I apologize for the TL;DR-ness, but
your article was also quite long, so bear with me:
So while I appreciate the underlying
ideas behind this article, I do (and I fully understand that this
will cause my argument to become moot in the minds of some others)
take offense at certain other points raised. Will I deny that seeing
this portrayal of women in the mainstream of games is fine by me? No.
Why? Because, wait for it: I am a male. That gender filter you claim
has no validity for males is partially true. In the world, most of
the time women are put through their gender filter. But you narrowed
your scope to the gaming world, and, I believe, to hardcore gamers
(or even more specifically, to games with a comic book/anime tie). If
we widen the scope of this article to all life, we would be sitting
around talking about how the masses assign others attributes based
solely on outward appearances, so let's just stick with the gaming
world.
Will I “acknowledge
that a one-sided (and one-dimensional) portrayal of women is the
dominant paradigm in gaming”? Yes. It is the dominant paradigm.
We'll cover that later. Before I say what I have to say on that, we
have to erase your idea that anything a straight male gamer says is
invalid because he is a straight male gamer. According to you, if you
are a male, then your argument is invalid because you are a male.
What? You fiat that most male gamers are either horny twits or
white-knight idolaters (thereby
still being horny twits, because they are idolizing this dominant
portrayal of women in games).
In doing so you have built an iron-clad reason for yourself to not
listen to any opposing ideas. This reason is fallacious, but that
hasn't stopped many others throughout history from holding similar
ideas of different topics.
All
gamers, and I do mean all (males, females, and yes, even you who is
taking the “side” of the female gamer group) gamers need to
approach this with openness to ideas. Does that mean we all have to
drop our old ideas? Not necessarily. Does this mean we need to be
unbiased? Yes and no. It does us no good if (as you desire) only the
male group drops their bias towards this paradigm. Then we lose all
ground we might already have, we are walking into battle with no
counter-arguments. You also need to drop your bias, and until then we
will be locked into this debate until developers stop desiring fast
money (fat chance) or female gamers accept the status quo (which, we
can agree, is just a little messed up). Now, with that out of the
way:
"Women are represented like this
because you're a male!" you scream. This is true. And why?
Because the developers want to cash in on that. However, you do seem
to dismiss franchises that don't objectify the women in it.
Dismissing a counter-argument simply because it is a common argument
is not a good way to go about debating. You must listen, and must
address, otherwise there can be no constructive change.
Now,
the
point I made above about this being an article about hardcore gamers
holds. I know very few female hardcore gamers. Why is that? Because
other female gamers I know disagree with the portrayal of women in
these games? No. It is because (as far as I have discerned) they
quite simply don't enjoy the games.
WoW? Starcraft? TRPG's? Gears of war? God of war? Assassin's Creed?
Metal Gear? The elder scrolls? Uncharted? Portal? Half Life? Mass
Effect? All major money makers, considered to be the huge hits (and
aside from portal, all considered to be hardcore games). Is it
because of their lack of objectified women? No. Look at Miranda or
Liara from Mass Effect, or Chloe from Uncharted. Even
the overly-buxom characters in Japanese TRPG's like Disgaea. Shining
examples of your point if I ever saw one. Heck, even the female deck
hand in ME2 makes herself an object. Is it because of the characters
obvious sex appeal that female gamers stay away? I think not.
CoD
or BF or
Halo or CS?
Hardcore, but male dominated. Why is that? Most female gamers I know
don't find sitting around shooting people over and over fun, and
I'm talking about gameplay, not harassment.
It
is gameplay thatt drives what games are played. If females found the
game fun, I believe they'd play the game and just mute the chat, not
stay away from games. On
your point about the verbal harassment of the female players that do:
I agree, that should stop. The
“offers for sex, threats of rape, sounds of simulated masturbation
or demands that [s]he blow the other players” is rude and
offensive, and we
as gamers need to be courteous and not do that. Chalk
that up to being a dominantly male thing for so long, as well as
those men lacking the sense to remember that's a human being on the
other end of the headset.
Those
gamers need some tact and taste, but then again, those are also the
insufferable alpha's in real life, not the beta's your article starts
off mentioning. As an aside: your girlfriend was “decidedly not
nerd curious” and yet you dragged her along to comic book stores?
Nice.
Onward to two more examples: Metroid
(but the zero suit! Pfft. Not core gameplay, just fanservice). Zelda.
But wait, Zelda is all about Link, right? No. The entire point is
that Link must go save Zelda (it just so happens in order to do that
he must save the world). But wait, isn't it sexist to say that the
man must go save the woman in these games? Maybe, if you don't take
into account that this story type has been around for ages, and the
majority of women are just fine with it when it's not in a game. That
oh-so-common knight in shining armor fantasy comes to mind. Accepted
as a book or movie but not as a game? That makes no sense. Also to be
included in this list are many other RPG's, as well as many of the
games listed in other comments here (let's not tread the same ground
too much, yeah?). Is
all fanservice then inherently wrong? No. Why? Because without
fanservice, we wouldn't have good
followups to IP's, or
most innovation
(note: by fanservice I mean all catering to the fanbase, not just the
scantily clad females to
cater to the male demographic you point out).
Look
at the casual gaming market: it has exploded with a multitude of fun
games that people of all ages and genders play. Is that because of no
blatant objectification of women? No. It is because those games are
FUN.
I
don't know a single person that has played Angry Birds that doesn't
like it. Am
I saying that hardcore console/pc games aren't fun? To me they're
loads of fun. To others? They're not. Why? Personal taste. You're
arguing at once a paradigm shift and a thought change, which puts you
into a bind. In order for that paradigm shift to be accepted, you
need to change the minds that drive the current paradigm. Forcing
that change will do nothing. I
think, that as long as developers keep making fun games, all
demographics will stop caring what women are portrayed as, simply
because we game for fun, not to look at scantily-clad women. Will
that keep those types of characters out of games? Probably not. It
doesn't matter, because as long as it's fun, people will buy it. But
riddle me this: if men are so responsible for this idolatry, why do
women strive to look like supermodels? Because women idolize that
concept of “beauty” or “sex appeal” or whatever you want to
call it as well. The
entire game market is driven by
the fans, who
purchase based on what is fun, not based on how many half-naked women
are in it.
If developers didn't give fans what they wanted, they wouldn't be
developing for very long. Developers need
to
cater to an audience (and then make
money to keep themselves alive), and they can't continue to make that
money without satisfying that audience. So,
how
do we change this common
(not really, most games cleanly avoid your “pitfall” of
objectifying women) objectification thread in video games?
By changing the way people think about
women?
Well that's quite a novel idea. I think, at your arguments core,
that's what you're getting at too. However, that change will happen
slowly, over time, and it most definitely will not happen by claiming
moral superiority (your “my ideals of what gaming should be” and
if you disagree you're wrong) on one hand and trying to beat your
“opponent” into submission on the other.
