| Mr Khan said: I agree that Mojang likely didn't do anything wrong here, just that the outrage still means we've dragged this issue out into the open. If they really didn't do anything wrong, no harm will come to them, but we make headway on an important problem. On a related note, i also agree that the women at the IGDA thing hardly qualified as "scantily clad," but again, the positive undertones here is that the game industry is standing up and acknowledging something that's been a big problem for a while. |
But I'm not sure that they are. It seems like they're taking legitimate frustrations over shitty depiction of women in games, the scuzzy treatment of female journalists at trade shows, a lack of prominent female developers, etc., and focusing it all on whomever happens to catch their attention at the moment. The way some people are reacting to this non-story on Twitter is beyond parody. Their anger isn't really about what Notch did, but he's the recipient of all their pent-up wrath for the moment.
If everyone goes nuclear every time a bunch of dudes who happen to make games party with a bunch of girls whom they maybe paid or didn't pay, that just further polarizes everyone and does nothing about the more fundamental issues. Meanwhile, you can have industry figures just keep saying, "Oh yeah! Women! They, uh... need to be in more games! Yeah!" and being praised for it without anything ever really changing.
There doesn't need to be a weird tension created about portrayals of women or minorities or gays or whomever. That's just going to make it harder for anything to improve. There needs to be a more fundamental reevaluation of how the industry is making the same kinds of games over and over and over, and how the high-wire act of AAAA budgets stifles creativity and will eventually cause the whole industry to burn itself out. Battlefield 4 being the latest really good example of this. Graphics aside, I can't even tell the difference between it and Battlefield 3, and yet there was EA (who are villains in every way except when they talk about how much they love gays) talking about how important story-telling is and how much Frostbite helps them with it and blah blah blah. But they're serving up the same shit as ever, and the day they say, "Oh, by the way? The guy you're playing who's shooting everybody? He's gaaaaay!" is not going to be progress.
