When games have impractically-dressed princesses to save - they're sexist and fulfilling a male fantasy.
When games have scantily-clad vixens cutting people's arms off - they're sexist and fulfilling a male fantasy.
When games have burly, bare-chested men ripping spines out - they're fulfilling a male fantasy...

Let me guess - we should have non-attractive people, dressed in casual attire, performing menial tasks ? Would that be the perfect game ?
I bet there would be people who would find even THIS sexist. Maybe not "Cubicle Farm 2012" but "Omelette maker deluxe" would surely stir up controversy, since the kitchen is even more taboo than the bedroom nowadays...

I say this half-jokingly but the original Half Life is almost like this; a pencil-necked geek dressed in a lab coat who starts out putting up with the administrative BS that comes with working in a large research institution.

Article: "The 5 Most Sexist Games of this Generation":

http://ps3.mmgn.com/Articles/The-5-Most-Sexist-Games-of-this-Generati

Personally, I play games to have fun and a bit of enjoyment. I think a better question than "Why don't games supply moral and political substance?" would be "Why don't parents and schools supply moral and political substance?"

In my culture, at least, everything seems to be reactive. People just let the media/entertainment bandwagon run rampant and then act shocked when it doesn't act like a parent. Why? Because too many people let the culture act like a parent rather than doing it themselves, and then simply react to what they don't like as if "entertainment" has somehow offended them by not providing "proper" messages.

That would actually be a male sexual fantasy in Germany....

I wouldn't call it sexist, but if you claim those are not specifically male fantasies you're in denial (the first two are sexual, the third is just a cheesy power fantasy in my book. ;) ).

Sexist is rather the predominance of typical male fantasies in games and the attitude that this is perfectly normal and catering to every player regardless of gender and/or sexual orientation. I don't really have a problem with some games fulfilling male fantasies, as long as they don't try to deny it, I just don't like that there are so few alternatives to it (and even among it, the "male" fantasies are pretty stereotypical most of the time).


The perfect game would be a game with perfect gameplay. It has nothing to do with being scantily clad or wearing unattractive unisex clothing. Besides, it seems to me you're confusing "sexualized" with "sexy" and "sexy" with "hardly any clothes on". That's a very one-sided oversimplification of the matter. Strong female characters can be very sexy and attractive without having to show their boobs at every occasion.


Good point.

Well the Witcher series stands out as tackling moral and political issues. I think the medium is still evolving, and the stigma that games are for kids is still strong - put volatile subject matter in your game and sales might suffer.

Yes, one of the games in my mind was Duke Nukem and in the article that describes "The 5 Most Sexist Games of this Generation", it tops the list! From the article:

"Duke is a funny character if you don’t take him too seriously. But it’s hard sometimes to not take notice of the way the game crudely treats him or its female characters, or “babes”, almost like everyone is sub-human. Whether it’s subtly, like one scene featuring a strip club with an in-game advertisement for “tampon night”, or the more in-your-face sexism and objectification that Duke Nukem is well known for, such as the slappable wall-boobs, Duke does and has always reeked of some pretty intense sexism and objectification of women. Doesn't matter that it's his signature style; it still is cringe-worthy.

It isn’t just the babes, though. The character of Duke has always been the epitome of male objectification; tall, hyper-muscular, obsessed with and concerned only with sex. Is it possible for a male protagonist to be a hero or a "man" if he’s not testosterone-filled, physically muscular, or otherwise saving "babes" in distress? Duke, doesn't think so. He ain’t got time to bleed anyway."

That article is more banal than the games it's criticizing. In the explanation of Lollipop chainsaw he's too fucking lazy to actually even make a case why the game was sexist, instead saying what amounts to he didn't like it or get engaged in the story. He basically relies on the screenshots to do the work for him and fool the reader into thinking he made point.

Seriously, fuck whoever wrote that. He's handling a social issue badly, like trying to pound in a finishing nail with a sledgehammer. Fucking lazy, pseudo intellectual bullshit spewing piece of garbage article is my review of that stupid waste of time spent reading.
Germany suddenly sounds very foreign to me...

Whoops, sorry, I overlooked your reply!

I hope I already made my point clear in the other post, but just to further clarify, I'm not against sex in videogames, I'm not against attractive looks and not against sexy characters. I just question the disparity between male and female characters when it comes to these topics. Males are cool guys, females are hot! Males are smart, females are seducing! Males are tough, but females have less clothes on! Being cool, tough and smart is sexy, always being hot and seducing and wearing impratically few clothes is sexualized. One shows that this cool male character is also sexy apart from all his other attributes, the other shoves it in your face that being sexy is that female character's main virtue.

Maybe it wouldn't even be that much of an issue if the developers stated "we made a game specifically to cater to the average male's sexual fantasies, if you're not into this, sorry, then this game might not be for you, but there are plenty of games you might find more to your liking". Then that would be similar to your example of the romance novel section in the bookstore, a niche catering to a specific audience. But in games this "niche" is often viewed as mainstream and putting off quite a few females from taking an interest in a lot of games or even in identifying with being a gamer. (Not to speak of those males who can't identify with those cheesy representations of manhood recalling the 80's action movies).

I wouldn't see your example of romance novel as an opposite either, because for me it's just more of the same. Both are catering to a gender-specific audience by using a common denominator of sexiness in males or females, and both are generally more interested in repeating and confirming established gender roles and clichés than in portraying plausible real life characters.

On sexuality: I think I align with Leroux here. It's not that idealizing characters it bad, that's something that happens in every media. It's more that sexualization of female characters has a tendency to go over the top, which is when you get ridiculous stuff like Tera's female armor. I don't mind a sexualized character that's supposed to be seductive, and most media consists of only attractive people (think of what Hollywood considers ugly), my issue is only when the sexualization becomes ridiculously out of place, and you've got tough warriors in chainmail bikinis and such. Conversely, male characters are also idealized, but they tend to lean more towards the "action" spectrum, so an overly idealized male feels less out of place in most games than an overly idealized female.

Don't forget the high heels, that always cracks me up the most. :D


Yeah, possibly I don't get it, but maybe you don't get what I meant to say either, or we just don't agree with each other. In my opinion you're still oversimplifying. The fact that sexism, just like racism, works both ways doesn't disqualify the terms sexism or racism in the least. You're construeing opposites that aren't opposed while ignoring the alternatives. Who actually said that a girl being powerful or a girl being vulnerable is sexist? Who would call a game sexist that featured both powerful male and powerful female characters, and both vulnerable male and female characters, or even both equally sexualized men and women, or best of all a credible mixture of all types of characters?


I don't really get what you're trying to say here either ... What precisely is it that you find so disturbing, even more disturbing than the attitudes you quoted, and why?

I don't think it's true that the perception of gender-based discrimination is one-sided, so far noone has claimed that men are not subject to gender-based discrimination and that it isn't an important topic. We just didn't talk about it. Criticizing discrimination against females doesn't make one a supporter of discrimination against males, and the alternative is not to shut up about female discrimination but to address male discrimination, too, especially if you think it is a serious issue in games. So if you deem the discussion one-sided so far, why not speak your mind about male discrimination? I wouldn't mind discussing it, I actually care enough about male emancipation that I hate to see it abused as a reactionary argument against gender equality.

Reading their discussion about Lollipop Chainsaw reminded me of when I watched the Angry Joe review of that game, mentioning how it just got a "little" pervy in some places...as the video slowed down to highlight how you could see Juliet's maxipad and pubes just under her bikini bottom during one of her attacks.

Obviously. No one is going to make a post saying "men are not subject to gender-based discrimination". It's all about subcontext.

It's sad when ad absurdum fails.
I have nothing of value to add aside from the single intuition that classifying such trivial nonsense as discriminatory or sexist is absurd. Stories exist within certain conventions and I'd be willing to bet that it would be hard if not impossible to create a story (much less a game) that no person would find bigoted / racist / sexist / etc. if they truly tried and used such amazing criteria as people do in this thread. Does this mean that Link saving Zelda is an anachnonistic relic of times before equal rights were respected as they are today, in our wonderful, uniform societies ? Is Diablo a satanic game ? Is it racist to have black zombies in a game ?
Do not attempt to answer the above questions before considering this: what if there are no answers, because the questions themselves are improperly asked and only appear to make sense while, in reality, they don't ? To tell stories we use archetypes, conventions, figures of speech. They can be interpreted in a multitude of ways and "as discrimination" is by far one of the silliest ones. Just because you have princesses to be saved, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's a statement about women, their place within our world, nothing of this sort. Black cats and four-leafed clovers convey messages in a similar way and you can continue to argue that I'm pointing out even more bigotry and it doesn't discredit the previous examples... except that it does, for I can keep enumerating the metaphors and connections commonly used until no stories at all are possible and if you don't stop me - soon everything will be intolerant, wrong and discriminatory. Language will cease to function, for crying out loud.
Some closing thoughts:
1. "Being a woman" is a goddamn construct. If we're dealing with a story or a game, it literally is a matter of few lines of text or code.
2. Every world has its own conditions, social mores, rules on what is "normal" and what is not. We can't project our own on the story more that vice versa and we have to adjust for the differences if we are to compare them in any way.
3. You can create a world where gender is pretty much a randomly assigned attribute of no practical consequence. I've been a Game Master of such a world myself and still think that it's no necessarily "the way to go".
4. If you DO decide to differentiate between genders... it's almost inevitable that someone will come along and claim that the world is sexist.
5. You know what ? Screw that. I like my bigoted little games, my bigoted little characters and my unrealistic depictions of hyperdrives, Mutalisks, Predators, demons, cleavaged armor, potions which cure broken ribs, anti-gravitic bras, badass one-liners and suicidal courage. I like them because I don't treat them as philosophical treatises on reality but wonderous what-ifs that satiate my imagination. I will protest if a world is build upon internal contradictions, I will not if it contradicts my silly preconceptions on what our world is like. I WANT it to be different.
6. If anything - stripperific games lend themselves to better cosplay.