zircon

First of all, YouTube has an enormous audience. It's one of the top 5 websites on the internet. That's about as wide a net as you can cast. It's absurd to think that anyone with a computer doesn't know about or use YouTube. Except that isn't true at all? Think about how many people in this thread alone disagree with her and refuse to accept what she's saying, now multiply that by the enormous groups of people who were giving her intense grief over her Kickstarter, who badmouthed and harassed her on YouTube, Reddit, Kotaku, NeoGAF, etc etc etc. There isn't even a GRAIN of truth in what you said. Again WTF are you talking about? This is maybe the most active and civil debate I've ever seen on OCR, on any topic. This is as relatively 'profound' as it is going to ever get. We have women participating in the discussion here as well!

I agree that in an ideal world it would have tons of unique music for every possible thing, but it is extremely unlikely that Joe Hisaishi had any control or say in how many songs would be composed for the game. An orchestral recording session can cost literally thousands of dollars *per hour*, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, so the total music budget has to reflect that. The composer fee is usually on the order of thousands of dollars per minute as well. Again I'm speaking from experience here, having worked on PS3/360/Wii games myself... Even that said, I actually find the music growing on me even more. It's really like a classic SNES game in that regard. Very bold, dramatic, and memorable. The overworld theme is downright gorgeous! As for gameplay, I do love my Mite (named Derp). Some other species I like are the Green Buncher (banana thing) which has a lot of punch and very strong defense, the Sleepeafowl as an offensive spellcaster, and Lagoon Naiad and Seed Sprite for healing. My team currently looks like this... * Mighty Mite (he's too cute to evolve!), Seed Sprite, Purrloiner (not 100% on this guy... I want another fast fighter though) * Strongo, Anglerfish, Clubber Cub (also not sure about this) * Green Buncher, Girlfriend (trying this instead of Sleepeafowl), Lagoon Naiad

I can't believe there isn't more discussion on this one. Ni No Kuni is absolutely enchanting. I am pretty cynical when it comes to JRPGs these days; I can't remember the last *console* JRPG I played and enjoyed. Probably FF7. I don't think I've played more than 5-10 hours of anything after that; to me, the magic of the genre was gone. NNK on the other hand summons a feeling of nostalgia I simply haven't felt for games in a long time. It is a JOY to play. For the first time since I was in middle school, I've actually woken up and played the game before doing *anything* else. It's just... incredible. The music is brilliant, the graphics are breathtaking (despite their cel-shaded style), the story is heartwarming and enthralling, and the gameplay is a blast. Speaking of, I've heard some criticisms of the battle system. I think it's one of the best battle systems in any JRPG I've ever played and the only negative is that the AI isn't super smart. However, I think this adds a bit of extra challenge. The game might be a little too easy if you could program your teammates with the same level of granularity as, say, FF12. I think this is a very minor blemish (if it is one at all) on an otherwise very fun and engaging combat system.

Even if you DO have a male main character, you could certainly make plenty of interesting stories that don't involve a female getting kidnapped and requiring rescue. Hell, you could make a character get captured, then escape and join the main character for some duo co-op action, right? But more often than not, as Anita showed, so many games just lazily had the woman get captured and dragged off, effectively turning them into a 'valuable object' rather than an actual person.

It's brought up because when male characters get kidnapped, it TENDS to be the case that they manage to get themselves out of it, and usually it builds up their character more. Whereas it's more uncommon to see a female character get kidnapped and actually do something about it (just think about that montage of captured women screaming 'help me!', and that's only old-school games... definitely made me stop and think about it for a minute.) Yes but the thing is, your anecdotal evidence isn't relevant to anything she said. She never said that the majority of games use the trope, so submitting any kind of evidence to the contrary is simply not an answer to anything being said. If you're trying to raise awareness about something and make a point, you're simply not obligated to make your opponent's case for them. That makes no sense. She's trying to highlight that women are often treated in rather stereotypical and perhaps sexist ways in video games. Biologically, female humans tend to have less muscle mass on average than men. Yes, while there are enormous variations from person to person and a great many females who are physically stronger than a great many males, on AVERAGE, that's true. But I don't think literal physical weakness what Anita was referring to. She's referring to the fact that historically, women have been treated as 'weaker' in ALL aspects of being; weaker-minded, weaker-willed, weaker-emotionally, etc. and men have been using this to justify treating them as second-class citizens all over the world to this very day. Just search for beheadings, stonings, and rapes in countries like Iran or even India to get an idea.

You're missing the point. The issue isn't that you're trying to save your girlfriend. That in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing. The trope is NOT just about kidnapping, as Anita said. The trope is about putting women in situations where they are totally helpless and MUST be rescued, usually by a male character. The sexism part is that this almost always happens to female characters, and not males. When male characters are kidnapped, jailed, etc. they tend to be able to use their ingenuity and cunning to free themselves. Damsel characters don't even try. Also, in some cases, the damsel characters are shown to have magical powers and abilities right up until they are captured - at this point, no matter how powerful they are, they still cannot escape without a (typically) man's help. Again, the idea of fighting for a loved one is NOT sexist, nor did Anita ever say it was. It's the entirety of the trope that is rather eye-rolling and has historically been weighted toward females being powerless and males being the heroes (though things have been changing lately). I'll also point out that some of you are straw-manning Anita's arguments. She REPEATEDLY said that just because a game uses the trope doesn't mean it's a bad game or we can't enjoy it. It's possible for a game to be good and fun and enjoyable, but have a lame element or cheap trope. We are not sexist or evil for enjoying the game, and in fact I don't think she even called ANY games 'sexist'... just the use of the trope itself. So let's not make up arguments that weren't actually made.

You've brought up a bunch of different things here, and I think they all deserve to be addressed separately. This anecdotal evidence isn't an answer to anything said in the video. Anita never stated that the majority of games use the DiD trope, or ANYTHING to that effect. So to say that your game library does not have a lot of games that use it isn't a response or counter-argument to anything. First of all, we can be pretty sure based on pics she's shown that Anita has played a great many games for this project (that plus she's been a gamer for her whole life). Second of all, this is the FIRST of 12+ videos on tropes and women in gaming. Anita has explicitly said and written that she will be doing a video focusing exclusively on positive female characters. It's her prerogative to structure the series in such a manner, but she's certainly made it very clear what the plan is, and so accusing her preemptively of not showing positive examples is baseless. 1. "She's talking to make a point." OK? How is this bad? So what if she is, and why does it matter? 2. The fact that the game uses the Starfox license is not why she brought it up in the video, and really has nothing to do with anything. The problem was that it took a female protagonist and made her into a sexualized damsel in distress who does nothing. It doesn't matter what the game's IP is. They could have made it a Starfox game without using the DiD trope. They could have kept Crystal as a playable character and alternative to Fox.

OK! We've finally collected all the votes and combed through them. Each mix was voted on in terms of arrangement creativity, and production (to a lesser degree, given the short timeline). It was actually very interesting seeing all the votes (each staffer picked their top 5 mixes). The spread was close and no two people had the same top 5. That speaks to the effort of everyone who contributed a mix, so thank you! THE WINNERS 1st Place: Archangel with "Umaro's New Groove" (tied with XPRTNovice's "Narshemellow") 2nd Place: Patrick Burns with "Following Forgotten" 3rd Place: Mustin with "Now is the Winter" Again, the voting was VERY VERY close, so I feel I should also give shoutouts to... Honorable Mentions: Adam Kirby with "Endless Stair" and Jakesnke17 with "Gizmo Loving Sasquatch" If you placed in the top three, please email me (aaversa@gmail.com) with your choice(s) of ISW libraries! Overall, there were so many good entries that we will definitely be inviting more than those listed above to the project - so even if you didn't "win", keep your eyes peeled for an invite nonetheless. Thank you so much everyone for participating, and you can find a RAR with ALL entries below! http://zirconstudios.com/FF6_Contest_2.rar

Actually you edited in your reply while I was writing my post. I didn't see it when I responded. I'm hard-pressed to think of how film, literature, or music genres were treated with "heavy-handed, dogmatic moralizing" from academic and scholarly institutions, so I really don't agree with that. At best, I'm thinking of things like "Elvis is the devil's music" but that was hardly an academic thing, nor is it really analogous to what we're talking about here. That was simply the older generation looking down on things the newer generation enjoyed from a religious perspective, which is again not related to this.

Wow. Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on that. I honestly don't know what your goal here is. Why don't you be more clear?

I think tropes can absolutely be problematic by themselves. What about the obviously racist trope of a bucktoothed Asian farmer with a straw hat? I think we've managed to move on from that because it really is offensive all the time. I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with some other tropes that are obviously offensive, derogatory, racist, etc. so a sexist trope should not be any different. There's also no logical reason to not talk about the "fledgling narrative medium" of games just because it's young. So what? It's bigger than the movie industry. It doesn't need coddling. Nobody, least of all Anita, is talking about any sort of actual legal restrictions on games. THAT is the only thing we should be worried about. Exercising our freedom of speech in an academic fashion is the mark of a medium that has matured to the point where it has obvious real cultural impact.

We're getting a little offtopic here. Remember that the video we're actually talking about did not condemn these games as sexist, but just discussed the trope, which can appear even in just part of a game and not necessarily the whole game. Likewise WE are not sexist for playing and enjoying them and there is nothing wrong with that... again, this was explicitly stated. We are not being accused of anything so let's move away from talking about guilt, perceived guilt, etc. because it's not relevant here.

Bleck, I'm with Ab on this one. If you have a point to make, don't half-ass your posts and instead actually write an argument. If you think Ab is missing something about Mario games, then write out what you think he's missing.

Could only stomach two minutes of that one. It's funny that Anita's videos and views are so offensive to people that they have to attack her personally. And what a surprise, it's primarily male gamers that have a problem with her, since they are the ones being challenged. When people disagree with Extra Credits videos I don't see people picking up James Portnow's master thesis or whatever.

Well, I don't think there's necessarily a problem with her approach. The series is primarily about identifying tropes which are lazy/sexist toward women, etc, not saying "this game is sexist and this one isn't". Like she said, you can have a good game that happens to have a stupid trope in it, or even a good character that gets put in an eye-rolling scenario (or skimpy armor or whatever).

Wrangling as many staffers/judges as possible to weigh in; hoping to wrap up voting in the next few days. So far we have about 6 or 7 votes in, shooting to get 10 at least.

Ahem http://impactsoundworks.com/products/world/koto-nation-classical-instruments-of-japan/

It's simply in bad taste. It's like if you were to kill a black person in a game and earn a trophy called "Coon Hunter" or something. You get a trophy for being violent against a female character using the demeaning term 'ho'. Enough actual violence occurs against actual women, even in the U.S. We don't really need to add to that by making light of it in a game.

I'm a mod and I don't agree. Take the semantic stuff somewhere else, please (second time I'm asking). No ONE THING contributes to massive, humanity-wide problems like violence, sexism or racism. These things exist and occur because of many many many individual factors. The game industry is enormous and influential; billions of people have played games. Thus the content IN games has an impact on us. If that content is reinforcing negative stereotypes, that's bad.

Brandon/EC stay on topic please. None of you are responding to anything actually being said here.

That's the video is saying. That's what we're all saying. With such an overwhelming flood of games that use this trope it's indicative of less-than-balanced attitudes toward gender roles.

Same with PS1 FF5/FF6 for that matter...

Hi all, To celebrate the release of the latest Impact Soundworks world instrument library (Plectra Series 3: Kazakh Dombra, only $29!) we're having a 48-hour sale on some of our acclaimed scoring libraries. These are great for film, TV and game work though you can also use them in other kinds of music production (pop, dance, alt rock, etc.) * Resonance: Emotional Mallets ($79 -> $55) * Impact Steel: Cinematic Metallic Percussion ($49 -> $34) * Acoustic Revolutions Vol 1: Adult Contemporary Guitar Loops ($25 -> $17) The discount is automatically applied if you add the item(s) to your cart. Please enjoy!

Well if you think about it though, in Skyward Sword, she still isn't doing much IIRC. She pretty much gets taken for a ride by Impa who is the one protecting her. So while it's cool that Impa is female, Zelda herself isn't much of a hero.

This is a bit of a straw man. She wasn't making a "big deal" about Mario and Peach, unless you have some other definition of the term. She went out of her way to say that you can still play and enjoy these games and have fun, and that she grew up playing such games. That's fine. She never said it was evil, or that it was going to destroy America or whatever. The reason why Peach and Zelda were brought up several times was because Mario and Zelda games are ridiculously popular on the order of hundreds of millions of sales, and are perhaps some of the biggest icons in the entire video game industry. A couple minutes of screentime in a YouTube video is merited. Are there specific things she said that you disagree with? Your objections seem kinda vague and not really in response to any specific thing. I think everything she said was exactly on the mark and not even really debatable. Just seeing so many examples of women being dragged off screaming 'help me' definitely made me uncomfortable but that's the reality of how games evolved in many ways. Uh... OK..? Some men can't defend themselves either. Basically your whole post there is saying "Well, this is a traditional tale, so who cares." I don't get how that is a defense of the trope. Anita never said that the game designers were evil or nefarious. She outlined her conclusion very clearly, in fact, and I don't know why people keep ignoring it. The point was this: Women have been in a lesser position across pretty much all civilizations for thousands to tens of thousands of years. They have been reduced to property (literally), stripped of rights to get education, vote, divorce, refuse sex, etc. Most civil rights for women have only arisen in DEVELOPED countries within the last century or so, and even then, we're still fighting workplace harassment, wage gaps, rape, domestic abuse, etc. If you look to other countries around the world, you see stories of rapists walking scot-free, fathers killing daughters for 'honor', and many more atrocities. We (society) have been fighting AGAINST the sexist attitude that women are weaker, stupider, more powerless, etc. for a long time now and progress has been really slow. Anita was correct when she said MANY people still have these views on some level. So considering the history and ingrained biases we are dealing with, and considering that video games are more and more of a cultural influence than ever (bigger than movies now), we have to think about the CONTENT in these games and how it reinforces or goes against stereotypes. Anita pretty conclusively showed that through the history of games, the damsel-in-distress trope, which overwhelmingly shows women as being too weak to save themselves and requiring men to rescue them, was overwhelmingly common. This trope REINFORCES negative views on women even if it's on a very small level. It's another voice in the chorus of "women are weak, they need men". Even if that wasn't the intention of the game designers, that IS the view that it reinforces.