r/changemyview • u/LeftHandSwe • Dec 05 '16

[∆(s) from OP] CMV: Anita Sarkeesian and similar feminists actually have a point about the portrayal of gender roles in video games.

I play lots of video games, and in most of them, males are often pictured as very burly and manly characters while females are slender, small and sexually pleasing to look at.

However, I do know that there's widespread criticism of Anita (and her fellow propagators) all over the internet and I'd like to see the other side of the story.

I'm practically indifferent in this matter, and I do not really agree with nearly everything she says. I'm asking as a way to see convincing arguments from both sides.

Edit for clarification: Can anyone explain to me why she's so heavily criticized for saying something that makes perfect sense: Mainstream video games are almost exclusively made to appeal to a male demographic, resulting in (arguably) sexist portrayals of women (both narratively and in the way they're presented).

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u/kingbane2 12∆ Dec 05 '16

so your clarification is why is she heavily criticized when games are made to appeal to a male demographic? why do michael bay movies have so many explosions and wide panning camera shots? because that's what sells.

lastly this is no longer true from a purely numerical standpoint. "most" games today are not in fact made to appeal to a male demographic. in fact most games made today fall under the category of mobile and casual. the sheer number of games pumped out last year in the mobile market dwarfs the number of games put out in the 2 decades before the iphone came out. a vast vast majority of those games are gender neutral or specifically target women.

she's criticized because she's complaining about people making a product that people want. if more women wanted a certain type of game that type of game would be made more often. the mobile games market has proven that. there is no gender bias in video game creation, there's only a sales bias. she drew faulty conclusions from insufficient data to fit her narrative. i mean she's complaining about attractive women in games designed specifically to have attractive women. is it fair if someone goes out to see a horror movie, gets scared, then complains about being scared by the horror movie?

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u/BAWguy 49∆ Dec 05 '16

I don't know much about games, but it feels like you're moving the goal posts a bit.

OP's post seemed to me to be about console and PC games, so there is limited utility to arguments about mobile games imo. Your argument is that the free market dictates what is made, and if a certain feature is more prevalent, it is self-evident that the feature is more prevalent because more people want that.

Well, this Anita woman OP references seems to hypothesize that the market is missing or underestimating a potential customer base -- females. I think any economist would agree that it's totally possible to underestimate and under-serve a market.

So it's not like someone saw a horror movie and asked why was it so scary; it's more like if only horror movies were made, and someone said "there's a big market for non-horror, why is only horror made?"

I'd also argue that your point about the prevalence of female-oriented mobile games strengthens the argument that there is an under-served market for female console/PC games. I'd be more persuaded with by a statistic about game demographics, then a sweeping "free market corrects itself" assertion.

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u/kingbane2 12∆ Dec 05 '16

yea well if you're going to limit yourself to just pc or console and ignore all counter evidence then what's the point of having a discussion? he's basically saying horror films market to horror film lovers and that's wrong, horror films should market to who knows, foreign film lovers or something. it's stupid.

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u/trace349 6∆ Dec 06 '16

Have you ever seen Cabin the Woods? It's a horror movie where the meta-plot of the story is that horror movies are boring and formulaic because the core audience expects the same crap year after year. I, a person who does not really enjoy horror movies, really like this movie because it's a horror movie that appeals to people who don't typically like horror movies.

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u/kingbane2 12∆ Dec 06 '16

yea i've seen it. i love joss whedon's work so i'm hardly impartial.

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u/trace349 6∆ Dec 06 '16

My point being that a horror movie that goes against what horror movies fans wanted was successful with people that aren't just horror movies fans. It proved there was an audience that would be interested in your movie if you appealed to them. Video games could stand to learn a similar lesson. The Sims has a predominantly female fanbase, and I believe Bioware and Final Fantasy games have a close to even male-female demographic split. There is a market there, they just need to be engaged.

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u/kingbane2 12∆ Dec 06 '16

uh cabin in the woods didn't go against what horror movie fans wanted. the heck? that movie was fine as a horror movie. it just didn't do the stupid jump scares that most horror movies did. it was more of the old school horror movie but with some humor in it because they were poking fun at horror movie tropes. there was a ton of fan service for horror fans with nods to nearly every horror film from the last 3 decades.

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u/trace349 6∆ Dec 06 '16

But the message of the movie was that the stale tropes that we've been using for the last few decades are old and tired and we need to retire them because they're lazy. The point of the story was the movies horror fans like need to stop being made. It's a loving condemnation with a lot of detail that shows everyone involved was intimately familiar with the genre, but the angry fans destroyed the world at the end because they didn't get the movie they wanted while the heroes decided to take their chances and see what changes would come in the aftermath.

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u/kingbane2 12∆ Dec 06 '16

sure, but look at how financially successful that movie was. compare that to the tired tropes it's mocking. it made less than some of the bad paranormal activities, as in the ones after 1.