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Posted By Austin Yorski about 3 months, 1 week ago
Needs more samus.
If you are engaged with the everyday controversies of gaming’s online culture, you probably remember video personality and culture critic Anita Sarkeesian. Her YouTube series “Feminist Frequency” was already pretty popular when she turned her attention towards video games and began a KickStarter campaign asking for $6,000 to fund a series called “Tropes vs. Women in Games.”
Inevitably, the collective misogyny of the web turned a backlash into $158,922. Nine months later we finally have the first episode of the project, which you can watch below.
Needless to say, the debate around topics such as gender and sexuality can get pretty heated (YouTube comments on the video are disabled for a reason). However, as a fellow pretentious observer of pop culture, I thought it would be interesting to share our thoughts about this piece on Blistered Thumbs.
I don’t agree with everything Sarkeesian has to say, but I respect her for speaking up and engaging in an vital discussion on the medium as a whole.
Thunderfoot’s rebuttal, Feminism vs. Facts:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I
Well, while I can’t disagree with anything she said, I would suggest that maybe she should choose a better target audience for her message.
The practical end of her argument seemed to be that because these legacy titles are being revived as downloadable content, they are once again relevant and influential in regards to the perception and role of women in society.
I would argue that the target audience of these remakes and re-releases is in their 20′s and 30′s, and by that point if they haven’t accepted the concept that women should be treated with equal respect, they never will.
Misogyny and gender bias are deeply rooted in human society all over the world, and video games are only one very small source of its perpetuation. Movies, music, religion, law, parenting… there are many vectors that shape us through our teenage years and young adult life that influence who we become and what we believe.
Therefore, in order to affect greater change, I think the individuals she should be targeting are parents, teachers, mentors, and the young people who haven’t yet had a chance to become set in their beliefs. And to this audience, discuss the core of your argument, the objectification of women, and how prevalent it still is across the full breadth of society, pop culture, the media, etc.
And finally, I think it’s a good idea to continue disabling the comments for your videos. Allowing them would only allow the people whose opinion you need to chang to hide behind snarky or outright misogynystic comments, and brush off your message in the process.
I’m not really seeing why the hostility in the comments section on this one. Sarkesian has some solid points and apparently intends to come to modern examples and subversions and notable aversions of the trope in the next video.
Really I find the most interesting point is that of who breaks out of prison. Male protagonists tend to break out themselves and female characters are stuck and incapable of breaking out under their own power and thus needing rescue.
This is another point that irked me greatly. Yes, what she’s talking about is rooted in sexism but not in the way she says. The reason for this is because more often than not protagonists are men. And the reason why they often break out on their is because the player is controlling them. It’s not a lot of fun to be thrown in prison and then just have to sit there and wait for someone else to rescue you. It breaks the flow of gameplay.
And how fun would it be to go save someone and then they already broke out of prison themselves. It’d feel like a complete waste of time and there would be a distinct lack of reward for your troubles.
So while what she’s talking about IS rooted in sexism, it’s rooted more deeply in the fact that men are protagonists and women are the damsels in distress. If you change the roles, it still wouldn’t mean the player would have to sit alone in a cell and wait for rescue because the protagonist is a girl. The player orchestrates their own rescue, regardless of gender.
And this is why Sarkeesian is prone to get a lot of opposition. I’m all for equal rights in everything but she often twists evidence to suit her point and if something stands in direct opposition to her she tries her best to ignore that it exists, even when faced with it in a debate. She has a history of riling people up without giving the opposition the opportunity to defend their case.
Again, I love women and want them to have the same rights and opportunities as I have. But Anita Sarkeesian is NOT the best spokesperson to do this and at times I think she’s out more for personal gain than supporting the equal rights movement.
it is true she made solid points but they are also biased because she does not bring at least one counter-argument. For example she clearly says that Mario bros game where 4 players are playable especially Peach, she claims Peach was there “accidentally” as if it is the only reason. Also I find hard to believe that one single person needed $6,000 to fund raise a 5 episode series where all she does is talk in front of a green screen. This might not be obvious to everyone but this spells out an exploit on a hot topic similar to how news agency cover a hot issue carelessly and know their newspapers are going to sell.
I can understand why she has comments disabled. After all she got rape and death threats over merely announcing she was going to do this series. And we all know youtube is not as civil a place as Blistered Thumbs is.
That said disabling ratings is stupid, more people find your videos from others hitting the like button on it.
I see a lot of people mad that she didn’t discuss the more heroic females… the video is about Damsels in Distress dude. I don’t even agree with a lot of what she says and I can understand that. That’s why it’s a series. She isn’t going to discuss everything in the very first video.
Oh, please…
She didn’t get any rape and death threats, she got trolling comments, mind you, after herself trolling 4chan of other places for several weeks, and then throwing the comments open only under the kickstarter video.
Promptly she spreads it around everywhere, “Oh, poor me, poor female me, I’ve got rape and death threats!” Then watch the money roll in from her personal army of Marios coming to her rescue.
That’s the most ironic part of the whole thing. A professional damsel in distress makes her very first video on the trope “damsel in distress” and how bad it is for women. You can’t make this shit up.
She promptly further destroys her own point, really, and who gets truly damaged with this trope. Notice how she describes all these damsels as useless sacks of hot air. And quite a few of them don’t even have a title or money you can gain from saving them. Yet men, will still risk their lives rescuing them, and male villains will still risk their lives capturing and keeping the damsels alive. Showing that women, even useless sacks of shit, have value, merely walking around, greater than a man’s no matter how exceptional. To such an extent that the “protagonist” in Donkey Kong, didn’t have a name. He merely held the title of “jump man”. Pauline, though, she has enough value to be named.
Men have no value if they are not of service to a woman, is what this trope teaches boys and girls.
“Ratings have been disabled for this video.”
Also, comments have been disabled.
Gee. Wonder why. >_____>
I’m going to start this with saying I don’t like this woman. In my eyes she does more harm to women in the game industry than good.
The second thing I’m going to say is that the video was pretty poor. She had no presence, her voice was incredibly monotone and she made no effort to educate intelligently. 150 thousand dollars? That must’ve been some of the most expensive recording equipment EVER.
As for the content itself, the origin of the trope was interesting but wailing on Peach and Zelda are low hanging fruit. Peach is a joke, one even Nintendo is in on. Her getting kidnapped is just the flimsy excuse they use to set the game in motion, to get Mario started. You could replace her with anything and it makes no difference. It’s not about gender, at first it was just lazy writing and now it’s to poke fun at itself.
As for Zelda, she probably hasn’t played any of the games post… I don’t know, the Gameboy Color. And no, Zelda having her own main series game would be awful and missing the point of the Zelda games entirely. Link is a blank slate for the player to project himself onto. Zelda is a character with a personality, thoughts and feelings. For that to work she’d have to become silent and lose everything that made Zelda Zelda. And Link would have to develop a personality and that usually doesn’t end well.
But my biggest gripe with this video is that she’s building these two examples up as the biggest battles ever when in reality, if Peach stops being kidnapped no-one would care and Zelda long since stopped being your run of the mill damsel in distress and if anything her role has greatly expanded, especially in the most recent titles where she has become a fairly active character.
And the Dinosaur Planet thing was pointless, it had nothing to do with gender. It was just good business. And besides, from what has been seen of Krystal from Dinosaur Planet, she didn’t seem very interesting.
Its hard to say modern Links are simple blank slates. WW Link definitely has a strong big brother sensibility nearly killing himself to immediately try and save his sister.
TP Link takes some personal responsibility and guilt towards the capture of his friends. He’s also clearly a hard worker and well respected member of the town.
SS is shy, lazy but is clearly broken up about watching Zelda get captured. And then clearly has a moment of self doubt when Impa confronts him about his slowness in response to catching up to Zelda.
But yeah Link is mostly blank, while Zelda is mostly character. Though switching their places I think would actually work well in direct sequel to a previous game. I’m sure it could work if the same care and attention was taken like previous titles.
I can see it working in a direct sequel like Phantom Hourglass but I’m one of those that don’t want them to make sequels but rather just move on to the next incarnation. Link and Zelda aren’t really characters I get attached to and I’d much rather just see the next incarnations. But that’s just me.
I understand. I’d have like to see some incarnations get expanded in some way.
Was it really lazy writing though?
Remember this was the 8-bit NES era; elaborate story lines wouldn’t exactly fit on the cartridge. Which is another problem with the whole video; criticizing characters that are so old and non-present basically because of the limitations of the system and genre; as opposed to this being somehow misogyny.
Holy crap, somebody else remembered that Krystal was once a protagonist! Yeah, and that little pterodactyl above her was the princess of the skies, or something, her little sidekick like how Tricky was the prince of the land, and sidekick to Sabre (another protagonist that Fox replaced).
…
Er, uh, sorry, a little off topic. I just remember following that game closely as a kid, then being a tad pissed when I played it and found Krystal became the damsel, heh (was hoping she’d get to do more than a tutorial level…then get ogled creepily).
I guess, in a way, this was my very first video game Betrayal. XD
You know, First Wave feminists like Susan B. Anthony argued for actual tangible rights, like the right to vote and equal opportunity employment. Modern feminists seem to argue mostly about vague, intangible things like imagery and perception. Is this what we’ve come to, that it isn’t enough to simply be treated fairly and equitably, but now we have to control how people think and perceive others?
Perceptions shape a fair bit, and larger attitudes come from smaller perceptions. I’d like to quote Game of Thrones about the importance of perception for power… but I haven’t worked out how to fully express it in a means to clearly get the point across.
To swipe on of Sarkesians point, the Damsel trope gives the impression of Women being weak and ineffectual thus needing male protection. To go back to Women’s sufferage if I recall one of the reasons for opposing giving Women the franchise was that they were weak and incapable of coming to a informed opinion about things as important as politics.
So you see, those images and perception SHAPE how people are treated or even what’s considered to be fair treatment.
So while you make a good case that perceptions influence the tangible, the point still remains: in this case, there is no tangible being effected by the perception. In the cases of suffrage and equal opportunities, you had tangibles being affected by perception. Here, you have no tangible.
Or to put it bluntly, at the end of the day, who cares? If you can point out an actual right that is being violated by video games, then the conversation might be meaningful. If not, then it is pointless.
Clearly, the ladies care. We’ve seen story after story with Women getting offended at a lack of representation, and poor representation when they are included (exceptions exist.)
Even if we ignore the reasonable request for better representation, consider the story a while ago of the fighting tournament where a guy outright harassed a female competitor, then claimed it was part of the fighting game culture. A extreme example but you can see where the potential for harm comes if negative tropes and stereotypes are not debated.
Besides, worst case scenario: she talks about videogames and inspires some designers to write better female characters. I can’t see the harm. I read lots of articles that look at videogames in a fashion that doesn’t pertain immediately to the protection of basic rights, but still have valuable insight and a path to improve videogames as a medium.
Women’s suffrage, Plankhurst in the UK were terrorists who performed bombings and committed arsons. When the government wanted to shame men into dying in WW1 she happily helped along with putting white feathers into men and even underage boys not wearing a uniform; having shamed many a man, some brilliant minds and even underage boys into dying in a hell-hole in France. She didn’t seem to volunteer to go die in that hell-hole ditch herself though.
Oh, by the way, she also only wanted suffrage for well-to do rich women. The ordinary and the poor could go take a hike for all she cared.
PS: No, the reason that women didn’t get the vote for a long while, is because women didn’t want the vote… and they weren’t (didn’t want to go) dying on the battle field. You see, men were given the opportunity to earn the vote by dying on the battle field. That’s how men got to vote: you get to die on the battle field, you get to vote; but only after the war we need bodies in is over.
Women didn’t want the vote, because crazy shit, they didn’t want to die on the battle field, and expected they were expected to start dying to be able to vote.
But then feminists and the government said: “Oh, you silly cows, you don’t have to go die on the battle field. We’ll just hand you the vote outright on a silver platter.”
And only then did a majority women say, “Well, in that case, get us the vote.” And only then did the government give women the vote.
It’s almost like the government found what women thought and wanted more important than anything else… you know, as opposed to oppressing them.
I’d like to quote a blogger Stefan Molyneux on some staunch feminist that goes “feminism is socialism with panties”
there is a video with the same title in a question
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNx2SLJVwy8
I know this not related to gaming but brings some insight that not all feminist have similar views and attitudes.
Love the disabled comment on youtube. So unless she has another place she won’t be getting much feedback. I know its to avoid the truly dim witted people who hate her. But it also shows a lack of wanting others input.
Now I am a 22 male gamer, with that said I do agree with a lot she explained and it is very interesting to see it presented like this. But much like her previous videos in her series. She focuses on the “problem” without really looking beyond with lampshade hanging and complete sub and inversions of a trope. I can’t really add to anything that’s already been said here. But maybe these points.
Peach is a joke in the modern era of Mario titles. They lampshade hang the entire damsel in distress aspect of her character to the point she actually sends letters that say she was expecting to be kidnapped or something.
Zelda is a character I wouldn’t exactly call a damsel in distress.At least in the recent games. She has too much of an active part in Link’s adventures even if they’re behind the scenes to be simply labelled that. She has a character is also aware of her limitations as a person raised in royalty. I will admit that Tetra/Zelda sitting there was a bit a weak.
But as for other characters. I’m sure she’ll get to them in other videos. But I think she’ll label characters like Samus as “Females written in the Male role” or something along those lines.
While I do agree with the fact that there’s too many games that have the damsel in distress trope, she seems to believe that a damsel in distress plot is altogether illegitimate regardless of context, which I don’t think is true.
“YouTube comments on the video are disabled”
And as per usual the feminist ideologue presented within the video is not open for discussion or debate.
It’s always struck me as strange, because comments raise the videos’ search ranking results. Disabling them just gives the video less coverage, which kind of defeats the purpose of her ideologue activism, no?
to be fair there are a ton of guys that would more then likely say awful tings in the comments and they would be disabled anyways. Yea there should be more of a discussion about this in the comments, but honestly do you really see that happening on youtube?
She got paid a hefty sum for this schlock, far as I see it is her job to *moderate* the comments and block trouble makers.
No, there aren’t. There are a couple of trolls that might come back, but it’s unlikely.
150k for this? The average review on Blisteredtumbs and TGWTG does a lot better. And a lot of this stuff has already been covered here too. She should be sending those Trolls thank you cards.
My basic problem with feminism isn’t the ideals it holds, but that in recent years it has increasingly reacted to non-issues. I’ve never felt that women were under-represented in video games or unnable to act on their own. Yes, the bulk of AAA titles commanding big budgets you have a male character, but largely this is because a) girls mature faster than boys and so can get over a gender gap more easily, and b) girl gamers is a relatively recent market demographic: within the last few console cycles. Below the AAA mark, female leads are all over the place. Tenchu, Portal, Mirror’s Edge, Jeanne D’arc, Perfect Dark, Parasite Eve. Resident Evil and Dino Crisis to a lesser extent. And those are just the examples I own with my (tiny) library.
I just don’t see this one being an issue.
Ok, so I would like to say that I can see where she is coming from, but I really thought this would be a lot better, the research seems poorly made, as if she just grabbed the most common good OLD fashion videogames, make a quick Wikipedia read and done. there is your video.
I would like to point out that while it is true that females didn’t got a lot of roles in the old age of videogames, that was around the 80′s, so what about now?
Are there no games to be mention in here, of course there are, a lot of good games with great female characters, did she ever heard of
April Ryan, Samus Aran, Jade, Lara Croft, Chill, Aye Brea, Jill Valentine, the Odin Sphere series, Amateurish, Coles, Commander Sheppard, The Boss, Alex Vance, Terra, Lightning, Disagree, THE ENTIRE PERSONA SERIES!
Why not mention the game industry today? why not take a look at the games that made females the protagonist, hell, let’s keep it in the 80′s, why no Samus? she was a badass and never a “damsel in distress”.
The other thing I have a gripe about is how she mentions females as stolen property, isn’t that how she views it?, I have played a lot of games and yes you had to rescue a princess in various of them, but she was never an object, she was never objectified, she was a character, a person who needed help, and that was is, whether you see her as an object or not it’s a matter of your own perception I think.
and really peach has never been a playable character
why she never appeared in super Mario RPG, one of the best RPG of its time right?
Take what you will from the video, but for something that was fundraised like this was, I think you didn’t get what you paid for, where is the money in this? I have seen YouTube videos that are made way better than this, with better research, and very simple design, they didn’t ask for a fundraise to start.
Sad that this is the best they can do, A proper view of video game history would have been great, it could have opened a new door for discussion, but sadly this is just a one sided perspective, nothing new is said, nothing really interesting is said.
I feel bad, not for us gamers but for those who actually put their money on this.
You do realize this is part 1 of 2, right? She says at the end that she will talk about more modern games in part 2 and see if things have changed.
…and to be fair, Peach is the damsel in distress at the start of Mario RPG and when she does join you, she is portrayed in a sexist way, with her main attacks being slaps or using cookware (frying pan) or lady accessories (fan and parasol) as weapons.
ok, you make a good point, hopefully part 2 will have something new to add to the table, but yeah peach while she was a damsel in distress at the beginning and later on she is portrayed in perhaps sexist way, she remains a part of the main team, actively doing something instead of just waiting for Mario to clean up the kingdom.
That has to be better than just “I have been kidnapped, help me Mario”
Couple of things:
——————————-
“That was around the 80′s, so what about now?”
Anita flat out tells us that she’s going to cover more contemprary examples of the Damsel, as well as flip-the-script:
Ok, so we’ve established that the Damsel in Distress trope is one of the most widely used gendered cliché in the history of video games and has been core to the popularization and development of gaming as a medium. But what about more modern games? Has anything changed in the past ten years? Well, stay tuned for part 2 where I’ll be looking at more contemporary examples of the Damsel in Distress trope. We’ll look at all the dark and edgy twists and turns and see how the convention been used and abused right up until today. And then we’ll check out some games in which developers have tried to flip the script on the Damsel.
——————————-
“Did she ever heard of April Ryan”
In Anita’s original pitch video, 3:30 shows an example of a tumblr page filled with examples of female video game characters. Staff-wielding April Ryan is looking badass in the center of the page.
Also, Anita backed Dreamfall: Chapters on Kickstarter and tweeted about it (which is how I discovered that series, which I thoroughly enjoyed).
So safe to say that Anita knows about April Ryan.
I don’t know if Anita plans to give April a mention as a flip-the-script example of damsel in distress in Dreamfall: The Longest Journey (I was about as confused as Zoe when April just shrugged and went ‘meh, whatevs, I’m fine kid, go home and bother someone else’).
It could go either way. I hope to see it as a flip-the-script – but even there, if Anita’s script for the video is already full of better examples, then it would make sense to cut this one. There has to be a balance between quality and quantity in the information given.
——————————-
I think you’re not being entirely fair to the medium.
That video of Anita’s was as thorough and information-packed as it could be in 20 minutes whilst still keeping things engaging and interesting.
If what you really want is a spreadsheet of all the female characters in any video game ever and a tick or a cross in next to each one in the ‘Damsel in Distress’ column, then that would make for a boring video.
Note that Anita isn’t making the argument that every woman in every video game ever made has been Damseled – rather, she is making the argument that Damselling happens a lot, it’s unconditional to the core plots of many foundational video game titles, and that sucks.
Chastising her for not including information that she flat out tells us is coming in Part 2, or chastening her for not mentioning examples of female characters that have very little to do with Damsel in Distress, is unfair and comes across a little bit knee-jerky.
IMHO.
Oh, don’t worry, all the ones you named will feature in the “asskicking fuckdoll” trope.
She’s also conveniently forget that virtually all male protagonists fall into the same character; especially if you drop characters so old they were designed in an era when a few pixels had to effectively show a character.
Interesting video. I can agree with what she’s saying, but hopefully she’ll address the other games where females have been treated way better.
Also, I think it’s worth noting the idea that “Tropes are not bad” in that of themselves. The Damsel in Distress plot does not instantly invalidate your character depending on HOW YOU WRITE IT. You can have a strong female get captured or be placed in danger and still have that character be compelling or develop interestingly, same with a strong male being captured or be placed in danger. It’s all just perspective and up to the duty of the writer.
Personally, Zelda I still find compelling and heroic in her later games even in moments where she is a “damsel.” And in those moments where she is, I don’t think it suddenly invalidate the rest of her development through the games.
She forgot to mention Samus Aran. You know, the woman who is always kidnapped at the beginning of every Metroid game so the hulking male protagonist (what’s his name again? I forget) can go on his quest to rescue her? And notice how they always show Samus in those highly sexualized outfits, again to get the player to identify with the masculine powerhouse of a main character.
Oh, wait. None of that ever happened.
Forgot to mention Samus Aran? The video is dedicated to a specific trope, why would she bring up a character that has nothing to with with the Damsel in Distresss trope? It’s just the first video in a series of videos she’s planning on doing, I’m sure she’ll mention Samus when it’s relevant.
I’m not saying her video was good or bad, but your complaint makes no sense.
Because I feel like this is somehow important, I have to first address that I am a male. Now with that out of the way…
Regarding the show itself. The historic facts were very interesting. I learning a bit about some games. The whole Crystal originally having her own game for example.
Then there’s the meat of the show. While I understand where she is coming from, I agree with some of what she said, I just can’t agree with how she is putting it.
Oh boy, the Double Dragon example. The first game had ruthless thugs punch out a woman. Future remakes/releases of the games kept the scene because that is how it starts. To be faithful to the source material. It’s not an excuse to have a woman getting hit for no other reason than just…because.
I took offense to the “subject/object” subject she used. That women were objects for rewards…as if wanting to save someone of the opposite gender just to save them is a foreign concept. I’ve played many a game where women had to be rescued but I never saw them as rewards, I saw them as characters who needed to be saved. Not to mention games where the kidappee was male, not female. Then there is the statement of females being a ball passed between the protagonist and antagonist…I mean REALLY! I don’t even know what to say to that. Again, I see where she is coming from but she goes too far and makes it sound unreasonable.
Alot of the examples she pulled out were made when gaming was originally aimed at males. Gun-ho and all that jazz. Now that gaming has become more wide-spread, there has been alot of examples of female characters that she seemed to mostly ignore for the sake of this video/series. Even when it was male-centric, there are some examples.
What about the Arland Saga Atelier games? What about Lightning and Terra being the main protagonists of their respective Final Fantasy games. Wild Arms XF has a princess being saved by a female who is the main protagonist. What about Arcana Heart and Skull Girls who have all female fighters (though Skull Girls are getting male characters soon). Samus and Lara Croft are two of the original pro-feminism characters. What about all those games where female characters are just as important as the male ones: Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy again, the “Tales of” series, the Disgaea (and related) games, ect., ect., ect.?
I recently read an article talking about how Hyperdimension Neptunia Victory is a game that promotes feminism. A game that has only female characters with fanservice up the wazoo with panty-shots, lesbian innuendos, revealing outfits, and scenes where the characters are all bare-naked in spas.
Here it is for those interested or want to debute me on it: http://www.technologytell.com/gaming/107818/fanservice-filled-hyperdimension-neptunia-is-promotes-feminism/
It really is a shame. For something that got fundraised so much, I expected a more fair show. It’s just too one-sided. I’ll probably watch one more episode to see if it changes for the better since this concept is very interesting. Otherwise, I wouldn’t really continue with it.
not bad for the 1st episode but as Xirbtt said not really anything new that gamers do not already know. This was a good intro but if she really wants to reach out and actually make a good point she’ll need to hit more controversial topics other then this.
Also, to point out some of these older arcade games that have this trope trend to the male demographic is stupid. They are silly nonsensical video games, as the plot for many of these older games really dont have much of a plot at all. That trope has been around a hell of a lot longer(100′s of years) then video games have been. It isnt a problem in video games, if anything it’s more of a problem in society.
I’m not saying she is wrong but she needs to back up her facts and use other examples then just video games, as it almost look like shes attacking video games for a trope that really has been around since the middle ages.
With all that said. She made some decent points but it went on for a bit to long. It felt more of a lecture then watching something entertaining. She didnt make her point to the very end, thus making this episode seem a bit drawn out.
It always annoys me to no end when people would rather blame game-makers for their “-isms” than to actually try to fix the problem themselves by adding any new content or ideas to the mix.
And no, the “I don’t have the resources to make video games” doesn’t fly anymore, especially with things like this around:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVbCECjxFds
maybe you should watch the whole video before making that judgement. If you did would not be saying that right now or you just were not paying attention at all.
Oh look, it’s that “feminist” again!
Another radical neo-feminist on the internet who doesn’t even understand her own philosophy or the topic she’s discussing.
She seems locked in the 80s when Toadstool and Zelda were all we got as far as women, but even in to the early 90s, once the SNES Era came about, we started having tons of strong, complex female characters. Heck in Super Mario RPG Princess Toadstool goes out on the grand, world-saving adventure with Mario.
This comes off as someone who has her mind made up about the state of games and rather than actually examining the issue, just decided to promote her warped world-view. She looks at the retro stuff and the dozen dude-bro releases every year now and thinks that’s all there is, rather than exactly examining the topic in a fair (and thorough) fashion.
Also, this was not the fruits of any $158,000. There’s people on you-tube who’ve done better with no budget. I hope the internet-white-knights who padded her bank account feel good that they probably bought her a new car cause their money sure didn’t go where they thought it would.
The fact that this ‘show’ was funded by a kickstarter just boggles my mind. Where did the money and effort go? There is NOTHING, underlined, bolded, and italicized, NOTHING here that is new or enlightening and as you said, just comes across as a bunch of blaming and finger-pointing. There is nothing positive expressed in this towards gaming culture despite a LARGE body of evidence of games including much deeper female characters and subjects in more recent years.
It’s depressing to see that someone who was essentially PAID to do this series, and titled it in a way that comes across as an objective view of the subject ‘Tropes vs. Women’, suggesting a counter-argument, has absolutely no mention of the opposing side, probably because she couldn’t be bothered with a $158,000 budget to do ANY research. Why was ANY of that money needed?
I could have easily made the same video better and with more points than she could with no money coming in in my free time. It’s sad.
Makes me wonder if I made a kick-starter wanting to show all the hentai games where men are attacked, restrained, and raped by a series of women to show how misandric gaming is if I’d get over $100,000 in funds. Or just show the rampant man on man or woman on man violence that is just as common in gaming as anything else. Then I could take the $2000 I would actually need to get a decent camera and editing software to slap it together and pick up the games I need.
I can actually name quite a few eroge with that theme, a good start would be Discipline: Record of a Crusade. And if you’ve seen the OVA, you saw the better version.
Then there’s the upcoming Starless…
http://vndb.org/v3161
I defentily don’t agree with everything said in the video but the premise and the overall message is nothing wrong or bad.
Nothing new was presented in this video though, I thought she had talked about the Damsel in Distress before just not at length and now that it has been given length no new or vital information was really put into this video.
Did anyone who watched this video really glean anything new from it? I didn’t. So I hope she actually puts new information in future videos instead of just pointing her finger and saying “here’s another example of ‘this’. ‘This’ is bad because patriarchy.”
I agree that female characters need to play a larger role in games, but seriously, whenever the sexist card is pulled out, I tune out. There are some great female heroes that are never given limelight at all like Jade from Beyond Good and Evil (still waiting for a freaking sequel, BTW), the protagonist from Syberia (don’t own it, but always been interested in that series), arguably, the new Tomb Raider (even if she is put in some situations, Lara is still a very strong character in my book), the playable female protagonists in Resident Evil, Alexandra Roivas from Eternal Darkness, April Ryan and various OTHER female characters in the Longest Journey series, Female protagonists in most SMT games (they are strong, even if occasionally overcome in the plot), and so on.
It just saddens me that people who harp on feminism in gaming 1. Always focus on old, nostalgic, compartively casual games in the medium and 2. NEVER REALLY PROVIDE GOOD EXAMPLES THEY SHOULD KNOW ABOUT IF THEY ARE GOING TO BRING UP THE ISSUE AS A COUNTER-ARGUMENT.
Because of these, it just comes across as ‘gamers are a bunch of sexist creepy man-pigs with white knight fantasies’. Well then, what does that make the female gamers that continue playing said ‘sexist’ games with no issues? Would you call them lesbians trying to act out fantasies of ‘getting the girl’? It’s an extremely stupid case of social tunnel vision, and probably indicative of some psychosis.
In other words, contribute to making things better or stop complaining, an objective analysis with both positives and negatives is stronger than only providing one side to the subject.
“… it works away by ripping away the power from women.”
That is so full of BS!
I understand where she is coming from. I mean, I’m a woman too. I grew up in video games where there was a damsel in distress. Nintendo isn’t purposely making the trope of damsels in distress… Its just those two series is what took off the most.
I mean, she’s only looking at the mainstream of video games.
In Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, there were two characters. The cute and shop keeper Tia, and thew General of the Parcelyte Army and Magical User, Selan. Who did Maxim go with? Not Tia. He ended up with Selan… and they married, had a son. And did she go weak when her son was kidnapped? Heck no! She went with her husband to beat down their kidnapper then went with her husband, and DIED with her husband, to save the WORLD. For their son.
And then there is the Fire Emblem series. They had a lot of good characters, as I recall. A lot of them were female and a lot of them were not kidnapped.
I understand what she’s coming through but BEING THE HERO DOESN’T MAKE YOU STRONG. She doesn’t even get the whole point of a character. Yes, you can be kidnapped… but that doesn’t always make you weak. The characteristics of a person is what makes that character. Their strengths, their weaknesses, etc.
The real problem isn’t that women are being forced into the damsel in distress role. The real problem is women are being written as women first before they are written as a character. Not only that but the age of video games she kept referring to was an era when it was marketed only to men.
Even then, that problem isn’t so much of a problem anymore. Writers and designers are slowly creating well-defined female characters that are written as characters first and their gender second. It has left us with some pretty memorable characters and even a pretty awesome reboot of Lara Croft.
Hopefully she’ll acknowledge this in the other parts but I don’t think she gets the real “root” of the problem… but its a problem that is slowly being resolved. Slowly. We’re getting there.
What we’re going to ignore the two Zelda CD-I games where Zelda is the main character? That’s okay they’re so bad I’d ignore them too.