welch wrote:ROBOKiTTY wrote:So I'm watching Sarkeesian's latest video, in which she actually draws on an academic work and listed five aspects of objectification, namely instrumentality, commodification, interchangeability, violability, and disposability.
Despite this attempt to dazzle with big words, Sarkeesian fundamentally fails to make a case that any of these happen to female characters exclusively or more than to male ones.
Instrumentality: In almost all games with combat, male characters are simply instruments of war and serve as the overwhelming majority of cannon fodder and footsoldiers.
Commodification: Linked to the above, soldiers are commodities to be bought (and sold), in some games as faceless abstract numbers until deployed.
Interchangeability: One mook is as good as the next. This one applies especially to male characters that serve as cannon fodder.
Violability: Men are targets of violence far more than women are in video games. In open-world games, the ability to hurt women does not make a case for misogyny; if women were singled out as invulnerable NPCs, there are feminists who would cry foul, too, as they would consider it putting women on a pedestal and assuming they need special protection.
Disposability: It is men who are the disposable sex, not women.
Epic phail, Sarkeesian.
The thing that pisses me off about her the most, (and there are parallels all over the place here), is that her idiocy is, of course, overshadowing some good points. For example, one of the reasons a lot of women want to see more women protagonists is so they can play as well, themselves or something close to it. I can see and agree with that. I play a lot of games where I have the option to play as a woman, but I don't. I don't have a reason beyond it's not something that interests me all that much.
If i'm playing metroid or tomb raider, then I don't have a choice, obviously, and those series are good enough that it doesn't bother me. But given my druthers, I play male characters. If I had to guess, I like to role play, and I'm most comfortable with the basics being like me, so I can concentrate on the other stuff.
I think, based on my wee sample size and unscientific methods, that a lot of women feel the same way. They want to play as women because they are one. They want to, just as many men do, project themselves into the game, and pretend it is them doing all that cool stuff. When you force them to add a layer of pretend over and over, it gets old.
But thanks to Sarkeesian's prominence, these, and other sober reasons for wanting an option for a female protagonist in a game, get overrun by endless twaddle from someone who thinks there's nothing to games but shooting people in the face.
Hu-ZZAH
Exactly. Instead of a legitimate reason to insert a woman into a game, or because the vision of the game developer is to have a woman in a game, due to the effect Sarkeesian and people like her has had on the medium, it's now almost a requirement to have a woman in a game. They become tokens. And if they're not done JUST right, naturally the developers will be crucified for it. It's ridiculous. In the beginning of the digital age when games was just starting to come into its own, did people care if the protagonist they played were male or female? It's a total stab in the dark but my guess would be, not a chance.
They didn't care. They just wanted a game that played well, did what it was supposed to do (entertain) and that was it. Then as it became more advanced, storylines were added and of course the storylines had to be topped to do better than the other. So we got games like Final Fantasy (the series), Secret of Mana, Chrono Trigger, Illusion of Gaia, etc, etc, etc. Many feminists who criticise the game industry don't know this, or they haven't bothered to find out, but many games on the NES, SNES, Genesis, and so on, did feature female characters and protagonists, and one of the most successful games on the SNES (Final Fantasy VI) had a female protagonist as THE main character. But as I said, did people really care about that stuff back then? No! What they cared about was, is it a good game? Does it have a good pace? Are the game mechanics sufficient? Does the story pull you in? Good! If not? Bad!
One of my favourite games on the SNES is a game called Lufia. It revolves around a female character (called Lufia) and it follows a story from the prequel (Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, which ironically was released AFTER the original Lufia). Anyway, it's a really good game and to this day I can play it to completion without getting bored. Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, same thing. I've played through the latter so many times, I still remember where all the secret jewels are. But did I play these games and judge their quality based on how many female characters they had in it, and how these female characters are portrayed? (Remember, not all women are strong and not all women are weak. In Lufia II, there's a meek and weak one you meet first and then later in the game someone more stronger and confident.) If games didn't have this kind of variety in characters, what would be the point in creating different characters in the first place?
No. No, I did not. And if you want to know how well the marketing goes for a game just because it has a woman protagonist in it, just look at Remember Me. Aesthetically pleasing, but it was such a boring game. Predictably formulaic, the fighting system was just not fluid enough (not like in the Arkham games), the story was bland and the voice acting was almost as if they called it in. Again, they marketed it as a would-be success just because it had a woman protagonist in it. Clearly, that is not everything that makes a game a game. Currently it stands at 65 total rating on Metacritic and that is combined with the enthusiastic user AND critic ratings who gave it a commanding 10, which it does not deserve. At all.
Another game that attempted this one-trick pony was the creator of Heavy Rain, David Cage, when he marketed Ellen Page as the protagonist for his new Heavy Rain-esque title, Beyond: Two Souls. That, too, did not go so well and it was panned by both critics and users alike. Now it stands at a mere 70 on Metacritic, an average rating, and it sold only 1 million copies.
I don't get it. Is this what gaming's come to? Stifled by prudes and political correctness? :snooty:
