Vainamoinen: As you go on to explain in detail, it's run of the mill video game
marketing people who think that gamers "demand" the same story in all their games, misogynist stereotypes up the wazoo and lots of scantily clad women as background decoration and domination fantasy. I certainly do not
demand that stuff. Do you?
If less developers and less marketing people are making those broad and clearly derogatory assumptions about gamers, it means that the art is given a chance to grow up - and develop
with more freedom than with these kinds of topical constraints.
That's the thing you cannot "demand" creators not to do something and at the same time pretend it will give them "more freedom". You are not asking for more freedom all you are just asking is for game to be changes/altered/censored to remove what you find "objectionable", that's not asking for more diversity that's actually exactly the opposite.
Yes there are a lot of games that abuse of over used tropes and all genre of stereotypes, but guess what not only it's not limited to games but it doesn't make necessarily makes it a bad game (or a sexist one) either.
Witcher had the "amnesiac hero" trope which is probably one of the most abused and most overused trope in the history of story telling and yet it doesn't prevent it from being a good game; I am not going to "demand" CDP to stop using such an overused trope and I am not going to pretend if would have improved or "grown up" the game if they hadn't used it.
Deus Ex, another very popular games, is also overloaded with all sort of tropes, conspiracy theories, stereotypes, cliché you can ever imagine and yet it didn't prevent it from being a good game.
I am sure that the next Rainbow Six won't become a bad games just because it committed the hate crime of using the evil "damsel in distress" trope (Knowing Ubi it will probably sucks for a tons of other reasons but that's another story...)
Vainamoinen: That is quite obviously an impossibility – and contradicts the notion that only the misogynist tropes would please the young male white gamer demographic. As to political correctness, that's an empty phrase I never understood, because it doesn't come into play here. Violence and strong language are obviously not 'politically correct' in most countries, yet you don't hear press and gamer critics protest much.
Well you don't really hear the whole "games are sexists" a lot outside of the US and UK; I read French gaming press and 99% of the time when a Kotaku or RPS article on the subject is mentioned it's either to make fun of it or to point at it's contradictions.
And concerning "violence and strong language" that's because violence is usually tolerated in US culture, a lot more that sex, so they are not really any US pressure group that would call you "
whatever'ist" if you have violence a in video games. While there are a lot that will call you sexist if you start hitting or killing women in a game or racist if you dare to pretend that it's normal that a zombie game taking place in Africa feature black zombies.
Vainamoinen: Sure, just a vocal sample, sure. But with this kind of backlash, we're not just dealing with a fraction of a percent ready to engage in this kind of harrassment.
I haven't really see anything more with this backlash than what you wouldn't by reading basic Yahoo news or MSNBC news comments. When it comes to death threats, insults and general douche-baggery it's hard to do worse than those two...
Vainamoinen: That's a misconception I often encounter. I have yet to find a good example of what it should actually mean. If a misogynist trope is clearly evident in one scene, it can not easily be "mended" by another scene that doesn't have the trope. Remember, this series is not about dismissing entire games for scenes which might be sexist. It's about dismissing those scenes only. What she "cherry picks" is the stuff that actually concerns her topic.
The key word here is "
evident", most of the time it's not "evident" at all as most of the time it's a question of point of view and/or bias, often it's just a basic trope, sometime overused I give you that, that can be made into a "misogynist" one if you try hard enough, and of course not helped by the fact that a lot of peoples don't have a single clue what misogynist actually mean.
Basically anything can be made into a "sexist" or "misogynist" trope/stereotype, there are lot of feminists who find Josh Whedon work to be pro-feminist and at the same time a lot of others who find it, often the same series or even the same scenes, to be hateful against woman and extremely sexists.