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[Fniff]

What if...there isn't a plot, but many? Life is like that, as are many stories - there is not 1 storyline that everything is in service of, so why should that be the case for games?

There's a few plotless games. DF, for instance.

[Dyret]

DF is hardly plotless. Minesweeper is though, last I checked.

[Reelya]

The number of female characters in itself does not denote sexism either. No one would expect any female characters on board a Cold War US Navy submarine, for example.

Choice of setting can be critiqued though. By focusing on each game in isolation, you don't get the big picture. if every story involves "man stuff" and thus justifies not having women, then it's circular logic. If 90% of stories are set in places like "Cold War US Navy submarines" and you go "duh, there aren't any women because of the setting", then that's just passing the buck as to why those settings are always the default.

[pisskop]

DF is hardly plotless. Minesweeper is though, last I checked.

DF is certainly choose your own adventure, and the characters are essentially randomized.  There isn't any definitive plot, but there are themes in which they form and revolve around.

[Fniff]

Better term: storyless. Toady isn't writing a series of events that happen as the game goes on, he's making a simulation that creates plots naturally.

[smeeprocket]

I think a lot of this is assumption and I wouldn't agree with it at all.

That's not quite clear whether you're saying it's all assumption on my part or assumption on the part of the people I'm citing? Because most of what I wrote was just relaying what established writers are saying. Since you say you don't agree with anything I said, I interpret that as you're saying I'm only assuming that people say all these things. That's not correct though since most of this is directly citing what established writers on the topic like Feminist Frequency say, and comparing it with what other people are saying about gender-flipped analogous situations in Metroid and Tomb Raider.

However, havning 2 dimensional characters to prop up the
plot, who seem to many times be women, is a problem.

Game characters are mostly 2 dimensional, that's a problem by itself but not one that's quickly fixed by engineering inclusivity. Games tend to be 100% from the perspective of a single character, so it's just not a simple task of emulating "how movies do it" or "how books do it", since the design differences are non-trivial. Side characters can't have a lot of agency, because either you end up railroading the PC with dialogue that's not interactive (info dumps of character background), or that NPC more or less takes over the plot for a while (you need a lot of plot railroading to keep the high-agency NPC in the picture), or the NPC is off doing their own thing and not interacting with the PC (and therefore not really part of the game).

Anyway, the general thing is that they complain that only 15% of game characters are female, now you're saying too many side characters are female too? It doesn't sound like there's a "win" condition here.

First off, you are presenting all of that out of context, But also, I'm sure varying women have varying complaints.

I think most of us just want, overall above and beyond anything else, powerful, developed, female protagonists.

You are saying there's too many different complaints that contradict so... should we maintain the status quo?

The important part is representing women in a way that makes them feel included. The details of each individual game will differ, but I have a couple good examples of games:

Mass Effect
Borderlands (pick one, 2 was especially good)

I like Borderlands approach because they have set out to really include women, and they have done a great job of it. I think if you want a go to for what a lot of women are looking for, that kind of inclusivity is it. But I am speaking from my own perspective.

I want to feel like the female characters in the game, who I would like to be just as likely to be the protagonist as a male character, are powerful and don't devolve into tears and huddle in the arms of a strong male whenever things go wrong. Giving them a sacrificial obsessions with babies and a strong dependency on men (a la the newest Metroid) just reminds us what the male developers think of our gender. We are props. Even when we are the main character.

No one expects 100% satisfaction, I think it's silly to suggest that. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to feel like we are actually a part of the games being created and represented therein though.

[pisskop]

And capitalism shall deliver, so long as the money goes in its requisite locations.

  Wasn't Bayonetta supposed to be just that?  A strong female character?

[Reelya]

https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/521781974017388544
"Everything about Bayonetta's design, mechanics and characterization is created specifically for the sexual pleasure of straight male gamers."

No, she was a sexist creation.

[Dyret]

  Wasn't Bayonetta supposed to be just that?  A strong female character?

Sex-positive feminists seem to think so. Others, not so much.

[Meph]

Ok, I actually wanted to stay out of this discussion, but... somebody please tell me why Moxxi (an extremely sexualized character) is perfectly ok in that discussion. (judging from smeerockets Borderlands does well with "representing women in a way that makes them feel included.")

Her weapons are literally sex toys she hands out to the player.

[smeeprocket]

Because Moxxi is a rather developed powerful character in control of her own sexuality. There are also female characters that are not overly sexualized in Borderlands.

For example, you have Moxxi's daughter, Ellie. She's another powerful character, she's big, and she doesn't care what other people think, she knows she looks good and doesn't need others' approval. God, I love that character. Make her playable please.

There's some jokes with Moxxi that are great. There's this quest where you retrieve some nude photos of her for her ex-boyfriend, or you can give them to her. If you give them to her, she thanks you, because she needed to upload those to the internet.

Moxxi is intentionally sexualized, but that's not true of every character in the game. Sexuality in a owman shouldn't be shameful, but moxxi doesn't play out as sexual for a male audience. Her every action doesn't exist to titillate men. She is ultimately in control of it all.

See, women wearing sexy clothing is just as okay as not wearing sexy clothing, I don't think women should be slut shamed if they want to be sexy, and there is a place for that. I like photos of sexy girls just as much as anyone else, as well. But it's when the character existence revolves entirely around sex and appealing to male gamers that the problem arise.

I hope that makes sense?

[pisskop]

Isn't being sexually appealing part of the power trip that you buy games for?  Especially now that games are can adequately show that and are much more social in nature.

  What is and isnt socially acceptable to wear aside, radiating raw sexual energy is part of a lot of fantasies people have about themselves.  Many people strive for just that.

---

For every Prince and Brittney Spears of the world there's 1000 who want to be like that.

[Urist Tilaturist]

I never played the new Metroid, but I played the original, and Samus didn't do too much crying in that.

Please define what "women are props" means. I presume you don't mean the rugby position, so it comes down to "supporting something", which does fit with certain sexist ideas of women supporting men, or "inanimate object used in theatre", which would indicate someone disposable to play a simple role, which is equally true of any number of male supporting characters (see the expression?) who are just there to be killed in various ways. A vulnerable, wimpy female protagonist is no more a "prop" in that sense than a hyper-masculine macho man - they are both cheap stereotypes in their simplest form.

Common settings of games, especially violent ones, do not really suit female protagonists - in a World War 2 game, for example, women would only be found in the ranks of the USSR, partisan forces like the French resistance and, at the very end of the war, Germany once they ran out of men and started using teenage girls to crew anti aircraft guns. Even in these cases, they would be a minority and not in senior command positions, though some fought with distinction. There would also be an awful lot of women being raped. This setting would not be endorsing sexism - it could easily be condemning it - it would just be showing things as they were.

I don't buy games for power trips. If I wanted anything sexual, I wouldn't look for it in a game.

[Adrian]

This thread isn't even about Dwarf Fort anymore.
Please take your soapboxes somewhere else and let the thread die already.

[Vherid]

Why is tumblr trying to play dwarf fortress? You killed whatever this was.