Note that Moxxi dresses up that way because she likes to, though. There’s an entire quest in BL2 that revolves around Moxxi’s daughter’s estrangement with her because Moxxi pressured her to lose weight and dress sexy, when she didn’t want to. In that quest chain, Moxxi is portrayed as, simultaneously, acting and dressing the way she does in rebellion against the extremely prudish hillbilly culture she grew up in, while also being in the wrong for trying to force her own lifestyle choices on her daughter. Both are portrayed as right for making the choices to dress and act the way they want, with Moxxi that happens to be putting a lot of effort in her appearance. But the game also makes clear that as long as you’re proud of yourself and your choices, there’s also nothing wrong with not being sexy.
I mean, look, I’m almost certain there’s someone on high above Burch that’s forcing him to work with the character design he’s been given. She’s objectified by the art department and that sucks and there’s not much you can do about that. Still, I think you miss a lot when you try to categorize everything into a binary sexist/not sexist bucket. Moxxi certainly has design elements that are bad and endemic of cultural problems, but she’s also not a complete pandering lost cause.
Edit: But then I think there’s at least a small amount of redeeming value in Bayonetta too, so take my argument for what you will considering that.
In real life, that matters. In fiction, not so much. Of course the fictional woman is going to be written to enjoy dressing up that way if it’s supposed to be a positive thing.
I also am not liking the line of talk of discriminating against gamers in general for the subset that are misogynist. If you hear “gamer” and think they must be misogynist, you’re crossing into bigotry.
And gamers aren’t dead. More people identify as gamers than ever before. The most popular YouTube channels are devoted to that culture. The culture is just changing to become more inclusive.
I’ve also never met a single gamer who treats gaming as a boys club. Almost every gamer I know thinks it sucks that there are so few women involved. Boys clubs kinda suck.
Kobal, I personally make you look bad? You kinda went off on a rant there, and I wasn’t sure if you were still talking about me.
OK, interesting, I’m gonna think about that.
Wow. OK.
Yeah. I worked that one out. Lovely indie game developers will write lovely female-friendly games for me to play. But if I want to play COD, or Car Wars, I’m on my own. Nasty ‘gamers’ play them, whom it is our duty to shun.
I disagree. We see sexed up women all the time in video games. The design seems to be “they dress up like this because ???” Where there’s no in-narrative reason, not even a flimsy one. Take Cia from Hyrule Warriors. She has that weird… naval showing boob dress… thing because that’s what Team Ninja decided she should wear.
We need to portray all types of women as characters. A sexy woman who owns her sexuality is one type of woman, and an underrepresented one at that. We see it all the time in real life where people don’t believe a woman can be dressing sexy because she likes to, and not to attract men. Not having any women who do that in our fiction only enhances that perception.
Now, my argument isn’t “Moxxi is peak feminism, sexism is over, if you disagree with me you’re a dirty slut shaming bastard.” She has problems, and her sexy design is one of them, but I think it’s a good thing to portray some women as characters who happen to like being sexy. Note that this is distinct from “portraying women as sexy”. We do that a lot already, but they’re almost always sexy for no reason, or to serve as a justified love interest. Not because their character wants to.
Leigh “Gamers are over” Alexander made a similar defense of Bayonetta here.
Now, I think Ms. Alexander goes a bit too far in Bayonetta’s defense. Bayonetta has a ton of uncomfortable problems with pandering, and the opening and post-credit cinematics in the game are really exploitative irrespective of the overall narrative. But I think she makes a really fair point that Bayonetta’s portrayal is a rare and one can definitely take some sex positive feminist tones, even if they don’t necessarily overshadow all the problems.
Not all of this applies to Moxxi, of course, since Moxxi is, well, an NPC in a game where NPCs sit around and wait for you to talk to them. Still, I think there are some redeeming qualities when you take into account the extended sidequests involving her.
To offer a more extreme example, in India, the swastika is a commonly used symbol. It appears on buildings, on cars, on shopping bags, in religious art, etc. But you don’t see Indians in the United States prominently displaying swastikas for the most part, because they understand that here it only has Nazi connotations, and none of the good connotations that it has in Indian culture.
The “gamers are over” issue has nothing to do with people not playing video games or avoiding certain games or not being allowed to play the games you want to play.
It’s about being aware that “gamer” as an identity label has come to mean those guys who as a group have constructed this attitude over what a real game is, what a real gamer is, what kind of games and game elements real gamers value, and what kinds of games should be shunned, and coming up with excuses to mistreat people who openly disagree with them.
While I understand that point of view, I’m not at all sure I’m ready to cede the term “gamer” to the misogynist assholes. My gamer friends and I have also been playing dorky games since the early eighties, but we manage to do so without sending death threats or even without filling our games with ugly sexist bullshit. I enjoy being a gamer, and I frankly think I deserve to keep the term more than the assholes do. I’d rather exile them than be exiled myself.
Normally I’m a radical descriptivist when it comes to how folks use language, but in this case I think there’s a decent reason to be a prescriptivist: using the word “gamer” to refer to good folk (whether adolescent, adult, or child) who play games, using it widely and often, and using other words to refer to the self-pitying violent tweakers who want to keep it an exclusive club, makes it clear that they’re pariahs.
The analogy with the swastika is apt, except for an important detail: the Nazis damn their eyes succeeded in changing the swastika’s implications in the Western world pretty much for all time, and that symbol has got to be ceded.
I don’t understand what the Leigh Anderson plan is for how I get to play COD (or any game that ‘gamers’ play)without being harassed. I don’t think she has one. Her concerns lie elsewhere, it seems to me.
I agree that Moxxi isn’t an example of the worst of gaming sexism. They’re trying to rescue her from that. And I think arguably this is one of those situations where if the rest of the industry wasn’t so generally terrible, she wouldn’t be as bad. The concept of the character that they’re trying to make her into is not inherently bad. But… she’s still not exactly great. And, in the grand scheme of things - how many male characters are there that get the “deliberately sexy, but owns their sexuality!” character? I can honestly think of none off the top of me head. There’s a hole in the market that isn’t going to get filled any time soon, because the reason Moxxi exists isn’t to be that nuanced character. That is to say, if for whatever reason in the game she couldn’t be overly sexualised, then she wouldn’t exist at all, I’d reckon.
And I too have less issue with Bayonetta. I think she has a similar problem, that of someone scrabbling to try and make “let’s have a sexy woman who gets naked a lot be our main character!” and after the fact try to justify it, but since she is the main character (and it’s a very different style of game) she actually gets character and character development, an active role in the plot, a chance to have a say. Again, not great, but if we suddenly tomorrow had a more even gaming pandering culture, then I don’t think I’d have a problem with her.
I’m sorry, but this is exactly the kind of shit that bugs me the most about this. Has been pretty much from the start. If the “gamer” identity label has come to be a negative identity, then that is on two groups of people:
A small, vocal minority within the gamer culture
The folks in the media who focus on those minorities
It’s like I keep saying to those who want to blame these death threats on “gamers” - how dare you blame that shit on us? We don’t support or condone these people. When it became clear what a cunt Aris Bakhtanians was, and when he tried to claim that abusing women was part of the fighting game culture, we called him on that shit. To my knowledge, he’s no longer seen as a serious member of the FGC, and he’s treated like shit (which he totally deserves for that shit). But when a stupid troll decides to call in a bomb threat against Sarkeesian, what the fuck can I do about that? Christ. If this were Anders Breivik calling himself a gamer, you’d understand how fucking asinine this logic was immediately.
I am a gamer. I have been for most of my adolescence and adult life. I spend much of my time playing, analyzing, and discussing video games. I play to win. I go to tournaments. I treasure the medium. I’m going to college to learn how to make games. I’m not a gamer in the same way you watch movies or listen to music. I’m a gamer in the way Roger Ebert is a film buff, or the way Carl Sagan is a science fan. I treasure this label and what it means for me. This is not a useless identifier.
And I resent people like you trying to paint the label as something negative because a handful of bad apples which we have no way to reach do bad things in its name. They aren’t us. They don’t represent us. They’re a tiny, insignificant minority of those who would refer to themselves as “gamers”. And when those we can reach do bad things? We tend to get on their case about it. We’re trying to self-improve. I haven’t heard “rape” on an e-sports stream in ages. Just a few years ago, that was the go-to slang for “being destroyed” in the FGC and the Smash community. It’s basically gone, because we realized that it wasn’t okay and took steps to change that (in particular, getting commentators who wouldn’t stop using the term off the mic). I realize that’s a shallow example, but there’s only so much we can do on a structural level, other than person-to-person “Stop being an asshole”. Which we also do more than people are willing to admit.
Part of it is because consoles (and when people are talking about these games, they’re mainly talking about console games) are primarily owned by males. Making a Jane Austen romance novel adventure* for the PS4 requires getting over not only women spending less on games but also fewer women owning the platform on which to play your game.
*Example taken from a thread in the games forum of something another poster would have liked to see.
On the other hand, most women own mobile devices and games oriented to women on mobile devices are booming. In large part because you don’t need to talk them into buying a $400 device to play your $60 game on.
But I disagree with the premise that even traditional video games are only for “undersexed 15-year olds”. Here’s the 10 top selling games from 2013:
Grand Theft Auto V
Call of Duty: Ghosts
FIFA 2014
Pokemon X & Y
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag
The Last of Us
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Tomb Raider 2012
Monster Hunter IV
Bioshock Infinite
Some of those are for portable devices (Nintendo 3DS) but if we exclude them to stick strictly to living room console devices, you add in titles like Battlefield 4, Minecraft, Disney Infinity, NBA 2K14 and Madden NFL 25 (I have more than ten total since different lists have different rankings, combine or separate Pokemon X/Y, etc)
Now granted GTA V sold the most copies no matter what list you look at but it’s also the only game mentioned that I think you could slap a “undersexed 15-year old” label on. Many of the rest have plenty of fights or explosions or monsters but they’re not so heavy on the tits and ass. Even Tomb Raider 2012 wasn’t designed around that stuff – and if you want to argue that it was, I’ll give it to you because that’s STILL only two out of fifteen.
The best selling games of 2014 so far are Lego Super Heroes, inFAMOUS Second Son, AC4: Black Flag, GTA V, Minecraft, Battlefield 4, Lego Movie Game, NBA 2k14, CoD: Ghosts and Titanfall. There’s GTA V again but nothing else really qualifies. Lots of pew pew shooting between BF4, CoD and Titanfall, not a whole lot of tits in your face.
Exactly. I would never deny that they exist but they don’t make up the bulk of the current market.
Ascenray, you’ve delved into the bigotry I mentioned. The identity of “gamer” does not mean misogynist. You take negative aspects of small group and generalize them to the larger group. That’s the definition of bigotry. It’s precisely the shit anti-feminists are doing. They let feminist assholes rule the entire feminist movement.
What you are saying would apply 100% to the word feminist. People don’t see that word as a good thing, due to the assholes in the movement. Should feminists give up their identity?
People have thought the word “gamer” was a bad thing pretty much since its inception. We were loners with no lives. We’ve fought hard to have our hobby seen as legitimate. As horrible as this is, this is nothing the gamer subculture can’t survive.
The concept of gamer is changing, sure. Diversity is starting to join our subcuture. And some feel threatened by this. The assholes turn this into misogyny or homophobia, or etc. We are increasingly kicking those people out.
#Gamergate happened because a jilted lover gave into misogyny and riled up the misogynist subset of gamers. Some in the media then overreacted, attacking the identity of “gamer.” When your cultural identity gets attacked, you are going to get defensive. And here you had this thing called “#Gamergate” who claimed their purpose was to attack these people. So people joined them.
As time went on, journalists started addressing this the right way, yet #Gamergate wasn’t satisfied. Those new people who joined started to realize the whole thing was about misogyny. It wasn’t just some bad apples who had descended into death threats and other junk. Those who didn’t realize it right away were called out by the rest of the gaming community for being part of a group that would do these sorts of things. So they started leaving in droves.
You go to any forum where #Gamergate people were allowed to talk. You will see many more people condemning them than supporting them. It got successfully kicked off of 4chan, even.
Gamer culture is still going strong. The Let’s Play community is the most popular form of entertainment on YouTube. And the people that watch those tend to consider themselves gamers. I know my favorite let’s player has a community that was completely not affected by #Gamergate at all.
He has a ton of young female followers. They’re gamers. They’ve never been questioned. They play on this guy’s servers because they know that misogyny and other trollery will not be tolerated. They meet up at cons and stuff.
That’s the gaming subculture. It has women it in it. It is not dying.
Stick to attacking #Gamergate. Not gamers. You attack our identity, you attack us.
The thing is, if there is no explanation for why someone does something, the default is to assume that they like doing it. So, in my opinion, those women are very well represented in games.
I do see your point, though, that they are starting to feel the need to explain this in-story. That means they no longer feel it is an acceptable default that you can just assume. They feel they need a reason for it. That is progress.
But I still don’t see it meaning nearly as much as it does in real life. In real life, we went through a stage where women’s sexuality was a bad thing, and these sex-positive women are taking their sexuality back. These women are true-and-true feminists who refuse to be objectified, while still being sexual.
The fictional characters, on the other hand, are just being somewhat less sexually objectified. They still literally exist to titillate.
Punk is dead. Or never was alive, except as a crass attempt to cash in on snotty teens’ snottiness. See: Malcolm McLaren.
“Gamer” is also not over as a positive name, because it was always negative to non-gamers. And this controversy isn’t helping change that. Might as well give it up, kids, because as soon as you call yourselves “gamers” most people mentally place you in your mom’s basement.
I don’t think that’s correct, and furthermore it can not be in fact really be correct.
Firstly because, quite obviously, the amount of money a 15 year-old spends on games is directly related to how much money Daddy and Mommy are willing to shell out, not how much the teenager has time to play or how many games they do play one way or another. Herein lies the explanation for piracy :p.
Secondly, because while there obviously is a new crop of 15 year-olds every year like clockwork to replenish the numbers, the proportion of gamers that are not-15-any-more can only grow. They show up, we *add *up (Which is the same reason old farts dominate every political arena, but that’s another story :)). And while we don’t have the same amount of free time as school kids - well, not all of us anyway - we do have the means to indulge our every gaming whim.
The point is : by catering mostly to stupid teenagers, big ticket developers and publishers are alienating an ever-growing moneyed market in favour of a renewable, financially limited one. That’s just a bad business model, plain and simple. As is the underlying assumption that girls only play Farmville and shit.
Simple facts : the average gamer is 31, not 15. 36+ is 40% of the market. The average age of purchase for video games is 35, not 15. Female gamers represent 55% of the market.
[QUOTE=Weedy]
You kinda went off on a rant there, and I wasn’t sure if you were still talking about me.
[/QUOTE]
Yup. Sorry 'bout 'dat. I was a bit sloshed at the time :o.
But you *did *piss me off with the whole “we are gamers because we all play games and that’s it !” equivocation. Much like a “movie buff” is not just “a person who watches movies”, “gamer” is part of or the whole of someone’s self-defined identity and goes further than just a common denominator. I watch movies, I’m no movie buff. I am a gamer, though.
It’d be silly to assume that every gamer is a rabid misogynistic troll, but it’s even more silly to say that it’s just a few bad apples. You also really do seem to get hung up on NotAllGamers as an antifeminist statement. Which is about as on-point as NotAllMen.
The fact that gamers, and mainstream video games in general, get routinely and casually sexist is, like, DUH (this is from the upcoming Zelda. Zelda, FFS ! They’ll be putting tits on Kirby next, just you wait). It’s very often cringe-inducing, honestly. The fact that it really doesn’t seem to bother all too many of us (and that in fact many resent the very suggestion that maybe that state of affairs is a bit fucked up) is the crux of the issue.
[QUOTE=Jophiel]
Even Tomb Raider 2012 wasn’t designed around that stuff
[/QUOTE]
Umm, yes. Yes it very much was.
Which is a problem, in and of itself. Well, not the lack of tits - the lack of women in pew pew. Women fight on the frontlines, y’know. And boom-boom flicks have included non-T&A-vehicle women since forever - Ripley & Vasquez, Sarah Connor, The Bride, Pam Grier, Angelina… (and admittedly quite a bit of strictly T&A “action girls” in leather catsuits too)
Of the immense mass of first person shooters out there, the hugest market at the moment, I can think of 3 (three) that feature legit action heroines : *Borderlands *1 & 2 with the Sirens, and Bulletstorm’s Trishka - and that’s an NPC. That’s about it.
Oh, there were the *NOLF *games too, and they were pretty awesome, but now I’m showing my age :).
Already out, actually. And it’s a spinoff game by the same people who made Other Fucking M, which explains a lot.
… Though I guess it is pretty cool that like, 90% of the cast of the game is female and (mostly) not sexualized like Cia. Because of the long-standing trope that “only evil women dress like sluts”, probably.
And bro-gamers are despised and made fun of by gamers. Yeah, bro-gamers do the whole boys-club thing and get all manly and shit. That’s one of the things we make fun of them for.
I’d almost forgotten about dropzone’s anti-nerd schtick. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s out of date on gamers. Or that he was woefully misinformed about a counterculture when it happened.
I have a feeling that, if he were a gamer, he’d be a bro-gamer. That’s what they are, the jocks and preps that grew up in a gaming culture.
The plot of the Hyrule Warriors is really funny too, but not quite Other M levels of bad/offensive (it’s at least entertaining):
[spoiler]Cia is literally a Link fangirl who guards a sealed piece of Ganon and watches Link, Zelda, and Ganon throughout all of time and space. She gets super obsessed with him and mad that he’d never choose her because of his shared destiny with Zelda. So Ganon corrupts her and she rips through time and space to make Link love her.
