Dragon Tattoo

"In the end, will thoust get the girl? or play like one?"

Oh, Nintendo.

bippitty

It's interesting how her own story fits into the "damsel in distress" category. A helpless woman being victimized by evil villains. Kickstarter heroes rush in to save the day. The fact that her top mimics the colors of the Princess Peach costume beside her further cements her into the role.

She's wearing those giant hoop earrings. They look almost like shackles. The blue lines in the plaid shirt are like the chains hooked to those shackles. (And if you drop the "p" you get "laid".) The base color of the shirt is not too far off from a flesh tone which would transform the shirt into a skimpy fishnet top.

Why is she cute and skinny? Couldn't she have gotten someone ugly and fat to helm the videos?

Why isn't she being the change that she wants to see in the world? Why not a Kickstarter to fund a feminist game studio? Games for women by women. Does she not think that women are capable?

Is her endeavor a subversive attempt to destroy feminism? Someone ought to do a Youtube report on this.

fumanstan

Agreed about the video, she's kind of boring but the research and material is decent. Can't really disagree with her, and I like the short clips of examples she gives for each point.

dugan

1. I thought the first episode was great. Written like a paper, and never boring.

2. Who else got PTSD when she mentioned Super Mario 2's ice levels? ARRRRGGGGGHHH. I'd forgotten wow frustrating they were.

3. This is definitely relevant, after she spends so much time deconstructing Donkey Kong:
Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario

LosingMyMind

Fixed

slop101

One of my favorite games, Half Life 2, has an "ordinary" male protagonist (Gordon Freeman), and the female protagonist in the same game (Alyx) is also ordinary and not hyper-sexualized, though unlike Gordon, she's "hot".

Breakfast with Girls

Left pile, fourth from the top.

Breakfast with Girls

I thought it was a well-done video essay and I agree with it 100%. I can't imagine what she'll actually use $160,000 for, though, seeing as how the equipment to produce these videos presumably costs, well, $6000.

slop101

Probably a good thing she disabled comments - it would most likely turn into an endless stream of "show us your tits" posts.

Jay G.

Well, she did buy a crazy amount of games for the the series, including well over 300 boxed games:


She also hired on her producer full-time and hired a part-time writer/researcher. Also, she dedicated herself full-time to the project, so she's likely taking a salary of some sort, or at least paying for living expenses while working on the series.
http://www.feministfrequency.com/201...projec-update/

She's apparently doing a lot of research for each topic. The tumblr page for the series currently has a crazy number of screencaps of games using the damsel in distress trope:
http://tropesversuswomen.tumblr.com/

Supermallet

Which she could easily make go away by showing her tits. I don't see the problem.

slop101

But as with all things, it would then escalate (or devolve) into "show us your poon" and eventually into hardcore porn with anal and bukake, with her thesis getting away from her as she's being covered with gallons of semen.

Supermallet

I'm still not seeing a problem.

I actually did watch the video and thought it was well done.

Johnny Boy

I rolled my eyes when I read about this woman, but then I watched the video that Breakfast with Girls posted, and she made some really good points. I like this girl, but she needs to understand that although the amount of female gamers have been growing rapidly ever since The Sims came out, the large majority of people who play video games are still males. And that is why we see things like this. Once female gamers (and female game creators) equal the amount of male gamers/creators we'll probably see more of a change. On a side note, some females LIKE being the damsel in distress. She should talk to these women and ask why they willingly want to play such a submissive role.

Jay G.

This isn't true. According to the ESA, about 47% of gamers are female, and of the most frequent game purchasers, 52% are male and 48% are female. So the genders are about even now:
http://www.theesa.com/facts/gameplayer.asp

The problem is, as you noted, that the percentage of developers that are female is still low.

However, I don't see why we have to wait until women fight hard and reach equality in the gaming workplace for this to change. Simply educating everyone, including men, about gaming tropes that may be considered disparaging women could cause people to take a step back and consider if they use any such tropes, and why. Then they can consider ways to avoid such tropes and make better games for both genders.

dugan

"Games that don't depend on sexist tropes" and "Games aimed at female gamers" are not the same set of games, obviously. For the second set, here's a recent interview with a company (Aksys Games) that's just released one:

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/the-x-button/2013-02-20

Johnny Boy

Thanks for that info, Jay G. I was not aware that 47% of gamers are women. That is awesome. I hope it keeps growing.

fujishig

I know that data was taken from a distributed survey of 2000 households, but they seem to club mobile games, computer games (I assume flash games and facebook games) and the like. Isn't this study mostly about console games? I have absolutely no research to back this up, but I would assume the majority of console game players are still male, given the demographic that seems to be targeted in most console games.

slop101

Yeah, that 47% of gamers being women includes everything from Farmville to solitaire and minesweeper. Console-only would be much less women.

Jay G.

These numbers from 2010 suggest that consoles were skewed male, while PC was about 50/50. Also, World of Warcraft had about 40% female players:
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Wanda...mographics.php

With consoles, it's a kind of chicken-and-egg situation. It's been historically more male-dominated, so there's lots of games appealing to males, like hyper violent shooters and even fighting games with "jiggle physics" for the female characters. But is it possibly these type of games that are keeping women away from adopting consoles more frequently. The Wii had higher female players, possibly because of the novelty of the controller, but also possibly because the games like Wii Sports were more gender neutral.


On a related note, here's a mod someone did of Donkey Kong NES for his daughter so she could play as Pauline:

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/0...-pauline-hack/

And again, a father changed the pronouns in Windwaker so that Link is referred to as a girl (although I guess Zelda still is put in peril):
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/1...-a-sex-change/

Johnny Boy

Here's an interesting video on the subject. I love The Amazing Atheist.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfkS9...J6X-sw&index=1

Supermallet

I can see both sides of the argument. She doesn't HAVE to enable comments and ratings, and frankly, I would never go to YouTube comments for reasonable debate. There are plenty of other places on the web that can host such discussions, like right here. And as someone who has released content on the internet, I know how batshit insane people can get, and how easy it is to take it personally. I got viciously attacked by people online for posting a zero star review of Apocalypto, which is nothing compared to a woman who dares to criticize the way women are handled in video games.

On the other hand, not allowing comments can be viewed as silencing criticism, and I don't know enough about Sarkeesian to know whether or not she has other ways of communicating with her audience, both negative and positive.

Jay G.

So his main point is that she should enable comments on the youtube page for the video.

First, he doesn't acknowledge the disparity between the 2 negative comments he received and the plethora of rape and death threats Anita received, which are an order of magnitude worse. The comments he got, no matter how wrongheaded they were, were still attempts at civil criticism. Rape and death threats are just attempts to silence that person through fear and intimidation.

She's already discussed this somewhat on her own blog:
http://www.feministfrequency.com/201...ng-on-youtube/
So people were trying to get her video delisted by flagging it as "terrorism", as well as trying to get her Kickstarter banned, in other words trying to silence here. And that's not counting the harassment she got through other websites.

Note that in the screenshot of Youtube comments in that blog post, partway through there's a comment from here on why she (initially) left the comments open:
So since she later disabled comments on that video, one can only imagine how much worse it got.

Groucho

This guy is clueless. First of all, he doesn't address the video at all, just the fact that comments and ratings were disabled. He claims comments were disabled because Sarkeesian wants to "stifle criticism". This is completely ignoring past history...I don't think we'd see any valid "criticism" posted in her YouTube comments section...just more rape jokes.

And of course, criticism of her video hasn't been stifled...there's plenty of it all over the internet...from this thread to The "Amazing" Atheist's response video. YouTube comments are probably the worst place to get interesting discourse on anything.

I only watched about half of this inane video before giving up, so if he makes any good points in the second half feel free to summarize here.

slop101

Is there a comment section on the internet more useless and brain-killing than the comments on youtube?