MikeRox said:
Her critical analysis was pitched as having had extensive experience with beloved videogames. And the money was meant to pay for her to be able to do thorough research. The fact that this was masked, gave the entire thing an instant bias agenda making her entire project of zero academic worth, other than how not to do an academic critical investigation in something. An outside perspective would be great, but when the examples are so cherry picked, again, it's not really a critical analysis, more a lets find the worst stuff and uses this to form a generalised conclusion supporting the initial hypthesis. Critical analysis starts with a hypothesis, then looks at all the evidence both for and against this hypothesis, then decides whether the hypothesis has been proven. I certainly wouldn't say there is no issue at all with the portraital of women in video games. Some games are even outright offensive to me. But to find these moments and state they are the norm is incredibly unfair. When people are challenging this, just shutting down the debate is completely unhelpful to both gaming and the "cause". That said, I'm also hugely disgusted at the internet in general at the moment. It's not just gamers lashing out with death threats, you only need to look at the more extreme opinions in the Scottish independence debate, I feel 2 groups are being merged and painted as one. As the death threat throwing trolls exist in social media in general thanks to the anonymity of the internet. I don't personally understand how anyone can communicate so prehistorically with another human being with or without a veil of anonymity masked in 1s and 0s. Two wrongs don't make a right and the trolls on both sides are killing what could actually be a genuinely interesting debate. |
Well if you look up the dfinition of a trope and how they are used in other media (including literature and film) you will find that any discussion of use of - or overuse of said tropes (sexist or not) will consist of nothing but 'cherrypicked' examples of those media. This is (by definition) how tropes are used and discussed. Tropes are never intended to be indictive of the whole work - again by their very definition.
The complaint that she picks tropes out of larger pieces of work - is pretty much spot on to *what she set out to do in her kickstarter*.
She's not making a series on sexist games - or about gamer culture (although given the vitrol surrounding anything she's done - she'll make a huge name academically for herself by writing a paper on the phycology surrounding these events) - she set out to point out tropes - which (in her view) were sexist and overused in the plots and settings of video games. This can't be done without 'cherrypicking' the tropes out of the games they are used in.
