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[–] Bastou ago 

I don't know enough about Zoe Quinn to have a clear opinion of her or her intentions, but I can speak about Anita Sarkeesian.

Anita has not said gamers are sexists (as far as I know). She said more or less that the industry was generally sexist. What she condemns, is too many games that either don't have female characters or the ones that they have are incredibly shallow and two dimensional, actually serving a single purpose in advancing the plot story. She's not saying this game is sexist, and so is this one, and that one, etc. She says this situation in general is bad, because there are almost no alternatives. The problem she talks about is not the current games, which she said many times she enjoys, it's the lack of at least a few that would picture women as humans with all it means to be human.

And for saying that, and only that, she has been attacked and harassed online, and maybe a bit offline as well. Many people have claimed she said all sorts of things she didn't say. She complained that people harassing her were sexist, not all gamers. And I seriously believe these attacks are coordinated by a smallish group of mentally disturbed people, and a few sheep moron who couldn't see the truth if we rubbed it in their faces.

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[–] Bastou 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

And by the way, Hollywood movies are only slightly better than mainstream video games when it comes to general representation of women. A lot of work has to be done there as well.

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[–] Fact_Checking_Alien ago 

I will raise the common point I most often hear, and that is "If you want an alternative, make one". The second point, and please don't reply to the prior one without also knowing how this impacts it, is that those alternatives so far presented simply don't sell. In our society, you make what sells. What people who've participated in "Gamergate" have routinely discovered is that these big names in feminism, in relation to games, don't actually drive up sales or get sales. Their market consists almost entirely of non-gamers. Even when they suggest people buy a certain game, that game flounders.

Therefore, it is of dubious intent to suggest there need be "alternatives". Why punish people for idealizing forms? Why criticize that? If you have a problem with an imagined ideal, that is your personal thing you need to work through and overcome. Our ideals of body and form have existed further back than the ancient Greeks, and Egyptians, and we have always held ideals of form to look upon and see beauty.

What I gather from most of these feminists and comments on the "problem of ideals in games", is they are more upset with comparing themselves to that ideal. As a Buddhist would say, this is an internal problem, not a problem with the world. Work together to solve it within yourselves, and learn to appreciate the beauty of forms we can create in this beautifully advanced technological world. Don't repress it, embrace it, because it's harmless.

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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.