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General Discussion / Re: Only two posts on 'Tropes vs Women in Video Games'
« on: June 05, 2013, 12:02:49 pm »The trope can't be separated from it's social context because its social context is largely created by its use, especially when looking entirely within the media. Using a damsel in distress in a video game is playing off the history and abundance of the trope. It's a shorthand that gamers will understand from the dozens of other games they have played where it's used. The individual use of the trope is shaped by the history of the trope and you can't entirely separate any single usage from the past examples.
For those who have read Dawkins, think of it as an extended phenotype. Animals shape the environment they live in even as that environment shapes the species' evolution. In the case of stories the use of tropes shape the future perceptions of those same tropes, which then change how those tropes are used, and so on ad nauseum.
Problematic tropes come about due to those social interactions with the central premise. They can stop being problematic (or become less problematic, or more) depending on how those interactions change. In the same way that beaver evolution might be shaped by how generation after generation shape their own environment with dams, the use of tropes will shape the future nature of the tropes.
The central element of the damsel in distress trope that makes it problematic in the current social context is the woman being denied agency. This is problematic due to both the general lack of female characters who have agency - or who have their agency stripped away by such tropes - in video games and the general cultural attitude that is hostile towards women who demonstrate agency in the real world.
Sure, these things are changing. The recent freak out over female bread winners had a bigger backlash against the freak out. But they are still there and underlie both the games industry and society in general.
The two parts feed off of each other. Narratives where women are assumed to be passive and dependent are more popular when they re-enforce assumptions already present in the wider world, while general attitudes are (at least partially) shaped by the narratives we use to describe and address the world around us. Making certain narratives the default or making certain narratives taboo/off limits can shift how people look at the world.
Today the assumptions about women's place in the world and general lack of female agency in common narratives are pervasive. Any re-enforcement of those assumptions and trends is problematic. It's not to say it should never be done, but doing so should be done with full awareness of what you are doing. And that means that people who are aware of the problems should talk about the problems and point them out where they see them. Which is what Anita is doing.
You seem to be saying that damsel-in-distress plots work by referencing other damsel-in-distress plots to let the player know what's going on. I believe this is incorrect. The plots might reference each other, but that's not the only thing they have going. While the trope might certainly be overused, it is also an entirely legitimate plot device that can stand on its own.
To clarify, you don't need to know the previous examples to understand the plot. That's kind of what references are about; you are building off a whole lot of prior stuff, and need that prior stuff to deliver your message. But with distressed damsels, you could find yourself a kid who's never played a video game, watched TV or perused any work of fiction at all, tell him that "The princess has been kidnapped! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the princess?" and he would get it. He doesn't need to know how many times before the same story has been told. Kidnapping is bad and rescuing is good and that is why you need to stomp on those goombas. Once you accept that abducting a person without a pressing reason is morally questionable, the whole rest of the plot follows. It only became a "trope" in the first place because it works.
As to whether the narratives in video games affect how people percieve the real world, I don't know. Maybe? I don't think it's a problem as long as there are other kind of narratives as well. Men sometimes lose their agency, a phrase I refuse to use without italics, but other times they're single-handedly changing the fate of entire worlds. Get some more female protagonists going.
I think it's more obvious with the Euthanized Damsel trope, where games are playing directly into common domestic violence narratives. They are re-enforcing the stories told where women are deserving of the harm done to them. The stories that are already present and pervasive in our society, but that doesn't mean that repeating them and increasing their visibility uncritically isn't harmful. Can such events have a place in good stories? Sure. But a part of that would require being aware of the danger surrounding those narratives and addressing that in some manner in the story. Otherwise it's just a repetition of a narrative that we should be discrediting and marginalising for the harm it does.
Are they really domestic violence narratives? I don't think they are. You're not hitting a woman because she's annoying, you're hitting her because she's an enemy. That's what you do with enemies. You kill them. This might be perceived as a problem, I guess, but it's certainly not a gender problem. In any game, you're usually killing enemies by the hundreds. In the real world, they would be people. If it's okay to kill them, what's wrong with gunning down a brainwashed girlfriend every now and then? It's not as if any of them really deserve death.
