That should literally be the mantra for anything to do with game development.
Yeah, America is not overrun by Nazis but by a combination of Nazis, Commies, and Socialists obviously. And no one knows what any of those things are.
Cyberpunk 2077 Review thread - Umm....
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
- Start date
More and more “civilization”. What a damn mess we’re makin of things.
-Arthur Morgan
So, you don't see the inherent hilarity when there's a dozen GTAs without a lady protagonist and the one time there's a rumor of having a lady protagonist (along with a male protagonist), fragile dudebros pull out the "but I can't identify with someone who is not like me" argument?
Because I thought that was hilarious. It's hilarious.
Amazing none of this controversy happened with Resident Evil and the choice to play as Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, etc.
Or the female character from Silent Hill 3 whose name I forgot.
That's because Capcom's been doing this shit for years and not run by corporate frat boy style assholes with insecure egos who want to constantly live the "rock star" life style in gaming.
"Cheryl"/Heather Mason.
Especially when like first 3 had a cardboard cutout with a gun as a PC.
I mean, if playing as a shitty person is all it takes, I'm sure they could somehow bring back Catalina from GTA3 and make her the PC. And then claim diversity points(as game companies are wont to do) by saying "Look, we have a LADY and a HISPANIC for our PC!". Hey, Ubisoft, didn't see you over there......
Let's not forget Saints Row has been doing the "Play as a character you create" since the beginning, with the "Lady PC" option being there since 2.
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Excuse me, wasn't common to have a female protagonist?
Off the top of my head here is a list of female heroes all in game prior to 2014.
Yuna - Final Fantasy X and X-2
Lightning - Final Fantasy 13, 13-3
Sera - Final Fantasy 13-2
Princess Peach - Mario 2
Zelda/Shiek
Lara Croft - Tomb Raider
Bayonetta
Tifa Lockheart - FF7
Chun Li - Street Fighter
Nina Williams - Tekken
Samus Aran - Metroid
Rayne - Bloodrayne
Sonya Blade - Mortal Kombat
COUNTLESS custom characters throughout gaming
Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield - Resident Evil 1, 2, 3, code Veronica
MRS. Pacman
Joanna Dark - Perfect Dark
Faith Conners - Mirror's Edge
Chell - Portal (and Gladius as the villian maybe)
Jade - Beyond Good and Evil.
Faith - Wet (voice by Eliza Dushku and completely under rated as a game)
Ellie - Xenogears
Kos-Mos - Xenosaga
Haruka - Yakuza 5
Ivy - Soul Calibur
and many many more
Woke Culture did not have a major impact on the number of girls running around our video games. Woke culture only made it seem like that was the case. It's been a bunch of bogus witch hunting from the get go. And like i said before I find it funny that the very same thing that the "Sarkeisian"-likes always cry out when a video game gets announced is "Oh boy another white dude as the main character! Get with the times Video Games only women should be characters. Men suck." Are the same people crying when internet trolls do the same thing about a female character in this GTA 6 thing that probably isn't even true.
It's just ironic and hypocritical imo. Because only one side get to play this card and when the other side tries it (whether troll or not) people lose their fucking minds.
While you have your points on the amount of female protagonists or playable characters, that still didn't stop the outcries of the neck beards overreacting and acting like they have the final authority on everything. I may not like Sarkesian (in fact I despise her, cuz she's nothing but a schemer), but for her during the criticize how women have been treated in gaming, a whole bunch of these butt-holes flipped out and sent rape and death threats. The same thing happened to Robert Ebert back in 2009 or 2010 where he said video games were not art, minus the rape threats of course. once again, I was never the biggest fan of Ebert and hated his guts, but he did not deserve death threats.
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They are overlooked now and were not made a big deal of back then because it was never an issue, and gender/identity politics hadn’t yet worked their cancerous magic on society. The whole issue was just was aggravated into one, and ended up pissing both sides off for different reasons. Now everything ends up having an “agenda” either directly or unintentionally because of it.
Trying to please everyone...
I think its more that he complaints about the cis man complaining they can't identify as a female character, while at the same time always having scoffed at whatever minority said they couldn't identify as well with the straight white males that were always the main characters. I don't think its the case of missing a double standard, but calling out the double standard of others.
Mmm after January its going to be hard to argue a certain subset of American politics isn't mildly fascist. Its certainly demagoguery, of which fascism is merely a more extreme form. I wouldn't say Donald should apply for direct membership of Adolf's party but there is more than enough overlap to start getting nervous. Things like an idealized mythical past that never existed, both an outside and an inside threat conspiring against ''the people'', anti intellectualism, a certain appreciation of violence, a racial hierarchy(whether unofficial or official), the belief in a ''great leader'' and the like.
Well, seeing as white, straight men are still the default in entertainment, yes, that side doesn't have any ground to complain about in terms of representation. The only reason individuals from that side complain is because the playing field is slowly and slightly evening out just a tad, with the majority still stacked in their favor. And that itself is enough to make some absolutely freak out. This usually happens when the status quo gets rippled.
It was an issue back then too, just as it was with gay and trans representation, it was just overlooked. That's why we look back on movies like Revenge of the Nerds or Sixteen Candles and think 'damn, that was kinda fucked up', and why certain tropes are regarded as outdated and kind of toxic, like this one;
You mean, then a bunch of middling-talent creatives who couldn't hack it on their own merit, seized upon the idea of using identity politics as a means to browbeat their way into the triple-A gaming industry, whilst a small and insular group of individuals already in it seized upon identity politics as a means to retain their positions despite waning relevance. And after a tidal wave of mediocre work that lasted half a decade, gamers finally got tired of being defamed en masse and clapped back because unlike those who ceaselessly pushed the narrative, actually valued storytelling over topical and superficial spectacle?
Not even women characters.
Women characters of such a narrow swath of permissible body types, visual designs, attitudes, beliefs, and available dialog choices, exclusively written of, by, and for an ultra-minority of well-connected fortunate sons and daughters, that it comes full circle back to body-negativity and exclusionism while inadvertently reducing an entire gender to a straw man of itself. Paradoxically, perpetuating stereotypes and objectification of women the creators themselves claim to stand against. At the end of the day, it's post-third wave, exclusionary, neopuritan pish-posh that anyone who actually calls themselves a feminist should rightly discard as the Orwellian nonsense it is by rote.
Meanwhile, I'm just over here having watched people piss and complain that Trish wears a corset and low-rider leather trousers, and showed buttcrack, in a game series that makes eye candy of every character. While those who the first group claims are horrible sexist neckbeards, are pissed she isn't playable.
What’s funny is a lot of women historically like those kinds of movies more than men. It does lead one to wonder if the realignment of social perception has had a greater affect on other things though. Like sexual assault for example. What’s perhaps most interesting there though is that nearly half of all reported assaults occur at the home of the victim. That could mean anything from a spouse being too aggressive while their SO wasn’t in the mood, up to a forced entry by a stranger (no pun). Or perhaps it’s most often somewhere in the middle, where trust is taken advantage of or too easily given.
Not my problem if you can't recognize the objectification and reductionism, and hypocrisy, inherent in being unable to...oh, I dunno...analyze a woman character that shows cleavage, beyond said cleavage. Like Bayonetta.
Or the incapacity by certain involved parties to recognize "no-gear levels", or sudden core mechanic shifts, as common tropes in video games and by no means exclusive to women characters -- and from that, launch nonsensical polemic diatribes about women's empowerment. Like, say, Zero Suit Samus levels, and MGS2's naked Raiden level.
(Or for that matter, lack the mental capacity to add two and two on Raiden's feminized appearance as contrasted against basically every other character in the games with notable inclusion, as subtextual and prototypical commentary on masculinity and armed conflict)
Or, somehow quizzically come to a conclusion that grindhouse-era torture porn is empowering, but the whole-ass franchise that predates it is exploitative, simply for having depicted a woman character in touch with and unashamed of her own sexuality...all while simultaneously, paradoxically, laying claims to sex-positivity. Like Tomb Raider and it's "reboot".
Or, hey more contemporarily, declaring as game of the year a game that ostensibly prided itself on realistic depictions of human bodies, but somehow got the whole "how deltoids, lats, and biceps work" wrong, in a game in which a main character is supposed to be a bodybuilder and that they were a bodybuilder was a key selling point of that character's depiction. And more confusingly, decided a setting of a zombie apocalypse was a really good place to make clumsy and self-contradictory commentary about Zionism...all while not being arsed to actually model a synagogue on...well, an actual synagogue.
Oh, but I can hear the "muh mael gaze!" already...but here's a tip: when that's the only thing you see, surprise, you're still being a sexist, objectifying pig.
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I mean i wont defend the buttholling. But you gotta figure that at least some of that was due to Anita's own behavior. Not from her Feminist cries about how female characters are protrayed, but the fact that almost everything she said about video games was a fucking lie. Proven with context within the game's she was criticizing herself.
Gamers are an easily angry bunch and nothing riles them up more than spreading lies and misinformation strictly designed to demonized their favorite hobby. Which is what Anita did.
I think her harassment would have been far more diminished if she had presented reasonable, well researched, arguments. Yet her whole campaign appears to have been designed from the get-go to bring about as much abuse as possible towards her so that she can turn around and use that harassments as leverage for her entire career. She is smart as fuck in that regard. I have a hard time believing that she just genuinely wanted to report on video games with no further motives. I think she knew exactly what the response would be and marketed it as such in order to create fame for herself. And it worked.
Ah yes the typical goal post shifting. The moment anyone shoves proof that the female character works and has worked since the beginning of gaming history, people like you wanna shift the goal post back, adding all these extra limitations on what "counts".
Ok let's go back and use your criteria. These must be playable characters and cannot be part of a large roster. Fine, here we go.
Samus Aran - Metroid
Jill Valentine - Resident Evil 3
Yuna, Paine, and Rikku - Final Fantasy X-2 (part of an ensamble but consisting of all women so this should count)
Jade - Beyond Good and Evil
Faith - Wet
Faith - Mirror's Edge
Lara Croft - Tomb Raider
Bayonetta - Bayonetta 1, 2, and probably 3
Countless custom Female protagonists
Joanna Dark - Perfect Dark
Mrs. Pacman
Rayne - Bloodrayne
Sera - Final Fantasy 13-2 (she is the main character and is partnered with monster pokemon and one other dude who is a minor character. so I'm counting this)
Shion - Xenosaga 1,2, and 3 (Main character in the RPG. Still counts)
Clarie Redfield - Resident Evil Code Veronica
So basically almost everyone on my original list counts, only removing the fighting game characters because that somehow doesn't count. Except.....
The Dead or Alive Cast (while part of a larger roster, the women are the main characters in the game's core story)
So I don't know what to tell you. I guess you can make up some other bullshit as to why these characters still don't count. But that only serves to invalidate the history of women in video games which seems a bit counterproductive to me.