The Big Picture: Tropes vs. MovieBob Pages PREV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 . . . 29 NEXT | |
I'm not sure if anyone has responded to you yet, so I'm sorry if you've been bombarded. As a ladytype, I'd like to say I like playing as beautiful badass characters :). Usually the problem with ancillary female characters arises when being pretty is the ONLY thing they do, and the problem with main female characters (for me) being when I feel like I'm playing someone else's masturbation material. The most recent example of this is the armor in Tera Online (there are a billion examples lying around, if you haven't seen it yet), but the most personally frustrating for me has been the armor in Ragnarok Online. I have a tough time getting into a character, who I'm building as a tank, when they dress in a metal bikini. This usually makes me think, "Oh, well, they're not dressing like this for me. They're dressing like this for all the guys who are playing as girls, so they have something appealing to look at for the trillion hours it takes to reach max level." This can be really immersion breaking and (sometimes) depressing. Like showing up for a party and realizing you're not getting in without a top hat and monocle. So, yeah, to some extent, you're right. No one really wants to play as a truly disgusting character (well, unless they do); most people want to play as an idealized version of themselves. I can just say, from personal experience, my ideal version of me isn't pretty-and-helpless or unreasonably-naked-but-awesome. I'd like a good looking character who dresses for the occasion. | |
First, yes. The knee-jerk reaction was incredibly stupid. It shows a large immaturity for gaming culture, but there are a lot of other things that show that as well. In short, it was a reaction that just about anyone would expect. Second, I've also seen some of her other videos... and I'm certain I'll find plenty of arguments against them. In fact, I made a facebook post not too long ago addressing her videogame tropes video in a more mature, but somewhat satirical manner... (http://www.facebook.com/notes/silver-waseskuk/in-response-to-recent-feminist-frequency-shenanigans/10151836742750008). If you want to take the time to read it, Bob, go ahead. I just don't feel like rewriting the whole thing or summarizing it all here either. What I will say from my response to her video, is that her project costing nearly as much as she asked for on kickstarter seems insanely high for gathering information on a subject that has already been covered by many others, much better, and with a much better way of presenting. But that's about it. I'm not opposed to her making her points or whatever. I'm just wondering why $6000 was needed to do it. | |
While your last 2 points were pretty valid I have to say that your first point kind fails as that sexist dick who doesn't hire someone who he doesn't find attractive would do that whether or not video games exist (yes I mean the entire medium). I wish that I could think of the words to explain this in more detail but after finishing my last exam my brain is kinda not going to aid me. Also it is youtube commentators they will find a way to complain about anything being horrible. | |
It's stopped coming in, you know. The total funding is $158,917. It was finished 3 days ago. Yeah, she could use whatever amount she wants and pocket whatever's left over, but I really doubt she will. Besides, when you fund a project, you know the risk; the people who gave her all that money did it in confidence that she would be honest and put it all into the videos, and I don't see any indication that she won't be doing so, though it's always a possibility. I find your lack of faith...disturbing. Edit: Hey, 79 posts. I almost feel like I should start a new account and leave this one like it is for eternity. | |
WHAT? It got to 150.000? | |
I just want to say Saturday Night Slammasters was a weird game. Though I still sometimes use 'flapjack' as a way to describe obese characters. on topic: My issue is why she needs so much money to do 'research' I guess we'll find out later. Everything else sounds fine to me. | |
Well... no. Still ignore everyone. Ignore her film if you don't care about someone asking for money to make the same points other people have made. Ignore the people who posted hate-speech if you aren't the type to post hate-speech. Ignore me if you aren't apathetic... wait. Anyway, stop giving a shit about this. 4chan is still out there, those people from the LUE had to go somewhere... and I bet about a tenth of them successfully made it with a woman so those few might have children... youtubers aren't going anywhere, and what's-her-name probably knows that hate-speech will get her attention anyway. You aren't going to fix the system this way... in fact, you're only feeding the system this way. I'm slightly disappointed at half of you... | |
so as a fat white male that looses out on jobs because of his body type im the white buffalo *sigh* the problem isnt that there is sexism in video games since many people play video games expressly to explore their fantasies. The real problem is that there isnt a larger variety in video games, for example getting an achievement for looking up a womans skirt is sexist but is perfectly fine as long as the opposite is allowed and gives an achievement. As for body types i understand that developers use only a few standards to appeal to a larger audience such as the tall big boobed female or the ripped brown haired white guy but id love some variety. I want the shy disheveled nerdy girl with acne or the fat lazy guy that bitches about doing something in a funny way and gets tired or at the very least i wont the option for those characters. If im playing a rpg to save the princess I would love to be able to choose the way my character and her character look or give the option to save the prince depending on sexual orientation of the character. The problem is for any of this to happen developers need to see that they will get a good return on their investment or they will keep giving us these cookie cutter builds. | |
thank you for summing up the view point. I think many on the interent are equating And honestly i think thats more her slight underhand to be portrayed as a victim in what is on some level a bit of a marketing ploy. She didn't need the 6000 (which she should have saved for herself), she does not deserve the | |
i do agree with you to a point, first off yes i think we tend to go way to far one way or the other with issue, and i completely agree that censorship is one slippery slop. i really wish we, as humans, could find middle points on these issue, but looking at things like Foxs News and well pritty much any other 24 news channel i relise that there will always be crazys and they always have to loudest voice. however, as my lit. teacher once said, for the most part, men suck at making good female charioteers, now there are exceptions but for the most part he is right, i think it's because most of us men don't know what motivates women, that is why i think the real solution is to bring is women writers, have story conferences, hash out motivations, wants needs, and the like. really i think most of the sexism in video games is laziness. just my thoughts on the matter | |
A sober, respectful and thoughtful reply. If Feminist Frequency had this tone instead of the accusatory one, it'd be a lot less bashed by the mindless idiots out there, a thought heavily ignored by most it seems. Kudos to you for explaining it far simpler and giving good reasons to why abundant sexualization might not be that appealing to a female audience. What you just said might give artists and designers a reason and ideas to implement more choices for people, who want to customize their character and not look like a total bimbo, while giving those who do want that look, the same options. | |
While Bob made some good points about how men are represented and how they see themselves he failed to do the same for women. Although there aren't mainstream games companies entirely staffed by women making games for a female audience women are involved in making games, books, movies, comics, and cartoons. Yet these women have never made a fat, macho, or ugly female character that other women liked. It can't be due to sexist males because this occurs even in indie media where these women have full control over what is published. Clamp is a Japanese company owned by women that produces manga for women. They have full control over the appearance of all female character yet they haven't produced anything other than cute girls. Women's magazines such as Vogue are designed for women but they don't feature fat, macho, or ugly women; they only feature very slim women. Why do women produce attractive, slim female characters and use attractive, slim models? Because attractive women are sexual self-image fantasies for women. Most women don't want to be considered fat, macho, or ugly so they don't produce these sorts of characters. Just like every macho man isn't designed to titillate women and can be a male sexual self-image fantasies attractive, big breasted females aren't always designed to titillate men and can be a female sexual self-image fantasies. | |
The thing that bothers me about her whole kickstarter thing is there are some videos i've seen which claim she posted links to youtube video and kickstarter several times on 4chan and have image showing her spam posts on there. If she did do that, then she pretty much baited the Misogynistic Horde to her youtube channel to her victimize herself and drum up support. | |
Let's start a kick-starter on how Twilight is sexist to men, vampires, werewolves and native Americans. Also, that Jabberjaw ep is a must now, Bob. | |
You know she didn't steal the money, right? People freely gave it to her. She certainly doesn't "need" $150K for the series, but I don't need dijon mustard for a ham sandwich. It's still better to have than not, and if I ask nicely for the mustard and someone gives it to me out of their own desire for me to have a tasty sandwich (I like this hypothetical person), what's the problem? | |
I'ld like to take the time to appologize to Bob for having to read so many paragraph responses. As well as congratulate him if he read them all. ^_^ | |
I've got nothing against the Tropes Vs. Women thing and its the kind of thing that needs to be around. My only beef is that their "fixed" female characters were dumb. Why use Peach in overalls and Zelda with Link's sword and shield when you could use *actual* good female characters? They are much more rare than they should be, but they do exist. | |
again, she is not just going to be talking about women in video games, this is going to be a full fledged research project, I'm getting ready to go for my masters, and i have to do a big research project for it, that crap is expensive, some of the resources you have to pay for, now yes she is not doing a masters or doctoral thesis, but to do the in depth research that she is doing, takes money, trust me on this one. | |
This is true for most gamers otherwise X-blades, Blades of Time and Heavenly Sword and other games like that would have sold more. I am not sure but I believe even Dead or Alive doesn't sell much. | |
She only asked for $6k. The rest has been freely donated above and beyond what she requested, and none of that is her fault. It's people freely giving their money, and its their money to give. What exactly is the problem? | |
Honestly it doesn't really matter especially if you watch at television the last 20 years even movies and such, In the early days there was a allot of male bravado and such and if you look now it has really diminished. Same will probably happen with video games. Twilight is probably something as well you can use as an example. First of all when men invent something they will experiment with it and even have fun with it we at first don't really take into consideration if it would appeal to some one else. And that doesn't make it bad just bad timing. Seeing we always had the primary engineering role among the male/female. But if you want honest information about. It's a very smart woman who's may not with the MRM/MRA but is a supporter and has allot of interesting stuff to say about feminists. | |
My opinion of the project hasn't changed much since hearing about it: good idea, bad person to cover the topic. She just seems far too unforgiving of excueses (aka context) for why decisions get made as her mind is made up: it's concious sexism that needs to stop, with no follow up for ideas. Left to fan made youtube videos, that itself isn't without merit, but she wanted money, and I'm afraid the money she needed for "research" will go to a video listing a number of princesses we've rescued, while ignoring how simplistic video game stroies dominatly were until the PS2 era. If rescuing a princess is sexist, then are all the alien invasion's we've stopped count as xenophobia? Is the amount of wildlife I've slaughtered in RPGs going to get PETA on my ass? If I have to respect anything in her about this, it is her business sense. 25x her asking investment plus a shitload for free publicity even in some legitimate press. You have to admire that. And in fairness Bob, I think men are prone to visual discrimination in employment to an unfair degree. (of course any is too much, but still) Reading blog posts and comments on jobs and hiring I've seen more than a few people that would avoid at all cost hiring people that are overweight, covered in acne, possessed of bad hair, ect. We just don't have a history of it, nor a movement to call employers that ascribe certain physical traits to how you'd perform the job. | |
Actually Twilight is more sexist to women than anything. Being written by a female doesn't make something less sexist. | |
I think the point that people make about girls getting things like Twilight and Trashy Romance novels don't really hold water. Even though there are plenty of them out there the medium they are in as a whole is still very diverse, there are still loads of films for other audiences that aren't single straight women. Games, not so much, there are very few games that have good female characters. Now to be fair there aren't exactly a plethora of amazing male characters either and I don't think the disparity between good female and male characters is nearly as bad, but the fact that the default 'can't be arsed to give them a personality' option is sex-toy for women and beefcake for men is discouraging. However much more importantly, whether this woman is right or not should not matter. Looking at games critically is always a good idea, developers should always be looking at ways to better themselves and their works. these videos are being used at universities and such so they know what to look out for when people write female characters, so they don't just fall into the same tropes but start to make more interesting and well rounded human beings, not just stereotypes. And no, this doesn't mean that every game will be some silly Politically correct rainbow coalition of charecters that have every single minority in them, but it will hopefully result in some more interesting and diverse games. I mean there's nothing wrong with a bit more variety, right? Also, she just asked people to contribute towards her making high quality videos without having to have them be preceded by adverts. If you compare a random youtuber with for instance TotalBiscuit you will notice a huge gap in quality, this is because he takes a lot of time and money to achieve his high standards and he can do this because he has ads in front of his videos that get him loads of revenue. Anita Sarkeesian doesn't want to have ads in front of her videos and is just asking for some money so she can focus more of her time on this projects, and if you find that that isn't needed you can just not donate money to her, but that isn't an excuse to harass her with death threats. | |
Darn, Moviebob, here I was thinking my opinion of you couldn't drop any lower. The entire thing just stank of double standards and white knight nonsense to me and I'm not even anti-feminist :( | |
that is very true, though in the case of Ivy i think she is soport to be ironice, or at least i hope so. | |
Except as a video junkie myself and given the evidence higher production value is determined not by the content alone but more importantly the equipment and environment to which it would be intellectually dishonest to say that she doesn't already have the top of the line equipment for video production. Given that she does this for a living I would find it hard to prove otherwise that she doesn't already own a mac computer or a powerful PC and own either final cut pro, sony vegas pro, or adobe premier CS 5 or 6(heck even 4 is still considered powerful). So that is a lot of video editing software which is pretty much overkill cause even the premiere elements or avid studio(previously known as pinnacle) enables video editors to do picture in picture. As for the physical location, notice that she already has an entire room sound proofed. There really isn't much more for me to say on this but in terms of audio quality she has the best around. The room is also plenty large for her material so she has plenty of space to work with using that green screen effect. Lighting? The average price of those lights in her video are true white light(if you've seen the latest LRR video on their equipment) and easily cost a couple thousand bucks. That is the most ideal lighting situation you can get that is on par with television interviews as you can see in comedy shows like the daily show when they do their "investigative" skits interviewing those very important people. Finally the camera, probably the bread and butter. That camera is already outputting HD quality and for it to be an all in one would cost at the very least 2,000 dollars. It's an all in one as well so even if she was in a pinch she could use the microphone on the camcorder but given the audio quality it is easy to tell that she already also has some audio equipment set up with her own personal microphone for both her studio and also when she wants to do off camera narratives. So in terms of improving quality from lighting, audio, physical location and visual quality she is already has the ideal setup that would make ANY aspiring video producer jealous. Hell you don't even see that quality from some of the most well known youtubers such as WillofDC and the Vlogbrothers. She has better equipment than THEM. | |
But wouldn't it be better to use female characters that everybody is familiar with? Besides, both Peach and Zelda are both pretty big examples of what the videos would be talking about. Peach has been more dedicated to her job of being a damsel in distress than most professional football players focus on their own careers. And the most notable time Zelda ever got to act in her own game, she had to dress as a man. Or get trapped in a male suit of armor. If shes making a female character trope video series, why not choose two female characters with the most tropes attached to them? | |
The problem is she is not an upstart, somebody who doesn't need kickstarting as it were. She has all the things to do what she needs to do. She needs a video game rental service and time. That is it, her video's are not any higher youtube than any youtube star. It rubs me the wrong way that she's not willing to save the 6k to do something she wants, so she's instead going to make other people pay for her dream. She's in a place where she could easily monetise and survive off of youtube and its a kick in the face to everyone who not only did it themselves but did it better. She didn't have enough faith in her series to self fund (which would be stupidly easy given her set up) so she expects other people to cough up the difference. If you can't figure out how to monetise youtube videos for a living, then don't make youtube videos for a living. Thats not to say she couldn't go the offical route and make a documentary Please don't quote this as i don't intend to post in this thread anymore because it will degenerate like every thread in this matter to people confusing the two seperate issues, which i have no interest in talking about. She can make series on whatever she wants but freeloading to her dream is just cheating. Youtube always had a built in quality control that only interesting or high quality things could survive long term, bypassing that is bad form and could lead to nonsense like people getting kickstarted for blogs. | |
I'd buy "big boobed pantie ninja 12" Just saiyan | |
*High-fives Moviebob across the vast oceans of the internet* | |
Bob completely missed the big picture sure men in video games are designed to appeal to men, but that's neither here nor there since the same damn thing happen in things designed for women ever seen a teen magazine and how they portray men, I mean the only reason since we don't have the same kind of portray of women and men as in other media's is because the majority women aren't interested in games. | |
It's a real shame that more women in games don't have the depth (well they could do with more than the level in SH3 but it's a start(or something)) and the realistic body portrayal of Heather in Silent Hill 3 I mean looking back on it, the combination of realistic look and an interesting personality is way more appealing than say Lara Croft. | |
If that is true then either all the women who saw it and loved it are: 1 stupid, 2 sexist themselves and shouldn't have any right to call out games or 3 twilight was not sexist and just a movie designed for women. | |
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It really irks me that you earn as much money as you do. I don't think you deserve that much, and even though that doesn't impact me in the slightest I am still going to complain about it.