| Verter said: 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. |
First of all, sorry it's taken me so long to respond to this! You know how the Texas power grid was knocked out at the start of the week and millions (at one point almost half the state's population) went without electricity -- as in heating and so forth -- in temperatures far below freezing over the course of the week? Well I was affected by that. My house lost power early Monday morning and I only got it back this afternoon (it's Friday), so yeah it's been interesting. I've basically spent as much time at work as possible because it was warmer at the store than at my house, but even the store relied on emergency back-up generators for two days, so there wasn't any heating there either for a good while. Now though the store is being mobbed by people stockpiling stuff again like it's last March; especially water this time though because the water-purifying facilities lost power too, causing the water for half the state to become contaminated. 12 million people even tonight are under local orders to boil water instead of using any running water they may have at home, so people are buying up all the bottled water possible to bathe in and drink of course. It's a disaster. But hey, I hear the same country, same state (NASA is based in Houston, Texas) landed a rover on Mars this week while back here on Earth we froze in the dark because they can't even keep the lights on. Which goes to show you the difference between the efficacy of a federal program and that of relying on private enterprise to solve all our problems like we do in my state because...because...I don't know. I really don't know. As you might have guessed, they've been especially slow to restore power out here in the boonies, as usual. I've been through stuff like this many times before, but this time it's not because I couldn't pay my electric bill. 
ANYWAY, as you might well imagine, between no electricity, no mobile phone in that situation, and being mobbed all day at the store for the entire week by panic shoppers, I've been pretty exhausted just trying to survive both physically and psychologically. Video games and online message boards dedicated to them have not only been totally inaccessible to me, but have also been the farthest things from my mind. I literally haven't done anything since I got home from work today but cry and rejoice that I now have heating again and can shower. I've needed time for healing and I'm nowhere near there even now. (Meanwhile my senator vacations out of the country; hard at work raising the issue on the national stage, as might be expected. Why senators even need vacations when they get like a third of the year off anyway while I work 60+ hours a week doing far more productive labor bagging people's groceries and cleaning public toilets and go without basic necessities, I'll never know. Anyhow, way to go re-electing him, Texas! 
)
...That rant went on longer than expected. Sorry, I needed to vent. You complain at work and they threaten you with termination, so that's not a very practical option. All hail the free enterprise system. We cannot do better. ...SO anyhow, what I've been trying to get at all this time was that that was the reason for the delay. Okay, I think I'm ready to actually respond to what you wrote now. I think.
Well mainly I just wanted to thank you for your comments. I think you're right about your main point: women's perspectives have been largely ignored in games development. I feel that this is owed to a lot of circular logic of men knowing what men like better and therefore making games for men to play and then when women complain of feeling ignored people responding with "Well most gamers are men after all; they make games to satisfy their customers of course!", and so the self-reinforcing cycle of selfishness continues indefinitely. The first step to breaking this vicious cycle methinks is getting more girls and women interested in video games. That's how you increase the number who want to go into everything from professional gaming to games development. The next question is how.
Getting more girls and women interested in gaming is a project to be pursued not for political correctness, but for the benefit of gaming as an art medium, as you say, in that the medium benefits from the presentation of a wide range of stories and perspectives more than from approximate repetition of the same stories and perspectives endlessly, and it's a project that requires overwhelmingly male developers to move out of their comfort zones. And for publishers to let them. And as you also say, that's a work in progress. I guess I'm just optimistic about seeing progress. As we go from a situation where shortly ago the people at Dontnod could only find one publisher that would let them use female protagonists in their game Life is Strange because it was viewed as too much of a commercial risk for neither of them to be male to one of now witnessing The Last of Us Part II winning Game of the Year virtually everywhere, we see volume of women interested in games development slowly creeping up. That in turn will ultimately yield more female game developers and, along with that, more fully honest representations of women in video games themselves. Which in turn are likely to interest even more girls and women in video games, and so on and so on. That's my perspective of it anyway.
In the bolded paragraph, you ask whether "there are any games which directly addresses the question of feminism and has it as its main topic and focus". That's an interesting question! Lots of games I've played include tacit, anecdotal allusions to living in a male-centric culture here and there, but it's quite rare for games to present explicitly feminist themes as the core of their identity. There are definitely some examples though. Lost Wage Rampage comes to mind as a particularly obvious example. (It's a heist game that uses the wage gap as it's narrative justification for that game play.) My favorite game falling into the heavy-on-feminist-perspective category though is definitely the freebie interactive visual novel Butterfly Soup created by Brianna Lei, which is about some Asian-American lesbian high schoolers (and a bi girl) who endeavor to play baseball in 2008, whereupon hijinx ensue. It's the flat-out funniest game I've ever played before. Being a visual novel, it's not heavy on game play, but it is highly enjoyable and one of the best-written games out there. It helps a great deal that the developer is lesbian herself, frankly, to understand the sort of nuances of what that experience can be like. But anyway, sex-specific topics come up in conversation between the girls a lot in a way that feels more organic and natural than it tends to when men create "feminist messages" in games. Where a guy-developed game might include say a "no girls" sign somewhere that female protagonists are like "Well that's bullshit!" about, Butterfly Soup takes the time to do things like flesh out exactly what the prospect of being the only girl on a baseball team feels like to each of them at length, showing why a misogynistically abusive cultural upbringing experienced by one makes it natural for her as part of a general lifestyle of defiance but horribly off-putting to girls more who are more shy or forced into an unhealthy focus on academics for example. The all-female nature of the team eventually formed is important in this connection. The game also explores these experiences through the lens of race in ways that strike one as both accurate and insightful. (For example, if you know anything about the South Korean women's movement, you know that Min is NOT an exaggerated character, and that neither are her experiences!) Romantic love between girls is also a topic explored by the game at good length (it being a romantic comedy, after all). Unlike so many other "yuri" games though, the relationships between the game's characters aren't there to service the male gaze, but rather to flesh out how different sorts of girls respond to discovering they're attracted to other girls; some are ashamed and repressed and struggling to accept themselves because of her background, while another is bold and shameless and still another thinks nothing of it and it all works very well in the service of sheer hilarity. But like I said, it is a freebie visual novel made by one woman. That seems to be the only form in which such themes can be explored with this sort of dedication as yet and it does make one wonder what Brianna Lei might have been able to accomplish with say a real budget and other people to work with. (It's still one of my absolute favorite games.)
Last edited by Jaicee - on 20 February 2021
