Heavy violence actually bothers me and turns my stomach that I don't buy games that have it. I can't even sit through Mortal Kombat around EVO time. I've even gotten uncomfortable and turned off with the amount of blood some indie games will use just to show you impact damage that I don't buy those either. And there are some good games from what I've seen but the heavy blood turns me off.
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Why is video game violence okay, but objectified female characters not?
- Thread starter FinalAres
- Start date
Well...I think partly it is "first world problems." Video games are a luxury product. Most of us playing them don't live particularly violent lives, where it is killed or be killed. We do live lives as sexual creatures though and we do think and care about the women in our lives.
But then you have a place like Japan where this is even more true wrt to lack of violence and there's much less of a conversation about sexual content and a greater tendency towards abstraction of violence.
So idk.
But then you have a place like Japan where this is even more true wrt to lack of violence and there's much less of a conversation about sexual content and a greater tendency towards abstraction of violence.
So idk.
excelsiorlef
Member
I hope you at least had time to read my opening thread that made it clear that I in no way support the objectification of women, and was asking for interests sake, as a devil's advocate.
Last thing the Devil needs is more advocates
I'm really not buying the "violence is critical for the game" argument, it can be said the same about the objectification, like Duke Nukem wouldn't be the same without the strippers.
Since video games are a made up medium, we cannot argue that *anything* is critical to them, things in games are there because developers wanted them there, end of story.
What is interesting is that both violence and objectification do tend to go hand in hand, GTA being the most obvious example.
Since video games are a made up medium, we cannot argue that *anything* is critical to them, things in games are there because developers wanted them there, end of story.
What is interesting is that both violence and objectification do tend to go hand in hand, GTA being the most obvious example.
Glass Shark
Banned
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John Kowalski
Banned
There's also the feeling that i hardly believe peeps are actually looking to where the discussions are happening. You can't expect NeoGAF to be a good measure of what the critical community or the developer community are arguing about, it isn't at all.
Torture is definitely a good parallel. And it's one that does sometimes get pushback in the gaming press when it comes up, even if it's not as much of a hot-button issue as sexism.
I know there was plenty of writing about GTAV's torture mission around its release (though I can't recall specific pieces I found interesting), but the bit of writing I always think of on that subject was Tom Bissel's piece on Grantland about Spec Ops: The Line, which opens with this passage regarding Splinter Cell: Blacklist.
I think, as people have said before, most violence as conflict resolution in games isn't controversial because society has a strong sense of when it is and isn't appropriate, so it's not going to shift attitudes meaningfully (in much the same way that all the casual theft that goes on in games doesn't impact people's attitudes towards stealing). But games, like any other media, can shape our attitudes towards things we're less decided about. In that respect, there are uses of violence that game designers should be very careful about. Torture is one of them. The presentation of modern warfare in military shooters (its targets, its costs, its effectiveness) is another.
In pretty sure every Goomba in Super Mario Bros is an innocent child.
I'm not sure about this, but it does point to an interesting difference. It is much easier to falsify "John played violent game and so John killed people," than it is to falsify "John saw lots of tits and ass and therefore thought of women as tits and ass." The latter is much more nebulous as to what it actually means in the real world. How do you quantify John seeing people as "tits and ass"? How do you draw causality of that back to video games? It is seen as a "softer" science so there is less pressure to show such causality and it is more a matter of "Do you believe that in consuming content of this type, you turn out sexist pigs or not?"
foolishoptimist
Member
Because females play games too.
There's a big difference between the way objectified females make you feel, and how females feel when they see/play the same games.
If there were only a few examples of it, it wouldn't be a problem. But it's extremely prevalent, and often completely unquestioned during development.
JonnyDBrit
Member
Torture I think hits that same mark of lack of necessity, especially in contexts where the torturer isn't actively interrogating a target. Even with 24 and the like, being cruel for cruelty's sake begs the question of why, and so makes people uncomfortable, especially if they're given time to question it.
I think one game that sort of works as an analogy for this point is, funny enough, Hitman, the one from last year at any rate. What makes you a good professional killer - both in terms of moral stance and in performance at the job - is being able to only take what actions are necessary. Killing anyone but the targets - all justified in the games as deserving of death as utter scumbags - is seen as unnecessary, and thus you are marked down for it if you do so. You could run through the game with an absolutely clear conscience.
Also just want to point out that videogames leading to violent acts is different than videogames feeding into a culture of violence, one which, say, America does have problems with.
The latter is also more in line with what people are worried about with objectification. They are worried about videogames feeding into a culture of sexism and objectification.
So I do think they have more in common than people give them credit for.
The latter is also more in line with what people are worried about with objectification. They are worried about videogames feeding into a culture of sexism and objectification.
So I do think they have more in common than people give them credit for.
Funyarinpa
Member
I think it's been explained already that there's a difference between the conventional form of video game violence and the problem of rampant objectification in the gaming industry.
Not all forms of violence are tolerated- look at the backlash Hatred got, for example. You also won't find a plane hijacking videogame or a live bomb simulator (Counter-Strike is an exception as it takes place in areas devoid of life and therefore avoids the pitfall of playing as a person that kills innocent people). The games based on violence usually don't humanize the mobs you kill. Some do this by making zombies or aliens the enemy, most do it by setting in an environment of war where people feel there's no moral quandary in killing hundreds since the other party's out to kill you too, and others disassociate themselves from the gravity of murder by satire or being over the top (GTA or Hotline Miami). So the sort of violence in games (and other mediums!) has been somewhat "neutered" as the industry developed. It's developed an implication that the things you're killing aren't people with feelings and personalities and loved ones waiting off screen and so it's okay. There's also the reason that the American (and overall Western) culture grew to be one to glorify conquest and violence. I know some people critique the prevalence of violence in video games, but many of us have played (and really enjoyed!) a game where the purpose is to KILL- be it robots, aliens, Russians, zombies, or faceless soldiers.
Humans do enjoy killing things in video games- that's just something we live with. So it's normalized. But, as we have obviously seen, this wide enjoyment does not at all translate to real life. People don't condone terrorism or murder because they enjoy going on a murderous rampage in a video game. People have demonstrated that they can separate a game's implications and their real-life conduct, so (rightly) it is allowed.
With objectification though, there's a different ballpark- the OVERWHELMING objectification of female characters in the gaming industry feeds back into how some of its constituents behave. The major concern of people standing up against the objectification of women in video games is that it perpetuates the oppression of women in the real world. The objectified woman characters do not imply that "this character is designed in this pandering way because of the sexuality of the developer"- it implies, instead, that its sexualized depiction of women corresponds to reality.
Objectification of women has failed to create the implication that it simply celebrates the (heterosexual male) sexuality of the developer. That's the major problem here.
Objectification also often makes no sense within the game's context- a bikini should not be able to serve as any sufficient defense against a sword slash but many RPGs have the option. Or a character does nothing but act in a way obviously (and deliberately) designed to titillate the audience. So it hurts the game's story from a critical perspective the way you wouldn't have a character just ranting about -say- snacks all day, or repeating a few clichéd stock phrases. So objectification also hurts video games as a storytelling medium.
The sexist perspectives portrayed in video games DO translate to real-life consequences, in sexual harassment (or worse) and a general disregard for women in the industry as a whole. A great lack of female protagonists and perspectives also causes much of the industry's output (especially AAA) to devolve into dudebro shooters and similar cliche scenarios.
That said, I think that it's still perfectly alright for a game to use objectification and sexualization by itself so long as it doesn't contradict the game's views and messages. Directors and creators have the right to create characters as they wish, which includes creating characters pandering to their sexuality. For example, I have no problem with 2B from NieR Automata especially being designed in a sexualized way because the director Yoko Taro wished it so- it doesn't contradict any theme (as far as I've played of the game), and it's just Taro sharing and embracing his sexuality. I believe it's more important to acknowledge such design as a facet of the creator's sexuality, rather than trying to shoehorn in a reason as to why a female character is designed in a way to appeal to a male audience (a la Quiet). The director's sexuality doesn't lose its merit or importance (or the director's right to share it and shape his work based on it) just because the rest of a game is about some other theme. It might not appeal to the whole audience, but that does not mean it is problematic for the creator to include it. (I used objectification and sexualization interchangeably because some believe that any sexualization immediately means that the creator's misrepresenting women and being sexist.)
I think the solution comes from promoting non-sexualized portrayals of women so that they greatly overtake objectified representation, so that the general impression of women represented in video games is more realistic than today's sexualized rendition.
I think it'd be easier to come to a conclusion if people were talking about characters designed SOLELY to titillate, but I've seen that many people have now also begun to argue that it's problematic to sexualize the DESIGN of a non-sexualized character (see the example of 2B above- people argued that 2B wearing a leotard under a skirt was sexist even though the character herself is characterized extremely well.)
Not all forms of violence are tolerated- look at the backlash Hatred got, for example. You also won't find a plane hijacking videogame or a live bomb simulator (Counter-Strike is an exception as it takes place in areas devoid of life and therefore avoids the pitfall of playing as a person that kills innocent people). The games based on violence usually don't humanize the mobs you kill. Some do this by making zombies or aliens the enemy, most do it by setting in an environment of war where people feel there's no moral quandary in killing hundreds since the other party's out to kill you too, and others disassociate themselves from the gravity of murder by satire or being over the top (GTA or Hotline Miami). So the sort of violence in games (and other mediums!) has been somewhat "neutered" as the industry developed. It's developed an implication that the things you're killing aren't people with feelings and personalities and loved ones waiting off screen and so it's okay. There's also the reason that the American (and overall Western) culture grew to be one to glorify conquest and violence. I know some people critique the prevalence of violence in video games, but many of us have played (and really enjoyed!) a game where the purpose is to KILL- be it robots, aliens, Russians, zombies, or faceless soldiers.
Humans do enjoy killing things in video games- that's just something we live with. So it's normalized. But, as we have obviously seen, this wide enjoyment does not at all translate to real life. People don't condone terrorism or murder because they enjoy going on a murderous rampage in a video game. People have demonstrated that they can separate a game's implications and their real-life conduct, so (rightly) it is allowed.
With objectification though, there's a different ballpark- the OVERWHELMING objectification of female characters in the gaming industry feeds back into how some of its constituents behave. The major concern of people standing up against the objectification of women in video games is that it perpetuates the oppression of women in the real world. The objectified woman characters do not imply that "this character is designed in this pandering way because of the sexuality of the developer"- it implies, instead, that its sexualized depiction of women corresponds to reality.
Objectification of women has failed to create the implication that it simply celebrates the (heterosexual male) sexuality of the developer. That's the major problem here.
Objectification also often makes no sense within the game's context- a bikini should not be able to serve as any sufficient defense against a sword slash but many RPGs have the option. Or a character does nothing but act in a way obviously (and deliberately) designed to titillate the audience. So it hurts the game's story from a critical perspective the way you wouldn't have a character just ranting about -say- snacks all day, or repeating a few clichéd stock phrases. So objectification also hurts video games as a storytelling medium.
The sexist perspectives portrayed in video games DO translate to real-life consequences, in sexual harassment (or worse) and a general disregard for women in the industry as a whole. A great lack of female protagonists and perspectives also causes much of the industry's output (especially AAA) to devolve into dudebro shooters and similar cliche scenarios.
That said, I think that it's still perfectly alright for a game to use objectification and sexualization by itself so long as it doesn't contradict the game's views and messages. Directors and creators have the right to create characters as they wish, which includes creating characters pandering to their sexuality. For example, I have no problem with 2B from NieR Automata especially being designed in a sexualized way because the director Yoko Taro wished it so- it doesn't contradict any theme (as far as I've played of the game), and it's just Taro sharing and embracing his sexuality. I believe it's more important to acknowledge such design as a facet of the creator's sexuality, rather than trying to shoehorn in a reason as to why a female character is designed in a way to appeal to a male audience (a la Quiet). The director's sexuality doesn't lose its merit or importance (or the director's right to share it and shape his work based on it) just because the rest of a game is about some other theme. It might not appeal to the whole audience, but that does not mean it is problematic for the creator to include it. (I used objectification and sexualization interchangeably because some believe that any sexualization immediately means that the creator's misrepresenting women and being sexist.)
I think the solution comes from promoting non-sexualized portrayals of women so that they greatly overtake objectified representation, so that the general impression of women represented in video games is more realistic than today's sexualized rendition.
I think it'd be easier to come to a conclusion if people were talking about characters designed SOLELY to titillate, but I've seen that many people have now also begun to argue that it's problematic to sexualize the DESIGN of a non-sexualized character (see the example of 2B above- people argued that 2B wearing a leotard under a skirt was sexist even though the character herself is characterized extremely well.)
mindatlarge
Member
Personally, I don't love either, but at the same time, it's pretty hard to avoid things of this nature in entertainment, including games. Never been a fan of "fan service" or extreme violence in games, the latter, when not glorified, at least can be important to a story, where the degradation of women really has no baring on story and alienates a portion of fans to boot.
NullPointer
Member
I know this is a joke but....like .. look at the size of your nostrils. Short sleeves would be more than enoght =P
MysteryQuesadilla
Member
I think part of it is if we step back and think about how game mechanics work, the underlying premise of almost any video game is to "defeat" something somehow. That is coupled with games telling stories that the audience finds engaging and well, most interesting stories involve violence we find unacceptable on a day-to-day basis. Now the objectification of women becoming gradually less acceptable to a wider audience is changing tastes and the studios realizing their audience isn't just teenage boys.
EatinOlives
Member
The vast majority of video games prescribe to the Hollywood action movie formula of violence. It's super stylized and not at all realistic.
Rampant objectification of females exists even outside of the games (while still being a part of the industry). There isn't really any industry-wide problem of people being violent, but there certainly is one of people being sexist dickheads.
Rampant objectification of females exists even outside of the games (while still being a part of the industry). There isn't really any industry-wide problem of people being violent, but there certainly is one of people being sexist dickheads.
I don't quite understand, though, why it's obvious that videogame violence does not contribute to real-world violence but that videogame objectification self-evidently contributes to real-world sexism. They seem like parallel lines of argument. It could well be that one connection exists and one does not, but that's a fact that would need to be discovered through unbiased empirical methods. My intuition is that neither has a strong impact on behavior.
I don't think videogames need to cause real-world problems to be badly in need of an overhaul, though. Narrative games have long been unfriendly to women, and the "male gaze" approach to female characters must play a strong role. It should be resisted for that reason alone, for the health of the medium and the happiness of the girls and women who enjoy it.
Honestly, tying the need for gender reform in gaming to big-deal consequences IRL seems like a risky argument to me - if those consequences are shown to be fictitious, the argument falls apart, and if it's merely an unsupported assertion it's easy for troglodytes to dismiss it (as perhaps they should). The argument that the medium needs to cater to more than 50% of the population seems much stronger, to me.
One is a gamemechanic, how you interact with gameworld, the other one isn't.
You can have a shooter without humans, but you can't have a shooter without shooting.
Lionel Richie
Member
Same here. I'm also able to take things in stride and I separate real life from fantasy, so I don't want an accurate representation of the former in the later.
But I am however a bothered by lack of representation of both women as playing characters and racial diversity as a whole. I think we're getting better at that though.
Sexual objectification isn't a fantasy. Its a oppressive reality.
JonnyDBrit
Member
She is a particular case where the objectification so blatantly doesn't match the context of character or circumstance. Doesn't match the character - what little we know of her anyway - as she doesn't really seem the sexually open sort. Doesn't match the circumstance because the level of clothing she wears would be enough to justify some sports wear at least, or otherwise some kind of uniform if very minimal clothing. If they really wanted to go whole hog on the idea she needs as much as her skin exposed as possible in order to breathe, it'd have been easier just to stick her in a cloak and say she was naked underneath it. What the game delivers is a half measure that only works on the presumption that bikinis are sexy, ergo an excuse must be found to have a sniper in a bikini, made only worse by Kojima's insistence that sort of thing wasn't the case.
Mechanized
Member
Playing Devils advocate here; so is war, a very harsh reality that results in millions of deaths. We don't have a problem with that being a video game though.
Funyarinpa
Member
That's also true, that the lack of games trying to appeal to an indiscriminate audience (or explicitly women!) hurts the medium greatly. I agree that that is reason alone. It's just that much of the discussion around the issue still revolves around that.
Even though many people play and enjoy games where you shoot people, we don't see these people condoning murder or shootings- so we can say that people aren't affected in their behavior by video game violence.
Many people also enjoy the objectified depictions of women, and the sheer amount of sexual harassment in the gaming industry is evidence enough that many gamers have a sexism problem in real life. The industry has a problem with sexism as a whole, which contributes to the greater societal problem of sexism itself.
Edit:
Objectification can be in fantasy as well- just a person having sexually fueled fantasies. Just because women are rampantly objectified in society doesn't mean that people can't or shouldn't fantasize about women in a sexual way (within reason and so long as it's relegated to fantasy).
LordKasual
Banned
....nevermind
I'm just going to drop my two cents and say that it's because it's extremely easy to point out that videogame violence is not acceptible in real life. Objectification of women on the other hand is subtle and may not be so easy to distinguish.
case in point, many (if not most) cases of rampant female objectification isn't even done on purpose.
Honestly, my suspicion is that it's simply too hard to extricate violence from gaming. It's the fundamental of almost every major genre - shooters, fighting games, RPGs, action games.
If harming virtual people was suddenly illegal, the entire industry would collapse.
Sexual objectification is, at best, tertiary. With the occasional exception - usually niche Japanese stuff, let's be real - it can be removed without doing any real harm.
MGSV without Quiet is mostly the same. MGSV without violence doesn't exist.
If harming virtual people was suddenly illegal, the entire industry would collapse.
Sexual objectification is, at best, tertiary. With the occasional exception - usually niche Japanese stuff, let's be real - it can be removed without doing any real harm.
MGSV without Quiet is mostly the same. MGSV without violence doesn't exist.
M0nochromatic
Member
It's a first world problems issue. Many of us discussing this issue are familiar with sexism and its effects, but have never been ganged up on and beaten or have lost a loved one to war.
I don't have a source on me, but I recall reading about how cultures who have suffered from war tend to shy away from creating art that features violence in any light, much less a positive one. For many of us coming from the western perspective, violence is nothing more then a medium for challenge and enjoyment, whereas sexism is something that hits a lot closer to home.
Lionel Richie
Member
Video games are a fantasy world and I don't feel the need to be shielded from attractive characters wearing skimpy clothes in order to not extend any questionable behavior in my real life.
I totally agree regarding gaming culture and its problem with problem with women. I think that's indisputable. I don't think, though, that it's in any way a consequence of the games themselves. I think the games themselves are a consequence of that culture and demographic.
It's the internet's favorite mantra, again: "correlation does not imply causation." My guess would be that gaming culture is sexist, leading to both sexist misbehavior among gamers *and* a petulant insistence that games cater to men. Because they are a big market, said petulant insistence is actually a pretty strong influence on developers, leading to games aimed at men, leading to less interest from women, leading to a more male gaming base in certain genres, leading to games aimed at men, and so on, down to the bottom.
Re: objectification, I don't think its a problem in and of itself - it's rampant in our society, but it's also a basic part of human nature, embedded in advanced primates of all genders by evolution. We've just hit this weird sinkhole where male-focused objectification is everywhere in games, but female-focused objectification (or homosexual objectification that isn't "OMG hot lesbians") barely exists.
GermanZepp
Member
I think video games or movies or art are inspired by real world culture, sometimes a thurthfull reflex sometimes it's more like a distorted mess.
I dislike any violence or sexualization or "objectivization" in real life. But context is key here.
For example, never heard of a man (except politicians or religious dudes) complaining about porn (and there are no more objectified females than they). Even some feminist movements are ok with that.
The thing is when is out of place, (pretty much always) in my country there was a gas/fuel station that made the female employees working in the pumps stay dressed as a schoolgirl or with tight "yoga pants". Scandalous.
However, in fiction as long as the have the right ESRB rating, an adult can decide.
Thats why gore and porn movies exist or hentai games or in less degree things like rumble roses or that dead or alive bikini beach game. Its fiction.
In my view of things there are too much troubles in real life to spend/waste time in digital intangible beings.
EDIT: What try to say is, having a strong confident non objetified non sexualized female character in a game, while refreshing is not going to make people more tolerant the same way shooters don't make you violent. It works both ways.
I hope that my poor english don't screw up the meaning of this.
I dislike any violence or sexualization or "objectivization" in real life. But context is key here.
For example, never heard of a man (except politicians or religious dudes) complaining about porn (and there are no more objectified females than they). Even some feminist movements are ok with that.
The thing is when is out of place, (pretty much always) in my country there was a gas/fuel station that made the female employees working in the pumps stay dressed as a schoolgirl or with tight "yoga pants". Scandalous.
However, in fiction as long as the have the right ESRB rating, an adult can decide.
Thats why gore and porn movies exist or hentai games or in less degree things like rumble roses or that dead or alive bikini beach game. Its fiction.
In my view of things there are too much troubles in real life to spend/waste time in digital intangible beings.
EDIT: What try to say is, having a strong confident non objetified non sexualized female character in a game, while refreshing is not going to make people more tolerant the same way shooters don't make you violent. It works both ways.
I hope that my poor english don't screw up the meaning of this.
QuantumZebra
Member
This and first post wrap it up.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Quite is not how every woman is portrayed in MGS though... and although there was likely not some real super elaborate clever story plan behind it, it was one character out of many in a way. You are not going around throwing clothes on scantily clad women or pushing away women bathing topless in non nudist beaches (it used to be super common in Italy and Spain for example), are you?
I am not saying Kojima did a great deed to humanity there, but presenting such a character (who actually has chemistry with Venom Snake and builds a not too subtly implied rapport with him over the course of the game if you accept to move past how she looks) does not mean he is promoting a stereotype or that he is hurting all women IMHO.
Gnome Scat
Member
Context.
I agree.
Super easy to sell Americans on a game about headshots. Not so easy to sell us on a puzzle game.
If the game was set in a tropical vacation island resort, that would be one thing. But it is not, and so this is a rather nicely packed strawman.
So let's show male characters in nothing but jockstraps with their dicks waving around. Would you feel welcome then?
Mobius and pet octopus
Member
Objectification still doesn't bother me in general. I am sure a couple specific examples could be given that I am not a fan of, but I'm not about to tell developers to stop unless what they're doing is morally repugnant to me. I don't think we should shy away from sex, expression, or sexuality in gaming either; even though I can think of few games that don't or that would be benefited from it it should still be a tool developers can use if they want.
Version 3.0
Member
Because video game violence clearly doesn't spill over into real life, but sexism probably does.
Alex_Mexico
Member
Something similar happens in The Walking Dead tv series. It's gotta be the goriest, most violent tv show I've ever seen in my life but they won't show one exposed breast or say the word "fuck" even once because that'd be too much.
Bodies ripped apart and eyes out of their sockets? Fair play. To have Negan use the word "fuck" like he did so much in the comics? WE CANT HAVE THAT!
Bodies ripped apart and eyes out of their sockets? Fair play. To have Negan use the word "fuck" like he did so much in the comics? WE CANT HAVE THAT!
It's easier to make a fantastic situation wherein violence is justified, because you aren't doing the violent thing, the character is doing the violent thing in response to that circumstance. Innocent people in the game universe are threatened and diplomacy is not a valid solution, so okay, violence makes sense.
It's harder to make a fantastic situation where you ogle objectified women because you, the player, are the one who is expected to be ogling them. It has nothing to do with the game universe.
It's harder to make a fantastic situation where you ogle objectified women because you, the player, are the one who is expected to be ogling them. It has nothing to do with the game universe.
Shooting isn't intrinsically violent, as Splatoon shows.
At least not the violence we are talking about in this thread.
For me it comes down to construction of game worlds. Most times, the violence in a game is inherent in the settting. It's a part of the world and narrative. Fan service moments are usually inserted without any real thought to the setting or narrative and purely for the player to hav something to ogle.
Crimson_Echidna
Banned
I don't think it's an either or thing, so much as it's a result of the "gaming community's" own doing that one side of the issue has gotten more spotlight than the other. A few critics decided to critique gaming through a feminist lens, gamers react violently as a response, and that led to an even brighter light be shone on that specific critiquing point.
Candescence
Member
Honestly, a better question would be "why is extreme violence in video games okay, but explicit sex not?" Because I personally find the murder porn in games like Mortal Kombat X far more repulsive than safe, consensual explicit sex.
Seriously, it's fucking irrational.
Seriously, it's fucking irrational.
Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
What about hate crimes?
Violence is a concept that can be both positive and negative. It's an aspect of something that has no inherent association with anything. It's entirely dependant on how it is used.
Objectification, aside from its use as a comment on itself (which is pretty rare), is purely negative.
Objectification, aside from its use as a comment on itself (which is pretty rare), is purely negative.