I’m a feminist but I admittedly don’t have a strong grasp on feminist theory proper, and I’ve only seen tiny pieces of Sarkeesian’s stuff. However, I am a gamer, so maybe I can help with this one. ''Objectification" in an abstract sense is a little confusing to me, but not in a concrete real-world application sense. Here’s why.
A few years ago someone on The Dope strongly recommended a wicked-ass PC game called The Witcher. What makes this game special is the level of detail and nuance that goes into it. Plenty of RPGs will set you up with ‘‘good’’ choices and ‘‘bad’’ choices and you reap the consequences, but The Witcher is different. The choices aren’t so obviously good or bad. This is a game with depth. As the recommendee explained to us, you can kill a dude and come back hours later to find someone scrubbing his blood off the floor.
So I bought the game, and it was predictably awesome. I actually think it has some of the best game mechanics that I’ve ever played, and the story is rich and deep. You’re a badass dude right, so inevitably hot chicks abound, and pretty much every woman you meet along your journey, you have some option of sleeping with. I really have no problem with that in and of itself. As I understand it, there’s also a love story/theme at some point down the road, I dunno.
I never got that far because every time you sleep with a woman in the game, you get a fucking trading card.
This isn’t fucking beach volleyball, this game is not intended for cheap thrills. It is a work of art, it is a goddamn masterpiece, and the women in it are reduced to trading cards. I could not play this game because it made me feel as if I, a woman, was actively participating in the reduction of women to objects.
This is a particularly egregious example of an extensive history of gaming perceived as a means of gratifying male fantasy, and that’s just fine it and of itself, the problem is 50% of gamers are women and nobody seems interested in gratifying my fucking fantasy of one goddamn female who exists for some reason other than male gratification. I don’t get to be the hero in 90% of games that exist. My existence in the video game world is represented exclusively to make things more interesting for men.
One of the reasons I love Diablo 3 is I get to wear a suit of armor that does not exist solely to make me look hawt. It actually, you know, protects me from all the stabbing going on in my immediate vicinity. I appreciate small favors such as this.
It sounds petty and if it were just one game, it would be. What it is in reality is a rigged system that shuts me out of full participation in gaming. It makes me feel like I can drop $60 on a game, bring it home and spend the entire time feeling like a guest visiting someone else’s fantasy. I paid just as much but I don’t get the same value.
