Do you see something maybe a little ironic in you judging her for her appearance in these videos?
No.
Appearance, tone of voice, and ease of understanding are important aspects toward catching and keeping the interest of the audience. Distractions are distractions.
My main problem with sarkeesian is she barely does any research before making these videos and calls anyone who disagrees with her "part of the patriarchal infrastructure."
I don't know why people even bother their time with Anita Sarkeesian, all she does is read information from Wikipedia, websites or a script written by someone.
Not only that but this male vs female games is just to try and separate the gaming community which hopefully doesn't work, and the way she talks is so uninteresting, tedious.. it just makes me want to turn off the video.
Oh by the way, if she cared sooo much about female hero characters why didn't she spend those $150k she got from Kickstarter?!
She has absolutely no credibility and no one should have ever supported her, that and she doesn't allow people to rate or comment her videos.
This is a great article to discuss but she's terrible and not even a suitable person to bring it up.
Oh please do chime in. We're in a new loop already.
/edit: All right, I'm up to speed. The beginning of the vid was a bit muddied, you didn't quite know where she was going this time. It became very clear afterwards, though. And again, there are many angles a valid criticism could take, but the central criticism I encountered here is not one of them.
The focus on indie games that are paying homage to the 'captured women' tropes - which she outright says is what they're doing - really isn't a solid base, considering most of these games are simple little titles that don't focus on plot and use the classic 'captured girl' as both an homage and a barebones plot to get the game going.
Geee whiz, this was the whole point of the video, for crying out loud. "Ironic sexism" is still sexism. A parodied trope is still the trope. An homage to a damsel game still has the damsel. Granted, she should have printed that on her video as a permanent subtitle because her most violent watchers just don't seem to get it, but STILL. It's a good point. It's an easy point. It's a pretty irrefutable point.
Also, her positive examples this time included my most favorite games, I mean, seriously, Beyond Good & Evil and The Secret of Monkey Island? Girl's got taste, you've got to give her that!
edit 2: What now, you want a stupid sexist joke to go with the things you can't swallow in these last lines? All right, here we go. Here's one of youtube's automatic captions for the new video. ENJOY.
(Original text: "let's try a thought experiment". Seriously, youtube has GOT to work on that thing.)
women are dumb there are lots of empowering women in games like ivy from soul calibur and the dead or alive girls from dead or alive paradise and hana and rain from fear effect and dont forget samus from other m
I'll admit she does have some interesting points, but the way she's delivering them - both from a presenting standpoint and in the actual material she's delivering - are both very flawed.
Presenting-wise... this is where things sound really bad, but personally (emphasis on that word!) I keep being distracted by her earrings, her plaid shirt and the incredibly well-manicured face. Also, her voice has very little inflection or emotion in it, meaning it's hard to stay invested in what she's saying.
As for the material... well, I've already said a bit about this, but I don't think I've gone into enough detail about why I find this series so frustrating.
She's picking obvious targets to make her points seem more validated, she's not examining the real reasons why the developers are doing it and all we're hearing is her own point of view.
She's not done any interviews with said developers to try and find out the logic behind the 'stereotypical' gender roles in their games, she's not really offering any positive titles that show how things should be done (aside from one 'hypothetical' title she's made up herself) and she's taking so long to deliver these videos that it allows her argument time to fester in the public conciousness, presenting her as just being overwhelmingly negative ALL THE TIME.
Seriously, it's been how long since her first video? Three, four months? That's four months of negative stuff from her (despite her only having released three videos). It's... it's really not good.
So yeah, while I feel that there are some valid points being made, she's not providing a balanced look at the subject and as a result the whole thing feels very backwards. Also, she seriously needs to lose the earrings. It's just impossible to take anything she says seriously when she has something bigger than her fist dangling from her ear.
So yeah, while I feel that there are some valid points being made, she's not providing a balanced look at the subject and as a result the whole thing feels very backwards.
That's because the whole thing IS backwards. She's been throwing stones into the other side of the scale as well, but for a balanced look, things would have to be balanced. With only 4% of games featuring a female heroine, we'll be waiting for any kind of balance for another 30 years, I'd assume.
I agree with the inflection thing; that's a skill she should indeed develop. Picking on the plaid shirt however, errrr. I don't quite get it. She can't wear a plaid shirt? Because... she's a girl?? :cool:
That's because the whole thing IS backwards. She's been throwing stones into the other side of the scale as well, but for a balanced look, things would have to be balanced. With only 4% of games featuring a female heroine, we'll be waiting for any kind of balance for another 30 years, I'd assume.
My point is that she should at least mention some of those 4% as positive examples to counter her constant negative look at games that get it wrong. It would help her argument immensely if she didn't wait forever to get around to looking at the more positives examples (she's said she'll be doing a separate video on them, but since I seem to recall the thing being a stretch goal in the original Kickstarter, I'd say we have a while to go).
I agree with the inflection thing; that's a skill she should indeed develop. Picking on the plaid shirt however, errrr. I don't quite get it. She can't wear a plaid shirt? Because... she's a girl?? :cool:
Because it's very unprofessional and one of many distracting elements to her presentation. There's a reason business(wo)men tend to wear plain white shirts.
You can wait forever. games with female lead characters don't sell well.
That, I believe is the problem that she is trying to address. It might seem like she's picking on the games, but she's really trying to pick on the culture and attitudes that make these games sell better than ones where women aren't objectified. And it won't change until the mindset behind it changes.
All the people picking on her because of her appearance, sending her death threats and rape threats, and generally harassing her are only proving that she's right that there's a problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of that $150k has to go to trauma counseling after this. I mean, seriously, if I had to go through a hundredth of what she probably goes through every day, I'd probably would have gone insane and murdered someone by now.
And oh god, they're are about the same size as her head. How does that even work? Also, her shoulder looks like it's been dislocated.
With those? I'm not surprised.
Anyway, I've only seen part one so far, and I think it has been reasonably well done. But she presents a very one sided arguement. Where's Samus? Nintendo's leading lady. Heck, she could've even mentioned that Nintendo covered her up for the entire game because they were scared that it wouldn't sell. But they were making a statement there, that not all women are helpless. Heck, even the villain is female (Mother Brain). Keeping her covered was the best way to ensure the game sold at the same time. And stripping her down to a bikini? To make it obvious she was female.
I do think the gender imbalance is an issue in video games. Especially when characters like the one Der_Ketzer posted appear and no-one seems to bat an eyelid. If a male character model was to have an extremely large bulge, I'm sure there would be a huge backlash. Then again, if a woman was seen to be getting less and less clothing throughout a game, like the Prince in Prince of Persia: Sands of time, I'm sure there wouldn't be a shortage of complaints.
As for games with lead females not selling, Tomb Raider is a prime example of the opposite. Sure, she had over exaggerrated proportions that no doubt boosted sales, but the latest tomb raider still sold pretty well. If it is a great game, people will buy it, regardless of the main character's race, gender or species.
As for everyone picking on her (Video Lady) appearance, and the death threats, I think that's just par for the course on YouTube, when you are talking about a slightly controversial issue. And i think she's actually pretty good looking, as far as women go.
The Quidditch Goal posts need to go the way of the Dodo though.
While I do hate the design of characters like Ivy from Soul Calibur, the sorceress from Dragon Crown (the one that der_ketzer posted) doesn't obtain same reaction from me, and I think that's mostly because... well, EVERYBODY'S design is incredibly ridiculous. Like, let's say this:
Look at that shit. Tiny legs, tiny head, huge muscled body and muscled hands that probably would reach the ground with proportions like that. And barely any clothing at all.
Maybe it's just me, but with characters of both genders being extremely disproportioned, ridiculously large breasts don't really seem as a cause to get enraged to me.
Maybe it's just me, but with characters of both genders being extremely disproportioned, ridiculously large breasts don't really seem as a cause to get enraged to me.
Well it's Atlus so I doubt it's meant to be mainstream.
But for me... it just makes me seasick in motion.
(The game's supposed to be really good, for the record. Take from that what you will.)
Well as with every Playstation exclusive game it will be praised because PS3-Fanboys don't want to hear the truth anyway. (just look at "The Lamest of Us"). So I'd be careful about that.
as it stands we have 6 cast members with one okay female and two okay male characters. 1 debatable male character and 2 glorified sexdolls for perverts that are supposed to be characters. And those are so disproportional that they are really hard to look at. Esp. the female barbarian which I will not even post here. See them over at: http://www.atlus.com/dragonscrown/
They even move if you click on them. Yay. I guess.
The big controversy around this was that a female reviewer gave the game a 6/10 based on the art (and I totally agree on that, it made me not want to play the game) and was bombarded with hatred from fanboys because of that.
But that's not what I wanted people to focus on, dammit. Archer - realistic and attractive. Mage - about as realistic as a love doll made from Styrofoam and every bit as pretty.
If the gamers started demanding games with strong female characters and refuse to buy the rubbish currently on sale, you can bet that the marketing pressure would force them to make more games with female protagonists.
Correct I guess. I personally don't mind. The gender of the heroes in my games is a minor detail to me. I pick female characters in RPGs most of the time though. I can be a man all day. I want to be something else when I play a game.
But then I read stuff like: Ugh the game (Rogue Legacy) gave me the choice of 3 female characters. I don't want to play as a girl. That was a thread in the game's steamcommunity. Why I don't know but it was...
Do you really think there are a large number of games that use or reference the Damsel in Distress trope, but do it in a genuinely subversive or non-sexist way?
I think the saddest thing is that Monkey Island handled the issue very well early on, with a strong female character that was actually above that sort of thing, and then later games (particularly Tales) paint her in a much weaker light
I tend to play female characters when I get the choice in computer games. Sometimes I don't, but the overwhelming majority of the time my first character is female. Later, I might go back and play a guy to see if things are different, but generally playing a woman allows me to connect more with the game.
Part of the reason I like Portal so much. All of the characters are female.
As far as the Monkey Island series, I agree. In the first two games, Guybrush functioned much the same way as Indiana Jones as far as his role as a character. Sure, he's the protagonist, but his participation in the story does very little. If Guybrush (or Indiana) were missing from their respective bits of media, the outcome of the story wouldn't change. Starting with Curse, Guybrush becomes more integral to the plot and actually starts effecting it. Whereas in the first two games, Elaine pretty much solves the problem while he's busy rubbing random junk together, starting in Curse, he creates the problem and then has to solve it, with little or no input from Elaine at all.
Also, best example of a "dude in distress" that gets rescued by a strong female protagonist: Michael Jackson in Space Channel 5 pt 2
But as you might have heard things like that do not count because it is no trope to have a dude in distress.
That's what she said and she's sticking to it. Stupid men.
I'm pretty sure the Amazon and the Sorceress are SUPPOSED to be warped to the point of being grotesque parodies of fantasy tropes:
Seriously, THOSE LEGS.
The problem with the Sorceress is that she appeared in the video game space, where she is less "insane parody of art" and more "egregious to a greater extent than is already sadly normal". The parody falls flat thanks to the unfortunate context of video game character design in which Ivy is seen as a normal entry in the pantheon of female characters.
Reading this thread, it kind of makes me want to make a videogame about an awkward nerdy fellow with a giant wang who has to quickly defeat or run away from a horde of sexy alien women before his bulge gets too big for him to move! XD
And the ladies would attack him with sexy poses (and lasers! Lots and lots of lasers! *pewpewpew*) XD
Reading this thread, it kind of makes me want to make a videogame about an awkward nerdy fellow with a giant wang who has to quickly defeat or run away from a horde of sexy alien women before his bulge gets too big for him to move! XD
And the ladies would attack him with sexy poses (and lasers! Lots and lots of lasers! *pewpewpew*) XD
Comments
Appearance, tone of voice, and ease of understanding are important aspects toward catching and keeping the interest of the audience. Distractions are distractions.
Not only that but this male vs female games is just to try and separate the gaming community which hopefully doesn't work, and the way she talks is so uninteresting, tedious.. it just makes me want to turn off the video.
Oh by the way, if she cared sooo much about female hero characters why didn't she spend those $150k she got from Kickstarter?!
She has absolutely no credibility and no one should have ever supported her, that and she doesn't allow people to rate or comment her videos.
This is a great article to discuss but she's terrible and not even a suitable person to bring it up.
/edit: All right, I'm up to speed. The beginning of the vid was a bit muddied, you didn't quite know where she was going this time. It became very clear afterwards, though. And again, there are many angles a valid criticism could take, but the central criticism I encountered here is not one of them.
Geee whiz, this was the whole point of the video, for crying out loud. "Ironic sexism" is still sexism. A parodied trope is still the trope. An homage to a damsel game still has the damsel. Granted, she should have printed that on her video as a permanent subtitle because her most violent watchers just don't seem to get it, but STILL. It's a good point. It's an easy point. It's a pretty irrefutable point.
Also, her positive examples this time included my most favorite games, I mean, seriously, Beyond Good & Evil and The Secret of Monkey Island? Girl's got taste, you've got to give her that!
edit 2: What now, you want a stupid sexist joke to go with the things you can't swallow in these last lines? All right, here we go. Here's one of youtube's automatic captions for the new video. ENJOY.
(Original text: "let's try a thought experiment". Seriously, youtube has GOT to work on that thing.)
I'll admit she does have some interesting points, but the way she's delivering them - both from a presenting standpoint and in the actual material she's delivering - are both very flawed.
Presenting-wise... this is where things sound really bad, but personally (emphasis on that word!) I keep being distracted by her earrings, her plaid shirt and the incredibly well-manicured face. Also, her voice has very little inflection or emotion in it, meaning it's hard to stay invested in what she's saying.
As for the material... well, I've already said a bit about this, but I don't think I've gone into enough detail about why I find this series so frustrating.
She's picking obvious targets to make her points seem more validated, she's not examining the real reasons why the developers are doing it and all we're hearing is her own point of view.
She's not done any interviews with said developers to try and find out the logic behind the 'stereotypical' gender roles in their games, she's not really offering any positive titles that show how things should be done (aside from one 'hypothetical' title she's made up herself) and she's taking so long to deliver these videos that it allows her argument time to fester in the public conciousness, presenting her as just being overwhelmingly negative ALL THE TIME.
Seriously, it's been how long since her first video? Three, four months? That's four months of negative stuff from her (despite her only having released three videos). It's... it's really not good.
So yeah, while I feel that there are some valid points being made, she's not providing a balanced look at the subject and as a result the whole thing feels very backwards. Also, she seriously needs to lose the earrings. It's just impossible to take anything she says seriously when she has something bigger than her fist dangling from her ear.
That's because the whole thing IS backwards. She's been throwing stones into the other side of the scale as well, but for a balanced look, things would have to be balanced. With only 4% of games featuring a female heroine, we'll be waiting for any kind of balance for another 30 years, I'd assume.
I agree with the inflection thing; that's a skill she should indeed develop. Picking on the plaid shirt however, errrr. I don't quite get it. She can't wear a plaid shirt? Because... she's a girl?? :cool:
Because it's very unprofessional and one of many distracting elements to her presentation. There's a reason business(wo)men tend to wear plain white shirts.
You can wait forever. games with female lead characters don't sell well.
Did you watch the ENTIRE video? Because I must now think you didn't...
Yeah. That one is so bad I lost all interest in playing the game. Trust me. It's worse in motion.
That, I believe is the problem that she is trying to address. It might seem like she's picking on the games, but she's really trying to pick on the culture and attitudes that make these games sell better than ones where women aren't objectified. And it won't change until the mindset behind it changes.
All the people picking on her because of her appearance, sending her death threats and rape threats, and generally harassing her are only proving that she's right that there's a problem.
I wouldn't be surprised if some of that $150k has to go to trauma counseling after this. I mean, seriously, if I had to go through a hundredth of what she probably goes through every day, I'd probably would have gone insane and murdered someone by now.
And oh god, they're are about the same size as her head. How does that even work? Also, her shoulder looks like it's been dislocated.
With those? I'm not surprised.
Anyway, I've only seen part one so far, and I think it has been reasonably well done. But she presents a very one sided arguement. Where's Samus? Nintendo's leading lady. Heck, she could've even mentioned that Nintendo covered her up for the entire game because they were scared that it wouldn't sell. But they were making a statement there, that not all women are helpless. Heck, even the villain is female (Mother Brain). Keeping her covered was the best way to ensure the game sold at the same time. And stripping her down to a bikini? To make it obvious she was female.
I do think the gender imbalance is an issue in video games. Especially when characters like the one Der_Ketzer posted appear and no-one seems to bat an eyelid. If a male character model was to have an extremely large bulge, I'm sure there would be a huge backlash. Then again, if a woman was seen to be getting less and less clothing throughout a game, like the Prince in Prince of Persia: Sands of time, I'm sure there wouldn't be a shortage of complaints.
As for games with lead females not selling, Tomb Raider is a prime example of the opposite. Sure, she had over exaggerrated proportions that no doubt boosted sales, but the latest tomb raider still sold pretty well. If it is a great game, people will buy it, regardless of the main character's race, gender or species.
As for everyone picking on her (Video Lady) appearance, and the death threats, I think that's just par for the course on YouTube, when you are talking about a slightly controversial issue. And i think she's actually pretty good looking, as far as women go.
The Quidditch Goal posts need to go the way of the Dodo though.
Look at that shit. Tiny legs, tiny head, huge muscled body and muscled hands that probably would reach the ground with proportions like that. And barely any clothing at all.
Maybe it's just me, but with characters of both genders being extremely disproportioned, ridiculously large breasts don't really seem as a cause to get enraged to me.
Well it's Atlus so I doubt it's meant to be mainstream.
But for me... it just makes me seasick in motion.
For comparison, here's the female archer in the same game (Dragon's Crown, in case you missed it).
Is it weird, or normal, that I find her far more attractive?
(The game's supposed to be really good, for the record. Take from that what you will.)
Well as with every Playstation exclusive game it will be praised because PS3-Fanboys don't want to hear the truth anyway. (just look at "The Lamest of Us"). So I'd be careful about that.
as it stands we have 6 cast members with one okay female and two okay male characters. 1 debatable male character and 2 glorified sexdolls for perverts that are supposed to be characters. And those are so disproportional that they are really hard to look at. Esp. the female barbarian which I will not even post here. See them over at:
http://www.atlus.com/dragonscrown/
They even move if you click on them. Yay. I guess.
The big controversy around this was that a female reviewer gave the game a 6/10 based on the art (and I totally agree on that, it made me not want to play the game) and was bombarded with hatred from fanboys because of that.
No, it's actually supposed to play really well. Plenty of reviews back me up on this.
But that's not what I wanted people to focus on, dammit. Archer - realistic and attractive. Mage - about as realistic as a love doll made from Styrofoam and every bit as pretty.
Correct I guess. I personally don't mind. The gender of the heroes in my games is a minor detail to me. I pick female characters in RPGs most of the time though. I can be a man all day. I want to be something else when I play a game.
But then I read stuff like: Ugh the game (Rogue Legacy) gave me the choice of 3 female characters. I don't want to play as a girl. That was a thread in the game's steamcommunity. Why I don't know but it was...
http://steamcommunity.com/app/241600/discussions/0/846958223104739780/
The ratio of good to bad examples that she lists is probably proportional to the ratio of 'good' to 'bad' total games (in terms of this issue).
No. The positive side is just completely irrelevant to the point she's trying to force.
I think the saddest thing is that Monkey Island handled the issue very well early on, with a strong female character that was actually above that sort of thing, and then later games (particularly Tales) paint her in a much weaker light
Part of the reason I like Portal so much. All of the characters are female.
As far as the Monkey Island series, I agree. In the first two games, Guybrush functioned much the same way as Indiana Jones as far as his role as a character. Sure, he's the protagonist, but his participation in the story does very little. If Guybrush (or Indiana) were missing from their respective bits of media, the outcome of the story wouldn't change. Starting with Curse, Guybrush becomes more integral to the plot and actually starts effecting it. Whereas in the first two games, Elaine pretty much solves the problem while he's busy rubbing random junk together, starting in Curse, he creates the problem and then has to solve it, with little or no input from Elaine at all.
But as you might have heard things like that do not count because it is no trope to have a dude in distress.
That's what she said and she's sticking to it. Stupid men.
There IS a male Shepard? Why?
Because Jennifer Hale trumps... whoever did male Shepard.
I mean, she's goddamn Sam from Totally Spies, she's just that awesome.
Seriously, THOSE LEGS.
The problem with the Sorceress is that she appeared in the video game space, where she is less "insane parody of art" and more "egregious to a greater extent than is already sadly normal". The parody falls flat thanks to the unfortunate context of video game character design in which Ivy is seen as a normal entry in the pantheon of female characters.
Also, she has adonis muscles. Girls don't have those.
And the ladies would attack him with sexy poses (and lasers! Lots and lots of lasers! *pewpewpew*) XD
...trust me.
Pfftt... Hehe hehe! XD
Life needs more crazy random games. Xp
What did she spend all that money on again? Hmm.
Production costs for videos can be pretty damn expensive, but this is sheer laziness.