R0guy said:
Netrigan said:
I think that just goes to illustrate what's inside your head, not what any of the saner voices are putting forth.
Ahem, no. Those examples I've given are a non-exhaustive list of "sexism" scandals either put forth by Ms Sarkeesian or the gaming press. So, nope.
You do realize most of the "controversies" in any fandom are just a handful of voices sounding off. Only on very rare occasions when fandom rises up (such as the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy) does anyone expect anyone to really do anything about it. If someone makes a compelling argument why something should change, then writers and devs tend to stand up and take notice. Usually it's just noise.
Netrigan said:
One of the things she harps on is the lazy writing which keeps throwing out the same handful of scenarios over and over and over and over and over again.
Again, nope. She only harps on one very specific scenario, being the "damsel in distress". Saving the kingdom/world/galaxy "trope" is unsurprisingly never mentioned, because she wants to make the case that super mario contributes to sexism, just like Jack Thompson said that call of duty contributes to school shootings.
I must have imagined all those bits where she plays the same line of dialogue from a dozen different games and chastises them for lazy writing. If you're a creator you can't expect to keep putting the exact same thing out there forever and expect people not to get bored and move on. While there's still a bit of damseling in games, less and less it's the primary focus of the plot.[/quote]
Netrigan said:
Gamers have largely been bored with Mario for a couple of console generations now and I don't think I've seen anyone put forth the idea that we need more Damsel In Distress games because the concept is just so damn great.
*Sigh* nope.
1) In the last couple of generations (just WII and WII U) Nintendo has sold almost 50 million copies of Mario games. Thats excluding DS, 3DS and spin-offs like Mario Kart. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_(series)
2) I don't recall anyone wanting more "damsel in distress" games but between saving a man or a woman, from the stats we have, people would rather save the woman.
http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Video_Game_Statistics
"Who did you save?
Saved Doug - 24%
Saved Carley - 77%"
Give the choice, they'll probably save the girl because they're more inclined to like them, but that's not the point. The point is do people really care about games where the primary focus is saving the girl. You can get away with it movies a bit more since you can split focus with the hostage, but in games you've got a major character off-camera for large chunks of time. As plot and characterization become more important, it becomes much more important to get them into the action as much as possible with perhaps only the last act being centered on saving them. If I saw a game description which stated I had to raid the castle to save the girl, I wouldn't be able to put it back on the shelf fast enough. The scenario pretty much screams "boring character alert".
Netrigan said:
So, sure, if writers are as unimaginative as you, then it'll be a bad thing; but it really only takes a handful of really well-made books/comics/films/games to point the way. Better written female characters expands the field far, far more than it limits it.
If the article you're talking about is this drivel: http://www.slashfilm.com/what-fast-furious-6-could-teach-star-trek-into-darkness-about-half-naked-women/
Then you might be right about me being unimaginitive, I would've never believed someone could write something so stupid. Aside from Star Trek being a reboot of 60s show with an almost entirely male cast, here is a wonderful quote:
"The sad part of all this is that it?s not as if Fast & Furious 6 is some paragon of feminist ideals. Male roles outnumber female ones by a 2:1 ratio, and the film fails badly at the Bechdel test."
So basically, by following the same reasoning, "Live at the Appollo" and "Bad Boys" 1&2 are reverse racist, "Sex in the city" is mysandrist and "No country for old men" is racist AND mysoginist. All for not ham-fisting different gendered/coloured characters that have little to nothing to do with the context or storyline.
Any better written character would expand the field, but I've been talking about the gaming press and Anita Sarkeesian's view of what is or isn't sexist. Not you're own specific opinion on the subject. All I know is Bordelands 2 got slammed for racism and the lead dev on Saints Row has recently apologised for being sexist.
PS: I'm unfamiliar with "Preacher", therefore I won't comment on it.
[/quote]
Passing the Bechdel test is meaningless. Even Feminists readily admit this. The test is only good at taking the room temperature, not the temperature of any individual work.
And you continue to act as though this is an all-or-nothing scenario. You can listen to whatever part of an argument you wish to and work on that. If 90% of a feminist critique is utter bullshit, but the other 10% is really insightful, you can choose to listen to the 10% and ignore the rest. And this is how people react to feminist and racial and homosexual critiques. Quite often the critique is a bit nonsensical, such as Spike Lee criticizing Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers" for not dealing with the segregation of the troops during WWII. It got published by quite a few newspapers in that "let you and him fight" kind of way, but when Eastwood didn't rise up to the bait and responded in a polite and thoughtful manner, the subject was dropped.
If you dig into what women are saying, you find what they want are more well-rounded and interesting female characters. A lot of the feminist stuff isn't terribly important. If the female character is a damsel, then you better make her an interesting damsel. You don't just lock her in a room where she cowers until the hero comes and rescues her. A lot of women love male-centric fiction, especially if the fiction loves them back. Sons of Anarchy is a show I frequently bring up in these discussions because even though it uses women as decoration, it also features quite a few really strong, interesting, flawed, and vulnerable female characters. They're just as interesting, if not more so, than the male characters.
You mention the Borderlands 2 racism "controversy". This is what I was talking about earlier in that most of these controversies are anything but. A handful of people made a bit of criticism. I don't even know if they were black, because it was mostly just reported on to see what kind of reaction it got. And the Borderlands 2 writer stepped up and responded in the classiest way possible. He asked people if they thought it was racist. Almost no one said it was. Controversy over, Borderland 2 won.
So saying "they're right" doesn't mean you have to stop using whatever trope it is, but, as is the case with any over-used trope, you have to get more creative using it. A good critique informs the creator. It lets them know when they're being lazy, when they could and should be doing better. Sometimes a writer is completely well-meaning, but they end up crafting something which is insulting. A good critique knows their heart is in the right place, but let's them know they're being condescending or completely missing the point. In a lot of ways, the way you're talking reminds me of all those people who get pissed off that someone ruined Toy Story's perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes, or got pissed off that someone dared give GTA V a 9/10 instead of a perfect score.
I don't exactly see eye-to-eye with these videos, but I think she's hitting a lot of the right targets. Most of the scenes she complains about in those games aren't exactly over-flowing with brilliance. Maybe she's completely off-base about why those tropes are bad, but she ain't wrong about most of those tropes needing to be less abused. Games like Watch Dogs and Max Payne 3 should be taught in schools on how not to write video games because of how awful and cliched their stories are and the presence of so many paper-thin cliched characters. I keep saying their worst sin isn't that they're sexist or racist or homophobic, it's that they're boring. I defend interesting any day of the week, boring never.