But aren't the creative endeavors like design and writing what this thread is about? After all, you don't just program male or female characters, you write and design them. So the ones who could make a difference (or not) are the writers, designers, art directors and such (if they get the support of the rest of the team and the publishers, that is). If we suppose that a majority of women is not interested in programming, that alone wouldn't be enough of a reason yet for them not to work in the game industry, would it?

Unless they prefer writing and designing to programming, which would make it harder for them to go indie and do it all on their own. In that case they would need to work in teams, e.g. at bigger studios, which would make them dependent on the studio and/or the publishers supporting their ideas.

(Not to say that "women are not allowed in the industry", because that's certainly not true; and neither to say that women have a hard time in the industry, because how I should I know; just saying that we don't know for sure why exactly women are less represented or visible in the industry, it's probably a combination of many factors.)

No, you gave some vague undefined desire for a "balanced portrayl of gender in video games" as your desired goal, and I specifically asked what exactly that meant. Because now you give a reason of some kind relating entirely to sexual gratification alone. So if I then said "just introduce an equal number of sexualized male characters" you would say...what exactly? Because that would involve having to deal with the real life issues regarding the distinct differences between the genders in what is sexually appealing and the differences in perceptions. All of this remains vague and undefined. Which has been part of my point.

"Balance" is something that offsets or compares the value of (one thing) with another. If you truly want a "balanced portrayal" then adding a bunch of sweaty bare-chested loincloth wearing male characters should do the trick, right? Except everyone realizes that this wouldn't be viewed by men as offensive or sexualized to begin with unless you had them in overtly contrived poses or activities, and then it would be related by most male viewers to homosexual appeal, not heterosexual. I think that the real issue is not balance as it is defined in the dictionary, but the desire to restrain most or any sexualized use of the female form as a integrated subject for male entertainment. I think this issue revolves around women projecting their own perceptions and dislike of the visual nature of male sexual gratification in entertainment whilst still desiring the ability or "right" to use that same imagery when it suits them to project a sassy sexy "empowered" female embodiment of feminity.

Personally, I find pretty much all hyper-sexual depictions of females in gaming to be offensive, vulgar, and crass. My personal preference is not to have it in games I play, or that I know will be specifically cynically targeted towards the young. I don't believe society actually benefits from cynical attempts at titillation to drive sales or gain interest in products. I also desire believability in the things I play or watch, relating specifically to the characters or worlds I partake of. Fighting or traversing in a dangerous world in little to no clothing is simply a ridiculous concept, especially for female characters. Personally, I can't think of a single example in all the years I have been playing games of a realistic use of hyper-sexualized apparel that was completely realistic and believable within that world.

That being said though, I'm not going to then ignore the basic differences between the genders relating to what is perceived as sexually appealing, the unequal application of your undefined and vague standard of "balance", or the actual issue of women wanting to have their cake and eat it too. The all encompassing desire by many to completely control how the female gender is portrayed, desiring both the "right" to be empowered through their sexuality, and yet not have the natural sexual reactions of men be the object behind commercial use of the same kind of depictions they otherwise might find "empowering".

The Searchers IS probably the greatest Western ever. How hilarious that you seem to have missed the completely obvious intent on the part of John Ford, one of the greatest and most influential directors of all time, to portray a FLAWED racist character who GRIMLY, not gleefully, killed Indians out of vengeance, and who CHANGES at the end.

From John Ford: The Man and His Films by Tag Gallagher: 'One reason he filmed so often in Monument Valley was that his Navajo friends needed the money his projects brought them. He paid them union wages at a time when Indians were not commanding even fifty cents a day. He studied their language, played their sports, was adopted into their tribe, and named Natani Nez, 'Tall Soldier.' A blizzard covered the Valley in the fifties, and Ford got army planes to drop food in. "To the Navajos," said Harry Goulding, who operated a lodge there. "Mr. Ford is holy, sorta."'

It might help if you didn't project your own ignorant agenda and biases onto works and people you clearly haven't bothered to understand factually. Ford was one of the first to change portrayal of Indians in movies like "Fort Apache" and "She Wore A Yellow Ribbon", and that changing period is rightly considered the golden age of movie Westerns.

Reminds me, just recently when GTA V got accused of sexism I frequently read "traditionally for the series" or "like previously in GTA IV". In GTA IV there was (unless there was more shocking turns of events which I haven't seen as I haven't beaten the whole game yet):
- Malorie, the only "regular", perfectly sane and truly likable (if somewhat naive) person in the whole game
- That FBI chick, quite clearly a strong and ambitious woman who would actually treat Niko as a tool and sleep with him to get closer to the Mafia
- some gangster's wife, the most civilized person in the game but also a victim of her husband's abusive behavior
- some black obese gangster woman whose obesity is not used for jokes and who finds herself in the same position of power (and in need of Niko's help) as all the male gangster bosses

But it's still a sexist game because there's Roman and Brucie, two sexist pigs - pathetic losers that everybody laughs at (even Brucie's "bitches" which he brings along one time are perfectly unimpressed by his alpha male scheme) and who only achieve any kind of success when Niko comes along. Niko, the guy who is characterized as someone who treats women with respect and gets along with people of all ethnic groups and is tolerant of homosexuals. But yeah, let's focus on the few sexist jokes and situations (there's strip clubs, for God's sake!), not on the fact that all female characters in the game were treated by the developers with respect and dignity.

Oh yeah, also there was the sister of those Irish brothers. I don't know how her part in the plot and her romance with Niko develop towards the end but from what I've seen (and from what I remember) she's again a rather strong and intelligent woman who is tired of her overly protective brothers (one of whom threatens Niko, should he show sexual interest in her) and clearly craves for independence. Man, SUCH a sexist game.

You missed this - No female main characters... oh wait.
I actually don't think GTA is sexist, it's a fictional reality close to our own and therefore there are a lot of stupid and violent men who have sex with prostitutes. I have'nt played the fifth one though.
Better some kids play games and live out their fantasies and not do it in real life.

I have no doubt that there are a lot of female artists.

What I would love is for you to provide some evidence in support of your facts that:

1. most heavily sexualized female characters are designed by female artists; and
2. female artists have no issues with overly sexualised female characters.
You realise this "evidence" doesn't go anywhere close to supporting your fact, right? :)

I see it the same way and when trying to simulate the whole gangster life the way GTA does it would just feel wrong and artificial if the developers omitted the whole stripper and prostitute thing just for the sake of political correctness. But in GTA IV they made up for it by designing *all* women relevant to the plot with great care and respect.

Same here and I'm not protecting GTA V before I've played it myself but it's just wrong that people (possibly justifiably) accusing GTA V of sexism just threw in "traditionally for the series" when the previous (and up to that point biggest and most important game in the series) was one of the most feminist games I have ever seen, despite depicting the sexist aspects of the stereotypical gangster life.

Yeah, that does sound absurd :).
Even aside from that - I was arguing against the completely ludicrous claim of perceiving a woman in fiction as:
1) purely ("nothing more than")
2) sexual (in no other context)
3) object (not a person)

"Sex object" is a well-established term with reasonable implications which you should not ignore. To quote Wikipedia's article on sexual objectification:

"Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person merely as an instrument of sexual pleasure, making them a "sex object". Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object, without regard to their personality or dignity."

The definition is broader than "a dead object resembling a person and meant for sexual pleasure". And you have to take into account that there are different degrees of objectification and that it is legitimate to use the term for exaggeration. It is in my opinion legitimate to accuse a character in a video game of being "purely a sex object" when the character shows no personal traits and is mainly designed to attract consumers through its sexual features. Perhaps even more than in the social or psychological sense where actual human beings are in an abstract sense reduced to a commodity or something as here the characters are artificially designed from the ground up and may not show any personal traits, intelligence or natural needs and desires in the first place.

Supposedly the decision why the protagonist of Tomb Raider turned out to be a woman was that someone at Core Design thought "if we're gonna make the players (predominantly males) stare at their alter ego's butt for hours it better be a woman". Now presuming that this is true and Lara Croft was designed and placed in the original game only for that reason it may not be unjustified to call her "purely a sex object", at least unless someone actually made adjustments to the gameplay and plot which took her gender into account, aside from maybe acrobatics which demonstrate her sexual features (like that weird sexy climbing roll which both demonstrates her flexibility and allows you to see her whole body, front and back, in one ridiculously slow and completely impractical animation).

And then there's of course actual porn/hentai games specifically developed as interactive pornography. I'm not talking about dating sims which may have a plot and even simulate non-sexual social interaction, I'm talking about the hardcore stuff like say Sex Villa or Rapelay to provide an extreme example. All the character's traits (their visual design or the background story of a single mother living with two daughters or something) and features which add some level of humanity (like animations and sounds expressing psychological states and emotions like fear, shame, pleasure or pain) have the purpose of arousing the player. Not to provide entertainment through plot or deliver social commentary, it's completely about the sexual aspect so the "characters" in these types of games are in my opinion perfect examples of women as "purely sexual objects" in video games.

I thought I defined it quite well, right from the start. Are you saying heterosexual women don't find depictions of sexualised men appealing? If not, then what is your point?

I dunno where you're getting your argument from. I have repeatedly stated that there is nothing wrong with having overly sexualised women in games. The problem is that that happens to be the vast vast majority of depictions of women in games, leaving little room for anything else. You think women are out to get you because of the visual nature of male sexual gratification in entertainment?


He changes? We must have seen a different movie. Also, I don't quite see what the intent of the director has to do with perceptions of native americans in movies.

I think RPS forgets that when characters are objectified is not a bad thing, and really it's a good thing to have a way that we can explore such things without anyone getting hurt. The worst is people can be offended and really, they have the right to walk away. Blizzard wants to have attractive female characters that wear outfits that show off their bodies, there's a market for that and it's big enough, Sex sells...

Or you can call it Objectification sells but a rose by any other name.

And really it doesn't matter if we objectify Nova, Kerrigan or whoever. They're characters and not real people, it's not the artists job to teach people, that's Education's and parent's job. (Also therapist's) To allow people to handle such things. Art's obligation is to be made and to exist, if you don't like it, you can move on.

Base art tends to objectify it's characters and in ways it's something that something that's healthy for society. I know that people think that's crazy, but really art allows people to explore taboo subjects in safe ways. Even horrible things like murder and rape can be explored in fantasy. And really, all RPS condemning is female characters dressed in "provocative" clothing.

The problem is not that there's too much sexy characters, just not enough decent female characters. I agree with that but really I just hear people complaining. RPS should be seen as the shallow cowards that they are, they can only criticize without creating, they have the right to do that but really when they attack with loaded questions to attempt to label the developers as sexist. I find it disgusting to bring destructive criticism.

I especially like it when they asked if the developer thought that everyone deserves their power fantasy, as if anyone could please anyone. Would be nice to please everyone, you'd be the richest man or woman in the world if you could do that.

This isn't about feminism or equality, it's politically correct representation bollocks. It's bullshit thinking if you think all women in general are put off by sexualized costumes and it somehow bars entry to the game. No way is it so black and white like that. It's this stupid line of thought that to identify with something, it has to physically look and/or be just like you or otherwise your somehow excluded. That's stupid and complete and utter bullshit. People identify most with personality. With media in general, do people really physically identify with all these characters? Do you look like the people on TV? In games? In movies? In magazines? Unless you model yourself after one of those characters you probably don't look like that at all. The media in general, creates and lives in it's own fantasy world. We need more non-sexualized female characters, not because sexualized characters are "inherently bad" (they're not), but because the market is rather saturated with it. It's getting to be unoriginal and boring character design and It's not just games doing that. RPS's current crusading approach to the issue doesn't positively encourage change at all. It's getting rather viscous and spiteful over something as vain as a fantasy costume.

Maybe, but it's a slippery slope. The implications can be taken all the way to the moon.
For one, why sexual pleasure only? This definition reveals a certain puritan bias.
I'd say women that try to get pregnant without consent of the man fit "sexual objectification" as above perfectly.
I still think something like this is much more problematic than a hentai game. I must be an ignorant privileged human.

I'd also be interested if you'd consider the following sexual objectification, and by whom.
.Voluntary participation in S&M
.Watching porn
.Fantasising while having sex
.Idealizing a partner

You see that definition is very problematic, exactly due to the reason Vestin listed.
The sexual bias I covered.
Then who defines "merely" by looking inside of someone's brain, or interrogating them?
Finally the line between object and subject is a huge grey line in philosophy, psychology, neurology, heck even biology overall. So again, who determines the appropriate level of... of what? Respect? Time spent listening? Agreement to demands?

I think video game is still too young as a media type and has too narrow a core consumer group. It still contains mainly male consumers, and most of the genres in video games are straightly targeting male gamers (and it tends to be the games that get more criticism). I think we can make a comparison with a media mainly targeting female, for example, romance fiction.

Just like these games targeting male gamers having female characters that appeal to male, romance fiction usually has male characters appealing to female. Both depictions in respective media are definitely above the usual population in reality. In extreme cases, there are traditional erotic games solely for male, but in romance fiction, there is also BL (boys' love) fiction, sometimes erotic, showing female imaginary unrealistic gay relationships between attractive, beautiful male characters (no, no Serious Sam x Duke Nukem).

However, no one has problem with romance fiction, because fiction as a whole has a lot of sub genre suiting different people. There are fiction targeting male specifically, fiction targeting female specifically, and fiction targeting both. Similar thing can be say about movies as well. However, most of video games are mainly targeting male, some of them can be for both, but very little video games are particularly targeting female.

Video game as a media is still young. The main targeted consumers are still young males, in fact, most of the genres are based on topics mainly guys interested in, like war, violence, sports, adventure, etc. Only when there are similar size of audience group in both genders, there will be equality in game design (including graphic) toward both genders. However, the solution is not in diminishing certain aspect of games for male audience, but in the growth of games for female audience.

I agree completely. I like a fleshed out female character but I also enjoy a sexy looking one. Heck, I prefer the two combined - sue me, I'm male. There's reason so many screenshots of Skyrim include sexy large breasted elvish girls that wear revealing outfits - and it's funny, but my female friends do EXACTLY the same thing and dress them up as sexy as possible.

I think feminists forget that many girls like the fantasy of being attractive and sexy. This is not society that made them that way, this is only natural. If girls can pick between a strong well-dressed male warrior and a skimpy female warrior, why do they nearly always go for the female one if it's objectification? Heck, the standard Skyrim armour isn't revealing yet very very few screenshots from said female friends use the standard armour and instead they use the skimpy versions from Nexus.

I think reality shows us how ridiculous this whole stance is - if I see all my female gamer friends laughing at this whole issue, why should we take it seriously?