Gena Davis institute on Gender in media tries to link violent games to mass shootings and police violence

Dwarvenhobble

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And there's your first and most dangerous mistake. It's not propaganda if it's true and still on going. You just rather be in la la land. You have a habit of ignoring actual points or truths people back up or show. Either by downplaying it or not responding when you know you have nothing to counter with. Or you overract or treat something as serious buinsess, because of a change of an outdated system, or "forced divsersity" bull crap you're tying to sell. I am starting to see why you don't come to the Current Events thread often. You told me that earlier this year, but you've been on it a lot more often than you want to admit.
Actually it very much is.

Anita herself has been pretty clear about it but apparently people weren't paying attention.

The funny thing is just how well the manipulation job has worked and how much people are still dug in to some belief they can see the Matrix code and everyone else is just a fool who needs educating.

People got played by Anita and co just as people get played by this commercial into wanting to buy mouthwash


Some kind of techniques on show.
The funny thing is people still can't see the tricks in play or the grand game. You know why so many companies are rushing to try and represent different cultures? Mostly Western ones? Because the are trying to take what other nations do and make it part of their own. Because how else are the mostly white mostly male Billionaires meant to keep making Billions is some jumped up little Japanese or South Koreans or Spanish or wherever else film studios stat making films that become popular?
 

Dwarvenhobble

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You ain't in the parts of the internet I am, slick.
Yes I don't generally stick my head into those echo chambers. Tell me how come that vast numbers you believe are in said places consistently keep failing to show up for things again?


Not at all. But my point about them paying more still stands.
So you want to even the pay out even though there's legitimate reasons for the pay disparities?


Except it has.
When?

I'd bet my life on it. Go see for yourself.
To use what is always turned round on me.

People who have any kind of actual voice impact and authority, or are we just talking nobodies


Of course it's not fine. It's a game that, in the end, very few people win, and you can rest assured regular people like you and me ain't among that Very Few.
But I have won I've has people try to cancel me and yet I've no see some great purge. I've seen pushes against me and setbacks but most insults don't work to silence me. A few insults sill work but that's only because of people running to authority figures (moderators etc) because they work enough still to bait me into insulting back. The great thing is very few people use those insults and I'm not exactly going round telling people what they are.

Insults to me these days? Water off a ducks back because to be honest once you've been threatened with Arson attacks on your home it kinda puts things in perspective really in terms of the power of insults.
 

Dwarvenhobble

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Yeah, they're just doing it for clicks, attention, Patreon cash, and free death threats!
$1.5 Million
That's what Anita has made that people are aware of.
That's not including her paid speaking services $20K a time or how much she charges for consultation.

So yeh hey for $1.5 Million you can sent me a load of death threats where almost all of them to any-one with a brain are obviously just idiot trolls or people bluffing lol.

About $750,000 is what Brianna Wu has got from backers over the years. That's not including anything that went to cover campaign expenses for use of Giant Space Kat resources (The company Brianna Wu owns)
 

Cicada 5

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This isnt even a fraction of the badass women that exist in fiction. The narrative of women always being just prizes is just incredibly false.

But the thing is, no matter how many examples of cool strong girls you showcase, it never counts because there are examples of the opposite. Female power fantasy is ok, male power fantasy is not because feminism says men dont deserve fantasy due to them having all the power irl.

So it is an argument that has no basis in reality and is an argument that cant be won because no amount of evidence will ever convince a feminist to say, "Oh shit. There are a ton of badass girls, okay nevermind i stand corrected."
Let's assume any of this is true.

Why get up in arms about the existence of characters like Captain Marvel or Rey? If media has so many badass women, I think it would make more sense for those who dislike them to just shrug with indifference and move on to something they didn't like.

But that isn't what happened. We had hate campaigns, calls for boycotts, lies about how the movies were really financial failures and the studios were faking the box office results, video essays about how this was the death of cinema as we know it and in the case of Star Wars, pirating and trying to sell a version of the movie that removed the women characters.
 
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Cicada 5

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This especially was weird. None of the female characters in Ghost were traditionally attractive, looking more like one would look when living in squalor in medieval times. Yet I've had someone in a thread right here post a picture complaining that the breast size of a TLoU2 character was slightly smaller than the face model's.

But then Ghost had you playing as a manly hero guy while TLoU2 not only had you play as a lesbian but also a butch looking girl as well, so not even having supermodels in the game on top of that was too much for those poor souls to handle I guess. I'm not even kidding, that's very likely the reason.
The whining about character's breast size being smaller than the model's might just be the most laughable aspect of it. I could understand it if the model had been forced to get a breast reduction by the studio but that wasn't what happened at all.
 

Cicada 5

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Except it actually was kinda Erased because for quite a while the claim was being pushed even the original MK game costumes were unrealistic looks for women to fight in.
It wasn't the original costumes that people had an issue with. It was the ones from MK9 and to a lesser extent, the PS2 era costumes. That was the image Netherealm studios was trying to get away from.


Eventually after a lot of fan pressure and a lower than hoped for sales they put the original MK costumes in the game as unlockable but initially you can look at characters like Scarlet etc and how much more they were covered up.
MK 11 was the highest-grossing game in the month it was released and even beat out Kingdom Hearts 3. It stayed the highest-grossing game for at least two more months and its sales are almost double the amount of previous entries. The notion that they needed the classic costumes because it was a financial failure is easily disproved nonsense.

uglified is probably not the right term I'd say toned down from what they were but the funny thing being it's never been realistic. The argument was basically "Well this is what real women who fight would look like not like the Barbie dolls of this game" with pushing for a look more in line with "The average woman" But apparently that doesn't apply to the male characters too so it almost sticks out more when you have


As kind of the look of the some of the male cast.
Most of the male cast wasn't dressed like this and the average woman doesn't look like the MK 11 either. And again, almost every woman was wearing high heels and figure-hugging outfits with two of them using moves in which they hit you with their asses. To say nothing of Sindel's intro dialogues being 49% sexual innuendos. The biggest hits were Sonya and Cassie who are soldiers and shouldn't be running around with the boobs out anyway and Sheeva who is supposed to be a monster.

And this isn't even getting into the fact that Mortal Kombat isn't Dead or Alive which built its identity around sexy women.
 
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Cicada 5

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Of course, it's totally different when the Boys does it...
Yeah, because they aren't doing what you say they are doing.

And it doesn't add more diversity anyway, since the Homelander was bisexual in the comics.
Is there a rule you can't have more than one bisexual character at a time?
 
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Cicada 5

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*Point to Liana K and many other women*

You don't want people to speak for them, I don't have to. I can just point out Liana K and many other women have made videos critical of Anita.
I can point out Comic Book Girl 19


Who publicly said how she stopped buying Marvel due to what she perceived as forced diversity and tokenism at the expense of good stories

I don't have to speak for them, just point out what they have said.

So no this argument of claiming to speak for most women? Nah Anita and Co and that lot also don't speak for most women.




It's a Trope because it works and has emotional weight and depth to it and saves having to spend however long explaining stuff. I mean we don't have to explain to cinema audiences that the things on the screen aren't going to rush out of the screen and kill them, that's technically a trope that said thing is understood. Saving a loved one / princess / Damsel is an easy trope to do in games where they are more about gameplay. There's little to explain, the character loves some-one they've been taken away against their will so go save them.

It's funny to suggest the Trope itself is the issue and needs to be removed as some great cosmic balancing of the scales or something. Would you not fight for the one you love to save them?

No-one may have put me in charge. But also no-one in charge at present as power to decide what or where I spend my money. So lets see how long the money lasts. I mean we saw what happened with Sunset and Tale of Tales.


Again easy trope to do with little story explanation needed.

As for the Trope being dead.

The Evil Within 2
Days Gone
Technically Nier
Resident Evil Village
Resident Evil 7
Part of the Latest Devil May Cry

To name but a few that would count lol
So why does it have to be a woman? You say that people can relate to fighting to save a loved one so why not more games about a guy trying to save his father, brother, uncle, male friend etc? Hell, look how much backlash occurs when the genders are flipped and its the woman who has to save the man. Expect the words cuck, simp and eunuch to be tossed around despite those words not even making any sense in context.
 
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Casual Shinji

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The whining about character's breast size being smaller than the model's might just be the most laughable aspect of it. I could understand it if the model had been forced to get a breast reduction by the studio but that wasn't what happened at all.
Also, it was a face model, they just scanned in her face not her entire body. So throwing out the accusation that 'look they made her physically different than the model', well duh. But then this whole stupid non-issue was predicated on Druckmann purposefully making characters look a certain way, these people apparently not realizing that as the creative director he has the final say on character designs among pretty much everything else that appears in the game. Just like how the creative director of Ghost of Tsushima had the final say in making nearly all the women (and men) look like poor peasants.
 

CriticalGaming

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Why get up in arms about the existence of characters like Captain Marvel or Rey?
Because they aren't good characters. It isn't THAT they are women, it's that they are shitty main characters.

If media has so many badass women, I think it would make more sense for those who dislike them to just shrug with indifference and move on to something they didn't like.

Admittedly Marvel and Rey are both the result of rabid pre-existing fanbases mad that these characters were fucking terrible. Not that they were women. But the media latched on to any sort of anti-woman bullshit angry nerds might have said on the internet. Because it is easier to blame sexist fans than it is to blame yourself for creating a shitty character in a shitty story.

Though again in Marvel's case the ire was more towards Bree Larson's out of character behavior more than the move itself being bad.

You'll notice that Jen Irso, from Rogue One didn't have the same problem as Rey. (At least that i could find) Because she was a good character in a good story and in an overall good movie.

So why does it have to be a woman? You say that people can relate to fighting to save a loved one so why not more games about a guy trying to save his father, brother, uncle, male friend etc? Hell, look how much backlash occurs when the genders are flipped and its the woman who has to save the man. Expect the words cuck, simp and eunuch to be tossed around despite those words not even making any sense in context.
People in general are hardwired to protect women, much in the same way people will protect children. Are you saying the idea of women and children first off the Titanic was just rooted in patriarchal sexism? All those men staying behind to ensure their kids and wives lived is all so that men can continue to rule and dominate women? In what way does dying secure your rulership if that is the case.

Also it isn't always women. Usually it is a women when the main character is a man because it's usually a woman as a love interest. However one must merely point to any female led property to see that the trope is more rooted in simply heterosexual relationships, which is because the mass audience is more likely to be straight than LBGT. It's simple aspects of the entertainment business.

For examples of women "saving" the man I would point too:

Underworld
Resident Evil
Tomb Raider
Terminator
Final Fantasy
Halloween

The list goes on and on and on and on. All people have to do it look.
 
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Avnger

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For examples of women "saving" the man I would point too:

Underworld
Resident Evil
Tomb Raider
Terminator
Final Fantasy
Halloween
  • Underworld is a Romeo and Juliet retelling where a vampire falls in love with a lycan. The plot is not "woman saves man."
  • Resident Evil's plot is based around the investigation then escape from an Umbrella lab. The plot is not "woman saves man."
  • Tomb Raider's plot is based around an heiress tomb raiding. The plot is not "woman saves man."
  • Terminator's plot is based around the titular terminator trying to kill the female lead while she is being protected by the male lead. The plot is not "woman saves man."
  • Final Fantasy's plot (guessing at The Spirits Within as the one you meant?) is based around the female scientist lead having alien dna and using it to stop the apocolypse. The plot is not "woman saves man."
  • Halloween's plot is Michael Myers killing people, his potential victims trying to run away, and his doctor and the sheriff trying to stop him. The plot is not "woman saves man."
One would think that when creating a list of "examples" of something you claim is so common, you would include even one film that is actually based around a "woman saves man" plot...
 

CriticalGaming

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  • Underworld is a Romeo and Juliet retelling where a vampire falls in love with a lycan. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT for the several times in the overall plot where Selene's sole go is to save Michael
  • Resident Evil's plot is based around the investigation then escape from an Umbrella lab. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT when any number of the female characters save the men from certain death. Ada, Jill, Claire, take your pick.
  • Tomb Raider's plot is based around an heiress tomb raiding. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT when she breaks off her adventure to go save her friends. Or when she goes bezerk to avenge Jonah.
  • Terminator's plot is based around the titular terminator trying to kill the female lead while she is being protected by the male lead. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT the entire Sarah Conner series in which she is saving her son (a twist on the father saving daughter trope) or Dark Fate.
  • Final Fantasy's plot (guessing at The Spirits Within as the one you meant?) is based around the female scientist lead having alien dna and using it to stop the apocolypse. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT tifa saving cloud, yuna saving the world, lightning saving snow and saz, or countless other events throughout the entire series.
  • Halloween's plot is Michael Myers killing people, his potential victims trying to run away, and his doctor and the sheriff trying to stop him. The plot is not "woman saves man." EXCEPT when Jamie Lee Curtis decides to finally (for the 12th time) stop Michael, saving all the other characters who have yet to die by the end.


Your requirements dont make sense because even the man saving women trope doesnt use that as the only plot point. It is exceptionally rare for a story to serve only a single purpose of man saves lady and nothing else. Mario is probably the closest to this in recent memory and some Nintendo games in which there wasnt any story other than very basic "go get em" instructions.

Typically the damsel is taken away by the bad guy, whom the hero was already going to stop anyway. The damsel is a means to raise the stakes of a story and not typically the sole factor of a story's purpose.

And like i said there is usually some play between the characters. Do you know how many times the hero saves the girl only for the bad guy to pop up for a big final money and strikes the hero down only for the "damsel" to appear and take the killing blow as a means of revenge? That shit happens a lot.

The point is there are lots of nuances to these plot rules and is it never as cut and dry as the feminist argument. And like i said before, examples are often cherry picked or used ignoring the context of the entire story. And frankly any trope looks bad when just described in its most basic elements.
 
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Gergar12

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I could literally design a better political science experiment in my sleep.

For example, the researcher could literally have the players download any number of steam hentai games or they could just have you play this.

Instead, they picked street fighter, street fighter. Not even dead or alive 5 or 6.
 
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CriticalGaming

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I could literally design a better political science experiment in my sleep.

For example, the researcher could literally have the players download any number of steam hentai games or they could just have you play this.

Instead, they picked street fighter, street fighter. Not even dead or alive 5 or 6.
Yeah that is the problem when it comes to video game studies. Too often they are done by agencies that have no fucking clue what they are doing or looking at. They have no video game knowledge and therefore dont pick games that would make sense to fit into whatever study they are performing. Not to mention that the potential effect of video games on someone could just as easily be compared to movies and television shows.

So how can you generate any concrete findings when surely someone who plays, (lets use violent games for this example), also would enjoy violent films? Where would the effects of violence appear, and how could you separate the impact of general violence versus violence from films versus violence from a video game.
 

Terminal Blue

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People in general are hardwired to protect women, much in the same way people will protect children.
Not really.

The grain of truth is that people in general tend to feel more empathy towards women than they do towards men, and our visual media reflects that. The faceless bad guys who get blown away in an action movie will typically be men, while horror movies that want you to feel something when a character dies will often use women in that role. That empathetic difference has nothing to do with some "hardwired" desire to protect women, it it has to do with the perceived relationship between gender and emotion in the society we live in.

The dominance of men over women is not rooted in the demonization of women as a class in the same way as other marginalized groups have been demonized. Women have, at various times, been viewed as more refined, more civilized, more beautiful, more lovable, more compassionate, more intuitive, more gentle and more loving than men. Even today, many "traditional" men will happily concede all these qualities.

In the pre-modern past, things were very different, women were viewed as inherently evil and morally weak and the idea of male beauty was more readily accepted, but in Europe at least that mostly disappeared sometime between the 18th and 19th centuries. The foundation of male dominance is not based on the complete negation of all positive qualities of womanhood, it is based on an idea of sex complementarity which ascribes to women superior virtues only in areas which do not actually grant them any possibility of agency. It is normal in our society to love women, it has been for hundreds of years, it is considerably less normal to allow women any kind of control over their own lives.

The reason men do not elicit empathy is because the society we live in understands men as instrumental beings. The kinds of emotions that would elicit an empathetic response are far harder for a man to display appropriately without undermining his perceived instrumentality.

Are you saying the idea of women and children first off the Titanic was just rooted in patriarchal sexism?
Yes, it absolutely was. What else would it be rooted in?

This is a time when the prevailing scientific belief was that women were neurologically or psychologically incapable of reaching adulthood, and thus essentially were children. Men were not expected to stay behind because of some intuitively understood biological imperative, but because the Victorian culture that came up with that rule placed a particular premium on the ability to face death with stoicism and dignity which is something that only men were perceived to be capable of doing. The perceived ability of civilized British men to face death without fear was very literally interpreted as proof of their superiority, not only over women, but over men of weaker and less emotionally reserved people. You're not seeing the "real" social structure of that society any more than you would be if you examined the personal histories of Japanese kamikaze pilots, what you're seeing is a culture with a bizarre and warped attitude to emotion, to dying, and to the value of dying.

If you want to see the real "desire to protect women" in action, consider the fates of women throughout history when encountering armies of "expendable" men during warfare.

All those men staying behind to ensure their kids and wives lived is all so that men can continue to rule and dominate women? In what way does dying secure your rulership if that is the case.
This assumes that perpetuating the individual rulership of men was the objective, when in reality it would be more accurate to say that the objective was to live and die as a man worthy of ruling. Male superiority, and the rightness of male rule, was not a convenient excuse or deception for these people. It was a sincere, deeply held ideological belief that transcended the individual self-interest of those who believed it. You think those men on the titanic are the only people in history to ever die in order to uphold a principle?

Add to this that the vast, vast majority of those men did not individually choose, but rather the choice was made for them by a small group of highly motivated professional sailors well versed in maritime custom. Factor in the enormous impact of social class in determining who survived the sinking of the titanic, and the overall picture starts to suggest something more might be going on than some ancient, primordial desire to protect the womz.
 
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Hawki

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What would be the correct proportion of representation? 50/50?
Probably, but I don't believe in enforcing it.

I work in a field that's 90% female, I'm not about to demand equal representation.

Quick go to the hot take thread for that one, it'll be hilarious. I want to see all the extra details of that one.
Well, to be fair, a lot of CoD arguably is. Even something like Infinite Warfare, I've seen people seriously argue that it's a case of in-universe propaganda, given the blatant black and white morality of the SDF and UNSA. I doubt that was intended as the case, but the argument itself was sound.

At the least, CoD is definitely political, only it's the type of politics that doesn't tend to trigger the "keep politics out of games" crowd.

So, the games can't be art?
Whether a game is art and whether it's political are two different questions.

Clearly not all art is political for instance.

I would maybe say it's not a good idea to base your conclusions about the kind of art that 51% of the global population enjoy on the romance section of a bookstore.

Much like if I based what men enjoy on the sci fi section of a bookstore, I'd conclude men only enjoy shitty video-game tie in novels.
I think it's quite likely that men do account for the majority of VG tie-ins.

Certainly that it's predominantly women who read and write romance is a fact. In fact, as discussed on this very site, around the 1960s, when more women entered publishing and writing, genres diverged even further in terms of authorship.

There's no shortage of fields and interests that, as society has become more equal, have become more gender-specific.

Nonsense, this is propaganda and nothing more.

First of all there is nothing wrong with the damsel trope. It's only a problem for these feminists because it is something to rally against. But despite their problem with it for arbiturary reasons, it is an effective story-telling device and it is hardly the only one used.
I'm not going to go on a crusade against damsels in distress, but I still really dislike it. It's frankly embarassing (to me) that Mario is still relying on it.

I mean, say what you want about Sonic, but at least Amy moved on from damsel in distress back in SA1, whereas Peach is still stuck in the role as of Super Mario Odyssey. Or even going by Nintendo IPs, Zelda stopped being just someone to rescue in LoZ, and she's a much, MUCH better character for it. There's a reason why Spirit Tracks Zelda is my favourite version of the character, and that's because (among other things) she's by Link's side the whole time, and is relevant in both gameplay and story.

As for the Trope being dead.
Resident Evil 7
This is the only game on your list that I played, but I really don't think RE7 counts as an example. The Joe Baker DLC, sure, but the main game? Well, it's the starting premise, sure (Ethan going to find Mia), but I really don't think the game can be boiled down to that. Mia spends an entire act of the game rescuing Ethan after all.

You'll notice that Jen Irso, from Rogue One didn't have the same problem as Rey. (At least that i could find) Because she was a good character in a good story and in an overall good movie.
That I disagree that Jyn is a good character in a good movie aside, what's undeniable is that Rogue One didn't have the audience Force Awakens did, so of course there's going to be less controversy.

I'd also say that any of Rey's Sueness in Force Awakens was offset in Last Jedi.

I don't think Star Wars fans are rabid sexists (see Ashoka for instance), but on the other hand, people did make a Last Jedi cut that specifically cut out the women characters, so, yeah.
 
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Gordon_4

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Last Jedi cut that specifically cut out the women characters, so, yeah.
Christ I’d forgotten that thing existed. What a fucking embarrassment. I mean hate the movie by all means, that’s your prerogative, but if you’re doing edits like that frankly I think you’re giving way too much attention to something you hate to be healthy. And no irony is not a defence.
 
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