White Privilege

I've personally found that the primary reason that girls don't play games isn't other girls judging them, but rather the men in the gaming community. Seriously, the minute you tell someone you're a woman, you're immediately either sexually harassed, or insulted as "only playing to impress your some guy." Usually both. The gaming community is highly sexist, and this contributes heavily to why women avoid competitive, multiplayer games. (I'm not a woman, this is all based on testimonials I've read, and some fairly high-profile incidents.)

edited 29th Apr '12 11:40:54 PM by setnakhte

Ok, so some gamers are idiots, and they drive off any women who might want to participate. All communities have their jerks, and if women get turned off gaming by them, there's nothing we can do.

And it just occurred to me that maybe having a female lead causes too much drama. A male lead is just a guy, but a female lead is a role model, and has to be perfect, or she is a bad role model. If she happens to be a black female and she makes any mistakes, a lot of feminists will try to cut your head off for that. Or, god forbid, what if your protagonist likes dresses and makeup and boys? The horror! Having a female lead is like walking into a minefield. Look at all the comparisons between the Princess and the Frog and Tangled.

I think you're straw-manning feminism a bit.

I think he's being sarcastic, or at least I hope he is. "All communities have their jerks, there's nothing we can do". Indeed.

The perfect solution fallacy is omnipresent on the internet.

The whole 'women must be perfect role models' is just as sexist in its own way as having women only as eye candy. Both approaches make the character FEMALE first and foremost, and a person second.

There's a particular fallacy that's not omnipresent on the Net?

edited 29th Apr '12 11:58:35 PM by IraTheSquire

I think that the reason that that attitude exists is because there are so few female protagonist who aren't just eye candy that we feel the need to make sure that every one of them must be a shining paragon of human virtue. Which is a boring character-type, which means fewer female protagonists, which means... Sooner or later somebody is going to have to break the chain and create a successful work with a realistically flawed female protagonist. If this actually happens from a major studio I will eat my shoe.

e: now that I think about it... no.

edited 30th Apr '12 12:03:56 AM by setnakhte

IF we're going by testimonials, I don't think that many women relate well to the "role models" they get in video games.

The whole tough as nails/never wears pink or takes interest in men/just one of the guys thing doesn't describe any of the women I know in real life at all, even the ones who play video games (all of them). It doesn't surprise me if they don't relate to these supposedly feminist characters at all.

I think it stems mostly from the stupid idea that women needs role models in their media, like they're students that need to be educated on the feminist-approved way to be a woman.

I think one of the reasons Ada Wong is such a great character is that she doesn't come off as a man wearing a woman suit.

edited 30th Apr '12 12:03:01 AM by Sarkastique

I believe that if you make a game that doesn't cater to men, it doesn't mean your game flops. The Sims is the perfect example of a game that wasn't designed specifically for men and around 50% of the gamer base for it is female. So, perception is just plain wrong in this case. You make a game that appeals to both genders, then you'll get customers of both genders.

So yeah it does matter a lot if you choose to put your money into sexist movies, it does matter if in normal conversation you engage in racist/sexist/whatever jokes because you actually laugh at the racism/sexism/whatever. There's a big difference to being politically incorrect with friends of various ethnic groups in a friendly manner, and sprouting racist remarks in a white crowd because you think it's okay to belittle an ethnic group that you are not a part of.

Society is going to be what you make of it. While I think the solution generally lies in a multicultural education program, much like Canada has done over the years to soften the blow of racism, you also need to tackle the built up economic problems. Yeah, okay, so whiteness isn't the factor in determining whether you get let down by society. So we tackle all the factors. A discussion of so-called white privilege is not a discussion about how we should beat down white people, it's an exploration of one of the aspects of society in which one group gains an unfair advantage over another.

So we should tackle racism, we should tackle sexism, we should tackle poverty... the point is to come up with solutions, not excuses.

No sarcasm here, sorry. There isn't anything we can do, besides ban everyone who makes a sexist comment. We can't do that though, so do you have another solution?

I'd love to say I'm straw manning feminists, but unfortunately these debates spring up everywhere. Look at the Legend of Korra. Some debates are raging over whether Korra is white or colored, and how rare it is for Korra to be a colored female role model. If you were a writer, would you want to stick your foot in that mess? A male with weakness is a flawed character, but for some reason a female protagonist with faults is weak and a bad role model. I've seen it too many times.

Why not? I've heard of servers that bans people for making racist comments. Forums (including this one) thump and ban users for making racist/hateful comments. We even have laws against speech that incites violence or ruins other people's reputation. Give players some kind of notice that such behaviour will result in banning when they log onto the server, and when they do it ban them.

It's my server, if you want to play in it you follow my rules.

edited 30th Apr '12 12:10:33 AM by IraTheSquire

It's because, unfortunately, there aren't enough characters like Korra (seriously, how many other non-white female protagonists are there in fiction?). The more we get, the less anyone will care.

edited 30th Apr '12 12:10:50 AM by Autumncomet

Cho Chang is one that I can think of, but she's not really a main character.

@Ira

Sure, but can we monitor every person on Co D multiplayer? Every World Of Warcraft player? If we ban them after they drive someone off, we still won't get that person back.

@Autumncomet

I know, but placing such importance on her gender and race kind of diminishes both. Instead of being a strong, violent and aggressive but well meaning character, she becomes a strong, violent and aggressive but well meaning colored female. It defines her, when I thought the whole point of the Civil Rights and Feminist movements was that people are all just people. If race doesn't matter, why do we make such a big deal about it?

Well, the catch is that people wouldn't put so much importance on her color and gender if there were more like her in fiction.

...I think I've broken my brain and it's 3am. Time to sleep.

You're right that if you ban someone who drove another player off, it won't bring the other player back. It will however, discourage other players from engaging in the same behavior. As I said before, your posts in this thread reek of the Perfect Solution fallacy: "The solution is not 100% effective, ergo worthless."

edited 30th Apr '12 12:21:15 AM by setnakhte

I'm all for more variety when it comes to protagonists, but we should't place so much emphasis on it. Women and non whites need to stop being held up as role models. Let the football/tennis players do that. Let's stop treating a female protagonist likes it's some amazingly big deal that should be handled delicately. Let people be people and characters be characters, I say.

@setnakhte

Of course, I would expect every game and forum to be moderated to such standards. But not all of them will, and I personally don't have the power to moderate them, so I think the only option is to tell female gamers to come and hang with another community or have them grow a thicker skin and prove all the trolls wrong. There is nothing else we can do.

edited 30th Apr '12 12:27:37 AM by Palidane

You know, I think we might actually agree on this, and have just been phrasing our arguments so differently we thought the other opposed us.

Beyond Good and Evil

Big-budget video games aren't very good lately to begin with. The Lara Croft types prove both sides of this argument absolutely right, but video game suckage goes well beyond that.

But yes - characters should be characters above all. Taking this role-model tightroping as a serious standard yields bland Captain Siskos at best and, more likely, prevents people from writing female and minority leads at all.

edited 30th Apr '12 3:57:23 AM by DomaDoma

Hey, what was wrong with Sisko?

He wasn't interesting enough to have anything in particular wrong with him. So you see.

And thus, we discover that you have terrible taste in Star Trek captains.

Seriously, Sisko was awesome. Introduced some nice shades of grey to the setting *cough*In the Pale Moonlight*cough*, did a great line in quiet, measured menace, and had a genuinely endearing relationship with his son.

Also, Avery Brooks has a fantastic singing voice.

Quick note to Raven Wild,

You weren't being rude, but it really should go without saying that there is more to disenfranchisement and invisibility of a population group when the dominant members of the country have made a conscious academic and social effort to make sure nobody knows who the smaller group is. It's not just a simple numbers game, and one of the advantages of being part of a privileged group means existing in such a way that numbers are irrelevant to the existence of power for that group. Black South Africans vastly outnumber their white counterparts, but apartheid was installed as a deliberate means of ensuring that power dynamic for that particular minority.

Even after apartheid has been dismantled, that power dynamic has yet to completely fade away. I don't think a young South African who wasn't even alive when apartheid was legislated should be blamed for something like that, but people have an intellectual responsibility to at least acknowledge the severity of these institutions. Likewise, I wouldn't call the Japanese total monsters for their past habits of historical revisionism (Korea and China are still rightfully a little butthurt about that), but there comes a point where you need to own up to something like that to the extent of making sure it doesn't happen again, starting with the textbooks and simple conversations like this one here.

In higher education, I've really found that people shouldn't be expected to memorize every nook and cranny of history. However, I was amazed - and sometimes still am - at how ignorant people are on subjects as relatively common as the French Revolution and the small pox epidemics that hurt native tribes in the US. I won't be surprised if future generations might occasionally forget to remember that, however you want to look at it, Middle Eastern people were "randomly" selected for additional screening at airports.

Going back to my previous example, there are talks that the United States will be a mostly non-white nation by 2050. This doesn't simply mean you're going to magically see Latino CE Os dominating major industries all of a sudden. It just means there will be a majority of non-white members of the population. Likewise when white Americans do become a minority, they're still going to, in all likelihood, hold a majority of the wealth in our country, and that in and of itself is not a problem. What is a problem is what that implies about the economic advantages that have been afforded to this group and how those advantages are going to change over time. African Americans, for example already have massive power in the entertainment industry that has cropped up over the past 30 or 40 years (which is a separate debate by itself), but you'll notice that racism still has a pulse due in no small part to genuine hatred of specific groups rather than the notion that "well, it would just away if people would stop mentioning it". It's more complex than that.

edited 30th Apr '12 5:26:34 AM by Aprilla