So, I have never played Diablo 2, for reference. But my understanding is that female corpse poses are posed on their backs with their legs spread, as opposed to male corpses being posed on their side or whatever. (This made it so that one of my friends was banned from playing for a while; I trust her mother's judgment, since god knows she played plenty of violent games. Her mom was just trying to keep her away from stuff that involved rape scenes as part of the "fun," because she was like 12 at the time).
If it's not a good example and I remembered incorrectly, then I apologize--it was an event that kind of stuck out in my memory. I'm sure that you can think of
lots of examples of games that have similar effects in them, though.
I think it's those undead spear women in the I act. Their death animation is... pretty interesting.
I'd believe this one, too.
How is there a difference between those things? If you fantasize about killing people who piss you off and these people happen to be women (or minorites or whatever), it's the same thing. In that case the problem is more an unresolved issue a player who does these things has with women, and that results in the impulse for backlash you describe.
The difference, usually, is that the game explicitly treats these groups as different. Thank you for raising this point, it's clear that I didn't specify.
It's one thing to go around killing women when women are treated equally in a game--no sexualization, no object treatment, etc. That's on the player. But when the designer treats one of these solely as a sexual class, that is different. That's on the designer
and the player--especially the designer, because while the player is just playing, the designer is disseminating a message.
Apparently for a Malkavian that means assless chaps 
The schoolgirl dress should have provided more protection.
Malkavians are insane though, the other female models probably don't look like strippers... right?
Take a look!
The reason why I am being so anal about it, is because it is used as a "if something happens to a woman you dislike, it is objectification because you can do any of those things to an object and you can project feelings towards an object". Essentially making the word meaningless. The worst is when it is used for "This woman is sexy, objectification because you are treating her as a sex object" or something along those lines without justification.
Sure, I'll explain. People aren't explaining because they assume it's obvious, but I'm willing to write it out.
I am saying that it has long since stopped being a helpful word... and that simply not using it would improve statements and arguments 110% because instead of just saying "This woman is being treated like an object" you would get into how it is wrong, how it is being done, and what could have been done instead.
The reason why it's seen as a helpful word is that it represents the ideas in the following essay. People generally assume that you understand already why it is wrong, how it is done, and what should be done instead, because this is not exactly an uncommon idea that is being discussed, here.
I am not saying "cruel treatment is tantamount to treating a person as an object, so my problem is that bad things are happening to women." Not in the least. I am also not meaning "object" as in "grammatical object."
What I mean is that there are certain distinctions we use to distinguish humans and objects like potatoes (which are becoming blurred slowly--see the Turing test, Siri, etc.). Humans talk. Humans want things. Humans have dreams, and desires, and their own little worlds that they live in--their own perspectives. They do stuff and change the world around them. They are intelligent. Because of these qualities, we put restrictions on what behavior is acceptable to treat them with. For example, it's acceptable to grow, farm, cull, and eat wheat with impunity, but we don't yet have baby farms to do that to human children. We see this as immoral, because even though babies are about as intelligent as your average dog, it is taboo to treat a human child in that manner. People have eaten babies, but it is seen as a strongly deviant, universally condemned behavior. This is, again, not just because they are helpless. Wheat is also helpless. This is because we recognize that babies are not objects. There's a similar taboo against treating objects as human--talking to the teakettle, for example, or marrying the Eiffel Tower.
In most games, you could replace the female love interest with an animal companion and the experience wouldn't be very different, because the female character has about as much leverage on the story line as a dog. Her desire is like a dog's, her sole motivation being to provide loyal friendship to you. Nothing she says matters, and nothing she does influences the proceedings. In many games, you could replace the female love interest with a fleshlight, blowup doll, or a paperweight (see: examples where her job is to look sexy and then die). She certainly isn't a player character, influencing the story line and imbued with humanity by reflecting your own wants and needs.
It is true that men are also represented as objects in games--faceless mooks and the like. However, the player character is also usually male, with something like 90%+ certainty. A player character is patently not most readily seen as an object, because it is a representation of the self. However, even the rare female player characters are typically represented not as a reflection of the player, but as a service object to the player (unless the player prefers to identify as a stripper with a chainsaw, which is certainly a valid choice--but it should not be the only one.). She is not "you," but a doll you are controlling with some nice clothes strung across her lovingly modeled backside (sole male example I know of: Solid Snake).
Since women receive this kind of treatment almost unilaterally, this makes the problem gendered. Women are overwhelmingly given characteristics more common to what we would interpret as an "object" than we would interpret as a "person." This is an issue throughout all of media. It is a cultural perspective seen reflected in the way that women are treated day-to-day, by their cultures and by their governments. It does not just teach people to treat women badly, it treats women to subsume their own natural desires. Stories teach.
And the story we're telling is that Women Are Objects. Women are not heroes, in our mythology--but constitute a piece of the "fully destructible environment." The problem is, again, not just that it's happening--but the extent to which its happening, and the fact that it is so commonplace that most people absorb and perpetuate these messages without even noticing.
And unsurprisingly, people respond to what they're taught by treating women as objects, because you can't expect people to break off the full force of their social conditioning and go against the immense power of that stream as though it were nothing.
Therefore, the solution is to take steps in the other direction. Push it out of the mainstream. I've got no issues with it appearing in games where that's part of the theme. As I've said before, no one wants to take away anyone's titty games. I enjoyed the sexualization of Bloodlines; played a female Malkavian with a garden clipper and both buttcheeks fully exposed, for goodness' sakes. But Masquerade is about being sexy and socially deviant. It goes a few steps farther than the mainstream in that direction, so that you get the point.
The presiding opinion should not be "A female's correct role in society is about the same as a dog or a rock."
Author
Topic: Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games' (Read 309209 times)