Earthpainting
Member
I'm pretty weirded out by the volume of sex workers in open world, and wonder why this has become a thing. I guess the pattern is crime-ridden and impoverished settings. Regarding the larger subject as a whole, I'm not sure how I'd tackle this subject myself. Some of her points become a bit tricky.
The active participant in voyeurism angle was pretty interesting. It's true that when you give control of your camera, the camera direction becomes the player's responsibility. The only other time I've heard it brought up was when Ueda was defending his decision to not have a female character in The Last Guardian. He did not want to give people the opportunity to let people look under the characters' skirt (because obviously a female character would have one), so that was an argument against making it a girl. It's one of those things where developers do not consciously make and give you the tools to oggle, since they exist to facilitate other elements, but they are available nonetheless. It's a silly thing to maybe bring up, but it's one of those things that is unique to the medium.
On the matter of the objectification and especially violence against NPCs, things get difficult for me. Violence is pretty much the primary method of interaction in video games. When the violence is framed specifically around sex workers, things clearly get a strong misogynistic slant, but this is a side-effect of the abstraction of NPC-based mechanics. NPCs in large games literally are generic game objects, categorised in types, with slight modifiers to make them look less cloned. That is how they often still are in games with a smaller, more intimate scope. Most of their behaviour and interactions are inherited from a generic base "NPC" character, regardless of gender, race or anything. If it is humanoid, chances are their available methods of deaths, and their posthumous spoils will be the same.
I understand that violence against women has a history, and should be treated with a bit more respect. However unless she's specifically talking about violence against sexualised game characters, I'm not sure how we can sidestep this. I'm not a supporter of excluding female characters from combat or certain mechanics. One of the bigger UK developers was and still is struggling with this subject. They opted to not include any female low-level enemies because of this, which quite a few developers were disappointed by. As gross as it may sound, I think it may be good on a grander scale to accept generic low-level enemies.
The active participant in voyeurism angle was pretty interesting. It's true that when you give control of your camera, the camera direction becomes the player's responsibility. The only other time I've heard it brought up was when Ueda was defending his decision to not have a female character in The Last Guardian. He did not want to give people the opportunity to let people look under the characters' skirt (because obviously a female character would have one), so that was an argument against making it a girl. It's one of those things where developers do not consciously make and give you the tools to oggle, since they exist to facilitate other elements, but they are available nonetheless. It's a silly thing to maybe bring up, but it's one of those things that is unique to the medium.
On the matter of the objectification and especially violence against NPCs, things get difficult for me. Violence is pretty much the primary method of interaction in video games. When the violence is framed specifically around sex workers, things clearly get a strong misogynistic slant, but this is a side-effect of the abstraction of NPC-based mechanics. NPCs in large games literally are generic game objects, categorised in types, with slight modifiers to make them look less cloned. That is how they often still are in games with a smaller, more intimate scope. Most of their behaviour and interactions are inherited from a generic base "NPC" character, regardless of gender, race or anything. If it is humanoid, chances are their available methods of deaths, and their posthumous spoils will be the same.
I understand that violence against women has a history, and should be treated with a bit more respect. However unless she's specifically talking about violence against sexualised game characters, I'm not sure how we can sidestep this. I'm not a supporter of excluding female characters from combat or certain mechanics. One of the bigger UK developers was and still is struggling with this subject. They opted to not include any female low-level enemies because of this, which quite a few developers were disappointed by. As gross as it may sound, I think it may be good on a grander scale to accept generic low-level enemies.