What an awful week for the culture that surrounds and influences video games.
That’s putting it very mildly. The people responsible for all of this – like the people who threatened a critic of the portrayal of women in games with physical/sexual violence – should be sent to jail. Especially the ‘Kevin Dobson’ character should probably be locked up in a mental institution for life.
Especially the treatment of women in the gaming industry – whether on-screen or off-screen – is absolutely horrible. As an n=1 social experiment, I often pretend to be female in my League of Legends matches, and the kind of shit you get thrown at you when you do so is disgusting.
I can shake it off because I’m actually not female – but I shudder at the thought of not being able to do so.
I’ve known many men over the years that exclusively play female characters in games for some of the dumbest reasons. I don’t understand it and likely never will. If they were actually role playing the part it would be one thing, but very very few of the ones I’ve know actually role play. Instead, they’re doing it to get a rise out of other people or so they can stare at the pixels on the screen and not feel gay (their words, not mine). Male maturity can be as rare as “real female gamers on the Internet” it seems.
There are exactly two reasons why I personally play female characters in MMORPGs.
1) Males (character or real) tend to give you free stuff. Back when I played Ultima Online, my friend and I were just starting out new characters, and we played for a few hours, and we already had several groups of dudes give us armor and swords and such. You can’t deny that it happens still.
2) Most of the games out there either have thickly muscled dudes, or comic book proportioned women. If I’m going to be staring at the backside of a character for hours on end, it may as well be of the female form, which I prefer to look at. And besides, Age of Conan has bouncing boobs.
I am not really getting it, most “bad guys” in games are invariably male. In fact all kind of stereotypes are ascribed to males in games.
Yes, but stereotypes of males, especially white ones, are OK.
And if you can manage a stereotype of a white southern male, you’ve got comedy gold.
Following forbes article dealing with the topic is rather good. In short: agreed.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5XT0uSAhcGAJ:w…
Also not exactly a new topic exclusive to video gaming:
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/He-Man_a51a94_4798301.jpg
Ever watched hollywood-movies? Fashion-shows? Or just TV / spots? Its omnipresent long before video games got relevant.
Edited 2014-08-29 02:19 UTC
You sorta answered your own question: in a lot of these games, men do all kinds of different things, but women are only around for a few negative tropes. That’s not the whole story, but it’s certainly an important part of it.
One of the examples was a bit weird – she was slamming a game because you only go after the bad guy; you don’t help the women to the hospital or visit them at the shelter to help them get their life back together…
Well duh! I’m the police man. I’m not the ambulance driver, the doctor, or a social worker. My job is to find the bad guys, and put little pieces of lead into their bodies. I do think that they can tone down the portrayal of women in those types of games as it’s unnecessary, but don’t slam the role the main character is in just because they don’t cure ALL the ills of mankind. Instead, help promote games where you ARE the ambulance driver, or the doctor, or even the social worker. There are enough police/secret agent/soldier games and always will be. Instead of ranting against those games, help promote the others.
I’d love to see that kind of role diversity in games as well. One can only play so many lame shooters before it gets stale.
One of my favorite games is FTL – Faster Than Light. The crew you command can be assigned whatever role you wish, and while they are barely distinguishable pixelated sprites from a visual standpoint, they do sport an equal measure of masculine, feminine, and ambiguous/non-gendered names.
Yeah, I’m off FPS for the moment as well. I can think of a good way to make an ambulance driver game – make it a racer! “In a world where SECONDS can mean the difference between LIFE and DEATH, you – are- THE AMBULANCE DRIVER!”
😀
I love a good racing game, and that could be a really good one. You’d have to know the town like the back of your hand, be able to route around traffic, and you couldn’t just blow through intersections. You’d respond mostly to accidents, domestic violence calls, elderly down, and the rare Super Model (male and female) ODed at a night club.
For a bit of variety, you could have different size cities, and maybe allow you to fly the Life Flight helicopter. I’d buy that game in a heartbeat!
Actually in a game called Firefighters Simulator 2014 you can play as an Ambulance driver. As you might expect from a game with “simulator” in the title, it is a pile of crap.
Yay! I’m happy!
Ahhhhhh – now I’m sad.
On the topic of games that allow you to be an ambulance driver without being the focus of the game, I read a blog post where the dad found his rather young kid playing GTAV… as an ambulance driver (or was it a fire truck driver?). GTAV has a LOT of open game-play in it. I’ve been really thinking about picking it up, with no intention to play many of the quests in it.
There’s actually Emergency Call Ambulance, a Sega arcade game from 1999. In each stage you had to drive an accident victim from their place of injury to the hospital. Every bump would reduce their chances of survival (timer), and you had to drive this route with shortcuts, trying to avoid traffic and make it safely.
It was fun for the first two stages I played. Engaging and energetic arcade feel, good gameplay. In the second stage, you’re helping a police officer to the hospital, so an organised crime mob try to stop you.
Thanks. I’ll have to see if MAME supports that yet.
It doesn’t matter how much BS one is telling, harassment is never ok. Her work could be so much more effective if she would not “enrich” what is really true with things that don’t actually happen in these games. The Hitman poster really *is* disturbing. WTF, who comes up with such things? No matter if the game is sexist or not, I don’t play such games.
In her movie about Hitman she did play the game in a pretty sexist way in order to prove that the whole game thus is horribly sexist. Even though most real gamers did not.
I think she is a fraud. There are plenty of ways to critizise games and the gaming industry for it’s sexism but her videos seems to miss most of it, and instead focusing on “easy targets” made easier by exaggereating everything. You know, what you would do when you are not really doing any substantial research at all. I think people give her way to much credit. She is a lazy gold digger.
That said, she REALLY doesn’t deserve all the crap she has got. Not many do. And some people just seems to want to hate her guts with such intensity it’s hard to remember that she’s just a lazy gold digger and not the antichrist.
If you want games with positive portrayal of women, then make them. If you want to harass people for “attacking your games” then have the guts to do it in person. All I see is whining and trolling. I vote with my wallet, but I know that internet comments (like this one) are just mental masturbation. I’m not convincing anybody who didn’t already agree with me before hand.
You can get shat on in League of Legends if you announce almost any personal detail about yourself, be it women, gay, fat, young, black, Jewish, French, or Russian. Let’s not narrow the fight for “stop being an asshole online” down to just a single group of victims.
And it’s also nowhere nearly as prevalent as the few loud voices make it seem and certainly don’t define an entire “culture”, if such a “Team Gamer” thing can even be said to exist. With League you are dealing with a new set of nine random people every game you play with very few real world consequences for the rubbish they sprout. You might go 10 games between someone saying something vicious (90 random people), but the bad things sad stick in ones mind and distort the reality of it.
It’s a bit like asking Customer Service representatives what they think of the state of humanity based on their daily interactions with angry people (in LoLs case, angry they’re losing a game) and with the added benefit of having no consequences to what they say. It doesn’t draw a pretty picture of people.
The guy responsible for community behavior at Riot made an interesting post that they’re now down to “0.3% of games having homophobic or racial slurs”. Less than 1 in 30 games or 270 random people. Those people don’t define a group or culture.
While a lot of games can have such issues, I’d also strongly question motivations of critics like Anita Sarkeesian. Her reviews often are not objective at all and make an impression that she simply is doing it for black PR and attracting attention to herself. Yet she is somehow treated as a honorable critic, got some awards and even had a successful Kickstarter campaign for her reviews (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/566429325/tropes-vs-women-in-vi…).
Edited 2014-08-28 23:37 UTC
Reviews and Criticism are two different things. Let us use film as an example: A film review should tell me about the movie so I can make a decision if I should go see it or not. And having known a few film reviewers, I can tell you they are a biased lot. The good ones state their biases in their review, but it doesn’t always happen.
Criticism is different. It is an analysis and examination of the subject. Film Criticism generally presupposes you have seen the film already, and attempts to break down themes, make literary comparisons, talk about subtest, etc. Criticism, to the best of my knowledge, carries no expectation of being objective
Returning back to video games, this distinction seems to get lost. Anita Sarkeesian is a critic — as you yourself said — and is not looking at the world of gaming though the same lens as a reviewer.
But even if she is doing “Black PR” and self promoting, she does not deserve death threats, threats of sexual violence, to have her accounts hacked, and all the other horrible things that have been done to her and other women.
Feel free to disagree with her all you want, but stand up against the harassment as well. They are two different things.
I disagree that criticism should not be objective. Otherwise what’s the point? Opinions can differ widely. And saying to the masses “I subjectively like this and subjectively don’t like that” is fine, but why should anyone else care? Doing it for the public requires objectivity. Otherwise holders of such opinions should just keep them to themselves, unless asked to express them.
In her case, she often makes weird claims, twists things around just to push her point. In any real discussion lot’s of her claims can be easily shown as false or illogical. Even for subjective criticism she is way off.
Undoubtedly, and it’s really disgusting that some react to criticism like that, even if it’s false.
Edited 2014-08-29 00:59 UTC
Unfortunately, for many it is all or nothing and are instantly conflated with being pro-harassment for disagreeing at all.
I agree, as a big fan of Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, he often get alot of fire for not “reviewing” games properly when he is merely criticizing them.
I am guessing that Anita gets way more flaks because :
– she uses a more serious and educational tone
– she is a woman
There is not justification for harassement nor death threat of any kind.
While I though the tone was boring, I though she her choice of material was very well done, and that we forgot too quickly about these games that made us raised an eyebrow for their strange communication.
to be honest, I really think that the “male gamer” outrage, sound like american right wing media to me.
Here is an interesting interview: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-fb5lkewSM0
Nobody deserves it, man, woman, human.
Agreed, no one deserves it. Sadly however, women disproportionately get death threats and threats of sexual violence just for saying things people don’t like.
A good example of it is documented here: http://www.onthemedia.org/story/31-race-swap-experiment/
Personally I do expect criticism to be honest. I don’t expect the thing being criticised to be misrepresented. That crosses the line from criticism to dishonest propaganda.
Of course that doesn’t justify morons sending Sarkeesian threats, but the existence of those threats doesn’t improve her arguments.
In my opinion much of Sarkeesian’s “criticism” is so laughably biased and ignorant that when I first saw it I assumed she was a parody character. I think the last time I was mistaken like that was when someone linked to this “criticism” of Dungeons and Dragons: http://www.chick.com/reading/tracts/0046/0046_01.ASP
Edited 2014-08-29 22:31 UTC
Exactly. And a lot of feminists do claim this: death threats is proof that she is right.
Ehm, no, it just proves that some people have some serious boundry issues. Nothing more, and certainly nothing less.
A few minutes (or hours, there are lots of YT videos dissecting her and her videos) of research on Anita Sarkeesian will likely cause anyone to question her and her motives. She very carefully manipulates the conversation to fit her narrative. A narrative which has gotten a lot of attention generally with the fad of SJWs.
I give her credit for playing people though. She’s done an excellent job of that. Made her quite the star in that circle and carefully hidden away most of the evidence of what she’s done.
Wooooosh.
Yes. But it’s not all bad though. She may be a fraud, but she has gotten the attention of the gaming industry.
According to Naughty Dog, they listened to her before making The Last of Us. And that game did really present women (and gays, and blacks) with a healthy dose of nuanse (unless you claim that you can never ever have a white dude as the protagonist). That really made the game shine in my opinion.
If others take up her plead and make something actually constructive out of it then atleast she has done something good in the end anyway. Even if it might be all unintential.
It’s actually bad. One thing is to make mistakes and other thing is to have a bad adviser. Listening to her won’t improve the gaming industry at all, if anything it will make it even worse.
She doesn’t deserve attention of the gaming industry, let alone following any of her advice.
Edited 2014-08-31 01:47 UTC
My point is rather that people who listens to her probably don’t follow her “12 point program” if we can call it that. They rather think “yeah, we can’t forget our female gamers and women issues in general” instead of going full ahead with “boobies!”.
But yes, if people did follow her advices to the letter we would have very dull and most probably very sexist games. But this time the sexism would be directed to men.
I think with all the recent scandals the awareness of this subject is pretty high, but some unfortunately do exactly what you said above – i.e. following the advice literally because she is viewed as a credible source.
Edited 2014-08-31 19:50 UTC
I don’t know about that. She says that it’s sexist that you can’t form meningful relationships with the NPC’s. So we should then expect that instead of beating up prostitutes in the next GTA you would talk to them, go home with them and discuss the latest Oprah over a cup of tea.
We can be assured that this is not likely to happen, since it would make the games unnecessarely huge, and also pretty dull. Most likely people who listens to her and like what they hear will interpret what she has to say into something less stupid and more constructive. Which I believe happened with The Last of Us.
This is not saying that she is a good force in the universe. She isn’t. She is just a fraud (lately, she has claimed she was so harrased online that she had to move. She didn’t call the police, but rather took the oportunity to ask people for more money).
But what’s important isn’t what she is saying, but what kind of inpact she is having. And it seems it’s pretty non-existing for the most zealous parts but some has got an eye opener about gender equality in games. And that is not bad, even if it originally comes from “Satan”.
I thought this article was going to be about the Zoe Quinn affair and the terrible state of Gaming journalism and its complete lack of integrity of transparency. Instead I get an article trotting out the usual professional-victims playing their victimhood card (again).
Of course there is some amalgam, there should be a little context about phil fish issues, but again, hacking or harassment is no adult response to issue (although in the case of the hacking the was some doubt expressed).
Anyway, I really don’t care about the zoe quinn scandal, as I was getting tired of those websites anyway. the only thing that iritated me was the irresponsible DCMA claim, and the mass censorship of discussion related to the issue (which went way of its course).
Media blackout though, meh.
Apart from the gamejam where she caused some rukus, I didn’t heard that much of her and wasn’t interested at all in her game.
I already have little trust in technology “review” website, and game “review” website is IMHO way worse, as it is often up to the publisher to send review copies, invitation to reveal event, and probably gameshow as well, paying these websites advertising. As described somewhere else these websites are not charity, their goal is to pay the rent and other things. their only goal is to feed fanboyship.
This whole thing is sadly simple.
Usually it’s younger men that play video games. They want to see boobs and violence. So publishers (not developers) target that audience. Unless you’re an indie developer, then you’re pretty much stuck with doing whatever bull crap the publishers think are going to be popular.
With Movies and TV it’s the same thing. I mean how many times I have we seen on Castle some woman brutally murdered as ‘background’ to the plot, and then we see Becket (as a strong female role) catch the killer with Castle’s help?
This video sums it up pretty well, though she was confused on why Indie developers are better writers. I answer that above (publishers should just let the devs do their thing…)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8RgbS9ESE
Oh, and the violent/sexual responses, as stated in that video are probably from men in their early teens to young adulthood that are sexually frustrated idiots who wouldn’t know how a real woman felt.
Edited 2014-08-29 04:37 UTC
Some people make games a way of life. They have the right to live their lifes. And I have the right to critcize them. It’s like any other addictive substance: If you can’t do it in moderation, you have a problem. We’ve all heard the stories about people who have let their kids starve or sold them for the sake of playing their video game. I’ve known people who just completely ruined their lives over games. On the other hand, something like a weekly gaming night, where you get all your friends together for LAN games, beer, and pizza is a GOOD thing (nutrition not withstanding). Games are just a thing that can be good or bad, depending on what you do with it.
But to reemphasize, those people who make it their whole lives have a PROBLEM. And now we’re seeing their problem externalized, because for some reason, they feel like their reality is being threatened. For some reason, these people have a psychotic need for violence, and as soon as it is pointed out that some of that is properly hateful to half the world’s population, they can’t handle it. “Don’t take away my disgusting video games!” Or else they’ll make death threats to the critics? WTF? Regardless of how you feel about yor next dose of crack, critics have every right to criticize, and they should not be threatened with bodily harm. (On the other hand, it’s perfectly fine to threaten the critics with rational criticism in response.)
Normally, I don’t give a crap about people being insulted. You have no right to not be insulted. Are you religious? Your religion probably has content that is silly from an outsider. Live with it. Are you gay? Actually, I have a lot of criticism to make about some of hypersexualized things you’ll see at gay pride parades (although this is a general criticim of sexual indiscretion, not of being gay). Are you female? Hey, why can’t we joke about some people’s excessive use of makeup or collection of 1000 shoes (500 pairs?)? Atheists, heterosexuals, and men do just as many silly things. (Many atheists have a superiority complex that gives them license to be indicriminately assholish to religious people, no matter how reasoned they are. Heterosexuals… actually do some very analogous things. And men? Don’t get me started with the hair, body odor, slobby work environments, tendency to create monocultures, etc.)
So, if you make a video game that criticises women for things women often do, then that would just be funny. If you make a video game where you go around killing some traditionally evil enemy (like Nazi Germans), then that’s something to consider carefully, but probably okay. I see no problems with killing plants, numbers, words, zombies, dinosaurs, aliens, or any other completely abstract enemy. If someone made a video game about clubbing baby seals, I’d find it disgusting, but I’d have to think a lot harder about whether or not the unpopularity of that would warrant banning such a game. What about a game that’s all about destroying the earth by polution? (Actually that could be educational.)
However, when your game contains indiscriminate violence against women, at the very least, you should take it like an adult and accept the fact that you will have mountains of criticism heaped upon you. Deal with it, pussies.
I can’t speak for anyone else but I am not talking about people giving insults.
No one should be subjected to harassment, threats to their person, and/or threats of sexual violence just because of their opinions on a subject — no matter how abhorrent one finds them.
Criticize video games and people threaten you with violence? WTF? That is indefensible.
Nobody has to agree with everything Sarkeesian says. Disagreement is where progress comes from. You want to argue civilly, fine. But this is so far from “civil disagreement” I can’t fathom it.
For my piece, women have to deal with more crap just about everywhere, I don’t see how it’s even a stretch of the imagination to think video game portrayals would be biased… And I don’t even keep up with current games.
Thom: good on you for having the guts to post this in the face of rampant idiocy.
Those of you who protest: read the freaking article if you haven’t, and stop defending violent nutcakes.
Edited 2014-08-29 17:49 UTC
http://i.imgur.com/LSNrEkg.png