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

Post Reply New Topic

Why is there a need to distinguish gender at all then? Pac-Man did not have a gender until Ms Pac-Man was created, so why not just leave it as gender neutral?

From the Kickstarter pager for this documentary:



So, how exactly does it stereotype all gamers again? Also, it hasn't failed because as you can see from the Kickstarter page, the project was funded:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1319761157/gtfo

How did Pac-Man not have a gender? The character's name is Pac-Man.

Ehh. Not quite. No characters are actually damseled in SC2 - they merely continue the plot line from the SC1 games where characters were. I don't think they're necessarily the same thing - one is a choice by game developers, one is the continuation of a story (10+ years later) that they probably weren't involved in writing to begin with, and getting stuck with it's canon.



I disagree. Well, not in the strictest moral sense that "killing innocent people is bad", but in the sense that video games, like other media, have creative license to suspend, distort, and bend our concept of morality in service of a story. After all, setting up a scene where you're attacking and killing security guards to break into the headquarters of this evil company is extremely immoral, because the security guards aren't complicit in the company's actions - they're just doing a job. If that happened in real life, that person would very obviously be arrested and put in jail for murdering a bunch of people. But we suspend morals in media because the hero's journey (and in the case of video games, gameplay mechanics) need to be challenging.

Similarly, society's demands for a hero mean that some kind of great sacrifice must be made to create the hero - and this sometimes means that the hero must sacrifice someone he cares about to preserve his life, or to "save" the character from unspeakable suffering (think zombie movies or games). The violence isn't celebrated - rather, the heroes don't want to take the action - and it's meant that way.

Because studies showed that people of all genders preferred playing Ms. Pac-Man games over regular Pac-Man - even though it's basically exactly the same game.

Like you said in an earlier post, people want to identify with the characters that they play, and people would generally prefer playing games that expose the humanity of the protagonist, even if the character themselves isn't human.

Isn't a better question, "why not?"? Why is distinguishing between males and females intrinsically bad?

Incidentally, I plan to respond to the lengthier posts tomorrow. It's been rather a long day, and appealing as continuing this discussion is it cannot compare with the seductive siren song of my pillow.

It isn't - in fact, I was arguing that it's intrinsically good.

Nopes, its simply stupid. You simply should focus on different player types that are existing, within girls and boys. So which type of players, do we want to attract with a certain game? - And when you have decided to do so, then you should simply care, that you give both genders of those player type the same possibility of enjoying the game.

I like tactical games, I like RPGs, I like MMORPGs, I like real time strategy. I dont need an Starcraft - "Barbie edition". ^^ As well as I dont need an "Dragon Age - Barbie edition". It´s only about minor stuff, as example the weird armor and charakter design in some RPGs, specially J-RPGs. There simply needs to be a bit more variety to choose from. You dont need to produce different type of games, only that players that actually like their character to be an anorexic half naked 12 year old girl with monsterboobs, wearing a chainstring into battle, and players that maybe like a bit more realistic possibilities are happy.

Just as the thing that disturbs me in Mass Effect is not, that male players are given the opportunity to go into a nightclub to see some sexy dancers, but the programmers simply need to get into their mind, that males can as well dance sexy.

Distinguishing between sexes is simply stupid, because there may be statistical trends according to a gender, but thats statistic. 60% of Sim players being female and 40% of Sim players being male, does not make Sims a female game. And 80% of BF4 players being male and 20% being female, does not make it a male game. Its simply a real good tactical shooter game, and the only thing you should focus on, is not doing stupid s**t, that might annoy fans of good tactical shooter, without any need because of their gender. Good example for producer doing so, was Resident Evil, where you have the ability to acquire a second skin cloth. Chris Redfield - cool bad ass looking second skin. The female char: A golden Latex suit. O_o *head --> desk* The responsible skin creator, sure would appreciate a golden latex boot in his butt.

That's not what he's saying. What he meant was that giving a character a gender makes it appear more human, and thus more relatable for the typical person, regardless of their gender.

And I was agreeing with you

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee8RgbS9ESE[/youtube]

Her argument can be summed up in three main points:

1) The implication in Anita's videos is that the game developers that made these games are sexist and/or misogynist.

2) There aren't a lot of female perspectives in games because women aren't interested in becoming game developers.

3) There's no discrimination against female developers in indie games

So, lets take this point-by-point.

First, I do believe that Anita's videos imply that the creators of these games are sexist, but I don't really believe that's her intention. I believe, in the videos that she's released so far, that she is merely trying to describe the mechanics of the trope, why the trope is harmful and provide examples - but I believe she's tabling the larger discussion about how employing these tropes influences the overall measure of whether a game displays gender bias or not - and whether that gender bias is intentional or unintentional. As others have pointed out, and I'm pointing out again, the mere inclusion of a gender trope does not automatically make a sexist game - while I would argue that all sexist games employ one or more gender tropes as a mechanism of that sexism. Again, context is critically important when examining gender bias in games as a whole.

Secondly, I believe the argument that "women's perspectives are under-represented in games because women aren't involved in the creative process" is true, but I think there's a lot more to the story there. To say that "some jobs just don't appeal to women" is to be somewhat dismissive. There are definitely a ton of women who are artists, and there are a ton of women who are into video game art, and there are a ton of women who are into 3d/interactive art. So, it should follow that there would be a bunch of women who would want to be character modelers for video games - but we're not seeing that in reality. The same can be said for other areas of video game development - there are female writers creating stories, etc.

Finally, I can't really comment on her observations on the lack of discrimination against women developers in indie games. She's sharing her perspective in her environment, and I'm absolutely grateful to her for sharing her perspective, and I'm glad that she doesn't see discrimination toward her. However, there are other peoples' perspectives that share a vastly different experience working in development studios - and their perspective is just as valid. I think the two can reconcile pretty easily, and the reality may very well be that indie development is much more welcoming of women than "mainstream" video game studios (and that would certainly fit my expectations).

Actually, Chris Metzen was responsible for both the stories of Starcraft 1 and Broodwar as well as the overarching story of Starcraft 2 and he definitely took the Starcraft 2 story where he planned to take it already at the time that Broodwar was released in 1999, especially with regards to the hybrid/Amon storyline. There's even a secret mission in Broodwar (called Dark Origin) that partly reveals that plot line. I do agree with you that Kerrigan is not really a damsel though and I only mentioned it because one of the complaints about the Wings of Liberty story by some Starcraft fans in 2010 was the accusation that they had turned Kerrigan into a damsel in distress, thou I disagreed with it. In fairness though, it is true that Raynor's main motivation at the end of Wing's of Liberty was still to rescue Kerrigan so as to get his old girlfriend back, so they made the case that she was damseled on that basis.



Just to clarify, I was talking about main characters with respect to something that seems little justified within the context of the story. I remember there that there was some controversy with regards to Lara Croft killing security guards in the second Tomb Raider game, though I didn't play any of the Tomb Raider games, so I'm not sure if it was that one. Then again, people like security guards in that situation are not main characters of the story that you identify with anyway and that was partly down to gameplay mechanics. When it comes to taking an innocent life for the purposes of self-preservation, then I still think that could be considered morally justified. For a real world example, think about situations regarding expeditions climbing mount Everest, like when one person slips and falls into a ditch while attached to the rope and the other person attached to the rope has no choice but to cut it or both of of you end up dying. In fact, when I think about it more clearly, some of the examples when you are forced to kill male characters, like the examples were shown in that video that you posted earlier, it was because the player character was put in a situation where he had no other choice. However, the difference is that in the clip that Anita Sarkeesian showed of that one game in her video on the topic, the play character is forced to kill the girlfriend that he was trying to rescue with a final shot, not because he had no other choice, but to "end her suffering" and then she even thanks him for doing so. That scene makes me cringe every time I see it, not only the clip in her video, but even when I watch that same scene in a let's play taken within the context of the rest of the cutscene.

I skipped a lot of reading in this thread, so can one of you summarize what ending someone's suffering has to do with gender?

It was something that I initially said in reply to Adifferentname. I initially spoke about the euthanised damsel or "mercy killing" variant of the damsel in distress trope in games, where the player character ends up being forced to kill the damsel the he was trying to rescue and which Sarkeesian mentioned in one of her videos. I then tried to explain why I found that distasteful and from there it went on to talking about how killing an innocent character can be justified in a fictional story. The specific issue I was talking is linked to gender because it was initially about a variant of or mixed up with the Damsel in Distress trope.

This is usually a trend in Japanese series, movies, and games when it comes to both male and female characters. Why is it distasteful when the person is a woman, particularly a so-called damsel in distress, that is being killed/sacrificed?