I think I can succinctly summarize the OPs thoughts, mostly, with my own and that's that I have no problem with feminist, structuralist, or critical theory based evaluations of games, they're media they should be analyzed, my problem is that the gaming press is really bad at it. The gaming press is seldom, if not always unqualified to pursue these critiques, they exercise zero rigor, they're ignorant of the history of these movements, and, well, they're lazy and trying to roll a bunch of competing interests into one review.
With the exception of formal rhetorical criticism like Anita is giving, I agree with you in general. However, there are specific commentators who are great at speaking about this even in their reviews. Danielle over at Polygon is one such example. She has a different perspective from most, and it's been a delight to read her writings and hear her on Idle Thumbs. In general, yes, but there are specific good people to follow if you're interested in reading further on feminism or critical discussions. Another good one is Patricia over at Polygon.
I've spoken a great deal on the website I assist with in regard to Yuko's point about the 'value' of females to gaming, and yes, that's exactly what you are imply here, 'that most people buying games and paying most companies' bills are men.' not only is that factually incorrect, but it is a dismissal by irrelevance. Income does not matter to the discussions, which is why your discussion is poisoned from the start. Especially saying something like this, "Fact is, you're not going to find a lot of ladies who spend enough time (or, more importantly, money) on games to make a dent in traditional "Men first" thinking."
That point can be directly contested by letting developers themselves speak about this. Here's an example from the best game of the year last year. I'm going to quote one of my fellows from another site:
"Neil Druckmann, writer of The Last Of Us, gave a talk about the development of the game's script. It actually started out as something misogynist. The infection in the game only affected women, so you'd basically spend the whole time killing female zombies in brutal ways.
In the speech he directly brings up Anita Sarkeesian's series and the impact it had on him. The end result is that the central character of the story became Ellie, a well-realized teenaged girl and not the middle-aged white male that the game is ostensibly about. He outright says that on TLOU he had a "secret agenda" to make "the coolest non-sexualized female video game protagonist".
Aside from being great from a representational standpoint, this also resulted in maybe the best ending from ANY medium from last year. Giving us something other than a male protagonist with women as window dressing gave us a much better story.
Aside from being the logical and good thing to do, diversity in characters and representation leads to more variety and more interesting stories.
Link to relevant part. Massive spoilers because its a post-mortem: http://youtu.be/Le6qIz7MjSk?t=30m50s
The really good stuff is at 37:30, but the whole thing is worth watching."
Log in to comment