The Derrit

you didn't read my post. i said it's pretty much the only thing that men can't buy *for themselves.* nearly anything else can feasibly be construed as gender neutral. and if you're really going to go the route of 'well lingerie is actually for men' then women might as well stop buying it. right? everything else djpretzel has already said, and pretty much been spot on about. and his reaction has been pretty congruent to my entire reaction to the arguments in this thread: that there are valid points and improvements to be made, but you're flipping out over *THAT*?

it came from their rap sheet *on that site you just posted.* let's just doubt analytics because we don't like what they say. and let's be fucking real for a second. according to feminist bullshit men and women are the same and should be allowed have the same interests. so what does it matter to you if they're trying to advertise to men? technically we're all the same so they're advertising to women too. and it's lingerie because that's literally the only thing that women buy that men wouldn't buy for themselves other than feminine hygiene products. and i'm thinking advertisements for tampons wouldn't really do it. the difference between 'no girls allowed club' and 'hey no women come to this website, let's not attempt to target advertisements at women' is worlds apart. if you HONESTLY think them saying "hey, a quarter of the males between 18-34 on the internet come to our site from time to time. that's 75% of our user base. we should advertise to them!" is 'no girls allowed club' then i don't even know what to say.

did i miss something here? if you go to ign.com it's not like their articles are geared towards men. they review/preview games, comics, movies and tv shows. being able to recognize that 75% of their users are male and market it to advertisers attempting to reach a male population doesn't strike me as discriminatory. i mean really. should they be trying to sell ad space to pintrest or victoria's secret? though some of the 'put hair on your chest' sound bytes were pretty stupid also i'm not sure what that cheap shot at remember me was about by all accounts it's a game with a fair amount of promise.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/publishers-said-you-cant-have-a-female-character-says-remember-me-dev-6405550?tag=Topslot;LatestGamingHeadlines;PublishersSaid039you see this is the type of thing that is problematic and needs to be addressed.

so then she's making a video that says 'even though this is not the majority of games, this isn't necessarily bad, and shouldn't necessarily be changed. just saying.' nobody buys that. also, there are only two conclusions that you can draw from this video, and that is that she's right in every way and games are sexist and must be changed, or she's full of bullshit. also, all of this demographic change is 150% moot because these people started playing the currently available games, and enjoyed those. nobody became a gamer while not liking currently available games. so either there are so many games that women don't find offensive that the number of women who play games grew to such a large percentage, or just about all of them really couldn't care less about said 'misogynistic portrayal of women.' And here's the biggest thing. Nobody except the people who truly, truly don't matter are disputing the point that women deserve to be respectable within video games. The question in point is whether or not ANYone except the most hard of the core of feminists actually thinks that things like princess peach getting captured in Mario games are degrading towards women. If you ask me, the shameless marketing of romance movies and novels to women shows a lot less respect to women than getting captured in a video game. There are so many conversations that are infinitely more important to the positive portrayal of women than a simple 'woman gets captured' story. If they were all like Knight's Tale, I'd see your point. But pretty much none of them are, especially not within the past 10 years. Like I really truly am interested to hear where people draw the line of 'hey that's degrading/disrespectful/i don't like it.'

so yeah. it's not a matter of whether or not there is such thing as the damsel in distress trope in video games. it's whether or not it matters, or has significant relevance. And the answer is no. Gamer girls love their Peach's and Zeldas and Faiths from Mirror's Edge and Lightnings and Tifas and Samus's. I teach in Japan, and literally ALL of my kids play mario games. Girls and boys. I highly doubt any of them think to themselves, 'Princess Peach always gets captured. I guess women are the lesser gender!' In fact I highly doubt anyone has ever thought that ever. edit: her saying 'even though a game has this sexist trope in it, you can still enjoy it' is akin to saying yeah, have fun. but you're being sexist by enjoying it. strongly implying something and then relying on the 'i didn't say that!!' defense is quite frankly the most infuriating thing on earth. and it is exactly what she implied: these games can be fun and good and complex and interesting, but they are sexist. and as such you are enjoying a sexist product.

yeah after finally watching the whole anita video through, it just falls flat. like i can imagine when she started the kickstarter she was like 'i've got all these good ideas this should go really well!' and then sat down at the desk and was like 'oh wait. i don't have nearly as much material or points to make as i thought' and made a half hour movie about how damsel in distress is socially constructed to keep women down. mostly by giving a one sided and very limited history lesson of gaming. which is already a stretch by itself. I just looked through my backloggery account, giving VERY GENEROUS lenience to whether or not a 'damsel in distress' was present. in 40 of my 186 games there was a significant damsel in distress theme. in 35 of my 186 games, not including fighting games, sports/party games, or games where you can select both a male or female character, a female is a required, permanent part of the game as a playable character, and holds equal footing with others as part of the 'hero group' or as the lone hero herself. if you include all of those games where you can choose to be a female, that number pops up to about half of the games i own total. and several of the games i own are games like tetris, meteo and audiosurf, where there IS no gender. so if you factor that in, more than half the games I own of a fairly significant collection allow you to play as a woman in an empowering role. where are the discourse conversations for a game like FF13, where Lightning is trying to save her sister along with Snow, and Lightning is essentially like 'fuck you dickwad I don't like you' for about 80% of the game and Snow just takes it? i understand the idea of giving a counter-example and being like 'there's no problem' doesn't work statistically, but one-sided arguments with no reference to opposing arguments or examples is by definition BAD RESEARCH. everyone learns this as early as middle school or high school; you can't do research on a perspective based topic without showing the other side of the coin. and she doesn't do it. she doesn't seem to be talking in this video to be right; she's talking to make a point. even her best example, dinosaur planet, is not a good example if you know gaming. think back to n64 times. if someone tried to release a zelda clone with time travel and furry creatures that nobody's heard of, who would that appeal to? who do you sell that game to? like starfox adventures was fun, but if it wasn't starfox it wouldn't have sold nearly as well. and it didn't sell that well to begin with, with 300,000 sold in Japan and less than a million in America to date. if you don't put a big name on that game we wouldn't be talking about it now, because NObody would remember it.

it actually *is OoS/OoT so yeah

some male gamers get 'really defensive about it' because they ARE sexist and want to protect their last bastion of free sexism while it lasts. i don't disagree but remember not to give people too much credit. and that is why but i still must explain. you just tried to say that a mindless, sexless, monsterminion has as much or more worth than the most well-known female videogame character of all time. aka equating both as worthless. they may just be bits of code but let's be real that's like saying some average dude in texas is worth as much as the queen of england because they both, you know, just sit in their chairs all day.

i mean simply enough, could that have happened without the game being like 'nice you killed that stupid bitch'? yeah. like there's no reason for it to be there so it shouldn't be. even if it WAS in reference to the dude taking you away, trophies are put in games for things that YOU DID. otherwise it's a worthless trophy and (again) doesn't need to be in there.

guys don't feed emperor-troll. you're not going to get anywhere

watch what you say emperor charlemange might be around to hear that

so here's what i'll do i'm gonna go ahead and say you are right that there are many archetypes of women i'm also going to tell you that if you can find a girl that's *not* a gamer and doesn't immediately roll her eyes at the mention of tomb raider i will be impressed when i said your ideas on respecting women are dangerously close to republican level i meant you're coming to conclusions on what is good and respectful towards women without realizing that women as a whole do not find the whole lara croft multimillionaire double-d superstar thing appealing and that's as far as it goes. it doesn't matter that they 'don't get it' and lara croft is actually very intelligent etc. etc. an actual woman that doesn't play games sees old lara croft and goes "oh hey. look. a bimbo with huge tits, wonder what guy came up with that one." the lara croft of this game, or pre-lara croft, seems like an actual person. how you are taking this so far out of context and proportion to say that i'm wrong is really quite mind boggling. it's not your opinion on what respectful to women is. it's what women's opinions of what's respectful to women. and a very large proportion of women don't see it the way you do. i like old lara croft but to say that she appeals to anything other than female gamers and men is really just not seeing it straight. also if by coherence you mean i make posts without punctuation or capitalization when i'm replying to something stupid then it was indeed incoherent

no what i said was that is was a game that portrayed a woman lead role respectfully. which you then took as GURL POWARR and made a completely unrelated uncharted reference to. you might have also read that this game takes place before she is the 'tomb raider' of the original series you may have also logic'ed out in your head that creating vulnerabilities is part of creating, oh i don't know, a well rounded character i forgot that creating emotional connections to characters is bad if they're women i also forgot that uncharted was really really bad thanks for reminding all of us who were clearly misled by its good gameplay and interesting story plus equals ? how about no. your understanding of what 'respecting women' entails is hovering dangerously close to republican level and last of all, YOU HAVE NO BASIS FOR SPEWING THIS NONSENSE WHATSOEVER. THE GAME WAS NOT OUT WHEN YOU MADE THAT POST. THERE WERE NOTHING BUT POSITIVE REVIEWS FOR THE GAME. ALL SOURCES WITHOUT FAIL CITE LARA CROFT AS A MORE INTERESTING AND BELIEVABLE CHARACTER. AS OF THIS MOMENT IN TIME THERE ARE NO NEGATIVE REVIEWS OF THE GAME ON METACRITIC BY PROFESSIONAL SOURCES, AND A MEASLY ONE NEGATIVE REVIEW BY USERS. YOU ARE LITERALLY TALKING OUT OF YOUR ASS TO BE LIKE 'OLD THINGS I LIKE ARE BETTER THAN ALL THIS NEW SELLOUT CRAP' i'm delirious sick right now so that last part might have been overboard but someone has to call you on your absolute bull. sorry this is so off topic i this this is a good conversation

i want to do this too there were lots of good games on ps3 i wanted to play. i got to play mgs4 though :3 Also, on topic, I had a lady friend in college who didn't even play video games, but liked watching playthroughs of Bioshock etc. She never could explain to me why, she was just like 'I dunno I like doing it.' always struck me as very unusual, but clearly there's some appeal there.

you learn to ignore him after awhile. the best part is how he didn't even refute my point he just made a snarky comment for the hell of it. also, that game grumps video is hilarious and if you don't think so then you're trying way too hard to be 'too cool for school.'

yep pretty much. yet the 'fanbase' was like SCREW YOU GIVE US THE REAL PRINCE BACK, got nearly the exact same game in forgotten sands + crowd combat plus dying, and said it was the best game ever.

that caught me by surprise. damn. also i find it sad and ironic that conan o' brien making sexist jokes while playing what is by all accounts a game that gives women their due respect is MORE APPROPRIATE than sexuality in games itself.

i've started seeing ads for it. too bad i don't have a ps3 i'm also coming back to the states at the end of march. it's been fun but i live in the pseudo-boonies and it's really not comfortable for a foreigner to live where i do. it's fairly xenophobic and not nearly good enough pay for having no friends and a solitary life, now that the japanese government devalued the yen by 20%. for kicks. /rant

sweetness. now i finally have a reason to want a ps3.

i'm with you. some of the things that i got stuck on the longest were like 'oh yeah there's a hidden block here you have to hit with your hammer. duh.' i also was sad they decided to put pretty much no story into it. bowser talks zero times, and after world 2 they just stopped putting in quirky and fun dialogue sequences that involved anyone but kersti and kamek (and wiggler, but that was for one world). they could have easily fleshed it out into something memorable, but seemed to choose not to, and in my opinion they chose not to because they wanted to make it 'handheld bite sized.' that's a very scary prospect; i'm also nervous about this happening in luigi's mansion.

the funny thing being there have already been screenshots of the xbox 360 version of challenge mode uncovered apparently. soooo yeah.

if you don't get it, watch this video and you will understand why the wii u is awesome.

i think this came up once in offtopic and got a little traction, but sadly you'll find a lot of people are not interested in sports in any way. in fact some people are staunchly opposed to them. i love sports but i don't play fantasy so i can't help you out

question for everyone: is the LL that much better than the original 3ds? i'm not in the market for one just yet but it has crossed my mind that games would look pretty good on a bigger screen.