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Anita Sarkeesian: "No more excuses for the lack of women at E3".

personally, i have nothing against her.
I'm sure there's all sorts of things you'd like to put against her. Nudge nudge.

the amount of backlash she is gets is what gives her power. without so many people screaming at the top of their lungs that this person is trying to ruin all of gaming, she would not have so big a profile. in reality she has little influence, and it only grows the more people entertain this fantasy.
While I agree that her true power comes from weaponizing criticism in the form of harassment, the fact is, if people had simply been allowed to disagree with her early on, none of this would have happened. It was because the community managers, game journalists, and even game developers actively punishing any dissent, claiming it to be harassment and bad for women, that her shitty ideas got any traction. This led to her getting speaking engagements and being invited to companies, to the point where we know exactly where she had direct influence on games (it's a pity that they decided to include her in the development of the Dishonored series).

So, it is really unfair to blame the complainers because they were never actually allowed to complain in the first place. By actively suppressing debate, they created a LOT of resentment. GamerGate happened because gamers lost their voice, not because their voice was too loud. Personally, I think it is healthy and appropriate to get that resentment out and get some closure on this whole thing.

all the "why doesn't she make her own game?" talk is so tired.
Tired? Maybe. Appropriate? Definitely.

why doesn't Jim Sterling do the same? no, he just stands on a soapbox, literally calls himself God, and constantly demands game companies change the way they do things. when is his game coming out? it's a shitty double standard.
I'd like to see Jim Sterling put his money where his mouth is and make a game up to his own standards. I have no respect for people who criticize but have no stakes in the game. If you can't be smart or illuminating about your criticism, then you are just preaching to the already converted. I'm not demanding he learn to code. I'd just rather see him have something to lose when he is wrong, so that his criticisms become more measured, considerate, and honest.
 

Saruhashi

Banned
Since then, Sarkeesian and her team have done the same analysis every year and -- with the exception of 2016 -- games with exclusively female protagonists have only ever accounted for 7% to 9% of announcements.

In 2016 -- "a very dark moment for the industry" -- there were only two female-led games: Horizon and ReCore, again. E3 2016 had no new female protagonists.

I think a potential uncomfortable truth for Anita is that the choices of those within the industry are vindicated by the success of said industry.

If you want to take things from the crash of 1983 to the present day, the videogame industry has grown at an insane rate over those 36 years.
PS sold 102 million. PS2 sold 155 million. Xbox 360 and PS3 sold 80+ million each. This was at arguably the peak "games are for dudes" years,

Even on the indie scene you could take, for example, Super Meat Boy and say "why wasn't it Super Meat Girl".
The thing is that it's irrelevant because they made Super Meat Boy and that's what sold a ton of copies. Their decision is vindicated.

Same with older games like Mario. Sure, the "damsel in distress" trope is tired and lazy but the games sold loads of copies and it is one of the most beloved series of games ever.

Uncharted. Metal Gear. God of War. All design choices justified by the amount of money they made, that was then invested into future games.

The only real argument I can see is that just because they could make money selling games to dudes doesn't mean that they should have.

It's a moral argument though. One that does not take note of history.
Back when I was just getting into gaming, if these developers were not actively appealing to me then they wouldn't be selling any games because, for the most part, girls weren't interested.

I suspect this is a similar problem today though maybe not quite so prominent as it was then. You want to sell a ton of copies of your game? Better make sure you understand the demographics you are aiming to sell to.

For established businesses it will always be a gamble.
If you change X to target a wider audience then you'd better hope that the number of customers you gain, Y, is greater than the number you lose, Z.

I think from the "video game activist" perspective the developers shouldn't care about that. They should be thinking "how can our game be a force for good in the world and help usher in an age of gender equality" instead of "let's make an awesome game that will sell loads".

Would the next Zelda game benefit from doing away with Link and just having Zelda as our strong feminist protagonist? Maybe. That's one hell of a risk though.

I feel like the only way Anita could get what she wants is if suddenly games started losing popularity specifically because there weren't enough female character.

So Breath of the Wild 2 comes out and it sells poorly and Nintendo looks into why and discovers people aren't buying it because they want Link to be a chick and be in a queer relationship with a non-binary Zelda. Probably then they would make the change.

New IPs like Horizon are always a risk but it did spectacularly well. So, just like before, the design choice was vindicated.

I just don't see a winning move for the industry at large here. The big games, the really big games, are only that way because they "connect" with their audience.

To just start messing around with that on the say so of political activists does not seem like a smart move.
 

DunDunDunpachi

Patient MembeR
I just don't see a winning move for the industry at large here. The big games, the really big games, are only that way because they "connect" with their audience.
Arguably, many big companies are not trying to "connect" with their audience. That would imply they respect their audience and are trying to understand what their audience wants.

Rather, some of these companies are trying to instruct their audience. They have an agenda they wish to preach, sold under the guise of an "experience" and "artistic expression". When given consumer feedback, they pick and choose which feedback affirms their own biases (though that's hardly unique to them) and they violently reject the feedback that tells them to stop doing it, often lumping it under the umbrella of #gamergate or racists or entitled manchild gamers or whatever.
 

Virex

Banned
When will this fucking woman fade into obscurity? No one gives a shit your opinion Anita. Only those in your deluded left wing bubble pretend to care. So please Anita. FUCK OFF
 

STARSBarry

Gold Member
To be fair lets just stop making excuses and carry on as normal. Would that be better?
 
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Shakka43

Member
So I went back through the Games I've played this year and found that almost all have either A) Playable woman character or B) Woman characters in a leading role

:messenger_mr_smith_who_are_you_going_to_call:

Rainbow Six Siege Playable Women Operators
Ghost Recon Wildlands You create your character
God Of War Freyja
Resident Evil 2 Ada and Claire
FireWall Zero Hour Women Operators
World War Z Women Character
Battlefront 2 Women Characters
Broforce (lol) Playable Woman Character
Spider-Man Playable Woman Character

RDR2 Has many woman main characters. Online you create your own.

The only games I played actually that doesn't have either a playable woman character or a woman in a leading role is MLB The Show and Days Gone.

And the upcoming games I know I am going to get CTR Remaster, Modern Warfare, and The Last Of Us 2 all have the ability to play as a woman character.

So I am not sure what she wants to address.
Days Gone at least has lead female main story characters, which only concludes that MLB The Show is a misogynistic piece of shit game and we should do all that it's possible to take it out of the market.
 
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Fbh

Member
Meanwhile the good guys at Koei Tecmo are hard at work trying to counter those statistics in their fight for a more equal and balanced representation:
250px-Doax3_scarlet_cover_art.jpg


That's 9 female leads and 0 men
 

Saruhashi

Banned
Arguably, many big companies are not trying to "connect" with their audience. That would imply they respect their audience and are trying to understand what their audience wants.

Rather, some of these companies are trying to instruct their audience. They have an agenda they wish to preach, sold under the guise of an "experience" and "artistic expression". When given consumer feedback, they pick and choose which feedback affirms their own biases (though that's hardly unique to them) and they violently reject the feedback that tells them to stop doing it, often lumping it under the umbrella of #gamergate or racists or entitled manchild gamers or whatever.

Yeah, it feels that way currently. For sure.
Like these folks want your money but also they fucking hate your guts and don't want to make games for you.

I think you could see Quiet in MGSV as Kojima saying "just give the damn thirsty nerds what they want".
Then you could juxtapose that with BFV where it's "amputee women fought in WW2 you ignorant fucking nerds, don't buy it if you don't like it".

Like, fine, if you fucking hate me that much I guess I won't buy your game. Fuck.

Hopefully though the aftermath of Anthem and Fallout 76 will have them thinking "shit, we'd better find our way back into the audiences favor".
Problem is that things influencing gaming today may not become apparent until 2 or 3 years have passed.

Sony, on their mad censorship spree, probably disagree right now.

I preferred the new MK11 character designs if I am being honest but even so the logic behind the whole thing fucking sucked.
Almost feels like the devs want a change of audience. I don't see where the new audience is coming from though.

Fells like if you went back 10 years games were just games. You picked out what you wanted to play and if you enjoyed it you'd keep an eye out for a sequel that would hopefully be more of the same but also better. The people writing the magazines were gamers just like you and even when they were being corporate sell-outs it wasn't like they were calling you a "man baby" because you like to look at glorious, wonderful, tits.

Gaming got weird.
 
Didn't Lorelai came out just this year? The game is amazing and the protagonist is a female. Wtf is wrong with this person.
 
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zeorhymer

Member
Meh. She makes money off of perceived outrage. Of course she has to poke her head out of the ground to keep stoking the fire so she can cash in from it.
 

jshackles

Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the capability to make the world's first enhanced store. Steam will be that store. Better than it was before.
Didn't Lorelai came out just this year? The game is amazing and the protagonist is a female. Wtf is wrong with this person.
Tons of games came out this past year with female leads. Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Resident Evil 2, and even smaller games like GRIS and Forgotten Anne.

This is just grandstanding.
 

Cranberrys

Member
Exactly. Acting as though there needs to be 1-to-1 representation overlooks the fact that the industry itself has long been driven by particular demographics. It's the same thing when someone complains about lack of racial diversity in games and development. Well, when a vast majority of developers are found in North America, Europe, and East Asia that means a vast majority of your potential talent pool and consumers are either Asian or Caucasian. People tend to represent themselves or people close to them in their works and publishers often concern themselves with making sure their products resonate with the largest demographic to improve chances of high sales.

As far as women go, as you said, it's disgraceful to act as though female developers and characters are somehow only a recent thing. Why are women like Jade Raymond so celebrated for doing not nearly enough to deserve the praise yet the women who actually blazed the trails before her are completely overlooked? It has a lot to do with people like Anita trying to virtue signal her generation of women. The same reason why Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was so highly praised for being "a woman fighting against impossible odds". Not only was that movie certainly not about a woman fighting against such odds, more like a goddess stepping on the faces of mortal men, the fact is Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley did it decades before in the Alien movies without the need to imply women as wonderful creatures and men as near barbaric beasts.

People like Anita need to impress upon people that they're somehow pioneers in an unfair world. They create dragons to slay when the real ones ceased to exist a long time ago. They have no real war to fight so they try to carefully craft battle scenarios that favor a victory for them. Because people like her can't actually fight those battles. That would require her to have actual knowledge of what she criticizes. She would need to actually develop the skills to enter the field and create what she wants to see. So instead she brow beats those already there into guilt and intimidates them with a resume of fabricated victories to make it seem like challenging her is foolish when the reality is being foolish is listening to her. She makes her money on the outrage of other people without lifting a finger to truly bring the change herself.

Totally.

Video games and more generally what we can refer as "geek culture" nowadays was male oriented for decades but it wasn't out of a conspiracy to exclude women in the first place. It was just a fact. I remember growing up, I was a teenager in the 80's, I was pretty much the same kid seen in any number of 80's teenage movies or TV shows. I played D&D, I read comic books, I went to the movies with my friends to see Back To The Future, Gremlins, Return of the Jedi or Ferris Bueller's Day Off and, of course, we played video games. None of us hated women (it was quite the opposite actually, we thought that women were goddesses) but we couldn't find many girls interested in those things back then, there were of course but it wasn't a common thing. It was the same in the 90's when I was a student. None of my girlfriends were interested in video games. The first woman I met who actually loved video games, tabletop role playing and told me that Blade Runner was her favorite movie ever was when I started work and she became my wife. It was in 1999. Like many women of that generation (who are in their late 40's now) she can't stand Sarkeesian because she can't stand people speaking in her behalf and she was never bothered by playing a dude in a game just because she's a woman as I never had a problem playing Lara Croft or Claire Redfield as a man. No gamer gives a shit about playing a man or a woman or a robot or a hedgehog, women characters exists since the beginning anyway. We care about having a great experience, about being amazed, about exploring new worlds.

Sarkeesian talks about non existing issues and she targets a very specific demographic. She's not targeting women as a whole, and she sure doesn't want a better world for women because she'll be out of business, she's after urban hip far left female (and male) activists in their early 30's who are so insecured that they think everything is offensive, who don't understand a thing about gaming culture. They came to gaming via mainstream pop culture and decided they want a piece because, hey, it's kinda cool, without understanding that, at its core, gaming is not mainstream. It's a culture with specific codes, a specific lingo, a very protective community... You don't show up and act like the landlord of the place like Sarkeesian did unless you want to woke the beast. If she had talk to any gamer before doing her videos in the first place, he would have told her exactly that and all this shit could have been avoided but she wanted the attention so she woke the beast.
 
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Shakka43

Member
personally, i have nothing against her. she is a basic academic feminist who did a kickstarter and made the videos she said she was going to do. i thought the videos for the most part were really good. yes she made generalizations but these are 20 minute videos not 20 page academic papers. yes she represented things in a way that made her argument sound good. that is ok. that is called making an argument.
I Don't know how that ended but it was proven that she used a lot of footage from other youtubers' let's plays without giving proper credit and passed of as her own gameplay experiences. I wouldn't consider her videos any good when she wasn't honest enough to play the games herself. And she's not even a gamer, she just passes as one cause that's how she can get some money.
 
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Silent Duck

Member
someone familiar with reeera should quote every post in this thread and list ban reason for each lol
I don’t go to reeera, but I’ll give it a go.
I’d fuck her good. You think I care about any of her bullshit. I don’t. I’d eat her pussy out and fingerbang her at the same time until she’s had multiple orgasms.
Should be banned: Too sexy.
She is sincerely a very handsome woman. It's just a shame that her beauty is only skin deep.
Should be banned: Not sexy enough
Silent Duck said:
I don’t go to reeera, but I’ll give it a go.
Should be banned: Being too sexy to post in an Anita Sarkeesian thread.
 
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juliotendo

Member

E3 2015, some declared, was the year of the woman. The return of Tomb Raider and Mirror's Edge was complemented by the debut of new female-led IPs like Horizon: Zero Dawn and ReCore. The diversity of gaming protagonists seemed to be improving.

Anita Sarkeesian was not so sure.

"Studies show that if 15% of background characters are female, you think it's 50/50 -- our brains just add that in," she says. "I thought that's what was happening -- we have such a lack of female protagonists that these felt like a bigger deal than these actually were. So, being the Debbie Downer that I am, I was like, 'Let's just count'."

And count she did. The first of Feminist Frequency's gender breakdowns for E3 showed that female characters only made up 9% of all announcements at the 2015 event. Males made up 32%. It was not the year of the woman.

Since then, Sarkeesian and her team have done the same analysis every year and -- with the exception of 2016 -- games with exclusively female protagonists have only ever accounted for 7% to 9% of announcements.

In 2016 -- "a very dark moment for the industry" -- there were only two female-led games: Horizon and ReCore, again. E3 2016 had no new female protagonists.

Sarkeesian acknowledges the limits of her analysis; it focuses on games at the major press conferences, and separates titles where you can design or choose from multiple characters. But she maintains this study can be a useful look at wider trends.

"E3 is the annual state of the industry," she says. "This is where studios and publishers decide what's worth showing and sharing. So while [our study] doesn't take into account every game released in a year, it shows what the industry thinks is most important."

Check the link for more.

Looks like she needs attention to make some money to pay rent or fund her craving for $7 soy lattes.

Nobody cares about this idiot anymore, please go away already!
 

joe_zazen

Member
There is no endgame outside of she gets more press.
Most people who go on about these kinds of things don't have a real endgame or solution in mind. It's the old idea that just gathering around something will force it to change.

The actual endgame, if you subscribe to a particular ideology, is to make society gender neutral which will allow each individual to attain their true potential unencumbered by societal ideals. And while this sounds good, it entails the destruction of all tradition, which is

  • really scary when you are at a point in your life that you actually have stuff to lose (which is why the most enthusiastic are young snd/or poor)
  • Maybe not a good thing since social engineering almost always ends badly
 
My advice to her-

Go make a game yourself instead of telling other game makers how to make their games.
It's a lot less risky to blackmail the studios into hiring you as a "representation consultant".

Then as a consultant you charge exorbitant fees, so you better tell them what to change in order to prove your value, and have a good laugh about what you can get away with... Then normal employees are disparaged as haters if they resist in any way, so anyone who is not a bit autistic will have the social skills necessary to keep their job and pay their house... They'll just take it and swallow, maybe even show "enthusiasm" like crowds do in 1984 - just to be on the safe side.

Once in a while somebody will speak - but as pointed earlier, they are the haters, so who will listen to those guys? Anyway they don't work anymore!
 
I try to ignore her as much as I can, but when the topic comes up I don't mince words.

And her brand of egotism really does veer into flat out evil territory, I'm not joking.

Her fans are morons and she is very egotistical but be the better person as she is loving the negative attention people give her.

I just laugh and move on because she will eventually get caught up in a big scandel soon. :)
 

Aintitcool

Banned
Anita is super influential, ubisoft had her essays help them define their new directipn and made their devs watch her youtube. They talked about it early this year ina leak I think.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
If you look at games to try and get validation, you need to seek help. Games are an escape. You play them to experience something you could not experience otherwise.
 
Anita is super influential, ubisoft had her essays help them define their new directipn and made their devs watch her youtube. They talked about it early this year ina leak I think.
This. You can ignore all you want, the ideology she was pushing has gained a foothold in the game industry. There's numerous examples. Ignoring it ain't working.
 

Dr. Claus

Vincit qui se vincit
Like... validation?

You can find validation in the real world and it isn't that difficult to locate, unless you are a raging cunt. I am referring more to the fact that no one can be a space marine from hell killing demons on Mars, a mustachioed plumber saving princesses, a bounty hunter killing aliens while exploring a vast world, or a marine experiencing a nuclear bomb and watching as they slowly die while they crawl from the wreckage.
 
Spoilers: Actual real feminists care about equality in the work place, discrimination, wage disparity, equal opportunities to compete in sports, you know, stuff that actually matters. No one gives a shit about how many women are the main characters in video games.
 
Spoilers: Actual real feminists care about equality in the work place, discrimination, wage disparity, equal opportunities to compete in sports, you know, stuff that actually matters. No one gives a shit about how many women are the main characters in video games.
Uhh, I don't know what feminists you've encountered that only care about "equality" and don't want to ruin life itself. Maybe in movies where the brave woman that got raped is now fighting for justice in the workplace. In reality REAL ACTUAL feminists do care about video game characters, artwork in stickers, messages printed on a pen for kids, the shape of your shit, video cards and how it's target towards gamers and not the empowered boss female gamers.

Feminists are portrayed differently in the media and are way different IRL.
 
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