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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.
[+]Bastou0 points0 points0 points
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(edited ago)
[–]Bastou0 points
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(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.
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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[–] 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.
[–] 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.
[–] 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.