Of course it's okay. And there are plenty of games like that.

Just type torture game in google and enjoy :-) He dismissed the issue, because for him it's not an issue at all. Some people don't share your views, you know.

If you don't like a game, don't buy it. Don't 'vote for it' with your wallet. That's as far as your 'freedom' or that of anyone else should go. It becomes dangerous censorship when people start claiming what kind of creative content should or shouldn't be made in a medium, and anyone who puts content into a game which isn't approved of by these people is personally attacked and denigrated.

It's extremist logic because even using Telika's opinion that all human beings are formed by exposure to different forms of media, it's implicitly justifying the idea that it's OK to try and put pressure on all creatives to only make content which is politically approved by them.

Using this logic, it would be okay in the 18th Century or earlier to put political pressure on all artists not to paint pictures of half-naked women because that is "sexualization" and it objectifies women.

That's the goal, isn't it? Because if it wasn't, all discussions like that would finish on

"We will not change how our female characters look in the game, because that's how we want them to portray in our game financed with our money"
"Oh, okay"

To each his own. I personaly like when video-games magazines take positions on political topics. I think it's refreshing when journalists try to dig deeper, and don't just do advertising for new releases.

After seeing all these threads, participating in some of them, I have come to this conclusion(and losing 100 rep just for posting a link to a video about Anita). There is a battle going on. A battle between those who enjoy sexed up females in video games and those who don't. A battle between those who enjoy saving women and those who do not because they only want to see strong women. It is impossible for both sides to a reach a compromise. It is impossible for devs to make a game that caters to both sides. There can only be total war and only one side can be victorious. So if you like sexed up females in video games, grab your imaginary swords and shields, get in formation and send the white knights and feminists back to the shit hole they came from. If you don't like sexed up females in video games, grab your imaginary swords and shields and join the feminists and white knights. Then send the "misogynist rape machine pigs* back to where they came from. Who will win? Only time will tell... Let the imaginary blood flow! Trying to civilized when it comes to this, is simply a waste of time. Personally I don't care about sexed up females enough to take part in this battle anymore. But the second, people try to remove violence from video games, I will unleash the monkey horde on them.

That's just it. RPS is not digging deeper. They are scratching the surface and they are using a sledgehammer to do it.

He probably has better things to do with his time than argue with professional victims on the internet. He makes games.

It's just a matter of different people having different agendas, and that's OK, some people just care more about the fact that games have female chars with big boobs than they just care about playing games for fun. Their politics are the most important thing.

You should just realize that to many people (myself included) politics are annoying and we couldn't give a shit about them and anything about them, we don't care about your "struggles" or views or anything about your political opinions, so you shouldn't assume that by default we care what you think about politics, especially when it's these people who invade the space of gamers to shove their politics in everyone's face.

I'm not saying that such people shouldn't care about politics or that their wrong to care about it so much, it's their right to do so. But stop assuming anyone cares.

I don't follow your logic there, but let's go along with it and pretend the goal was to put some cloth on every sexy female character in every game. Then let me play the devil's advocate of your strawman: According to you, that would be a bad thing because ...? Would it decrease your enjoyment of the games, if if the gameplay was still the same? Isn't it's just bits of pixels and polygons?

Yes, when it comes to sexed up females in video games or no sexed up females in video games.

Because, as I've already said, if you consider video games art, then freedom of creation is the most important part about it.

I think I am just a liberal person, you know.

If making all video game females covered with cloth was the artists idea, I would be glad someone did it. If it was forced by a third party whiners, I wouldn't. The same as I wouldn't like if someone forced the devs to make Duke Nukem's muscles smaller because some males are offended.

Seriously, I don't really think that these things have to be at war. Why wouldn't it be possible to have both strong women and women who need to be saved in one game? The saving thing should be down to character/personality/circumstances, not gender. So no, I don't think everyone who needs saving in a video game should be female. There should be males too. But similarly, not every woman in a video game needs to be 'strong'. Why do we have to see everything in absolute black and white?

And then the whole sexy/not sexy thing. I don't mind sexy characters if they're done right. Take Isabela from Dragon Age 2. She's hardly wearing anything. Do I mind? No, because it's in her personality to behave pretty much like a temptress. It's part of who she is, and I actually enjoy that about her. What I don't like is these supposed warrior women who go out in full armor only to have cleavage showing still. That makes no sense. Why would you wear armor in the first place if you're still going to expose yourself like that? Things like that bother me.

I think it's time for both sides to make some concessions and realize that having one thing does not exclude the other.

Not everyone thinks like you. There will always be some people, pissed off about this, pissed off about that. There is a reason, why war was invented by our ancestors. To settle things once and for all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMkz-Mrxs-c

Please note that nothing in my post indicated whether or not I'd find such games okay. That's another discussion, and in fact the only thing that I said about that particular topic is that I believe that games should be free to explore all topics.

What I _am_ saying, though, is that "It's just a game", or "We're not running for president", is not a particularly great way to answer specific questions and concerns about my game's content.

Exactly. And for some reason, the fact that there are "people not sharing one's views" seems to be a problem for many.

I'm curious now, though - which exactly _are_ my views, as posted in this discussion? It's interesting, but somehow the simple fact that I a) welcome it if gaming media addresses bigger contexts, and b) think that a games company spokesperson should be able to address specific concerns with specific, relevant answers instead of cop-out lines, seems to make some people think that I _also_ believe that sexually charged depictions of women in games are evil. Despite the fact that I never said anything like this, and even stressed my belief in artistic freedom. There seems to be a "For or against us!" mentality going around that makes it difficult to see the nuances.

I'm quite sure that a lot of kids who supported the bush wars had a vision of it that was well mediated by videogame logic, and that a lot of kids who considered "cool" to go join the army had fantasies of videogame heroism (analogous to the war movie heroism that is one form of deliberate propaganda). Remember "america's army" which was a specific tool of the US military, going as far as to swap characters nationalities in multiplayer, to force identification on one side.

So, I don't know exactly about the effects of our games and action movies on aggressivity, antagonism, and violence legitimacy. If they do promote forms of violence through their models ("woot, i'm like steven seagal, you picked the wrong guy, dude"), I don't know what form of violence. I don't know what is in the head of petty, brutal teen thiefs, and whether they see themselves as the GTA guy. I know that our actions and attitudes often mirror our mythical models, I know that lots of traders see themselves as some valorised Wall Street's Gordon Gecko, I know that many mafia lamers see themselves as the romantised characters of The Godfather, I know that many cops chose their career or live it through action movies, and that war prisoners are being tortured by fans of 24h. These are documented things, but isolated, punctual. Not only we tend to bath in a very complex and contradictory network of fiction-endorsed values, but even "violence" itself is a network of contradictions : "Violence" may be less relevant to everyday life than its object - who are defined as the valid target of violence. When so many tales glorify the righteous killing of criminals, is the support of capital punishment such a surprise ? When so many tales justify the slaughter of a specific "attacking" ethnicity, is xenophobia and warmongering such surprising ?

You can ask the question of the worldviews that are reflected by videogames. Violence is generally directed a violent characters, so very few videogames normalize gratuitous aggression (and generally, those that do it, do it in a very self-conscious, self-mockery tone). They do however normalise the answer of violence with violence, and this may be very well linked to specific social trends. You can argue that they also normalize some specific economic models (accumulation, and investment-return cycles, you asically can't have a game without these nowadays and players are frustrated without a "sense of progression", even if it's just the gun and the monsters both looking bigger), and historical models (look at how similar all societies are, even the more exotic ones, in terms of economic/political structures, in management games, as if one kind of organisation was natural, universal and intemporal...

The relations of genders, the "role" of gendered people, are one aspect of that : the role of the woman is to be visually sexy and to be a general commodity (stolen, given as a reward, etc), the role of the man is to be efficient and to earn access to the pinup. It is not specific to games, it's part of our culture, from tv series to action movies and even classic damsel-in-distress tales. And it has always played a role in (or reflected a reality of) our socity, its gender expectations, role attribution, work management, etc. We are now in a time where we can't be naive anymore about these things. We became more self-aware, and the ridicule of it is becoming blatant. Our traditional tales, their traditional structures and imageries, are becoming a bit embarrassing. Old James Bond movies may be lovely, but their sexism is now facepalm-inducing, or just funny in retrospect. We're evolving out of that. And we stress out the bits of pièces that we've inherited to that era, and that are becoming increasingly outdated and ridiculous, even when we're still used to them - so much that we don't always spot them without changing our angle of vision.

It's not more complicated than that. No tale, no fiction (interactive or not) will ever be neutral - they will always represent a world Outlook, if just a reflection of the culture it was produced in. All tales and fictions carry implicit values. All can be criticized for that. Any movie or game can be analysed in these terms. It is a good thing that videogames -a powerful media- get the same kind of analysis as books and movies, in terms of described worlds.

Now, do with that whatever you want. But sexism, just like racism, just like any echo of any author's worldview, is fair game for critique. What is up to you is to decide what is important to you or not, but denial is not a valid way. I do enjoy a lot of fictions that are sexist and/or racist and/or homophobic, etc. I know they have these flaws, and I appreciate qualities that compensate them. And I distancise myself from these flaws instead of endorsing them or denying them. And yes, I do appreciate postmodern stories that do avoid these tropes, and make our norms progress a bit.

Is that such a big problem, warranting such rants ?