djpretzel

March 21, 2013

Can you rely on people not having a relationship with these characters? The whole point of a game is to be interactive. If a little girl can feel frustrated enough with Donkey Kong to want to play as Pauline instead of Jumpman/Mario, doesn't that suggest that in some way, she is identifying with the characters and has a relationship with them? If there is such a relationship, there should to be greater creative responsibility in the gaming medium as to what sorts of images developers feed their consumers, even with games as "reductive" as what you're describing. That doesn't mean distilling games into generic, "politically correct" plots with uninteresting characters--which no one in this suggested we should have, by the way. It does mean getting developers to think in ways that are more creative and would ultimately result in many games with different sorts of characters, thus diluting the damsel in distress' prevalence.

One, I'm not sure how prevalent this particular trope truly is, anymore. Two, you're dealing in the highly uncertain realm of the human psyche. I can't "rely" on people not having "relationships" with PINEAPPLES... The human brain is weird. Trying to anticipate & study its reaction to playing a (barely) male plumber saving an (incidental) princess from a giant turtle-dragon thing by stomping on mushrooms and what not, well... we're not there yet. We don't have the science, and may never. If you want to speak conclusively about the net effects of these things, you can't, you can only suppose.

And I'm not saying that such supposition can't be beneficial, but it can (and does) go way overboard, and speaks from a position of nearly laughable certitude. Let's say for every single game out there, you offer a choice of a male or female protagonist, equally equipped in every way, shape, and form. Now what you're doing is forcing the choice of gender upon every gamer, which you could easily make arguments towards being equally destructive. Are two choices enough? Mario's Italian, and my Austrian-Welsh roots are offended by a lack of an option I can identify with. Or, you're contradicting (or exposing) my transgender inclinations, and indoctrinating me into your boolean-gendered artifice at a young age!!

Great counter-examples have been there from very early on, by the way. Ms. Pac-Man - I'm sure she'll get picked apart by feminists for being too effeminate because THAT BOW... but her mechanics & capabilities are equal to that of her male predecessor. Hell, in the localized version of Doki Doki Panic - aka SMB2US - Peach is not only a protagonist, she kicks ASS with that hover jump.

How much do we need? What's the quota? Who's keeping track? And how is picking apart obvious cliches making any sort of progress? When have we achieved "success"?

It's not a zero-sum game. Princesses don't have to stop being saved for there to be alternatives. Game developers with stories to tell will be the ones to effect change, and I don't think their stories will be motivated by let's-change-the-world-by-talking-about-it-a-lot academics. Dys4ia is a fantastic, highly-creative example.

March 21, 2013

I really haven't seen anyone in this thread argue for equality quotas and censorship as you seem to imply though, which kinda makes this part of your post a strawman. In fact, different people in this thread have repeatedly stated that the goal should be to generate awareness throughout the community and hopefully nurture self-examination among both creator and consumer.

Well, folks were saying Cosmopolitan was sexist, and the objection to the IGN page was that it was targeting men. My point is that it's okay for women to read Cosmo, for Cosmo to target them, & for IGN to target men (boys) - the goal you articulated there sounds great and lofty and what not, I'm all for generating awareness & self-examination, I just don't think hating on easy targets is the right path, and also there's a certain cross-section of the population for whom awareness and introspection usually won't play a persuasive factor, and demonizing their taste as being unaware/uninformed just ends up being condescending.

I'll speak for myself here, but the DiD trope to me isn't just offensive from a gender equality perspective. It's also a huge sign that the writer is either lazy or a hack.

Is it really that offensive? In a vacuum? Really? You can slice and dice it a number of ways, but as you said, it's usually employed as a cliche, echoing fables of the past. There's certainly room for execution that is neither lazy or hackish. There is nothing inherently wrong with a male rescuing a female, it's just overused. The overuse in and of itself is what people find dangerous - any single example shouldn't be knee-jerk offensive, but the trend could be construed to have subconscious effects. That's the theory. If you want a glass half full version of this, let's see... in the DiD universe, the damsel is often depicted as flawless, worth saving, and "above" the physical combat that is nonetheless required to emancipate her. Men are either agents of antagonism - kidnappers - or agents of restoration - rescuers - and all of their myriad efforts at best result in a return to the status quo. None of it would have been necessary in the first place - no distress - had it not been for men. Players are persuaded that risking life and limb to rescue the "damsel" is a worthwhile venture - far more offensive if they just found themselves another princess - but probably more historically accurate! You CAN do worse. It's not great, but I'd temper my indignation. It's also usually employed in a clearly fantastic sense, clearly echoing fables from the past.

I want to have a gaming culture where if a writer wants to include a DiD archetype in a story, they are at least *conscious* of the social implications of the trope, and preferably take it in some interesting new direction rather than playing it straight (again, see Prince of Persia 2008 ). That is my 'endgame'.

I think we're getting close. I see this trope being employed specifically to harken back to fables, and the past, and in a reductionist, clearly non-realistic context that doesn't focus on verisimilitude or grant characters - male OR female - much depth. That CAN be okay, provided the focus of the game doesn't revolve around your belief and relationship with those characters. In circumstances where it does, while there are still many instances of "male rescuing female," I think the helpless/distressed angle has greatly diminished and is seen as outdated.

March 21, 2013

Just because something caters to a specific demographic at the exclusion of other demographics doesn't make it inherently problematic. Otherwise Tyler Perry's everything is all sorts of wrong. It's more problematic when there's a vacuum - when one group is being catered to, and another is simply not. Or when a demographic centered around an activity - like video games - is assumed to be 100% male when in fact it's a little more diverse than that. It's not a LOT more diverse than that - YET - or I'm relatively convinced they'd be marketing differently.

Capitalism.

It's a little axiomatic, but this boils down to a "things will change when they've actually changed" argument. You're talking about an underlying shift in the medium that's going to take longer than it should, but will almost certainly occur to some meaningful extent as games become more and more pervasive. It's also worth noting that equilibrium may not be - probably is not - a 50/50 split in the gamer demographic. You have to allow that, for any given interest, or metric, in any given demographic, there can be meaningful, innate differences. It's plain-old unscientific to assume that any given activity or predilection would, in the absence of "evil cultural pressures", still end up being equally appealing to either sex. Then again, you also can't sabotage yourself into thinking that the status quo can't be improved - or, let's say, manipulated - to be more inclusive.

There will probably always be games that cater to stereotypical male/female interests. I'd argue that's a good thing.

The endgame some folks seem to have in mind is a world where everyone is identical, treated identically not only by the law but by all art and media, all games are certified politically correct, and we've achieved some state of equilibrium where no one is ever offended or even potentially offended by anything. I'm a liberal, I believe in equal rights under the law, but in the world of entertainment, that sounds like a sanitized, soulless wasteland of good intentions and shitty art.

The newsflash here is that we're animals. We're biological. We're not equal, or perfect, or consistent, or born free of ingrained attitudes about a lot of fundamental aspects of social interaction. We're often at our best when we learn to overcome these realities not by ignoring them, or pretending they don't exist, or pretending they're part of a huge conspiracy by THE MAN, but rather when we play to our strengths AND our weaknesses and learn to adapt. That doesn't mean sanitizing video games, or boycotting ads targeting men, it means doing more to bring women into the fold, employing sensibilities appropriate to the era. It's far more additive than subtractive, and it doesn't start with advertisers.

March 21, 2013

Kind of looks like a PR stunt, though. I mean this isn't going to affect the beauty companies that demand photomanipulation in their ads, and it's not going to stop the photoshop artists who have to edit the photos for a job, because they're still going to do what their job is so they can get their paycheck.

Right well... who knows. Might be legit, permanent change of heart and campaign for public good, might be an attempt to get out ahead of an issue and appeal to a new demographic, might be both. They're still a single advertiser, though, and the IGN page caters to numerous advertisers. I think they could have taken a higher road, if not THE high road, but I also imagine that many of their potential advertisers are inquiring - repeatedly - about the young male demographic, and so they've created a page that caters to what they perceive - based on their actual interactions with advertisers - is the topic of greatest interest.

Is the argument here that IGN is immune from criticism because it's appealing to advertisers to make a profit? Because I wouldn't allow them to get off that easy. They should come under even greater scrutiny to the point where it becomes unprofitable to cater to the lowest common denominator.

No one's immune, no one gets a free pass, but if you want to change the world, it's one of the absolute worst places to start. Your own statement almost contradicts itself - the lowest common denominator is what it is because it is common, i.e. ubiquitous. If everyone somehow makes catering to it unprofitable, you've already accomplished the sea change, and the LCD isn't even the LCD anymore, and so you've won the game. Mentioning things like this IGN page betrays the vagaries and nebulous targets causes like this end up latching on to, rather than anything constructive. Build your solution, or contribute directly to those building it... deconstructing & demonizing easy, relatively meaningless targets like this never got anyone anywhere.

Well, it probably generated a lot of BS thesis papers, I take that back.

March 20, 2013

Why make such publicity when it could alienate part of it AND the demographic you're purposefully rejecting?

You do need to understand what you're looking at, and who it's geared to. The audience for that page, at http://corp.ign.com/, isn't customers or even visitors, it's advertisers. IGN has determined that advertisers interested in advertising on their site want to reach a young male demographic, and so they are catering to that audience, specifically. Because they want to make money.

It's really not THAT much more complicated. You've got a chicken-and-egg problem, and overanalyzing it is counter-productive. Will advertisers start wanting to target females more when there are more statistics to back up that's who they will actually be reaching? Yes. If you can count on one thing, it's that these folks want to make money. That's almost your only given. They like money. They don't care about agendas, rights, dreams, hopes, wishes, or hurt feelings. They aren't the ones you're going to persuade, or who will even take the time to care.

Don't expect advertisers to turn the sway or effect social change; they follow the money, they are reactionary, and they deal in cold metrics and hard numbers. To expect advertisers in the video game industry to exhibit behavior in any way different from advertisers in other industries to me is to misunderstand the nature of the beast. I don't disagree with most aspects of the overall argument, and I want to see some sort of change effected, but it would never start with advertisers, and misinterpreting content like this weakens more legitimate arguments.

March 20, 2013