Trops vs Women in Video Games - Women as Background Decoration: Part 2 - General

[QUOTE=LurkyLurker;45817869][B]The Wire[/B] has nearly every single character fully fleshed out to the point that its less a television series and more a documentary that just so happens to involve fictional persons so you're point doesn't really hold. It didn't need to be zombie shlock to evoke emotions or be socially relevant, just show regular urban life and the injustices that you and I feed every single day. Which makes it all the more laughable that TWD gets held up so highly. Just because it has competent writing ([I]not[/I] good, [I]competent[/I]) does [I]not[/I] mean its the pinnacle of art.[/QUOTE] You can't make a good video game based on "regular urban life".

[QUOTE=G-Strogg;45824366]Still rings true. If you remove story from a game with good gameplay you're still gonna have a very good game. If the game is mostly story-focused you're just gonna have nothing.[/QUOTE] True, but that's why we have games on both sides of the fence. Games like 'The Walking Dead' or 'The Secret of Monkey Island' emphasize story/character over gameplay, while games like 'Unreal Tournament' emphasize gameplay over story. Both work just fine.

[QUOTE=Virtanen;45817431]Did she really just imply that mutilated corpses are "intended to be sexually titillating to straight male players" just because they're female? I dunno about the men she knows, but I, and I'm pretty much everybody else, gets the opposite reaction.[/QUOTE] Remember this incident : [t]http://static.mnium.org/images/contenu/actus/JeuxVideo/Dead_Island/deadislandriptide_collector_1.jpg[/t] It basically proves Anita's whole thing wrong. Everyone was grossed the fuck out and the only people who purchased this for the torso were either die-hard collectors and guro enthusiasts. The whole thing caused a massive outrage against deep silver by basically everyone. Fans of the game were pissed because the collector's edition of a game they wanted was coming with a feet tall statue of dismembered tits and nothing else, everyone else was pissed because Deep Silver thought people would actually be appealed to a fake pair of dead breasts attached to a gored up torso - the name of "zombie bait edition" was more of a reference to Deep Silver's massive misjudgment of players than to the actual game at this point. Yet somehow I wouldn't be surprised if she used it as an argument that video games are sexualizing women to please the mostly male gamer base (if she hasn't already, may have missed it) because she either doesn't know about the background surrounding the incident, or because she purposefully ignores it. And since she used Hitman's marketing but not that one, it proves me even further she knows nothing because that caused such a massive reaction last year, as she instead prioritized a much older campaign that was a lot more documented (thus easier to google and copy-paste).

[QUOTE=Kljunas;45824489]You can't make a good video game based on "regular urban life".[/QUOTE] Why?

[QUOTE=Swilly;45817793]Its a balancing act, just like in movies you have to stick to only parts of dialogue and action that propel the story forward and shots should hold on something unless its important.[/QUOTE]If story gets in the way of gameplay it becomes a problem. I don't want some deep and fleshed story in Hitman, I just want to creatively assassinate people. It is really hard to balance story and gameplay so both work well. Good gameplay > Story. I don't need a story to enjoy good gameplay. It really depends on the game, some can benefit from story more than others. In the end I prefer devs to focus on gameplay because that's what games to me are all about. This does not apply to atmosphere and immersion.

[QUOTE=carcarcargo;45800283]You know she had some good points in one or two videos, but now she just seems to be nitpicking. What is she even on about at the bioshock part, they're not sexualised at all, it seems she just sees sexualisation wherever she wants to.[/QUOTE] Bioshock was the one game I played and thought that there was very minimal sexual content at all, I really don't get how she can see sexualisation in it

I think Sarkeesian is using the TV Tropes definition of trope: a pattern in storytelling. Regardless of whether you think it's good or bad, you gotta admit that a whole lot of M rated games feature violence against innocent, defenseless women as a plot point.

[QUOTE=Larikang;45824786]I think Sarkeesian is using the TV Tropes definition of trope: a pattern in storytelling. Regardless of whether you think it's good or bad, you gotta admit that a whole lot of M rated games feature violence against women as a plot point.[/QUOTE] Most M rated games feature violence against men as a plot point too, in fact it's more prevalent. It doesn't mean it's sexist because the bad guy hits a woman, it means the bad guy is a prick.

[QUOTE=Ganerumo;45824535]Remember this incident : *deep silver retardation* It basically proves Anita's whole thing wrong. Everyone was grossed the fuck out and the only people who purchased this for the torso were either die-hard collectors and guro enthusiasts. The whole thing caused a massive outrage against deep silver by basically everyone. Fans of the game were pissed because the collector's edition of a game they wanted was coming with a feet tall statue of dismembered tits and nothing else, everyone else was pissed because Deep Silver thought people would actually be appealed to a fake pair of dead breasts attached to a gored up torso - the name of "zombie bait edition" was more of a reference to Deep Silver's massive misjudgment of players than to the actual game at this point. Yet somehow I wouldn't be surprised if she used it as an argument that video games are sexualizing women to please the mostly male gamer base (if she hasn't already, may have missed it) because she either doesn't know about the background surrounding the incident, or because she purposefully ignores it. And since she used Hitman's marketing but not that one, it proves me even further she knows nothing because that caused such a massive reaction last year, as she instead prioritized a much older campaign that was a lot more documented (thus easier to google and copy-paste).[/QUOTE] I think her central problem is that she [I]begins[/I] her arguments from the assumption that all heterosexual men and game developers are autistic psychopaths. And that's something I at least take strong exception to, if not find it downright insulting.

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;45824828]Most M rated games feature violence against men as a plot point too, in fact it's more prevalent. It doesn't mean it's sexist because the bad guy hits a woman, it means the bad guy is a prick.[/QUOTE] Has she brought up the mass effect running gag of punching Emily Wong in the face ? I feel like that's exactly the type of stuff she'd bullshit into her videos.

[QUOTE=Larikang;45824786]I think Sarkeesian is using the TV Tropes definition of trope: a pattern in storytelling. Regardless of whether you think it's good or bad, you gotta admit that a whole lot of M rated games feature violence against women as a plot point.[/QUOTE] A whole lot of M rated games feature violence against genders. Cant think of a game thats purely about beating up women that isnt some free little joke game.

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;45824828]Most M rated games feature violence against men as a plot point too, in fact it's more prevalent. It doesn't mean it's sexist because the bad guy hits a woman, it means the bad guy is a prick.[/QUOTE] It's lazy writing. "See he's the bad guy cause he hit a girl and that's bad right guys?" The problem is when you add a girl character just to die or something for a cheap easy character motivation (and yeah, there are guy characters who get the same treatment, just as bad and dumb, but it seems to be girls more often because of this weird innate sense that doing something to a girl is innately worse than having scores of nameless foot soldiers massacred)

[QUOTE=Venezuelan;45825033]It's lazy writing. "See he's the bad guy cause he hit a girl and that's bad right guys?" The problem is when you add a girl character just to die or something for a cheap easy character motivation (and yeah, there are guy characters who get the same treatment, just as bad and dumb, but it seems to be girls more often because of this weird innate sense that doing something to a girl is innately worse than having scores of nameless foot soldiers massacred)[/QUOTE] As a society we value (in theory) the safety of women. We do, generally, view violence against women as especially heinous. I'm guessing it dates back a long ways and has something to do with women being more necessary for procreation than men. A small number of males can produce a large number of offspring, whereas women can only produce one (barring twins obviously) at a time. Men are, at a very basic level, expendible, while women play an important role in expansion of communities. Writers leverage this perception to make a character more dislikeable. It is rather hard to find fault in that.

[QUOTE=Valnar;45824545]Why?[/QUOTE] Because it's hard to make engaging gameplay out of it. If you want to tell a "slice of life" story about regular people, video game just isn't a very good medium for that.

[QUOTE=GunFox;45825297]As a society we value (in theory) the safety of women. We do, generally, view violence against women as especially heinous. I'm guessing it dates back a long ways and has something to do with women being more necessary for procreation than men. A small number of males can produce a large number of offspring, whereas women can only produce one (barring twins obviously) at a time. Men are, at a very basic level, expendible, while women play an important role in expansion of communities. Writers leverage this perception to make a character more dislikeable. It is rather hard to find fault in that.[/QUOTE] Because gamers are smarter than that. That's why Andrew Ryan with his actual identifiable motivations and very human characterization is praised while Aiden "oh no my kid niece you never got to know is dead :(" Pearce is mocked

[QUOTE=Janus Vesta;45824828]It doesn't mean it's sexist because the bad guy hits a woman, it means the bad guy is a prick.[/QUOTE] Isn't that what Sarkeesian is criticizing though? The fact that hurting women seems to be the go-to trope for conveying that someone is bad.

[QUOTE=Larikang;45825489]Isn't that what Sarkeesian is criticizing though? The fact that hurting women seems to be the go-to trope for conveying that someone is bad.[/QUOTE] It's not the go-to trope in video games though, if anything it's pretty rare. Most of the video games she talks about have a lot of other reasons to hate bad guys, most of which are far beyond the scale of "he hit that one person". Like, idk, mass effect 2. Some female characters get killed right in front of you and in a pretty horrific way but you're not supposed to hate the bad guys because they turned your crew (which had women) into goo, but because they're trying to literally blow up the galaxy. It's kind of an extreme example but it's an example nonetheless. Bad guys in video games are bad guys for a lot of reasons, not just because they slapped a woman once, and you'd have to be pretty dumb or tunnel-visioned to only see that part.

[QUOTE=itisjuly;45824693]If story gets in the way of gameplay it becomes a problem. I don't want some deep and fleshed story in Hitman, I just want to creatively assassinate people. It is really hard to balance story and gameplay so both work well. Good gameplay > Story. I don't need a story to enjoy good gameplay. It really depends on the game, some can benefit from story more than others. In the end I prefer devs to focus on gameplay because that's what games to me are all about. This does not apply to atmosphere and immersion.[/QUOTE] That's the point I'm making.

She brings up some good points. She's asking for better in-depth characters, but she's doing it in such a poor way (i.e. only focusing on females, though that is the point of the show I guess) it comes off as dumb and uninformed. Goddammit.

[QUOTE=Gamerman12;45826258]She brings up some good points. She's asking for better in-depth characters, but she's doing it in such a poor way (i.e. only focusing on females, though that is the point of the show I guess) it comes off as dumb and uninformed. Goddammit.[/QUOTE] And even then the only way she found to forward her point is to cherry pick or blatantly lie about the content and purpose of games.