Is it bad that videogame characters are sexualised?

Lupine

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endtherapture said:
theSteamSupported said:
In all sexual contexts, there are subjects and objects; subjects act and objects are acted upon. When it comes to sexual contexts in pretty much all fiction, including video games, it is explicitly the norm that men are depicted as subjects and women are depicted as objects. That is what is the actual problem, not that women in video games appear in a specific way, that has more to do with the fact that most vg artists are straight men or supervised by straight men.
Quoted directly from the lovely Ms. Sarkeesian I say?

All I have to say is the subject/object dichotomy as she describes it, is one of the most poorly thought out theories I have ever seen someone enact, a close second to her "The more you think are you unaffacted by something, the more likely it is to affect you".

omega 616 said:
The op said "where it makes sense", which I agree with but it doesn't make sense in most games. Lara Croft has outfits such as cocktail dresses! In the ice caves she is wearing booty shorts!
I'd say this is okay in some games because what is Lara Croft known for back in the 1990s? Her outfits and being a female character in gaming.



Yeah she's wearing shorts, but she's also put a jacket on, and you have to keep at leas one memorable aspect of your character in order for it to be recognisable to people. I don't know if there's an ice level on God of War but if there is I don't expect Kratos to put a top on for that.
I'm gonna be that guy...

It is all about context. You used Kratos as an example here and honestly he's a horrible equivalency to Laura Croft. No one expects Kratos to put on a winter coat, he's a magical demi-god on a murder revenge rampage. Meanwhile I feel like everyone expects Nathan Drake to put on a coat, so it isn't exactly one size fits all in the expectations department. In fact during the only snow level I can think of in Uncharted they make a pretty big deal about Nate starting to freeze to death and fall over because of a combination of the temperatures and the blood loss he's experienced up until that point after the train wreck.

Now I can't in honesty use Uncharted as a valid example, mostly because the Tomb Raider here is its predecessor in a time before certain technological advances gave rise to certain gaming aspects reaching for "realism" but that's okay, I have another example.



The one on the far right, yep fresh out of Tomb Raider 3. I agree with you that you want to keep your character recognizable, but at the same time it makes no sense to do so at the expense of the tone of the game or the details of the character. Tone is kinda everything here. People don't expect Adam West or Golden age Batman to care that there is no air in space, but have modern Batman breathing in space and people are going to be all over it and probably rightly so because the tone doesn't match their expectations.

Laura's tone for the most part is the same as your average Indian Jones movie. Realism (complete with the quotes because action movie realism) is more or less the standard until suddenly it isn't when a supernatural twist shows up. Shorts in snow really doesn't fit and I feel like that is why someone brought it up because it runs outside of the established tone. Well except for the using Laura as eye candy part which honestly while never a massive part of the games, still manages to bleed over into the tone from time to time, but then it feels kinda awkward because Laura is played straight until those rare cheese-cake moments which makes them feel out of place.
 

mecegirl

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endtherapture said:
theSteamSupported said:
In all sexual contexts, there are subjects and objects; subjects act and objects are acted upon. When it comes to sexual contexts in pretty much all fiction, including video games, it is explicitly the norm that men are depicted as subjects and women are depicted as objects. That is what is the actual problem, not that women in video games appear in a specific way, that has more to do with the fact that most vg artists are straight men or supervised by straight men.
Quoted directly from the lovely Ms. Sarkeesian I say?

All I have to say is the subject/object dichotomy as she describes it, is one of the most poorly thought out theories I have ever seen someone enact, a close second to her "The more you think are you unaffacted by something, the more likely it is to affect you".

omega 616 said:
The op said "where it makes sense", which I agree with but it doesn't make sense in most games. Lara Croft has outfits such as cocktail dresses! In the ice caves she is wearing booty shorts!
I'd say this is okay in some games because what is Lara Croft known for back in the 1990s? Her outfits and being a female character in gaming.



Yeah she's wearing shorts, but she's also put a jacket on, and you have to keep at leas one memorable aspect of your character in order for it to be recognisable to people. I don't know if there's an ice level on God of War but if there is I don't expect Kratos to put a top on for that.
You say she put a jacket on like that would be enough to protect her from the cold. Either way, I don't get your recognizable argument. It's an ice level...an ice level( level 11 in the particular game in question) not an entire game. A player would have to be stupid to get to an ice level in a semi realistic game and suddenly not recognize the character just because they put some pants on.
 

DaWaffledude

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It sure as hell gets annoying after a while, especially if the game expects me to take it seriously. Seriously, don't these women ever get cold?
 

AVATAR_RAGE

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Sexualised characters are fine, it is all about context. This is the same in any genre or medium.

My problem tends to be when sexualisation exists for its own sake. You know those two dimensional characters who are just a "hot" body and nothing else.
 

veloper

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DaWaffledude said:
It sure as hell gets annoying after a while, especially if the game expects me to take it seriously. Seriously, don't these women ever get cold?
Lara Croft is almost bullet proof and she can push 8 cubic meter blocks of solid rock, even without leverage. Is it so surprising that she doesn't get cold?
 

GloatingSwine

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The problem is not this. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fM6lxmFGvB8] The problem is when this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MSQcolaSjU] is all there is.


That's actually the argument that everyone misses in the Tropes vs. Women series. People spring to the defence of specific examples like Hitman and ignore the fact that the only reason the examples are all there is to demonstrate that the the issue being discussed is so prevalent in the wider context that it almost is the wider context.

Sexualised portrayal of characters in videogames isn't the problem, the problem is that, specifically in the case of female characters, the ones who aren't sexualised at least a bit stand out as the exceptions.
 

Lychizzle

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<img src=http://i.gyazo.com/c1f096de9b84f265d8d68a795f81b3ec.png>
(Drawn by me don't repost without asking)

Also keep in mind that these characters are not real people. They cannot consciously choose to be sexual- they are designed to be sexy and appeal to the (straight) male gaze. A real life woman should not be scrutinzed for her choice of dress, but when a (often male) game designer makes these decisions for a female character, we must ask if it was done to give her depth of character, or to titilate the (presumed staight male) audience.
 

veloper

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Lychizzle said:
<img src=http://i.gyazo.com/c1f096de9b84f265d8d68a795f81b3ec.png>
(Drawn by me don't repost without asking)

Also keep in mind that these characters are not real people. They cannot consciously choose to be sexual- they are designed to be sexy and appeal to the (straight) male gaze. A real life woman should not be scrutinzed for her choice of dress, but when a (often male) game designer makes these decisions for a female character, we must ask if it was done to give her depth of character, or to titilate the (presumed staight male) audience.
You don't need to ask. It simply IS titillation.

Only it's still not a problem, it's what the fans throw their money at.

I can direct fans of any genre to many excellent games (gameplay) that don't need and don't feature any of this crap, but the budgets tend to be a bit lower, so the games don't look as pretty. It's simply the result of how gamers vote with their wallets and when all's said and done, it was their money.
 

softclocks

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It's wrong when the sexualization prevents the narrative from growing.

I love massive titties and thunderthighs in my videogames, but I hate it when its forced on developers because "it's what sells".

Sexualised characters fit just fine in games where it makes sense for them to be, but I really can't stand it when they try to jam that nonsense into every game. Every woman in medieval action games should be either dressed like Hilde from Soul Calibur or the protagonist in Dark Souls, just like every man shouldn't walk around like Conan the barbarian (unless he happens to be a barbarian).
 

DementedSheep

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Because the way we sexualise women tend to have a focus on useless or outright crippling things and so makes them look retarded especially if they are put next to guys who are far more grounded. If you put the same shit on guy and posed them the same what would think of that guy? would you respect him? would think looks capable or intimidating or would think he looks like a moron? Sure a lot of women do wear high heels and the like but most them still wouldn't be stupid enough to do so anything that is going to be more physical than walking around. If they use sexuality as a weapon? Great they not only look like a whore, they are one. Having tease and spread your legs to get shit done is not a admirable trait. A character never "chooses" to dress a certain way, the developer decide they want to dress them that way and then maybe comes up with an excuse for it. Yes there are already a ton of characters built around their beauty and they are not any any better. A character built around their great beauty is barely a character. Their an ornament and worthy of about the same amount of respect as one.
 

Porygon-2000

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Jul 14, 2010
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I, for one, am all about equal opportunity.

Game developers can put as many buxom women in chainmail bikinis in their games as they like, so long as there is an equal amount of rugged pretty-boys showing off their six-packs as well. Until this equilibrium is reached, I am not satisfied.

(The above facetious comment was provided to you by Porygon-2000. Porygon-2000, for when Poe's law gets you down!)
 

The Lunatic

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Jun 3, 2010
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We live in a society in which you can buy sex dolls. Literally the object of a gender.

If you don't like it, don't buy it, and instead buy games that cater to what you want.

If you really want the game but dislike the sexualised aspect, then send an email in feedback to the developers.

Feedback exists for a reason.
 

QuintonMcLeod

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Well, lets all be honest. Anything and everything can be sexualized. Sexualization all depends on the person. Truth be told, A woman could wear a potato bag and still be sexualized. A woman's facial features, their body shape, how they talk and how they move can all be different aspects of how a person interprets one's sexualization. This isn't really a fair comparison to make. Maddox said it beautifully in his youtube video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CB6TiRJNI-Q
 

Branindain

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slo said:
Um...
It suddenly occured to me, that I actually cannot find those sexualized women that are supposedly everywhere.

I am a PC gamer, I like me some over the top fanservice every once in a while, and I've been actively searching for such games for a couple of times. I mainly use Steam for my gaming, and I don't do MMOs, so they're out.
Sooo... I have 223 games in my library. If i'm really generous there's something remotely sexual in maybe ten of them tops.
Where is all the steaming sexiness that I'm missing?
I mean there's 3500 games on Steam, there must be at least several hundred with some sexualized characters in it.
Where the hay are they?
This.

I agree, in principle, with the people saying that it's only a problem when it's unreasonably pervasive. But it's NOT. Everyone keeps tossing that around as an axiomatic fact of the debate but I don't believe it at all. I think people have been indoctrinated to think it is because EVERY. SINGLE. EXAMPLE of it gets signal boosted and debated to high heaven because it's become the hot topic, but people debating this are still talking about Dragon's Crown, Lara Croft and a couple of others ad nauseam. How many games are released a year? Does Destiny have female eye candy? Watch Dogs? CoD? Shovel Knight? Shadow of Mordor? Alien Isolation? Evolve? Wolfenstein? Hyrule Warriors? I have about 200 games, and my personal collection of sexualised females is the God of War girls, Trish in DMC4, a couple from FF12, and a few characters in ensemble games like Street Fighter & LoL which contain a diverse array of females. Of which, the GoW girls are the only ones who could be described as "objects" in the sense it's being used here. Hardly a pandemic, and that collection covers a lot of older stuff from before this was a thing.
 

endtherapture

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KazuhiraMiller said:
Honestly? I think that if there were more of an effort to get young people to feel good about their bodies without that "THE BEAUTY MAGAZINES ARE EVIL, SETTING A STANDARD YOU WILL NEVER LIVE UP TO" line, if there were more of an effort to get young people to look at their bodies and go, "M'yeah I'm not an 10/10, but I like me." Then this issue with "hyper-sexualization" would be fucking gone.

Rather, the modern rhetoric seems to be to demonize the images of beauty in popular media, from games to movies to even fucking porn(!), and make young people scared of images of beauty, afraid of sexual liberation in the attractive.

I think if we reformed that "body positivity" movement to be about actual body positivity instead of casting shame on the mainstream medias tendency to want to use the evoloutionary enforced idea of beauty to sell their products then the insecurity that seems to get this stuff deemed "problematic" rather than being "advertusing" we'd all be happier.

Oh, and calling Bayonetta a "sexualized character" is only half-right, she was literally designed as a womans self-insert power fantasy.
The thing is with videogame characters is so often they are really physically active characters. They will be traversing ancient ruins, having gun and fist fights, jumping or sprinting around everywhere. That doesn't really give much leeway. Could you imagine Nathan Drake as fat or overweight with the amount of tomb running he does?

I suppose you could make a mage character in an RPG fat, which could do something, or give a Lara Croft esque character stuff like acne or cellulite to be like - hey you can still be badass and hot even with a few spots or some cellulite!, but going full obese or chubby is not really in line with the peak physical condition our mainly warrior human player characters are.