There hasn’t been much of a signal in here for a while in reality.
Discarding comments as being without merit is not very fair. Some people just see things differently; they are still important to provide some form of balance to the discussion though.
I’m not saying that opposing viewpoints aren’t a good thing. They are, or else you run the risk of echo-chambering. I was specifically referring to the posts that are writing-for-reaction; in other words, trolling.
But I said no trolling 
I never said Brad Pitt was a troll, I just said he isn’t aging well.
I popped in really quickly & saw this topic had revived again. Since it also appears to have derailed, I thought I’d add something that’s been on my mind.
I found a copy of Metal Gear Solid V on sale so I bought it & gave the game a try. I’d assumed I’d hate the game but everyone is always like, “Ooh, Hideo Kojima is a genius,” so I thought, eh, if so many people think that this is as good as video games get, for $20 I’ll see what all the fuss is about.
There was a fair bit of controversy around the character of Quiet, right? She’s a sniper you recruit as a companion. Due to her very elaborate backstory, she (1) Cannot speak (2) Has to walk around nearly naked all the time.
She’s basically a repellant male fantasy come to life.
Also, when the camera follows her in cutscenes (getting in and out of the helicopter, mostly) it very often captures her body–and centers on her breasts–while leaving her head out of the frame. And you can’t move it up!
That being said… she has a body that you encounter in the real world. Probably everyone has met at least one woman with a body like Quiet’s. The basic proportions (bust-waist-hip), the width of her thighs–they’re not unrealistic.
I am, however, completely mystified by the fact that developers can devote so much attention to breast jiggle and no attention at all to how breasts interact with the objects they most often come into contact with. Like bras. It would take so much glue to keep that bikini top on. She must stock her closet with nothing but ripped tights and glue.
I dunno. There are interesting things about her. The way she ignores the player is kind of fascinating. Obviously the body language is designed to give the player permission to look and lech all over her. And the way she stretches sexily in the helicopter bugs me but at the same time, it’s a pretty standard yoga/pilates stretch so… why should I be mad? There’s something interesting there. At least something slightly more complicated than “the person who dreamed this up is a jerk.”
Maybe not.
Anyway, long story short, Quiet is far from a shining standard of female representation in video games and yet her body model blows Gems of War out of the water, which is something to think about.
You missed the best part about Quiet, WHY she HAS to be near naked.
Apparently she has to breathe through her skin and clothes suffocate her…
Just an excuse for permanent near-nudity.
Oh totally, I wasn’t excusing it myself but I had to reveal THEIR excuse because of it’s absurdity.
I didn’t miss it. But no one will convince me that the backstory came first & the result (near naked woman who can’t speak) after.
Hideo Kojima could visit me in person and explain until his face turned blue and he wouldn’t convince me. Almost every aspect of the game is a lizard-brain fever dream. It really needed someone on staff whose sole job was to say, “Sooooo… why don’t we think about this choice you just made? Let’s just sit down and talk it out before we spend money making it happen.”
I got Metal Gear cheap too but haven’t started it yet. Some other big games are starting to come out now; I can see this game starting to lose it’s appeal
You do realize there are about 37,000 JRPGs on the market that do the exact same thing to female anatomy, for one lame excuse reason or another. The only real difference is their sexualized ideal is somewhere around 10 years old.
In case it’s not obvious, we all do a lot of self-sorting. Our interests very quickly become our environment.
A lot of people in this thread seem to think feminism, for example, is kind of a fringe thing. They believe this because they’ve self sorted into an environment where there are few feminists and so anecdotal evidence supports this conclusion.
Personally, I’ve self-sorted away from rampantly sexist games and so most of them don’t even come to my attention. So, no, actually. While I’m aware that I avoid a pretty substantial subset of the market, I don’t know much about it.
Thank the heavens that I married the woman I did and am surrounded my empowered females. Some of them occasionally watch “adult content” (with or without their partner) and all couldn’t care less if their man does. IT’S NOT REAL. Each of the truly empowered women I have encountered in my long life are not threatened by the image of female anatomy, another woman in proximity of their partner, or the fact that it’s human nature to look at beautiful things. My wife notices pretty girls, I can acknowledge if a man is attractive. Marking something as natural as nudity or sexuality as “taboo” doesn’t get rid of it, it gives it strength.
We have been re-watching Spartacus on BD this week, and there are both male and female body parts displayed regularly, but it’s simply not the reason to watch. I have recommended it to everyone I know, including my mother. Men and women have fought naked or nearly naked all throughout history. The Olympians all used to be nude and nobody thought a thing of it. How the human race has “evolved” to think that the body can be offensive is beyond me.
Big, medium, or small breasted, all I care about is if the woman in the game (or real life) can kick some ass with me.
Feminists practice feminism. There’s no universally accepted use of the term. However, if feminists didn’t practice feminism, they wouldn’t be feminists, they’d be something else.
.#english
I just deleted an obvious troll post in this thread. Keep them out, please… there’s room for lots of disagreement in this topic, but no room for trolls! Consider that the first and last warning to any potential trolls.
I went and moderated some of my OWN posts. Sirrian got me afraid. 
Glad you’re keeping an eye on things.
Thanks, @Lyya. Explaining this stuff is a thankless job but you have a knack for clarity.
I believe that’s why it sells. Unrestrained creativity ends up being more appealing to the target market than something that’s been watered down to appeal to everyone. That’s also why his games end up being so expensive to produce, which is probably why Konami eventually tried to rein Kojima in, resulting in him leaving on less than amicable terms.
Kojima isn’t considered a genius for his portrayal of women. It’s because he’s able and willing to really examine ideas that other people take for granted, to ask questions that other people don’t even think about, to take things to their logical – or absurd – conclusions. Whether his work will seem novel or genius depends on how familiar you are with the tropes he’s deconstructing or subverting, whether the game’s elements seem reasonable or surprising. Without that point of reference, they may just seem like a strange mixture of realism and absurd video game logic.
There’s also the matter of cultural context. While Kojima intentionally speaks to a more international audience than most Japanese developers, he is still Japanese, and primarily targeting a Japanese audience. I think the fact that he attempted to justify Quiet is significant, when his target market wouldn’t have ever asked for justification at all. Even if that justification is paper-thin, it introduces the question, and casts a shadow over similarly sexualized portrayals that don’t bother to justify themselves.
Sometimes the most effective way to get people to reexamine their beliefs is to agree with them. If you draw their subconscious reasoning into the light and lay it out, it can make them face their contradictions in a way that makes them uncomfortable with their own position. Attacking a person’s beliefs often just puts them on the defensive, makes them unwilling to listen.
The reason i ask is because the definition and the practice have changed over the last five years, it used to be that the definition was “equal rights for men and women” but then it changed to the “advocacy of women’s rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men.” Therefore the part of feminism that also dealt with men’s rights that gave women an advantage are no longer advocated for by feminists because they beleive this new definition is the better one. As such the second definition is the wildly accepted one. There are many instances in gaming including game shows where women have abused their power to force a result. This topic is not much different, someone trying to force their ideals onto others which is against creative freedom. That alone seems oppressive to me.
I’d love to see some cited evidence on this. Whose definition are you using? I can’t find two sources that have the same definition. Also, “feminism” has subdivisions within it, just like “rock music” has subdivisions within it. You’re applying some very strange black-and-white mentality to this social space.
Which ideal is that?