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Sexism in gaming
(spun-off from the nth iteration of a TVT thread or so)
Okay, so let's talk about this perennially controversial issue.
For a long time I was wondering what people were talking about when saying that gamers were misogynistic.
Then it turned out I was playing the wrong games.
Well, more accurately, I came across this one video that's supposed to be the pilot episode (?) of a reality show about indie game designers. One of them had a...let's just say a rather crazy idea for a videogame, involving a plot premise of a female straw feminist using menopause as an excuse to take over the world.
I was like, da fuq did i just watch
And then I started putting the pieces together. Thing is, many of the pieces really are little pieces. You can't call, say, Lara Croft's huge boobs sexist, by themselves. However, when you put Lara Croft's huge boobs together with Duke Nukem's hypermasculinity (starting with DN3D) together with some observations on character clothing design differences between male and female characters in various games, and throw in some higher-profile controversies like the "girlfriend mode" or FATAL, you start to see a very distinct pattern.
Curiously, I've never played Tomb Raider, or Duke Nukem (past the MS-DOS DN1, or 2 barely), or Borderlands, or Grand Theft Auto, or Counter-Strike, or Quake, or Halo (except for five minutes), or pretty much most super-well-known games from the past ten to fifteen years (especially if they were PC games). In fact, that "girlfriend mode" thing was something I just now found via Google; I'd never heard of it before writing this post. Instead, I stood in my own little corner of the gaming world, rediscovering and discovering anew 8- and 16-bit console games for a whole ten years, at least. Sprinkle in a few indie games (most notably Cave Story and La-Mulana). So I had no idea what was going on.
Perhaps that was a good thing?
Anyhow, I find it ironic that the western gaming industry, centered in the U.S. which prides itself on women's rights (Todd Akin and stupid conservatives notwithstanding), produces stuff that's criticized for sexism, while the eastern gaming industry, centered in Japan which has a reputation for traditional gender roles, has on par avoided that criticism.
Though that may be due to them casting female characters into all sorts of roles (including many awesome ones) because, well, cute and sexy. One could make a whole discussion about whether this is a different kind of sexism, a "sexualization of awesome" as I've sometimes called it. But at least this isn't misogynism, so that's one step forward. I guess?
Comments
Ah. Ha ha. Oh man.
Uh, GMH, we gotta talk.
For starters, fans of Sofia Belmont will probably disagree with you on that.
You mean Sonia Belmont. Yes, I've heard lots of fans criticize IGA for sexism, for decanonizing Castlevania: Legends. I have, on occasion, been one of them. That said I think what little fan consensus there is generally suggests that his reason probably has to do with the implication of romance between Sonia and Alucard, the further implication that Trevor and the entire Belmont clan would thus be part decendants of Dracula himself.
Yeah, that's true, though there's still the matter of Samus in Other M.
Although that seems a lot more like incredibly incompetent writing than the kind of gross, misogynistic schlock that Duke Nukem Forever had.
...
Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball, then.
ahahaha, remember when the DoA series was actually about fighting.
Dead or Alive is kind of a low hanging fruit, but its problems are endemic to fighting games in general. I mean look at female designs in any given fighting game (Street Fighter, Tekken, BlazBlue) and see how sexualized they are compared to males. Look at how Soul Caliber eclipsed even Dead or Alive in obnoxious fanservice. It's kind of hard to ignore.
Yeah, Western developers are hardly perfect in their portrayal of women and LGBT, but if we take BioWare and Obsidian, they at least seem to be trying.
This IS misogyny. Period. Casting women into a role based on how cute or sexy it is, is making women out as sexual objects only good for being eye candy.
Heh, DoA;XBV is another of those higher-profile facepalm moments. And that whole series is another one that I haven't played.
^ Actually, come to think of it, one could argue that eastern developers aren't really much better. You just pointed out the character designs in fighting games, and beyond that, there's just the whole thing about anime being filled with porn. Obviously games aren't anime, and the fact that console gaming is big in Japan probably prevents mods, but mods for western games seem to have kinda filled the porn niche themselves. (I just now realized I forgot to mention the infamous "hot coffee" mod.) But you also have random stupid shit like Rapelay. Or maybe it's because I live in the west so I hear more about western games being sexist.
I have a hard time getting offended by Duke Nukem merely because of how over-the-top it is. It's a pastiche of hypermasculinity rather than a model to be followed. I'm more bothered by the 'strong independent women meant to get you off' like Lara.
Not that I'm completely guiltless of this. I enjoyed Bloodrayne and Bayonetta more than any feminist would be glad to hear.
Or I dunno, maybe there's literature on how Bloodrayne is sex-positivist like Bayonetta.
^^Bioware isn't exactly what I'd call a great example. It took them a good long while to have gay male options after lesbian ones and they've always got to have that 'sultry bitch' archetype in there.
Also, while Blazblue is kind of crazy with its fanservice, Street Fighter is pretty chaste in regards to almost all of gaming. Hell I'd say Kingdom Hearts is more sexual than that game.
Well, actually, Lara Croft and Bayonetta are kinda more in line with the non-misogynistic form of sexism. The "female characters as sex objects" kind of sexism, but without the "female characters suck at everything that doesn't have to do with sex or housework" kind of sexism.
...speaking of that last thing, there's also the whole idea of mocking people for playing "like a girl".
And this is related to a bunch of random misogyny on places like Youtube (witness the number of videos that purport to be about bad female drivers, and then the number of comments about how said female drivers should stay in the kitchen). I really have not had even anywhere close to an idea of what sorts of people these are that write these comments.
Hence the word "trying". At least they have LGBT options at all. I can't think if one Japanese game that let you play as a gay character without obscuring it under loads of subtext.
Well, besides Yaoi games. But that's a whole different can of worms.
^^Oh man, I can't believe I forgot about that.
Yeah, the open abuse towards female players is a much bigger problem in my mind, since it prevents women from enjoying games that even lack that sexism.
And yeah, I think Bayonetta does a good job of sexuality in gaming. I think Lara could too if we didn't have to be afraid of her being raped and oh my god what the hell game culture.
^I think disavowing an entire genre of gay gaming fiction isn't quite fair. I mean sure, a good deal of it fetishizes homsexuality, but Bioware does the exact same thing.
It's kind of weird how strong a female gaming figure I thought Juliet from Lolipop Chainsaw was. Despite her insecurities, she was a positive and strong figure with a supportive family and a loving boyfriend and it was nice to see a female character with an overall healthy life.
I thought Lollipop Chainsaw got ripped into for being sexist? I might be thinking of something else though.
...sort of? The only complaints I've heard were generally about her outfit, but once it got played people had a lot of good things to say about the characters and aesthetics, even if the gameplay was really unpolished.
Really, her outfit is a part of the whole ensemble of the way we see high school and interactions there in. There's a lot of metajoking about that sort of stuff and there's a very literal example of high school emotional bullying of hurting with words.
I think a lot of this stuff needs to be taken on a case-by-case basis, because just because something shares elements a sexist work has, that doesn't automatically make it sexist.
Maybe, I dunno.
Personally I just try to avoid obviously sexist material and ignore it if I already am playing the game/watching the show/whatever else.
On the other hand you can shift camera angles to look up her skirt, and she pulls it down, obviously having a problem with the player doing that. Yet, the game doesn't actively discourage the player doing this at all.
One could argue that this is part of the meta-commentary that this game has, but that gives it more credit than most games deserve.
The former is impossible, and the latter is implicit approval of that sexist material.
?? why don't most games deserve credit for meta commentary.
I find the former very possible and have no idea what you mean by "implicit approval". I have played plenty of games I haven't liked at all for whatever reason, I see no reason why I can like parts of some games and not parts of others.
Liking or tolerating something does not mean you're ok with it being problematic.
I mean, let's face it, if that were true, you literally couldn't like almost any Hollywood movie except for like...0.001% exceptions? Something along those lines
>One could argue that this is part of the meta-commentary that this game has, but that gives it more credit than most games deserve.
But not more than Lollipop Chainsaw deserves. The fact that she pulls it down, does put a separation between the player and the character and the fact that she doesn't want you seeing it is made as that it's clearly that it's not something you should do. In almost any other game you can just look under a character's skirt without any objection and if their only desire was to get you off, they wouldn't have bothered.
One of the brilliant things about the game is that Juliet is both aware of other sexualizing her (how could she not be) and very insecure at the same time. Her not wanting you looking up her skirt is an extension of that.
>The former is impossible, and the latter is implicit approval of that sexist material.
Because you've never liked anything with sexist material ever.
Because most games are shallow power fantasies made for children and manchildren, bereft of any real intellectual or cultural merit and won't be for a long time.
Don't I know it. I hate myself for it.
is this a serious statement.
Honest question.
Wouldn't it be much less of a burden to just enjoy the good parts and get the complaints out into the open, in the hopes that future works will eventually begin to avoid it? Having read horror stories about the M:tG community, as well as proposed solutions to community problems, I'm not foolish enough to assume this would be an easy issue to fix, but still.
An exaggeration based on the fact that i mad, yes. But not entirely untrue.
^Problem is, you can tell yourself all you want that you can like x and still disapprove of y. But at the end of the day you are still the one that looks like the guy who plays the game with creepy shots of elf tits or whatever. Good luck convincing everyone else.
I'm going to dispute that and ask you how you're going to claim with authority that all videogames ever are
Because he read that once on Tumblr so it must be true
Every time someone implies that tumblr is nothing but raeg, I post the most recent thing from my tumblr feed. So here you go
are you happy now DYRE
are you happy.
Well, the part of tumblr that isn't "I MUST BE ANGRY ALL THE TIME ABOUT EVERYTHING!" is still really pointless and dumb so I don't feel bad about talking about the whole site like it's bad.
Whatever works for you, dude.
also, counterpoint:
tragedy series > > > > > >
>Judging tumblr as if it were a uniform blob of thought
>Unironically
>le meme arrows
>inb4 unfunny spurdo spade posts
The entire purpose of the website is so that you can just repost other people's shit. It's like a 4chan-style imageboard in that regard except that having any sort of actual discussion is difficult and there is even less original content.
That's actually sort of not the point at all. But again, whatever makes you feel superior to me or whomever else for arbitrary reasons.