Jump to content
Roderick

Feminism

Recommended Posts

I feel good that I can actually contribute some original content to this thread. One of my favorite video game ephemera blogs recapped the Metal Gear series' history of using rape as a plot device, then explored several other games to see if there's a better way. It's a bit short and gets tied in a bow at the end, but overall I'm glad it was written.

That was a good read because I've never played any of those games, besides MGS1/2 and I forgot all about any implications of rape (it's been so long!). Also I like this blog now. Nice.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That was a good read because I've never played any of those games, besides MGS1/2 and I forgot all about any implications of rape (it's been so long!). Also I like this blog now. Nice.

 

If the good essays aren't enough, the Gallery of Hideous Box Art, complete with artistic critiques, should put it on anyone's bookmark list.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

So... Rock Paper Shotgun's comments section has become almost unreadable in the wake of Ubisoft's FemaleCharactersAreTooMuchWorkGate (which henceforth I'm calling LazyGate), with at least half the comments in any article about any game trying to paint the site's coverage as hypocritical by complaining about the very existence of any non-female character. I can't imagine how bad it is on sites with more centrist leanings and a less aggressive moderation policy.

 

Is it ever not going to be like this? Is someone ever going to be able to say they don't like something because they don't feel included and not be mobbed by angry little boys who are scared of any change whatsoever?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think it will. It's not like there are no longer blatantly racist comments online now, but at least they're stigmatized in a broad sense. I honestly feel it'll be the same way with comments like those, in a "wrong side of history" way. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

RPS comments always end up like that for a while after they post an article about Issues in Gaming. But there are at least some people, maybe even an even number of people, who counter that. Well, last time it happened anyway.

 

That said, something I don't like about this is when we accuse those people of being "scared of change". I don't think that's it at all - at least not for all of them. They're just ignorant. They side with the developer because they like the games and don't recognize that the issue is, indeed, a real issue. They're aggressive about these things, not because they're afraid of change, but because they don't believe it's necessary and they're sick of seeing people talk about something they don't believe is a real problem. I assume that often enough the comment is a sarcastic one, meant to belittle (and rightfully so!), but I see it enough that I can't imagine there doesn't exist someone who actually believes it.

 

Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe they are just afraid of change. I know that that was never the case for me personally before I joined the illustrious Educated Folk, but I've also always been pretty weird in all facets of my existence, so that's not really indicative of anything.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I don't disagree with any you, but I tend to think it's more complex than any one explanation.  It's just easier to lump them all in together.

 

A recent Freakonomics episode covered people's problems with saying "I don't know," how a significant percentage of people will make up an answer rather than admit ignorance.  This tends to be age correlated, children do it the most and once you're well into adulthood, you do it less (though a lot of people still do it).  I wonder if with issues like this, it never occurs to people to acknowledge their ignorance, just as it never occurs to some people to say "I don't know" when asked a question.  Part of the issue of wrapping your head around social issues is realizing that you will never really know what it's like to be another person.  To be a woman, to be an immigrant, to be of another race.  There seems to be a built in or developed resistance to acknowledging personal ignorance (I don't know if this is mostly an American thing or not).  So what I wonder is how much that plays into people's reactions in situations like this. 

 

Unfortunately I don't know if it's going to get better anytime soon.  I think the only reason we don't see racist comments as much is that race just doesn't get as much coverage in gaming circles.  Go check out some popular sports blogs and let the rampant racism wash over you.  I suspect that if gaming sites wrote about racism with the frequency they wrote about gender issues, we'd see comments sections full of racist bullshit. 

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

That said, something I don't like about this is when we accuse those people of being "scared of change". I don't think that's it at all - at least not for all of them. They're just ignorant. They side with the developer because they like the games and don't recognize that the issue is, indeed, a real issue. They're aggressive about these things, not because they're afraid of change, but because they don't believe it's necessary and they're sick of seeing people talk about something they don't believe is a real problem. I assume that often enough the comment is a sarcastic one, meant to belittle (and rightfully so!), but I see it enough that I can't imagine there doesn't exist someone who actually believes it.

 

Maybe I'm completely wrong, maybe they are just afraid of change. I know that that was never the case for me personally before I joined the illustrious Educated Folk, but I've also always been pretty weird in all facets of my existence, so that's not really indicative of anything.

 

Yeah, sorry. That was my anger talking. Fear is just the first thing that comes to mind when I see the most typical defense against inclusivity in games: "Well, next we'll all be forced to play paraplegic gay transsexual Chinese dwarf geriatrics in every game and no one will be having any fun then!" That sounds like someone who's afraid of change to me, at least the notion that change might keep going and leave them behind and make them look bad retroactively, but you're right that the concluding statement to the example I just gave is most often, "Just stop bothering the developers and let them make the game they want to make," so there are also (mostly misguided) concerns about artistic purity and and resource allocation and whatnot, too.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think that kind of thing, Gormongous, is just people biting back in the easiest way possible. They're upset because people are criticizing the things they love, and they know the quickest way to make the other side upset is to toss out some random bullshit to antagonize. 

Which of course makes them assholes. Which of course makes me an asshole sometimes.

 

Bjorn's probably the most correct in that it's a little bit of everything, though.

To wrap it back around to a more optimistic note (...sort of), I definitely think things will improve, and are improving (however slowly), and will eventually not be a significant problem anymore. It might even happen in our lifetime! ...But probably not. I suspect it'll take a couple generations. At which point we'll have met another alien civilization and we can take our hatred of That Which Is Different to a whole new level.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Out of nowhere, Slate's feminist podcast closed with a recommendation for Prison Architect this week (around the 41:20 mark). There wasn't much discussion, since it was just a recommendation, but it was cool to hear out of the blue.

 

Also, the podcast is generally good, especially when the normal host, Hanna Rosin, is on (not this week).

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Anyone seen Pitch Perfect?  I found the main male character to be characteristic of the "nice guy" mentality.  He wore her down throughout the entire film until she finally "understood" how great he was.  His final line of the movie to her after she and her group just gave their best performance of all time: "I told you so."  Ugh.  The whole movie was just terrible, but this stood out to me as notable.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Anyone seen Pitch Perfect?  I found the main male character to be characteristic of the "nice guy" mentality.  He wore her down throughout the entire film until she finally "understood" how great he was.  His final line of the movie to her after she and her group just gave their best performance of all time: "I told you so."  Ugh.  The whole movie was just terrible, but this stood out to me as notable.

 

Yeah! That's a good observation. Pitch Perfect is so good in so many ways, but no one with whom I saw it was interested in the romance subplot. Anna Kendrick was too cool to end up with some scrub who just wants to sit around and watch movies. In my head, the point of their relationship was to introduce her to the song "Don't You (Forget About Me)" and that's it.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Wow this one is pretty intense. Really great breakdown of how game systems combined with agency-less sexualized female NPCs create really horrific scenarios and often by design.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

What's damning about most of these examples (and also likely to be used as a knee-jerk defense) is that these developers are largely to blame for thoughtless implementation of emergence. Maybe they didn't want you to beat up semi naked women, just so happens that their gritty M-rated story called for a brothel or whatever and they can't very well count on the player of a murder simulator to restrain from psychoing out more than is polite... but you DO get extra points if you DON'T kill the innocents!—in the whore level, the innocents just so happen to include pole dancers...

 

At the end of the day, the biggest sin of games is that they're made by really lazy unimaginative dude-bros. The bigger an art project (an entertainment, a spectacle, a narrative, A MEDIUM) is, the bigger chances some parts of it will just be running on auto pilot... plug in your society's soul here...

 

What is most curious to me is WHY it was such an obvious thing to try to sell the earliest, most abstract video games via boobs, exclusively to boys? Video games are such a stupid all-addictive distraction from everything that is real in the world, why is it that only boys get to be devoured by them? Is it just because technology tinkerers have traditionally been dudes? Is that in turn because lately (last few hundred years) men have been encouraged to participate in manufacture of sellables (engineering being modern marketplace's cornucopia) while women are relegated to "support role" of creating, nurturing, maintaining humans—and thus ought to have some other, more appropriate preparatory toys to play with? 'Cause that is one pretty extreme runaway train of bullshit... and with Tropes we're focusing on the aspects of the issue closest to the surface...

 

There is so much emergent gunk in the wiring of our civilizations, not just our video games. Lately I can't look at one thing and not see it as a symptom of a much larger sedimentation of kruft that goes much deeper down our conception of the world—and is basically usurped by the bourgeoisie in the support of the existing class system—with patriarchy as the keystone—and feminism as a sledgehammer.

 

Ugh... I am such a damn dirty optimist/utopian... Is it even fucking healthy for a wee individual to look at the world like this, with an eye towards molding crazy emergent systems that have been in place for millennia?

 

Fake-it-till-you-make-it is how a stupid superstition becomes a powerful church, maybe the way to deal with the structure is to break it at the point where our imaginations meet the world. Maybe the exact thing we need more of is responsible popular fiction, as a revolutionary act, as a surface erosion that slowly washes the castle away. Might still take a couple of generations, especially considering how the science of marketing eagerly undermines the realignment of the basest parts of our nature, and the business of entertainment is not in the business of making waves...

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Killing a prostitute in GTA should work like attacking a Cuckoo in Zelda.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Well that's the best idea I've ever heard.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Fake-it-till-you-make-it is how a stupid superstition becomes a powerful church, maybe the way to deal with the structure is to break it at the point where our imaginations meet the world. Maybe the exact thing we need more of is responsible popular fiction, as a revolutionary act, as a surface erosion that slowly washes the castle away. Might still take a couple of generations, especially considering how the science of marketing eagerly undermines the realignment of the basest parts of our nature, and the business of entertainment is not in the business of making waves...

 

I think that's precisely what's needed. I hate to drag in Malcolm Gladwell here, but his Tipping Point story serves as a great example: the New York subway crime wave in the 90s was hamstrung by removing surface level elements of crime: graffiti, fare dodging. By removing those seemingly superficial features of a rotten system, the deeper underlying mechanics of crime were suddenly way less viable. The same will apply here: remove the top sediment that okays and validates gender inequality and the root structure will dry out.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I had pretty big problems with this episode until the last 7 minutes where all my 'hang on, you forgot about's got answered in one fel swoop. All of the NPCs are objects, but dressing up scantily clad women as objects is particularly problematic, and it's not fixed just by having equal opportunity objectification because objectification is associated with a whole host of evil.

 

Killing a prostitute in GTA should work like attacking a Cuckoo in Zelda.

 

Something that players do for kicks to see what happens?

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I had pretty big problems with this episode until the last 7 minutes where all my 'hang on, you forgot about's got answered in one fel swoop. All of the NPCs are objects, but dressing up scantily clad women as objects is particularly problematic, and it's not fixed just by having equal opportunity objectification because objectification is associated with a whole host of evil.

 

Equal opportunity objectivication is a pretty lame equality play when your way of equalising the field by allowing the male characters to take on the depictions you were giving to women, but women occupy no more roles than before.

 

 

(also just in case you didn't know, in some Zelda games when you attack the Cuckoos enough a fleet of them swarms across the screen and the player is inevitably killed by the cuckoos retribution)

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I know, but when you get right down to it having a fleet of prostitutes hunt you down and kill you in GTA doesn't really make you take NPCs particularly seriously, given that GTA already has a 'hunt you down and kill you' mechanic and failure there is pretty light.

 

I gotta mention how insane the footage collection is, though. There is an absolute ton of perfect video from the games discussed in these episodes.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

I think that's precisely what's needed. I hate to drag in Malcolm Gladwell here, but his Tipping Point story serves as a great example: the New York subway crime wave in the 90s was hamstrung by removing surface level elements of crime: graffiti, fare dodging. By removing those seemingly superficial features of a rotten system, the deeper underlying mechanics of crime were suddenly way less viable. The same will apply here: remove the top sediment that okays and validates gender inequality and the root structure will dry out.

 

That interpretation (broken windows hypothesis) is not uncontroversial.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

The was the most difficult of the Feminist Frequency episodes for me to watch. I know intellectually that women are casually treated like sex objects in basically all media, but since I'm able to select what I watch/read/play, I've been able to avoid a lot of the more gratuitous examples of this over the years and only ever hear about it secondhand. The clips in this video absolutely astonished me, because it's been so long since I've willingly exposed myself to this kind of thing. I had no idea that so many modern games have topless women as set decoration. It was so disheartening for me to see scene after scene of awkwardly rendered women fondling themselves in front of the camera. The worst though were any of the clips of NPC sex workers propositioning the player character. There's nothing more unsexy about a dead-eyed game woman flatly offering to sleep with you (for a reduced price player, because you're so much more handsome than her usual clients!!). And the Red Dead Redemption "Dastardly" achievement actually made me feel sick to see.  

 

My experience with games is so atypical and I'm grateful for that. It saves me from having my opinion on the value of games be poisoned by this utter trash.

Share this post


Link to post
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now

×