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[scrdest]

The wot?

[palsch]

I'd just like to chime in that looking at it like that isn't really fair to the game itself. Since the setting, general tone and intent of the game gets overlooked like that. Skyrim is set in the fantasy north, it's rather cold so you won't really see scantly clad ladies. GTA is usually set on the west coast of the US which is hot and therefore allows scantly clad ladies. The time period is different, with different standards and social conduct. And ultimately the aim of the games is different, Skyrim is a generic fantasy H&S with a big damn hero protagonist, while GTA is usually focused on the more criminal elements of the modern society with antihero protagonists.

So of course one will have more sexualized women and prostitutes than the other.

Well, for starters that doesn't actually change anything. If you are criticising the trend towards female characters being sexualised ornaments then the justification doesn't really matter; they are still sexualised ornaments.

But going deeper into this, it's not like the type of game and eventual content are somehow predestined. Video game worlds are designed and reflect the choices of the designers. They chose the setting and the people who populate it. Digging into why these choices so often reduce women's roles to sex puppet is part of the point.

Now it's not that you can't write worlds like that or that you can never justify such things, but just because a particular usage of a trope/problematic element might be justified it doesn't mean it isn't an example or that it can't be examined as part of a larger trend.

And in any case, my goal was more to say that sandbox or open world style games can still be good examples by trying to draw contrasts that highlight the problem. People seemed to take issue with these because you can do similar things to both male and female NPCs, none of them have agency, etc. But in a game with less sexualisation and better general representation (Skyrim just being the first example I could think of) this isn't problematic, while a game with heavy sexualisation and poor representation of female characters in general it becomes significantly more problematic. Equal treatment of unequal classes and all that jazz.



And yeah, the 'parody cake' thing is actually a useful concept. Came from "have your cake and eat it too". Basically it's games or other things that contain problematic elements and try to avoid criticism by calling it a parody. It's a film making fun of sexually exploitative movies which still manages to include an extended strip scene for 'parody' purposes.

[Jopax]

What I tried to say was that the setting justified their existance, if they were going for realism and a beliveable world then they needed to include them in some way.

And to respond to the rest of it (and pardon me if this seems rambly or missing the point, not exactly focused right now). I don't think their sexualization or objectification is the real problem, the real problem is that it's their one and only defining trait. Why they don't go deeper with them and flesh them out is probably a thing of budget and time constraints. This is even more apparent with games that have large worlds with huge numbers of NPC's milling about where you can't make every single one of them anything more than a setpiece.

I honestly consider sandbox games to be more limited by budget and time in their representation of NPC's than any other reason, Skyrim is a good example of that, where they went with smaller numbers of better made NPC's.

Yeah, not sure if that was clear or not.

[penguinofhonor]

The setting can justify the existence of anything. The people who make the game choose and create the setting alongside all the other content.

[Jopax]

That is true for imaginary settings like Skyrim and Mass Effect. But settings based on real world places/times/whatever else need to have some basic elements in order to identify as such. And so far, the criminal world being very much a male only thing (barring some exceptions, but those are a minority and can be represented as such) you can expect the minority to be poorly treated.

Which is why I think a human trafficking game would be very interesting if done properly, since that whole can of worms needs to be dealt with, but knowing people it would be either poorly made or the point missed completely (wether intetionally to further some goals or accidentaly because people can't stomach certain things, no matter their goal).

[Neonivek]

Ok because I feel I need to rejoin for this.

One way you can do it is simply to look at the framing. Of course a Grand Theft Auto game is going to feature prostitutes and strippers and they are going to be dressed in rather scantly ways, this is because the games are about crime, degradation, and corruption.

But if you took Mass Effect and you took Grand Theft Auto and you altered them so everyone is in bikinis there would still be a major difference between the two and how they handle women. Heck put all the women in bikinis and make their jobs prostitutes and you will still see a major difference (Heck if they were, Mass Effect would probably have some of the best prostitute characters in all videogamedom. What with their characters not beginning and ending with being a prostitute, them not really being about sex, and having a depth of character. Only Heavy Rain could contend)

Sexy clothes, bikinis, sexy dances, and even being a prostitute are of themselves not insulting to women (well the prostitute part is debatable, but that is another debate). Yet what is the purpose and the framing being used for it? What is the scope of their use and the depth of their character.

Don't get me wrong, I am not going to say that you couldn't make an argument that Grand Theft Auto's use of women is more of a commentary or is more neutral or possitive then Anita makes it seem (As many of her examples go). Only so much that just because a game requires prostitutes and sexily clad women, it doesn't mean it needs to be framed disrespectively.

The way usually can tell if a sexy looking character, who isn't wearing something egregious, is just sexy or is eye candy... is by where the Camera ends up looking and how she is treated by the narrative.

Lucy from Fairytale for example, in at least the early run, is such a sexy character with exceptionally large breasts especially when compared to the current cast (One of whom wears non-boob armor). Yet, once again in the early run, the Camera never swivels to her breasts or ass and not only that but is the one who completes her own story and even gets a few battles in. This changes later (and I wish it didn't...) but if it stopped there...

[XXSockXX]

I think the controversial parts in the GTA games were more driven by player behaviour than by design.
In GTA Vice City (I haven't played newer ones) you had strippers and prostitutes, which makes sense in a crime simulation. The strippers didn't do anything useful at all, except that they gave you a pixelated animation of a stripper dancing in exchange for money. Having sex with a prostitute let you recover health for money, which may be a pretty stupid mechanism, though it isn't much more stupid than recovering health by eating food if you think about it. Neither recreational sex nor eating a pizza should heal bullet wounds, that's how game mechanisms go.
The problem was that beating or killing pedestrians would let them drop random amounts of money sometimes, which led to the whole "kill a hooker to get your money back" thing. That was not a game mechanism that was supposed to encourage players to kill hookers specifically, but something the players came up with, though you could definitely argue that it was a poor design choice. You could rob stores without killing NPCs, but you couldn't rob individual NPCs non-violently.

[penguinofhonor]

It's not a problematic design choice when women serve the same purpose in your game as food serves in other games? I think that's the best example of women as objects yet.

[XXSockXX]

It's not a problematic design choice when women serve the same purpose in your game as food serves in other games? I think that's the best example of women as objects yet.

No, I said it was stupid and a poor design choice. Just the most controversial thing about the game (killing hookers after sex) was mostly player driven.
The strippers were arguably more designed as objects, watching their dance animation had no in-game purpose whatsoever.

Good point about the objectification of prostitutes though. It does fit wit the crime theme, but they could have used plenty of other games mechanisms instead.

[penguinofhonor]

Ah, I thought you were saying it was dumb but not sexist.

[Jopax]

@Neonivek

Like I said, it's a matter of budget constraints. ME has much less NPC's and thus can afford to flesh out each of them more. GTA can't really do that without having hordes of same looking and same behaving people.

[Rolepgeek]

@Neonivek

Like I said, it's a matter of budget constraints. ME has much less NPC's and thus can afford to flesh out each of them more. GTA can't really do that without having hordes of same looking and same behaving people.

You mean they don't already have nigh-identical behaviour?

[Jopax]

They do, and that's what makes them bad representations and leads to them being considered objects. To have them charachterized properly and to a believable degree would require incredible amounts of both time and money. So the shortcut would be to make a handful of personalities and spread those around, but those would I think be worse than if everyone was just the same. The, all or nothing approach if you will. You either make everyone a believable enough person or you leave them all as bots so the player can keep on ignoring them.  Having anything inbetween that would be awkward and lead to confusion imho.

[Ogdibus]

Ok, that's probably what was bugging me about that video.  The talk about stock npc's being shallow and obviously identical doesn't really support her argument.  It sounded like she was saying that the problem was that they were stock npc's instead of frequently encountered sexualized woman npc's, with no traits other than those that contribute to their sexualization. 

With this cleared up, it becomes easier to understand why the racing genre would be problematic.

[Sheb]

I wanted to cheer for Uristoteles. That was a most splendid act of thread firefighting.

Now, regarding the NPCs, the problem is not there are women NPCs that are shallow cardboard cutting. As it has been pointed out, it's normal due to budget constraint that most NPCs aren't fleshed out. The problem is the dearth of interesting female character: they only exist as shallow NPCs, or at least they exists as shallow NPCs much more than men do.

And I think that's part of the problem with the video: how can you show an example of a kind of character not existing? You can't. It becomes even worse when you realize that there is nothing wrong with a male-only game, or as Vector said "We are not there to take your titty game". The problem is that male-only game should be a niche and not the norm. But how can you illustrate this?

The only way to do so I think would be to try to collect statistics, but a) it doesn't look good on video and b) it might cause a tons of argument on the exact way they were collected/used rather than on the issue of underepresentation.