Violence in games vs Sexism in games?

[WindKnight]

The only situations I know of that's come to light of female characters being an issue were Remember Me and Timesplitters 2 am I missing some others ?

Sleeping Dogs started life as Black Lotus with the lead character being a Lucy Liu styled heroine, but the devs were forced to make the characters male (not to mention other publisher mandates that ultimately came to nought).

Naughty dog also talked candidly about how the publishers wanted Ellie cut from the packaging and promotion of the Last Of Us and they had to fight to keep her on the front cover, and then Elizabeth is entirely absent from the Bioshock: Infinite packaging despite the game being very much about her.

 

[Smeatza]

Wrestling has the issue that well the womens Wrestling circuit has been a joke for many years. I think it was either the Retirement of Trish Stratus or even as far back as China that the legitimacy was somewhat lost in the public eye. Though I will say there are female wrestling fans but I don't have any numbers to say the percentage of each so it could well be a mostly male market.

What you say of women's wrestling is certainly true for the WWE, I can't really speak for anywhere else. Although I did see some clips from a relatively new Scottish wrestling league and the women there seemed to be badass.

But I was just drawing a little parallel. People often say "how would men like it if your media was full of speedo-wearing, muscle-bound demigods?" And it would seem that in at least one case (wrestling) they don't mind it.

 

[generals3]

Not to say companies always make the right choices, but, their decisions are, in their eyes, based on their expected profitability. It's up to you to prove them wrong. And how you do that is with your wallet.

Except honestly they seem to be succeeding (when they are - the last few years have been very bad for EA) in spite of their decisions, not because of them. What success they have at the moment is due to milking of yearly franchises, one of the biggest of which I must point out again would not exist if its publisher had gotten their way.

These are not people to trust they know best about the profitability angle of gender representation. You know what did gangbusters at the cinema last year? Frozen and The Hunger Games, female led films in a market producers still point at Catwoman and Elektra as proof audiences don't want female led movies.

I'll have to ask, how do you know that it is "in spite of"? I feel like you simply want to believe that. Now if you're a marketeer specialized in market research of the VG industry i may believe that but i don't think you are.

You may be true, but this is all speculation. And I have yet to see evidence that suggests it's actually "in spite of".
As long as male lead franchises consistently top the charts I really don't see how anyone can claim with certitude the market (on the demand side) bias towards male lead games is just in the publishers' heads.

And i don't really think Frozen is an appropriate example. The cinema equivalent of AAA violent VG's are action movies not animated disney movies. And The Hunger Games is indeed an exception, but for all we know it is indeed just that, an exceptions. Exceptions don't necessarily disprove trends. Surely we cannot expect big companies to risk millions in the hopes the project becomes an "exception". (and what is gangbusters? Never heard of it and neither does IMDB apparently, correction IMDB knows but there is little info and is categorized as "in development" :/)

 

[gargantual]

Ridiculous. Its all paranoia from non gamers.

So what if guys entertain the idea of playing as a powerful dude, getting ass. Big deal. Everyone has some bit of thematically wild escapism fantasy in games or film. This stuff is for functional people who 'get it'. Not for real world psychoes.

Any person that has potential negative takeaways from fiction into their real lives, means they are lacking real world education in that dept. Most of us have or have had parents or parental figures, or good friends of different genders and backgrounds, or have responsibilities to keep us grounded.

I wonder if it ever occured to a few of those critics, the reason why these 'power fantasies' will always be in the entertainment market because most functional gamers are painfully aware real relationships are NOTHING like those one dimensional fantasies, and demands the exact antithesis of 'Kratos'. Another ideal that may be easier to start but can be hard to consistently maintain.

If ladies, or LGBT had a few more of their own power fantasies, the game market would be better. Wouldn't be comfortable experience for some dudes but fuck it we'd lave less of these debates. They'll be too busy with Madden and CoD to really care. Everyone gets their fantasy. Devs cater to niche markets for that stuff, and go diverse when they aim for 100 million blockbuster sales.

What about real people who don't know how to look in the mirror. Who have to superimpose themselves unnecessarily, and start fights with civil people, or play snide 'professional victims' to extort money or false respect. Games didn't teach them such levels of social abuse or snide opportunism. Other REAL people in their lives who validated such behavior or 'showed them how to get away with it' with power and money did.

The rest of us sink into unruly avatars, and unrealistic dreams for unwinding purposes only.

TL,DR. Why constantly go after the themes of games? I don't see much of a real-world correlation to homicide, thievery, social oppression and sex abuse. Many factors condition people to do wrong. They do wrong in "the real world", when they see it works in "the real world".

 

[Bluestorm83]

Violence VS Sexism in games, eh? I'll put 75 bucks on Violence, in a come-from-behind victory in the last inning.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

Hell, I think that first picture's pretty attractive. You see dirt, scratches, and scars. I see sinewy muscle, bright blue eyes, silky hair. And if any girl who saw that happened to have a power fetish, well... really, the only truly unattractive thing I see there is the overly pointy chin and the vaguely cartoony art style - broaden the jawline a little and make the picture more photo-realistic and bam, smutty romance cover.

Well honestly I'm a little surprised that you find that picture romance novel cover attractive. It is very different than the images that I always see brought up here in attractive character threads, and as you mentioned the overly pointed chin is pretty unattractive. Not to mention every romance novel cover I've seen has a more seductive expression than a scowl. But to each their own I suppose.

Now, I'll admit that I don't exactly get hot and heavy over Kratos, but aren't you sort of boiling down what women find attractive in a man to a single ideal? If I went "All men find busty, curvaceous women with thick blonde hair, plump lips, and a perpetual 'orgasm voice' attractive, and that's all they ever find attractive" you'd probably fight me on it, wouldn't you? Same goes here. A wide variety of men can appeal to a wide variety of women - there's no single ideal, and a lot of women can find wildly different types of men attractive, just like a lot of men do.

I may not have made that entirely clear, but this is more or less what I was trying to get across. A male character being attractive boils down to more than just being shirtless and muscular. Which the vast majority of the examples mentioned in this thread are doing, equating shirtlessness to a deliberate intention to sexualize the character for women. As I said in my previous post, someone brought up Gears of War as an example of a game with sexualized men. As much variety people have in what they're attracted to, I can't imagine that "Gears of War: The Romance Novel Collection" being a hit in any sense. For some reason men resembling tanks has never been a massive hit.

While some people indeed may find Kratos or Marcus Fenix attractive, they're at best very, very niche groups. And any game trying to grab the female demographic by presenting them with characters like that will fail very hard. It's like you wouldn't say that Ellie from Borderlands 2 is sexualized because she has massive tits. Besides that she has a dressed just like a average person would. Some people probably do find her attractive, but you're not going to grab the male demographic by smacking her on the cover in a sexy pose.

I mean, Geralt has been mentioned as a grizzled scarred sort that no straight woman would want, but hey, I think he's pretty good-looking. Not a bombshell by any means, but still attractive. As a matter of fact, I've noticed I actually have a bit of a propensity for the grizzled, gravelly-voiced bad ass.

As I saw someone else quoting you about, just because a character is attractive doesn't mean they're sexualized. While I have seen people considering Garrus attractive (not many, if anything people find his voice attractive) in no way is his character sexualized. There's pretty much zero chance that when they were designing Garrus they were sitting around a table saying, "Okay, this looks good, but do you think he's sexy enough? I mean we want something in there for the women right?". On the other hand, I am pretty sure that's what was in the front of their minds when they designed the busty blue bisexual female race that sends off half of its population to be strippers.

On the other side, there's plenty of female characters that a men consider attractive that are not sexualized. With very, very few exceptions, I'd say that every female character I've seen in games is attractive. In almost all media this is true of both genders, if less so with men. But there's a difference between a character being attractive, and them grinding a staff between their butt cheeks.

 

[Saetha]

Gah, long post. Okay.

Well honestly I'm a little surprised that you find that picture romance novel cover attractive. It is very different than the images that I always see brought up here in attractive character threads, and as you mentioned the overly pointed chin is pretty unattractive. Not to mention every romance novel cover I've seen has a more seductive expression than a scowl. But to each their own I suppose.

Yes, well, again, what is considered to be of attractive to an entire sex isn't necessarily so. I mean, plenty of movies and video games seem to think men lose their minds over unrealistically busty-but-thin women running around in a scrap of chain mail and a few bits of tape, but my general experience with actual men is that they find it base and pandering at best, unattractive and grossly misogynistic at worst. What's considered attractive, especially by marketers trying to land on a universal ideal, isn't what always works. Just because romance novels tend towards lithely muscled men with come hither smiles and deep v-necked shirts doesn't mean every woman goes for that, or that it's the peak of attraction for them.

As for the rest of the post... I mean, yeah, I more-or-less agree. I recognize that many male characters in video games aren't made with driving women wild in mind, something which may not be true when it comes to female characters. That being said, I reject the idea that because a female character - or any character, really - was made to be sexually or romantically attractive means they can't be a good character in their own right, or a character empowering to the gender they belong to.

It just also helps to keep in mind that you shouldn't judge the general tastes of women by what you see on underwear ads and romance covers, just like how I'd be remiss to judge what men like based on something like Duke Nukem. I mean, yeah, I guess they're attractive, and you won't have to look hard to find women who will go wild over the likes of Dean Winchester and Captain America, but there's also plenty of women who find men attractive even if they fall outside of the norm - I know people who find JonTron pretty cute, for instance, and he's way off the mark of traditionally attractive. And there's plenty of women who find people attractive on both sides of the fence. There's no universal ideal for women, just like there's no universal ideal for men.

 

[The Almighty Aardvark]

*snip*

Yeah, no real disagreements here. I wasn't trying to go for a catch all "This is what women find attractive" in my first post, just an example of how a male character could be designed with the intent of being attractive to a larger female audience. In fact the friend I was talking to about it didn't even find the romance novel guy attractive, but she knew that's what they were going for by the posturing, appearance and presentation. And since I was trying to draw comparisons to the stereotypical assumptions that game developers make about what men are attracted to, I wanted to go for more stereotypical portrayals of what women were attracted to.

I was considering adding something about how a character can be sexy without it being a bad thing too, but my post was getting long winded enough as it was. There's a big difference between a character being sexy and being sexy to the player, or through characters the player's supposed to identify with.

 

[mecegirl]

Yeah, I can see where you are going with this. According to that literally any male video game character ever could be portrayed as a power fantasy. I don't know what your ideal male lead character with no power fantasy behind him looks like, but I bet he'd be fucking boring.

The same thing, by the way, could be said of female characters too.

If more female characters were protagonists in video games, yeah. But they aren't. It stands to reason that most protagonists would be power fantasies within video games as a medium because most video games tend to fall within the action and adventure genre. The power fantasy is pretty much the whole point. The same can't be said for the love interest, or the female protagonist that's been sexed up beyond normal levels. Most protagonists are attractive anyway, but there is a difference between the relative attractiveness of a chracter like Miranda, and why the camera felt the need to follow her ass around during cut scenes.

 

[Something Amyss]

Yes, because there are absolutely no women in the game industry.

Entirely male profession, no females are ever involved in any of these games people are talking about.

All the fault of men.

Is there any reason that strawman even if it was someone's actual argument would make a solid counterpoint? There's women in the industry. And? Unless you demonstrate a significant leadership or marketing role that puts them directly in charge, it still falls to men. And since almost nobody disputes the disparity of men and women in tech jobs, I'd think it was a given that you cannot make that burden of proof.

because I chose it doesn't detract from the fact I still forced my way through until I hit a point where I stopped looking for it and was able to enjoy the game as a game.

You forced yourself to as a challenge. That's inherently different and exactly why the diet analogy holds up.

The He-man vs Barbie was done because specifically Barbie was made by a Women and is regularly attacked as being bad while He-man was made by a man and is often presented by the same people as a good role model or at least not a negative one.

Barbie was created by a woman and Heavy Metal was coined to refer to Led Zeppelin. Both are irrelevant to the modern state. You will note that almost all (possibly all, but I'm affording for something I haven't seen) of the criticism comes from after Ruth was no longer a hands-on member of Mattel and she was radically changed. Your premise, as such, is false. Barbie may be created by a woman, but saying the reason she catches flak is related is like saying LZ wrote "Through the Fire and Flames."

The simple point being when a man designs a character for men it's a male power fantasy. When a women designs a character for Women but certain women don't like it then the free thought is removed from said women and it's claimed to be the Patriarchy that made her do is as she seemingly can't think for herself.

I already addressed why this was false with Barbie; can you offer an actual example?

Not that I entirely discard the idea of an issue with "patriarchy." Majority rule has led to self-loathing blacks, self-loathing Jews, self-loathing gays, why would women be any different? Why wouldn't women be influenced by male standards of beauty predominant in what sells to the only group marketing cares about: dudes?

Again, to the Barbie example, would there be any complaints if it was still the same Barbie from the 50s? Maybe, but most of them would be DOA. Her proportions wouldn't be an issue, and that was one of the biggest issues. She likely wouldn't be the poster girl for domesticity, either. an ironic statement, since she was invented in the 50s and many of her changes weren't codified until the 70s, when the Handlers had a significantly reduced role in the company (having, you know, resigned by the mid-70s).

Would the same thing have happened if Ruth Handler was full involved? Maybe, but the idea that it's getting flak for being a product by a woman doesn't have legs because it was at the hands of men it saw most of the changes that led to criticism.

On the other hand, maybe not. Ruth was a feminists in the 40s and 50s. Maybe she would pull an about-face, but even later in life she didn't seem to. Still, all we can do is speculate. There's just no reason to use Barbie as an example here.

Also, He-Man's kind of bad. I'm not talking about the physique, though I think that's dumb[footnote]However, the fact remains that we had scrawny male heroes, while any woman in kids' media who wasn't a knockout was treated as ugly, or homely[/footnote], but rather, using him as an example. One of the primary reasons he's seen as positive is what he taught kids. He taught kids not to use violence, to think before fighting, and some weird messages about drugs and being touched in your nono bits. What messages did 80s Barbie offer us?

 

[Something Amyss]

Violence VS Sexism in games, eh? I'll put 75 bucks on Violence, in a come-from-behind victory in the last inning.

I don't know, I'd expect sexism to come from behind, if you know what I mean. Possibly with a wolf whistle.

 

[Something Amyss]

What's considered attractive, especially by marketers trying to land on a universal ideal, isn't what always works. Just because romance novels tend towards lithely muscled men with come hither smiles and deep v-necked shirts doesn't mean every woman goes for that, or that it's the peak of attraction for them.

It's also worth consideration that what sells might not be the cover of the book but the contents.

Which brings me to an interesting question.

And since I was trying to draw comparisons to the stereotypical assumptions that game developers make about what men are attracted to, I wanted to go for more stereotypical portrayals of what women were attracted to.

The issue I have here, is the question of whether the situations are equal.

Let me explain:

When the issue of sexism in games comes up, it is met with hostility and antipathy. People who bring it up are accused of trying to ruin guys' fun and of removing all boobies and asked what's wrong with a little fan service.

Do you honestly think there would be parity if we changed the covers of romance novels? Would women threaten death and rape and other violence, like male gamers have in their entitled little outrage?

My point is this. The difference between the situations is one of definitive reinforcement vs one of implied approval. We as the gaming community have time and again demonstrated the attitude that is stereotyped: that we're so in love with our pixelated boobies that we will rape you, kill you, and kick your dog if you even talk about how it's a problem to women in the industry (Who by the same argument, either don't exist or are invading the treehouse).

Can you point to an area of reinforcement on that level offered by women that fits the stereotype of "what women want?"

It seems pointless to argue equal weight if the ground itself isn't equal.

 

[The Lunatic]

Yes, because there are absolutely no women in the game industry.

Entirely male profession, no females are ever involved in any of these games people are talking about.

All the fault of men.

Is there any reason that strawman even if it was someone's actual argument would make a solid counterpoint? There's women in the industry. And? Unless you demonstrate a significant leadership or marketing role that puts them directly in charge, it still falls to men. And since almost nobody disputes the disparity of men and women in tech jobs, I'd think it was a given that you cannot make that burden of proof.

Have you worked in the industry?

Have you studied the industry?

Do you have any basis for your claims other than "lol, I hate men"?

The reason why it's not a valid counter point is that it has absolutely nothing backing it. There's no burden of proof if you've brought nothing to actually counter beyond the notion that all men are evil and it's all their fault.


And frankly, such arguments don't really work outside tumblr.

 

[The Lunatic]

Unless of course you count the redesign she went through and that despite having been a Doctor, a Vet, A presidential candidate and an Astronaut in recent times

Those totally don't count.

She was an attractive doctor, an attractive vet, an attractive presidential candidate and an attractive astronaut.

It's completely different!

How dare some women be attractive and successful role models!