Giant Bomb Presents: The Bumpy Road Towards Games for Everyone

@tonetta777: Actually, I find those statements just as bad as the black friend analogy. Again, opinions. Japan actually has a lot of different games for women or men specifically, they even have sex appeal for women in many male protagonists. We're differing from the point of discussion entirely now, but I also heavily disagree that we need either "cis white male scum" or "beautiful trans" characters, I don't think it matters as long as the story is good! If people want those experiences, all power to them and it'd be foolish to avoid that market. But the level of harassment and bullying that takes place because a game offends people's subjective morals is nearly as depressing to me as any of the accused phobias laid upon game publishers. It's one thing to have a positive influence, making your own game or supporting those you like, but having a persecution complex because games have straight white males, and clearly that is "problematic," makes me want to quit this hobby.

Uh, then I don't know what to say. You're offended by somebody being offended by state institionalized inequality, and I guess.....that's that?

If you think representation of female identity is making the male characters sexy, then you're already way off on the wrong foot. What does that have to do with the topic at all? The conversation of the majority of the medium being dominated by white hetero cis-males isn't digressing by the way, it's the entire point of this dump truck interview.

It's already immediately apparent in your choice of words that you are either obfuscating the point here, or aren't understanding it. Nobody is saying that heteronormative white characters are somehow inherently bad and that by default anything that deviates uniquely from that norm is inherently good. The point is that it would be beneficial to the medium in its entirety to start exploring outside the comfort zone of "WHITE DUDE SPACE MARINE 1" for every character we create in a story, because the medium is completely over-saturated with a single archetype of character: straight white dude needs to rescue straight white woman and save humanity because of reasons. That is only so interesting and engaging as motivation for so long. Moving outside of that realm of character type would start to cause steam to pick up and developing the narrative that everybody says they want, which is for video games to become a more mature medium that garners more serious respect and criticism. You're not going to get that when 99.9% of your stories that are available to critically examine are just extremely slight variations on the Hero's Tale starring generic white character.

Secondly, your insistence that there is no need to proactively pursue such character diversity has been demonstrated to be false in multiple other forms of media before. Do you know what happens when people of different backgrounds are included in a story simply because the market demand finally reaches a point where it is large enough to influence a company to decide it's of enough potential profit to do so? You get things like George Lucas casting Samuel Jackson in an underwritten role in order to rake in more tickets from a particular demographic simply because focus testing done by the film executives show that they aren't earning enough from the "african-american market". Or you get entire decades of the type of pandering that you and others in this thread say they don't want. That's when the real senseless and cringe-worthy pandering comes into play, and all that will happen is you will have gays and transgender people being objectified on screen in order to drive sales in the same exact way women are objectified as sex puppets in a large sample of the medium in order to generate more profit. So no, it isn't just a matter of "well if people want it obviously they'll get it". Because a lot of people already want it. Enough for their to be plenty of material written on the subject and for a group of people to form their own PAX panel regarding it.

Lastly, you are aware that it's not a 'persecution complex' when you're talking about an actual persecuted minority, correct? I mean, it isn't some sort of fabricated ordeal. The overwhelming majority of congressmen, presidents, and senators have been straight white christian dudes, you can't tell me there is no existing pattern there. To use your earlier logic of 'demand drives progress', am I to infer that you take this to mean that there simply is not enough demand for african-american/gay/muslim/diabled/transgender political representation? After several hundred years of white patriarchy dominating over politics, economy, culture and media, its extremely evident that it has nothing to do with white dudes being the only ones who want to be involved in these arenas.

There are plenty of valid reasons for people to have considerably strong emotional attachments to a conversation such as this, and to label it as mere whining is inconsiderate and privileged behavior. How in the world does it personally affect YOU when people voice the opinions they have regarding the topic? Why would you believe your right to play video games without hearing others' opinions of them is somehow more of a priority than said persons' right to express those opinions?

@tonetta777: I simply don't think video games persecute minorities just by having normal white males in the protagonist role. If there was a market for a black trans otherkin protagonist, we'd have that game, or maybe it's in production, but games with female protagonists tend to sell worse. It's fallacious to argue we need something new on the sole basis that it's new, there is no real benefit to diversity in entertainment, leave it up to the financiers and creators to decide. That is why it should be financially beneficial, because making changes to your game based on one vocal minority's demands is wrong. Let the creators freely express themselves.

I'm not bothering to reply to your insane political ramblings, give me a break.

@tonetta777: In point of fact I did not confuse the two types of 'strong.' Bayonetta is confident, sure, and completely in control of her sexuality. Further any scene with both her and 'cheshire' it very clear who is in control. To say nothing of the whole premise of the game (the men tie with angels and are evil megalomaniac assholes while the women tie with demons and are misunderstood protectors of humanity who pay an ultimate price for their selflessness.) If you're willing to say that sex and sexuality are not inherently a negative traits she's an excellent character with plenty of backstory/history/etc. characterized in a distinctly feminine way and the premise of the whole game is hilariously pro-female.

Still you seem to already be having some serious problems with argument here. I see a lot of "If you disagree with me, you're either lying or don't understand" an outlook which makes for incredibly poor debate and problem solving. (To say nothing of actual benefit to your cause, I don't think you know how many people you're losing... 'bleeding sexily?' isn't the sort of thing people swallow without a raised eyebrow.)

It would be worth taking another look at your views on japan too. I notice even when you were typecasting them for anime you didn't mention the highly esteemed Studio Ghibli's raft of well characterized (since you dislike the term strong) female protagonists with hardly a sexual appeal in sight. Someone also pointed out Otome/Yaoi/Bishonen games are very strong female appeals with almost entirely female and gay fan bases. All stuff very unique to japan.

I dunno, I'd love to have a good talk about the merits of sexuality in games and Bayonetta's character in specific or about how Japan is miles ahead of America in terms of appealing to smaller audiences. Still, It seems like the best thing you can do for your argument is to take a deep breath and pick over your views and find the reasons why you believe them and how you can show that to an impartial third party, because it seems like you're having trouble getting your message across.

She lost me the second she said "hetero-normative."

You honestly expect me to repackage my calmly explained, rational argument in order to please anybody else when you have people saying things in this comment section like saMANtha and this?

Oh boy how did i miss this...

If you want anyone to listen and respect you, yeah, kinda. If you're just shouting for your own sake it doesn't matter, but if you actually want to connect, educate or make a difference for the cause you believe in you have to do your best to understand the other side and how they feel.

The problem lies within the fact that it isn't the obligation of a marginalized minority to educate a privileged person, as so many people in this thread seem to believe. The biggest objectors to the progress of social justice are always the moderates who think they're not prejudiced, but alas, actions speak louder than words. Those who honestly give more than one sub-atomic particle of a fuck about the rights and dignity of other human beings tend to educate themselves on what issues are present within said community as opposed to coming to a marginalized people and demand that they do the research for them and lay the information at their feet, forming a cleanly stated case why that group should have rights in the first place.You don't have to read much further than MLK's stance on the white moderates during the civil rights movement to see exactly what I mean.

If you were a white guy living in 1950 and you walked into a room full of African-American individuals and demanded they explain to you why they deserve equal rights, how many of them do you think would provide an answer in the form of a baseball bat to your cranium?

Sure it isn't the obligation but if you want to make any headway in winning hearts and minds with your arguments it's a pretty good move. If you're going to jump into a discussion and have no interest with engaging the opposing viewpoint in a fair way, you're just a hindrance to any progress that would be made.


Keep in mind without clarification your arguments appear to include that Japan is a fundamentally homophobic xenophobic area that literally (since you say you've used no hyperbole) exports media of complete female subservience, you've addressed no one calling out counter examples (such as pretty much every studio ghibi film) refuse to give any sort of data other then other analogies and anecdotal items of questionable merit (meryl 'bleeding sexily' when shot is not something that can stand on it's own through 'common sense')

proceeding then to make another "if you're a good person you'll already believe what I believe" isn't doing you any favors, especially since you're not actually arguing something like racism or sexism, you're arguing incredibly specific societal effects from a very particular type of media. That's not something that happens without some good data and good backup. Then backing it up saying an entire country is fundamentally sexist with sexist laws while not giving any sort of indication you've actually lived or interacted with said laws or culture.

I don't have a particular horse in this race, but I thought it would be polite of me to point out how you're losing a great many people and likely pushing people away from your own perspective with your more and more extreme accusations and hostile tone.

Finishing your post with a 'you're lucky you don't get beaten with a baseball bat' analogy when I did so is not exactly the most winning finisher to get people on your side, and if you don't want or care if people are on your side, why are you jumping into a discussion?

Could you please make the intro music louder? The massive difference between the painfully loud intro music and the whisper quiet podcast audio only caused my ears to bleed for a few hours.

I'm a little nervous just reading this comment section.