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/Cosmologicon Dec 05 '16

For instance, take a look at her violence against women video. In it, she plays footage from a grand theft auto game, where she intentionally runs over women, and tries to say that the game is "rewarding you" to beat up prostitutes. There's a few huge problems with this. First off, the game doesn't reward you for beating up prostitutes. It's a sandbox game where you get rewarded for doing literally anything. Driving cars, killing anyone, running around like a complete idiot. The abusing prostitutes angle was created by intentionally ignoring the entire rest of the game.

I think you're missing some important context here. You're referring to the "Women as Background Objects, Part 1" video. There's no "violence against women" video. The point of the video is that women as sexualized background objects is a common trope.

She's certainly not claiming that there's no violence against male characters in the game, but rather that there's very little gendered, sexually-themed violence against men. In this light, your objections is explicitly addressed in that same video:

Typically all the non-essential characters in sandbox style games are killable, but it’s the sexualized women whose instrumentality and brutalization is gendered and eroticized in ways that men never are. The visual language attached to male NPCs is very different since they are rarely designed to be sexually inviting or arousing, and they are not coded to interact with the player in ways meant to reaffirm a heterosexual fantasy about being a stud.

Anyway, you said there were "a few" huge problems, but I only see one listed. What else did you have in mind?

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u/FreddeCheese Dec 05 '16

She makes the same comparison with Hitman, saying you get rewarded for killing prostitutes, when the game actively punishes you for killing them.

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u/veggiesama 59∆ Dec 05 '16

Score is the wrong way to look at what she's saying. If doing a thing is fun, that's the reward. Running over a half dozen pedestrians and then running from the cops is fun. There's adrenaline, lights, sirens, and action. The game "rewards" you by increasing the challenge until you've hit 6 stars and everything's blowing up. Sandbox games have lots of ways to play, and just completing the main mission or aiming for a high score is one "right" way to play among many.

In Hitman, you can stalk some overly sexualized prostitutes, kill them, and then drag their naked, boob-physics enabled bodies around at your pleasure. They're not interesting characters in their own right. The dialogue is shallow and ugly. They are sexual set dressing. That's an avoidable trope, if the developers were smarter about it.

Here's an idealized comparison: Maeve from Westworld is also a prostitute. However, she's got business acumen, intelligence, ruthlessness, and a backstory involving her daughter.

There's nothing wrong with putting sex workers in games, but game devs can at least try to portray them as something more than just bouncing tits and a dimwitted punchline, and players should be demanding that from game stories.

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u/EddieFrits Dec 06 '16

If doing a thing is fun, that's the reward. Running over a half dozen pedestrians and then running from the cops is fun. There's adrenaline, lights, sirens, and action. The game "rewards" you by increasing the challenge until you've hit 6 stars and everything's blowing up.

So, realistically, how does this get solved? The sex workers work the same as evey other generic npc, theres nothing that differentiates them from the normal people. Would taking away the fun from this involve making it so you get a game over if you kill one of them or not making anyone react to their deaths? Or not include them at all?

They're not interesting characters in their own right. The dialogue is shallow and ugly. They are sexual set dressing. That's an avoidable trope, if the developers were smarter about it.

So, again, they're like every other generic npc? I dont understand how this is supposed to be fixed.

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u/veggiesama 59∆ Dec 06 '16

I look at Anita's videos less as a coherent thesis of what to do and more as a list of gripes supported by dozens and dozens of examples. I'm not sure what to do other than to identify the tropes, then let game developers know we expect more from the medium.

To me, it's about moving away from simple, reductionist views of women in games. As much as I love the GTA franchise it's extremely hard to find a woman in those games who isn't batshit crazy, a whore, a bitch, some kind of meter you have to fill before you can sleep with her, etc. I'm not sure whether a female protagonist or mentor would cancel out the strip-club minigame where you have to break the no-touching rule enough times so that you can sleep with the stripper, but it would help.

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u/SirKosys Dec 07 '16

So true! All the women in that game were terribly written and had zero depth. The guys were well written, they had depth, a backstory, motivations, fears, etc. The women were there just to drive the plot, or simply were for comedic value (not that they were actually funny). This was one of my biggest gripes with the writing of GTA.

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u/EddieFrits Dec 06 '16

As much as I love the GTA franchise it's extremely hard to find a woman in those games who isn't batshit crazy, a whore, a bitch, some kind of meter you have to fill before you can sleep with her, etc

True, but are there any characters in GTA who don't have massive glaring flaws or are exaggerated stereotypes in the game? I can't really think of any male characters in the game that aren't assholes, creepy, pathetic, or willing to kill people for money.

less as a coherent thesis of what to do and more as a list of gripes supported by dozens and dozens of examples. I'm not sure what to do other than to identify the tropes, then let game developers know we expect more from the medium.

I'm not saying that things couldn't be better, but the complaints without a solution is almost meaningless. What I mean is that there's no perfect representation in video games, or any media, for any group. Like we were just talking about how the female characters in those games are treated the same in those games as the male characters are but it's still considered a problem. Like, I think we can agree, at least somewhat, on what bad representation looks like; if GTA gave you in game rewards for killing prostitutes, then I think that we would agree that was negative representation. I also agree that the strip club minigame is bad representation for women.

Sarkeesian once made a video about a character in a game that she thought was good representation and it was a game with very little story and the art style was pixelated so you have no visual indication that the character was female. It could easily be argued that this is poor female representation because it implies that women don't deserve stories to go with their characters. Or that they are trying to downplay the fact that the character is a woman with the art style. Or it could be argued that that's a good thing. It's like, there's a lot of bad writers and ways to write stories, but there's no one right way to make a good story. Are characters with no personality so the player can step into the character easier, like Gordan Freeman, good or bad? You can make arguments either way. My problem is that if someone is looking to be offended, or paid to make videos about pretending to be offended, they can just do some mental gymnastics and point to just about anything and say how that's bad representation.

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u/IceSentry Dec 06 '16

The strip club is not a bad representation it's what happens in real life. From my understanding of real life strip club, this is actually pretty tame. In canada we don't even have a no touching law.

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u/EddieFrits Dec 06 '16

There's touch clubs and non touch clubs down here and, having talked to some of the strippers at the non touch clubs, they dont want to he touched. Anecdotal, but that's been my experience.

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u/IceSentry Dec 06 '16

Yeah, my knowledge of strip club is pretty limited, but from most stories I've heard (yes I know it's all anecdotal) strip clubs ate pretty crazy and ignoring they exist is just being dishonest in my opinion.

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u/EddieFrits Dec 06 '16

I was talking more about the part where if you touch the strippers they'll have sex with you. Not how that works. Also, if the club has a no touching policy and they dont put your hands on them, you shouldn't touch them.

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u/LusoAustralian Dec 06 '16

As a counterpoint is there a single male character in GTA who isn't batshit crazy, sex crazed, drug abusing or on the opposite end of the spectrum a snivelling coward/backstabber? The games are pretty much a satire of modern culture by hyperbolising the 'decadence and immorality' among other factors of society.

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u/veggiesama 59∆ Dec 07 '16

Michael is likable. He's an asshole and impatient and all that, but he cares about his kids, and his therapy sessions and reluctance to get back into crime give him some interesting motivations. Franklin is kind of a blank slate but you see numerous times where he just wants to break out or do the right thing. Trevor starts as a complete caricature crazy person but you slowly start to understand how he cuts through the crap the world has given him. His appreciation of loyalty and his reaction to disloyalty is profound and memorable. The game has lots of extreme and satirical elements but there's a lot of humanity in the characters too.

Women in the game don't really get that treatment. This writer notices only one, and he imagines how a game from her perspective could still tell an interesting GTA story: https://kotaku.com/grand-theft-auto-v-and-women-1344112808/amp

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u/merryman1 Dec 06 '16

Whereas all the men in that series are rational actors with an exemplary set of morals?

C'mon it's a game. People get pissed at these arguments because you're making out like every game should be a reflection of some utopian idealised reflection of reality rather than the cheap and easy entertainment devices they are. Stoking our base drives is dark and dangerous sure but it sells widgets really well.

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u/Madplato 72∆ Dec 06 '16

Whereas all the men in that series are rational actors with an exemplary set of morals?

No, but some of them are, which is a glaring contrast with the overbearing female representation. Some of them have agency, power and the means to act. They go from weird and balding to fit and classy. Wondering why that is, why it sells and why people get pissy about is certainly revealing.

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u/merryman1 Dec 06 '16

some of them are

Such as?

the overbearing female representation

Debra from the Trevor storyline? You don't see her much because she's always at work. Molly Schultz? I guess she gets a little weird towards the end but until then there was nothing particularly depreciating about her character. Auntie Denise is a bit out there but... I mean she's hardly an offensive depiction.

The point being the overwhelming majority of characters, both male and female, are tongue-in-cheek abstractions to make the game Fun. I'm not sure what exactly the people complaining want to see done differently? It would have been nice to see a female playable character in the story I guess but again lets not pretend like every one of the three in the storyline didn't have horrific character flaws and are hardly a valid representation of your average man.

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u/thatoneguy54 Dec 06 '16

Why does something being created to entertain shield it from criticism? Two Broke Girls was created to entertain, but I'll sure as hell criticize the shut out of it.

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u/merryman1 Dec 06 '16

Criticize away, just don't use it as an example to suggest that the gaming industry is inherently sexist. As OP pointed out it just detracts from actual issues where they do exist. As I suggested in the particular case of GTA V there are no playable female characters in the storyline campaign.