Tropes vs Women in Video Games: Ms. Male Chararacter"

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I believe she says at the beginning of every video she has ever uploaded that you can enjoy a game and at the same time be critical of some of it's aspects.



She doesn't allow comments on her YouTube videos because back when she did, she got a lot of sexist comments on them.


Unless you say or do something misandric, you're not a feminazi.

isnt she just trolling for attention/ video views?

As for the rest. I think the sex being male for a lot of computer games.... its just as default. I dont think anything has ever been meant by it.

how about that description of a computer game from waynes world, as its on my mind right now.


Zantar is a gelatinous cube

that eats warriors in a village.

If you eat a chieftain,

you go up a level.

Beauty is, you can't

get to the next level,

kids keep coughing up quarters.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4MBZnaz4CM[/youtube]


i dont think much should be made from any sex in a computer game. None of the characters are anything more than 2d plot devices to put some kind of context on what you're doing within the game. Its more like, we have to put a character in because its the done thing, so they give it a name and make it a character because its just the natural thing to do for a human person making a computer game. Add some character details, a background, a sex,, which is obviously going to be male because its the default when your audience is male. thats all there is to.

I dunno, its just one of those things where people assign meaning where there was never any to begin with. I hate people bringing politics into everything .

dont even start with sexual orientation for a computer game character. If its not mentioned we can call it undetermined and leave it at that, gay people sure as hell dont all wear pink and talk in a squeaky voice so almost every character thats ever not had it stated he's straight could easily be gay.

Last edited by woodster on 04 Dec 2013, 10:17 am, edited 1 time in total.

My female shephard wants a sexy-hexy male stripper, to waste her money on. If you think thats so horrible political, I cant help you. ^^ There is a whole galaxy with a sexy-hexy female race, having a 4 century horny phase, but I dont get even one lousy malestripper and have to wait for two lousy cutscenes in the whole series to see a sexy halfnaked male ass.

About the cheese, I prefer french ones.

That's still an ad hominem and it still has nothing to do with the points that she is making.



She is making and producing the videos that she promised that she would make on the Kickstarter page. Therefore it is not a scam because her backers are getting exactly what they payed for. How is this hard to understand? If you did not back the project, then it's got nothing to do with you. Also, she did not ask for $160,000, she only asked for $6000. It was due to the harassment that she received after the mere mention of what her project was about that got many people to sympathise with her and therefore donate to her as a form of protest.



Actually, the gaming industry does need it's customers to tell them what they want. Game publishers are sometimes actually out of touch with reality with respect to who are buying their games. The fact that modern games are often still marketed to the same demographic as they were 20 or 30 years ago, despite the change in demographics is not always the fault of the game developers either. Game developers are adapting to the new gamer demographic of gamers over 32 by having more mature content and sometimes want to include stuff that appeal more to female gamers but sometimes the publishers actually tell them not to include features or reduce them so that they can still market them to 10 - 15 year old boys. Also, if I buy a game, I have a right to be critical of it's content and telling just gamers not to buy the games are unhelpful if the majority of the games or even virtually all of them have the things that they do not like. The games can never improve either if we don't tell them what we like and we don't like, that's the whole point of criticism.



Yes, despite the fact that I think that there are some valid criticisms of Anita Sarkeesian's videos and despite the fact that I've made them in the past, the very fact that I'm defending her now, both against harassment as well as just BS rebuttals, just means that I want to sleep with her. I don't even live the country as her, grow the f**k up. It seems like you're the one wanting to get laid and you're just projecting.

Whose fault is that exactly? Perhaps the people who started harassing her with rape and death threats after she proposed the Kickstarter project? If it wasn't for them then we wouldn't have this issue. I started this thread precisely to have a rational discussion of her work. There are some legitimate criticisms, however there's so much BS from her haters as well that takes almost forever to sift through all the BS in order to find the legitimate criticisms.



I disagree. I don't agree with everything she says and she does make some mistakes, sometimes specific details about games that she may not of played or not completed but I find that some of her points are quite valid.



As per the linked to article, yes, I do think that it's quite unfair to call the whole community misogynistic, despite the amount of harassment that she received. Let's not forget that most of her backers were actually gamers themselves who donated to the project in protest of the amount harassment and threats of violence that she received in response for simply proposing it. I actually find your statement about ignoring her quite hilarious, considering that this thread has now got 6 pages in just a few days with me hardy needing to post anything in it at all. I have actually posted another thread in PPR only a few days before this one and it hardly got any replies, so now it's buried and pushed back to the second page of the PPR forum. Yet, simply because I mentioned Anita Sarkeesian's, this thread now has 6 pages due to you and Sephardic-Male not ignoring it.

I've watched the whole video and he hasn't debunked anything. All he's managed to do really is miss every single one of her points.

Game publishers are scared of even allowing the developers to include scenes of female protagonists initiating sexual activity with male characters. They're scared that will set off homophobic feelings in male teenage gamers. The fact that Mass Effect at least allowed male romance options for female Shephard as well as gay male romance options for male Shephard still means that the game industry is getting there though. This stuff is partly the reason why it's useful to have discussions about the kinds of points that Anita Sarkeesian makes.

Video games are such a niche market, if there was a significant enough demand for more female focused games then there would be more. I don't really get the point of Sarkeesian's videos, what does she want? I know she wants video game developers to heed more attention to their female demographic which is fine but her digging thru the entire history of video games comes off as a not so implicit attack on the entire medium of video games and the people that play them as misogynists. I don't know what she all advocates but maybe it's just an overreaction due the to the way other feminists and members of the PC police usually conduct themselves toward people or things they personally disagree with(banning, firing, censoring, silencing) Video games are still an artistic medium, nobody has the right to censor or force their own agendas on to it.

Obviously Sarkeesian isn't a scholar or held to any academic standard, what she's doing is essentially just click bait, people seek out these topics and videos to debate and have their views heard. I don't think many people watch her videos passively, that's the whole gist of blogging and being a youtube star. I don't really care that she apparently pocketed something like $154,000 of her supporter's money, I'm not sure those people that donated to her knew that were going to be paying for shoes and steak dinners regardless of their abuse she faced on the internet but as said about fool and their money.

BTW, abuse on the internet isn't really a big deal. People manipulate it for attention, it's not hard to anticipate what will stir up the internet. I don't think anybody has ever received real harm from these online harassers. People say nasty stuff in literally almost comment section on the internet on pretty much anything, that's just the way it is unfortunately. \

Our culture has become way too influenced by bloggers and other attention seekers, some are great but most aren't. The ones that actually make money get paid by the click and have a quota of work they need to produce. It's a lot easier making a post about why such & such proves why God is or isn't real and anticipating the ****storm it will create than to actually produce something informative, creative, or whatever.

bolded to help you understand the point.

What's a female focused game? Women play games in all genres, even first-person shooters. Also, movies and TV shows are an artistic medium but doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about how women or anyone else is portrayed in them either.



And what's wrong with debating the issues that she presents in her videos?

I'll repeat, Sarkeesian received zero legitimate rape or death threats. Guthrie (one of her supporters) allegedly received "thousands of rape and death threats" on twitter, and yet only one person was arrested and subsequently charged because he was in breach of a Canadian 'peace bond'. Sarkeesian clearly did not feel threatened by any anonymous abuse that came her way. Remember that Sarkeesian herself referred to the posters of "threats" as "trolls", which sums up precisely how little threat she felt. Amongst the posts she labels "threats", are a bunch of harmless if ill-directed jokes about 'making sandwiches' and 'going back to the kitchen'. By polarising the audience, she achieved exactly what she wanted, and the entire thing has been blown monstrously out of proportion.

In reality, 4chan (who the fudge takes 4chan seriously?) users - who are most definitely not representative of any gamer with a mental age higher than their shoe size - were largely responsible for the 'cyber-terrorism'. This was not a worldwide campaign of abuse against women (or indeed, woman), rather it was the stupid response of an immature community with a batshit crazy concept of what passes for 'humour'.

What I find appalling is the disgraceful manner in which any detractor of Sarkeesian is automatically tarred with the same brush, regardless how balanced their criticism of her work might be. It doesn't matter how many idiotic things have been said on either side of this debate, as with all 'journalism', Sarkeesian's work should stand or fall based on its merits. By turning it into a polarised media circus, this has been rendered near impossible.



Which points do you agree with? Please give details as I'm sure this would be a much more productive topic of debate.



Let us also remember that 'gamer' covers a massive range of different people from different backgrounds, despite still having the connotation of "spotty geek in darkened bedroom" attached to it.



Sarkeesian didn't create this thread, ignoring it does not constitute ignoring Sarkeesian. The subject has been put on the PPR table and so those of us who have an opinion on the topic are going to discuss it. I don't have a policy of ignoring posts on WP, especially when the subject matter touches on my personal interests. There have been a lot of active threads on PPR recently, so it's not surprising that some have been lost in the mire. Alternatively, it's possible that the other post wasn't interesting enough to inspire further comment.

As for Sephardic-Male, while I find his posting 'style' to be abrasive, hostile and incredibly badly written, he has made a number of valid points. Sadly they've been neutralised by his combative approach to dissenting views.

Gamers, if you don't want to be seen by a stereotype, stop acting like one!

[img][800:474]http://manboobz.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/the-berenstain-bears-no-girls-allowed-e1341612225753.jpg[/img]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qn6Isg0bmVU[/youtube]

A genuine threat would, at the very least, be required to be found threatening by the target. In this case, it has been widely documented through video evidence that Sarkeesian herself dismisses such threats as "stupid trolling". A genuine threat would presumably lead to a police investigation and subsequent arrests. Nobody has been arrested for making death threats against Sarkeesian.

Despite her claims, it has already been shown that the harassment Sarkeesian received through 4chan and (correct me if I'm wrong) reddit existed prior to her creating the crowdfunding video. They are not directly attributable to "the gaming community", whatever demographic is supposedly meant by this.



So because a minority of people who play video games behave stupidly and therefore anything Sarkeesian posts is above critical reproach? Is this minority representative of gamers? Because that's what's happening here. There are numerous reasons for socially well-adjusted gamers to give a s**t about Sarkeesian's, the first being that her videos are ill-informed, poorly researched, politically (and financially) motivated codswallop. Sarkeesian, by her own admission is NOT a video game fan. Her goal is not the improvement of the medium, which is progressing nicely all by itself.



Didn't you just write a paragraph against ingrained ideas about social stereotypes?

lets take a break and have fun with costumes




some pictures from dragoncon2013