You know Loud Whispers, you post everywhere and I lurk everywhere and I generally find your posts to be entertaining or insightful. But in this one thread the way you're arguing is bothering me.
First of all, you used romance covers as an example. That still bothers me. First of all, again, its smut. But not even that. Women are more objectified (and typically written worse) than men, not just in media at large*, but in books, already a negligible share of the entertainment industry. You took the one portion of an already small medium in which the normal objectification is reversed, and used that to argue that women and men are objectified equally. Its a dishonest debating strategy because it picks an exception and an extreme and presents it as the norm.
That's not even the argument - it's not saying "women and men are objectified equally", so debunking that is debunking a strawman. It's pointing out that the
form of objectification is the same. The claim made is that the physical form of males, the "conan" archetype is purely a male power fantasy, and not objectified at all in the sense that females are. What the romance novel covers show, is that the
physique of males objectified in the romance novels (which are a segment marketed directly to women, and often written and approved by women) is almost identical to the physique we are told is the male power-fantasy. This shows that that body-form for males is in reality a common female fantasy, which is the thing that was dismissed with the "power fantasy" theory. So, if you're going to debate it, debate that actual point. Also the "it is smut" line, is
not an argument, it's an
appeal to emotion.
Who really *honestly* cares about that though? Must we know strive to eliminate all that is deemed 'offensive' by any one persons?
This is literally just dismissing the people who make the argument without acknowledging the argument. People aren't saying "change video games because I don't like them." They're saying "change video games because they have problems".
As to who cares: feminists, female gamers, all the people who sent death and rape threats to Anita.
Basically it's a Godwin right there - labeling anyone who disagrees with your point of view as "death and rape threat" person.And you have the nerve to talk about how "the way you're arguing is bothering me"!
We don't need to change video games. We need to create alternative games. Reducing everything to "gender neutral" forms will only SHRINK the overall market, not grow it. For the sheer sake that many titles we have now couldn't exist in that Brave New World. It's the same as forcing everything to have a G rating so as to enforce "age-neutral gaming". You can see, while
individual titles may have a larger potential demographic if you did that, the overall industry sales would decline. But you could make the
exact same type of arguments against anyone who opposed your G-rated-only scheme, as are made against people who defend "guy games". Any, a solution which reduces total sales volume won't ever get off the ground.
e.g. how would gender-neutral Call Of Duty work? Diversity is the key, not forcing everything to conform to a set of guidelines. The research shows that that a large number women
choose to play a different type of game to the average guy. Now, should we "masculinize" the games women like and "feminize" the games that men like? Why only change one segment out of existence, if the goal is gender-
neutral games?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Differences_between_the_gendersBasically, it sounds like no matter how much you try and make heavy-duty shooters female-friendly they're still going to have a larger number of male fans. Should we turn every single shooter into an RPG with romance options to try and bring in more ladies? What about people who just wanted a shooter then? This is the wall I think will still be faced no matter how much we "sanitize" the existing genres.
The whole "death and rape threats" thing was poorly (ok, not) thought out and explained, but I wasn't comparing anyone in this thread to that. Or anyone to that. What I didn't say properly but was on my head, was that the reaction to Anita reveals a problem. I believe the criticism to her is overblown for what her kickstarter and youtube video ultimately are. To me this indicates is that A video game consumers are more sexist than people would care to admit and B people find this shit way too normal. What I was trying to say was "that those people care so much reveals a problem", but I can see how you got to Godwin.
It's not about making heavy duty shooters female friendly, its changing things so that those games that DO have women portray them properly*, or at least not awfully. As far as I'm aware, CoD doesn't even have female characters. It doesn't have a significant female audience. There are no women to objectify in CoD, and their absence is largely justified by the subject matter. It is basically irrelevant to the conversation, except to say that male characters in heavy-duty shooters are not female fanservice. They are non-sexual male fanservice. Thus it is ridiculous to point at them and say that men and women are equally objectified.
I don't think you understand what I'm getting at here with the conversation about smut. All smut implicitly gets a pass, within reason, to be stupid or even offensive because its about appealing to sexuality and nothing else. I wouldn't fault male-focused internet porn for having cardboard female characters. Thus I wouldn't fault a romance novel that portrayed a man in a similar way. On top of that, there's an understanding the smut tends to be low quality in certain respects, in the same way that say horror isn't exactly known for its deep characterization. Borderline nonexistent characterization is a genre convention for most smut, one that makes sense.
Video games are not primarily smut, and thus do not get that pass. As such, comparing the two is meaningless. Part of the reason smut gets that pass is that no one is going to watch "hot lesbian make-out action" who isn't into girl on girl**. Women aren't going to watch that shit, so it doesn't need to clean up its act. Videogames, at their most basic, have the largely gender neutral appeal of gameplay. Designers should expect at least some women to play the game, and thus there is a reasonable expectation that they be presentable to a female audience. Because of all this, I think its ridiculous that romance novels be part of this conversation. If I linked you to "Two Girls One Cup" as an example of how women are objectified, you would similarly dismiss my argument. Yes, I know, that goes way further on the offensiveness than romance novels, but its the same concept but less extreme.
Also, no, its not about creating diversity or whatever. In general media, bad female characters are bad female characters are bad female characters. Regardless of whether the majority of the expected audience is male or not. The day a significant portion of video games start handling female characters properly, is the day everyone starts calling the videogames that don't on their shit. The only reason people don't notice how bad they sometimes are is because its currently normal.
*which means a whole host of things, many I've already mentioned in the previous walls. I could elaborate if you want.
**I'm not talking about lesbian porn, but transparently male focused porn involving two women.
