Damsel in Distress - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

I think the baseline has to be established of what exactly is a negative portrayal of women, full stop, regardless of the medium, and once that's achieved evaluate videogames to see how they, as a format, measure up in terms of the norm within entertainment.
Much of big film portrays women within narrow tropes, certainly in the normal summer fare, yes you can take in something a bit more cerebral and see even more tropes, women in crisis, women in the firing line, women as mothers/daughters/lovers etc.
Books, TV, same thing, lazy easy to digest mediums come to represent all their characters, women or not, in terms of simple tropes, the grizzled cop, the naive waitress, the beauty behind a pair of glasses just waiting for her prince to come, the man on the edge, the same crap here there and everywhere.
So why would games be so different?

While it would be useful to have 'baselines' as you put it, Im not sure that its necessary to really compare so much against other media.
Sarkeesian isnt just criticising video games - she has videos on other tropes-vs-women, too.

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Lazy games production and publishing, by companies mostly staffed by men, targeting a mostly male audience, and you are surprised by the archetypes cropping up again and again?
Lara Croft is an easy one, the bigger insult to our intelligence is that she is a rip off of the Indiana Jones tales, couple that with unlikely bodily proportions and it's a mess, what saves it is the level design, what nearly sank it was the controls!
Alyx Vance, much more interesting, how easy it would have been to make her a damsel in distress, with Gordon out to save her again and again, but no, she is driven, clever, Gordons equal in almost everyway, realistically portrayed as a hero by both the writers, her voice actor and those that designed her character model.

I like your post, focusing back on the positive - its important to remember there's a lot of positive too.

Im looking forward to Sarkeesians video on positive characterisations in games.

There are positive characterizations from way back - games like Final Fantasy 6 come to mind.
I think games have a lot of potential to be way better than in the past.

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Sadly, we are also caught with those "auteurs" who convince us they are serious story tellers with something to say about geopolitics, before giving us cutscenes of ladies clad in tight outfits and encouraging the audience to zoom in on their person, I'm looking at you Metal Gear Solid 4!

Theres a thread somewhere on boards where I spent literally pages giving out about how badly written MGS4 was, and how I could not understand everyone raving about it...

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Double Dragon? A poor representation of women? It has a poor representation of just about every character in there, from the macho bullsh1t heroes to the racially stereotyped enemies.
Take it as a creature of it's time, together with early 80's exploitation flicks like The Warriors, see much positive female role models in there?
TV the same of the day, George and Mildred? Terry and June?

Agreed.

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

Modern gaming is transforming characterisation in general, with RPG's leading the way, from the aforementioned Mass Effect 2&3 to Skyrim, you can choose who to be, regardless of sex, race or even species!

I really enjoyed the mass effect series - you could find flaws, sure, but there's a lot of really good stuff in there, I thought.

Similarly with Dragon Age.

CiDeRmAn wrote: »

If you focus on examples of poor female representation within big budget titles, you are going to be unsurpised to find them fulfilling your expectations, Call of Duty:MW is full of that crap, but that has more to say about the 13 year old kids playing it, I'm not saying it's right, but it is understandable.
Games for the slightly more grown up, Left 4 Dead for example, has a foursome of women, men, mixed races and so on, each as capable as the other, with different attributes, none with an overall advantage, same with it's sequel. This represents the very antithesis of lazy game development, with balance and a welcome inversion of the typical horror female trope included.

The future surely holds more improvements in the portrayal of women, as time has progressed, Rebecca Chambers excluded, we have seen female protagonists and antagonists better written and designed as more than two dimensional stereotypes.
From Eternal Darkness to the recent Tomb Raider reboot, from Beyond Good&Evil to Mirrors Edge, we see games moving forward, even normally macho havens like Gears of War has portrayed women as more than rescue fodder for the first time.

So, can we move on from this now?
Is Bayonetta really poor female character? Reality is hardly the titles raison d'etre is it?
Lollipop Chainsaw on the other hand, let's just say that no responsibility can be taken for the japanese approach to female games characters, they are well weird, good thing no one bought it!

Just looked up Lollipop Chainsaw; very strange :-)

I have to say, at the same time, I like the increase in strange or surreal games - as an aside from the female characterisation issue - increasing diversity and range of risky games is a good thing to shake up the medium as a whole.

I'm amazed that noone's mentioned Alyx Vance as an example of a strong female character yet.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Yes it's a male dominated industry but then again it's because women aren't studying game design or want to work in the games development industry and really that's due to a negative attitude and view that women have of videogames.

I studied computer science with an eye towards videogame design for a bit. I love videogames very much. One of our two alternating second year programming lecturers was notorious for his belief that girls can't code. His attitude was clearly evident in the fact that in the room full of students, the ten or so females got a disproportionate amount of hassle when it came to new coding concepts or problems. Even the lads noticed it, and revelled in it - if somebody was going to be asked a tough question and get a hard time when they got it wrong, it was going to be one of the girls. Eventually, it became routine that the girls would avoid the lectures they knew he was involved in and do their own study, placing them at an obvious disadvantage when it came to exam time. In other words, his belief that girls aren't natural programmers was ultimately self fulfilling - it created such a passive aggressively hostile environment that they didn't want to be involved. He "won."

And that's not an isolated anecdote. Women are, still, a minority in the gaming industry, and while an element of that is indeed likely because there is a perception that "games aren't for girls" - the industry itself is still doing its damnedest besides to squeeze that minority even further. Just as with TV and movies, fewer women behind the screen makes for fewer women on it - and fewer again being represented in any meaningful, useful context.

The presence and quality of female characters in lead roles, lead roles that aren't directly reliant on other male authority characters, serve as distinct characters rather than bouncy boobsy baubles is actually declining. Again, the trajectory of Jill Valentine is a sad example of that. The new, jiggly titted Lightning is another. Lara Croft is a rare reversal of the trend.

Women compose upwards of 40% of the online videogame market and that number's going up - but you'd never know it from the marketing, which either clearly prioritises males or even aims at them to an exclusionary extent. Yorkie style marketing.

We keep being told, too, by industry idiots that "women don't sell" in videogames, but... based on what? Even considering how few female-led videogames there are out there, that statement doesn't actually seem to be backed up by anything tangible. It's a convenient excuse that sounds nice and rational and objective, but drill down into it and there doesn't actually seem to be any discernable relationship between female leads and IP successes at all. Yes, most of the big sellers are male-led - but most videogames period are male led, so that means SFA unless you weight it against those qualifying factors. It's a mantra that seems to have taken such a deep root that nobody ever really questions it, nobody ever really thinks too hard about it.

What we do have numbers to support is in marketing - “Games with a female only protagonist, got half the spending of female optional, and only 40 percent of the marketing budget of male-led games. Less than that, actually,” Zatkin said.

"With under 30 games with exclusively female protagonists, and those games receiving much smaller marketing budgets than games with variable genders or male leads, it's hard to draw any conclusions about the impact of gender on sales or reviews. "

A quote from that Kotaku article sums the problem there neatly -

@smgrissom

#1reasonwhy Because the metrics team was shocked to discover that girls liked our game at all. Weren't even trying for that "demographic"

The videogame community, like many other arms of the entertainment industry, still has this weird psychological barrier where it views women as an optional, niche demographic. A nice bonus. Instead of what they are - 50% of their maximum potential paying public. 50%. It's absolute madness for somebody in a commercial arena to treat half the wallets waiting for them as an afterthought. Madness.

Male viewers and players often don't see the problem just because they aren't tuned to see that "absence". Just as I, as a white person, am not always aware of the surreal lack of anybody of colour on something like Friends. A closer example of that would be how male viewers and reviewers hardly ever notice or comment on the giant reality failure at the heart of Modern Family that seems absolutely bizarre to female viewers, for instance, or how shocked they tend to be about how few movies pass the Bechdel test.

It is absolutely bananas that a game series featuring over one hundred playable characters over ten years can feature only one female - nine years ago, btw - without that having long ago firing up the absurdity siren all over the landscape. To me, that just goes to show how conditioned we are to accept it, to the point that we don't even notice how crazy it is anymore. Meanwhile...

The commonly accepted wisdom about videogaming and women is frequently false and often self fulfilling, but it's so often repeated that people treat it as true. That's not necessarily "hating" women in itself, it's just an unwillingness to think about it. And hey, it's kind of a bummer to think about, I get it. And that's not a diss on men, but maybe instead of automatically adopting a defensive position and trying to find reasons why she's wrong, it might be worth thinking about where she might have a point.

Instead of saying "Well, videogames aren't the only market guilty of it, the effect probably isn't that bad!", and putting our energy into brushing it off as an issue, maybe we could just hold our hands up, agree that it's Bad Thing, and start thinking about where videogaming could start taking steps to sort its own gaff out rather than running to shore up the barricades in its defence.