You know when it comes to the issue of sexual exploitation in video games, there are times I have to agree with the complaints about women being objectified to arouse male interests, and times I do not. To me, there is a line between what's considerable as exploitation and what's meant for camp value, and with camp there's meant to be a sense of humor or irony behind it. With this trailer, I don't see anything anywhere as offensive as any other game with ladies dressed femme fatal style. What I think has really bothered a lot of people over this trailer isn't that issue but something much more deeper.
I think it's the same issue that a game called Final Fight once dealt with back in the late 80s early 90s. In a beat 'em up game where the objective was to take on wave after wave of muscle bond urban criminals. The game suffered fear of controversy when within the line up of bad guys, one of the characters just so happened to be female. When the game was brought over from Japan, the fear was male audiences would feel disheartened by beating up a female characters, no matter if they were made out as enemies there to kill you, and the game would suffer from it. So what they did was turn this female character into a transvestite, making it okay now to beat up a supposed homosexual as long as that character supposedly at one time in its life had male genitalia. Now I'm not going to dive into its further on going stupidity or the controversy if a game like that was to come out now vilifying a character by making them gay. But the original issue still stands, and what I feel has really bothered people about this trailer isn't the fact that those women were dressed provocatively enough. It's simply the fact that they're women at all, and they were killed in the process.
Now this my MY problem with this issue. Why is it that it's okay to murder wave after wave of male enemies, but when they turn female it all of a sudden becomes wrong? So killing men in movies and games = good, killing women = bad. No matter if they're portrayed as murderers out to get you themselves, it's still some how wrong. This is what I think is at the heart of what's wrong with this trailer. Not as much the trailer itself, but the reactions that it's getting.
As a Veteran I find this offensive because at one point in my life I was treated as an expendable tool. Personally now that I'm in my 30s, any form of gratuitous violence just for the sake of itself I find offensive in one form or another. What this trailer here is is camp. But, once the issue begins to preach between the lines that it's okay for men to die in the masses in games but not women, now it's offensive to the point that I'm going to start getting up to show my contempt. Now I know that that's the issue because I remember an earlier trailer for Hitman: Absolution that showed gameplay of murdering of several male police officers, and I don't mean corrupt cops; just those out doing there job that got in the way of Agent 47. I kinda found that offensive, now at the time no one else seemed to care. Now that we have sexy women in lingerie who are obviously murdering degenerates out for blood. IT'S WRONG!
Murdering bad women > law upholding men.
So that's the equation I'm getting out of what society finds value in.
