Topic: More sexism in Smash Bros!!!

[theplottwist]

The people who designed such a woman, often due to lazy writing, pandering to the audience, through their own narrow-minded view of the subject, or other factors I cannot think of at the moment, will paint the character in a non-inclusive light, as either 'eye candy', or if an npc, due to the entire team designating the person as 'fodder' (GTA prostitute, AC whore, Hitman Stripper) or even 'background gore' (prostitute corpse in an alley, AC 'checkpoint' prostitute murder victim, etc.).

This looks awfully like "Lets ignore every NPC girl that is not a prostitute or stripper, and focus our efforts on the ones that are".

AC is widely regarded as a great historical reference, so now we will pretend that female prostitutes were not a norm back then?
Hitman invades a brothel (I guess that's what it was? Anyway~). Why would you expect to not see prostitutes there?

I fear for my games, and for the decision of inserting females there. Because if they're not "well fleshed" enough, with Tolkien-level minutia on their backstories, realistic-as-cryengine modelling and lifelike acting, I'll be accused of sexism. I fear for selecting a female as villain and cause a feminist uproar. I can put in a male with whatever bad quality I want, but make it female and here comes the shit storm.

I dunno... I feel like feminism doesn't want to see female portrayal in videogames unless it's righteous and supreme and caring and loving and pure. Someone will correct me like the chauvinistic pig I am, so I'll be sitting here in wait.

The problem lies in lack of choice. In games the more revealing female clothing is often better mechanically, meaning your only "choice" is to die or run around in a bikini. That's if there's a choice of practical clothing at all. Male characters are allowed to dress all sorts of ways, and to be short, fat, ugly, tall etc. But 98% of the time a female game character is defined by their unusual attractiveness and skimpy clothing. 1% of the time they're "Lol look at her she's so fat and ugly." and 1% of the time they get to be actual characters. With personalities and opinions that effect the story/gameworld, instead of just being objects placed in it to gawk at.

Keep in mind that women are half the total human population. Are you seeing a problem with lack of representation here? In an industry that's always talking about how it wants to be "taken seriously as art" and always preaching that it wants to "reach a wider audience". It's pretty freaking hard to reach a wider audience when you objectify and alienate half the people on the planet. Or be considered to have artistic integrity when almost all female characters can be summed up as "eyecandy" or "macguffins", and little else, in a naked attempt to pander to a presumed young straight male audience.

The problem isn't that some games objectify women, it's the fact that almost all of them do.

What is the correct portrayal of a female on a videogame, for it to be considered "non-sexist"?
Also, how does a female on a videogame must be portrayed for her to not be objectified?

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Hitman invades a brothel (I guess that's what it was? Anyway~). Why would you expect to not see prostitutes there?

It seems that you don't know the scene, so I guess I'll explain it to you.
1. it's not a brothel, it's a strip club.  Here's an issue that's easy to fix.  Many games use the 'strip club' as the stage.  Again, easy pandering to a mostly-male demographic.  They could've made it a regular bar, with bartenders and attendees, but the company/writers know that the demographic they're pandering to loves their digitized T&A so making it a strip club is an easy way to add appeal on the shoulders of misogyny.

You can argue that 'all bad guys/monsters objectify women so they must use this locale at some point', but in a game where you've got 100+ items stored in your person, you'd think there'd be a little more leeway with regards to villain hideouts, rather than resorting to easy cliches, since we're already riding that Suspension of Disbelief Train.

2. In said strip club, the player is given the choice of:
-'sneaking past the exotic dancers' - the hard choice, which requires stealth and other reflexes, and has no real reward for your efforts
-blowing the strippers' brains out - the easy choice, which has you murdering what are basically civilians (except with normal civilians, usually there is some kind of penalty - though with these games I don't even keep track of which do that or which don't).  There is no penalty for killing these characters, and there is no reward for letting them live.  However, killing them is just easier so there's where the player can be inclined to just pick the path of least resistance...

The dancers become nothing more than background gore here, and it's not like you get rewarded for being sneaky or for being morally proper.

The key here is, the player is given a false sense of choice.  The thing could've been done at a meth lab somewhere with male and female people in in clean room suits and it would have achieved the same effect.

I dunno... I feel like feminism doesn't want to see female portrayal in videogames unless it's righteous and supreme and caring and loving and pure. Someone will correct me like the chauvinistic pig I am, so I'll be sitting here in wait.

I'm not gonna call anyone names.  I'm saying the industry needs to kick their writers/scenario-writers and make them do something better than the usual crap they do.  (And no it shouldn't just pander to the male demographic with their stuff because the amount of female gamers is growing - there is no longer an excuse - I2, N5).  We gotta evolve.

Now, I'm not saying these shouldn't be shown at all anymore.  Certainly there will be times where this sort of scene may be called for.  However, it seems to happen all the time.  If it isn't this, it's some other trope.  We haven't evolved as an art medium where we can craft better stories than "Let's show you how awful the villain/world is, by 'kicking the dog', here".  Except, y'know, instead of dog, the trope is done at the expense of the representatives of half of the population in the world.

What is the correct portrayal of a female on a videogame, for it to be considered "non-sexist"?
Also, how does a female on a videogame must be portrayed for her to not be objectified?

These are basically the question.  With an easy answer:

-The same way as the male character would.  It's not about censorship, it's about equality.  That's why, at least in my example with Xenoblade, you can dress both male and female character up to your choice of interesting armor with however level of conservatism you feel is fine.  I've dressed up characters like Tanks when I either feel it's necessary, or when I need a particular task done.  I will admit I find the femme characters sexy, so at times I may put them with a little cleavage window here and there, but it's not forced upon me.  It's my decision.  In that game there are strong female characters as well as strong female NPCs.

As for the AC remark, AC has some great historical reference (here comes B5), but you're also playing a game in which you ride a character's DNA train into the past.  Did they need to show that particular aspect?  In fact, using prostitutes as cover could've been done much better even back then.  Great gameplay mechanic (I love the AC games) but I feel terrible as a person when I have to use people like that.  In ACIII (the one I hate) they started using the environment more and eventually you end up not really needing to use the whores nearly as much as, say, the Assassin attacks, or the Ruffians/Thieves.  And in ACIV (which is awesome) you can finally use the environment is far more better ways, essentially rendering the whore-entourage mechanic nearly useless (I think I used it, maybe... once?  I don't even recall). 

Did they 'need' to have the scene in AC where there's a 'serial murderer running around, killing our women', and have you chase him, and have him just grab a girl, slicing her neck, and use that as your Checkpoint Marker?  "Realism" aside (and I highly doubt anyone did that particular thing as the game had you perform the chase), it could've been handled better.  Here would've been an easy fix for that scene that would've worked out just the same:

-"Assassin, we have a crazy lunatic out there, who is targeting the girls in my brothel as well as their customers".  He needs to be stopped.
-The assassin chases the lunatic, who grabs not only the whores, but also male citizens whom he deems as 'dirty customers' or something.  Change one line of dialogue (I've seen you with them!  DIE, SINNER! **slice**)  Now at least it's equal-opportunity carnage. 

It's lazy writing/scripting that hasn't evolved yet.  I'm looking forward to it doing so.  There are little glimmers here and there where I see advances.

I realize it's 'just a game'.  And I care, even if it's just a videogame.  O5.

[Abnormal Freak]

I never thought I'd come across the phrase "equal opportunity carnage."

A vast majority of these games have shitty writing, period. I don't think we're seeing instances of otherwise great fiction that needs to change its treatment of women in order to evolve. There needs to be better writing and less cliches in general for video games to be taken seriously as an art medium. That means less "Ooh, save me please!" and lame female characters and lame male villains, etc.

It's also noteworthy that nothing pleases Sarkeesian when she takes aim at No More Heroes 2 at 19:59 of this video, a game which is so unbelievably over-the-top in every respect and treats every character, including the "hero," as an object. You can't try to make a case for violence against women in video games when you also throw the absurd and satirical under the bus with everything else.

Really though, I come to hate video games more and more not just for their stories but the putrid gameplay as well. Most of the big AAA, giant-budget blockbuster titles reek of sterility and pandering to dufus dudebro gamers. I'd like to crawl back into my hole now.

[Belmontoya]

What is all of this complaining about women in video games being too sexy!?

Let's not forget that back in the day all of our video games had females with square boobs.

It's better to have the problem be that things are too sexy than it is to have them not be sexy enough IMO.

If game devs were putting females in turtle neck sweaters and sweat pants, then we would have people complaining that women are being portrayed too plainly and or ugly. I suppose they would call that sexism too!

Guys are clearly fantasized in games as well with rippling muscles and sexy voices. I'm a scrawny little turd and it doesn't make me upset when I look in the mirror!

GTA is a terrible game for society in general so there's that. There are just as many devs that are making games that are worth while and tasteful. There's always gonna be junk crap. It's the same deal with movies and books. Video games are no special place for such problems (if you can call them that).

Ahhhhhh. I've had my good rant for the day. I'm gonna get back to working on sprites. I have some boobs and man bulges that need enlarging.

Bah! It's all of a bunch of malarkey!

[theplottwist]

2. In said strip club, the player is given the choice of:
-'sneaking past the exotic dancers' - the hard choice, which requires stealth and other reflexes, and has no real reward for your efforts
-blowing the strippers' brains out - the easy choice, which has you murdering what are basically civilians (except with normal civilians, usually there is some kind of penalty - though with these games I don't even keep track of which do that or which don't).  There is no penalty for killing these characters, and there is no reward for letting them live.  However, killing them is just easier so there's where the player can be inclined to just pick the path of least resistance... The dancers become nothing more than background gore here, and it's not like you get rewarded for being sneaky or for being morally proper.

You receive up to a 3,500 point penalty for killing a non-target, and has the chance to earn 90,000 points if you don't kill them in the final rating. You're supposed to be a Hitman, where only your target is only one. The game penalizes you for not acting like a Hitman. In fact, you lose points in pacification, civilian casuality, and non-target casuality. The player is constatly told to not kill innocents. How is this not a penalty?

I may not know the game, but I have Google, and the evidence seems to be plenty.

And well... You're allowed to do just the same to males, right?

The key here is, the player is given a false sense of choice.  The thing could've been done at a meth lab somewhere with male and female people in in clean room suits and it would have achieved the same effect.

So the problem is that the Agent is killing a female exclusive place, in a game where 90% of the victims are males?


I could go on and say that I feel misrepresented on games because most games have buffed up, overly manly characters, and that his also sets an undesirable, unachievable standard for males, and how saying this argument is a cop out is actually a cop out, but meh.  I won't be on this topic anymore. Whenever this issue is brought up, nobody listens to the other side. I'm the one who never learns and keeps putting in my opinion, uselessly.

Ramble on, my good people.

[Ratty]

What is the correct portrayal of a female on a videogame, for it to be considered "non-sexist"?
Also, how does a female on a videogame must be portrayed for her to not be objectified?

As Jorge said and I hinted earlier, write them like you would an actual person. Make them have the same value to the story as your male characters. This is not to suggest you can't have characters not important to the story, but when ALL the women ALL the time are just there as decoration that's a big problem.

It seems that you don't know the scene, so I guess I'll explain it to you.
1. it's not a brothel, it's a strip club.  Here's an issue that's easy to fix.  Many games use the 'strip club' as the stage.  Again, easy pandering to a mostly-male demographic.  They could've made it a regular bar, with bartenders and attendees, but the company/writers know that the demographic they're pandering to loves their digitized T&A so making it a strip club is an easy way to add appeal on the shoulders of misogyny.

You can argue that 'all bad guys/monsters objectify women so they must use this locale at some point', but in a game where you've got 100+ items stored in your person, you'd think there'd be a little more leeway with regards to villain hideouts, rather than resorting to easy cliches, since we're already riding that Suspension of Disbelief Train.

2. In said strip club, the player is given the choice of:
-'sneaking past the exotic dancers' - the hard choice, which requires stealth and other reflexes, and has no real reward for your efforts
-blowing the strippers' brains out - the easy choice, which has you murdering what are basically civilians (except with normal civilians, usually there is some kind of penalty - though with these games I don't even keep track of which do that or which don't).  There is no penalty for killing these characters, and there is no reward for letting them live.  However, killing them is just easier so there's where the player can be inclined to just pick the path of least resistance...

The dancers become nothing more than background gore here, and it's not like you get rewarded for being sneaky or for being morally proper.

The key here is, the player is given a false sense of choice.  The thing could've been done at a meth lab somewhere with male and female people in in clean room suits and it would have achieved the same effect.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=8N-tkrxAEWw Here's a good related video.

SNIP

Watch the video above.

What is all of this complaining about women in video games being too sexy!?

Well that's not the complaint. The problem is that women aren't usually treated as characters, but as objects.

Guys are clearly fantasized in games as well with rippling muscles and sexy voices. I'm a scrawny little turd and it doesn't make me upset when I look in the mirror!

That's apples and bananas man. The dudes with rippling muscles etc. are created for you to fantasize about being. The women are there for you to fantasize about acquiring.

GTA is a terrible game for society in general so there's that. There are just as many devs that are making games that are worth while and tasteful. There's always gonna be junk crap. It's the same deal with movies and books. Video games are no special place for such problems (if you can call them that).

Yeah but games are just as worthy of critical analysis as any other medium. They're just as important to our popular culture, and just as worthy of critical analysis, as stuff like TV and film, which have been getting feminist critique for decades.

[Dracula9]

I feel like I should at least contemplate bringing up God of War where background/equal-opportunity gore is involved. I know it'd be countered with the countless boobshots (even though they're historically accurate) and sex mini-games, but I feel like I should mention it.

Ah, well.

*starts butchering civilians, regardless of gender*

EDIT: I lied, I have to touch on this one real quick.

GTA is a terrible game for society in general so there's that. There are just as many devs that are making games that are worth while and tasteful. There's always gonna be junk crap. It's the same deal with movies and books. Video games are no special place for such problems (if you can call them that).

GTA is only a terrible game for society if all of society was inept half-wits who can't distinguish the game from reality (oh, shit, it kind of is like that already). I grew up playing GTA, a fondness for which I got from my father, who also played each of them successively. I don't see how it's fair to say GTA is bad for society when most of the time it touches on aspects of society we aren't usually willing to concede to. But since it's a game that relies heavily on satire, it's okay to explore those avenues without getting too close for comfort.

Just look at San Andreas. Half that game is gang wars. Gang wars are a thing, and the game brings attention to it by humanizing it. GTAV touches on the drug trade, supercorporations abusing power(the Steve Jobs parody was fucking gold), and the tech underground, just to name a few. Vice City and Liberty City Stories feature a lot of mafia conventions and lifestyles. And don't even get me started on The Ballad of Gay Tony.

But no, a game has strip clubs, or flat female characters (it doesn't even have to be the entire cast, just one will do the fucking job), or any sort of hint of masculinity getting more screentime or depth, and suddenly every other theme of the game becomes irrelevant. I understand that notion if the inequality/sexism/objectification/etc. is central to the plot or part of the plot or is done so often regardless of player choice that it hinders the game, BUT; it's not like the GTA games force you to spend every minute of the game in the stripclubs or brothels. Oftentimes it's usually just a few missions out of the games' hundreds, or a car dropoff point. And I've heard GTAV get a lot of shit for actually showing tits and really bringing the lapdances to a highly sexualized level, and while the complaint's not without its merits...that's how stripclubs fucking are. A guy paying to get tits in his face on a lonely Friday night doesn't mean shit if a big-selling game does essentially the same thing; a guy paying for a game that eventually has a brief scene with tits waving onscreen.

In sum? Grand Theft Auto isn't 'bad for society.' People only say that because it brings some more unpleasant aspects of society to light, and also because every now and then some idiot kid will do something stupid and blame it on the game. Don't blame the game, especially in games like GTA that require so much fucking work just to make (just think, someone had to drive around every goddamned nook and cranny of San Andreas and Los Santos in order to map out GTAV), that you could just spend the whole game looking at all the effort put into mapping it alone and still feel satisfied.

DON'T BLAME THE GAME!

[theplottwist]

That's apples and bananas man. The dudes with rippling muscles etc. are created for you to fantasize about being. The women are there for you to fantasize about acquiring.

How do you know? Because males are the target audience of videogames?
But on a world where half the gamer population is composed of females, this doesn't seem to add up. Females seem to have a fairly high standard for males.

"You can't say what are on their minds, Plotty dear"

So they can't say what is on mine too. I might have comitted a strawman here, so enlighten me how wrong I'm.

Also, I arrived on pretty much the same conclusions about Hitman as Thunderfoot. What I'm find quite interesting is that the person speaking against Thunderfoot seems to be completelly oblivious to the fact that he (And Anita) are comitting the exact same fallacies he is accusing Thunderfoot of doing.

The bit where he mentions that "penalty is not even so much penalizing". This applies to the males on the game too.
And what would be a good penalty? Getting a game over for killing women, but not for killing men?

He also says that Thunderfoot is committing Ad hominem for calling her a liar. Well, she lied about the game, what does it make her? Hint: Not a very honest person.

Ad hominem is about attacking your opponent without bringing in evidence. You could call me a fuckhead, and still defeat my argument with evidence. This is not Ad hominem, this is you stating I'm a fuckhead because the evidence against my fallacious point exists. If anything you're actually stating two truths.

And you see... When the developers tried to add some background to the strippers so they don't seem to be so much background props, the lad on the video goes out of his way to condemn this.

Anita looks like she's saying "Please remove any negative portrayal of females of videogames. I don't care much about males, but please take out the females. This will make things even".

I can't agree with feminism, sorry. Looks too much like a hypocrisy+victimism combo to me. Women are victims, but over the board dishonesty is not needed to point it out. The lad in the video completelly misses the point of many of the critiques. The Watch_Dogs one was utterly ridiculous. The player is made to look at the females specifically for rage inducing purposes. The hero is fighting to free them. He's not having a happy-go-lucky time at a stripper club. Mister Logic there seems to not want females at all.

So I'm not adding any females to my games, ever. It'll be impossible to get it right.

[Dracula9]

You and I are on a similar wavelength, it seems, plot.

And you'd still be screwed doing that.

By not putting a female character in, you're still a sexist for excluding the female gender.

[theplottwist]

By not putting a female character in, you're still a sexist for excluding the female gender.

Better to be called exclusionary than misogynistic. Since I seem to be unable to write women just because I was born with a penis, I'll conform to writing ultra muscular dudes, going in adventures and killing demons using their bare hands, with balls so big they have their own gravitational pull, on a world where women are inexistent and males are born out of trees.

And when I'm questioned about it, I'll ask the person to write a female to be on the game, but also to withstand all the hate he/she'll get for it, because writting females is impossible. They're too divine (and too much victims) to be correctly written by mere mortals.

[Dracula9]

Fair enough. Can't argue with you there.

[Jorge D. Fuentes]

Better to be called exclusionary than misogynistic. Since I seem to be unable to write women just because I was born with a penis, I'll conform to writing ultra muscular dudes, going in adventures and killing demons using their bare hands, with balls so big they have their own gravitational pull, on a world where women are inexistent and males are born out of trees.

And when I'm questioned about it, I'll ask the person to write a female to be on the game, but also to withstand all the hate he/she'll get for it, because writting females is impossible. They're too divine (and too much victims) to be correctly written by mere mortals.

Well that escalated quickly.
I'm looking forward to when your game hits the market.

[theANdROId]

Don't we kinda misrepresent everything, in a sense?  I mean...:

- Michael Jordan as the Hanes Representative, because if you wear Hanes,  you'll be ultra cool like Jordan!
- Victoria Secret's Angels, because you'll look this sexy if you wear V.S. underwear!
- You're a helpless old person who probably needs help!  Call this number to apply for some helpful service!
- Drink X-brand beer, because you'll be partying and surrounded by babes, just like the people in this commercial!
- Eat at X-restaurant because it's cool and fun, just like the people in this commercial!
- Play with this awesome toy, because these older kids are cool and they do! (Ever noticed that the kids in toy commercials are frequently a little older than the target audience?!)
- Play this game because the protagonist is a barbarian ( with gravitational balls, apparently! X-D ) who saves hot women!  You can totally live out your fantasy this way!

I mean...it just seems like everywhere you look people just say whatever it takes to sell their product.  Not that it's right, but we do it everywhere!

[beingthehero]

As a pale flabby hairy guy, I can in fact confirm that wearing victoria secret underwear has boosted by sex appeal by at least 2%.

[Belmontoya]

The only thing I don't like about GTA is the whole senseless crime simulation thing. I don't play the games myself, but I have friends who talk about what a good time they have stealing, and killing prostitutes and other pedestrians, ect in those games. I don't have a real problem with it, but I just don't like hearing about it and something just seems icky about it to me. It's just the whole idea of glorifying crime. I'm not denying that the games are probably fun and well made, but I just don't like the idea of them. Like I said, I don't play those games, so I'm really only assuming.

As long as the game has a mature rating it can have all of the nudity, violence, sex, and drugs it wants as far as I'm concerned.

If people don't like it, they don't have to play it. Trying to cry the sexism foul is pretty pointless if you ask me. And as far as games misrepresenting women goes... There are plenty enough women in the world who choose to dress skimpy. If an artist in a game designs a female character to have sexual flare, there is nothing unrealistic about that. Some women really are that way and choose to dress that way.

My wife and I logged in many hours of enjoyment with Dead or Alive 5. She was never offended by it. She was amused!

As a pale flabby hairy guy, I can in fact confirm that wearing victoria secret underwear has boosted by sex appeal by at least 2%.

I'm gonna have to check that out. I could use a 2% boost.