So far, here is what I have gathered from this series. Women in games cannot or should not: wear makeup, wear bows, wear jewelry, wear pink, be endowed, have eyelashes, be the only female, be rescued, be helped, or bare even a remote resemblence to a male character. Otherwise it violates a trope, and that character is therefore offensive.
No, I'd say that's not really the point at all.
It's when these things form the totality of a character that it's a problem.
So far, here is what I have gathered from this series. Women in games cannot or should not: wear makeup, wear bows, wear jewelry, wear pink, be endowed, have eyelashes, be the only female, be rescued, be helped, or bare even a remote resemblence to a male character. Otherwise it violates a trope, and that character is therefore offensive.
No, I'd say that's not really the point at all.
It's when these things form the totality of a character that it's a problem.
But that's the problem. Several of the examples she gave don't have this as their totality.
So far, here is what I have gathered from this series. Women in games cannot or should not: wear makeup, wear bows, wear jewelry, wear pink, be endowed, have eyelashes, be the only female, be rescued, be helped, or bare even a remote resemblence to a male character. Otherwise it violates a trope, and that character is therefore offensive.
No, I'd say that's not really the point at all.
It's when these things form the totality of a character that it's a problem.
But that's the problem. Several of the examples she gave don't have this as their totality.
Perhaps, but I don't think the takeaway from this should be to focus too strongly on specific examples. (FWIW, I think Dixie Kong is a fine character.) The point is the ubiquity of the overall trend.
I understand, and I agree. I also think some of her examples (particularly Ms. Pac-Man and Bowser's sole daughter) are perfect representations of problematic female depictions, and I appreciate that she also notes characters where these issues occur. But there are times where she focuses too much on a single aspect of a character that I feel should be given a pass because it feels like she is criticizing any depiction of such trends.
I mostly agree with Ack here. She tries to use examples to help define these tropes or issues. But when the examples she uses don't really follow the trope she is trying to define it really hurts her argument. It is also as if she hasn't even played some of the games she is discussing and is using a wiki, review, or game footage as her basis. She narrowly picks the parts to support her argument while ignoring those that don't.
Last edited by Jmustang1968 on Tue Nov 19, 2013 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Jmustang1968 wrote:I mostly agree with Ack here. She tries to use examples to help define these tropes or issues. But when the examples she uses don't really follow the trope she is trying to define it really hurts her argument. It is also as if she hasn't even played some of the games she is discussing and is using a wiki, review, or game footage as her basis. She narrowly picks the parts tonsupport her argument while ignoring those that don't.
I agree that greater depth on fewer ideas would help - but a video series is hard to do that with given the nature of the medium and the general audience expectations. I applaud her efforts to call attention to some of these ideas, but every time I watch one of these I can't help but think that the arguments she's presenting would come together much better in essay form.
To me, these videos are interesting primarily as an experiment in how to translate feminist scholarship as it pertains to games into online video form. In some cases she's succeeded in doing that well, in others the limitations and trappings of the medium have been tough to overcome. Nonetheless, I am myself very interested in working on projects that bring academic theory and criticism into contact with a wider audience, and her approach is nothing if not intriguing.
It's very hard for me to get over the fact that she's not an eloquent person because her poor communication skills are the source of many of her problems. For example, it seems the reason she focuses so much on examples because she thinks that if she points things hard enough everyone will agree. How are we not going to? Isn't it obvious?
The second issue (and this one is the most important) is that she attempts to judge individual works by general trends, which not only doesn't work, but is heavily disrespectful towards the artists and the works. For example, she makes no distinction between a straight play of a trope or a satire of it, finding both equally disrespectful, because to her what matters is the general trend, not the indiviual.
This arises from her second wave feminism, which was pretty noticiable in other videos of hers I saw some time ago and explains her sex-negativity and heavy focus on society instead of women as indiviuals.
Bayonetta is a great example of this. Sarkeesian thinks it's a horrible sexist character because in her mind she promotes the idea that women are only sexual beings, that they are not equals to men and that it adds to the trend of women being seeng badly.
To her this is more important than Bayonetta's designer being a woman herself and being, pretty much the character herself, equality for women is more important to her than freedom. She sees a forest, not a group of trees.
Hence her idea that you shouldn't focus on the specific examples too much, because what matters is "the trend". She doesn't think the indiviual game matters, she doesn't care about the artistical visions contained therein because to her what matters is the "general sense", "the trend", how women are treated in "gaming" as a whole.
Gaming to her is a sociological construct, not an art form.
I don't think I explained myself well but this is basically another "society vs the individual" debate.
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There's a library/public use space near my house and for a long time the toilets were marked by a square-wearing stick figure to represent men and a triangle-wearing stick figure to represent women.
Feminist found this sexist, hey being a woman is not about wearing a skirt!
So they protested and decided to replace it. No more skirits! Now the woman also wears a square and to mark the difference they decided to use...pigtails.
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