@yinstarrunner:
I don't think the ultimate goal is to please any one person. She has criticisms, and a creator is free to listen to or disregard them as he or she sees fit.
I think a huge amount of the huff about her is just people not understanding that an academic critique isn't a mandate on high. Every year, tens of thousands of scholars analyze hundreds of thousands of works through hundreds of critical lenses. Hers became particularly visible because she put it online as a video instead of in a peer-reviewed journal, but it's the same thing.
If you disagree with her, you can shrug this off just as easily as you can shrug off some English professor's article on queer themes in The Great Gatsby.
But even if a creator followed her advice, what would happen?
No damsels in distress? A fully-clothed female protagonist? Fleshed out and complex female characters? The dead bodies of women not used as motivation?
None of those things make a bad video game.
@jarmahead:
The attackers from 4chan are real people who hold those real beliefs. A good chunk of Gamergate was largely a mobilization of those beliefs.
And death threats are something that a lot of women in video games have to face and be legitimately concerned with. With the personal information leaks from months ago, it stopped being just an internet thing that we can ignore and pretend doesn't exist. And in a post-Elliot Roger world, you never know when the guy who says he's outside of your apartment with a gun is telling the truth of full of shit.
Log in to comment