What other gaming forums would you recommend?

[Verter]

Jaicee said:

Glad we're largely in agreement! As to the other stuff...

First of all, the comparison of forum bans to a movement that commonly advocates things like "state girlfriend programs" and has on a number of occasions conducted mass shootings and car attacks is still an absolutely terrible one, but I'll forgive it. That in the first place.

As to my feelings about addressing female representation in this medium, I'm of two minds on the subject:

On the one hand, I think it does matter. Before Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series came out, I'd largely lost interest in gaming and wasn't even really keeping up anymore hardly. I probably...no actually I'll say certainly....wouldn't still be a gamer at all today if something didn't give because I'm telling you gaming culture as a whole was absolutely toxic and misogynistic by definition a decade ago and it had been getting noticeably worse over the preceding decade. The climate that yielded such outcomes was one where female-fronted games practically didn't exist and virtually all of them that did were like Bayonetta and Heavenly Sword and Lollipop Chainsaw and Barbie horseback riding games and well you get the picture, and wherein traditional damsel-in-distress were being "spiced up" with scenarios where you had to attack the damsel instead of rescuing her to keep things fresh and edgy and apparently no one could think of any other ways and it was all getting to be a little too impossible to ignore for me. Something had to give, at least for the sake of my psyche. And then along came this miraculous web video series that just said everything (well almost everything anyway) and well let's just say that I was there for Anita Sarkeesian. (Back then anyway, for that series. Not nearly as much nowadays, but that's another story.) Maybe it was just a coincidence, but I couldn't help but notice overlap between the time span of that series (2013-17) and a period wherein female game characters started becoming more numerous, more diverse in every way, more often playable, and generally less sexualized and also wherein frankly the gaming community matured a little (albeit with some growing pains...like Gamergate). And so today we find ourselves having moved from a situation where, over the 7th console generation, male-fronted games outnumbered female-fronted ones by a margin of 14 to 1 (https://web.archive.org/web/20130321064024/http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/article/games-with-female-heroes-dont-sell-because-publishers-dont-support-them) to a situation wherein the ratio in games announced in 2020 was almost equal and women today sometimes even actually make games and everything. The difference between a decade ago and today in female representation in gaming is night and day, seriously. Well, it's made a difference for me anyway, just in terms of like, ya know, feeling valued. All this on the one hand.

On the other hand, do I feel that people should be banned from forums simply for like disputing a claim of sexist elements in a game? No. I just said a bunch of good stuff about Anita Sarkeesian, but that doesn't mean I just reflexively agree with all her takes, even on this subject. She's argued for example that Mad Max: Fury Road and Wonder Woman are not feminist films because violence and mini-skirts and such. No. No, I'm gonna disagree with those sorts of frivolous, contrarian arguments, as do most feminists and most women in general who are familiar with these movies frankly, because I feel like they fail to see the forest for the trees, and I think that that actually exemplifies why people should be allowed to dispute these matters.

Anyway, your main point about the range of opinion though is well-taken and fair enough. I'm just elaborating on the other stuff because I can't fall asleep right now. Thankfully tomorrow's not a work day anyway, so it shouldn't come back to bite me in the ass.

I think I'll make my little contribution to this topic.

One problem about women representation in games is that this medium was born at the hands of men who didn't have any kind of feminine vision. So, as you said, all that there was for a long time were games made by men for men. But the thing is, that hasn't changed much in the past several decades, and I mean not even now, in spite of all these non-sexualized, female main characters that we're starting to see around more frequently. It's true that we've moved forward, but all this is still nothing more than a work in progress.

For instance (this is just anecdotal experience, but it's what I've got at hand), when I studied to be a game developer 3-4 years ago, there were only around 15-20% girls among all classes. If that proportion was carried over to employment, that means 80-85% of new crunched slaveshappy talents in this industry were boys, so in the end, even if there are more women making games nowadays, it's still far from being something common. Thus, the gaming industry still has a noticeable lack of feminine vision.

And that leads me to my next point: all this female (or black or homosexual, for that matter) representation in any cultural or artistic product, specifically video games in this case, has a double face, because the only or main reason why we see so much exposure in this industry (not only as characters in games, but also as spokespeople of companies, hosts or invitees to events, etc.) is that it means good PR.

So, on one hand, this gives room to a situation that is easily described using a comparison with a guy I met not too long ago: this guy mocked or criticized feminism in private conversations with other men; however, he used inclusive language on all his social media in order to look like a feminist/ally, just because doing that made it easier for him to have talks with girls and eventually get laid. Well, that's exactly what all these companies and organizations do: they make this effort to build a pro-women image only because they want more people to go to bed with them by buying their games, watching their events, etc.

On the other hand, however, this kind of exposure is good even if the reasons behind are not. It's like when the stigma of games being for children or immature men was still strong: at some point, all the big companies started to focus their marketing efforts on reaching a more mature audience first and a more widespread one later. But the only reason why companies did that was because they considered it good for their business, allowing them to cater to a lot more people and subsequently sell a lot more games.

The result of that, however, is that this stigma has almost entirely disappeared by now (there may be still a little in relation to Nintendo, but not to the industry in general), and that's also what could happen in the current situation of women exposure and feminism-friendly games: purely selfish actions that ultimately lead to positive changes (Machiavelli would be happy with this).

And that's also why I wouldn't care much if a black Joel was casted for the upcoming The Last of Us series, or if Zelda was the main character of The Legend of ¿Link?: Breath of the Wild 2, or if Master Chief was confirmed as gay in Halo Infinite. All these decisions would be pure self-interested PR material (and probably bad commercial ones in these particular cases), but all that exposure that they'd give might have a beneficial impact in like ten-twenty years. Until then, however, all this alleged equality in video games is highly artificial.

In any case, what actually matters isn't achieving a certain percentage of representation (50% women playing or making games is not necessarily better than 40 or 60, for instance); having a wide variety of visions and talent when creating games is what really matters. And more female players and therefore female developers coming naturally to this industry can effectively help a lot in that regard.

As an example of that, is there any game which directly addresses the question of feminism and has it as its main topic and focus? Because that would be an interesting game to play if done right, and I don't think there's nothing like that - basically because there's still no one to do it.

Anyway, this is just my take on this. As usual, all this can be wrong and argued. What cannot be argued by any means whatsoever is that I'm way too sleepy, so I'll stop writing here and go to bed.

Last edited by Verter - on 15 February 2021