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[Gatleos]

When Adam was mentioned in Fusion, it gave the impression of "Oh cool, Samus had a kind of complex relationship with a superior officer when she was in the space police or whatever". But Sakamoto's idea of the relationship was different than yours. It just didn't become apparent until he was given the creative freedom to fill in those blanks, at which point he took over the story of Metroid with his Tragic, Misunderstood Mary Sue who makes Samus look like a blubbering idiot who needs a big strong man to tell her what to do.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The worst part of Other M is that it didn't just fuck up for itself: it retroactively changed the ending of Fusion from a good one to a bad one. Oh, cool. Now Samus's abusive father figure is immortal and following her around. Surely this will be healthy for her.

[Neonivek]

Sakamoto's idea of their relationship was very different from Metroid Fusion too. Where Samus have a completely different description of Adam.

[Rolan7]

When Adam was mentioned in Fusion, it gave the impression of "Oh cool, Samus had a kind of complex relationship with a superior officer when she was in the space police or whatever". But Sakamoto's idea of the relationship was different than yours. It just didn't become apparent until he was given the creative freedom to fill in those blanks, at which point he took over the story of Metroid with his Tragic, Misunderstood Mary Sue who makes Samus look like a blubbering idiot who needs a big strong man to tell her what to do.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The worst part of Other M is that it didn't just fuck up for itself: it retroactively changed the ending of Fusion from a good one to a bad one. Oh, cool. Now Samus's abusive father figure is immortal and following her around. Surely this will be healthy for her.

This is so painfully true.  My impression from Metroid Fusion was that she had somehow met an officer in the galactic bureaucracy who was a decent person, willing to do the right thing.  The "lady" thing seemed like a respectful nickname. 

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This former officer then cooperates with Samus to destroy the evil, defying the federation's commands.  He seemed like a good guy, a strong supporting character with the delicious angst of being from the system.

But then Other M and... I couldn't believe this travesty was the original creator's fault until Putnam said so.  Goddamn.

[Putnam]

Amusingly the current community choice is all female protagonists (Tomb Raider, Mirror's Edge, They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams). Can't remember what the category was called though.

Haha, nice catch!  Not just gender-neutral, gender-choice, or tits for the sake of tits either.  All four of those games feature tasteful female protagonists, that's pretty ironic.

Half of the games there are gender-choice.

Uh, I find that hard to believe.
Because Lara Croft and Faith are the protagonists of their respective games, and Giana Sisters has "sisters" in the title. Which would lead me to suspect that the protagonists are multiple women who are sisters.

Oh, I thought we were talking about the current vote somehow ("story-heavy, female protagonist") which was Mass Effect 3, Dragon Age: Origins, Gone Home and The Walking Dead Season 2.

[Mindmaker]

The Banner Saga suprised me with a discussion about strong women right now.
The character in question scolded me for picking the cliche dialogue choices which made me feel a bit like a fool.
Well played developers.

[Neonivek]

The Banner Saga suprised me with a discussion about strong women right now.
The character in question scolded me for picking the cliche dialogue choices which made me feel a bit like a fool.
Well played developers.

It should be stated however that the game does, however, treat the female characters as women within a society that often doesn't treat women well.

One character in particular was a temporary leader of her people and is more then willing to give it up because no one would really accept her and that it isn't her place to do such a thing. She is flattered if you go out of your way to tell her to be a leader, but she considers it more of a thought of fancy then something she needs to seriously ponder.

[Jelle]

So I was playing this game recently, Outlast, and while it was a pretty sweet horror game, there was something that really stood out to me and reminded me of this thread and I thought I'd share . I'll spoilerize the details because of gore and well, spoilers.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So basicly you're this guy investigating an off the road psychiatric hospital in wich unspeakable horrific experiments took place. Two of the levels in the game are the male ward, and the female ward, where the unfortunate patients were held.
When the game takes you to the male ward the place is filled with male patients, all of which are gruesomely scarred and physically degenerated by the experiments carried out upon them. They're all completely deranged and desturbed, some of them agressive.
But then when you get to the female ward...the place is nearly completely empty. The few living you do encounter are all male patients. Throughout the entire facility you find not a single of the female patients that were supposably held there. Some of the mutilated corpses scattered throughout the game may have been female, but really it's hard to tell at that point. It just seemed really bizarre to have an entire female ward, but no female psychos.

So yeah, that sort of boggled me. I don't know, is there some kind of taboo to depicting women victims of horrible bodily and mental degeneration? Do deranged psychotic female characters fall in bad taste?
Do you think it would have been sexist and/or inappropriate the depict females in this way? If yes, why is it appropriate for male characters, but not female ones?

/discuss

[Dutchling]

I think it's safe to say that the weaker inmates got killed, mutilated, and/or eaten by the others.

[Rolan7]

Which implies that none of the women were strong enough to survive.

It's common to only have male mooks, and I think it's a combination of two things:  More character models requires more development time, which is a valid concern.  But also I think developers are worried about letting the player slaughter women as they slaughter men.  Which is crap.  It results in all sorts of unfortunate explanations for why there are no female mooks.

[Dutchling]

The player doesn't slaughter anyone in Outlast. Well, he disables life supports of a single dude, but that's it.

Another reason for the lack of women (well, not really the lack women, but rather the lack of them despite there being a female ward) might be that it's a reused asylum, so the new one might simple not have any female patients to begin with.

To be honest, I watched a rather... humorous duo play the game who despite collecting all the in-game logs, didn't read any of them, so I'm not that deep into Outlast lore

[Reelya]

It seems a bit weird to have a ward labelled the female ward then some in-universe explanation of why there are no women. Since this is a fictional setting created from scratch, they could have just made it an all-male institution.

It's much more likely that they originally conceived the game to have male + female characters but cut down the range of characters due to time and money issues, time and money is more strongly hinted as the main constraint due to the fact that they left the female ward levels "as is".

I haven't played Outlast so i don't know if the non-inclusion of female characters makes this less sexist, more sexist or neither, which would be a consideration if you're trying to understand the motives for the developers to only leave out female models. How varied are the prisoner graphics? If there are a only a few "stock" prisoners then it would make sense to leave out one gender to cut production costs.

[Dutchling]

The models aren't very impressing. They all look very alike, ignoring the four or five main characters (ignoring non-inmates).

Honestly, considering the amount of violence and mutilation in the game (most of it already happened before you arrived) I guess even if they had the budget for women, not including them was the better choice. People complaining about a lack of women seems like a safer alternative to people complaining about violence against women. Especially since there's a fair bit of sexual content as well. This is from the developers point of view, obviously.

[Mindmaker]

The Banner Saga suprised me with a discussion about strong women right now.
The character in question scolded me for picking the cliche dialogue choices which made me feel a bit like a fool.
Well played developers.

It should be stated however that the game does, however, treat the female characters as women within a society that often doesn't treat women well.

Well yes, they are supposed to be norseman after all.
While women had more freedom there than in most other medieval societies (divorce and infidelty wasn't religiously sanctioned, since their gods commited both quite regularely and female partner choice was also a lot more common), military and politics were mostly male domains.

One character in particular was a temporary leader of her people and is more then willing to give it up because no one would really accept her and that it isn't her place to do such a thing. She is flattered if you go out of your way to tell her to be a leader, but she considers it more of a thought of fancy then something she needs to seriously ponder.

She was less worried about being able to lead her people, than about the interaction with other (male) leaders.
I wouldn't necessarily call it flattery, since a person with a more romantic/naive worlview might have honestly replied like that (just like I did).
The character also criticised how being a strong woman mostly meant mimicking "male characteristics" while avoiding "female ones".

[Neonivek]

I say flattery mostly because no matter what you do seemingly you cannot convince her to take up the mantle, nor does she seem to seriously consider it.

The reason I even mention the "doesn't treat women well" is because one of the solutions listed on this thread is that if a game is a not a documentary that it should rewrite its setting to be very female inclusive (AKA the Dungeons and Dragons Approach)

Yet Banner Saga didn't do away with it, and it functioned well. It didn't even rewrite it so that women outright defied convention, the first three female units you get in this game are Archers.

[Rolepgeek]

See, I kinda see a problem there.

Why do you say it like that? "very female inclusive" instead of just saying not sexist. Or simply leave it aside entirely because sexism should not be the default go-to for a game, and therefore shouldn't need to specifically mention that it's not?

If you're really going for a genuine historic feel(you keep saying documentary like it's a buzzword, I don't know if someone else did first but please stop it's getting annoying), then yeah, showing things how they were is alright, but the society within the game being sexist is different from the game itself being sexist. If there are female characters who break apart from the mold their society expects from them, in-game, and show that their entire gender isn't represented by the oppression the culture within the game, that is avoiding sexism. But if a game claims that women and men are equally represented throughout the world, and fails to make good on that claim(see: Dragon Age: Origins) and has very few good examples of female characters, NPC or no, so that most women encountered fit the mold that many people who've been subsumed in this culturally-reinforced sexism expect, that is sexism.

It's not just about the parts within the game, though that can play a role, it's the game itself.

But on a different aspect of that; why is it bad, at all, for a game to have an equal-gender society in it? Hell, what's wrong with it having a female-dominated one? I can think of very logical explanations why lineages might be passed down from mother to daughter, rather than father to son; for one thing, you can be sure the baby has your bloodline, which was more difficult to do with male inheritance in medeival times. For another, if it's a society in which men are the ones who typically go to war, the women have less risk of dying on the battlefield and leaving the house without an heir. And so on. But the problem is this: If it's a male-dominated medeival society, we don't ask for explanations. We just take it as the norm and move on, but if you try to make a world dominated by women, it's damned likely that people will always ask why it's female-dominated, or ask why there isn't equality instead, etc. And while if you go deep enough, there's some good reasons for these questions(mostly being that men are more likely to be physically adept than women, and thus in a less civilized society they could bully the women into doing what they want, and the trend of that would continue into later societies etc.), most people don't have that as their reason for asking. They're just offended that men would be placed into a secondary position, as women have been forced into for so many years.

Mind you, I'm not talking about the ridiculous parodies that are trying to raise sympathies for 'the poor oppressed men' by exaggerating the effect when the roles are reversed, I'm talking about where that's simply part of the setting. It's not the focus of the story, it's the background for it. It might play a role in the story for one reason or another, but there's no reason for it to be particularly noticable, other than the fact that it's unusual in our culture as a subversion of typical gender roles throughout history.

Okay, I think I'm done for now since I started to confuse myself.