Is it really an issue of gender equality?

[Olikar]

I've gotten a bit long here. The point is, her critique is built around literary criticism - she's critiquing a piece of art and suggesting that perhaps Devs think about what they're writing a little more. She is a critic - nothing more or less.

Moralising over art and calling for censorship makes me think she is less critic, more lunatic.

If she really was a critic and was building her ideas around literary criticism she wouldn't make nonsense alarmist implications (such as implying video game violence leads to the acceptance of domestic abuse) about works of art based on her own societal values. She has no real interest in artistic critique, but only in debasing the nature of art to where the value of a work of art is not of aesthetic quality but it's value to a sociological/political goal as some sort of cheap bastardised tool.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Her judgement of devs is quite irrelevant to whether or not she's using guilt tactics.
Let's say I told you every time you posted a puppy dies. I'm not saying you like to kill puppies but I would be trying to use guilt for you to stop posting. Because if you'd continue posting you'd come off as a prick who doesn't care about the death of puppies. The same holds true with Anita.

No, it does not. For several reasons.

First off, yours is untrue. And not in a "we can argue about effects" kinda way - in a blatantly false kinda way.

Secondly, it is a false comparison. Anita never ever said that these tropes cause domestic violence - she said that they reinforced sexist attitudes connected with domestic violence.

A better version of what you said would be this:

You should stop writing all these posts about murdering puppies. If you keep making jokes about murdering puppies, you might upset someone who has experienced the loss of a murdered puppy.

Which is not a guilt trip - it is entirely true. You might remind someone of their dead dog. However, that is not necessarily not a good reason to risk it - you might have an artistic reason for talking about murdered puppies, or you might want to discuss the pain and suffering caused by a murdered puppy. However, if you're just using this talk of murdered puppies for shock value or because it was the first thing you thought of, then being reminded that people really do get their puppies brutally murdered might cause you to reconsider your words.

She said the DiD trope reinforces sexist attitudes in RL and that tropes like the Euthanized damsel is "dangerously irresponsible".

People keep quoting that as if it wasn't part of a larger sentence. She stated that in the context of rising domestic violence rates. The "Euthanized damsel" trope shows a woman "asking for it" - which is a common phrase in domestic violence cases. The woman literally asks to be harmed. Encouraging the idea that women deserve to be harmed is a bad thing. She used the term "dangerously irresponsible" - which implies someone who is doing something irresponsible that could result in a dangerous result. That is fairly mild language all things considered.

If you disagree that media has any effect on society, then that is another discussion entirely.

Now this wouldn't be so bad if at least there was evidence for what she claims. Unfortunately there isn't. She gave 0 citations and i looked for it on google scholar and I couldn't find any study proving the DiD trope reinforced paternalistic attitudes or the Euthanized damsel made domestic violence more prominent.

Well, considering that Anita made up the term "Euthanized damsel" herself (which she states in her video), of course you wouldn't find any scholarly work on it. The term did not exist prior to her video. A google scholar search for that term is less than useless.

You'd have to look up some actual work on feminist theory, read it, understand it, and apply it. Which is what Anita is doing.

Try searching for something more general, like domestic violence and the media.

 

[wetnap]

Regardless, the issue at hand exists despite semantic arguments: for whatever reason (and there are a lot of them), people want more women in games. Attempting to dispute one makes little difference to the sum of the point.

But the fact of the matter is that the economics don't support the theory. A lot of people want nice cars; but they don't want to pay for them. When the market shifts in favor of this, determined *solely* by the consumers, the industry will automatically shift accordingly.

Sadly I've seen a few good games, with varied characters, fail simply because there was no consumer support for the project. It irks me when people blame the industry for not giving them what they want when they refuse to support the industry in doing so.

What specific games are we referring to here, though? Do we actually know they failed because they had female protagonists?

It's not a matter of them failing because they had a female protagonist but that they don't seem to succeed any more than any other game by having them.

That's a *huge* part of it. You can take like games and do a sales comparison for them. Say for example, God of War & Heavenly Sword. Even just comparing the 1st God of War, and it beat Heavenly Sword by 2.35m copies.

But the question is still a valid on; did they fail *because* they had female protagonists? And honestly I don't know if that was the sole reason, or mere one contributing factor. But I will say that if you want to get funding for a game you have two options; publishers or crowd funding. Publishers want proof of concept for investment, and rarely take chances. Crowd funding is a long hot at best, and you begin to see just how cheap supporters really are.

The point though is that the raw data doesn't indicate a economic drive for the change, merely a social one. When more people actually throw money at the issue we might see some headway.

Yep money speaks the truth, talk is always cheap. The same womens groups and advocates were sure women would support the professional womens basketball league, but when time came to show us the money...didn't happen.

The market doesn't lie, and doesn't leave money unmade. I'm sure many guys find twilight "gross" but it got made, and it made bank. People can not like it as much as they want to, but the market proves demand. When people just don't seem to want to test their theory for a supposedly lucrative unserved market, one just has to question their assumptions by default.

 

[Gronk]

Ok, I'm going to ignore the little demon sitting on my shoulder saying "Nooo, don't do it!" and post here. Now i haven't read all the posts here, so maybe someone else already said this:

I would love to see a video game story written by a female, not too coloured by genre clichés. What kind of characters would she present? What would their relationships look like? What would the actual gameplay look like? Wouldn't that be exciting?

You do know that the scriptwriter for the new Lara Croft was Rihanna Pratchett? And if you want to know more about her thoughts on writing females, i would recommend this interview.

http://www.killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/tomb-raider-writer-rhianna-pratchett-creating-men-boobs-and-writing-vulnerable-lara-croft/

I'm sorry, but I don't know how to respond to this. Was this a critique of my post or an agreement? I read the article several times, but I honestly don't know what you want to say with it. Please explain (I am not sarcastic).

 

[broca]

Ok, I'm going to ignore the little demon sitting on my shoulder saying "Nooo, don't do it!" and post here. Now i haven't read all the posts here, so maybe someone else already said this:

I would love to see a video game story written by a female, not too coloured by genre clichés. What kind of characters would she present? What would their relationships look like? What would the actual gameplay look like? Wouldn't that be exciting?

You do know that the scriptwriter for the new Lara Croft was Rihanna Pratchett? And if you want to know more about her thoughts on writing females, i would recommend this interview.

http://www.killscreendaily.com/articles/interviews/tomb-raider-writer-rhianna-pratchett-creating-men-boobs-and-writing-vulnerable-lara-croft/

I'm sorry, but I don't know how to respond to this. Was this a critique of my post or an agreement? I read the article several times, but I honestly don't know what you want to say with it. Please explain (I am not sarcastic).

Neither critique nor agreement. I just thought of the interview when reading the first part of your comment, thinking that it might interest you, as it deals with two of your questions (What kind of characters would a female writer present? What would their relationships look like?).

 

[briankoontz]

While 80% of the mainstream games industry has killing as a primary form of gameplay (including games featured civilized killing like Caesar and Civilization), 50% of Newgrounds games (few of which make any money) have killing as a primary form of gameplay. The mainstream games industry greatly influences the rest of the industry, including indies.

Saying violence is the primary form of gameplay in games like Civ or Caesar is an exaggeration. In both games the non-violent game mechanics are much more prominent. Total War would for instance be an example of a civ game with killing as a primary game feature.

"A" primary form of gameplay, not the, like in Diablo 3 where inventory management is a primary form of gameplay, along with hack 'n slash.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? If 80% of books featured killing as the primary plot device, studies would show that readers would be into killing in books. How could we expect the studies to show otherwise?

The industry itself is an influential force. By making games about killing, it encourages players to favor games about killing over other games. If 80% of books were about killing, it would encourage readers to enjoy books about killing which they could call "normal books" over any other type of book which they would dismiss as "weird books".

But think about it, what makes more sense: that devs made violent VG's because that's where the money is at or that that is where the money is at because devs made violent VG's?

Both make sense. It's a two-way feedback loop. For example, id software, makers of Doom, emerged before there was a market for fast, frenetic games with lots of graphic killing. They made Doom because it was the game THEY thought was fun, the game they themselves wanted to play, not because they expected a huge market for it, and they wouldn't have had even the expectations they did if they hadn't made the similar Wolfenstein 3D previously.

Think about it. Let's say you never watch a violent film, not on overt principle but just because they don't interest you. But now your favorite director for the first time makes a film where the protagonist is a mass murderer, and the movie is about him carrying out those murders. He keeps making those types of films, abandoning his earlier themes.

Why wouldn't you watch his newer movies? You still enjoy the director and you lack any overt principle which hinders you from watching hyper-violent movies. So you would be transformed from a viewer of non-violent movies to a viewer of violent movies, all due to the change in the preferences and output of the favored artist.

Other upcoming artists are influenced by existing artists, so if 80% of movies featured the protagonist killing living things as a primary plot device, they would be influenced in that direction, and viewers would likewise go in that direction, unless there was some conscious movement among artists, consumers, and/or critics to move in another direction.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying games (or books) about killing. Dark Souls is great. Doom is great. Deus Ex is great. Any number of other games featuring killing as a primary form of gameplay are great. The problem is that when the industry is super-dominated by killing games it ensures that creativity and innovation are severely hindered, that game designers are put in a box from which they can't escape prior to ever designing their game, and to return to the original purpose of this thread that many women and many men who wish to experience a variety of gameplay have a scant selection of options, especially in the mainstream industry, from which to choose.

Games featuring killing have so dominated gaming culture for so many years that it's not even possible to have a serious unbiased discussion about them - gamers treat such criticism as if it's criticizing gaming itself.

But what's wrong with violence dominating the industry?

That's a 200-page book in itself, but I'll try to condense it into a mere several paragraphs.

The countercultural drug movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose primary purpose was to alter one's consciousness so as to gain enlightenment, then to use that enlightenment upon "returning from the trip" to help save a dying world, was recognized even at the time as being damaging to one's overall health. When this effort officially failed with the self-destruction of Timothy Leary, a new "consciousness altering" form was taken - that of video games, the drug roots of which can be seen in the frequent pot smoking of early Atari developers (and the even-to-this-day stereotype of gamers as "stoned gamers"), the "mushroom kingdom" of Mario, the "alternate reality" ideological conception of early developers, and the like. Operating in parallel and with frequent crossover to early gamer culture were the hackers, who were attempting to subvert the state by being smarter and more technical.

Video games were the "clean" version of drugs, minus the psycho-chemical alterations. When one gamed one went on a "trip to an alternate reality", which one would then learn from, and bring back knowledge to the "real world" to apply and help save the world. This conception is clearly detailed in early versions of Ultima, where the player is literally (within the game) transported from the "real world" to the alternate reality as well as through Garriott's focus on player behavior in the gameworld.

But something terrible happened along the way. The bipolar world, which enforced a certain degree of good behavior on the world's powerful actors, became at least militarily a unipolar world. Those powerful actors who were pleased about the new unipolar world gained great confidence, spawning both the Neoconservative movement and providing the basis for Francis Fukuyama's infamous book "The End of History".

For countercultural gamers hoping to subvert the primary global culture, this was a disaster, leading to a deepening of the existing culture of despair as well as giving birth to gaming's post-unipolar seminal moment: the video game Doom (another word for deep despair).

This despair, in turn, is the underlying reason why gaming is so substantially about murder, as opposed to books which have a completely different cultural basis, or television which (as a whole) was never countercultural.

There are some dark possibilities for a world deep in despair, just as there were some dark possibilities in the 1930s in Germany, what would then become Nazi Germany. The despair is far deeper now, since the problems in Germany had nothing to do with nuclear terror or ecological collapse, merely terrible economic oppression.

Fascist movements around the world are growing, from the Zaitokukai in Japan, the Zionists in Israel, the Golden Dawn party in Greece, and likewise - despair breeds desperation which breeds insular violence.

And in this world we live in we then examine the content of gaming, which typically features a cleansing process - the protagonist leads a civilization to conquer all others, for example, as in Civilization V, or a superpowered hero murders thousands of monsters in the name of "saving the civilized world". This compares very closely to a certain "superpowered" fascist leader in 1930s Germany who went about "killing the monsters" in order to "save the civilized world", as well as providing a kind of template for what the Zaitokukai, the Zionists, and the Golden Dawn, among others, hope to achieve.

Given that fascism in the world is growing at a substantial rate, it ought to give non-fascist gamers a long pause to consider the nature of the games they are playing. Since fascism is a cleansing process to save the world, and gaming is (largely) a cleansing process to save the world, why do non-fascist gamers enjoy games featuring fascist cleansing?

 

[Nuxxy]

Godwin, is that you?

How did this thread go from "gender equality" to "game violence is fascist"?

 

[generals3]

Godwin, is that you?

How did this thread go from "gender equality" to "game violence is fascist"?

That's the beauty of the internet. It's like following a crappy GPS, you never know where you'll end up.

"A" primary form of gameplay, not the, like in Diablo 3 where inventory management is a primary form of gameplay, along with hack 'n slash.

Ah ok, my apologies for the misunderstanding.

Both make sense. It's a two-way feedback loop. For example, id software, makers of Doom, emerged before there was a market for fast, frenetic games with lots of graphic killing. They made Doom because it was the game THEY thought was fun, the game they themselves wanted to play, not because they expected a huge market for it, and they wouldn't have had even the expectations they did if they hadn't made the similar Wolfenstein 3D previously.

Think about it. Let's say you never watch a violent film, not on overt principle but just because they don't interest you. But now your favorite director for the first time makes a film where the protagonist is a mass murderer, and the movie is about him carrying out those murders. He keeps making those types of films, abandoning his earlier themes.

Why wouldn't you watch his newer movies? You still enjoy the director and you lack any overt principle which hinders you from watching hyper-violent movies. So you would be transformed from a viewer of non-violent movies to a viewer of violent movies, all due to the change in the preferences and output of the favored artist.

Other upcoming artists are influenced by existing artists, so if 80% of movies featured the protagonist killing living things as a primary plot device, they would be influenced in that direction, and viewers would likewise go in that direction, unless there was some conscious movement among artists, consumers, and/or critics to move in another direction.

Your reply here doesn't really say what you initially meant. All you basically said was "People making violent games made consumers realize they liked violent videogames". You can't really make someone like something just by making it. Relic could make The Sims 5000 but despite being devs I like I still wouldn't play that game because I don't like The Sims. To take your director example, you basically said "A director you know makes violent films, you don't mind violence, will you watch it?". Well sure if I don't mind violence why not? But as you can see what happened here is nothing more than the director tapping on an untapped market. Obviously I was already a potential consumer of violent films, all he did is make something i'd watch. That's very different from saying "people like violent VG's because that's all there is". The latter implies that the supply side made the demand side like what they offered while your example simply says: "If there is demand for something and it is supplied it will be bought". (Whether the demand is active or passive (as in, i like it but don't know it yet because i've never seen it) is relatively irrelevant)

Video games were the "clean" version of drugs, minus the psycho-chemical alterations. When one gamed one went on a "trip to an alternate reality", which one would then learn from, and bring back knowledge to the "real world" to apply and help save the world. This conception is clearly detailed in early versions of Ultima, where the player is literally (within the game) transported from the "real world" to the alternate reality as well as through Garriott's focus on player behavior in the gameworld.

I'm sorry but that seems far fetched. For the simple reason most early age games to teach anything. I'm not sure what can gather from the mario games but I doubt it will be very enlightening.

But something terrible happened along the way. The bipolar world, which enforced a certain degree of good behavior on the world's powerful actors, became at least militarily a unipolar world. Those powerful actors who were pleased about the new unipolar world gained great confidence, spawning both the Neoconservative movement and providing the basis for Francis Fukuyama's infamous book "The End of History".

For countercultural gamers hoping to subvert the primary global culture, this was a disaster, leading to a deepening of the existing culture of despair as well as giving birth to gaming's post-unipolar seminal moment: the video game Doom (another word for deep despair).

I think you're looking way too much into it.

This despair, in turn, is the underlying reason why gaming is so substantially about murder, as opposed to books which have a completely different cultural basis, or television which (as a whole) was never countercultural.

Is it really?

There are some dark possibilities for a world deep in despair, just as there were some dark possibilities in the 1930s in Germany, what would then become Nazi Germany. The despair is far deeper now, since the problems in Germany had nothing to do with nuclear terror or ecological collapse, merely terrible economic oppression.

Fascist movements around the world are growing, from the Zaitokukai in Japan, the Zionists in Israel, the Golden Dawn party in Greece, and likewise - despair breeds desperation which breeds insular violence.

Not sure how we went from videogames to Hitler...

And in this world we live in we then examine the content of gaming, which typically features a cleansing process - the protagonist leads a civilization to conquer all others, for example, as in Civilization V, or a superpowered hero murders thousands of monsters in the name of "saving the civilized world". This compares very closely to a certain "superpowered" fascist leader in 1930s Germany who went about "killing the monsters" in order to "save the civilized world", as well as providing a kind of template for what the Zaitokukai, the Zionists, and the Golden Dawn, among others, hope to achieve.

Given that fascism in the world is growing at a substantial rate, it ought to give non-fascist gamers a long pause to consider the nature of the games they are playing. Since fascism is a cleansing process to save the world, and gaming is (largely) a cleansing process to save the world, why do non-fascist gamers enjoy games featuring fascist cleansing?

Well firstly i don't think focusing on the conquest aspect of Civ V is fair... Mainly since it is merely one of the many victory methods possible. And the super heroes usually do kill actual monsters (either zombies, aliens, just monsters or very very bad guys. Not just innocent people who the protagonist think are monsters like Hitler and his cleansing). And you're also conflating Fascism with Nazism here. Mussolini for instance put less emphasis on the cleansing aspect and merely ended up following Hitler's footsteps when he realized Hitler was far stronger than him and it would be better to be on the same page (before that he would even pride himself he wasn't persecuting the jews like Hitler). But anywho, all in all I think you're just looking for things which aren't there.

 

[briankoontz]

And in this world we live in we then examine the content of gaming, which typically features a cleansing process - the protagonist leads a civilization to conquer all others, for example, as in Civilization V, or a superpowered hero murders thousands of monsters in the name of "saving the civilized world". This compares very closely to a certain "superpowered" fascist leader in 1930s Germany who went about "killing the monsters" in order to "save the civilized world", as well as providing a kind of template for what the Zaitokukai, the Zionists, and the Golden Dawn, among others, hope to achieve.

Given that fascism in the world is growing at a substantial rate, it ought to give non-fascist gamers a long pause to consider the nature of the games they are playing. Since fascism is a cleansing process to save the world, and gaming is (largely) a cleansing process to save the world, why do non-fascist gamers enjoy games featuring fascist cleansing?

Well firstly i don't think focusing on the conquest aspect of Civ V is fair... Mainly since it is merely one of the many victory methods possible. And the super heroes usually do kill actual monsters (either zombies, aliens, just monsters or very very bad guys. Not just innocent people who the protagonist think are monsters like Hitler and his cleansing). And you're also conflating Fascism with Nazism here. Mussolini for instance put less emphasis on the cleansing aspect and merely ended up following Hitler's footsteps when he realized Hitler was far stronger than him and it would be better to be on the same page (before that he would even pride himself he wasn't persecuting the jews like Hitler). But anywho, all in all I think you're just looking for things which aren't there.

All of the victory methods in Civ 5 (domination, science, cultural, diplomatic, points) are conquest, since all of those things are interrelated. Conquest through means other than domination is largely what Sun Tzu's The Art of War is about. Or the Carl von Clausewitz phrase "War is the continuation of politics by other means". When the nerd sneers at the jock bullying him in high school his sneer can be translated as "I'm going to go into a tech field and make $100,000 a year while you'll be at best a struggling salesman". Conquest by other means.

Your phrase "actual monsters" is curious since there are no "actual monsters" in the real world. Even people who produce terrible results (CEOs, heads of state, other types of serial killers) are not monsters in any strict sense of the word. Many hierarchical structures (corporations, warlord tribes, gangs) require that their leaders be ruthless, terrible people, so the structure itself is blamed for empowering what would in a world without such structures be productive citizens. Without the Nazi party structure Hitler would just have been a desperate in deep despair Austrian/German.

Therefore, it makes sense to ask the question of what the "bad guys" in video games actually translate to in the real world, or if they have no translation whatsoever then why are we wasting our time murdering things with zero substance?

Why not just make all game enemies pink snazzlefrazzs from the 5th dimension, or why have enemies in games in the first place? The fact that many game enemies are "ugly monsters" (contrasting with the attractive heroes) and most of the rest "enemy soldiers" has some actual significance, a real world translation. So let's determine that real world translation rather than wish it away on the grounds that the answer might not be to our liking.

Films justify their existence by being art - by providing us with information, a new point of view, from which we learn about the real world. Films add to the learning we get from other means. Games often justify their existence by being "fun", which begs the question of the precise nature of the fun. Why is it fun to cleanse the game world of monsters, thus saving the civilized world from being overrun? Why is it fun to murder thousands (or in Civ 5, often millions) of enemy soldiers in order for one's own set of soldiers and associated civilians to dominate?

Ask some simple questions - in games with monsters, how often are these monsters uglier than the heroes? In games with soldiers, how often are the enemy soldiers portrayed as "evil" and the allied soldiers "noble"?

No artistic medium in history has been less examined than video games, with the excuse given that video games are inherently good, beyond reproach, "just a game", all in the name of fun, so just shut the fuck up and play.

Turning off one's brain and not questioning reality was what the Nazis asked for and what the German populace agreed to. We should not follow in those footsteps.

 

[wetnap]

Anyways back to answering op, what always seems to be failed to mention in such discussions.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
http://www.cis.org/more-us-stem-grads-than-jobs
We need more they say...... yea whoops.

 

[Nuxxy]

Anyways back to answering op, what always seems to be failed to mention in such discussions.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
http://www.cis.org/more-us-stem-grads-than-jobs
We need more they say...... yea whoops.

That's not really on topic according to the original post, but I know that feeling. It's the same here in South Africa. Dire reports and predictions of shortages of qualified Science and Technology graduates, but knowing many who are without work. And our unemployment rate is almost 25%.

Regarding Civ 5 and the like, I don't know where the fascism thing comes from. War games are a natural evolution from chess, checkers, go and tic-tac-toe. Basic principles of strategy with ever prettier coverings, not some latent wish to enact ethnic cleansing.

 

[wetnap]

Anyways back to answering op, what always seems to be failed to mention in such discussions.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/education/the-stem-crisis-is-a-myth
http://www.cis.org/more-us-stem-grads-than-jobs
We need more they say...... yea whoops.

That's not really on topic according to the original post, but I know that feeling. It's the same here in South Africa. Dire reports and predictions of shortages of qualified Science and Technology graduates, but knowing many who are without work. And our unemployment rate is almost 25%.

Regarding Civ 5 and the like, I don't know where the fascism thing comes from. War games are a natural evolution from chess, checkers, go and tic-tac-toe. Basic principles of strategy with ever prettier coverings, not some latent wish to enact ethnic cleansing.

It relates in that in such discussions, female developers are always brought up, and why so few and why not push more in that direction in colleges, but the very basic question of whether there are any jobs for the graduates just isn't asked. As he said, if you can't acknowledge a problem you can't fix it, well they can't even acknowledge the actual conditions of the industry which they are so concerned about. Jim like many asks why not, while purposely ignoring the answers they just can't consider.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

If you want the perfect example as to how insulting the East can be towards women take a look at Berserk. A great anime let down by some incredibly fucked up ideas. I swear there was an entire episode devoted to calling women weak and incapable of battle because they might have a period.

Ignoring the fact that said anime was set in medieval times and said female character (who, admittedly, was on her period at the time, which led to her defeat) was the second or third strongest mercenary in her squad, and the character who spoke said sexist lines was an obnoxious villain later killed by said woman when she recovered.

Of course, after a certain event (in the manga), she did basically become a classic Woman in Refrigerator. I will say that Miura tends to quite liberally use the ?rape as drama? trope for multiple female characters, named or not, in Berserk, but he still handles it a helluva lot more maturely than the countless other animes, video games and TV shows that employ it poorly. As far as I can recall, there was only one instance where a rape scene sexualised the female victim?but that, as well as other scenes like that, were still meant to be horrifying.

Anyway, I don?t know what this ?East vs. West? bullshit is about. Despite being two distinctly different cultures with distinctly different attitudes towards women and their representations in media entertainment, both have their problems. You want to complain about Casca in Berserk? How about the Silk Spectres in Watchmen, or, for that matter, the majority of super-heroines (or, should I say, super-strippers) in comic books? The oh-so-uniquely ?housewife? characters in The Simpsons and Family Guy? What would you rather have: schoolgirls oblivious to how much their panties are showing, or pretty blonde valley girls without a brain cell in their head?

Oh, and all of them are white, or at least, light-skinned? If they are black (or Hispanic), they?re either involved in the criminal fraternity, show up to make some funny Ebonic one-liners, or exist to get killed off first. If they?re distinctly Oriental, they must be some insanely talented martial artist. If they?re Muslim or Russian, they must be an obviously bad terrorist. If they?re gay?well, heck, since sexuality isn?t as obviously something to be stereotyped, that could be part of the reason why there are probably more black people in video games than they are gay people.

But as long as we keep criticising the symptoms with no action, we?re just near-willingly blinding ourselves from the real disease. And it?s big. Anyway, people are still buying the games. The game everyone?s talking about now is Grand Theft Auto V ? something the likes of Anita Sarkessian would probably hate for having three protagonists, not one of them male, as decidedly masculine gangsters with the ability to go into strip clubs and shoot strippers (no, I haven?t played GTA V; I?m just going by previous games, really; nonetheless, it?s still a sequel, and sequels sell well, just like sex, even if you?re not aware how much your primal instincts influence your consumerist actions).

But honestly, I don?t give a shit about any of it anymore. I?ll continue playing the games I want to play, which are mainly 90s-to-early-00s-era platformers with anthropomorphic animals as the protagonists.

The countercultural drug movement of the 1960s and 1970s, whose primary purpose was to alter one's consciousness so as to gain enlightenment, then to use that enlightenment upon "returning from the trip" to help save a dying world, was recognized even at the time as being damaging to one's overall health. When this effort officially failed with the self-destruction of Timothy Leary, a new "consciousness altering" form was taken - that of video games, the drug roots of which can be seen in the frequent pot smoking of early Atari developers (and the even-to-this-day stereotype of gamers as "stoned gamers"), the "mushroom kingdom" of Mario, the "alternate reality" ideological conception of early developers, and the like. Operating in parallel and with frequent crossover to early gamer culture were the hackers, who were attempting to subvert the state by being smarter and more technical.

Video games were the "clean" version of drugs, minus the psycho-chemical alterations. When one gamed one went on a "trip to an alternate reality", which one would then learn from, and bring back knowledge to the "real world" to apply and help save the world. This conception is clearly detailed in early versions of Ultima, where the player is literally (within the game) transported from the "real world" to the alternate reality as well as through Garriott's focus on player behavior in the gameworld.

But something terrible happened along the way. The bipolar world, which enforced a certain degree of good behavior on the world's powerful actors, became at least militarily a unipolar world. Those powerful actors who were pleased about the new unipolar world gained great confidence, spawning both the Neoconservative movement and providing the basis for Francis Fukuyama's infamous book "The End of History".

For countercultural gamers hoping to subvert the primary global culture, this was a disaster, leading to a deepening of the existing culture of despair as well as giving birth to gaming's post-unipolar seminal moment: the video game Doom (another word for deep despair).

This despair, in turn, is the underlying reason why gaming is so substantially about murder, as opposed to books which have a completely different cultural basis, or television which (as a whole) was never countercultural.

There are some dark possibilities for a world deep in despair, just as there were some dark possibilities in the 1930s in Germany, what would then become Nazi Germany. The despair is far deeper now, since the problems in Germany had nothing to do with nuclear terror or ecological collapse, merely terrible economic oppression.

Fascist movements around the world are growing, from the Zaitokukai in Japan, the Zionists in Israel, the Golden Dawn party in Greece, and likewise - despair breeds desperation which breeds insular violence.

And in this world we live in we then examine the content of gaming, which typically features a cleansing process - the protagonist leads a civilization to conquer all others, for example, as in Civilization V, or a superpowered hero murders thousands of monsters in the name of "saving the civilized world". This compares very closely to a certain "superpowered" fascist leader in 1930s Germany who went about "killing the monsters" in order to "save the civilized world", as well as providing a kind of template for what the Zaitokukai, the Zionists, and the Golden Dawn, among others, hope to achieve.

Given that fascism in the world is growing at a substantial rate, it ought to give non-fascist gamers a long pause to consider the nature of the games they are playing. Since fascism is a cleansing process to save the world, and gaming is (largely) a cleansing process to save the world, why do non-fascist gamers enjoy games featuring fascist cleansing?

No offence, but this sounds like psychobabble in its most concentrated people. You know the whole "Mario's Mushroom Kingdom is to do with drugs" thing was just a joke, right? But hey, at least you?re not quite as bad as Frederick Wertham for reading a homosexual subtext into the stories of Batman and Wonder Woman, although ?video games = fascism? is one of the more interesting theories I?ve heard in years.

People play games to have fun. You don?t have to write some pretentious, ?in-depth? essay on it, for goodness sake.