A-D. said:
Well..i cant believe im doing this but..i am actually gonna post here.
The Video? It tells me nothing. I dont need her to say she "does" or "doesnt" like videogames, or whether she considers herself a gamer to begin with. She is not a gamer, not a hardcore one at least. And i use hardcore in this context with "growing up" with games, literally. She is claiming to be an expert, boasting a large library funded by the kickstarter money, the first question that has to instantly pop up into your head should be "Why does she need to buy all those games?". I mean take your average youtuber, or take a bit more "prominent" ones, reviewers, lets players, whatever. They all share the hobby of gaming, they boast a large library to some extent without having to go buy them for a "study". If she was an expert on games to begin with, or it was her hobby in any serious way, she'd have a large enough library to cite countless examples without the need to actually buy any for a while, or at least not use the kickstarter cash for it.
It is obvious that gaming is not a big hobby, she may have played games, she might have only played a certain type of game, but that should disqualify her from making any claims to what she is doing, i.e. a series about tropes, their usage and the industry in which these games are made. She lacks the context of the games she has to play to give specific examples. I mean if we look at Mario superficially, its about a dude in red who eats mushrooms, plants and stars, saves a princess and throws a giant lizard into lava by jumping onto an axe. The princess is obviously a damsel, you saving her means she had to be saved, tada, damsel in distress. You dont need to play the game to see it, but playing the game might also give insight into WHY she needs to be saved, what she is saved from, the entire motivation behind the character. Of course using mario as a example doesnt work there since it really is archetypical hero saves princess, but other games that pull this? The Zelda series for example? Thats a whole different story there and varies depending on the game you use as example.
In short it is clear that she is not really a gamer in the sense that gaming is not her hobby. She has not spent the amount of time in these fictional worlds as others have who are by definition more knowledgeable on the subject of why game X uses trope Y and why it matters there. All she does is look at games, plays a bit or looks just at footage and then goes to tvtropes to find the right trope that fits the game and some kind of sexist undertone, whether it applies or not. I mean if you really want to, you can find something sexist about an apple, yes the fruit, you might have to bend logic a little but im fairly certain that you could come up with a argument as to why the apple is sexist eventually. So the problem is, either confirmation bias, in that she looks at a sexist trope and then cites examples that prove it, even if they might not (Zelda..). Or she is simply lazy in that she merely looks at a plot synopsis or a short footage of beginning and end of some game and then labels them with a trope, which is by itself just lazy.
In short, her opinion should not matter because it is evidently clear that gaming is not her hobby, therefore her expertise, or lack thereof, or opinion on the state of the industry should be considered suspect at best.
And before someone goes "but you just want to detract"..no, i dont. I dont see the problem of mysoginy or sexism in gaming, in the community? Oh yes, but blaming games doesnt solve that. It is fact that gaming has been dominated by males for most of its history, gamers were male, developers were mostly male, the community has a large amount of males in it, so you are obviously going to find the view skewed to one side right away. Does sexism exist within the gaming community? Oh yes it does, but are games at fault for it? Are the developers? Are tropes, some random thing we apply a name to somehow at fault for doing this? Not really. Look at the idea of feminism and how long it took them to get..anywhere, get voting rights for women, equal opportunities in the workplace and so forth and then come back and tell me how a medium that has at best existed for 30-40 years should be all equal right now, when it took way longer than that for our societies to get even anywhere close. She demands results now, rather than just trying to educate the community at large in a better, constructive way to include the female element into our hobby.