5 ms·

Why it’s important to talk about Tropes vs. Women In Video Games

25 points by MikeCapone 14y ago

mrigor 14y ago
Thunderf00t rebuttals this quite well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I
- hudibras 14y ago
  Wow, that video does exactly the opposite of what you say it does.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    What do you mean? I think that Thunderf00t very elegantly shows that she picked one poor example for her video. Then, that her conclusions from her examples are non sequitur because you could draw completely opposite conclusions by the same reasoning. But for me most powerful blow is him showing that she contradicts her own masters thesis. Her masters thesis was all about criticizing something that she gave as positive counterexample in the video. That said I enjoy videos by feministfrequency (especially the one about Lego) as well as girlwriteswhat that present completely opposite point of view. Thunderf00t has my utmost respect for confronting religions (Islam included) and for his "Why do people laugh at creationists?" series and for being actual scientist.
    - pifflesnort 14y ago
      "Thunderf00t"'s rhetoric reminds of Glenn Beck. It's heavy on emotive language and expression, while relying on extreme leaps of rationalization and logic that withstand only the most superficial scrutiny. Anita's video covered the existence of the "Damsel in Distress" trope. It exists, it's wide spread, and it's a fact. I don't even remotely identify myself as feminist, and in fact, I'm usually on the complete opposite side of the political room from liberal feminists, and I don't agree with a lot of what Anita has to say. Despite all that, the barely masked misogyny around Anita's work disgusts me.
      - scotty79 14y ago
        Thunderf00t is a bit snarky with his commentary but I don't really see the leaps in his logic. I also don't see misogyny. I think his voice here is motivated not by his (nonexistent) veiled hatred of women but rather his really obvious hatred for what he sees as bullshit.
        sliverstorm 14y ago
        I haven't finished the video yet, but bear in mind that (at least as far as I have seen) challenging feminism is frequently labeled misogyny, in good old-fashioned "If you aren't with us you are against us" form.
    - GhotiFish 14y ago
      thunderfoot is fundamentalist reasoning with that tangy atheist flavor we all know and love. Let's unwrap that lovely 171K subscriber foil cover and get into the package! He starts by showing feminist frequency promising to deliver thoroughly researched compendium of games that use tropes to marginalize women. He then cites one example (@0:54) that happens to break from the fold AT THE END, that she didn't mention (she uses ~20 unique examples in her video). He then harps on it for 30 solid seconds, and then concludes that because she failed to account for this surprise ending, that all of her research is shoddy, incomplete, and halfheartedly done. So oh well, that was a bit of a wash. Luckily we start getting into the juicy nugat of thunderf00ts reasoning, as he outright states that tropes vs women fails to acknowledge that these games were designed to make a profit. (@2:26) This is of course wrong, but he doesn't substantiate it any way, and meanders on to say that having men go after women is healthy because it shows how much men care and are committed to taking care of women.(@3:05) (I encourage everyone to watch this to see what an emotional appeal looks like. It's so textbook it's kinda funny) Yup. Yup. and yup. no. I wonder how much more I could pick apart from thunderf00ts reasoning in the space of 3 minutes.
      - scotty79 14y ago
        I don't really see your point. Am I right that you think it's wrong that he: - shows only single example of her failing at her research - assumes that something that happens at the end of the story is at least as important as something that happens at the beginning? - uses this example to have a little bit of fun by ridiculing to entertain his viewers (and probably himself). - claims (falsely?) that tropes vs women fails to acknowledge that these games and their stories were designed to make a profit. - proposes that this trope is just using natural instinct of helping loved ones and oppressed to provide motivation for male protagonist and was not invented to diminish women. What about the part where he shows that she contradicts her own masters thesis in this video? That was main point of this video for me. Did she change her mind and female characters doing stereotypically male things are now ok for her and she just forgot to mention and explain reasons for that change of her opinion? Or is she perfectly capable of holding and arguing in favor of two exactly opposite views at the same time?
        14y ago
michaelochurch 14y ago
Without all the stereotyping, it's impossible to tell which one is the healer and which one is the offense mage by hair color alone. It gets really annoying when a level-10 death knight comes into your office and starts fucking up your shit.
- nness 14y ago
  Because that makes it right...
revelation 14y ago
“The reality is this trope is being used in a real world context where backwards sexist attitudes are already rampant. It’s a sad fact that a large percentage of the world’s population still clings to the deeply sexist belief that women, as a group, need to be sheltered, protected and taken care of by men.” Did she really just generalize about double-digit percentages of the whole world population?
- GHFigs 14y ago
  Shh. It's okay when feminists do it.
- lowboy 14y ago
  Maybe there's a source for it and it's not generalization. I'd believe that a "large" percentage (not the majority, but double digits) of the population thinks that women need some level of care/consideration by men, and that there would be quite a few women in that group.
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    It's a fairly large research area, the effect in question is called "benevolent sexism", in which women are portrayed as being "weaker" (where the definition of weak is NOT purely physical strength) and need help to get along in life. The interesting thing is that benevolent sexism is also widely spread in women themselves. Here's a fairly recent paper about the spread of benevolent/hostile sexism in university undergrads, where benevolent sexism was relatively evenly spread between male and females: http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/36/4/432.full http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/36/4/432.full
rayiner 14y ago
"The backlash is less surprising if you remember Tropes vs. Women In Video Games as the Kickstarter campaign that incensed some gamers so much that they targeted Sarkeesian with extreme online harassment, much of which is chronicled by Helen Lewis at The New Statesman. (Warning: It’s pretty vile.) To cite a few examples: there were malicious edits on her Wikipedia page, violent and sexist comments made about her on YouTube (and just about everywhere else online), rape and death threats sent her way, and someone even made a game on Newgrounds in which you could punch her in the face until she was bruised and bloody." Stuff like this makes me think that we're probably not much better than the people in the middle east/south asia who have these kinds of attitudes towards women. One wonders what it is about our society that at least keeps these sorts of attitudes from boiling over into the physical violence you see over there. Maybe we can build on that.
- Cushman 14y ago
  What is your cutoff for "boiling over"? Rape and violence against women is not exactly unheard of in America.
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    I think he's speaking of degree, not frequency. Surely you've heard some of the stories coming out of India and Egypt in the past year?
VeejayRampay 14y ago
Women make up 48% of the game buyers demographic according to the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Female_gamers_as_a_demographic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Female_ga... (note that there aren't any sources cited there, so to be taken with a grain of salt). The solution to the women / video games is quite simple from there. Women should stop buying video games that don't portray women in a good way / reinforce stereotypes / try to typecast characters. Video game companies are capitalist companies by nature, they understand the concept of offer and demand.
- Cushman 14y ago
  > Women should stop buying video games that don't portray women in a good way / reinforce stereotypes / try to typecast characters. Women? Everyone should stop buying them.
  - scotty79 14y ago
    Also books and movies about princesses and princes.
- anabis 14y ago
  Is this by headcount? Considering jokes about Farmville and Dr. Mario, women may be more inclined to play the same games repeatedly. Which would mean less money spent, and thus less votes by money.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
anabis 14y ago
There is also an aspect of technical limitation. Satisfactory modelling flowing hair on current hardware is still difficult.
barotto 14y ago
It's important to talk about it because it shows, once again, that feminists are batshit insane. Some people apparently still don't get it.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "Some people apparently still don't get it" Hrm, yes.
- lowboy 14y ago
  A few feminists are probably batshit insane, as I'm sure are a few HN posters. Don't generalize about entire groups based on limited examples.
jacques_chester 14y ago
There is no version of this genre of discussion that does not end in a mess. And internet-stalking misogyny is squick raised to the power of wtf. But even the trope-busters are, themselves, tropes (cf. Joss Whedon's parade of badass waifs). I have one personal nitpick, though: > The messages these popular characterizations send — women are weak and need men to protect them; Taking a very narrow of definition of "weak", strength sports demonstrate that actually, men are generally physically stronger than women. (I leave emotional strength to another discussion). Granted, a female strength athlete will generally drastically outperform Joe Q Couchmaster on something like a snatch or a bench press. But compare like with like -- powerlifters with powerlifters, weightlifters with weightlifters -- and men lift more than women in every weight class.
- illuminate 14y ago
  "even the trope-busters are, themselves, tropes (cf. Joss Whedon's parade of badass waifs)." Don't forget http://io9.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make http://io9.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-...
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    Let's not bang our drums over something that wasn't even made. I've had plenty of stupid ideas too.
    - illuminate 14y ago
      I'm not. It's just symptomatic of someone that, for all the cred, still holds serious issues if that even ~sounded~ like something worth bringing up.
- nness 14y ago
  I've noticed that any time we hear "strong" or "weak" (in discussions such as these) we always assume the definitions to mean physical attributes and abilities, and then it is ultimately comes down to performance, agility, pain tolerance, etc. This is dangerous as it looks to add credence to the concept that it is okay to portray women as weaker because under some averaged metrics they perform less than the average man. However, the "women are weak" quote isn't exclusively, or sometimes at all, related to physical ability. I would say that weak would be any situation or scenario where a person is not able to escape or solve (Princess Peach may not be able to defeat Bowser physically, but the writer's haven't had her try and out-smart him either.) "Women are weak" isn't exclusively in their ability to win in combat, its their ability to outsmart, to plan and problem-solve, and ultimately to look out for their safety. Very few games show female characters doing even that...
bcoates 14y ago
Does Sarkeesian give any credit to tvtropes.org in this project? The whole video seems to be a recitation of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DamselInDistress/VideoGames http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DamselInDistress/Video... but without the context and analysis.

25 points by MikeCapone 14y ago

Thunderf00t rebuttals this quite well http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I

hudibras 14y ago
Wow, that video does exactly the opposite of what you say it does.
- scotty79 14y ago
  What do you mean? I think that Thunderf00t very elegantly shows that she picked one poor example for her video. Then, that her conclusions from her examples are non sequitur because you could draw completely opposite conclusions by the same reasoning. But for me most powerful blow is him showing that she contradicts her own masters thesis. Her masters thesis was all about criticizing something that she gave as positive counterexample in the video. That said I enjoy videos by feministfrequency (especially the one about Lego) as well as girlwriteswhat that present completely opposite point of view. Thunderf00t has my utmost respect for confronting religions (Islam included) and for his "Why do people laugh at creationists?" series and for being actual scientist.
  - pifflesnort 14y ago
    "Thunderf00t"'s rhetoric reminds of Glenn Beck. It's heavy on emotive language and expression, while relying on extreme leaps of rationalization and logic that withstand only the most superficial scrutiny. Anita's video covered the existence of the "Damsel in Distress" trope. It exists, it's wide spread, and it's a fact. I don't even remotely identify myself as feminist, and in fact, I'm usually on the complete opposite side of the political room from liberal feminists, and I don't agree with a lot of what Anita has to say. Despite all that, the barely masked misogyny around Anita's work disgusts me.
    - scotty79 14y ago
      Thunderf00t is a bit snarky with his commentary but I don't really see the leaps in his logic. I also don't see misogyny. I think his voice here is motivated not by his (nonexistent) veiled hatred of women but rather his really obvious hatred for what he sees as bullshit.
      - sliverstorm 14y ago
        I haven't finished the video yet, but bear in mind that (at least as far as I have seen) challenging feminism is frequently labeled misogyny, in good old-fashioned "If you aren't with us you are against us" form.
  - GhotiFish 14y ago
    thunderfoot is fundamentalist reasoning with that tangy atheist flavor we all know and love. Let's unwrap that lovely 171K subscriber foil cover and get into the package! He starts by showing feminist frequency promising to deliver thoroughly researched compendium of games that use tropes to marginalize women. He then cites one example (@0:54) that happens to break from the fold AT THE END, that she didn't mention (she uses ~20 unique examples in her video). He then harps on it for 30 solid seconds, and then concludes that because she failed to account for this surprise ending, that all of her research is shoddy, incomplete, and halfheartedly done. So oh well, that was a bit of a wash. Luckily we start getting into the juicy nugat of thunderf00ts reasoning, as he outright states that tropes vs women fails to acknowledge that these games were designed to make a profit. (@2:26) This is of course wrong, but he doesn't substantiate it any way, and meanders on to say that having men go after women is healthy because it shows how much men care and are committed to taking care of women.(@3:05) (I encourage everyone to watch this to see what an emotional appeal looks like. It's so textbook it's kinda funny) Yup. Yup. and yup. no. I wonder how much more I could pick apart from thunderf00ts reasoning in the space of 3 minutes.
    - scotty79 14y ago
      I don't really see your point. Am I right that you think it's wrong that he: - shows only single example of her failing at her research - assumes that something that happens at the end of the story is at least as important as something that happens at the beginning? - uses this example to have a little bit of fun by ridiculing to entertain his viewers (and probably himself). - claims (falsely?) that tropes vs women fails to acknowledge that these games and their stories were designed to make a profit. - proposes that this trope is just using natural instinct of helping loved ones and oppressed to provide motivation for male protagonist and was not invented to diminish women. What about the part where he shows that she contradicts her own masters thesis in this video? That was main point of this video for me. Did she change her mind and female characters doing stereotypically male things are now ok for her and she just forgot to mention and explain reasons for that change of her opinion? Or is she perfectly capable of holding and arguing in favor of two exactly opposite views at the same time?
      - 14y ago

michaelochurch 14y ago

Without all the stereotyping, it's impossible to tell which one is the healer and which one is the offense mage by hair color alone. It gets really annoying when a level-10 death knight comes into your office and starts fucking up your shit.

nness 14y ago
Because that makes it right...

revelation 14y ago

“The reality is this trope is being used in a real world context where backwards sexist attitudes are already rampant. It’s a sad fact that a large percentage of the world’s population still clings to the deeply sexist belief that women, as a group, need to be sheltered, protected and taken care of by men.” Did she really just generalize about double-digit percentages of the whole world population?

GHFigs 14y ago
Shh. It's okay when feminists do it.
lowboy 14y ago
Maybe there's a source for it and it's not generalization. I'd believe that a "large" percentage (not the majority, but double digits) of the population thinks that women need some level of care/consideration by men, and that there would be quite a few women in that group.
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  It's a fairly large research area, the effect in question is called "benevolent sexism", in which women are portrayed as being "weaker" (where the definition of weak is NOT purely physical strength) and need help to get along in life. The interesting thing is that benevolent sexism is also widely spread in women themselves. Here's a fairly recent paper about the spread of benevolent/hostile sexism in university undergrads, where benevolent sexism was relatively evenly spread between male and females: http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/36/4/432.full http://pwq.sagepub.com/content/36/4/432.full

rayiner 14y ago

"The backlash is less surprising if you remember Tropes vs. Women In Video Games as the Kickstarter campaign that incensed some gamers so much that they targeted Sarkeesian with extreme online harassment, much of which is chronicled by Helen Lewis at The New Statesman. (Warning: It’s pretty vile.) To cite a few examples: there were malicious edits on her Wikipedia page, violent and sexist comments made about her on YouTube (and just about everywhere else online), rape and death threats sent her way, and someone even made a game on Newgrounds in which you could punch her in the face until she was bruised and bloody." Stuff like this makes me think that we're probably not much better than the people in the middle east/south asia who have these kinds of attitudes towards women. One wonders what it is about our society that at least keeps these sorts of attitudes from boiling over into the physical violence you see over there. Maybe we can build on that.

Cushman 14y ago
What is your cutoff for "boiling over"? Rape and violence against women is not exactly unheard of in America.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  I think he's speaking of degree, not frequency. Surely you've heard some of the stories coming out of India and Egypt in the past year?

VeejayRampay 14y ago

Women make up 48% of the game buyers demographic according to the Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Female_gamers_as_a_demographic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Female_ga... (note that there aren't any sources cited there, so to be taken with a grain of salt). The solution to the women / video games is quite simple from there. Women should stop buying video games that don't portray women in a good way / reinforce stereotypes / try to typecast characters. Video game companies are capitalist companies by nature, they understand the concept of offer and demand.

Cushman 14y ago
> Women should stop buying video games that don't portray women in a good way / reinforce stereotypes / try to typecast characters. Women? Everyone should stop buying them.
- scotty79 14y ago
  Also books and movies about princesses and princes.
anabis 14y ago
Is this by headcount? Considering jokes about Farmville and Dr. Mario, women may be more inclined to play the same games repeatedly. Which would mean less money spent, and thus less votes by money.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

anabis 14y ago

There is also an aspect of technical limitation. Satisfactory modelling flowing hair on current hardware is still difficult.

barotto 14y ago

It's important to talk about it because it shows, once again, that feminists are batshit insane. Some people apparently still don't get it.

illuminate 14y ago
"Some people apparently still don't get it" Hrm, yes.
lowboy 14y ago
A few feminists are probably batshit insane, as I'm sure are a few HN posters. Don't generalize about entire groups based on limited examples.

jacques_chester 14y ago

There is no version of this genre of discussion that does not end in a mess. And internet-stalking misogyny is squick raised to the power of wtf. But even the trope-busters are, themselves, tropes (cf. Joss Whedon's parade of badass waifs). I have one personal nitpick, though: > The messages these popular characterizations send — women are weak and need men to protect them; Taking a very narrow of definition of "weak", strength sports demonstrate that actually, men are generally physically stronger than women. (I leave emotional strength to another discussion). Granted, a female strength athlete will generally drastically outperform Joe Q Couchmaster on something like a snatch or a bench press. But compare like with like -- powerlifters with powerlifters, weightlifters with weightlifters -- and men lift more than women in every weight class.

illuminate 14y ago
"even the trope-busters are, themselves, tropes (cf. Joss Whedon's parade of badass waifs)." Don't forget http://io9.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-joss-whedon-didnt-get-to-make http://io9.com/5959794/the-firefly-episode-were-really-glad-...
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  Let's not bang our drums over something that wasn't even made. I've had plenty of stupid ideas too.
  - illuminate 14y ago
    I'm not. It's just symptomatic of someone that, for all the cred, still holds serious issues if that even ~sounded~ like something worth bringing up.
nness 14y ago
I've noticed that any time we hear "strong" or "weak" (in discussions such as these) we always assume the definitions to mean physical attributes and abilities, and then it is ultimately comes down to performance, agility, pain tolerance, etc. This is dangerous as it looks to add credence to the concept that it is okay to portray women as weaker because under some averaged metrics they perform less than the average man. However, the "women are weak" quote isn't exclusively, or sometimes at all, related to physical ability. I would say that weak would be any situation or scenario where a person is not able to escape or solve (Princess Peach may not be able to defeat Bowser physically, but the writer's haven't had her try and out-smart him either.) "Women are weak" isn't exclusively in their ability to win in combat, its their ability to outsmart, to plan and problem-solve, and ultimately to look out for their safety. Very few games show female characters doing even that...

bcoates 14y ago

Does Sarkeesian give any credit to tvtropes.org in this project? The whole video seems to be a recitation of http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DamselInDistress/VideoGames http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DamselInDistress/Video... but without the context and analysis.