What do you think is the most successful video game of all time in Germany? You never gonna get it right! (It's a trick question, because it isn't really a game).

It's Excel.

Germans use it and play it like other people use Solitaire. When we get bored at home (we don't get bored at work. How get you get bored at work?!) We love to open an Excel chart, doing a few tables, making some calculations. Stuff like that. We can even go meta on this. Do our grocery list while playing, due or taxes, balance our budget.

Hence why this concept would pander to our sexual power fantasies.

On more serious note:

Why do strong women always have to be "not-hot". Why is a sexy woman always assumed to be a sexist description. If a women is strong, intelligent and confident, why do good looks somehow make her less of an role model?

If I think of who I want to be, I always envision me as the mind of Immanuel Kant in the body of Paul Ryan. And not in the body of Chris Christy. Does this make me a sexist? Am I trying to achieve less by looking good?

I wonder if this represents a valuable new expansion opportunity for software developers. They could put up a site called GOS - Good Old Spreadsheets, where people could post to forums pontificating for hours about the virtues of Lotus 1-2-3 vs. VisiCalc.

I'll raise you one. I actually admire beauty more than intelligence, or righteousness. For some reason that reminds me of what Oscar Wilde said about "The Picture of Dorian Gray". From memory:

"Lord Henry is who people think I am, Basil Hallward is who I am, and Dorian is who I want to be."

I feel the same. The body of Dorian Gray is enough for me. The mind of Immanuel Kant would be a secondary extra.

I wouldn't dare to question your authority on the customs and sexual fantasies of the Germans, but as for the quote above - is that really the case? Whoever said that strong, intelligent, confident and sexy female characters are sexist? Sounds like a strawman to me. But a very sexy strawman, I must admit. Makes me want to open my favorite Excel sheet and type, rawwwr! ;)


Well, okay, I have to concede that I partly agree with your points - after all it wasn't me who brought up the "sexist" discussion and you kind of drove me into that direction by being so defensive. My personal impression of these kind of threads is that whenever someone mentions the words "sexist" or "feminism" or whatever, some people automatically react defensive and expect a witch hunt, even though it's not about demonizing games and men, but just about being critical and aware. That doesn't even have to hamper the enjoyment of a game that's "not politically correct", "bigoted" or whatever you want to call them.

Personally I neither agree with people who want games to be all political correct and educative and maybe even censor or ban those who aren't, nor do I agree with the notion that it's all just fiction without relation to our world and that noone can be judged by the ideas that they put into a game, or more importantly how they integrate them (there's a difference between a game portraying a 'bigoted' world and a game made by 'bigoted' authors or with a 'bigoted audience in mind).

Anyway, I find both positions equally extreme. If in art everything is allowed, then it should also be allowed to discuss it and have a critical opinion. But what I really meant to say before it turned into discussion about sexism is just that I'd love to see more alternatives to the ever present macho tropes that are so dominant in the industry (because sex sells and young males are still seen as the major target audience) - and by alternatives I mean apart from, not instead of, without wanting to take these "male fantasies" games away from those who enjoy them.

I believe that is a... strawoman @_@.
However - it showcases the problem rather well - an attractive, strong and intelligent female character is OK ? Well - what about merely a strong and attractive one, dumb as a sack of doorknobs ? What about a weak and dumb one which is, nontheless, attractive ?
Which traits are we forbidden to assign to women / other minorities ? Is intelligence IT just because we live in such wisdom-obsessed times ? Is Duke demeaning to men by being portrayed as a dumb, sex-obsessed brute ?

Yeah, that's why I made a last-second edit before posting my comment, as I realized you were merely caught in the crossfire...


I DROVE you into something by being DEFENSIVE ? Well, I guess the best offense is defense ;P.

Nah, I'm not deluded by any expectations of practicality. I have simply had enough cultural philosophy classes to immediately go for the jugular. The damn hard-drinking Native-American dialysis queue blocking guy won't leave me alone ;P.

No, I wasn't trying to suggest that we enjoy them ANYWAY. I was saying that calling them such is ridiculous. DOES NOT MAKE SENSE. That's why I kept piling up absurdities - for people to reach the moment of clarity and ask themselves "wait a minute - what was I thinking ?".
They are not "bigoted games". They merely contain settings which some people may find offensive due to real-life connotations. They are the "blonde jokes" of gaming.

Agreed. On the other hand... There is a reason for it's presence, IMO. If the hero is a warrior, soldier or the setting otherwise entails physical violence... it's only natural that we're dealing with a fit young gentleman ;P. Well - unless he's Gordon Freeman.
Shooters and slashers aside - there's always been plenty of variety, IMO. Wizards, bards and clerics in RPGs, guys like Guybrush Threepwood and Bernard (from Day of the Tentacle) in adventure games, fricken plumbers in platforming... When I'm off to crush some skulls, it only feels appropriate to do it with a guy who looks like he could be capable of doing so.
If you're referring to the ATTITUDE of said character... Well - what do you suggest ? There's not much room for innovation between the postmodern jokester who doesn't take anything seriously and the inspired hero on his way to save the world... Well - then there's Max Payne, of course, though you'd probably discount him as "macho" ;P.

I think a game with one dumb attractive woman in it wouldn't cause much controversy just because of that, it's more the games where every woman is like this, where attractiveness is measured by boob size and where they have names like Bimbo Titbanger. ;)


You mean like KZ Manager is the "racist joke" of gaming, merely containing a setting which some people may find offensive due to real-life connotations but certainly not a racist game created by racists? Interesting, btw, how the English wikipedia article treats it like your average resource management game ...


Or unless you accept your argument that in the game world anything is possible and plausible because it doesn't relate to or make statements about the real world we live in. Maybe in the game world old ladies are fitter than young gentlemen? ;)

Do you have a link to the Kickstart project? I want to fund it. :D

Bah - what you don't know is that this was actually an alien plot to subdue humanity (an otherwise unstoppable force in the galaxy) and after a few stages spent repelling attacks, piecing together clues in order to find a cure and finally, in a daring strike, disabling the pathogen emitters in you home town... the game shifts into the overmap, as you rally the survivors, immunize them, form strike teams and fight back against the alien menace one sector at a time ;P. Who'd want a granny-based strategy game ?

I would totally buy an X-COM game with grannies.

MovieBob kind of nailed this one and I haven't run into any females that disagree, in fact I found lots of gals cosplaying at PAX this last weekend, many in very reveling outfits. Here's the video, 7 minutes, I'd be very interested if anyone actually had a decent argument for disagreeing with it: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/the-big-picture/4719-Gender-Games

That is pretty much the most rational and to the point argument I've ever heard and I encourage everyone to watch it. Also note, not all the women gamers I met at PAX, attractive and otherwise, were straight:)

I'm either extremely uninformed or am about to ask a refreshing question:
WHAT games is this guy talking about ? Disregarding console titles - I'm not a console gamer.
I don't believe I've ever played a game with as "flat" female characters as he has described. Admittedly - what I've played is but a drop in the ocean but there were plenty of strong females there: Elaine in the Monkey Island series, Zoe and April of TLJ, Mona Sax from Max Payne, my female demon hunter from Diablo 3, Julie from Heavy Metal... Hell - say what you will about Bloodrayne's outfits but she's not a vapid ditz either. Where are all the bimboes ? Is Duke Nukem hoarding them in his cellar or something ?
Even if there is a vast list of titles I somehow overlooked, it would still pale in comparison to counterexamples. I'll claim this problem is contrived until someone proves me wrong.

Well, some genres are worse than others (especially fighting games), it's not so much that the women aren't strong as that much of the presented imagery doesn't do anything more than present them as pin-up models.

The examples in the video are pretty good, you can pose people to say something about what they're thinking, something about their character. Randy Emberlin just signed a Batman print of mine a month or two ago, Batman is striding angrily forward, his posture indicates he's resolute, probably controlling his rage, and about to open a can of whoop-ass. It's not that the women in video games don't often have a strong backstory, it's that most presentations of them don't bother to do anything but make them look like they're posing for you, giving you a nice view of their tits or asses.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having some shots be pretty much of that, but when it's the majority, that's a problem. The video didn't go into, beyond briefly mentioning, that women often have far less selection of body types. That's why I'm such a fan of the new Lara Croft, yes, she's attractive, but far more within the realm of a reasonable body type. Still, it's infrequent to have other body types. I met two lesbians at PAX and they could never find women characters in games that had body types with which they were happy. Hell, unless it's a zombie game/movie, you won't find a fat guy as a lead either (seriously, why is this primarily the genre where you can have a bad ass fat dude?).

So it's not so much about the characters as they way they are superficially represented. Fanservice is okay, but if almost all your media and advertising is fanservice then you're being a bit unfair, primarily to women.

Aren't all characters in fighting games, males and females, pin-up models? And isn't that kind of the point? I actually like, say, Street Fighter 4 for providing me with a wide array of visual stunning models for my fights. I absolutely love the beautifully animated characters in that game, and not least of all questionably sexualized ones like Juri.

While I assume I very much agree with your fundamental points, I think it's very, very hard to convincingly criticize beauty standards in the media without sounding like a hypocrite. I mean, I'm such a movie buff, and I will forever praise them as a supreme art form, but there's no denying that they are more responsible for exaggerated beauty standards, especially for women, than any other medium. We're simply more sympathetic towards beautiful women than we are towards ugly men, which is why a movie like Melancholia of course stars someone ridiculously beautiful like Kirsten Dunst. Even someone like Dreyer mostly made movies about beautiful women, though in his case he probably cast eyes, not faces. Let's face it, we all want to see supernaturally beautiful women, best we can do is not be hypocritical about it. Hint, hint, Ingmar Bergman and Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Further thoughts: Video games ridiculously exaggerate reality, that's deeply ingrained into the medium. It's not just beauty, it's ugliness and everything else. To return to the example Street Fighter 4, when a character is fat, he is fat. Think of Rufus. This phenomenon is actually something I like about video games, and probably has, due to its "unnatural nature" much less impact on something like beauty standards than a life action movie. It's the old debate about comical violence all over again, I guess.

The discussion here is pretty much focused on one adjective I happened to use: "Sexist". By using sexist, I also mean one dimensional thought based on sterotypes that disregard any different way of life or thinking; the constructed, established norms of gender roles represented in media. Video games are part of the media, and like movies, newspapers, ads we see similar ways of representation in video games too.

There is a documentary called The Codes of Gender that explores "the normative ideas about masculinity and femininity":

"Written and directed by MEF Executive Director Sut Jhally, The Codes of Gender applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman's groundbreaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape, showing how one of American popular culture's most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity.

In striking visual detail, The Codes of Gender explores Goffman's central claim that gender ideals are the result of ritualized cultural performance, uncovering a remarkable pattern of masculine and feminine displays and poses. It looks beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that focus on biological difference or issues of objectification and beauty, to provide a clear-eyed view of the two-tiered terrain of identity and power relations.

With its sustained focus on how our perceptions of what it means to be a man or a woman get reproduced and reinforced on the level of culture in our everyday lives, The Codes of Gender is certain to inspire discussion and debate across a range of disciplines."

You can watch the doc in Vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/40682960