Feminists? In my games? It's more likely than you think.

Morality Games said:

Feminism is an elaborate movement. It has achieved some good and has worthy goals, but there is a lot of baggage and pit falls that can make people reluctant to accept it.

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Feminism is basically nothing more than opposition to the enforcement of gender roles. Distilled down, that's basically its only message. There are a few other peripheral, like sexual liberation, but even that is a move to escape the role women had where they were only allowed to be brood mares for the men who were essentially their owners.

While power relations have been historically lopsided in favor of men, there were a number of not even discreet ways women were capable of exercising influence in earlier periods. Feminists have tended to stress how inaccessible political roles like the British monarchy were to women, and place emphasis how women were dis-empowered by arranged marriages. Therefore a woman becoming Senator seems like that much more of a triumph.

In truth, women were able to use those marriages to influence both sides of very powerful extended families stretching the European continent. Aristocratic women could often pursue policies and agendas with effectiveness comparable to that of men. Even in the lower echelons of society, women were able to use their natural talent as networkers to acquire influence in the community. On the whole, feminism tends to understate how much effective power women exercised throughout history. They were shoved into certain roles, but through those roles they could frequently exercise power and decision-making in human social development.

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Why should women have to marry in order to obtain power? Why can't they have it on their own? And "natural talent as networkers"? Please, more stereotypes. Claiming that women had power because they could control their husbands is the shoddy excuse that the anti suffrage movement used. It's pathetic. It's not enough to have some power, it's only enough to have equal power. That's what feminism wants. It does not ignore high profile instances where some women managed to overcome the odds and wield power despite the barriers against her. But it certainly understands that those women shouldn't have had to overcome those barriers at all. They should not have been there.

As far video games go, part of it is that it is difficult for men and women to share the same fiction, or even the same porn. Thanks in no small part to neurochemical differences, we have disagreeing expectations of what drama should be like.

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Even if this were true, and it mostly isn't, why does that mean that gaming should largely not make fiction aimed at women? Why is only the male drama to be made? That's the core gripe about video games. They're almost entirely aimed towards males. They almost entirely star male characters. They use female characters as plot devices, eye candy, and punching bags. What's so bad about stories starring women? Are you really incapable of relating to a female main character? Why is your mind so limited?

Redress said:

It is easy to say that when you are not being insulted, stalked, harassed and generally treated like **** based on your gender while you simply to and enjoy your hobby.

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Don't you think you're overstating your case just a little bit here? :roll:

Paschendale said:

Even if this were true, and it mostly isn't, why does that mean that gaming should largely not make fiction aimed at women? Why is only the male drama to be made? That's the core gripe about video games. They're almost entirely aimed towards males.

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Those games don't bring in nearly the same amount of profit and they don't seem to attract nearly as many males, which is still the majority of the consumer base. On the other hand, many women play and enjoy the very games you have a problem with and as you might expect the creators of the games don't have any problem getting males that want to play them.

They almost entirely star male characters. They use female characters as plot devices, eye candy, and punching bags. What's so bad about stories starring women? Are you really incapable of relating to a female main character? Why is your mind so limited?

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For more than a decade more and more games are allowing the gamer to pick if they want to play as a female or male main character and for the ones that don't the sale numbers don't seem to indicate any sort of problem as the female consumer base continues to grow and the male consumer base does as well. As it stands women don't seem to have any problem relating to a male character and smaller boob characters don't seem to have any problem selling with the male demographic.

Since mostly men continue to make these games and the owners of these companies are to my knowledge men don't expect anything to change with how women are done. They like to create their product in a certain way and since they have the right to produce products they find themselves happy with and their consumer base is happy with what they are getting your opinion is entirely moot.

Maybe it's just me, but I would very much like it if feminists ****ed off and didn't turn video games into another Barbie nightmare where they aren't happy until Barbie is a fat ass.

Redress said:

It is easy to say that when you are not being insulted, stalked, harassed and generally treated like **** based on your gender while you simply to and enjoy your hobby.

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If you're being legitimately stalked and harassed, a call to the authorities, and to the makers of the game in question, will take care of that quick, one in the game world, the other in the real world.

You seem to be confused. I never said their criticisms (which I state I share) are patriarchal and condescending, I said adapting the products on the basis of the concerns expressed by these people taking it upon themselves to speak for women is patriarchal and condescending. Sales indicate that a growing proportion of women are gamers, so I don't see how the data justifies their suggestions being taken any more seriously than fans wanting zelda being voice acted or GTA being set in the future. They may be valid suggestions, the game designers have no reason to change based on the actual data.

And comparing the design of a product by private companies to universal suffrage? Really now.

A pretty central figure in all this is a guy who calls him self thunderf00t. Thunderf00t - RationalWiki He's been on a crusade against feminism and Anita Sarkeesian for a while now. He has pretty much made a character assassination of her. And yet the gamergate community are in full support of him

A quick search on him showed he's either a flat-out liar, or such a poor researcher that anything he says can't be trusted.
Excuse Me While I Dismantle Thunderf00t's Anti-Sarkeesian Video With One Screenshot

The problem was that no one who played the game DOES that. Trust me, I watched at least 40 playthroughs and none of them attacked the dancers, ‘cos in Hitman, you’re not meant to kill innocent people. Indeed, you get penalized for it. So how can Anita then claim that this game is making people sexist? Well, obviously she’s gotta go beat the living crap out of these virtual women herself, then drag their bodies around in a big circle—and you know it’s her doing it, because the body starts right by the body locker that she’s eventually going to put it into, and then she drags it around in a BIIIG circle over the other body to make it seem as nasty as possible. That is, in reality the only people who play Hitman as a fantasy to kill women and desecrate their bodies, are feminists like Anita Sarkeesian....Anita’s footage of this part of Hitman is quite literally the only footage that I’ve seen anything even remotely like this.

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That's not only false, it's trivially shown to be false with just a few seconds of research. There are plenty of gameplay videos out there featuring people killing the dancers in Hitman (with plenty of approving comments), and there have been for literally years before Sarkeesian's video discussing and depicting it. The screenshot of one YouTube video at that link (which you can watch here, for example, charmingly titled "Fun with Strippers", considering that the description reads "In which we Enjoy Talking a Lot and Killing Strippers a Lot. We strangle and kill many strippers, then make piles out of them and watch them ragdoll and roll around the floor.") shows it was uploaded on December 4, 2012. Just right now, as I was typing this post, I did my own YouTube search using the exact same search terms - "Hitman game strippers" - and found two more videos just like that one, one right below the above video on the first page of results, the second the video at the top of the "related videos" section on the right hand side of that one. Both of them were uploaded in the middle of 2013. Sarkeesian's video, "Women as Background Decoration: Part 1", wasn't uploaded until June 2014.

So, either thunderf00t couldn't be arsed to do two seconds of research before he spouted his ******** about how Sarkeesian was totally making that whole thing up and no one would even think about doing such a thing in Hitman (much less make videos about it) before she did it, or he was directly and blatantly lying about it.

Are you going to necro any other threads for your copy and paste job? Or have you now found them all?

Sorry. I tried posting in the other thread a couples of times and it didn't work. Then i tried here and it didn't work either. But now suddenly all 3 posts popped up almost 2 days later. I noticed the last time i tried posting it said waiting for moderator approval.