Imp Emissary said:
That's one of the points Anita talked about as well. The issue isn't so much the trope itself, but the issue of laziness in writing when it's relied on too often.
But laziness in writing isn't a moral issue. It's just laziness. That's a non-argument, especially when motivations are actually quite limited. Love, lust, duty, money, fear, revenge, etc. There's not the biggest list of reasons for why we do things.
Powerful people end up in trouble too. However, there's an obvious disproportion in the number of women who end up in such trouble, regardless if they are actually quite powerful.
The same is true in real life. This is a real issue women have when more powerful men take advantage of the disparity of power. This is why we see groups of women finally escaping from kidnappers 20 years later. In real life, it is women and children who so regularly get kidnapped or raped or any other manner of terrible thing. Not so much with men. To demand that literature depart significantly from the way things actually are is somewhat nonsensical.
So if it wasn't weakness, or foolish mistakes, what is one to believe when the only other thing they seem to have in common is their sex?
Why not weakness or foolish mistakes of the individual? Is it really now sexist for a female character to have a lapse in judgement and for the evil to take advantage of it? I see it like a girl walking alone in a dark alley at night. She made a poor decision but it doesn't mean she's an idiot or responsible for something someone else decides to do in response to it. In her mind, she was just going home. You know?
I see where your going with the examples of how men and women are different. That does give an advantage in some cases to men over women. However, like many things in our world, we have kind of countered that with our "tools".
Not really. It still happens all the time, even with said "tools". A fully armed and trained woman can be every bit as dangerous as others. But even then you've got to admit that females express a lesser eagerness to engage in those kinds of activities for whatever social or biological reasons (for better or worse). Would you rather the women that are captured be incompetent or do you consider it a lesser evil to make them competent individuals who merely fell pray to bad fortune? I'd consider the incompetence to be a greater evil, if you will.
The argument you made sounded like because women do have a disadvantage normally in real life, that is why it is shown in games as a reflection, in the from of D.I.D.
Yes, this is a reason why it shows in games as a reflection. It's also because it is a quick and easy motivation for men (the average gamer). It's not bad that it exists as a plot mechanism. I'd think men should want to be trained to rescue those in need. The important distinction is to note that the DID should actually be in distress and not merely apparent distress.
That said, the end goal is not to have NO games that use tropes. Rather, it's that there should be more variety. And there is more coming every day.
In order for there to be more variety, there would have to be more human motivations. Take the Uncharted games, the motivation is everything from discovery, wealth, and fame to the D.I.D. scenario AND the women are competently written. But even then, there are few better motivations than the desire to save someone's life. That is simply one of the best and it's going to keep showing up. Like I stated, D.I.D. exists all over the place and there are tons of scenarios where the "damsel" is a captured soldier or group of soldiers or men (like Sully from Uncharted to keep with the example). Complaining about D.I.D. because women are often the damsel is a little off for that reason.
Even if we have tons of new games coming out not using the old stories, will still have quite a few still using them, and we'll have all that came before as long as we keep the data held safely. Thus, we need not fear that a change in trends will cause us to lose our "moral lessons", as long as we make sure they are safely stored. Plus, it's not like games are the only ones to ever use these tropes anyway. Even in the present.
This won't happen, all stories are told and retold in millions of different ways. Give me any plot or scenario and I can likely tell you about hundreds of other pieces of literature or film or whatever where that element was used. The Greeks were already aware of the finite number of scenarios that are possible. The culture and tools/tech may change across the generations, but there will only ever be so many main Genres with so many possibilities.
As for the Male vs. Female demographic in gaming. I would say that looking at it from a stand point of "well not all of them are playing this or that game, on this or that system, so we don't need to worry about them." Is both a financial, and creative mistake.
Not really. It's catering to your audience. It is good business sense to understand your audience and to respond accordingly. Frankly, this is the building block of "the customer is always right". This does stimmy creativity, but it makes financial sense. Especially when women actually do exhibit different interests than men in other forms of media too. Why do you assume that this is somehow untrue in gaming? That there is necessarily a huge untapped market for action games for women when the truth is more likely to be an untapped market in something like a true romance game or a "chick flick" variety of games. Not a genre that women in general haven't expressed as much an interest in regarding other genres. But when hundreds of millions of dollars are put into an action flick, everything is going to be done to maximize the return and that includes catering to the mostly male audience and that isn't a bad thing. Males should be catered to like any other customer demographic.
But as far as it being morally wrong to use the D.I.D., I don't see the argument except in the kind of scenarios you and I agree on.
