Everyone can talk about anything. As long as people are receptive of opinions other than their own, especially if they do not have direct knowledge of the specific subject. It only bothers me when people who would have no idea tell me that my experiences are wrong because they just don't agree with it even if they have no direct experience themselves.
And it has even happened in this thread, yeah. Spanish people have a saying: "la ignorancia es atrevida" (ignorance is bold).
Anyway, there are a lot of scenes or art where a female character is directly sexy-posing for the viewer or winking at the viewer or whatever. But that is not true of male characters. Like, would it be acceptable in the current gaming community if there was a lot more of
this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmfaQFh-tvo) kind of thing?
I wouldn't have any problem with something like that (BTW, Gackt is awesome), and some DMC games have Dante (the player's projection) do similar stuff (for an hypothetic female/gay audience, not necessarily the player), which is actually kind of cool. There's a couple of times in DMC4 when I found it forced and embarrassing, but mostly for the insanely cheesy/juvenile dialog that I think anyone would find pretty sad too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNYeNz4nHaM
Then again, DMC4 sexed up like crazy all of their characters, including Lady, one of my favorite DMC characters who was given the standard "raise cup by two sizes, open zipper to half body" treatment from 3 to 4, and reduced from one of the most interesting and nuanced DMC characters to pretty much a wallflower. They even gave her shades to hide one of her most striking and defining features, heterochromia. :/
So if people truly believe sexuality should stay,
Well, that's part of the discussion, really. I don't think anything is decided (nor, probably, will ever be) about whether sexualization is a good tool to use, or a crutch. I myself have no opinion either way yet. This is not the same as sexuality, by the way, which I do think is a healthy component of many well-written characters and stories.
I rather think it's more like people have given up on the industry ever dialing down by itself the rampant sexualization of women (since demand will always be there), and, rather than advocate censorship (which is almost by definition always evil), they wish to balance the scales by adding male sexualization, which is all but nonexistent currently. I can't help but think it's only fair, and worst case scenario, if some males do truly find it offensive, perhaps this will help them rethink about the whole subject at large.
then it means the sexualisation of men should dramatically increase. Right now women are just more sexualised than men and so that imbalance can be attributed to sexism by some people. It's probably because most developers are straight men and probably aren't comfortable sexualising men (or don't even know how to). I'm not sure how that can be fixed.
I actually think the problem is more with the publishers than developers, which I address below. This is also why I think self-publishing, the indie scene, Kickstarter and such might end up being great factors to at least start changing several of these issues.
The solution's simple. We need to get more women and gay males into game design positions, and publishers need to greenlight characters/games that target these audiences. The hard part is actually implementing that.
Completely agreed; also, games that truly target both audiences (not a "default male" audience like it is now). And there IS stuff we can do. We can start by supporting games with a large percentage of women in the design team. The one game I've played most and loved from summer 2012 is Guild Wars 2, and at least their lead lore designer, as well as several other designers, are female:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXORsebPy80
Unsurprisingly, Guild Wars 2 is rather egalitarian for an MMO, with default female bodies being pretty "normal", a much smaller than usual percentage of armors being more revealing on females than males, and the ability to make guys that don't look like Conan rejects (here's my two humans):
There are more games designed by women. If I remember correctly one of the key people that designed Portal was a woman, and lo and behold, the main character is a strong, independent, non-sexualized woman who's not the love interest of anyone (even if arguably her gender is mostly irrelevant to the game's plot).
Also, get the word out. Each time someone says that games are targetted at males because that's what sells, remind them that
47% of all games are female!
