Misogyny and video game culture

[Rome Existed]

[quote="Thommo";p="2109055"]I don't understand why people even call Anita Sarkeesian a critic, she's not.

A critic is a person (usually a fan of a form of media), who in a professional or nonprofessional manner experiences a work of art, explores its dimensions and then writes about it, analysing it in terms of culture, background, technical mastery, themes and execution.

What Anita does is more a form of polemics, running on confirmation bias. She decides that video games are "vs women" and goes hunting for examples, which she then holds up saying "see!". Since she goes back and uses examples from up to twenty years ago this isn't informative as criticism, no game is analysed deeply and the samples are completely non-representative so no legitimate inference about the state of video games as a whole can be drawn. The number of examples is so low you could (if sufficiently bored) come up with examples featuring a man in the negative role to match each and every example cited by Anita - we are only talking about a few dozen examples out of literally tens of millions of video games made over the last couple of decades.

This doesn't of course mean that Anita is wrong, although as I've pointed out before her claims certainly don't match my experience - around 7/10 games featuring a protagonist in my collection allow me to play as a female character, it's not remotely uncommon unless you arbitrarily exclude huge numbers of games for also allowing choice of a male one.

I also wonder why so many people talk about objectification of women in games without ever realising that games don't actually feature women, they feature depictions of women that require anthropomorphisation. If I stare at some drawing of an imaginary woman, admiring her curves and drooling there's never any objectification, she has no feelings, dreams, hopes and fears for me to ignore, I can't treat her "like" an object she "is" an object. This is in stark contrast to real and damaging objectification where a woman, a person in her own right is treated is less than human. Frankly if teenage boys are going to get het up over pictures it's hard to see where the harm in those pictures being fantasies, drawn for that express purpose actually is.[/quote]

Yes, they do have playable women............ MEN with BOOBS!!!!

You can sum up all of Anita's vids into the following sentence: Male sexuality and masculinity = bad.

Anita Sarkeesian is a sex negative feminist who is criticised by quite a number of women, many of whom are feminists themselves. She pretty much ignores the fact that many members of so called Gamergate are women who like playing as big breasted, beautiful women (it's fantasy) the same that many men like to pretend that they look like Arnie when they play games.

[Thommo]

[quote="Rome Existed";p="2109141"]Yes, they do have playable women............ MEN with BOOBS!!!!

You can sum up all of Anita's vids into the following sentence: Male sexuality and masculinity = bad.

Anita Sarkeesian is a sex negative feminist who is criticised by quite a number of women, many of whom are feminists themselves. She pretty much ignores the fact that many members of so called Gamergate are women who like playing as big breasted, beautiful women (it's fantasy) the same that many men like to pretend that they look like Arnie when they play games.[/quote]

Sorry, I'm not quite following, in what way do most of the games I play feature "men with boobs"?

I'm not quite sure about how many men or women like to pretend anything when they play games, a lot of people seem to buy into the idea that everyone really projects onto their character avatar, I'm not sure it's really true, I know I don't do that. It's one of the grounds on which games like Spec Ops: The line fails, they criticize the player for choices the game designer makes and for most players they fail to feel guilty about the deaths of non existent people that they didn't cause anyway.

[WayOfTheDodo]

Anita Sarkeesian? Isn't that the woman who was caught lying about this whole thing? For example, she claimed to be a long-time avid gamer, while a different video from earlier that surfaced showed that she didn't play games at all.

[Rome Existed]

[quote="Thommo";p="2109142"][quote="Rome Existed";p="2109141"]Yes, they do have playable women............ MEN with BOOBS!!!!

You can sum up all of Anita's vids into the following sentence: Male sexuality and masculinity = bad.

Anita Sarkeesian is a sex negative feminist who is criticised by quite a number of women, many of whom are feminists themselves. She pretty much ignores the fact that many members of so called Gamergate are women who like playing as big breasted, beautiful women (it's fantasy) the same that many men like to pretend that they look like Arnie when they play games.[/quote]

Sorry, I'm not quite following, in what way do most of the games I play feature "men with boobs"?

I'm not quite sure about how many men or women like to pretend anything when they play games, a lot of people seem to buy into the idea that everyone really projects onto their character avatar, I'm not sure it's really true, I know I don't do that. It's one of the grounds on which games like Spec Ops: The line fails, they criticize the player for choices the game designer makes and for most players they fail to feel guilty about the deaths of non existent people that they didn't cause anyway.[/quote]

It's one of the tropes she talks about. Man with boobs refers to a female character who displays male characteristics, such as using violence (so female soldiers) instead of using positive female characteristics such as negotiation or nurturing.

[Thommo]

[quote="Rome Existed";p="2109235"]It's one of the tropes she talks about. Man with boobs refers to a female character who displays male characteristics, such as using violence (so female soldiers) instead of using positive female characteristics such as negotiation or nurturing.[/quote]

What a load of gender essentialist bollocks.

[Rome Existed]

[quote="Thommo";p="2109301"][quote="Rome Existed";p="2109235"]It's one of the tropes she talks about. Man with boobs refers to a female character who displays male characteristics, such as using violence (so female soldiers) instead of using positive female characteristics such as negotiation or nurturing.[/quote]

What a load of gender essentialist bollocks. [/quote]

And then when she described how she'd make a game it was a princess who is taken prisoner but instead of being a Damsel in Distress she frees herself, fights her way out of prison and then fights her way to her castle and overthrows those who overthrew her.......... so in other words a man with boobs.

That's how you can tell when someone is spouting bullshit, they can't keep their arguments straight.

[Jerome Da Gnome]

/

She never defines what is girl positive.

It is a scam.

[Rome Existed]

[quote="Jerome Da Gnome";p="2109314"]/

She never defines what is girl positive.

It is a scam.[/quote]

Because everything is sexist!

Have a male main character? Sexist!

Have a female main character? That character could be replaced by a man! Sexist!!!!!

[Rome Existed]

She must live on a different planet to the rest of us.

[Rome Existed]

What I have found amusing is that lately she's been coping a lot of flak over her comments about Bayonetta, which Anita has decried as sexist, a fuck toy and designed to sexually arose adolescent males. Why has she been coping flak? Bayonetta was designed by a woman. Bayonetta has also been a favourite to dress up as among female cosplayers. This I think is the problem for sex negative feminist Anita Sarkeesian. She views women who don't toe her line that female sexuality is only for women as basically traitors to the cause. They've been duped by the patriarchy. Female sexual expression existing on a spectrum from totally asexual to likes to have sex in public is patriarchy.

[Deremensis]

[quote="Rome Existed";p="2109307"][quote="Thommo";p="2109301"][quote="Rome Existed";p="2109235"]It's one of the tropes she talks about. Man with boobs refers to a female character who displays male characteristics, such as using violence (so female soldiers) instead of using positive female characteristics such as negotiation or nurturing.[/quote]

What a load of gender essentialist bollocks. [/quote]

And then when she described how she'd make a game it was a princess who is taken prisoner but instead of being a Damsel in Distress she frees herself, fights her way out of prison and then fights her way to her castle and overthrows those who overthrew her.......... so in other words a man with boobs.

That's how you can tell when someone is spouting bullshit, they can't keep their arguments straight.[/quote]


One of the things that really bothers me is how some games have been quietly getting gender right in video games for ages, and no one really notices or takes from their example. Most of the people speaking up about sexism in video games or in the video game culture don't even notice - they throw out the good with the bad.

Take pokemon for example. In the vast majority of Pokemon games, you have the choice of either male or female as your main character - and literally nothing is different as a result. Your pokemon can be male or female with very little if any difference. Antagonists and protagonists can be male or female with no real preference either way.

The mere fact that we have to put so much freaking thought into how we represent women in video games, or how we represent men for that matter, or in any medium for that matter, is ridiculous. If there's one thing that we can take away from something like the pokemon games, it's this: that the only way to get gender right, is to not think about gender at all. That means, throwing out ridiculous preconceptions of what makes a man or a woman a man or a woman, and write about people, not stereotypes, regardless of gender. You don't need to portray women as particularly strong or as particularly anything, and you don't have to avoid portraying them as any other common trait of human beings - the fact is, plenty of human beings are dependent or passive, or as violent and aggressive, and both men and women will end up with these traits. You just have to portray men and women in a realistic light. If a writer or whatnot can't wrap their head around that, then it doesn't seem like they have much place writing stories for games, shows, et cetera, anyways.

[Thommo]

I broadly agree with you, but I think even requiring that men and women are portrayed in a realistic light is too much.

I enjoy a good Sherlock Holmes novel, but I can certainly assure you it's not for realism. Indeed anyone attempting to portray Holmes as even remotely believable is facing a Sisyphean task, that is precisely his charm.

[Rumraket]

[quote="WayOfTheDodo";p="2109194"]Anita Sarkeesian? Isn't that the woman who was caught lying about this whole thing? For example, she claimed to be a long-time avid gamer, while a different video from earlier that surfaced showed that she didn't play games at all.[/quote]
And that's not the most egregious of her lies by any stretch. Whether sexism is a problem in the video game industry or not, Anita Sarkeesian's "reporting" on that issue has been utterly discredited. I trust her just about as much as I trust Ken Ham to properly describe the situation in evolutionary biology.

[Rumraket]

[quote="Varangian";p="2099973"][quote="Animavore";p="2099963"]I wonder what the statistics are for people who aren't paying the slightest bit of attention to "gamergate" and are just playing their games.[/quote]
I'm too busy shooting prostitutes in GTA to stay updated. What is the fuss all about?

Just kidding. Playing Mass Effect and War Thunder.[/quote]
Oh, I was shooting for the top-10 stripper rape-a-thon in Hitmale 3.

Most succínct explanation for this whole thing: Self-appointed (but curiously un-raped, still alive and now tens of thousands of dollars richer) professional victim, Anita Sarkeesian, started making shit up, a shitstorm ensued that have yet to quiet down.

[Forty Two]