A decade ago, an hitherto obscure cultural criticism project called Feminist Frequency -- created by a Canadian-American woman named Anita Sarkeesian while she was studying at New York University -- launched an extensive web video series analyzing in-depth and critiquing the representation of women in video games throughout the history of the medium. That web video series was called Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and it made Anita and Feminist Frequency famous for a time, becoming the site's flagship series. (You can find the entire series here.)

Like most people who did, I discovered Feminist Frequency through Tropes vs. Women in Video Games. The series was announced as a developing project on Feminist Frequency that was intended to be composed of several parts, each about five or ten minutes in length and examining a separate female trope commonplace in video games; Anita's biggest project up to that point. She requested $6,000 on crowd-funding site Kickstarter to finance it and was reportedly stunned to receive the entire requested sum within 24 hours, so unexpectedly high was the demand for this particular work. Then the backlash began.

A large-scale harassment campaign was mounted against her over the project. I like to highlight that point of origin to point out that the opposition campaign began here, well before the publication of the first video in the series; a fact that highlights the reality that, to many of Anita's detractors, the contents of her work didn't actually matter. Simply knowing that she was a feminist who was to critique portrayals of women commonplace in video games was enough on its own to start sending rape and death threats, rape porn depicting her as the victim in massive quantities, hack her social media accounts, saturate her Wikipedia page with pornographic images and anti-lesbian and anti-Semitic slurs, and even create a computer game called Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian and anyone who dared criticize any of this could be and often was treated similarly, moreover. (For example, when Toronto feminist Stephanie Guthrie criticized Beat Up Anita Sarkeesian, she began receiving rape and death threats as well.) The campaign was of a scale and viciousness sufficient to generate some notice and coverage in the gaming press. That coverage is how I first learned about the project and, through that, discovered Feminist Frequency.

At the time, nothing like such a project existed and I was personally at a place of feeling highly alienated from gaming culture in general and drifting toward abandoning video gaming as a hobby for reasons I felt much more deeply than I understood and felt even more scared and ashamed to try and voice. The second I saw a picture capturing the essence of the project, I instantly knew that it concentrated those feelings I often couldn't find the right words to explain myself and greatly sympathized with Anita's plight, to which end I contributed what little I could toward increasing the fund for Tropes vs. Women in Video Games beyond the requested sum. Many others did the same, resulting in the eventual donation total of nearly $159,000 from just under 7,000 backers. The entire series had originally been planned for publication in 2012, but got pushed back because the additional resources allowed Anita to drastically expand the scope and scale of the project. In the meantime, I took the opportunity to explore earlier Feminist Frequency content, which in turn only made me more excited for the Tropes series. The first Tropes video (Damsel in Distress, Part 1) was released on March 7, 2013 (the day before International Women's Day) and the series wound up spanning the subsequent four years.

The first four videos in the series, all of which launched in 2013, focused on the damsel in distress and "Ms. Male Character" tropes and were all viewed over a million times and positively reviewed by the Boston Globe and the New York Times and generally up-voted contemporaneously (there was a like-to-dislike ratio bar attached to YouTube videos at the time). Early the following year Sarkeesian received the Ambassador Award at the annual Game Developers Choice Awards on the grounds that these videos helped the medium "advance to a better place", becoming the first woman to receive the award. I highlight these points to make it clear that this initial body of work was contemporaneously well-received not only by feminists, but also by most gamers, video game developers, and media critics in general, perhaps because these initial commentaries focused on points that were both glaring and pretty easy for most to agree with.

The next several videos in the series though centered on the sexual objectification of women in the medium in ways that were, to my view, ahead of their time in that they included critiques of "mainstream" pornography and the prostitution of women, thus drawing the ire of liberals and praise from the radical feminist community to which I belonged. (No more awards for you! ) The infamous (mostly) 2014 Gamergate harassment campaign against female and "pro-feminist" video game developers and critics (a handy, comprehensive and well-sourced timeline of which can be found here for the edification of anyone wishing to dispute that characterization) was in part a direct response to the first batch of these videos, called Women As Background Decoration. Anita was forced to flee her home more than once during this window of time. I was harassed online by this movement contemporaneously for speaking out in defense of Anita and its other victims. To me, the ferocity of this reaction, if anything, proved the importance of those sorts of critiques. Over-sexualization of women in the gaming landscape was, and to a much more limited extent remains, a problem that most women ourselves I think find more demeaning and alienating than patriarchal chivalry and such, and also clarifying of the cultural battle lines; clarifying of who is really on your side and who is not. (It was very clarifying, for example, that the sex industry directly participated in Gamergate: example 1, example 2.)

It may be worth noting that, in larger feminist politics, Anita had notably been an early critic of the Slut Walk movement and of liberal "choice feminism", and to some extent hook-up culture itself (to which I reference her positive takes on the 2016 indie game One Night Stand). These positions would've fit her in much better with today's post-Me-Too movement landscape wherein you've more recently seen phenomena like the return of the feminist porn wars and the popularization of "high-value dating" and the politics thereof than it did with that of the early-to-mid 2010s. Indeed, as you can see at the first link in this paragraph, Anita back then described radical feminism in positive terms and would cite areas of agreement with thinkers like Gail Dines and Meghan Murphy, in addition to more conventional theorists; stuff she certainly wouldn't do today. On the flip side though, Anita's work was always intersectional and trans-inclusive in nature (although gender ID stuff was hardly the focus of her work), thus evading a stray too far in the radical direction. My point here being that, if some of her critiques -- particularly the stuff from 2014-15 (Women As Background Decoration part 1 and part 2; Women As Reward main video and follow-up) -- felt different from / more "prudish" than what other feminist commentators of the time were offering, that's because they were indeed coming from an unorthodox place that was not strictly liberal-minded or strictly "woke", though definitely not conservative either, and one that I connected to a lot.

Anyway, the general tone of Feminist Frequency changed after the election of Donald Trump in November of 2016, and that tonal shift was for the worse, IMO. From this point forward, Anita and the rest of what was now her Feminist Frequency non-profit organization just simply converted to what I like to call more conventional wokeness in direct response, and you could feel this tonal shift in the subsequent final two entries of the Tropes series that launched early the next year. In Not Your Exotic Fantasy, for example, which incidentally is overall an excellent and recommended critique of the sexualized exotification of women of color in video games, she uses the term "sex workers" to describe women in the sex industry for the first time in the series instead of "prostituted women" or "women in prostitution" or just "prostitutes", thus implicitly accepting the sex industry's own preferred terms for its chattel instead of ones that originate in the women's movement. And in The Lady Sidekick, Anita explicitly weighs in against criticizing the political far left on the grounds that they can't be as bad as rightists.

The subsequent post-Tropes era for Feminist Frequency was marked by a shift away from both video games and women's issues as central topics of the organization's attention, to which end public interest quickly waned and donations dried up, resulting ultimately in the organization's reduction back to obscurity. It still exists today, but it's now just a widely forgotten audio-only podcast where she, co-hosts, and occasional guests discuss stuff like the importance of abolishing the prison system and such like this in the context of critiques of mostly obscure films and TV shows that few others will have even heard of before. In short, from my standpoint, Anita and Fem Freq have gone from feeling distinctive and ahead of their time to feeling more conventional and behind the times. I miss her awesome feminazi era!! It made a difference.

Speaking of that difference, recommendations from Tropes series and broader work of Feminist Frequency introduced me to many games I've come to cherish, including Dear Esther, Papo & Yo, Thomas Was Alone, Aquaria, Fez, Sword & Sworcery EP (here's the specific commentary that proved decisive in my choice to buy it), A Case of Distrust, Firewatch, One Night Stand, That Dragon Cancer, Kentucky Route Zero, Pyre, Butterfly Soup (one of my top five favorite video games of all time!), Florence, and Celeste. Indeed it was furthermore the review by Carolyn Petit, who later went on to join Feminist Frequency the following year, that persuaded me to buy Gone Home as well, which also ranks in among my very favorite games ever. In fact, Feminist Frequency in general, those who worked for Fem Freq, and the Tropes series in particular, played an enormous role in building my interest in indie games and even the way I write about games has been influenced by Petit's writing style because I just love it!

Tropes vs. Women in Video Games has had a profound impact on the medium over the years. As Colin Campbell wrote for gaming publication Polygon shortly after the final Tropes installment was released, "video games have seen a rise in the number of positive women and minority protagonists and a decrease in the tropes [Sarkeesian] discusses" since the launch of the project. Indeed, during a Game Developers Conference talk referenced in Axios last year, Sarkeesian herself said "making [Tropes] videos today might be 'not impossible, but harder,' as there are fewer examples and 'the pattern is less egregious.'" The question of whether a game character today is treated as a subject or an object no longer breaks down half as neatly along gender lines as it did a decade ago and titles centering on female subjects, ranging from the Horizon series to The Last of Us Part II and the new Tomb Raider trilogy to even the little indie platforming gem Celeste, among others, have been known to sell millions, and sometimes even tens of millions, of copies. It's a different gaming world today and one that I'm now happy to be a part of. Anita Sarkeesian herself may not be someone I still follow very much, but the legacy of her flagship work, the Tropes series, lives on in the best possible way. I just wanted to honor that legacy with these reflections this morning.

If you've never seen Tropes vs. Women in Video Games before, here is the first and most widely-viewed video published in that series as a primer and a powerful glimpse into the origins of the damsel in distress trope both across history and, in a specialized way, in the very foundations of the video gaming industry and at exactly how it empowers men at the expense of women. It's about 23 minutes and a great place to get started. The caveat, of course, is that it's a reflection on the gaming landscape as it had existed up to that point in time; up to 2013.

Great write-up, very informative. Games are indeed slowly changing, gamers are not though. This article popped up recently with depressing statistics https://www.eurogamer.net/one-in-10-female-gamers-feel-suicidal-about-the-abuse-they-receive-playing-online Plus there is the frequent outrage over 'too much inclusivity' in games nowadays.

But as long as you play offline and ignore the nonsense outrage over for example a video game kiss, things are getting better. There's still a long road ahead to actually make games all inclusive, and an even longer road to make online gaming a safe and positive experience. But at least there are plenty indies to enjoy in the mean time. Great list, I enjoyed many of those as well. Papo and Yo left the biggest impression on me from that list, brave and very clever way to tell a personal story.

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. 

Any kind of harassment is never okay. However, the feminist take on everything is not really helping anything. Just makes everything seem like a problem if you have those glasses on. Let people make games the way they want to make them, and people can choose whether to buy those game or not. That's how it works.
The whole feminist take on gaming was a bit of a grift back in the day and now its time has gone.

Online gaming has abuse across the board though. It might be more sexual in nature towards women, but I think it'll often become aggressive quicker towards men.

It says 51% of men have witnessed a woman being harassed online. How many of these people have witnessed a man being harassed online? According to a study in 2021, over 83% of gamers 18-45 and 63% of gamers 13-17 have experience some form of harassment online.

''27 per cent were concerned the threats could translate into real-life attacks'' This isn't a result of the virtual abuse, but irrational fear as there is absolutely no statistical evidence that 1/4 of women abused online are also abused in real life by that same person. It's a problem they feel this way, but this is a cultural/media problem. 

There is definitely a toxicity problem in a lot of online communities, it is not going to be solved by only focusing on one target group, attention will just move to the next group.

Yes all lives matter...

Of course cleaning up online harassment will work for everyone. But it's a fact females have it much worse and rather pretend to be male than play as a female online. I've had plenty harassment online (not playing online anymore as a result, screw that) but never had rape threats directed at me.

Sony, Microsoft, Meta, etc need to take this stuff seriously. You can only report text messages on PSN for example, and even then at most the offender gets a week online ban on their profile. Result, he just pops back up on another profile to keep on harassing. You can block people, but you still get matched with them anyway. Hence I quit GT7, not worth the aggravation of having to deal with the same assholes over and over. Even with 2 of his accounts already blocked one the antagonists simply used a 3rd one to keep on ramming and deliberately targeting people on the track. He just made sure he used abbreviations now in text chat which are fine according to the report filter. I've seen good people leave online racing behind for years due to these kind of assholes, now it simply takes too much time to find a decent race.

I can only imagine how bad it is in games with open mic. At least GT7 is just text chat you can ignore. Some idiots send you PMs to insult you further, report them and they get an ineffective warning. Some people see it as something to be proud of to have a long moderation history... My oldest plays Rust with his friends and says there are often people throwing racial slurs around. Maybe AI can help find the patterns and track down the troublemakers, as human moderators are completely useless.

And maybe making games more inclusive will slowly start educating gamers that everyone matters. Not just the white male hero saving the world. And no, just having another skin color option isn't enough. There are real differences between ethnicities and how males and females solve problems and its about time that translates more into games.

First of all, thanks for taking the time to share your opinion at-length. There's a lot to respond to there and a lot that seems incoherent to me, and honestly I just don't have the have the energy to go through this in an itemized way, but I do get and want to respond to the crux of your argument, which is that "games and entertainment in general needs to be free from politics". It's an old argument you won't be surprised to learn that I've seen many times before. It just strikes me as naive. You cite "games like GTA" as examples of what a games "free from politics" look like. Frankly, I don't understand how anyone can play through a game like Grand Theft Auto V, for instance, and conclude that no political statements were made therein; that no social commentary has been offered. And the reality of the matter is that this includes some pretty definite gender politics too, not just rather blatant statements about public policy. There is a worldview being advanced here, both wittingly and perhaps sometimes otherwise.

Not seeing the demographic politics in games (or other media) is a luxury that I haven't enjoyed. It's a luxury that stems from a sense of entitlement begotten by a long history of self-reinforcing special treatment. For example, you go on to complain about the fact that Ariel is black in Disney's new live-action version of The Little Mermaid and don't see how you've just contradicted your case by insisting that she should be white instead because it's just natural or traditional  or something for a fictional mermaid to have white skin or because the Little Mermaid fan base supposedly skews overwhelmingly white and objects to the change (which is an assessment perhaps contradicted by the opening-weekend surveys of its audience). Yes, the decision to cast Ariel as non-white this time around was likely a deliberate one. The reasons why one would object are no less political though; they are just differently political. And I think I've got more respect for the motivations behind that casting here than I do for the sorts of ugly reasons why you'd object.

What your case ultimately boils down to is the same circular argument that I've been seeing since back in the days when these gender-role debates between mostly male and mostly female gamers would play out in the letters pages of gaming magazines instead of online because nobody had the internet. Namely, the "winning" contention that games have to broadly be sexist because most creators and consumers of video games alike are male and no questions can be asked about why that is or whether that lopsidedness a good thing. To ask these questions is to be objectionably political, apparently in contrast to the status quo from which one group of people benefits a whole lot more than others, has seen themselves more favorably reflected, etc. Supposedly, gaming culture exists in a vacuum. Supposedly it is naturally free of politics and only feminist killjoys introduce them. That all is a rather convenient way of looking at these debates. Reality is more complicated than that.

I tend to agree with Anita. As a parent of young kids too many games are just too blatantly overly sexual. I do think it has gotten better.

It's ok in every world.

Game companies, movie companies, or whoever, are business people. It is perfectly within their rights to make whatever changes they want to a character they own (setting aside the morality of how much control a company like Disney has over a character as opposed to the artist that actually does the work) to make it marketable. And, the audience can vote with their wallets. Personally, I would have been more likely to see the Little Mermaid if Ariel looked more like Alyssa Milano (who she was modeled after), because that would hit my nostalgia buttons more. If the market tends to agree, then I suspect Disney will adjust accordingly. But, I don't feel I have any right to be offended about Ariel being played by Hailey Bailey. And if people like this better, that's cool too.

Lets not forget that this is what companies have ALWAYS done. For example, gay people didn't really exist in movies or TV until the 90s. This was done specifically to appeal to a certain demographic who would get very upset if you had lbgt characters. Disney Princesses where white until Aladdin. I don't think that was simply a coincidence, that was what they thought would sell. And, again, companies can do what they please, but people can't complain about companies catering to a certain demographic now when they hadn't been bothered at all when they were the ones being catered to.

But what's more troubling is that these kinds of arguments only pop up when a character is changed to become part of a marginalized group. For example, let's take a look at Aunt May in the new Marvel movies.

Rosemary Harris, Aunt May in the Raimi film, was basically a perfect representation of Aunt May from the original comics. She was bizarrely old (why is Peter's Aunt his Grandma?) and mostly existed to worry about Peter to make him think twice of being Spider-man. On the other hand we have Marissa Tomei, who is a total smokeshow, encourages Peter to Spider-man it up, and is considerably younger than Aunt May was ever portrayed.

They really changed Aunt May, but nobody really had much of an issue with it. In Disney's Beauty and the Beast remake, the French Belle spoke in a British accent, and nobody cared. Batman in Batman vs Superman was shooting up motherfuckers in the most anti-Batman way possible and there really wasn't a huge outcry. In fact, many of the Snyderverse people who accepted this drastic change that completely alters the character are likely the same that are upset by a black mermaid.

Point being, we're ok with all kinds of changes and new interpretations. It's only when race, sexuality, or gender gets involved that people start clutching pearls and talking about the integrity of the source material.

And, it doesn't even seem to matter if a character is actually being changed or not. Ghostbusters had entirely different characters that were now females, and got the same kind of vitriolic reaction that went far beyond whether it was a good movie or not. She-Hulk and Ms Marvel had always been females and were pretty comic accurate portrayals, yet they also got the same kind of treatment. When Pixar made Turning Red, a film with a female Chinese-Canadian main protagonist going through metaphorical puberty, again there was lots of hatred, this time justified by talking about how the film was not relatable, because we can relate to toys, bugs, fish, and physical manifestations of abstract concepts, but not an Asian girl having her first period.

Point of this rant, which isn't necessarily targeted at you but is more of a general rant, is that there is pretty often a harsh and hateful response when a woman, person of color, or LBGTQ person is the star of a movie or sometimes just in the movie. There are various legitimate sounding explanations. Historical accuracy, source material accuracy, etc., but when you take a closer look, people really don't make a big deal of these things in other circumstances. It really seems like these are just pretenses for people to avoid the saying what they're actually upset about.

As for the actual topic, not much to add really. There is certainly room for valid criticism of Anita, but that was not what happened. And that's something that I think happens a lot. Kind of like with the stuff I mentioned above, people find some justification to be upset about something involving a minority group and use it as an opportunity to just vent out all of their hatred.

Video games have brought me tons of joy in my life, and it fucking sucks that so many in the community try to gatekeep it. It's especially bizarre because a lot of guys work really hard to keep women out of the space, but also want girlfriends who are into gaming. There'd be a lot more of them out there if men were less shitty.

First my apologies, I was drunk writing that so it's really messy. I'll try to keep it simple and easy in this response. 

1. I've only played GTA online so that was naive from me to use it as an example. My point was that I wanted games to keep stuff you can't really do in real life. Entertainment is fun because it's filled with imagination, and real life issues only restricts that. To be clear, I think it's fine to have politics in games, like maybe the setting takes place on Earth and there's politics in that universe as well. It's also fine if the game is centered around politics and it's clear, like a visual novel of some sort. However, most games shouldn't be a form of message to real life political issues, cuz more often than not politics are hugely controversial. I'm sure nobody wants a Mario game talking about gun laws or see Call of Duty used as an example for gun law related stuff. After all, games are meant to take a break and "escape" from reality.  

2. I never said mermaids needed to be white did I? I just stated my distaste how Ariel did not look like the character that represented her in the original without any particular reasons other than "inclusion" and "representation" in modern society, from what I've gathered. I would've disliked it if Ariel was blonde for example and I assume most people would be too. Furthermore, it's not just the looks, but the characteristics. I wouldn't like it if the personality changed in a character either. Chris Pratt voicing Mario had a huge negative reaction for the same reasons. Communication is key however. Change is accepted in the community IF there's a logical/reasonable explanation that makes sense to the audience. Like a character turning into an adult, it may still leave fans in distraught but at least it makes sense. 

3. All of this is difficult. I never implied that games are meant for boys because majority of creators and consumers were boys. I meant it as, it's natural that boys would make games for boys as they know what they want. Since majority interested in game creation were boys, it makes sense that content were "male oriented". Anyways there's no such thing as complete freedom. Just because games can express someone's thoughts doesn't mean it should. There is a line of common sense as to what is okay and what isn't usually decided by majority rules. Anita's claims tried to change that line on how much is acceptable and people didn't like it. It would be much less controversial if her stance was simply "I want different types of female characters in future games", but the narrative was more like blaming existing games and developers for the lack of intentions to. Hence restricting creator's freedom of choice making it seem like they needed to take those into consideration, or they're sexist. It doesn't cross the "line" if the game doesn't explicitly convey discrimination, but looks like to me Anita and her followers thought the tropes mentioned were. Although she probably played a role in the future of gaming, it was bound to come as society change and video games became more mainstream. Her claim would be far more valuable if she had claimed the gaming industry was preventing female characters or female devs to succeed (as there are probably lots examples like Activision Blizzard) but that wasn't the case. There were plenty of dependable female characters and main characters even at that time so her narrative was almost out of place. It was just a selfish request to push her opinion and poor narrative that gaming is sexist. Her intentions could be seemed like she wanted to restrict the gaming industry to how she wanted even if that wasn't the case, which cycles back to my statement on how the way things are presented is very important. To conclude, it's obvious that there needs to be a balance of both restriction and freedom. I value freedom as I want games to be imaginative as much as possible. Instead of changing what already exists, make a change with something new.