How do you feel about the objectification of women and the sexualisation of minors in East Asian games?

[Broker]

5 hours ago, Isaac said:

 

Western media is definitely significantly better than Japanese media when it comes to the sexualisation of children.

 

The west does not routinely and openly create media that essentially romaticises grooming and child sexual relationships with adults like they do in Japan.

I would say that the ways that Western society fetishises young girls are probably just more familiar to you. The recognisable trope of school uniforms, models routinely being teenage girls who are encouraged to work at fashions shows where they’re often naked, the day to day jokes about jailbait and girls being “legal”. It’s a weird thing to say, but is it worse to fetishise having a relationship with a teenage girl than just having sex with her and totally dehumanising her? I’d fall on them both being disgusting in different ways. 
 

I read an interesting thing a few weeks ago about the prevalence of incest as a theme in Japanese media. From a western perspective it seems insane to have a storyline where a teenage boy’s younger sister is in love with him, but it’s a very common trope in Japanese media. A society that isolates young people and forces them to repress their sexual urges will make them come out in weird ways, and when horny teenagers are forced in to only ever being in intimate personal situations with family, it becomes more common. Alien as it sounds, a lot of eastern cultures find the pressure on young western women to wear makeup and dress like adults and sexualise themselves equally repulsive. And without the context of having been raised in that society and consumed its media it is. 

 

3 hours ago, Jamie John said:

 

I think that's true, but if we're limiting the scope from 'media' to games, and games published by recognised companies (as opposed to some of the porn-disguised-as-games dreck you can find on Steam, or - increasingly - the Nintendo eShop) then I do think that Western-published games are much more progressive in this regard. Not historically, but within the last 5-10 years. I don't think Rockstar, for example, would be able to get away with their portrayal of women from the PS2-era GTAs nowadays.

 

And when it comes to the quasi-paedophilic representation of young girls, I can't think of any analogue for that in Western games, modern or otherwise, when you very often see it in contemporary Japanese games (Fire Emblem Engage, Persona 5, Xenoblade 3, for example - all games published or re-published in the last 12 months).

Since the tropes Vs women series western games have become less overtly sexualised visually, which I imagine is also in part due to numerous high profile cases of sexual misconduct at western developers. But David cage is a man who made nude 3D models of a woman without her consent and he’s still working and had been handed the Star Wars franchise. Western games still routinely relegate female characters to love interests, often with a subtle but present sexual undertone. Different cultures fetishise different things, but a complete lack of respect for women is universal. 

 

3 hours ago, Jamie John said:

 

 

This is what I'm talking about, though - this collective shrugging and further perpetuation of the idea that Japanese games get a free pass just because they're Japanese. Shouldn't that be challenged? Because, at the moment, it more or less goes unchallenged by the Western media; apart from the occasional editorial, you never see major outlets mentioning this stuff, far less challenging it. Do we need the GameSpots or IGNs or Eurogamers of the world to say, 'Actually, we're not got to endorse or platform this videogame that incentivises you to bang a 17-year-old, one who dresses like (and has the emotion intelligence of) an 11-year-old - that shit isn't ok anymore'? If this is happening already, then I'm not aware of it.

 

And what about the national press? God knows there have been enough stories about violence in videogames (both Western and Eastern) over the last thirty-forty years, so why don't we see any headlines about the portrayal of women and children?

 

I don't want to sound sanctimonious or holier-than-thou - I've played, and enjoyed, a lot of the games I've mentioned, in fact. But I find it notable that there's seemingly little to no resistance to this sort of thing in 2023 when the portrayal of women in Western-published games has come such a long way over the last decade (while still being by no means perfect). Those changes came about in no small part because of the challenges and questions raised by the consumers of those games, so why haven't Eastern games been challenged in the same way?

The answer is, as it always is, money and patriarchy. The men in charge care more about their bottom line than respecting women’s bodies. If you can dress it up as “those crazy Japanese people” and skirt the issue then you’re able to sell it to the western market that exists and avoid blame. 

[Anne Summers]

12 hours ago, SeanR said:

The formatting of the thread title has broken phone browsing

Fascinating insight Sean, I'm really grateful you took the time to share it with us. It shows that you are highly respectful of the time the OP has taken to raise this important issue to our attention, that you have put so much effort into addressing the key points they made.

[Floyd]

Japan still has some issues...

 

Have you ever been to a hostess club?

[thesnwmn]

5 minutes ago, Darwock said:

I was making the assumption that we as a community have some appreciation for Japanese game development. Although there are greater and lesser degrees of objectionable content, this stuff stinks up a lot of it. I bet if you go through our top 100 games of all time vote results there would be a lot of highly regarded games that wouldn’t make it through the censor’s cut.

 

I appreciate some of what they produce of course but my Japanese game interest is definitely limited. Mostly core Nintendo games for the most part and they're either already okay or Nintendo would absolutely change them to make them so.

 

But I'm not bothered about the welfare of anyone making this content.

 

As for older games, this is always a tricky thing. We should consider them on their merits of the time whilst vocally acknowledging their problems. I think it's a very difficult line to tread but anything that don't discuss it at all is a problem for me. Acknowledge. Talk about how games do it better today.

[KRP]

Having just finished Persona 5, and Xenoblade Chronicles 2 not that long ago, yes it does bother me.

 

Persona 5 puts school age girls in bondage wear, and goes on and on about how great they look. 

 

Xenoblade 2 character design feels closer to hentai than anything else. 

 

There’s also always a scene (in anime as well) where the girls are in skimpy/sexy outfits, and the male character(s) are being pervy, only to be told off it for it. It’s such a having your cake and eating it, stance. Yes, we’ve made these school girls looks as sexy as possible but whoa now you better not get turned on by it. 
 

It can get in the sea as far as I’m concerned, and I wish reviewers would make more of a stink about it (or at least highlight it more) because frankly I’d rather not play any JRPGs that are like this. 
 

 

[Mogster]

It really weirds me out to the point where I've avoided many Japanese games I'd otherwise be interested in. 

 

I do think the Yakuza games are probably better than some of the other examples here. I don't remember anything particular dodgy in Yakuza: LAD, and it's a rare example of a JRPG dealing with characters my actual age (and certainly not underage!).

 

I get the impression that part of the issue is that a lot of Japanese games seem to be aimed squarely at horny, straight male teenagers. That doesn't excuse the content of course, but I wonder if there's less of a market over there for older gamers? 

[JamesC]

12 minutes ago, KRP said:

 

It can get in the sea as far as I’m concerned, and I wish reviewers would make more of a stink about it (or at least highlight it more). 
 

 

The question is - why don't they?

I think the answer is probably quite depressing.
I suspect reveiwers just don't want to make a target of themselves. You just know they'll end up getting labelled as woke feminazis or something.  It would take a very brave female reviewer to make a stink about this issue. They have to deal with enough online hate as it is.

[thesnwmn]

17 minutes ago, JamesC said:

The question is - why don't they?

I think the answer is probably quite depressing.
I suspect reveiwers just don't want to make a target of themselves. You just know they'll end up getting labelled as woke feminazis or something.  It would take a very brave female reviewer to make a stink about this issue. They have to deal with enough online hate as it is.

 

Same reason everyone is still playing them.

 

In part I guess the challenge is whether journalists should reflect societies desires and interests or shape them. And it's both. So games journalists ignoring all of them whilst everyone plays them are going out of business very quickly.

 

The question is the same for the players right? Why do people keep playing them even though they KNOW this was going to be there. Did anyone need to be told the Persona was going to be a bit creepy? Or FE? Surely not right? These aren't out of left field.

[Qazimod]

25 minutes ago, Mogster said:

I don't remember anything particular dodgy in Yakuza: LAD, and it's a rare example of a JRPG dealing with characters my actual age (and certainly not underage!).

 

The "casting" of the main party was always a bit rubbish - I think it got brought up once or twice in our GOTY round-up. The guys were a diverse range of old, out of shape losers and misfits...and then you had Saeko and (the optional) Eri who were relatively lithe and attractive and "safe" designs by comparison.

[Kryptonian]

58 minutes ago, Rex Grossman said:

 

I absolutely wasn't trolling at any time unless trolling means saying that incels will love games that depict women as child-like idiotic sex objects. 

 

I said that you don't go broke appealing to incels, riffing off the common cliche no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.

 

It wasn't a dig at you. I have absolutely no idea why you took it as such a personal slight that you wanted to inform me you had indeed had sex to produce a child. I guarantee no one in this thread thought my remark was anything to do with you or anything you had said. Your reaction was bizarre. 

 

If you don't think many of these games are made in such a way as to appeal to a creepy male demographic who have little idea what real women actually look like or think about then we are simply on opposite sides of this debate. Nothing more.

 

I'm very sorry to hear about your dog. That's tough to go through.

 

I read your original comment as a general statement rather than directed at any one in this thread

[matt0]

48 minutes ago, Mogster said:

It really weirds me out to the point where I've avoided many Japanese games I'd otherwise be interested in. 

 

I do think the Yakuza games are probably better than some of the other examples here. I don't remember anything particular dodgy in Yakuza: LAD, and it's a rare example of a JRPG dealing with characters my actual age (and certainly not underage!).

 

I get the impression that part of the issue is that a lot of Japanese games seem to be aimed squarely at horny, straight male teenagers. That doesn't excuse the content of course, but I wonder if there's less of a market over there for older gamers? 

 

The way I've come to see it is I think it's just been this terrible feedback loop in Japanese geek culture (which I suppose is informing geek culture world wide now). Back in the late 90s, I was really interesting in Manga in terms of how it was produced. The big comics magazines, your Shonen Jumps etc. (and the equivalents targeted at teenage girls too), would run user surveys and the editors would be churning through this data and sticking to it religiously in terms of how they would tailor the series in the magazines. If you've ever read a Manga - Battle Angel Alita or All You Need is Kill are two that stick out for me - where a female character completely tonally at odds with the plot suddenly appears and waves their cartoon cringe knockers about - there's probably a reader survey somewhere where enough teenage boys complained that the series wasn't sexy enough and an editor leaned on an artist and said, look, here's the data, this is the business.

 

The thing is, you're not going to stop teenage boys being weird and gross, but if you're the adults in the room, the editors, the Mangaka - you should be steering them through this, not reinforcing it.

 

You get everything tooled towards peoples worst instincts, in the same way that developers of mobile games shouldn't be using feedback loops to modify human behaviour to extract money from people with gambling addictions - there's a very strong current in manga and anime and Japanese games (especially JRPGs) that's been engaged for decades in the cynical pandering to the worst instincts of teenage boys. Then many of these boys grow up in to a state of arrested development still consuming this stuff, and some of them get into the industry and... down and down it spirals. The girls get drawn to look younger and younger, the storylines become more pandering, the male characters are tooled to be audience surrogates who girls throw themselves at for no apparent reason. What was once implied, becomes explicit. Everything gets grubbier and grubbier.

 

Old school Fire Emblem (NES through to DS / Wii era) was riffing on 80s/90s fantasy anime, and while it's still sexist in how female characters are limited in terms of the roles they'd be given, their appearances, body types etc - the main female characters were written as people and not sex objects or cyphers and what romance there was was age appropriate and crucially pre-written for specific characters. The games weren't presenting a cast of two dimensional female characters and telling the player "here, take your pick". Modern Fire Emblem is based on what Fantasy anime is today which is... gestures at the Crunchy Roll homepage while shaking head.

 

There are wrinkles and complications to all of this. Fire Emblem and a lot of the JRPGs that are the worst offenders for this stuff are also popular with women and girls. A lot of what's good in these games is being reconfigured and re-contextualised in indie games without the gross bits. I see very occasional call outs by reviewers and podcasters now where before there was nothing.

 

Also, I know next to nothing about Japan (although I guess more about Japan then any other country outside of Europe except America), but I'm sure loads of people there think all this is gross too. I remember reading an article about a PTA petitioning a town's tourist board to stop using an anime set in that town to promote the area because it was paedophilic.

[Mogster]

2 minutes ago, Qazimod said:

 

The "casting" of the main party was always a bit rubbish - I think it got brought up once or twice in our GOTY round-up. The guys were a diverse range of old, out of shape losers and misfits...and then you had Saeko and (the optional) Eri who were relatively lithe and attractive and "safe" designs by comparison.

That's fair, but while "safe" and boring I don't think I'd class them as problematic in the same way some of the other examples in this thread are.

[Lying Cat]

On a personal level, I just won't play anything that sexualises minors. It triggers my squick response and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

 

Many years ago, I used to work for the Leicestershire MAPPA unit, and managing the case files of the worst-of-the-worst sex offenders was my day-to-day bread and butter, and naturally these included those who had sexually assaulted children. What surprised me initially when I started the job was the number of people on our files who had never offended and had in fact approached the authorities, concerned about their urges and hoping to get support in never giving in to them. It hammered home the reality that paedophiles and the like probably didn't choose to be what they are, any more than you chose to be into whatever it is you're into.

 

I'm also aware that it's impossible to just permanently submerge any desires you might have without causing yourself serious psychological strain to the point of damaging yourself or - critically - doing something awful out of desperation. I believe it's even worse for people with those sorts of urges because they're also unable to have casual conversations and are, in effect, locked in with those feelings - which they didn't ask for. As always, being a Paedophile isn't a moral or ethical failing, acting on those urges is. It's a complex position and I struggled with it in my job for a long time as I resolved the dissonance of finding sexual crimes grotesque on one hand, whilst actually having sympathy of those who had never offended, seeking help to make sure they never do - despite knowing exactly where their urges might lead.

 

So, to the topic - the question I'm now asking myself is "would I prefer people who are into that sort of thing to be able to get some sort of release playing a video game?", and it's extremely complicated co-question "do videogames that feature sexualised, underage characters allow offenders and potential offenders to begin to normalise their urges and begin to move to a point where they're mentally prepared to offend?" Because nobody just wakes up one day and decides that they're going to commit an unspeakable crime; they move toward that point slowly, resting at stages and building up their comfort levels around the concepts.

 

So, I guess, no - I don't think this sort of media should be available. I'm not a therapist and I could be completely wrong here (if anyone wants to jump in and correct me, please do), but allowing people to sort of "self-medicate" is going to be intensely risky at best.

 

But of course, not everyone who plays these games is a sexual offender or a potential sexual offender. I understand this, but communities that normalise the sexualisation of children, even if that child-body houses a 1000 year old dragon (rendering nothing okay) do provide cover for those who have those predilections and might seize an opportunity. I'm not particularly worries about the women in these video games because they're code and don't really have feelings or an awareness of the male gaze, but the wider implications of the normalisation of that sort of thing does give me some pause for concern.

 

Apologies for perhaps an over-serious answer here.

[Jamie John]

3 minutes ago, Lying Cat said:

Apologies for perhaps an over-serious answer here.

 

Not at all - an excellent post!

[Haribokart]

The creepy peado shit being so prominent totally put me off anime type stuff, however I also play DoA6 every few months which now leans heavily into that too with super young looking characters so I am a bit of a hypocrite. Regarding the latter, when possible I play with my character choice set to random and 99% of the time am given a scantily clad girl - the whole reason I got this one was because it was marketed as not leaning into that stuff after DoA5 costume DLC (none of which I have ever bought for any game I might add) took it way too far.

[Rex Grossman]

16 minutes ago, Kryptonian said:

 

I read your original comment as a general statement rather than directed at any one in this thread

Thank you. That’s exactly how it was intended.

[Qazimod]

8 minutes ago, Mogster said:

That's fair, but while "safe" and boring I don't think I'd class them as problematic in the same way some of the other examples in this thread are.

 

True. Things get a bit more iffy when the job system changes a party member's outfit. E.g.

 

Night Queen Saeko

Idol Saeko

 

But that's a cosmetic thing which doesn't influence narrative. Thanks Japan. 🤔

[Isaac]

1 hour ago, Broker said:

I would say that the ways that Western society fetishises young girls are probably just more familiar to you. The recognisable trope of school uniforms, models routinely being teenage girls who are encouraged to work at fashions shows where they’re often naked, the day to day jokes about jailbait and girls being “legal”. 

 

Japanese girls have extremely specific skirt length requirements at school (short by western standards) and cannot wear trousers or shorts regardless of weather.

 

I don't know what content you consume or where you work but I wouldn't call jokes about jailbait or girls being 'legal' something that is 'day to day' - in my office you'd get sacked for saying anything like that. Do you work on a building site or something?

 

58 minutes ago, thesnwmn said:

 

I appreciate some of what they produce of course but my Japanese game interest is definitely limited. Mostly core Nintendo games for the most part and they're either already okay or Nintendo would absolutely change them to make them so.

 

 

The game that started this thread is a core Nintendo game (Fire Emblem). And it is one of the worst offenders in a while.

[Fry Crayola]

1 hour ago, JamesC said:

It is quite interesting how we are more desensitised to violence than we are sexual content in western society.

 

My pet theory generally was that violence in the media didn't quite reflect the reality of life as the average Joe lives it, and actual violence is widely condemned, whereas sexual content was so much more prevalent and encouraged in everyday life. We can view violence as "not normal", while objectification is "normal", and so overt sexualisation of women (and it's almost always women) is the more pressing problem.

 

These days, I'm not so sure, with the state of gun crime in America an obvious example to the contrary, and the rise (or more public face) of the alt-right. Our media both reflects and influences the cultures in which we live in, and while I don't think watching an action movie and playing Call of Duty turns someone violent, or that playing Fire Emblem makes someone a paedo, they shine an ugly light on what significant numbers of people want.

 

I think these days you could have a thread here on violence in video games and it'd be a very different read than if it cropped up during the days of Jack Thompson.

[Dig Dug]

1 hour ago, KRP said:

Xenoblade 2 character design feels closer to hentai than anything else. 

The blades in that game were designed by multiple artists, some of who are known Hentai artists.

 

On that note, the lead artist for the Etrian Odyssey games is a Lolicon artist, which caused a massive stink when he was commissioned to do art for Fire Emblem Heroes due to how he made the female characters look like children.

[KRP]

9 minutes ago, Dig Dug said:

The blades in that game were designed by multiple artists, some of who are known Hentai artists.

 

On that note, the lead artist for the Etrian Odyssey games is a Lolicon artist, which caused a massive stink when he was commissioned to do art for Fire Emblem Heroes due to how he made the female characters look like children.

Well that does make a lot of sense tbh. The thing is you can have a horny game that works - Immortality is one - there is an erotic element to the story and characterisation that doesn’t feel forced. The problem is the incidental/rote male sexual fantasy that a lot of JRPGs go for. 
 

FWIW - I had no idea that Persona was going to depict its characters in that way. All I really knew about it was that it was a 10/10 GOTY rated game. 
 

I think @JamesCis right that reviewers are worried about backlash from readers. I also think that it’s so endemic in parts of the culture that sometimes it’s hard to see the wood for the trees; reviewers would basically have to be continually raising the same objections. Not saying they shouldn’t but I’m sure that most outlets would prefer they didn’t. 

[Ferine]

At the risk of painting with a very large brush, Japanese media – or at least the majority of which that makes its way to the West – is like Logan's Run: if you're a character over 30 you might as well be dead. I can't speak to the causal relationship with the objectification of minors, but I feel like this fixation on youthful protagonists is at least a contributing factor to its perpetuation.

 

This quote from Toshihiro Nagoshi regarding Ghost of Tsushima is pretty telling:

Quote

“The protagonist [Jin] isn’t a particularly handsome lead, don’t you think? At your typical [Japanese] company, if you showed concept art for a character like him, I don’t think it would be approved.” The marketing team, he continued, would offer all this data stating why such a lead character was a bad idea, and that would be the end of a lead like Jin. Nagoshi thought it was amazing that such a protagonist was the lead character. “All this money and development time is being spent on this middle-aged dude.” He applauded the resolve to entrust things in such a character. From what Nagoshi said, it doesn’t seem like that would be possible in Japan. Perhaps he thinks game companies would prefer a younger protagonist, which is certainly more common in Japanese games.

 

The most on-the-nose example of the above is probably the original NieR, where the Japanese and Western releases were essentially the same game but with protagonists in totally different age brackets. Not being pressured – or pre-empting said pressure – to have the player character be a minor would instantly make certain games less awkward.

 

Let's take Persona as an example. You could set one of the games in a workplace, with a cast of 20-somethings, and very little would need to change in terms of structure or mechanics; sub out lessons for meetings, teachers for managers, etc. It would totally re-contextualise the dating aspects to be more palatable, though. It wouldn't solve the wider issue of gross sexualisation – see the tone-deaf treatment of Ann in P5, who's introduced as a victim of sexual harassment who you are then encouraged to ogle throughout the game – but I'll take progress where I can get it.

[gossi the dog]

27 minutes ago, Fry Crayola said:

 

My pet theory generally was that violence in the media didn't quite reflect the reality of life as the average Joe live sit, and actual violence is widely condemned, whereas sexual content was so much more prevalent and encouraged in everyday life. We can view violence as "not normal", while objectification is "normal", and so overt sexualisation of women (and it's almost always women) is the more pressing problem.

 

These days, I'm not so sure, with the state of gun crime in America an obvious example to the contrary, and the rise (or more public face) of the alt-right. Our media both reflects and influences the cultures in which we live in, and while I don't think watching an action movie and playing Call of Duty turns someone violent, or that playing Fire Emblem makes someone a paedo, they shine an ugly light on what significant numbers of people want.

 

I think these days you could have a thread here on violence in video games and it'd be a very different read than if it cropped up during the days of Jack Thompson.

Yes. Anyone who played the Last of Us for more than an hour and didn’t turn it off in disgust is clearly a psychopath. 

[SeanR]

1 hour ago, Anne Summers said:

Fascinating insight Sean, I'm really grateful you took the time to share it with us. It shows that you are highly respectful of the time the OP has taken to raise this important issue to our attention, that you have put so much effort into addressing the key points they made.

im just saying they put a lot of the key points in the thread title, and it broke safari on iOS.

 

Thanks for taking time to point out that that is a thing that I did, and further derail the discussion. I hope someone pos’s your post, and makes it all worthwhile.

 

[Strafe]

I don’t really play JRPG’s so thankfully don’t get exposed to this sort of stuff. Xenoblade 2 and it’s juggs magazine blades were an embarrassment that made no sense whatsoever in being there but I got bored of that reasonably quickly.

 

I love the Bayonetta series but I don’t view it as exploitative. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there’s intended titillation but it doesn’t do anything for me. I suppose the character is sexy but written like it’s her choice and she owns it (I realise it’s written by a man obviously), which makes her pretty cool, sort of. I don’t read too much into it, I just find her a great character, not a lust object.

 

I suppose I have some mild concerns about the Bayonetta prequel out in March given that she’s a kid in it. I’m hoping that the evolution from lost child in a forest with a cuddly toy to dominatrix esque naked dancing adult isn’t something they feel the need to cover in the game.

[Broker]

55 minutes ago, Lying Cat said:

On a personal level, I just won't play anything that sexualises minors. It triggers my squick response and it makes me feel uncomfortable.

 

Many years ago, I used to work for the Leicestershire MAPPA unit, and managing the case files of the worst-of-the-worst sex offenders was my day-to-day bread and butter, and naturally these included those who had sexually assaulted children. What surprised me initially when I started the job was the number of people on our files who had never offended and had in fact approached the authorities, concerned about their urges and hoping to get support in never giving in to them. It hammered home the reality that paedophiles and the like probably didn't choose to be what they are, any more than you chose to be into whatever it is you're into.

 

I'm also aware that it's impossible to just permanently submerge any desires you might have without causing yourself serious psychological strain to the point of damaging yourself or - critically - doing something awful out of desperation. I believe it's even worse for people with those sorts of urges because they're also unable to have casual conversations and are, in effect, locked in with those feelings - which they didn't ask for. As always, being a Paedophile isn't a moral or ethical failing, acting on those urges is. It's a complex position and I struggled with it in my job for a long time as I resolved the dissonance of finding sexual crimes grotesque on one hand, whilst actually having sympathy of those who had never offended, seeking help to make sure they never do - despite knowing exactly where their urges might lead.

 

So, to the topic - the question I'm now asking myself is "would I prefer people who are into that sort of thing to be able to get some sort of release playing a video game?", and it's extremely complicated co-question "do videogames that feature sexualised, underage characters allow offenders and potential offenders to begin to normalise their urges and begin to move to a point where they're mentally prepared to offend?" Because nobody just wakes up one day and decides that they're going to commit an unspeakable crime; they move toward that point slowly, resting at stages and building up their comfort levels around the concepts.

 

So, I guess, no - I don't think this sort of media should be available. I'm not a therapist and I could be completely wrong here (if anyone wants to jump in and correct me, please do), but allowing people to sort of "self-medicate" is going to be intensely risky at best.

 

But of course, not everyone who plays these games is a sexual offender or a potential sexual offender. I understand this, but communities that normalise the sexualisation of children, even if that child-body houses a 1000 year old dragon (rendering nothing okay) do provide cover for those who have those predilections and might seize an opportunity. I'm not particularly worries about the women in these video games because they're code and don't really have feelings or an awareness of the male gaze, but the wider implications of the normalisation of that sort of thing does give me some pause for concern.

 

Apologies for perhaps an over-serious answer here.

I suppose a related question is whether it is less harmful that a lot of Japan’s sexualised women are cartoons, drawings or 3D models, where the majority of the West’s sexualised women are real women being filmed and photographed actually wearing those outfits and doing those things. 

[Qazimod]

1 hour ago, Ferine said:

Let's take Persona as an example. You could set one of the games in a workplace, with a cast of 20-somethings, and very little would need to change in terms of structure or mechanics; sub out lessons for meetings, teachers for managers, etc.

 

Persona actually sort-of did this already in Eternal Punishment. You play as Maya (a supporting party member in Innocent Sin but the lead here) and are established as a 20something working as a reporter for a teen magazine. And along the way a lot of the party members you recruit are adults with established professions - a 20something police detective, a 30something renowned extortionist, etc. The school does still feature as a core backdrop to the narrative, but it's more about discovering things in the school and talking to characters for information.

 

The only "problem" is that it's the pre-3 gameplay which doesn't have all of the modern battle systems etc that were established in the PS2 game. But it would be awesome if they revisited that kind of environment and updated the gameplay to suit the patience and attention span of today’s gamers.

[SeanR]

I had the other half ask me to turn off an 8-ball game on my Pandora. Some Japanese pool game where a young woman reclines in a bikini changing pose after each (good) shot. 
 

I was that engrossed in the game of pool that I didn’t even notice it. Mind you I can’t recall he name of the game either, couldn’t have been that good.

 

but it does seem that tittilation as a performance reward in video games is unnecessary. Like Qix clones that have the saucy photo reveals.

 

play games or look at naked ladies. Why does one follow the other as a fundamentally Japanese phenomenon?

 

and then I remembered Sam fox strip poker…

[thesnwmn]

59 minutes ago, Isaac said:

The game that started this thread is a core Nintendo game (Fire Emblem). And it is one of the worst offenders in a while.

 

Maybe. I'm a very wider audience Nintendo game. If it's not Mario and friends, Zelda, Pokémon or Animal Crossing then it's "not my Nintendo".

 

I mean on of them isn't even first party Nintendo developed. But that's my Nintendo reality.

[Fry Crayola]

42 minutes ago, gossi the dog said:

Yes. Anyone who played the Last of Us for more than an hour and didn’t turn it off in disgust is clearly a psychopath. 

 

If you took that from what I've said, then there's a misunderstanding. If that's your opinion, then we're in disagreement.