Men.
Imagine a world where every movie is Magic Mike. Or a clone thereof. Imagine that if you went to the movies, you were likely to experience the Magic Mike experience. How long until you’re turned off from going to the movies?
Hey, you’re open minded. You’re comfortable with your sexuality. Keep in mind that Magic Mike is a pretty good film: 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. Imagine these movies were EVEN BETTER. Imagine that they were, by film standards, all time great films that hit 95%+. Every one of them is praised by critics as being masterworks – charming, funny, and solid examples of the craft. And every film was full of washboard abs and oversized codpieces. Every. Single. Film.
How long until going to the movies makes you feel a bit icky? Do you even bother owning a television? Are you enthused by sitting next to your girlfriend while she drools at the screen – EVERY trip to the movies? When you watch movies in a mixed crowd, is it an audience split between enthusiastic women hooting and hollering next to awkwardly silent men quietly nursing their beer?
Imagine that other films exist, but the movie press just ignored them and continued to plaster every cover of every Entertainment Weekly with massive mounds of Channing Tatum quality manmeat attached to hollywood bodies unobtainable by normal men. And most of the other movies happened to be movies aimed for the Nickelodeon crowd.
Imagine if, when you suggested that perhaps there should be a few movies that aren’t like Magic Mike, angry women flooded your mailbox with profanity, vile attacks and death threats so authentic and frightening you feel the need to notify the authorities. Imagine you got this treatment even if you asked for one male character in the next Magic Mike to dress sensibly and keep his clothes on the whole movie.
Imagine that even when the Avengers, a movie with massive crossover success appears and even outsells Magic Mike, the Hollywood studios ignored that success and kept making Magic Mike clones to the degree that they kept cannibalizing each others sales, while this entire other market just remained unexploited. Imagine that movie directors actually talked about how the movies DEPENDED on washboard abs and manmeat to be successful. “Our extensive focus groups have shown that men will tolerate this, but women WILL NOT BUY A TICKET without a codpiece that looks like it’s got a Kielbasa Sausage inside”. Because, the movie executives tell you with a straight face, women are incapable of enjoying film for any other reason.
I like sex. I like boobplate. I like Bayonetta. I like jiggle factor in my games. I have no problem with porn, as perhaps my prior writings have made clear. I pooh-pooh people who think that armor (male or female) should be realistic, because its far more important that characters be strongly identifiable and marketable. And also, because I adore the female form personally.
But right now, that’s what it looks like coming in from the other side. We have video game aisles that are still too narrow in their depictions across the board. We have comic book stores where daughters cannot find a magazine they feel like is aimed for them. The diversity and experimentation that we do have is buried away in Steam. Which is a real problem – as games get more expensive to make, we need to sell our games to broader, wider audiences. Joss Whedon gets to spend $200M making Avengers films because he puts female butts in seats for what are normally male-oriented flicks. Now that our AAA budgets are crossing the 9-digit mark, it’s high time that the industry started to think the same way, or the AAA game will soon head the way of the dodo.
Bad analogies make for bad arguments.
Bad comments make for bad discussion. Perhaps if you told us why you thought it was a bad analogy, folks might take you more seriously?
Well, first of all, can we establish whether women are near half of the active comic book and video game market as many articles claim, or if they simply can’t find anything to buy as Damion suggests?
And, last I checked, DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball wasn’t the only video game visible on the market.
Most female purchasing of games is still on handheld devices. Most AAA games are still solidly male. League of Legends published numbers that they were 90% male. Call of Duty and Battlefield both boasted 80%+. Even the Sims was about an even split. The one genre that women have really advanced is in RPGs, particularly and probably due to the work of Blizzard to make WoW more inviting to female audiences. They’ve been rewarded – women purchase less often, but tend to be more loyal to one game once they do.
More than 80% of console purchasers are male (a metric that is eyebrow raising, but one must be cautious because its a household purchase).
The equivalent of our AAA games are our AAA comics, such as DC. DC reported that their ‘The New 52’ reboot was purchased in-store by a 93% male audience, or online by a 77% male audience. At any rate, DC and Marvel both agree at least somewhat with my assessment, as both are now pushing major diversity initiatives. Overall female comic readership is rising, but still women prefer to purchase online, and they are tending to find stuff that is not the classic men-in-tights superhero stuff that men consider the norm.
So, then the whole “women are 50% of the audience” is at best oversimplified and at worst intentionally misleading.
Game studios can’t rely on people that don’t even have the hardware to play their game. Of course they are going to cater more to a more reliable and active market. I would like for them to take more chances, I think they are lazy a lot of the time and don’t try hard enough to write things well, but Sony and Microsoft need to do more to sell consoles with functionality and first-party games if they want third-party devs to be more confident in going after a market that hasn’t been reliable in the past.
I get bored of superhero comics, too, and that’s what Vertigo, Image, etc., are for.
The Marvel universe has had near male/female parity at least in their team comics since the 1970s, but I really don’t know what this did to their reader demographics. Then again, I’m not even clear if you were criticizing the overabundance of superheroes or the overabundance of male superheroes.
Regardless, I wasn’t really disagreeing with your watered down ultimate point (which you seem to project onto even your most vitriolic ideological allies), I just though your analogies were an incoherent mess that didn’t accurately reflect anything.
One thing you and I can agree on – the ‘50% of women play games’ stat is one of the most abused stats – BY BOTH SIDES – in the games industry. 50% of women play games, but they are not yet buying consoles, and they are not yet buying into a lot of AAA games, at least not in broad numbers. Nintendo does a lot better than XBox or Playstation in that regard, although the weakness of the WiiU in general is currently distorting those numbers.
As for superheroes, it’s not the overabundance of superheroes or male superheroes, as much as the overabundance of cheesecake on the flagship properties. Superhero comics tend to favor skin-tight, sexy outfits – which wouldn’t be a problem, if they were a subsection of the comics instead of the norm. Instead, these are the posters that are on the doors when you go into a comic book shop. Which is, i believe, a strong reason why online purchasing is much stronger than shop purchases for these.
Lol has more than 10% women, im sure, i met a few who also met few and I’m in my 2nd week. Think 15 to 25% is more realistic, because we tend to hide gender to not get shit.
My stats come from Riot’s infographic from 2012. These demographics may have changed quite a bit since – after all the company has spent a lot of time and money trying to reduce the toxicity of their community, which would be the first step towards getting more women.
Which says something.
Sure, no one can say “women are already 50% of the market so everything is fine!” and no one can show that women are spending 50% of the gaming dollars and AAA devs just need to grab their share.
The publishers are simply risk-averse more than they are racist or sexist. They just aren’t going to radically change proven money makers, but no one (not even teenage boys) can argue with better writing and more fleshed out characters.
Still not sure what the problem is with superheroes wearing tights. I don’t recall the X-Men being oversexualized despite wearing tights. Other than characters like Emma Frost and Psylocke, the X-Women (Storm, Kitty Pryde, Jean Grey, Rachel Summers, Jubilee, etc.) were pretty conservative. I think the success of the X comics is evidence that men, even us gamergaters, are happy to have well-written female characters in our entertainment, but also that maybe you can’t get a consumer gender balance in a specific genre just by being more fictionally inclusive. It’s a worthwhile goal, but it’s nevertheless an uncertain market and so publishers need to take baby steps to make sure they don’t lose a reliable market to chase one that hasn’t proven to be so.
Anita wants immediate parity between male-only protagonists and female-only protagonists, whereas I would suggest that women could make their voices heard by buying more games with character creation. If games like Mass Effect, Fallout, and Destiny would get a female audience in parity with the male audience, publishers would feel more confident to go after that market.
Publishers could and should take more risks. We should at least acknowledge that more radical changes are risky and also that games with character creation are a testing ground for the marketability of games with female-only protagonists.
By far the most popular comic genre among female readers is manga (which is actually many different genres, but you know what I mean). That would seem to be pretty strong evidence against the idea that changing comics/games/whatever to fit with feminist/Social Justice ideology is the key to attracting female readers, considering that Japan doesn’t appear to have anything resembling online Western SJ activists. See, for example, the recent bewildered reaction of actual Japanese people to the backlash against a Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit that supposedly “culturally appropriated” kimonos. Or how they had the exact same reaction to last year’s controversy over Avril Lavigne’s Helly Kitty video, which was also accused of cultural appropriation.
In fact, Japanese society has much more rigid gender roles than most Western countries, but, again, that hasn’t prevented them from making comics, cartoons, and video games that are very popular among Western female audiences. Also, their approach by and large was not to change male-targeted franchises to appeal more to female audiences, but instead to make new female-targeted franchises with significantly different genres and subject matter.
That would be more plausible if women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan didn’t constantly put images of sexy women on their covers. Or if a scientific study hadn’t directly tested this and found that female players actually derive more “entertainment value” from games with sexualized female protagonists. It also completely ignores the existence of lesbians and bisexual women who might appreciate cheesecakey art for the exact same reasons that straight men do.
I propose a different theory: women, on average, have different preferences in entertainment media than men, which are related to average differences in personality traits (whether these differences are due to biology, socialization, or a combination of the two is irrelevant; whatever the reason for them, these differences exist). As a result, more men than women read superhero comics for reasons that have little to do with the frequent presence of scantily clad women on their covers, whereas more women than men read romance novels for reasons that have little to do with the frequent presence of scantily clad men on their covers. In both cases, the cheesecakey/beefcakey cover art is there to attract more of the audience that already likes that kind of entertainment product.
Markets are mutable, you know. It’s not like God himself reached down from heaven and molded the video game market according to His will. Why, it’s even possible that more women would be part of the video game market if the people creating and marketing video games weren’t constantly insulting them.
Not insulting them is certainly worth a try; we are talking about more than half of the planet’s population here. They have money and they need entertainment just as much as any man, believe it or not.
Women are already part of the video game market. In fact, women make up around half of it if you include everything from mobile games to the AAA console scene. They just prefer, on average, different games than men. Genres that more women than men like include music and puzzle games (particularly Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure, or HOPA games, which tend to have 80% female audiences). Relevant graphs are here.
What I don’t understand is the bizarre insistence on the part of some people that every genre that more men than women like must be changed to appeal more to women, especially when the changes they advocate don’t actually seem to have much effect on how much women like them (see how in the graphs above, Mass Effect has a slightly more male dominated audience than “ultra-misogynistic” GTA V). You never see anyone telling writers of romance novels that they should change the way they write those books to make them appeal more to men, and the first thing they should do is stop putting so many shirtless hunks on their covers.
Regarding your first paragraph: Yes, we actually can. There’s been studies for this, look it up.
I have no idea what you want to say with your other paragraph though.
Another thing that would helpful if you want to be taken seriously is not to use straw man arguments ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man ) especially when you are trying to claim that the analogy is not valid.
Not having something directed at you doesn’t lead you to purchasing nothing. It just leads you to downheartedly looking for something else to buy. If we stuck to only buying stuff that was aimed at us nerdy girls would have almost nothing to buy.
Apparently Bad analogies make for bad arguments.
No useful criticism from the GG crowd as per usual.
Generally when you are critical of an argument you have to put forward points saying “This argument is illogical, here is why.”
My goodness he made this post after midnight and I made a single response to it because he has a habit of not addressing my arguments so I’m now less likely to go into detail in addressing his. It’s not even 3am and you’re already celebrating that there’s no useful criticism from the gg crowd. Maybe wait a full day.
The analogies are clearly poor and that needs no explanation. They do not reflect the current state of the film, game, or comic market. Nor would my, or the dominant, arguments against a Magic Mike-dominated film market reflect any of the arguments against the current game and comic market that many of us gamergaters actually disagree with.
Damion makes a lot of broad arguments and then waters them down to a largely uncontroversial point that big budget media needs a broad multicultural/international audience. Unless your game is Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Madden, etc. Or if your are Bioware and have token human diversity on top of your alien diversity. And apparently CDPR “left money on the table” by not putting some random Asians in Witcher 3. Because Witcher 3 just isn’t a clear enough critical and commercial success.
Hey. Hey. Hey.
It was random Zigan and Turks. Get it right next time, GAWD, fake gamer boys don’t know their history of fictional nations that need to reflect the modern day by holding true to a fictional history that must be just like a really silly and shallow interpretation of a time that never actually existed outside broad, useless stereotypes.
So it’s a bad analogy because it’s an analogy rather than a detail-perfect description of the current market. Thanks for clearing that up.
Ah, yes, it’s a good analogy despite not being actually analogous to anything. Hyperbole and satire are not the same as analogy. Hyperbole and satire aren’t effective rhetorical devices unless the situation is so bad that simply disproving the comparison must reveal just how bad conditions are.
No, it’s a good analogy because it does reflect the actual state of affairs. It’s a pretty simple point, in fact. What, do you think that if you just comment to the contrary enough times that everyone else will just forget the last few hundred video games they’ve played?
Believing that the analogy is apt would actually require me to forget many of the games that I’ve recently played.
So do I win something if I’m a straight male who wouldn’t be bothered by it?
Tickets to a broadway musical and a book on denial.
Oh no, Schubert, you mentioned that things MIGHT BE NOT RIGHT IN VIDEO GAMES. I don’t know how I can handle this kind of RADICALISM.
What if my unexamined and baseless worldview is totally wrong? Then I might enjoy things slightly less while I recalibrate! You can’t bring up PROBLEMS IN VIDEO GAME CULTURE( bwahahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaa oh God, that’s something that exists, my poor heart, bwahahahahahahhaha), that’s just being MEAN.
What next? Are you going to mention the often HORRIBLE WORK CONDITIONS? The SLAVISH DEVOTION TO MINDLESSLY STRIP-MINING OTHER MEDIUMS? The LAUGHABLE, SOPHOMORIC ATTEMPTS AT DEPTH AND MEANING?
How dare you say this hobby isn’t perfect, and is riddled with blatantly obvious flaws and flagrant injustices! How dare you not ignore the dozens of failures and unfinished projects that are payed for by the handfuls of “successful” games! So what if the industry is consolidating into an oligopoly in the AAA space, let’s not bring anything political in here! Loss of studios and mass layoffs? Those chumps should have just succeeded if they didn’t want to fail!
What’s your end-game, #(@&% filter?!
You’re acting as if ever game is crammed wall to wall with scantily clad female characters, which is completely untrue.
Okay. If every game you played had a random 10 minute male striptease in it, how would you feel?
Let’s look at the top 10 best selling games of 2014: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Madden NFL 15, Destiny, Grand Theft Auto 5, Minecraft, Super Smash Bros, NBA 2K15, Watch Dogs, FIFA 15, Call of Duty Ghosts. That’s two games with prominent sexualized female characters in them at some point.
But maybe 2014 was an anomaly, let’s check 2013: Grand Thef Auto V, Call of Duty: Ghosts, FIFA 2014, Pokemon X&Y, Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, The Last of Us, Animal Crossing: New Leaf, Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter IV, Bioshock Infinite. Two games again (if you count Black Flag because it has prostitutes in some parts of the game), maybe three if you count Tomb Raider, which sexualized the main character much less than previous games in the franchise.
2012: Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Madden NFL 2012, Halo 4, Assassin’s Creed 3, Just Dance 4, NBA 2013, Borderlands 2, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes, FIFA 2012. One game (Halo 4 for Cortana; Lego Batman may have had female characters with sexy outfits but come on, they’re lego figures).
2011: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Just Dance 3, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Madden NFL 12, Call of Duty: Black Ops, Batman: Arkham City, Gears of War 3, Just Dance 2, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. One game (Arkham City for Catwoman, Harley, and Poison Ivy).
2010: Call of Duty: Black Ops, Madden NFL 11, Halo: Reach, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Red Dead Redemption, Wii Fit Plus, Just Dance 2, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 , Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, NBA 2K11. Two games (AC Brotherhood for courtesans, Red Dead Redemption for prostitutes).
2009: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Wii Sports Resort with Wii Motion Plus, Wii Fit with Balance Board, Mario Kart with Wheel, Wii Play with Remote, Wii Fit Plus with Balance Board, Halo 3: ODST, Pokémon Platinum, Madden NFL 2010. Zero games.
I could go on, but I think that’s enough to get the point across.
Exactly. That just goes to show that the points he makes directly in the bottom of his post may be apt, but the analogy doesn’t make sense. The gaming market isn’t just clones of Rumble Roses and DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball. It’s a lot of games starring men with gameplay and writing tailored to male audiences, a lot of games with terrible writing and sexualized male and female characters, a lot of RPGs that should appeal equally to men and women if we are to believe that better representation and writing is all that’s needed to retain them, and then a lot of platformers and puzzle games with no story or characters even worth speaking of. You also get the occasional good writing but with gratuitous sexualization, or the occasional female-centric games.
Good job figuring out that hyperbole exists, someday you’ll be a real comrade, like Marcy over there, or maybe Wat Tyler.
Let’s start with something recent, because the past is DUMB.
In Arkham Knight, the four women characters prominent enough to matter in the plot are all rendered helpless at some point solely so Batman and some other guy can rescue them or else feel bad for not rescuing them. Could say generally the same for the other games, but that would be excessively true.
The God of War series, where women exist primarily to have boobs and be has of sex with by then Kratos.
That focal point of the Jesuit Agenda, Suda 51, who makes sure that we know his company’s games are aware of the depersonalizingly reductive and infantile pandering nature of fanservice by, for example, requiring intense and repeated stares into polygonal cleavage to upgrade your armory in Killer is Dead.
BioWare and their incredible laziness. Figure out what I mean yourself, I’m FAR too lazy.
BioShock: Infinitum introduces an effectively omnipotent woman with magic powers who then exists mostly as a cartoon doll that’s dangled in front of the player for motivation and comes in naughty/nice costumes.
Metro: Last Light rewards players creeping on/watching a random instance of lesbianism with Immersion/Morality/whatever you call the “please take your time and explore this game world” points.
Those David Cage Video Game shower scenes.
Against this is a backdrop of women characters that are almost solely ineffectual ciphers when they have any relevance to the plot at all. Games that focus on narrative have this problem to an extent few others do outside fighting games. That is to say, when it’s considered important that this character be a woman, this happens. Over and over again. And that’s just the ones I know about.
But, I mean, what problems are there in video games? None exist!
Good job covering for a bad analogy by telling us now that it’s not an analogy, it’s hyperbole! Even as hyperbole, it’s not persuasive, it’s just self-congratulatory for being a dude who “gets it.”
You’re too lazy to talk about Bioware’s laziness. Awesome. They have some cheesiness, but the writing is mostly good. They have male/female character creation, so the stories aren’t sex-specific. They probably use a decent number of tropes, but tropes are just devices and slightly lazy but they aren’t inherently sexist or anything so I really don’t care.
Did you play Arkham Knight? Neither did I, but I’m pretty confident you are being overly reductive.
Are you actually interested in finding interesting games to play or just complaining about them? I could think of numerous games that I’ve either played recently that have well written female characters or other games that aren’t particularly well-written but that don’t put female characters at a disadvantage. Do you want to play those games? Or do you want to ignore them and whine about the rest?
In this age where there are Let’s Plays for just about any game that cost more than $10 million to make, asking “have you even played [X]” is a meaningless question. Though yes, I have(besides God of War/Dragon Age II and Mass Effect 3), and no, I’m not being any more reductive than the bare facts of the matter. Arkham Knight just cares more about its men than its women. The Arkham series has always had that problem.
Darcy, if I wasn’t looking for things I found interesting, I wouldn’t care either. The point is not to find things to complain about, the point is to find where good things could be even better, and ‘not be weird about women’ is such a low bar it doesn’t exactly win you many brownie points if you make it over. Just like how not yelling racist slurs at people on the street isn’t considered a commendable achievement. That’s why people don’t talk so much about the ones that do it well/not-terribly (like how much better The Witcher series got about its women characters). Anyone competent should at least be able to get it half-right.
I admire and enjoy Asura’s Wrath for how well it integrates its themes of Buddhist theology and philosophy into its world and mechanics(the religious motifs, the effort needed to reach a supreme state, etc), the team who made the game clearly cared a LOT about that, about making it resonate and be just right. So when its women are essentially afterthoughts(a weak cannon-fodder antagonist, speechless eye-candy, a dead motivator and a living plot device), it’s jarring and out of place. It didn’t need to be that way, it could easily have been improved, but it wasn’t, because for the women they just leaned on familiar, easy tropes without thinking about what THOSE would collectively say.
That’s the problem in essence. Sure, it’s great that you can be a near-emotionless brick with a personality achieved through voice-acting and the player’s imagination in any gender in a few titles, but most games focused on their stories are still about guys doing things and fighting each other with maybe some women in the background helping out.
Not, of course, that I would ever suggest there’s anything wrong with video games.
“Did you play the game?” is still a relevant question. Maybe someone played it, maybe someone watched a full lets play, maybe someone watched some partial gameplay videos, or maybe someone is just repeating second-hand information. Whatever the case may be, it’s all relevant. My understanding is that 3 women and 3 men are “damseled” in Arkham Knight, and that it’s okay to do this to men and some people think it’s never okay to do it to women. Everyone is an “object” to serve as some motivation or info dump for Batman, because he’s the main character.
Anyway, I guess you did peg the initial post by Damion as hyperbole. Others are defensing it as a straight analogy. Any time someone does a lot of complaining I’m interested to know if they actually like anything, whether I’m arguing with feminists or the bitterest of assholes at RPGCodex.
I also have to wonder if someone focused on representation can be pleased by anything if you’re so displeased by Bioware games (unless we’re moving on to racial representation, where Bioware probably could be accused of laziness).
You’re completely right that this would make me uninterested in movies. And while I’m not a big movie goer as is (one movie every two or three years), I can imagine similar analogies that would leave my life relatively impoverished in comparison to now (change movies to books, or video games).
But at the same time I don’t think this would justify the creation of a philosophically suspect ideology in which I claim that the movies are *doing something* to me. I’d like to think that I would be able to just say, “A consumer product is favoring the interests of a demographic to the extent that it’s actively repelling my demographic, and that makes me sad because I’d otherwise like this product and be otherwise willing to consume it.” And then stop. Before going off the deep end.
That’s a bit incoherent, isn’t it? If something is actively repelling you and making you sad, then how is it “philosophically suspect” to say that it’s doing something to you?
(Or are you defining “doing something” as “changing your nature”? That’s the net.libertarian position. Roughly, “If I believe something, then no amount of argument or persuasion from the rest of society can get ever me to change. Because I’m so strong-willed. Being strong-willed is always a virtue.” If that’s what you’re saying, then I can’t argue against that.)
I wasn’t trying to be deep. I was trying to reference the difference between not being able to buy a luxury consumer good that is to my tastes because the creators of that good are indulging the tastes of someone else, versus being belittled, used, degraded, or excluded in an affirmative sense. The difference between not liking something, and being treated badly by someone.
If the state of affairs described in the post were actually happening–and, moreover, everyone considered it normal that this was happening, then of course men as a whole would start to see themselves differently.
I think this is an area where computer games have a strong advantage over other forms of entertainment.
Traditional forms of entertainment establish a point of reference that is unchangeable, this canon must be swallowed whole by every audience.
Computer games have the opportunity to be a little more flexible. RPGS have long allowed players to create their own avatar and while the adventure is the same the player has a sense of ownership over the protagonist. Unfortunately this causes some issues if the computer game has to rescind the players creativity when it ventures back into the traditional avenues or lacks the resources to set up every eventuality in a sequel.
Most notable are many of the Bioware games.
For example, ‘Knights of the Old Republic’ introduced a character that the player created, and could be male or female and follow dark or light. Yet when this character transfers into literature or future games it is a male light side only option. This feels like a major failing on the part of game creators to keep the creative power in the hands of the players. Far better to explore other characters or resort to ‘History recalls only the name and actions…’
Of course the biggest step is to break away from established canon altogether. Allow a player full creative input to the protagonist. Instead of the traditional route of comics to insert minority characters as sidekicks or borderline patronising stereotypes, or the frequent alternate dimensions.
Games where you get to decide whether Commander Shepard is male or female or ethnic or homosexual present a far greater inclusivity.
Maybe that is as much a reason MMOs are more appealing, they typically allow a player to create an avatar they want to play.
It’s cool because Channing Tatum is hot as fuck and I’m not even gay, but I’d like it better if they mixed it up with a stripper Dwayne Johnson for variety’s sake.
Imagine a world where there are a great variety of games, where visiting Steam, Mobile/Handheld or Social platforms and browsing through the new releases you would find treasure troves of different offerings and experiences for everyone and every age, this has always been the case but it is more so than ever before even though if you look at a list of top-selling video games of all times you would find titles like Tetris, Wii Sports, Minecraft, Super Mario Bros. Mario Kart, Pac-Man, Kinect Adventures, Nintendogs, Pokémon, The Sims, Brain Age at the very top.
Imagine that you were a normal human being with a healthy view of human sexuality. Imagine that like in TV and movies you didn’t think that normal human sexuality or liking breasts and an attractive female form was something damaging, something to be repressed and condemned for and you liked shows like Game of Thrones, Banshee, The Borgias, Marco Polo, Rome, Outlander, The Tudors, Boardwalk Empire, Spartacus or similar employing it.
Imagine you expected the same maturity from video games, but there wasn’t really any video game series that did this well maybe aside from The Witcher. Imagine you always thought that the way BioWare displayed their dry-humping was hilarious and a sign for immaturity.
Imagine there were a band of ideological zealots going around using borderline insulting “arguments” that had nothing to do with reality to say that anything you liked was wrong, both morally and objectively and your preferences in entertainment were responsible for an industry being unable or unwilling to properly reach out to new markets and not the market realities themselves and they were also responsible for any plight that might befall the fairer sex and borderline terrorism.
Imagine if they always misrepresented any arguments you made to look like the worst and most hilarious strawman caricatures that you could come up with, when put together leading to an equally hilarious hour of Law & Order TV entertainment and condemning an entire industry they claim to be invested in as backwards and horrid. Imagine that they took a few people on Twitter as an example to strawman millions of others and were entirely unwilling to engage in any sort of arguments other than throwing mud.
Imagine that the entire games press were in with these ideological zealots, and all they did whenever a game you could potentially like came along or even got Previewed was them shitting on your preferences, market buying power and trying to shame both you and the developers for being responsible for inducing “misogyny”, being agents of the “patriarchy” and responsible for the plights of women worldwide and possibly violent crimes. Imagine that they even went as far as to overinflate the importance and quality of specific “games” for the sole purpose of pushing their zealous ideology and being friends with the makers, not because of their inherent quality as a product and tried to deceive you.
Imagine that you had enough of this shit and spoke out against it and some washed-up Ex-BioWare developer having worked on one of their worst games and possibly biggest blunders came out of the woodwork to throw equally stupid strawmen and misrepresentations at you.
What would your opinion of this person be?
They sound like another Jesuit stooge, unconscious of how their blind acceptance of the status quo as the best possible result warps their interpretation of other points of view.
That entire spiel is based on norms. It’s NORMAL, therefore it is GOOD that things are the way they are. Any change from the norm (unless it first appeals or works within the norm’s framework) is thus illegitimate and the result of EVIL intent, of an agenda that doesn’t match the accepted standard agenda. You’re comfortable, warm and well-fed, why should you accommodate somebody wretched, cold and starving? Why, the very idea that anyone would discomfort you for the benefit of another is an affront!
When the vast majority of something is made for the benefit of some segment of the Earth’s population that you inhabit, ANY faint shift or mild challenge to that looks like a total invasion. ANY dissenting voices must be shouted down, before change sets in and the thing you took for granted is stolen from you by THEM.
Games where stupid, weak and pathetic people can pretend to be something else aren’t going away. They never will. Nobody can make that happen.
But it sure is convenient to pretend that they can.
I have nothing against cheesecake-y female characters in games, nor do I believe that it leads to unrealistic expectations amongst male gamers or that it serves as prima facie evidence that women are being treated as little more than sexy objects. It’s a self-indulgent fantasy, to be sure, but it’s awfully self-righteous to demand that someone’s fantasy conform to your politics.
That said, it’s stupid to expect women to look at a game packed to the gunwales with cheesecake-y female characters and not feel excluded. If order a pizza for me and mates, and I *always* order it with anchovies because most of us happen to enjoy anchovies, what does it mean if one of my friends says she doesn’t want anchovies? It doesn’t mean that liking anchovies is bad, just that I ought to have some consideration for those with different tastes, so that they might be able to enjoy themselves every now and then.
One of the games I enjoyed the most playing was Patrician III, a trading sim. (Patrician IV is just a sad afterthought in comparison.) It was quite charming, a micromanager’s dream, sailing around the Baltic trying to make money and rise in the Hanseatic League. It was German, of course, and in that quite reminiscent of the obnoxious way the Boche is now trying to assert his dominance over Europe by financial means. But the thing is that it wasn’t anywhere near the level of a AAA game, and could not have been. It was very niche, and my kind of niche.
And that’s the problem I have with this entry: you seem to think there’s no salvation outside of the AAA game, in the way you think there’s no salvation outside the Hollywood blockbuster movie (a telling choice of words: not “film”, not a serious art form, but “movie”). And well, I couldn’t care less about The Avengers having or not having “crossover appeal”; I don’t like superhero films. I’m not going to watch it even if you made it as inclusive as possible. I haven’t been to a cinema in years, because the films I want to see are never screened here; I only know they exist because I read about them. But The Avengers and its ilk we get, invariably — no way out of this but to avoid new films altogether.
So, I couldn’t care less if games were made more inclusive, if that meant — beyond the laudable goal of not setting out to offend (and I’m only giving video games a pass on this because I don’t think they’re art, because art should remain free to offend, which it should be encouraged to do) — watering down what it does well to attract more money from other demographics. (Isn’t that at the heart of the entire controversy over Star Citizen?) . Which means the nine-figure-budgeted trading sim is never going to happen, or at least not in a way that will please the trading sim enthusiasts.
What needs to happen is not so much that AAA games should attract more people; it’s that the other games get enough visibility to be a success on their own terms, even though they can’t provide employment to a small army of programmers. In other words, I don’t want a more-inclusive Avengers; I want something that *isn’t* The Avengers.
And on this you seem to have little to say.
Sometimes I feel like seeing a more-inclusive Avengers, and if I wait long enough one will show up at the local multiplex. (“The Hunger Games” and “Django Unchained” and “Wreck-It Ralph” and “Mad Max: Fury Road” were all pretty good.) I wish movies like that would show up a bit more often, though. It seems like they do pretty well financially, it’s just that the big studios are afraid to make them for some reason. That’s a problem with the studios.
Other times I don’t want to see anything like the Avengers; I want to see something that’s slower-paced and more nuanced. I’m lucky enough to live in a big city, so I can usually find something like that at one of the “art house” theaters downtown. I’m guessing that you live in a an area where you only have access to multiplexes. That’s not a problem with the studios; the problem is that you had the bad luck to fall into an unprofitable demographic.
But is there a college nearby? A lot of times they’ll have film clubs that will screen the sort of stuff you like. You could even start your own club; just rent a space with a video projector and get a license to show the latest indie films from Netflix. (I do agree that watching movies on a big screen with a crowd is a lot more fun than watching them at home.)
Anyway, the same thing applies to gaming. The fact that AAA games tend to pander to a demographic that’s already oversaturated is a problem with the studios. The fact that unpopular genres don’t sell well is a problem for people who like unpopular genres.
This world you describe. This is Heaven, right? #feminism
(I’m almost afraid to make this joke because feminists don’t have a sense of humor. Therefore, this must be evidence that the end goal of feminism is a female dominated media landscape where men are pressured into having amaaaaazing abs, and there are no more boobs in Game of Thrones. QED.)
I want ‘Being Channing Tatum,’ to be the sequel to ‘Being John Malkovich.’ And I want it now.
The survey linked at the end of the post is totally worthless. The survey was an internet poll, which the creator of the survey, Ashly Burch, publicized on her Twitter account. Multiple people admitted to taking the survey despite not being teens themselves. “Unrepresentative sample” doesn’t begin to describe it.
And that’s without even bringing up the fact that the survey questions were ridiculously leading (“do video games use women as sex objects too often,” and also have you stopped beating your wife yet?).
Dear Zen of Design,
You say imagine if all films were like Magic Mike XXL, well as far as I’m aware the mainstream-ish films centring around women stripping mostly settle into the arthouse genre where much of it is about the acts around stripping rather than stripping itself. E.G. Chicago, Caledar Girls, Striptease , Cherry (though that is about a porn actress more than a stipper) and the rather infamous sequence in powder blue.
Your comparison of Magic Mike to being a reverse version of what is seen in video games is very far off base considering many video gaming Male characters are based on or evolved from a genre of films commonly known as “Swords and Sandals” the audience they were aimed at was Young Males and Older housewifes. The genre itself began it’s popularity in Italy with a number of films (Bob Chipman has even done videos on these and the quite infamous Hercules film). The entire point of the genre was big buff bodybuilder men wearing very little for the women to look at and a lot of fantasy stuff and sword fights for junior to enjoy.
The claim that there is a very generic look to many male characters recently is not a co-incidence. Feminist frequency posted such a list on her Tumblr a while back showing the similarities. However if you compare then to Nathan Fillion you’ll find a strong similarity amongst them with all western studios. A very simple reason for this is the show Castle tested very well with *shock* Women. The Male protagonists are in many cases being designed to appeal to female audience. It’s no fluke that new Dante shares more than a passing likeness to Gerard Way. If you want to argue that somehow games portrayal of women is like a reverse magic mike then almost their entire portrayal of Men can be equated closely to The Swords and Sandals Genre which was the precursor to the magic mike film. The reason so few people notice this is because people aren’t shouting from the rooftops about it, for guys the sexualisation is there as much it’s just the specific lens and angle being used to look at it that obsucres this. The sexualisation is just accepted and while many will say “oh it’s just idealisation not sexualisation” no that’s merely a re-branding trying to pretend it’s not and isn’t based in sexualisation.
To quote a girl I knew who was very much a hardcore gamer “I love Metal Gear Solid as really it’s just a whole game series where you spend most of it staring at a fit guy’s ass”
I was hosting a house party a few years ago when two of my female friends saw that I had the DVD for the first Captain America movie, and they insisted that we watch it because, and I quote, “Chris Evans is sexy in it.” They proceeded to spend most of the movie making catcalls at the TV, especially during the scene where Cap gets out of the Vita Ray chamber. Since then, I’ve had a really hard time taking the “male superheroes aren’t sex objects, they’re male power fantasies” argument seriously.
There was also the time when I was watching X-Men Days of Future Past in a movie theater, there was a totally gratuitous shot of Hugh Jackman’s naked buttocks, and the theater immediately filled with high pitched squeals. I highly doubt that was an accident on the part of the filmmakers.