Lightknight said:
Then perhaps you can explain in what way her language could be imprecise? She said that she's not a fan of video games and then went on to explain why she doesn't like them.
I can think of numerous times in my life where I've said "I don't care for X" or "I don't like X" or even "I hate X", only to turn around and like it as quickly as a few months later. Melted Cheese leaps most immediately to mind as something I have at various times in my life both loathed and adored. People speak off the cuff. People will affect certain personas in front of certain audiences, sometimes without even realizing it, in order to appeal more to them.
I can tell you what I THINK. I think she has gamed, but probably not very much. I think when she said "I'm not a gamer" in that video, she meant it...she didn't consider herself a gamer and probably didn't have a very positive attitude towards them based on the research she was doing and the conclusions she was aiming to reach. When later she said "I've been a gamer all my life" she was probably reflecting on how she'd been around games since the time she was a kid, and probably touched them here and there, and thought "Huh, yeah, I've been around games and played games. I'm a gamer!". People like to think of themselves as correct and justified in their opinions. We can tell ourselves a lot of stories about how right we are, and completely believe them.
Or, she could've been willfully lying, in an attempt to dupe people into believing an elaborate ruse.
I honestly have NO IDEA though. This is all just me playing armchair psychologist. If I like Anita, I'm going to default to assuming she's honest. If I dislike her, I'm going to default to assuming she's a liar. I'd really rather make NO assumptions.
Lightknight said:
...get your hands off my word choice.
...leaped immediately to mind.
Lightknight said:
I'd say that many of these games are specifically aimed at males. Ergo, sexy females is an element of it. Not as central as horror in general, but let's say it's lessening jump scares in a horror movie because it makes you feel icky when the response is that the movie wasn't made just for you and some people like jump scares.
I still don't think removing "jump scares" from a scary movie is a good analogy. A much better analogy would be to remove "sexy girls" from a scary movie. After all, "sexy girls" in scary movies is kind of a tradition of the genre, isn't it? So, what happens when we take them out? Have we violated the core of the scary movie? Is it less of a scary movie without sexy girls in it?
Lightknight said:
And yet you buy those games that aren't catering to you?
I buy games for a variety of reasons. I have never bought a game because of a perceived "sexiness" quotient, and I have never NOT bought a game for that reason, either. However, I am most certainly not the target for the standard issue titillation that most frequently gets criticized. I find it lamentably juvenile. I'm not even sure it would've appealed to teenage me.
Lightknight said:
There is a corresponding increase in profit when sex is involved. Because, you may remember, sex sells. This won't become false no matter how loudly people scream about it.
Yes, that's an old marketing maxim, but I'd like to see actual figures on that. Off hand, if I'm looking at some of the top selling games of all time, there aren't a lot of sex-heavy titles in the list, unless you count ERP in World of Warcraft or woo-hoo in The Sims, and no one has ever accused The Sims of being sexist (to my knowledge...never say never I guess).
Lightknight said:
Oh ho ho! I like you. Didn't think I would from the start of this conversation but sure enough, you're fun to talk with. The electoral college, giant middle finger to the proletariat from the founding fathers.
I'm not even American. I'm Canadian, where we voted to overturn proportional representation because too many people didn't understand what it meant, and voted "no".
Lightknight said:
Actually, we see distinct gender preferences amongst all other forms of media like movies, TV and literature that follows similar lines as gaming.
I've never seen anyone argue that film, or television, or novels pander to a single gender the way we generally acknowledge that video games pander to men. We consider our medium on par or at least competitive with those others as entertainment. Why is ours so mono-gender? Is there something fundamental to gaming that only men can enjoy? It seems evident to me that there's plenty of room for the industry to grow.
Lightknight said:
Catering to women as a group may not take the form of better representation in FPS games. It may take the form of casual games or figuring out how to make games that specifically meet women's needs in a way that is reasonable in gaming as a medium. So, in film women usually go for drama and romance while actively disliking action films. Maybe we need to start seeing games that lean more on drama and romance then? The problem is that gaming lends itself really well to action games but has a lot of difficulty with just telling romance or drama stories with little or no action.
I'd love to see that, but just a little catering to women can actually make them pretty happy. My girlfriend is more or less delighted to just have a female protagonist option. Like a great many men who simply cannot fathom playing as the opposite sex in a video game, she'll hesitate before playing a Brodudes Only game, and thus it greatly limits her options. I prefer a female protagonist too, it's just not a show stopper for me. Clearly there are going to be limitations...no one sane is going to ask for a female Nameless One or testicular Lara Croft, but where the option exists it seems rather short sighted not to take advantage.
Lightknight said:
I thought it was pretty interesting when that developmeer mentioned the ability to skip the action should be made available the same way skipping cut scenes is. I thought that was a great idea, why not? It was pretty weird to see the response to her.
That was Hepler, one of Bioware's writers. I believe she actually went on to make a game that was pretty much exactly like that, but I cannot remember the name of it offhand.
Notably, even though that was an ENTIRELY non-controversial thing to say, and story heavy/game play light games like The Walking Dead would go on to earn huge acclaim, she was met by an OCEAN of hatred for that.
Lightknight said:
But don't get me wrong, I'm not saying women don't like FPS games. My wife and I play COD all the time, or Destiny as of late. But that's not typical if studies are to be trusted. That may change, but that change isn't apparent in other industries either so we've got to ask ourselves why we assume that gaming is going to show a drastic difference from other mediums. Especially when the numbers show otherwise.
My girlfriend doesn't mind a shooter, but she dislikes the CoD series reflexively, believing it to be a Boys Only club full of machismo and Very Serious War Faces. She liked the Bioshocks, and she enjoyed playing Borderlands with me. Even though she kept insisting on driving and couldn't drive a lick. Her favorites are the Bioware games, Bethesda RPGs, and the Saints Row series.
Lightknight said:
In what way are they harmful to society? Keep in mind that your response may be something that can be interchangeable Jack Thompson's claim that games make us violent.
Let's imagine a black man in, I dunno, 1930's America. Let's imagine he's reading books and watching shows. And in all those books and shows, he sees Black Men as slaves, and servants, and criminals. That's the cultural narrative he absorbs. "This is what you are, these are the things you can be".
Now let's imagine a girl today. She buys magazines, she watches television, she plays video games. Perpetually, her gender is HEAVILY sexualized, and viewed as prizes for men or objects of lust. You can internalize that. Guys can internalize it too. It can effect how they see the opposite sex.
Now, Jack Thompson was arguing that if I watch a lot of violent movies or play a lot of violent games, I'm going to go and fucking kill someone, because FUCK YEAH VIOLENCE. And I think that was a pretty stupid argument to make. If Jack Thompson had instead chosen to make the argument that constant exposure to portrayals of violence could potentially normalize violence as a concept and blunt its impact on us, that would be one thing. Turning a peaceful person into a violent loving maniac? Significantly bigger leap.
There's also the problem where portrayals of violence and the reality of violence are pretty different. I don't know how much violence you've been exposed to, but there's a SHOCKING difference between shooting at demons in Doom and, I dunno, being in the area when a mass shooting breaks out, or having someone mug you, or just being involved in violence in any capacity. Whereas someone can pretty easily carry a slightly warped concept of sex and human relationships out of gaming or media or porn into relationships, and it could lead to issues.
NONE of this is to say that if person A plays sexist game that person A is now sexist. People are responsible for thinking critically about the things they consume, and you don't get to blame media for your shitty behavior. But neither do I think the idea that media can help shape or guide societal attitudes is completely out of left field. I think it behooves creators to think about what they're doing, and what kind of message they want to send. Maybe they REALLY WANT to keep their T&A and what not intact, and if so, so be it. But there's nothing wrong with reflection, either.
Lightknight said:
I'll admit it. I misjudged you.
I refuse to believe I ever came across as anything other than charming and delightful.
Lightknight said:
I do think it's already happened. I'm not sure what it was or if it is only one thing. The 7th generation of consoles was absolutely crazy with a huge expansion of the whole market particularly with the Wii. Smart phones in our pockets may also be to blame.
It very well might have. I know that prior to Sopranos, being on television was seen as a catastrophic artistic failure. David Chase would actually go out of his way to try and GET HIS OWN SERIES cancelled because he viewed his career as a television writer as an embarrassment, and thought he deserved to be in film. Now, we have people like Soderbergh or Kevin Spacey actually CHOOSING television as a medium. It's a valid artistic choice for A list talent.
Lightknight said:
I am, yes. And demanding that game writers do it is no less unfair. Here's a sad truth, the more you've seen and enjoyed, the less of a chance you will ever run into a new theme. You may have already reached maximum capacity.
We're just going to see the same themes mixed around in an epic shell game but the truth will always be that if we take a careful look at it, all those plot mechanisms are likely thousands of years old or older.
All I'd like to see is diversity in the medium. I like fantasy novels, but I don't want every single one of them to involve the same epic journey. I loved World of Warcraft, I'm tired of other games aping it. The Wire was the best show in the history of television, but I don't need other cop shows trying to be The Wire and failing. It's a creative medium. People should be creative. There's way too much me-tooism and aping of popular concepts in gaming, much as there is in film. I don't care how many boots up the ass the industry takes, or from how many sources. It's merited.
Lightknight said:
But we don't. We have a shit-ton of games from all kinds of genres. The Damsel in distress one is just the most common. The issue comes down to there being even fewer forms of motivation than there are generes/themes. Greed/lust, love, power/fame, religion, revenge, fun, charity (the desire to do something good like helping someone with no chance of return) and malice (the desire to do something bad like graffiti or murder a village).
Look at a game like Stanley Parable. Isn't even much of a game, but can you name another one like it? Or Portal. Or To The Moon.
Now look at Dragon Age. Can you name another game with a story like that? I bet you could name FIFTY.
Lightknight said:
Also, modern games often use multiple motivations at the same time. Uncharted has the damsel, greed, fame, power and other motivations all in one. So we see a lot of damseling as a side quest and not THE motivation, you know?
Alas, I have never played Uncharted. I even own a PS3 now, but I've only used it to play The Last of Us, which I yelled at a lot, and NHL hockey, which I am obligated to own and play because Canada.
Lightknight said:
You mean water off a duck's back that was from the splashing you make as the athletes drown you in a nearby river? An insult is an insult. So I disagree. Call them a sissy while you're at it and see how many hits you get on the youtube video of you getting hit.
I mean it wouldn't affect them at ALL, emotionally, because that's not their emotional sore spot. Everyone has a weak spot. Everyone has areas that are sensitive to them, but possibly not to someone else. Something you or I laugh off might be devastating to someone else.
Lightknight said:
I don't think rescuing anyone is objectification. As stated, that was a bullshit false definition on Anita's part. Frankly, I'm not sure that you can objectify a fictional character as they are not people and do not have a dignity that you can respect or disrespect. At least in a movie the actors are real people who are having to act out what the writers write, so you can argue that the actresses are being objectified while portraying a character that is objectified. But an assembly of 1's and 0's? That's like complaining that someone objectified the ball when their response only needs be, "But it's an object... so?"
What do you think, can non-persons be objectified? Do you believe playing these games have made you think of women as inferior or objects?
I'm not sure if it was you I was talking to, but I made the point that in reducing a character to an item to be rescued, you've made them an object, yeah. They're no different than questing after a sword or a magic stone at that point. You've removed agency and volition. So if you're a woman, and you've become accustomed to seeing this as regards your gender, maybe it's extra irritating. As a guy, who is NOT used to seeing that, it doesn't affect me.
I can see why someone might make the argument that a recurring narrative wherein women are prizes to be rescued and then "won" could be viewed as problematic on a level. It wouldn't send me speeding off to ban a bunch of games, but I might say "Yeah I see where you're coming from".