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Forums - Gaming Discussion - Is Catering To Women, Homosexuality and Minorities Restricting Game Developers' Creative Freedom?

pepharytheworm on 17 May 2015
generic-user-1 said:
pepharytheworm said:
generic-user-1 said:
Pandering to feminists doesnt work, nobody likes those menhating liars, not even women, and they have absolutly no concept of art or fun, or civil discourse, or math...

the video games are anti women argument is just a lie, like the gender wage gap or other female discrimination in the western world.


What does a person's math skills have to do with feminism? That's like me blaming your above grammatical errors on you being an anti-feminist.

1.math is hard and you dont learn it in gender studies or popculture critic curses at college.

2. im talking in a language i teached myself, i never learned english at school or college.

Anyone can be a feminist, you don't have to take courses to become one and they can even be mathmaticians. You didn't have to take classes to be an anti-feminist.



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RubberWhistleHistle on 17 May 2015

does anyone actually think about these things when they get a game? this is absolutely mind boggling!
my concerns:
a) does it play well?
b) is it fun?



RubberWhistleHistle on 17 May 2015
pepharytheworm said:
generic-user-1 said:
Pandering to feminists doesnt work, nobody likes those menhating liars, not even women, and they have absolutly no concept of art or fun, or civil discourse, or math...

the video games are anti women argument is just a lie, like the gender wage gap or other female discrimination in the western world.


What does a person's math skills have to do with feminism? That's like me blaming your above grammatical errors on you being an anti-feminist.


i think what he may be referring to is their constant misuse of statistics. "one in four women will be raped before they're 25" kind of thing. 



Proxy-Pie on 17 May 2015

Way too many games have "token minority X/Y/Z/etc" characters that have barely any value.



MikeRox on 17 May 2015
RubberWhistleHistle said:
does anyone actually think about these things when they get a game? this is absolutely mind boggling!
my concerns:
a) does it play well?
b) is it fun?


Yup, they're pretty much my 2 default requirements of a game too! I don't care who the main character is. Hell, when playing RPGs where you get the choice, even if my character is the same species as me, it's rarely the same race.

That was why I wondered how people know what sexuality their game characters were. I mean even playing Daytona USA, you never see the driver, so it could be a rainbow unicorn!



RIP Dad 25/11/51 - 13/12/13. You will be missed but never forgotten.

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RubberWhistleHistle on 17 May 2015
MikeRox said:
RubberWhistleHistle said:
does anyone actually think about these things when they get a game? this is absolutely mind boggling!
my concerns:
a) does it play well?
b) is it fun?


Yup, they're pretty much my 2 default requirements of a game too! I don't care who the main character is. Hell, when playing RPGs where you get the choice, even if my character is the same species as me, it's rarely the same race.

That was why I wondered how people know what sexuality their game characters were. I mean even playing Daytona USA, you never see the driver, so it could be a rainbow unicorn!

you know, if youre talking like RPG or something, i can see it being nice to customize your character to whatever race or gender you want. but doesnt like every western RPG that comes out these days let you do that? if thats the case, then what are people even complaining about? and how would you customize your character to be gay anyway? 

im totally with you though, when given the option, i hardly even match my own ethnicity anyways. 



pepharytheworm on 17 May 2015
Qwark said:There are many games in which some races just don't fit all that well, take the order even though I did not play it, how odd would a black person be in that game as counts for nearly all Western based medieval games (so shame on you Dragon Age where on earth did you find a dark African in Western Europe during that time). 


Sometimes you can almost see that developers put a black and female character in to avoid criticism, I don't think that should be the case in any game.

The Moors, Ethiopians and plenty of other black peoples were in Europe during the Medieval era. But you know what didn't exist in medieval Europe, dragons. Or any era for that matter.

I find it funny that people think of black people living in ancient europe as unbelivable, but a white person portraying ancient biblical characters and egyptians is plausible.

 



Psychotic on 17 May 2015
Qwark said:


One individual or group might believe his view/point is superrior to that of the artist (which makes the game,) but that doesn't say it actually is. The artist must produce within the boundaries in the law, but not including a race in a game isn't by defenition racism or discrimination, unless that person says I didn't put a female gay black etc. in my game because I hate them. In this case the artist remains superior since he has the power to do whatever he thinks is best for the game. I f a certain individual is not going to play it, that would be his loss as sometimes forcing a certain character in a game negatively affects the story and reviews resulting in more then one thousand less copies sold.

If the artist simply says this type of character didn't fit in my vision of this product, he shouldn't be (profesionally) critisized for that, that some action groups do, that is there right but an artist shouldn't be in any right obligated to bow for them and addapthis work to their vision. Imagine a God of war with censored boobs or a partly black cast in lord of the rings or partly white Africans in Resident Evil 5 (oh wait they did do that). By adding things that seemingly don't belong there, you get kicked out a game which sucked you in at first. Sure later on you get sucked in again, but why should we get kicked out in the first place, an atmosphere must seem natural at all times. Having some races which don't belong somewhere is almost  as bad as putting a rainbow and colourful flowers in a Bloodborne area.

if we take lord of the rings for example a black elf, or even Aragon, Boromir, Frodo being black would be disturbing at fist, we might grow to love or hate them but at first everyone would be a bit dazzled for the first 10 minutes, which is something an artist shouldn't want to. Games are eventually an art form and at no point art should be restricted to political corectness which would limit the hard fought freedom of western countries in which most devs are making games anyway. So even if a group might think they have to by law and otherwise they are discriminating, we can still say they are luckily not. 

I can agree with everything in the first paragraph. But only a very small minority of people are accusing developers of racism, homophobia etc. right away. Most simply question why some design decisions were made. For example the Tomodachi Life fiasco - most people were simply asking a very rational question why would the developers not include same-sex relationships in a game that is designed to mimic real-life relationships. They had to specifically decide not to include them and it was actually more work to exclude them than to include them. I think asking why the hell would they do that is justified. If they gave any acceptable anwer to that, I would even give them the benefit of the doubt, but they didn't. And as things stand, it looks like they exluded them, because they didn't consider them "kid-friendly", the implications of which are... bad.

The second paragraph is more questionable. I don't think anyone "forced" Capcom to add white people to RE5's Africa - they simply saw the reaction was negative and they changed it. Maybe they didn't care enough to stand by it? Some people didn't like it, it wasn't important to the designers, so they changed it. If it was a big deal to them, they wouldn't. Are you saying an artist can't change his or her work in a minor way if the reception is negative and the change doesn't impact anything at all? BUT I do agree that there is nothing inherently racist about a white guy killing a bunch of black dudes in Africa and the uproar was out of proportion. But.. what did you say about not assuming my opinion was better than someone else's?

I think that only racists would be dazzled by a black Aragorn - I don't know if his skin color was ever mentioned in the books, maybe we just assumed he was white anyway.

BUT THE MOST INTERESTING THING IN YOUR POST WAS:

It's strange that you think artists shouldn't be limited by people moaning about race (in RE5)... and then you do want artists to be limited by people moaning about race (in LotR). The only difference I see is... the people moaning about race in RE5 aren't... you.



pepharytheworm on 17 May 2015
MohammadBadir said:

Way too many games have "token minority X/Y/Z/etc" characters that have barely any value.

I would say there are more generic white characters that have barely any value, than token minorities.



o_O.Q on 17 May 2015

off course not how could it be since the pool of ideas used to form the games is being increased

what i would say though is that in some cases its a bit stupid

sacrificing aspects that the majority find appealing simply to cater to small portions of the gaming community is a bit stupid i would say

for example the suggestion by anita sarkeesian that the controls on certain games be simplified to make them more inclusive for women