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[Max White]

being portrayed as a meathead psychopath with a Messiah complex isn't exactly flattering either.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[chaoticag]

Well, all things in consideration.
Yea, the DiD trope is both over used and poorly used in most cases where it is. You can have a good damsel in distress story and not be sexist, but it requires good story telling, and that requires effort.

Still, in some cases, you need to look at things relatively speaking.
Is Peach nothing more than a thing to be saved? Perhaps, especially in the earlier games.
Is Mario anything more than a thing to save the princess? Not... really.
Is Bowser anything more than a villain with zero depth other than being a jerk? Not at all.
Does Toad amount to anything more than a letter saying 'Wrong castle douchebag'? Nope.

Nobody in Super Mario has character depth. The closest you are going to get is Super Paper Mario, where Peach is a more active character than Mario.

Perhaps, but not all positions are equal in that comparison. The hero is desirable to be, but no one wants to be kidnapped, and at the same time the great big issue is the amount of times females get relegated to the role of being in distress. Therein is a big part of the problem. It isn't a matter of how well written the characters are, but the disparity in power that each of the characters have as well. Unless you're going to argue that being peach in a game where she's kidnapped is more interesting than being the villain or the hero, she's still an object in that case.

Sure, things are better now, but more modern games are out of the scope of the first video, and the second will pick up on those, and examine the changes, for better or worse.

[DJ]

IMO the real problem isn't that game writers are sexist (some of them must be, but I don't think it's the majority), it's that they're terrible writers who just cram as many cliches into their stories as is humanly possible because they just can't come up with anything original. It just so happens that a lot of cliches are sexist. I don't recall well-written games, such as Black Isle titles, being particularly sexist.

[Max White]

Perhaps, but not all positions are equal in that comparison. The hero is desirable to be, but no one wants to be kidnapped, and at the same time the great big issue is the amount of times females get relegated to the role of being in distress. Therein is a big part of the problem. It isn't a matter of how well written the characters are, but the disparity in power that each of the characters have as well. Unless you're going to argue that being peach in a game where she's kidnapped is more interesting than being the villain or the hero, she's still an object in that case.

Sure, things are better now, but more modern games are out of the scope of the first video, and the second will pick up on those, and examine the changes, for better or worse.

Like I said earlier in the thread, in any narrative, especially with a small cast, some characters just get the short end of the stick, and if you have gender equity then sometimes it will be a female character.
The problem isn't with games like this. The problem is the industry that has a culture of gender inequity where the female character always gets the short end of the stick.

There is nothing wrong with a female character playing a passive role in a game. There is everything wrong with publishers deciding that to back a game, they need a male lead character.

[Killjoy]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

If this was an intentional pun on the whole subject then it is quite clever.

IMO the real problem isn't that game writers are sexist (some of them must be, but I don't think it's the majority), it's that they're terrible writers who just cram as many cliches into their stories as is humanly possible because they just can't come up with anything original. It just so happens that a lot of cliches are sexist. I don't recall well-written games, such as Black Isle titles, being particularly sexist.

Writers make stories that appeal to the lowest common denominator. Since most gamers are in fact still male, they write stories that appeal to males. That is how capitalism works..

[Vector]

The assumption that non-sexist stories cannot appeal to men seems like a pretty shitty deal for everyone.

[chaoticag]

There is nothing wrong with a female character playing a passive role in a game. There is everything wrong with publishers deciding that to back a game, they need a male lead character.

I would actually argue that given the history of them playing passive roles in games, we do need to be critical of them being placed in passive roles in games, in the same way that having, say, a black person be in a subordinating role can be seen as demeaning, not because that fiction shouldn't have subordinating roles, but it always seems to be relegated to the black guy, and his superior is always white. I honestly think we've passed the point where these narrative roles should be examined with heightened scrutiny.

[DJ]

It's not that they can't appeal, it's just that it's all that shitty writers know how to write because they just copy stories of previous games and change a couple of details. And story is very, very low on the list of priorities when budget is parceled between the different departments. Because let's be honest, who actually gives a shit about story in these mass-produced games? A dollar spent on even better graphics will bring a lot bigger return than a dollar spent on hiring better writers.

[Max White]

The assumption that non-sexist stories cannot appeal to men seems like a pretty shitty deal for everyone.

People like things that reaffirm their beliefs. Shitty sexist story telling is kind of a self perpetuating thing.
Just spend fifteen seconds playing some FPS over the internet with a microphone as a female and it becomes apparent that there is a very viable market for the 'blatantly sexist male gamer'. Doesn't mean all male gamers are, simply that there is enough of them to support a market.

I would actually argue that given the history of them playing passive roles in games, we do need to be critical of them being placed in passive roles in games, in the same way that having, say, a black person be in a subordinating role can be seen as demeaning, not because that fiction shouldn't have subordinating roles, but it always seems to be relegated to the black guy, and his superior is always white. I honestly think we've passed the point where these narrative roles should be examined with heightened scrutiny.

Lucius Fox disagrees with your statement.
It isn't about keeping certain races out of certain roles, but rather making sure that certain roles aren't demeaning.

[RedKing]

Well, the way I see it there's three ways to approach gender (of the player-character) in a game:

1. Irrelevant. This would be 90% of games, IMHO. Either the gender is completely unspecified or it's purely window dressing. For instance, you could choose male or female in Ultima IV. Had absolutely no in-game effect. That was pretty common for RPGs in the 1980s.

2. Predetermined. Gordon Freeman is a guy. That's just the way it is. Alyx Vance is a woman. That's just the way it is. Does this mean that the developers over at Valve are biased towards heterosexual men just because the lead character is a male and has a female love interest? My answer would be no. That's simply the narrative decision that was made. In theory, they could have created way more content where Gordon Freeman is replaced by Greta Freeman, and Alyx with Alan, and you play a brilliant, crowbar-wielding female physicist, falling in love with the son of a colleague, etc. Or even mix/match so you could have homosexual love interests for either character. And if they had done so, HL2 would have taken 5 more years to develop and cost $200 to cover all the extra work. Customizability has its costs, and often one of them is narrative depth. If you want strong narrative (especially including pre-rendered/prescripted cutscenes), you typically need to make those fundamental decisions about characters in development rather than allowing the player to make them in-game.

3. Branching. This would be the Mass Effect model. You choose gender at start, and it does have an impact on both the play experience (different voice actors, for instance) and/or the narrative experience. This gives you a much better chance to identify with the character, and also increases replayability, but it has its costs. Development cost/time can be significantly increased if you need to write and record multiple versions of dialogue for every step in the game. Narrative can sometime come off as disjointed, because you don't have an editor making sure that the player's choices flow in a realistic progression (Example: switching back and forth between Paragon and Renegade dialogue options in the same conversation make Shepard come off as bipolar and slightly unhinged).


#3 is a relatively new model for game development because in the past it just meant a ridiculous amount of work. With the new emphasis on replayability, it's garnered more attention even though BioWare still continues to be the only developer to really put that much effort into it. (Although Saint's Row 3 had a nice amount of customizability as far as gender, it had little effect on narrative.)

I can't help but feel that players and critics both have been a bit spoiled by the recent wave of branched-narrative games and are now judging much older games through that modern lens.

[scriver]

Relatively new? Even Fallout had "branching" gendergameplay.

[GlyphGryph]

Like I said earlier in the thread, in any narrative, especially with a small cast, some characters just get the short end of the stick, and if you have gender equity then sometimes it will be a female character.
The problem isn't with games like this. The problem is the industry that has a culture of gender inequity where the female character always gets the short end of the stick.

There is nothing wrong with a female character playing a passive role in a game. There is everything wrong with publishers deciding that to back a game, they need a male lead character.

You... uh... realize that this is exactly what she's saying, right? That this is why she is criticizing the tropes (as in, the social and cultural dominance and style of a particular narrative tool) rather than the individual games - the games themselves serve only as examples to demonstrate the scope and issues with the trope on a broad level.

The Damsel in Distress trope is sexist. Flat out. That doesn't mean every use is sexist. That doesn't mean it always needs to be a sexist trope (well, except to the extent that every sex-specific trope is a bit sexist. But there are even some tropes that despite sex-specific origins eventually get generalized, so even that isn't guaranteed).

A trope is all about how it gets used, culturally. It doesn't really exist, outside of that. It's not sexist that Mario rescues the Princess. It's sexist that "rescuing the princess" has become a dominating trope in the industry, where the trope is followed even at the expense of the story (like in Wind Waker). Actually, I think Wind Waker is probably one of the very best examples of how the trope is sexist. (Again, not the specific instance.) It's perfectly possible to have non-sexist instances of a sexist trope. It's possible for a formerly sexist trope to become non-sexist. Because a trope, at least in the way she's analyazing, is all about the cultural baggage it brings to the table. Which is most obvious when a trope is being explicitly used.

It's not a problem when the hero saves the damsel. It's a problem when people decide the hero HAS to save the damsel "because that's just how it's done". And I think WindWaker makes it obvious that this particular trope has acquired that sort of cultural power.

Bringing it back to race, it's not a problem to have a black sidekick to a white lead. But if that becomes a trope, if "black sidekick to white lead" actual gets enough cultural traction, then yes, that trope is racist... even if the originating and many of the following instances of it aren't. Because tropes influence our own "cultural narrative". They are powerful. And some of them can do a lot to perpetuate racist and sexist culture without being intentionally or individually racist and sexist. It's about context.

[Loud Whispers]

Just about sums up all the wrong things about her videos.

[Leafsnail]

IMO the real problem isn't that game writers are sexist (some of them must be, but I don't think it's the majority), it's that they're terrible writers who just cram as many cliches into their stories as is humanly possible because they just can't come up with anything original. It just so happens that a lot of cliches are sexist. I don't recall well-written games, such as Black Isle titles, being particularly sexist.

This seems like a decent point.  "Troper" style analyses tend to miss the fact that a lot of tropes are a sign of extreme unoriginality.

[Skyrunner]

PtF