My opinion towards these controversial topics in general are close to neutral. I don't understand how people can take a heavy side when the straightforward answer is that neither group is right nor wrong. Simply don't force or restrict opinions. Imo games and entertainment in general needs to be free from politics at the very least. Creativity is where it shines and where it is valued. Its purpose is to have fun, feel joy from them not stress on real life issues. That's why you can have games like GTA that is completely revolved around doing crimes, or FNAF with anthropomorphic animals scaring you, or Nikke with bouncing ass simulator, or Animal Crossing with peaceful life simulator. Political viewpoint completely ruins it all. So, I support neither sides as every side tends to be extreme with their actions. We can have unattractive, realistic, strong female leads, as well as erotic and fictional bazoonka girls. Keeping in mind that this applies only to new titles. Why? Every franchise has a concept/image in mind and if that were to suddenly change, fans are obviously going to be displeased. Recently, The Little Mermaid caused quite an uproar. Things like this makes me disappointed, and is an example of something I would not like to see...
I think it's sickening and simply repulsive if people were to criticize a new project purely for the fact that it has a black female lead for example. But in what world is it okay to swap race of an existing character to appease for "certain demographic". Like I said it's fine to apply any creative thoughts into work, just not forcefully.
In Anita's case obviously all of these harassments are never okay. It is such a shame how internet culture especially evolved in a way that made it okay to be toxic and harming with no risk. On the other hand, I also dislike the pressure to apply diversity, representation, attacking certain designs, cancel culture, political correctness, etc in general. Anita Sarkeesian puts out some good points (although I haven't seen it all and completely based off of what I remember watching in the past) but I don't know if I can agree with them and the way she centers her viewpoint around what's good and not good. I understand most of this is to create awareness and to spread a female perspective of the landscape. Tho just from part 1, those gaming tropes are perfectly fine imo. If people want to make games about saving a girl, or oversexualizing women for interest, it's fine. Same for saving a boy, or oversexualizing men, vice versa. After all video games are established through the concept of motivation. Those "tropes" are merely just a part of motivation. Would people want to save ugly-looking blobs of slime? Maybe, but nobody realistically wants that. And I'm sure there were games that did it but did not succeed. A cute looking girl is just more appealing. After all games back then were especially made with the interest in creation. She has to remember that technology was considered nerdy back then, being a nerd had a negative connotation which resulted in some people getting discriminated against. Boys were much more interested in technical stuff than girls. So naturally the majority of gaming devs are going to be males, and if the vast majority are males, the thought put into work would be from a man's perspective. Did she want to force male devs to make games for girls as well? Like a game about a girl rescuing an old man or perhaps a dating simulator for girls. Those did come later eventually btw. Did she want to force teams to take in female devs just for the purpose of making games for females? Did she want to restrict sexualizing fictional female characters? If a man wants to create games about saving girls then so be it. If a man wants to fantasize about fictional female bodies so be it. If a woman wanted to make a game about a girl beating monsters so be it. If a lesbian wants to make a game about falling in love so be it. Again, it's just about perspective.
I understand if she just wanted to see more female characters that acted different to those tropes. Or there were evidences that those ideas were being restricted on purpose. But there's no need to downplay those mentioned tropes and ideas. Plus there's a reason why it's a "trope", because it's easy and simple to reuse while focusing on the gameplay where the difference is made. It's understandable if the trope is revolved around spreading hate or something, but that's not the case with her examples. What's worse is pressuring to include every type of individual for "representation". That is more discriminatory imo. As an example, it's completely fine to make a game with only one race. As well as creating games with all kinds of race. Because it's not about the race, only sensitive racists would care about the skin color of characters in media. It's also perfectly fine to make games for certain groups of people or targeted audience. What's not good is seeing people cry that there needs to be equal amount of games for different kinds of people, or restricting ideas solely to try pushing certain ideas more. There's going to be more stuff for certain people than others. Nothing is balanced, and to take out frustration on existing games is extremely rubbish. Right now these "activists" are only ruining gaming by applying peer pressure to creators for political correctness and awareness. Restriction only creates unnecessary frustration and hatred towards one another. Simply supporting games for your liking is much more peaceful and lovable. Even if it may be few. I'm not a big fan of FPS games but I don't go out of my way to stop people from making FPS games so that they can make games I like.
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