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Anita Sarkeesian’s First ‘Tropes vs. Women in Games’ Video May Come Out Next Month

J

Jenga

Banned
cj_iwakura said:
I expect a rational breakdown of tropes in gaming and how they can be improved on and maybe eliminated, like in the Lego video.
Click to expand...
I'm hoping we can see the Lego tropes eliminated once and for all

i'm not just a building or stacking block, im a person
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
prwxv3 said:
Can't wait to lurk /v/ for the shitstorm.
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/v/ can't argue worth shit so they ruined it for everyone as nearly all of their criticisms were steeped in sexist bullshit anyway. If you just want results from Anita you get called a misogynist, and it lowers the quality of discussion for everyone once you get one of those witch hunts started.
 
Z

Zen_Arcade

Banned
Omikaru said:
She started up a Kickstarter, aiming to only get around $6,000 to do some low-budget and low-scope documentaries covering some tropes about women in videogames. Men and women then pledged upwards of $150,000 to her Kickstarter, so she expanded the scope of the series and this subsequently caused a delay. Because of said delay, all the misogynists so desperate for her to fail have come out of the woodwork and accused her of running away with people's cash. Yesterday some people on Reddit kicked up another stink about her not releasing the documentary yet, so I assume that this announcement is in part a reaction to that.

I've never seen any of her previous work, and I never backed her Kickstarter because I was broke at the time, but I'm certainly interested to see her take on the issue. I hope she does a good job.
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Well this is pretty shitty.

While I don't particularly care about the subject I always love seeing people discuss video games and break them down, so I'll give it a shot. Judging by her examples I'm worried the content and quality will be lacking though. She lists the same character multiple times and most of the games listed that came out after the year 2000 are all sequels to games from the 80s and 90s.

If she's just citing examples and analyzing them it might be good, but if she's trying to sway the way gamers think she may have to put up a stronger argument.
 
J

joe2187

Banned
Did she ever get around to interviewing devs and producers?



Whompa said:
8472929_600x338.jpg
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This is off-topic, I dont get the reference, but now I cant see her hand as anything but a foot.
 
M

Margalis

Banned
Platy said:
Most of then are the kind of people that would not understand feminism even if Judith Butler tapdanced on their faces
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I have two criticisms of her work:

1. It's poorly done

2. It's a poor premise

My objections have nothing to do with feminism, whether games are sexist, whatever. Criticizing games through the lens of how many TV Tropes they exhibit is an idiotic concept, especially given that there are roughly a billion tropes on TV Tropes.

What's more her stuff is very poorly reasoned and researched. She gets basic facts wrong and her analysis is extremely surface level. So it's a poor execution of a poor premise - not a great combination.

There are a lot of games where you save the princess. Great.

I'd much rather see for example an in-depth video about the changing portrayal of Samus and Lara Croft and how their newest iterations represent a regression in gender roles, what the critical reaction to their newest outings might say about changing times, etc, than be reminded that hey, in Final Fight you save Jessica just like how in Double Dragon you save...whoever you save in Double Dragon.

At the end of the day I don't get what anyone is supposed to take away from her videos.
 
D

Delusibeta

Banned
BearPawB said:
I hope her videos are of high quality, and actually make reasoned arguments. There is something to how both genders are treated in games, and there is an interesting video series that could be bred from this topic.

I just have zero faith she's the one to be able to do that
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Pretty much. I fully expect a large quantity of people demanding refunds.
 
M

Metal Gear?!

Member
Avallon said:
She goes to Kotaku of all sites? I'm really skeptical of this woman.

Anita Sarkeesian Part 1: The College Graduate
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI

Anita Sarkeesian Part 2: Burqa Beach Party
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpFk5F-S_hI
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Did you really link to Anita Sarkeesian Part 2? I mean Part 1 is just snarking on her grad work which is something every student should go through but learning about "feminism" from Part 2 is akin to learning about Islam from David Horowitz or Bill Maher
 
R

Road of Ease

Member
Zen_Arcade said:
What is this all about? This woman doesn't like how women are represented in games so shes making a series of documentaries about it?
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I think that the point she's trying to make is that there's little variety in how women are represented in games since the target audience focused by game creators is not Everyone, but boys and men. Of course there are exceptions, and you can find more of them currently than in the past, but because games tend to be mostly oriented to men, they tend to use women scarcely.

When they do show up, it's generally in the roles of "goal to be achieved", "sexy bodies to look at/call attention to our game", side-kicks, walking jokes (Super Princess Peach comes to mind) or as women with "positive" (as in, "male") attributes.

Again, that's what I think her point is. And it's a good point to make, in my opinion.
 
O

Omikaru

Member
Echoenigma said:
You don't have to be a mysoginist to ask for some progress after a year of waiting, you realize. You may just not be entirely trustworthy of some random person on kickstarter.
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As cj_iwakura posted, she supposedly does her research and is well-spoken. Presumably she's known for addressing these issues from a feminist perspective, so she's not just "some random person on kickstarter".

Let's also not ignore the fact that she received torrents of abuse from people for even mooting this idea, and the hatred only got stronger as the dollars rolled in. And the tone of many of the people "asking for some progress" has a strong stench of desire for her to fail. I've seen some pretty vile threads on Reddit with a hostile tone towards the project.

I'm not saying everyone asking how progress is going is a misogynist, but there's a lot of them out there, and they're very vocal.

cj_iwakura said:
Here's a good one:

Lego & Gender

She does her research, and is very well spoken.
Click to expand...

Good to see. I'll check it out.
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
Road of Ease said:
I think that the point she's trying to make is that there's little variety in how women are represented in games since the target audience focused by game creators is not Everyone, but boys and men. Of course there are exceptions, and you can find more of them currently than in the past, but because games tend to be mostly oriented to men, they tend to use women scarcely.

When they do show up, it's generally in the roles of "goal to be achieved", "sexy bodies to look at/call attention to our game", side-kicks, walking jokes (Super Princess Peach comes to mind) or as women with "positive" (as in, "male") attributes.

Again, that's what I think her point is. And it's a good point to make, in my opinion.
Click to expand...

...Explain this. I think I know what you're implying, but I want to make sure.
 
J

Jenga

Banned
Delusibeta said:
Pretty much. I fully expect a large quantity of people demanding refunds.
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No, most people made the donation to make a point. Even if she sucks at the video a significant majority won't do anything of the sort.

It'll make some people laugh tho.
 
cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Member
rvy said:
Well, fuck my life it turns out Bayonetta really is a single mother.
Click to expand...

I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume she never got to play the game, just went by hearsay about it, when her real subject was the subway advertisements.

Was that even the whole video? It kind of seemed chopped up, and it was reuploaded by some other account.
 
S

Smash88

Banned
What a joke this whole thing is.

It's a shame so many people were scammed by this, just because she was getting some flak from people on the internet. She used it to get more money, so she is smart in that sense.

But her Ted talk was a complete nutbag presentation.
 
S

sleepykyo

Member
cj_iwakura said:
I expect a rational breakdown of tropes in gaming and how they can be improved on and maybe eliminated, like in the Lego video.
Click to expand...

Although her anger makes it seems like tropes (god, I fucking hate this term) are inherently bad. They aren't. In some of her past videos, she even mentions that overused tropes become cliche.

Tropes are just another word for convention. It is impossible for everything to unconventional.
 
C

Coffee Dog

Banned
Road of Ease said:
You should watch her "Lego and Gender" videos, someone quoted it here. I think she talks about that in part 2. It's a better explanation than I could give, anyway :p
Click to expand...

Well, it's just that quote implies that women shouldn't be embracing male attributes and men shouldn't be embracing feminine attributes, which is frankly a little ignorant.

Edit: I need to leave this thread before it spirals out of control, I am but a junior.
 
S

SolidSnakex

Member
cj_iwakura said:
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume she never got to play the game, just went by hearsay about it, when her real subject was the subway advertisements.

Was that even the whole video? It kind of seemed chopped up, and it was reuploaded by some other account.
Click to expand...

It was reuploaded onto another account because she deleted the original video after people called her out for it. She then edited out those and reported it.
 
G

GrizzNKev

Banned
cj_iwakura said:
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume she never got to play the game, just went by hearsay about it, when her real subject was the subway advertisements.

Was that even the whole video? It kind of seemed chopped up, and it was reuploaded by some other account.
Click to expand...

That was her real original video, which she unlisted due to her getting called out for attempting to criticize a game she clearly hadn't played.

It's also the only full game criticism she ever attempted. I'm sure she saw the potential market based on the amount of attention that video drew, and decided to cash in big time on the internet battle waged over her incredibly lame video.
 
Q

QaaQer

Member
rosaceadude2112 said:
It's cool how her garden variety media criticism earned her a small fortune and let her all but martyr herself to talk about "tropes".
Click to expand...

Actually, it was scary gamer rage that did that. Some people wanted to show their support via kickstarter donations as a reaction against the reaction. You know, like how people donated to this: http://www.forbes.com/sites/anthonykosner/2012/06/21/bullied-school-bus-monitor-video-and-the-paradoxical-public-will-to-make-good/

Many people hate bullies.
 
cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Member
GrizzNKev said:
That was her real original video, which she unlisted due to her getting called out for attempting to criticize a game she clearly hadn't played.

It's also the only full game criticism she ever attempted. I'm sure she saw the potential market based on the amount of attention that video drew, and decided to cash in big time on the internet battle waged over her incredibly lame video.
Click to expand...

I'm hoping she plans to take it seriously this time like she did her other videos on marketing and the media in the past, but I guess we'll see.
 
P

Platy

Member
Margalis said:
My objections have nothing to do with feminism, whether games are sexist, whatever. Criticizing games through the lens of how many TV Tropes they exhibit is an idiotic concept, especially given that there are roughly a billion tropes on TV Tropes.
Click to expand...

Sorry, but this has EVERYTHING to do with feminist.
She is not criticising how those tropes exist, she is criticising how those tropes are INTRINCATE TO THE DEFINITION OF VIDEOGAMES.
Everyone think of Save the World, Get the Girl for videogames .... and it IS a very complicated definition of feminility since it is both a representation of how women are weak and how you can have sex with a girl just doing a good deed to her.

The problem is not troopes existing, is how the ones damaging women are EVERYWHERE

Margalis said:
What's more her stuff is very poorly reasoned and researched. She gets basic facts wrong and her analysis is extremely surface level. So it's a poor execution of a poor premise - not a great combination.

There are a lot of games where you save the princess. Great.

I'd much rather see for example an in-depth video about the changing portrayal of Samus and Lara Croft and how their newest iterations represent a regression in gender roles, what the critical reaction to their newest outings might say about changing times, etc, than be reminded that hey, in Final Fight you save Jessica just like how in Double Dragon you save...whoever you save in Double Dragon.

At the end of the day I don't get what anyone is supposed to take away from her videos.
Click to expand...

I personaly only think the bayoneta one was poorly researched, and she delisted the video from her channel.

And even with that, she is taking that amount of time EXACTLY because with the huge money she and HER TEAM could research every game and the evolutions

You can be pretty sure that the Samus and Lara croft things you talk about WILL BE MENTIONED, just not the first video, wich is focused on the "kidnaping a girl" cliche.

There are others that might fit those ... and in last case the last video is about the positive examples and i'm SURE that Samus and probably lara will be there
 
Sentenza

Sentenza

Member
Maragidyne said:
Haha, I didn't know that. It's even worse than I thought. Still, just because quite a few of her previous videos were reaching, shallow and not really worthwhile pieces of work, I'm still not dismissing her future work immediately. Sure, it does point at the possibility that nothing will have changed, but you never know. We'll see whether she's actually worth listening to with her first new video.
Click to expand...
Just to be clear, I'm talking both as...
1) ...someone who already watched many of her game-related videos before the notorious Kickstarter campaign even started and found some of them reasonably enjoyable.
2) ...someone who spends hours and hours browsing TV Tropes because I find narrative tropes and their analysis highly entertaining.

With these premises in mind, as I said I' don't hate her nor I'm hostile toward what she's trying to do. I just think that she's not as "balanced" as one should be to make these kinds of commentaries and yes, many of her arguments are very, very far-fetched.

Even accepting as a fact that there are many negative representations of women in gaming, TV fiction or any other form of narrative, you can't blame every single fictional woman that doesn't incarnate a positive model to be a "blatant display of misogyny".
What I feel she often seems to miss is that some characters are negative simply because they are supposed to be negative, not because who wrote them hates the opposite sex.
 
R

rvy

Banned
cj_iwakura said:
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and assume she never got to play the game, just went by hearsay about it, when her real subject was the subway advertisements.
Click to expand...

I, too, am going to take a shot in the dark and argue that you shouldn't be reviewing shit you have never even tried in the first place.
 
N

Nert

Member
Minus_Me said:
Is there anything in the modern world I shouldn't feel guilty of partaking in?
Click to expand...

Hint: she isn't calling you or anyone else a bad person for playing video games. She already played and enjoyed video games herself before any of this happened. If that's what you're getting out of this project existing, you're missing the point of it.
 
F

Foffy

Banned
rvy said:
I, too, am going to take a shot in the dark and argue that you shouldn't be reviewing shit you have never even tried in the first place.
Click to expand...

Or research fully. It's like taking things at face value. Granted, she probably spent the last century (in internet time) actually playing games and getting her facts straight. Still reeling people funded something like this in the first place, though. People dive into themes about video games for free all the goddamned time. She made enough from funding to not work for a whole year if she wanted to. Maybe even longer. That's crazy.
 
R

Road of Ease

Member
Echoenigma said:
Well, it's just that quote implies that women shouldn't be embracing male attributes and men shouldn't be embracing feminine attributes, which is frankly a little ignorant.

Edit: I need to leave this thread before it spirals out of control, I am but a junior.
Click to expand...

Well, I can assure you that's not how I feel. In fact, I don't think attributes should even be identified as male or female at all.
 
cj_iwakura

cj_iwakura

Member
CambriaRising said:
Don't nitpick, you know what he meant.
Click to expand...

The subject of the video was about Bayonetta's advertising methods. She just happened to (unwisely) comment on the game before getting into it.


By the by, I've beaten Bayonetta and I love the game, but I can definitely see why she'd feel that way about it.
 
M

Mononoke

Banned
Echoenigma said:
It's because people donated out of a sense of "ending misogyny" rather than realizing they just gave someone 150k to make youtube videos. Her backers are probably going to be angry as fuck if it's anything short of documentary quality.
Click to expand...


In other words: The Reddit Effect.
 
G

GrizzNKev

Banned
Nert said:
Hint: she isn't calling you or anyone else a bad person for playing video games. She already played and enjoyed video games herself before any of this happened. If that's what you're getting out of this project existing, you're missing the point of it.
Click to expand...

According to her twitter she isn't enjoying video games at all.

you know, all the most popular blockbusters from the last decade

that she bought with the donations

because she never played them before
 
S

sleepykyo

Member
Platy said:
There are others that might fit those ... and in last case the last video is about the positive examples and i'm SURE that Samus and probably lara will be there
Click to expand...

Nah, Samus and Lara are going to be under fighting fuck toy. Most likely Jade from Beyond & Good, Faith from Mirror's Edge, possibly the lead from Longest Journey. Maybe new Lara will a bone.
 
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