Gender Diversity / Politics in games (was Tropes Vs. Women)

[NEG]

Thank God that wasn't The Divine Comedy just then.

Edit: Neil Hannon - The Game would be fantastic.

[George Clooney]

Imagine being someone who thinks they're hard done by compared to someone whose kid died of cancer, because the dead child's parent made a game about that experience and you're afraid that this might somehow result in the next Gears of War being slightly less violent.

To be fair, some of these people are the same people now defending that Ralph dick for repeatedly hosting guest columnists on his "news" site who write articles slagging off women involved in Gamergate which amount to personal insults and calling them sluts or ugly. This includes an article about how a guy who was quite involved in GG lost his girlfriend after she committed suicide, and one of their friends said some words on twitter where she mentioned that they were both involved in GG, and one of the guest writers wrote an entire column to call her an attention whore trying to capitalise on someones suicide to boost her popularity. The same article ended with a message to the grieving boyfriend with and image of the "I choo choo choose you" Valentines Day card Ralph gave Lisa that time in the episode of the Simpsons, which seems weird until you know she killed herself by standing in front of a train. The writer on twitter then apparently sent the boyfriend a picture of a dead body on a train track.

Apparently not posting that article would have been against free speech and tantamount to censorship, and sending her boyfriend pics of train related shit and dead bodies is just dark humour, and while it may not be to everyones taste, not sending it would have been censorship too. Or some shit. To be fair, quite a few GG bods are speaking against him, but the amount that are ok with this shit because of "free speech" is pretty sad.

[b00dles]

Free speech and being civil to people aren't mutually exclusive though and having free speech doesn't mean the right to be a complete dick.

I don't even know how those two things could have ever been confused, it's mental.

[RossW]

SJW scum

[David Kenny]

You called?

[Dig Dug]

The whole freedom of speech and censorship thing gets on my nerves really.

These people keep insisting that them coming under scrutiny for being twats is censorship but in true censorship they'd never get their say, they'd never get a platform where they can get their views out there in the open and they certainly wouldn't be able to complain about coming under criticism either.

They have rights and they are expressing their right to be twats. The people who do not like them being twats however also have equal rights to rebut such behaviour. You can do something but no action is without some form of impact on someone else, it's why a lot of laws exist in the first place.

[b00dles]

It's actually Ros Social Warrior, she just doesn't only fight for justice. Hence not liking these fly by night SJW's only putting in effort in a narrow area within the vast social war battlefield.

[Alex W.]

https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=9aspp1r0tS4

[Dudley]

The whole freedom of speech and censorship thing gets on my nerves really.

These people keep insisting that them coming under scrutiny for being twats is censorship but in true censorship they'd never get their say, they'd never get a platform where they can get their views out there in the open and they certainly wouldn't be able to complain about coming under criticism either.

They have rights and they are expressing their right to be twats. The people who do not like them being twats however also have equal rights to rebut such behaviour. You can do something but no action is without some form of impact on someone else, it's why a lot of laws exist in the first place.

And even then Twitter removing a badge or even banning him outright is neither censorship nor a free speech violation.

Because the government aren't doing anything. A private business deciding they don't want something in their house is no more censorship than it would be if Milo tried to stop me standing on his coffee table all evening repeatedly calling him a cunt.

[RossW]

Sorry, seemed funny when I was in work

That is the response I get from my internet manchild friends when anything like this comes up. For any with bingo cards they also identify as libertarians and like the red pill in a non-ironic way. I really need to find new people to play Rocket League & Civ with

[Capwn]

The future of the series has now been outlined;

2015 was our first full year as a nonprofit, and throughout the year I assessed what Feminist Frequency’s short-term and long-term goals should be. After seeing the goals and scope forTropes vs Women in Video Games balloon far beyond my initial imagining, it's important to me to set reasonable expectations for future projects. So, I spent a fair bit of time last year laying the foundation for FemFreq to grow. I continued and expanded our advocacy and consciousness-raising efforts, worked on a complete overhaul of our logo and website, and put together a great team who have been diligently helping me prepare exciting new programming to launch this year.

I’m really proud of the work we have done with Tropes vs Women in Video Games; we took traditional feminist media criticism and developed our own framework for analyzing and deconstructing games via an accessible and engaging format that appeals to a wide-ranging audience. As I’ve talked about before, this project took on a life of its own beyond anything I could have conceived of on that spring day 3 1/2 years ago when I hit publish on a modest Kickstarter. As with many early Kickstarters that were wildly overfunded, we expanded the project accordingly, increasing its scope with each stretch goal. I was so excited that you were so excited about feminist media criticism. By the time we started creating the episodes, however, it was clear the project had become an ambitious beast. Each trope started becoming its own multi-part miniseries that took months and months of research and writing and production. So here we are, over three years later, working on a project that I thought was simply going to take six months to complete.

The reality is that Tropes took over my entire existence, both personally and professionally. For me, the work of Feminist Frequency has become synonymous with constant daily harassment, death threats, bomb threats, intense public scrutiny and profound violations of privacy that have spilled over into the lives of my friends and family. Along with all of this came an impossible pressure to never get any detail or fact wrong; even when our research was impeccable, harassers would act as though we were lying and start wild campaigns to generate more hostility toward us and our work.

The enormous amount of stress caused by the harassment, along with how the project unfolded, took a huge toll on my physical and emotional health. I have been dealing with depressive tendencies for the better part of my life but with my physical health declining and the added pressure of this project, my depression became quite intense. Looking back from a place of greater clarity and balance, I don't know how I managed to survive from day to day, let alone how I continued to step into the public eye online, in newspapers and magazines, and even on national television. Many of my personal relationships were strained or collapsing, and getting out of bed every day felt like climbing up a mountain. There was no end. I was going to be doing this tropes project forever. FOREVER.

In short, I burned out. In some activist communities we talk a lot about burnout because so many of us sacrifice our health, our relationships, our personal lives, in order to try and make positive change in the world. But I don’t believe this needs to be an either/or situation. I realised there had to be a way to balance my health and this project I deeply believe in. That’s why I’m making a change to how I complete this project, and I think you will like it.

And we are currently working on:

• Bonus Video: Top 10 Common Defenses of Sexism
• Classroom Curriculum and Lesson Plans

We plan on completing Tropes vs Women in Video Gameswithin the year but it’s going to look a little bit different. Instead of incredibly long videos that focus on one trope and deconstruct hundreds of examples, we are going to break it down into smaller bite-size pieces. We’re going to publish shorter, more focused episodes, by taking the theories and concepts from the remaining tropes and presenting them in 5-10 minute long videos around a very focused topic. These are the topics we will create (titles might change):

I’ve been working hard with my team and am excited to show you the new format - With no further ado, here's the first episode. I hope you enjoy it.

[ZOK]

No PN 03?! She's no gamer!

While the video is sound, it seems a bit odd to pick out Batman as being a game where it's impossible to get a look at a man's bum because it's purposefully obscured. Doesn't he always wear a cape?

[Capwn]

Yeah, I felt myself being a bit like "hmmm, really?" during the first half, especially when they seemed to have the player angle the camera right under the butt of Lara. It's not like that's the game's camera is it?

The main point I got from it was that both male and female butts can be displayed but for males it's never a pronounced/obvious butt. Lots of games have women's butts that are not pronounced/obvious but some DO, why are men's butts NEVER pronounced/obvious? Right, so there is a good question there but I can see many of the GG crowd will be so angry about the 'cherry picking''and not be able to think beyond that.

[Wiper]

I was faintly amused at the use of Assassin's Creed as an example, seeing as it's a series that has always been careful to make sure its female leads are treated the same way. Look at the comical lengths it goes to to cover up its female protagonists' behinds!

But otherwise, yeah, it's a reasonable observation, albeit one that is effectively just a subset of the wider 'female characters are dressed and framed in a more sexualised manner than male characters' issue which must have been covered by Tropes... by now, surely? It's been going for long enough now that I can't actually remember everything that's been covered.

No PN 03?! She's no gamer!

While the video is sound, it seems a bit odd to pick out Batman as being a game where it's impossible to get a look at a man's bum because it's purposefully obscured. Doesn't he always wear a cape?

I was thinking that PN03 would have been the ideal example of this issue, yeah. As for Batman's cape, in the comics/cartoons it's generally a lot lighter, flaring around and showing off that sweet, sweet bat-arse with far less effort than would be required in the games (though of course the cartoonists rarely frame it with the camera directly behind bats), so it's still a valid example.

If FF/Sarkeesian can't relate to a character in a game because they have a pronounced bum, does that say a little about their preconceptions? It's a body shape of many women, it's not an entirely unrealistic depiction, those games will sell more based on the attractive design of the protagonist.

Well, for one thing it was made clear that the 'body type' wasn't the only issue here - in fact, I'm pretty sure she doesn't mention it once in the video, only issues of costuming, camera angles and the way that characters carry themselves. Rather the whole is off-putting - when your character is dressed revealingly, coded to walk in a slinky manner* and framed with camera angles that emphasise their arse, then it's clear that the character is being presented as titillation to the player, and that, as titillation, that's going to distract you from any other aspects of the character.

As you say, limited expression is an issue for male characters too, albeit that they tend to be presented as being some variant of tough guy heroes, and are rarely characterised beyond that, but that hardly takes away from the argument that female characters tend to be presented as sex objects. I would be very happy to see a similar series done about the tropes the male characters tend to fall into, as I find that male characters I can identify with come around even less often than female ones!

*one of the recurring sources of unintentional comedy for me and a couple of friends is those games which have female protagonists who walk with massively accented sway despite wearing, you know, flat shoes, meaning the character must be putting a hell of a lot of effort in to maintain their unnatural gait.

[macosx]

That video is hilarious.

[Liamness]

It's definitely a "thing" that third person games with female protagonists tend to overly focus on butts. The character and custom design, their movement and idle animations, camera angles, it all adds up to something pretty undeniable. Maybe she could've used some gender-swap videos to help illustrate her point:

I'm disappointed though that she doesn't see equal-opportunity ogling as the way forward. That's kind of where TV and film are headed.

[NEG]

Just remembered that no one commented on a point I tried to bring up a week or two back: Why doesn't Anita decide to show posses/negs on her videos? Comments I can understand but surely there's very little achieved out of hiding how many misinformed clicked a red button. That's it's own form of censorship, you could say. Knowing what the YT community thought, for better or worse.

The other thing I raised was that apparently on the FemFreq live streams no one is allowed to talk in the chat/you get automatically banned (the video made it seem that way). Which again, can understand to a degree but Twitch far more so than YT is made out of it's viewership talking during, you know, live streams.

[Liamness]

Knowing what the YT community thought, for better or worse.

Given that Gamergate has a strong reputation now for brigading / sock puppetry, there would be no point. Every video just had an incredible number of thumbs down before it was disabled, is that really meaningful? For me, it was just another reminder that she has an active internet hate campaign against her. Shouldn't give them any platform, not matter how small.

Even at the best of times, I'm not sure I would want to hear the opinion of "YT community" anyway. You can get plugins that completely disable comments on the site, massive improvement.

[Fry Crayola]

with regards to Catwoman, isn't it a character traits of hers as a femme fatale, so actually appropriate for her character?

Yeah, though it doesn't stop it from being a valid example of the trope, even though Rocksteady are more restricted in their use of existing and established characters than, say, Core Design were when they created Lara. That said, the argument (as with the entire series) is one of normalisation rather than individual examples, so there's room for sexy Catwoman in a world where an accentuated female arse is relatively rare.

[NEG]

52) Strategic Butt Coverings

- Butts don't affect how we think about a character (well, other then sexy butt thoughts), the character writing does

- The examples so far are more to do with the way females are dressed/portrayed more than to do about their butts, imo. Ground I'd say we've already covered. Old Lara being designed to be sexy is old news. New Lara would have been more to think about.

- Men butt examples coming from different games is a little unfair. Would have been interesting to see titles with both male/female selectable in the same game.

- METAL GEAR BUTT

- 'Male butts are deemphisised'. Again, portrayal/costume design is more guilty than the butts and cameras themselves, imo.

- 'This is what's important. This is what you should be paying attention to'. Don't speak for everyone. Gameplay first, everything else second. If there's sexy butt along the way, the butt itself does nothing wrong to the overall portrayal of women by itself. Whilst some games are guilty of being sexy overall with little female personality to speak of, sexy butt alone does not, in fact, discourage me from identifying with the female character.

- It's not in the subject matter, but I wish she'd point out how boring box art is with the single figure approach in recent times.

- I don't think Jade's GC butt is sexy in that box art. Eh

It's one of those videos that reminds me she doesn't play games to, you know, play games.

Sorry if I came off a little grumpy this time around. Parents laptop shit a brick and causing me a headache over the past day.

Given that Gamergate has a strong reputation now for brigading / sock puppetry, there would be no point. Every video just had an incredible number of thumbs down before it was disabled, is that really meaningful? For me, it was just another reminder that she has an active internet hate campaign against her. Shouldn't give them any platform, not matter how small.

Even at the best of times, I'm not sure I would want to hear the opinion of "YT community" anyway. You can get plugins that completely disable comments on the site, massive improvement.

And telling me you want no YT discussion/voice to be had doesn't help

Anita is not exempt, even when she's right. Obviously don't wish her ill-will, but to me all greens and reds would do is show how many misinformed are out there, and how we could work towards changing that. Shutting off isn't a solution. From this same page:

Free speech and being civil to people aren't mutually exclusive though and having free speech doesn't mean the right to be a complete dick.

[Liamness]

- Butts don't affect how we think about a character (well, other then sexy butt thoughts), the character writing does

Hardly encourages you to consider whatever intricacies of character they might have though, does it?

[NEG]

Wearing tight stuff would be more the trope I think she should have had better luck with, in all honestly. Wearing tight stuff is definitely a trope. (in gamez)

[smac]

I'm disappointed though that she doesn't see equal-opportunity ogling as the way forward. That's kind of where TV and film are headed.

And I guess why the choice was butts; the buttocks are one of the few body parts seen as 'sexy' by both men and women - so if the playing field were level, you'd see both male and female arses given the same prominence.

It's one area where the male and female gazes coincide.

[The Bag]

It's one of those videos that reminds me she doesn't play games to, you know, play games.

Why, because she has thoughts/opinions about them? So anyone who thinks about games - developers, critics, reviewers, academics, people who write so eloquently about games here and elsewhere, etc - none of us play games to 'play games'? Or does that only apply to Anita? And what does it even mean to 'play games to play games', it sounds like it just means uncritically consume, but I expect you don't really mean that.

[robdood]

Fucking hell, all that effort to get NEG engaged in the topic and this is all we get?

I think I preferred it when he wasn't 'contributing'.

[Fry Crayola]

- 'This is what's important. This is what you should be paying attention to'. Don't speak for everyone. Gameplay first, everything else second.

You're still not getting it. Anita isn't determining the overall worth of any individual games. She's specifically critiquing them from a feminist perspective.

So no, gameplay isn't first. Not from that angle, and continuing to assume that your stance is the only correct way to view them just highlights your own inability - or perhaps refusal - to understand where she's coming from.

[Capwn]

- I don't think Jade's GC butt is sexy in that box art. Eh

Yeah, she picked a very specific cover there. Firstly there are various versions of the cover but even the one where her butt is in the middle just above the title, I find it hard to believe it was intentionally made like that to be sexy rather than just badly composited box art for that region/format cover? Does anyone here really think there was intent behind it? Can't quite see it myself.

[NEG]

You're still not getting it. Anita isn't determining the overall worth of any individual games. She's specifically critiquing them from a feminist perspective.

So no, gameplay isn't first. Not from that angle, and continuing to assume that your stance is the only correct way to view them just highlights your own inability - or perhaps refusal - to understand where she's coming from.

No, I meant she's judging how everyone might think about certain things, and putting words in the mouths of the developers, hence my 'don't speak for everyone'. Did every example shown really come from a dev saying 'PAY ATTENTION TO THIS BUTT!', no, I don't think so. Don't speak for every nasty butt-making dev out there. And that as a gamer, no, butts don't make me assume too much (because I'm generally focusing on gameplay (aka: is it fun). That's just me.

Congratulations on confirming I can only be myself. My stance/voice is my own. Same should be for everyone posting in this thread.

[NEG]

Why, because she has thoughts/opinions about them? So anyone who thinks about games - developers, critics, reviewers, academics, people who write so eloquently about games here and elsewhere, etc - none of us play games to 'play games'? Or does that only apply to Anita? And what does it even mean to 'play games to play games', it sounds like it just means uncritically consume, but I expect you don't really mean that.

It didn't sound like she's having fun coming up with examples this time around, that's all. Her not being into games (which has been quite clear in the past) doesn't bother me as long as it doesn't stick out like a sore thumb to the audience she's aiming herself at. Sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it does. This is another of the times it did.

I'm sure plenty of people who don't play games (to play games) comment on games, The Bag, so no, Anita isn't the only one. The Sun and The Daily Telegraph are also probably on the list. <--comedy

As for 'to play games', to have fun, essentially. To be able to critic the oversexual nature of Bayonetta and still be able to deem the game fun is something we're all capable of and many devs, critics, reviewers, academics we read do also. Anita could do with commenting on the games she's actually playing sometimes outside the spectrum of just the singular point she's trying to get across each time around, that's all. It can't be fun observing games from a certain perspective all the time. Since you've delved into this hobby, try to have fun with it, too.

The episode itself felt poor to me, nothing new really learned compared to past episodes and no real singular thing that really made me face palm at a game like in past episodes, either. Oh, besides perhaps some of the promotional posters having butts, that was fairly shameless. (and yet was only 2-3 posters, so not large scale buttage across the industry!) but episode quality and 'she's not having fun with these games, is she' are two different discussions, certainly.

[Broker]

Jesus Christ, just close the thread. It's never going to be the discussion it was intended as, it's just an endless circle of pointless repetition.