An interesting point here. One thing about really costly creative undertakings (movies and video games, in this case) is that the people who decide whether or not to fund the projects spend a lot of time looking at comparables–have other games of this kind made money? How reliably? How much?
(Yes, I know you probably know that.)
The problem with comparables is that it is impossible to measure money that has not been spent. You can say, “Okay, Call of Duty made X obscene amount of money” but you can’t say, “And Y obscene amount of money that could have flowed into our industry didn’t, because we didn’t have anything for that segment of the market to buy in this quarter.”
This leads to bad decision making. (For example: endless sequels, a summer of ‘blockbusters’ that all bombed, the mass flight of real creative talent away from movies and toward television…)
For me, the neatest part of this thread was the little detour through games that have done a great job at portraying women. SO much progress has been made and more all the time.
Like, you don’t think women are voting with our dollars? I wonder why The Witcher series shifted away from porny sex tourism to serious adult relationships, complete with parental bonding? I wonder why the Fallout 4 included a male AND female voiced protagonist? I wonder why Fallout 4 allows you to romance your companions? I wonder why Assassin’s Creed Syndicate included a playable female protagonist–who romances a lovely, sweet, kinda beta POC guy? Or, hey, Dishonored 2–funny how this time around, we’ll have the option of playing as a woman.
I don’t know about you but when I was a kid I saved up my allowance so I could buy one of the original Nintendos. I played Super Mario 1, 2, and 3 into the ground. Games didn’t start out as a male preserve and they won’t end up that way, either.
I apologize, I meant no strife, just continuing the discussion. You and I are on good terms and that hasn’t changed.
[quote=“LegendMaker, post:224, topic:11906, full:true”] @TaliaParks I get the impression that a few of the posters involved here have a bit of a history, either from the forum itself, from being guild mates, or from elsewhere. Being outside of that circle, I won’t be able to fill in all the blanks in what just happened here (although I’m curious), but fine, I’ll give it a rest. I’d much rather focus on the discussion anyway.[/quote]
Only history I have here is me being a butthead unnecessarily, I’ve taken a new path lately (I get my rage out with memes now). You can PM me and I’ll gladly share if you want.
Because of the sensitive topic. Sometimes a topic will get locked because of the topic itself and not the content in the topic.[quote=“Robert, post:215, topic:11906”]
But, for the love of god, tell us what you lot want to happen about it. It is endlessly dragging on without anything productive coming from it
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The only way to end sexism in games is either to remove women from video games entirely (because they need protected from being seen as sex objects) or force women to stop thinking they are sex objects (you can’t claim sexism if you do not know how the culture works.)
As far as men’s issues go, it would be easy to name a few. Not like men are forced to be fathers for a child they never agreed to have or anything.
No, no, and no. The way to end sexism in games, and every where else for that matter, is to treat women like people. Women don’t need to be protected and they don’t need to be marginalized. They don’t need to be made into men, they just need to be capable people on their own instead of eye candy only.
Congratulations, @killerman3333, you are now officially master of the false dichotomy.
Sexism is about power. All the ‘isms’ are about power and that’s why they can’t be reversed. You can be a jerk, you can be biased and hateful, you can have a chip on your shoulder the size of Rhode Island, but you can’t be a reverse sexist or a reverse racist or… any of that because the broader context defines the word, not the individual actor.
An -ism is just a suffix used to describe a specific ideology. These ideologies are not required to be based on power.
You can totally be counter to an -ism, and “reverse whateverism” is rarely used. Because these are ideologies, the opposite of an -ism is usually another -ism.
Nicely put - my thoughts exactly. As a female who regularly plays this game, it does get a bit tedious to see ginormous boobs on the female characters over and over again. It feels very childish to me.
I was attempting to head off an argument that I don’t believe anyone’s actually made in the discussion here, but which I’ve seen elsewhere. Probably not a wise idea, but I was tired and just kind of rambling. The argument probably isn’t all that applicable to GoW, because it has so little narrative. It follows from the claim that the way to write a good female character is to think of them as people first, like you would a male character, and then just make them female. This would be an improvement, but it’s still flawed, because as I said, our culture is dominated by the male perspective. We tend to think of male as the default, and female as “special”. We don’t distinguish between “masculine” and “neutral”, we don’t know what properties are universal to the human experience, what is shared between men and women. So that approach mostly ends up creating characters that are “male” in every respect, but we arbitrarily call them female. Since we can’t directly access other people’s experiences, we can’t really know what they’re like, beyond what they tell us. In general, we need more female characters, written by people with actual female experiences (you know, women!), so we can gain more insight into the female perspective, rather than relying on the male perspective of women.
In my own experience, individual variation between people is more significant than things like race or sex. I believe most of the commonality that people see is culturally enforced, rather than naturally occurring. But it’s hard to gather data on that, because of the direction of human history.
Perception is everything. If you can control the perceptions of an individual or a group, you can direct their actions. People don’t operate directly on reality, they react to their perception of it. Religions, governments, media, etc. all figured that out long ago, and so they desperately fight to control the public space, control the dialogue and narrative. And most people aren’t fighting for an ideal, they’re fighting for a side. They’re fighting to conquer, to subdue or eradicate their enemies. Most people aren’t invested in an ideal that allows for alternate opinions, though they’ll use the language if they think it will help their cause.
There’s an important distinction between expressing a thought or belief, and calling on others to act upon it. However, it’s a fine and muddy distinction. Most controversial thoughts or beliefs are controversial because they demand the world conform, because they allow for no variation, no individuality. To act on those beliefs requires hurting and restricting other people. But I think it’s relatively rare for the expression alone to have “legal repercussions”.
Once again, I’d call the frequent conflicts of feminism a forest/trees issue. People on both sides focus on specific examples, when the problem is not with any specific example, but with the context as a whole. But people aren’t good at seeing the big picture. People on one side point out an example, and say “this is an example of the problem”, while the other side says “that isn’t a problem, it’s just one example”. And they’re both right, while being wrong at the same time, because they’re talking about trees when the issue is forests. So they fight to the death over individual trees, because each side thinks the other side won’t allow them to exist.
You are the sexist, you deny women any power over reality, as if they are too weak, dumb or helpless to have any control over anything. Everything is the Man’s fault. Women have no blame or responsibility for anything, they are just along for the ride. Ridiculous.
I have to say, I find it fascinating how you re-frame every argument into an easily-reducible statement that is obviously refutable, and yet you take objection to the term “strawman.” That’s not at all what @Personette is saying, and it should be abundantly clear by now, so I have to wonder if there’s a reading comprehension problem at play.
A really easy way to balance that male/female ratio would have been to assign some of those indeterminate troops as female in the card text. My question is whether it would make a difference to how people feel. What does the space in between oversexualization and invisibility look like? Does it help that several of the dragons are nominally female, when most people don’t even notice?
I actually really like that there’s a pretty healthy balance between male and female dragons. It doesn’t impact the gameplay in the slightest, but I like knowing that the devs acknowledge that (of these sentient beasts, at least) there are both genders, and formidable examples of both.
This isnt an Israel-Palestine peace talk. It is a few cartoon characters, in a match 3 gems game, showing cleavage. If you continue writing biblical proportioned responses without coming to some form of agreement then the thread is nothing more than a counselling session. You could do with a slap in the right direction.
Why are you so hung up on this? There will be no agreement. That’s completely unreasonable to expect from a thread like this. At most, a few people who are sitting on the fence one way or another will have their opinions swayed. At worst, this is an exercise in both sides simply hearing more arguments in favor of their viewpoint and filtering out the opposing point of view. But either way, it’s a discussion, not a managerial meeting where a decision must be made before everyone can leave the room. The thread will die when interest wanes, and then everyone will go on with their lives and you can, as another poster mentioned, go back to your gorilla and cat gifs if you please. In fact, you can do that right now if you so desire – nobody is expecting you to remain here against your will.
I really don’t think there’s much disagreement over the solution, which has been posted by various people throughout the thread: The addition of female characters that are different from the existing ones, that do not focus on their sexual traits, and are not designed first and foremost to appeal to sexual desire.
The only debate is about the nature of the problem, and whether or not it’s a problem at all. The same could be said of this argument anywhere else it occurs, on the internet or in real life. It’s not a matter of finding solutions, but of convincing people of the necessity of implementing them.
