations of household labor, illness (mental or physical), or financial obligations, and is therefore near-homogeneous, and would likely remain at least majority young, white men even if studios began aggressively hiring for diversity. That’s an issue that has been seeing a lot more awareness recently, but again is something that our voices and choices on the outside can influence to only a limited degree. On both ends, it is incumbent upon those on the inside (who are, as noted, mostly men) to bring about change.
The unfortunate part is that, as we’ve seen largely with the example of the movie industry, refusing to make changes doesn’t really come with a lot of real consequences (beyond perpetuating the creation of stunningly mediocre art).
Derp, point. Lost focus of want I really wanted say, which is Anita should not be consided to be THEE go to person about feminism and video games. Although she is the first person to raise the issue-or at least the first person to reach a mass audiuance of any degree–there are other feminist gamers who think she is wrong. There, done being an idiot on this thread.
Oh look, a dude telling a woman she’s making too much noise.
As long is “SARKEESIAN IS RIGHT” vs. “SARKEESIAN IS WRONG” is the spectrum of debate that seems to be important to you, then you yourself are identifying Ms. Sarkeesian as “the go to person about feminism and video games.”
She’s a SWERF as far as I can tell. She refers to sex workers as “prostituted women” constantly in her videos. Actual sex workers view this as an slur that denies their agency and infantilizes them for their choice of profession. That’s pretty “sex-negative”.
She definitely highlights problems with the depiction of women (especially sex workers) in games – often they are sexist, abused caricatures that only perpetuate stereotypes. But insulting the actual women (who are often already marginalized) in that profession is not (IMO) a good way to advocate for them.
It’s not like people with different opinions are automatically Trump-loving nazis.
Maybe not, but this isn’t really a ‘difference of opinion’ situation. People who make games where “the goal is to rape a Native American women” are objectively horrible people, and their game is fucking horrific.
I have found Anita to be a little off here and there (not agreeing on some points, but she misses some legit points to make elsewhere). Overall I find her work to be pretty obvious stuff overall, and uncontroversial. I am a white dude myself who grew up with games, and I wonder what all the fuss is about with her. She is largely right.
I disliked the way she consistently cherry picked video game examples to make wildly exaggerated claims (for example, according to her it is impossible to see Batman’s rear end in Arkham Knight because sexism which… isn’t even correct), plus the way she considered violence in video games unacceptable.
Yes, there is plenty to improve upon in gaming, and I fully support a “women’s magazines” as well as a “men’s magazines” and “general audience magazines” view of gaming… but I hope she moves on to other subjects.
Yeah. And the absolutely hysterical hostility from gamers and alt-right scum she’s been getting is strong evidence that she’s doing something right, and that we seriously need the kind of criticism she’s been giving.
The whole “But creative freedom!” thing would be more credible if it a) took into account the actual realities of art direction, design etc. in gaming industry; it’s a job where you create what the client/employer wants, and this applies to background scenery and fuzzy doggos just as much as it applies to busty ladies; and b) if sexualized female characters weren’t so overwhelmingly present.
I’m going to make a confession here, of sorts: I like Lara Croft’s old design, with big boobs and all, just as Power Girl happens to be one of my all-time favorite superheroes. I like cool, badass women with big boobs in my games and comics and so on. But it would be nice if those characters and character designs were more of an exception, if most female characters in video games weren’t as sexualized as they are, and if most superheroines weren’t super-stacked and wearing body-hugging costumes.
Sure, I want my tastes catered to, and occasionally titillated. But not all the time, and not at the expense of other people’s interests and tastes and, most importantly, their ability to feel comfortable and safe in gaming circles, or comics fandom, etc.
Can anyone here offer / point to some hint of what she’s talking about?
YouTube is too saturated for new, innovative, game-changing voices to succeed, at least at the rate we used to see. Some of my favourite channels, like FranLab, are basically doing the math and telling us they are going to be condemned to irrelevancy. Others, like Veritasium, are a bit more optimist, but still point that they have to make their videos more “appealing” for youtube (and thus, profits) notice them, even pointing that sometimes subscribers miss the video because it was not “relevant” enough.
We are seeing an upsurge of “mainstream” channels and a decline of “alternative” ones already, and this is going to be more so before the end of the year.
In short. The new youtube only favors people who do the things that the majority want. If you want to cater to niche markets, you won’t earn money and you will have a hard time finding your audience because youtube is going to actively ignore you, so is better to find a platform that will appeal to those markets.
