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[–] Bastou ago  (edited ago)

What you're saying makes sense. But for one thing. Games that don't sell are not games with strong female protagonists (some of them did sell), games that don't sell are bad games, no matter who the protagonists are, or how they portray women (or anyone or anything else, for that matter).

The abysmal majority of games made are as Anita Sarkeesian describes. A proportion of them are good, even very good games, and these sell well. Many of those are bad, and they don't sell well. Most of the very few games that tried to put a strong female character up front, or an intellectually realist one, focused too much on that aspect and it made a bad game, not because they made a game about a woman, but because they neglected every other aspects of the game.

If you take a random sample of games, a certain proportion of them will be excellent, another proportion will be average, and a too big one in my opinion will be mediocre. This is just normal. But if we had a big enough proportion of games that had normal women in them, it would cease to be an exception, developers would stop focusing on that part and make a shitty game as a result, and a bigger proportion of these games would be good to excellent games, and these would sell.

That is Anita and these feminists' goal : to make it a normal thing we wouldn't have to think about. But to get to that goal, we have to start somewhere to break the status quo where too many people, even smart people like yourself, believe games with female characters don't sell and they fail to see the real reason why.

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[–] Fact_Checking_Alien ago 

There are plenty of games with female centric protagonists, but these are often criticized because of the idealized or sexual form of the female. The problem with this is the fact most of the players are men who, unsurprisingly, are attracted to beautiful women. Which is the problem I've had with feminists talking about this all along: They aren't the gamers, but they want to proscribe their morality onto them.

Secondly, you make a very big mistake. People don't want to play as normal people in a game. Normal people don't go about slaying demons, or fighting never-ending wars (every FPS multiplayer), or what have you. Playing something as a truly normal person defeats the purpose of fantasy and gameplay, because we use fantasy in our minds to enjoy living as someone else. Someone better. Playing a game as ourselves would be absolutely boring, as we might as well live our own lives.

So no, they would not sell, because you've completely misunderstood why people play games or get into any fantasy at all: To be someone who is not normal.

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[–] Bastou ago 

Wow, you're reducing all the games in the world to only one subtype? And you make it your sole argument? I wonder if I should really answer to you or if it's completely futile...

Where are the superheros in SimCity? Does the female transport adviser has to be sexy in that game? Of course a fantasy game doesn't feature normal people, but male characters do heroic things (as they should) and female characters are helpless. They could very well put a female character that is capable of doing anything the action of the game requires. And she could be beautiful without being (almost) naked. Male characters are represented in all sorts of ways (again, as they should), but female characters are left with about 5 different roles, all related in their lack of influence on the main plot.

I know this is an over-generalisation and there are some games that feature female characters in different roles, but there should be enough of them that we don't feel the need to celebrate them, it should just be normal.

And you completely misunderstood what I meant by normal. A game character can have a human reaction and still be badass.

This is exactly the same as cinema : of course characters are shallow in action flicks, but there are people who are tired of the formulaic crap that is mostly produced by Hollywood all the time. A regular action movie will make good money. An action movie where the characters react more like human beings (exceptional human beings for sure) and not robots will make a lot of money and critics will like it as much as the dumb masses. People that enjoy international cinema, independent movies, Woody Allen films, and the likes exist, because cinema has evolved from a light, shallow entertainment for the masses to a proper art form. There is a small diversification in films, but it's almost non-existent in games. If we want games to be recognized as a respectable art form, it needs to expend and diversify itself.