Damsel in Distress - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

deathrider wrote: »

Maybe it's because it's late and my brain ain't functioning right, buy I really can't think of any leading ladies that are just there to be eye candy. Who exactly are we talking about here?

Ms PACman

Monkeykube wrote: »

As many people have said the argument has been made over and over again. I can assure you that I have killed and knocked out lots of ladies in video games over the last twenty odd years without any adverse effects in real life. If people have underlying psychological problems is this not just another way of finding a scapegoat in games. It was "video nasties" as they were called in the 80's that were a great evil of the time. Sick of it now and no place for it here, just my opinion of course.

Since the first episode covers retro games, and can't see why it didn't belong here. I reckon you're right about it simply being another scapegoat though.

Monkeykube wrote: »

As many people have said the argument has been made over and over again. I can assure you that I have killed and knocked out lots of ladies in video games over the last twenty odd years without any adverse effects in real life.

While I would guess it probably hasn't, you don't actually know that it hasn't had any adverse effects on you. You might know that it hasn't caused you to be violent to women or anything like that (I hope so) but that doesn't mean it hasn't adversely affected you. Even if you did know it hasn't affected you, that doesn't mean it hasn't affected other people.

Monkeykube wrote: »

If people have underlying psychological problems is this not just another way of finding a scapegoat in games. It was "video nasties" as they were called in the 80's that were a great evil of the time.

Yes, its a big problem, people trying to lay the blame for bad actions on single factors. Things like video games which were new, and poorly understood, and mainly played by younger people, made easy targets.

Scapegoating is bad.

But Sarkeesian is not scapegoating games in her videos.

She's just pointing out that they certain tropes, which are over used in them, might be having negative effects, and that we should do better.

Monkeykube wrote: »

Sick of it now and no place for it here, just my opinion of course.

Honestly, that sounds like you are just trying to close down discussion because you disagree with it, or find it uncomfortable.

Dan_Solo wrote: »

I see the presenter of those videos is wearing lipstick and ear-rings.
So she's basically tarted up just to get people more interested in her, exactly the same as females in computer games (and most of the media) are.
I'm afraid you can't make attempts at looking good yourself and then moan when media products do the same thing.

1) Wearing lipstick and ear-rings doesnt mean she's trying to sexualise herself in her videos. She might be doing it for some personal preference.

2) You don't know whether or not she's doing it to make people more interested in her. Assuming that just because a woman is wearing lipstick and ear-rings, that they are 'tarted up' to make people interested in them is kind of strange. Yes, there's a connection; but thats not a fair assumption.

3) Anyway, its not the same as female characters in computer games. Sarkeesian is a real person. She chose to look like that. Because she's an actual person, she has the ability to make choices for herself. Even if you believe she set out to sexualise herself by wearing lipstick, that was a choice she made as an individual. She wasn't being exploited by cynical character designers, for marketing ends. Video game characters on the other hand don't freely chose to look sexy (because they dont make choices because they aren't real). Anyway, not that there's even a problem with sexy looking video game characters; its only a problem when they are commonly exploited to sell video games, and when that becomes a trend, to the absence of other more real characters.

4) Finally, what she looks like doesn't undermine her argument. No matter what she is like personally, that doesn't make her argument wrong.

ancapailldorcha wrote: »

I've been playing video games for as long as I can remember and I find these videos to be a little condescending. Yes, the damsel in distress is overused and Anita does make some valid points. Then she ruins it by implying that men are so stupid that their behavior would be influenced by games.

I don't think its about stupidity. I don't think I'm stupid, but I do think I can be subtly influenced by the cultural norms around me - even now, as a full adult, with some education in how persuasion and marketing works.



Again, like, the point of the videos, as I understand it, is not that any one thing individually is bad.

I think sexy characters in entertainment have a place.

The argument that Sarkeesian is making, as I see it, is more subtle, but more powerful, than that simply a) video games cause specific bad thing X, or b) specific video game Y has a bad depiction of women.

The argument thats worth considering, is that video games, as a medium, as a whole, in the large scale, don't offer particularly good depictions of females.


If you were an alien, and all you did was played human video games, you'd have a pretty strange view of women. Maybe that's worth thinking critically about, or trying to fix.


You can also argue that they dont offer particularly good male characters; but I'd accept its worse for females.

The damsel-needing-to-be-rescued trope is regressive. It is tired, it is destructive and it is restrictive. Same as it is when we're fed it via medieval fairytale, same as it is when we're fed it via Barbie. It sets up and reinforces a template of what makes a hero a hero, and a man a man, and a woman an accessory to points 1 and 2.

Now, those things aren't the most serious forms of sexism, but please don't try and suggest they don't have an effect. They do. These are the ideas and values we absorb without even realising it, from the moment we start piecing our world together. It's all part of a bigger picture. The way videogames treat women, and the way movies treat women, and the way music videos treat women, and the way ads treat women, and the way religion treats women... etc etc etc. Like it or not, it's all part of our pop culture, and pop culture does have an effect on the values people develop over time. Videogames are only one aspect of it, sure, but we can't pretend they're some exception either.

What frustrates me, as a woman, and one who has gamed since my childhood, is the sense that we've somehow managed to go backwards in terms of how we're treated in video games in the last decade or so. There are a lot of reasons for that, but I think there are two main ones.

The first, and most mundane, is the increasing technological threshold. It's not enough to have mute little clusters of pixels wander around the screen any more. They have to have hours and hours of associated voice acting, and they have to be realistically drawn. If you're going to do one lead character and only one, right now, 99% of the time, it will be a male. "Male" is the default, "Female" is speciality. Males are both slightly easier to depict realistically - you generally don't have to worry about hair, or unless you're making DOA, how best to apply gravity to boobs etc. Back in the day, making a female alternative player character just meant offering a slightly different wraparound for the model's face, and maybe a slightly different block for a chest. Female players are also used to immersing themselves in male heroes because we've had to do it in movies and videogames for ever already, while asking a male player to do the reverse is considered to be inherently more difficult. A male character is considered an inclusive mechanism for your audience, but a female one is exclusive. So a default male seems like a safer bet if you're going to bank all your development resources on one or the other. More on this in a moment.

The second, and this is the cancer of the modern videogame industry in many more respects than this one, is money. There is a sh*t ton of money in the videogame industry, and that means that all the stupid ideas that have become gospel in the movie industry etc, as the "rules" to eliminate risk, have crept into the videogame industry too. As more and more money has pumped into the industry, any sense of character diversity has bled right out, and female characters have suffered the brunt of it. Right now, it's conventional wisdom that blokes won't buy games with girls as the heroine because they can't put themselves in her shoes - but my question is why is this suddenly true now, if it wasn't true during the age of Fear Effect, Resident Evil, Urban Chaos, Tomb Raider, Parasite Eve, Perfect Dark etc etc etc etc? I'm having a look through my Xbox 360 collection right now, and literally the only titles where I play as a female character are ones where the hero is player-made. Glancing over my PS2 and even PS1 collection is a completely different story. Why are there less female heroines to be found in videogames now, than there were when the videogame audience actually was a niche interest that was almost entirely male?

Of course men can play as female characters. And they'd been doing it just fine until videogames became a blockbuster industry and all the Michael Bay marketing ideology leaked through to become gospel. The male brain didn't fundamentally change, players just started absorbing the ideas they were being indirectly fed. After steering Lara Croft off ledges for years and years without a problem, suddenly they were trained to think that a female character was something weird and unusual.

Certainly, there are some female heroines around nowadays, but how a heroine is represented matters too, and that too has gone in the wrong direction. There's a world of difference between old school Claire Redfield and whatsherface from X Blades, as an example that leaps to mind.

In an RPG title where some personal immersion is to be expected, the gender of your character does matter to the player's experience to some extent, for sure. But how in the hell does it matter in an FPS? I'm struggling to think of a single female character in the COD series, ever - and regardless of what COD fanboys think, that simply isn't a realistic reflection of a modern battlefield. So we've come to a point where videogames aren't just failing to represent women in some kind of right-on, affirmative action kind of way, they're actually defying reality to erase them from the picture. There's a problem with that, a big problem, and it's fairly deeply embedded if simply recognising that can and does provoke an uproar. It's one highlighted fairly keenly to me, because I seem to remember being able to taking female operatives for granted in Ghost Recon more than a decade ago.

That's what I mean about going backwards, and it isn't restricted to the games themselves. While I won't pretend the Rainbow Six: Eagle Watch community of old didn't have some issues with female players, the difference between the occasional berk encountered then, and the sheer brick wall of berkiness encountered by the time Vegas came along, is pretty stark. And the Vegas community is one of the better ones, compared to its contemporaries. If you don't think there is an associated issue with sexism reflected in the online community, I suggest you sit down with a woman playing any major multiplayer shooter, first with- and then without- her headset on. The contrast is depressing as all hell, and it's a large part of the reason that the enormous female sector of the online community is mostly invisible.

When I sold videogames for a living, conventional wisdom had it that the only games women bought were Singstar and Sims, and they were marketed accordingly, in "Games for girls!" branding. And, no argument, they were the biggest sellers for girls, but those numbers were substantially inflated by the fact that in many cases, they were being bought for girls, by parents etc. And the reverse also applied - I've seen little boys get the heads eaten off them by parents because they tried to buy pink controllers etc. So a younger generation were being trained to see their options for play as gendered, they didn't necessarily come with those ideas in-built.

What seemed strange for nobody to remark up was that, next to those "traditional" girly games, easily the biggest seller was GTA. Easily. And after that, miscellaneous horror titles like Silent Hill. And there was some shift towards western RPGs later on, but regardless, there is a huge silent market of women quietly playing some of the most violent, gory and complex titles out there, and being basically overlooked.

Just to be clear - playing a videogame with a male character at the centre isn't really an issue for me in isolation; it's the fact that that's pretty much all that's available, ever. And I understand that guys have trouble seeing the problem here because they've never really had to see it from our perspective. But if you can imagine sitting down to your console one day, only to find that every single lead character in every single major videogame series - and most of the secondary cast - had suddenly become female, wouldn't that seem like a slightly alien universe to you?

And when you pointed that out that bizarre disparity, and the first instinct people had was to wrack their brains to think of the occasional exceptions - just so they could deny there was an issue -wouldn't that seem doubly so?

Alyx Vance is a great character - I just wish she didn't look so lonely in the bracket she occupies.

And maybe that "awesome sidekick" wasn't a step up from where we'd be otherwise.

fergalr wrote: »

While I would guess it probably hasn't, you don't actually know that it hasn't had any adverse effects on you. You might know that it hasn't caused you to be violent to women or anything like that (I hope so) but that doesn't mean it hasn't adversely affected you. Even if you did know it hasn't affected you, that doesn't mean it hasn't affected other people.

Honestly, that sounds like you are just trying to close down discussion because you disagree with it, or find it uncomfortable.

You say I don't actually know if I had been adversley affected which may be true. You seem to be obsessed with the negatives of games, maybe if you could put that to one side for a minute you might be able to embrace some of the many positives that can be gained from games. I'm in no way uncomfortable about it, as I said it has been done to death over the years here and on hundreds of other forums all over the world.
And yes I honestly think that whether you like it or not games where women are seen as weaker or eye candy will always be there. This has been the case since the dawn of cinema and has progressed on to the medium of video games. I do not agree with this in any shape or form but unfortunately a lot of these titles ride high in the charts year on year and while this continues there is no way games companies will stop making these titles and that's all I have to say on the subject.

o1s1n wrote: »

I think this is an interesting point and one she missed in her videos. It's not just limited to females. Male characterization in many popular games could be criticized along similar lines.

It could; the characterisation and writing of most video games still leaves a lot to be desired.

I'm sure Sarkeesian is well aware of that.
The fact that male characterisation could be criticised doesn't nullify any of her arguments, imo.

o1s1n wrote: »

Why do most of them solve problems by fighting for example? Why are so many of them bone headed space marines? Also notice that in many instances, the bone headed man is being guided by a female?

Games have a long way to come as a medium with regards to narrative and characterization. There are some examples where it has been done very well, but unfortunately they're not as common as they should be.

In a lot of cases it just comes down to 'what is the easiest way to construct a game?'

Why are there so many shooting games for example? Because it offers a really easy way to put a game together. You press a button and get a big reaction. It's the same thing with the damsel in distress, it's very easy (in many cases lazy) way to build a premise for a game.

It might arise from laziness - maybe, maybe not - but that wouldn't in any way excuse or mitigate it.

A lot of sexism, racism etc is tied in with lazy thinking, in my opinion; thats just another part of the problem.


If someone is trying to fill an intern position in a company, its easier for them to just filter candidates based on their biases, rather than based on a thorough investigation of the merits of the candidates; maybe they throw all the CVs of women away; maybe they are motivated by a combination of laziness and prejudice, or laziness and mistake belief, but that doesnt really change the badness of their actions.

o1s1n wrote: »

It might be offensive to some and lazy from a development point, but whether it's damaging or not is something else entirely different. And that all depends on what you view 'damage' to be.

Would 'damage' be considered to be leading people to committing acts of violence towards women?
Or is 'damage' the result of how men perceive women after playing these games?

Much like ever other form of media, I think you'd need to be a fairly unbalanced person to run out and punch a woman because you saw it in a game/on tv/read it in a book. So no, I don't believe it has this affect on people. (and by 'people' I mean the majority of normal, balanced individuals)

Perceptions, well, that I don't know. We develop our perceptions from a range of sources. Does seeing Zelda locked in a cell requiring me to come to the rescue lead me to viewing women as weak and helpless pieces of property? I can't say it has added to my perception of women as that (as that is not how I perceive women)

I tried deal with this in post 51 on the thread.

You are basically arguing there that, as you saw Zelda locked in a cell (zelda3?) and you don't view women as property, therefore viewing Zelda in a cell doesn't lead to people viewing women as property. Implied is that therefore its not bad.

Like, that might be literally true for you, but isn't that the same argument as saying:

"I have smoked all my life and have lived to 90. I don't have cancer. Therefore smoking doesn't lead to cancer." Implied is that therefore there's no problem with smoking.


We're seeing this argument again and again in this thread.
"Ive played video games, and I have a reasonable view of women, therefore theres no problem."


Its just not a very good argument, in the same way it'd be a poor argument that theres nothing wrong with smoking.

I can see how its an appealing argument (in the same way that every now and again you get someone telling you a story about their 90 year old granny who drank sherry every day), but surely we can move beyond such misleading ways of thinking?


If games are having a subtle negative influence on our views of women, they might not affect most of us, or they might affect us in ways too subtle to easily definitively identify as coming from the games.

But surely we should still be able to reason that perhaps widespread negative images of women in games are something we might want to try and improve on?

o1s1n wrote: »

On a similar note, why is emotion not touched on? Why does it always come down to a 'must get my female property back!' with many feminists? Is it not feasible that maybe the protagonist is actually trying to save something because..well..he cares?

Because emotion isn't touched on in the game, either.

Look at Double Dragon - its been mentioned several times in this post, and in the original videos.

I remember playing it when I was a kid. The music still sounds great (which lets me know it affected my tastes negatively ;-) )

But, like, the woman is in it for about 10 seconds at the start, and is stolen. Thats about it. She is carried away.

The heroes go to get her back.
And the end, the fight the baddie, and she's tied up in the background as a prize.

If its a two player co-op game, the players then have to fight each other, and when one of the players kills the other, she kisses whichever one wins.

I mean, this is caveman stuff.


Now, right, that game was probably never designed to be thought of as a cultural influence; its a simple arcade game from the 80s. But, my god, many of us played it, and someone even based a movie on it.

Its just one example, but its one example in a medium which pretty generally does a bad job of characterising women.


Sure, maybe the guys were out because they care about the woman. Based on how we think the world works, that would seem likely, if we take the very simple (innocent?) video game, and try and think about it as if it was real.


But theres none of that shown in the game; theres no evidence of it in the game; and its not part of the message of the game.

fergalr wrote: »

Because emotion isn't touched on in the game, either.

Look at Double Dragon - its been mentioned several times in this post, and in the original videos.

I remember playing it when I was a kid. The music still sounds great (which lets me know it affected my tastes negatively ;-) )

But, like, the woman is in it for about 10 seconds at the start, and is stolen. Thats about it. She is carried away.

The heroes go to get her back.
And the end, the fight the baddie, and she's tied up in the background as a prize.

If its a two player co-op game, the players then have to fight each other, and when one of the players kills the other, she kisses whichever one wins.

I mean, this is caveman stuff.

Depends on the game in question.

Look at the remake of Splatterhouse. Yes, it is indeed a dumb, fun gore-fest from start to finish, and yes you have to save your girl. However, from what I can recall, Rick spent the whole game constantly talking about how much he loves and needs Jenny, and panicking over the fact that she might die. Don't get me wrong, I know there are unnessecary things in there (the collectables spring to mind), but it's a case where the player's character is doing everything to save his girl because he actually loves her.

Pretty sure this game still managed to slip a negative appearance into those videos somehow.

My favourite part of Jill's clubbing outfit was that she brought a sensible white cardie with it. You know, because otherwise it would have been wildly impractical for a last dash from a doomed zombie nest.

It's a timeline that sort of reflects the series' own trajectory into Bananaland, IMHO.

Dan_Solo wrote: »

Same goes for computer game characters then. That's just they way they preferred to make it.

There are social expectations. If the woman was in a bikini, dancing seductively around a pole, trying to use sex appeal to get her video watched, it might undermine her criticism of bayonetta. It technically shouldn't - if her argument is sound, its sound - but I could see how it would in practice.

She's just wearing earings and lipstick.

Its completely absurd to say that she is being hypocritical when complaining about the common extent to which she women are sexualised in video games, just because of that.


But even aside from that, there's a more important point here:

Dan_Solo wrote: »

Again, grand, you therefore also cannot claim that video game characters are sexied up to make them more interesting.

If video game characters are sexed up to make them more interesting, then you can make that claim, even if you are a woman who likes to wear things that makes her look sexy.


Look, imagine you are a woman engineer, in the following scenario:

Potential new business clients are coming over to meet the company CEO, and look at the office, tomorrow.

The CEO (imagine the lecherous CEO from the IT crowd) comes up to you, and says: "We really want to get this new deal. Can you please wear a short skirt and low cut top, to look sexy for the new clients, so that they are more likely to do business with us?"

1) You see that that would be a terrible thing of the CEO to do? Its trying to exploit you as a sexual object in a way that has no relationship to your role in the business, in a way that they wouldnt do to a man, and its wrong, right?

2) Even if you had previously worn a short skirt and a low cut top to work last wednesday, it would still be wrong of your boss to say that. The fact that you had previously chosen to wear (for the sake of argument) sexy clothes to work does not mean that it is ok to exploit you as a sexual object, and it does not mean you cannot complain if someone tries exploit you, or another woman, as a sexual object. That you previously wore those clothes - maybe you were going out on a date afterwards - does not undermine your position that it is wrong to be asked to wear them, to exploit your looks.


Do you see this difference?

A woman choosing to wear clothes that might be sexy, for her own reasons, is different than asking a woman to wear sexy clothes to somehow influence the potential clients.


Similarly a woman can do a video where she wears earings and lipstick, and still complain that female characters in video games are being exploited as sexual objects purely to sell video games. Theres no contradiction.

Dan_Solo wrote: »

Computer games are quite regularly used to reflect reality. If that reality has women, including feminists, doing things to make themselves look better, then it most certainly should also be in video games.

It does in that if she is incapable of recognizing "appearance augmentation" as either a personal choice or an means of garnering attention in herself, she's unlikely to be the best person to go looking for it anywhere else.

fergalr wrote: »

I think Lara Croft is divisive; she's a strong female lead, but (at least initially) she was also a bit of a gimmick, as a big breasted female character to generate marketing hype.
Probably did good, though, to at least show that female heroes would be accepted.

I think the boobsiness is an obvious alarm bell, true, but overall I think she did far more good than harm. She's physically and intellectually capable, good at her job, and heroine of her own story in a real way. Like, she makes her own decisions by and large, she's not just told to go somewhere, she solves her own puzzles and gets on with it. And she did carve a path for heroines who could do the same, so overall, I'm pretty pro-Lara.

I believe western combat special forces are almost exclusively male, which might be some defense of COD.

Some defence, yeah. Special Forces are pretty much all male. However, particularly in American armed forces, women have a strong general presence.

Mostly, they were theoretically relegated to support roles until recently, but in practice, it was quickly realised that patrol detachments needed to have women attached so they could deal with Muslim women from the local populace if the need arose. Such patrols were regularly engaged in firefights. So while women aren't, obviously, a majority in the armed forced, they're artificially distributed across the board because they were required for section effectiveness.

It's probably unfair to single out Call of Duty in particular for failing to reflect that, given the direction it took with more recent entries. But at the same time, it's pretty silly that games which go to the lengths of licensing trademarked details on in-game weaponry - which nobody in the world can see anyway - overlook a pretty fundamental aspect of military reality in the Middle East. And one which has been very high profile with the recent relaxation of frontline restrictions, too.

So it's not an oversight, it's a deliberate decision. Made not to reflect the reality, but to tailor the experience presented by the game. Why is arguable, but it is a decision, because there's no way the developers' consultants would be unaware of it.

That's just a handy example, but it's a big one for studios to keep making, and it does bleed into all military-styled games. And videogames aren't the only medium guilty of it, by no means, they're just the one on the table for now.

Dan_Solo wrote: »

Your analogy fails because it is of no relevance to computer game characters, which is what we're talking about here, yes?
Lara Croft cannot be "forced" to do or wear anything against her will as she has no will of her own. She still doesn't exist to do so!

tbh, this reads as a bit of wilful obtuse...ness? Obtuseness?

Dan_Solo wrote: »

For who's benefit exactly then are lipstick and ear-rings? They are to make a person more presentable and desireable. No amount of claiming they are a common occurrence in society changes this fact. People all want to look good, and the woman presenting this video appears to be no different. Why shouldn't video game characters also look as good as possible?

That would be assuming video game players cannot tell the difference between real people and video game people.
The evidence here from this very thread would appear to say it is those who oppose video games who are having this problem, not gamers.

When you think of all the poor astronauts killed in Spacewar in 1962 it's amazing they didn't ban all video games there and then.
It most certainly is *not* reasonable to object to this. It certainly isn't logical. You have *again* conflated real and fictional characters. Lara Croft cannot be exploited. She does not exist. You be as well off objecting to me dreaming of a hot bird in my sleep.
If people want to make games with objectionable thing X in them that's up to them really. I'll just ignore them. I refuse to be upset however by things that don't exist, but that doesn't seem to stop some people doing just that.

Lets say that in video games and movies, almost all the baddies were always dark skinned, and all the goodies were always white skinned.

Would there be any problem with that?

They'd all still be fictional characters, and we'd all know they werent real, and so, by your argument here, you mightn't see any problem with that?

What if instead almost all the goodies in all the video games happened to be protestant, and all the baddies happened to be catholic? (Doesnt seem probable, because its not like video games are just made by anti-catholic protestants or something- but lets just say).

Would you see any problem with that?

Would you accept an argument that says 'hey, this isnt good, its constantly portraying conflict along religious (or racial) lines, and its sort of making it out that all the bad people are from group X (and, in peoples minds, hence people from group X are more likely to be bad)' ?

Or would you instead say 'well, theres no real, actual people getting exploited, so no real people can possibly have been hurt, so I dont see why people are complaining'.


All of those things would be bad, imo. Not if it was a once-off thing, but if it was a recurring pattern. They'd be portraying certain groups in negative ways, by building up a pattern where people from that group are generally used to fulfill a particular role in the game. Thats not something we should want, even though the particular characters portrayed would be fictional.

Does that make any sense?

If so, do you see how it makes sense to object to the portrayal of a specific group in video games, even though the characters are fictional?

fergalr wrote: »

The fact that male characterisation could be criticised doesn't nullify any of her arguments, imo.

To me it does though, as it doesn't provide a balance. When I watch her videos, I get the impression that games are for male audiences, glorify the male role as a hero and the women all get shafted.

Where this may be true in places, it negates to include the fact that in many games, men are far from glorified heros and in fact idiotic numbskulls. She needs to address this to find a balance. Otherwise it leads to assumptions from the viewer.

fergalr wrote: »

You are basically arguing there that, as you saw Zelda locked in a cell (zelda3?) and you don't view women as property, therefore viewing Zelda in a cell doesn't lead to people viewing women as property. Implied is that therefore its not bad.

Like, that might be literally true for you, but isn't that the same argument as saying:

"I have smoked all my life and have lived to 90. I don't have cancer. Therefore smoking doesn't lead to cancer." Implied is that therefore there's no problem with smoking.

No it's not and you've created something of a straw man here. We can agree that smoking causes cancer due to medical analysis and testing. It is a medically proven fact. There's no arguing with it.

Can we cut open a videogame and witness whether or not people view women as property due to Zelda being placed in a cell? No, we cannot.

Therefore how do we assess this? Through analysis of cases and testimony. I'm in an interesting position as I have played videogames my whole life therefore can assess my own thinking and come to a conclusion based on my personal experience.

fergalr wrote: »

If games are having a subtle negative influence on our views of women, they might not affect most of us, or they might affect us in ways too subtle to easily definitively identify as coming from the games.

If something has such a subtle negative influence on you that you cannot even detect it, why would you care about it?

Do you care about mild radon levels coming from living on top of granite?

Do you care about inhaling car fumes while walking through a busy street?

Why would you care about something 'apparently' subtly changing your opinions when you actually in fact hold a completely opposing opinion?

In fact, seeing as I think the complete opposite to what is being suggested, maybe these games actually subtly made me the way I am?

fergalr wrote: »

But surely we should still be able to reason that perhaps widespread negative images of women in games are something we might want to try and improve on?

I've bolded a part there which is an assumption. You assume there is a widespread negative image of women in games.

I believe there is an oversexualized role of women in some games, but do not agree that there is a widespread negative image of women in all games.

I do agree that we need to address the oversexualiation as that is simply embarassing to the hobby and makes taking it seriously difficult.

fergalr wrote: »

Because emotion isn't touched on in the game, either.

Look at Double Dragon - its been mentioned several times in this post, and in the original videos.

I remember playing it when I was a kid. The music still sounds great (which lets me know it affected my tastes negatively ;-) )

But, like, the woman is in it for about 10 seconds at the start, and is stolen. Thats about it. She is carried away.

The heroes go to get her back.
And the end, the fight the baddie, and she's tied up in the background as a prize.

If its a two player co-op game, the players then have to fight each other, and when one of the players kills the other, she kisses whichever one wins.

I mean, this is caveman stuff.


Now, right, that game was probably never designed to be thought of as a cultural influence; its a simple arcade game from the 80s. But, my god, many of us played it, and someone even based a movie on it.

Its just one example, but its one example in a medium which pretty generally does a bad job of characterising women.


Sure, maybe the guys were out because they care about the woman. Based on how we think the world works, that would seem likely, if we take the very simple (innocent?) video game, and try and think about it as if it was real.


But theres none of that shown in the game; theres no evidence of it in the game; and its not part of the message of the game.

Can nothing be implied? Does everything need to be spelled out and literal?

Where you play Pong, do you see two lines of pixels hitting one pixel and take that at face value?

'This can't possibly be tennis, I don't see any of it in the game!!'

When I play Double Dragon, there would be an emotional urgency. 'Crap! they just assaulted my girlfriend! This is wrong! They are scum! I must help her!'

I don't think 'those bastards stole my property! I must regain my property!'

Just to summarize my own thinking, as I said, I do agree that there is an embarrassing level of over-sexualization of women in some videogames which panders to a male teenage audience. For a feminist critical thinker, this is easy fodder and I completely welcome her to take these games to town.

However, some of the arguments are just verging on over analysis. As you said, classic arcade games were never created to be held up as pinnacles of culture (which is perfectly fine and I'm sure she agrees) - but then to go on an over analyse issues of female ownership/properly in these games is simply ridiculous.

In simple terms (as the game's story arc was designed in simple terms); guy's girlfriend is assaulted and kidnapped, guys freak out, go on rampage to save her. That is it. Seriously.