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Anita Sarkeesian "Tropes vs. Women" Video will come out today [out now, link in OP]
- Thread starter Chairmanchuck
- Start date
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All I can say is that since the video, I've been somewhat engaged, participating here and thinking about things that I would not otherwise devote much time to. And there are things that I've come to have a greater understanding of. So in that sense, I'd call this "effective" or label it as "progress." But I also see people repeating the same discussion about certain points, when it would be be easier in some cases to take a different approach to achieve faster results in the "video games writing" department.
haha, I know - it's a fine picture you posted - I was just making a joke by referencing one of the most ridiculous examples of sexism that I can recall
Yeah, if anything, the video has provoked much discussion. I don't know how other gaming communities have responded to the series, but I'm glad that we are at least having the conversation.
I'm wondering if anything has changed in how people react once the final video hits the web, if people still care, and if the industry as a whole will be properly affected by it.
This makes me happy. Whatever the take-away from this is for everyone, I'm just really glad that people are thinking about things at least. Even if we disagree, it's nice that there is some dialogue being generated from this video. I hope it continues throughout the series - even if it does get heated at times.
I don't think you're wrong either. Better writing would fix many things. But I do think tackling it one topic at a time is also valuable instead of just a broad outcry for "write better!"
I like that picture.
I know it's a parody of some other picture though. And I don't know if there is some negative history about that source picture?
Because in the 80s the audience for video games was almost entirely little boys. This is the reason why most of the protagonists are male, males would be the ones playing them. This conversation is like wondering why most action heroes are male.
Additionally, as captainnapalm pointed out, men care about women than they do men. Boys would care more about saving a princess than they would a prince. The only way I see the Damsel in Distress trope being misogynistic if it's misogynistic to value women more than men. I've watched the video and read most of this thread and I still don't see why people think Nintendo did anything wrong.
I feel that the video was a waste of my time and a waste of people's money.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
I noticed in vid-docs for Guild Wars 2 that there appear to be a number of women at Arena Net responsible for character and racial design. This caught my attention as the human female archetype in GW2 seems a step more towards logic and realism - costumes, armor, hairstyles are less inclined to be based on wacky fantasy cliches.
Maybe it's not a coincidence that I found the female characters in GW2 more interesting than typical for an MMO. I suppose my perspective is different from most male players mind you, seeing as how I'm on team gay guy. The female form is pretty to me, nice aesthetics, but I'm not really moved by scanty costumes and cleavage.
The women in the cut scenes also tend to be rather aggressive characters and intelligent. Though I don't know offhand if any of the female staff members are among the writers.
I wonder what it would be like if action-adventure themed games in general, where the fiction is set in a dangerous world requiring a lot of conflict and fighting, were designed with the sensibility of modern MMORPGs.
The next topic is going to be amazing. And any discussion of women in fighting games will need to discuss the evolution of the Chun-Li character, and how, despite the revealing clothing (which is still modest compared to her contemporaries), steps have been taken to bring her more in line with the reality of who she is and how she fights (from softer physical appearance and the schoolgirl giggle in SF2, to a more serious attitude and appropriate musculature for her fighting style, to even giving her a pant-suit in SFA). I would hope that Chun-Li is used as a focal piece in that segment of the series.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
It's often been remarked that Chun-Li is a female fighter who looks like a fighter. But then, Capcom also made Makoto as one of their female follow-ups to the Chun-Li generation of characters. Then there's C.Viper, who is definitely a member of the super-spy femme fatale class, but rather adult and businesslike about it.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
But are you authorized to do it?
also weirded out there's already an 80+ thread on this when while liking her video I don't feel Anita said anything particularly controversial or even that subjective. She just talked about the history of the Damsel in Distress and then listed a lot of older games which in some fashion use the trope.
I know some people are just arguing about the Kickstarter or what she'll potentially talk about in the future, but is anybody legitimately angry at the contents of just this first video? Seemed to go out of its way to avoid stepping on toes, at least not yet anyways.
Actually, if Anita ever wants to do another Kickstarter after the end of this series, she'll have plenty to choose from:
(not specifically agreeing with all of them, I just find it an entertaining flowchart)
lol that Michelle Rodriguez is her own category
cutmeamango
Banned
Whoever made this flow chart just said "pack it up women, we will never be a strong character".
This chart is one of the worst things I've ever seen.Actually, if Anita ever wants to do another Kickstarter after the end of this series, she'll have plenty to choose from:
(not specifically agreeing with all of them, I just find it an entertaining flowchart)
Thinking in "tropes" is brain poison.
Overthinkingit actually classifies Sarah Kerrigan in Starcraft 1 as being a strong female character (while also explaining how Starcraft 2 has an awful, awful, awful, awful plot):
I guess you failed to find the humor in the listed tropes in the flowchart. :lol
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
To be honest, I've been thinking this entire thread: "People do realize this is the intro to a multi-part series... right? What happens when part 2 comes out. The gamer internet goes up in a nuclear fireball?"
Especially the people focusing so much (so very, very much) on the kickstarter money - it is as if this single 20 minute piece is being taken as the entire production.
with her tits hanging out.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
Well it just seems like in comparison to her other videos (quite a few of which like the 50's christmas song and the Bayonetta one I felt were outright bad, so thankfully this series is off to a good start) Anita was incredibly restrained in this video. Unless you're actively denying Peach is a damsel in distress or that it's not a trope a lot of old NES and arcade games used, I don't really see how there can even really be a debate about this first video.
EDIT: Makoto is probably the only SF girl I can't really see how anybody could have a problem with. She isn't sexualised, doesn't resort to a fighting style that shows off her thighs, (probably?) doesn't have jiggle physics in the SF4 line of games and she doesn't look particularly masculine either.
I'd struggle to personally call the other SF girls outright sexist (mostly since I love all of the SF cast!), but to varying degrees they are sexualised. I think it gets muddled also by SF being an incredibly over the top series which relies a lot on mostly non-offensive cultural caricatures, so to Capcom along with fan-service they just view those other girls as being representative of the extremely exaggerated world the SF cast inhabit.
Kai Dracon
Writing a dinosaur space opera symphony
You ever seen some James Bond girls?
For that matter, everybody ever in Dead or Alive.
The interesting thing with Viper is that how she is used, her attitude, even the way she's animated doesn't mesh the stereotype one might imagine with a quick glance. It's amusing that the only reason she's wearing heels is because they're actually weapons. (Shades of Bayonetta.)
Street Fighter is like Southpark - an equal opportunity offender. Everyone is an over the top version of what they represent. To this day I'm amused that some Americans players are offended by Rufus. ("The Japanese think we're all big fat people!") Rose might also be an example of a female SF character who wears a simultaneously conservative / sexy outfit, but has a non-sexualized personality and a mature attitude.
Across most SF games, it seems only Cammy gets singled out as the prime cheesecake offender, especially with her most iconic win pose. Though I suppose there's R.Mika... she did always seem like a female joke character to me.
People don't like when their comfortable status quo of majority power and representation gets criticized and needs change. It should be noted that in most cases, if not all, there are no evil intentions from such amount of opposition towards minority claim to rights - it's just knee-jerk reactions to the feeling of their position of power being threatened and/or diminished, so a lot of unreflected arguments, ingrained structural thinking and outdated views on gender/race/sexuality get invoked.
The debate is "What's the point?", "Why is this trope bad exactly?", "Why is she telling us something everyone knows and asking for people's money to say the obvious?" The 90 pages are people disagreeing over the answer to these questions.
faceless007
Member
This is what's amused me so much about the controversy: it's hard to imagine how the video could possibly be any milder or milquetoast, given the subject matter (I don't mean these as negatives). As so many of her critics are quick to point out, it's not much more than a brief explanation of the trope followed by a bunch of examples in detail. (This came as no surprise at all to those who bothered to read her stated goals from the beginning.)
And yet that alone sparked as much venom and ire as it did. I shudder to think what would have happened had she made a much more pointed and incendiary argument.
It's kind of funny how the two common counters were that it's nothing more than a list of tropes that everyone already knows anyway, and that the video is damaging to the cause of feminism and makes her look ridiculous because she cherry picks things to suit her agenda.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
... Were people offended by Rufus? Ken (if he counts, forget if he's American or is just Japanese and moved to the US after his training with Ryu), Alex, Guile and Viper all go against that stereotype, so seems like an odd complaint.
I agree SF's just going for a wacky atmosphere, but it still seems like the more out there characters like Rufus, Blanka, Q or Hakan you're not going to get anything too extreme for the female fighters. Guess it just boils down to whether you'd agree if there's an equal ratio of cheesecake among both the male and female cast, which without really minding (though I am a guy, whatever) I'd agree it leans towards the latter. If you had wackier ideas for the girls like Peacock in Skullgirls or even that fat prototype they had for Juri I think it'd balance out more.
There isn't a female-equivalent of motherfucking Dudley though, so i could be wrong.
Grand Funk Carwash
Banned
Thank god this thread is about video games then.
you're just kidding yourself now.
It's like 80 pages filled performative self-contradictions.
Not that I am agreeing with the chart, but it can be either of the 4 qualifiers that makes the flowchart go down, i.e. if Harlequin doesn't meet the 1. Can she carry her own story? 2. Is she three-dimensional? 3. Does she represent an idea? 4. Does she have any flaws? If Harlequin didn't pass just one of these, then she is not a strong female character, according to the flowchart.
I think the Flowchart is not meant to be taken very seriously, as the wording of some of the character should indicate. I mean, Michelle Rodriguez has her own category, Chun-Li is Vanilla Action Girl, and River Tam is Badass Waif! It's more of a laugh than actual research.
DICKS AHOY
Banned
That's what I thought too until I realized all possible answers except for being killed in the third act of a story lead to that villain question. It's sort of confusingly laid out.
I also don't agree with a lot of the characters listed being 'weak' female characters, unless they're not talking about the quality of the character/writing/portrayal and more just they're they're physically/mentally strong?
I agree with Rose. She's equal parts sexy, serious, conservative and powerful. And yes, Cammy is the furthest we go down the over-sexualized path with Street Fighter. But Sakura in quintessential teenage fetish gear (exposed midriff, overly short skirt) sits pretty close.
As far as sexualization goes, Street Fighter is hardly a huge offender. Chun-Li as an example of a positive evolution will still hopefully be part of the conversation.
No, she's more likely to rip apart Darkstalkers Dead or Alive and Soul Calibur. And of course, Mai.
I think that it being the first video, there was also a lot of discussion about "general" issues that are relevant (or irrelevant issues) but not the direct focus of video #1. And I think that it is reasonable to expect people taking on broader issues even though the video was about the "damsel in distress" trope. It's actually really interesting because the video-specific discussion and broader discussion will continue throughout each video release and seeing how the release schedule affects that. So, I think, it will be interesting to see how the discussion evolved and what patterns emerge from them when we look back after all her videos are out.
Actually, if Anita ever wants to do another Kickstarter after the end of this series, she'll have plenty to choose from:
(not specifically agreeing with all of them, I just find it an entertaining flowchart)
I'm disappointed that Gwen Stacy's death is listed under woman in the fridge. Sure it predates Kyle Rayner's girlfriend, but they named after that scenario.
GillianSeed79
Member
I just watched the video and actually found it really interesting. Quick historical question. Does anyone know which came first, the Popeye licensing thing or the Radar Scope incident in regards to Donkey Kong?
In the video she says the reason why Donkey Kong was created was because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye. The story I always heard and read was that there was this game called Radar Scope that bombed in the U.S. Basically, Nintendo wasn't a household name back then in the late 1970s. They were trying to break into the North American arcade scene, so they overhyped this game called Radar Scope and sold a bunch of arcade cabinets to U.S. arcade operators. The problem was the game bombed financially, but Nintendo wanted to put those arcade cabinets to good use. They tasked Miyamoto with making the game better, but instead he decided to scrap the game's concept and made Donkey Kong instead, which went on to become a huge hit.
The video made it sound like they just switched the characters from Popeye and Olive to Mario and Donkey Kong, when what I've always heard and read is that it was an original creation by Miyamoto after Radar Scope bombed.
That aside, I really wonder what her thoughts on the new Tomb Raider are. I know the PR was horribly sexist, but she's actually a somewhat strong female character in that game. Yeah she's kind of weak at the start, but she starts killing people left and right later on. I've found some of the criticism of Laura in the new game kind of weird, because half of it sounds like male reviewers saying that they are unsettled by Laura, being a woman, acting like 99 percent of lead male protagonists, ala Nathan Drake, in that she *shocking* kills people. Am I reading this wrong? How is it cool when Drake does it, but it's unseemly when Laura does it? That's where I'm drawing a blank. Is the anger coming from the borderline BDSM stuff where they basically punish her in the game for shock value or that she's a woman doing stuff that traditional male protagonists do?
In the video she says the reason why Donkey Kong was created was because Nintendo couldn't get the rights to Popeye. The story I always heard and read was that there was this game called Radar Scope that bombed in the U.S. Basically, Nintendo wasn't a household name back then in the late 1970s. They were trying to break into the North American arcade scene, so they overhyped this game called Radar Scope and sold a bunch of arcade cabinets to U.S. arcade operators. The problem was the game bombed financially, but Nintendo wanted to put those arcade cabinets to good use. They tasked Miyamoto with making the game better, but instead he decided to scrap the game's concept and made Donkey Kong instead, which went on to become a huge hit.
The video made it sound like they just switched the characters from Popeye and Olive to Mario and Donkey Kong, when what I've always heard and read is that it was an original creation by Miyamoto after Radar Scope bombed.
That aside, I really wonder what her thoughts on the new Tomb Raider are. I know the PR was horribly sexist, but she's actually a somewhat strong female character in that game. Yeah she's kind of weak at the start, but she starts killing people left and right later on. I've found some of the criticism of Laura in the new game kind of weird, because half of it sounds like male reviewers saying that they are unsettled by Laura, being a woman, acting like 99 percent of lead male protagonists, ala Nathan Drake, in that she *shocking* kills people. Am I reading this wrong? How is it cool when Drake does it, but it's unseemly when Laura does it? That's where I'm drawing a blank. Is the anger coming from the borderline BDSM stuff where they basically punish her in the game for shock value or that she's a woman doing stuff that traditional male protagonists do?
I think either you're grasping at straws or really don't have a solid perspective at what "positive evolution" in a meaningful sense really entails.
Otherwise, you're inadvertently confirming how dismal the state of women's portrayal in gaming really is.
The writer of lore on the GW2 staff is female, and is penning the next novel of the gap bridging (between GW1 and 2) book series.
Also, the designer of many of the characters, races and armors is also female.
So that may be why you feel that way. GW2 certainly got some complaints over bikini armor earlier in its dev cycle, though I feel Anet has struck a decent medium.
Xenon
Member
I would agree with you up to the point where she got into the subject object dichotomy. After that she started spouting some outlandish observations like Peach is nothing more than a ball used for sport for Mario and Bowser. She she even found a clip of Peach surrounded by a spherical force field to "support" it. But considering rescuing Peach has always been more of an end game and Mario has never used her to draw Bowser into a conflict the whole premise is just silly.
The problem is when people disagree with some points often they get dismissed as either someone who is ignorant of the larger issue or have their character attacked by lumping them in as part of the problem. They seem to be completely missing the fact that they are getting exactly what they are asking for, a dialog on an issue that is important to them. But often I find that people don't want to enter into a true discussion on these issues. They just want to educated those who are ignorant of what they know to be the truth.
Anita should be using the feedback in this thread to tighten her arguments. It could only help her to deliver a more convincing message.
I'm clearly not saying she is the perfect representation of womanhood in gaming. But from conception to today, there has been lots of changes to the character, making her a better depiction of a non-macho strong martial artist woman.
You kind of missed the point by taking the statement too literally.
I hope she brings up the female clothes exploding in KoF 13. Cause what the fuck.
I felt like writing a much simpler analysis of some of the problems with her video and its manner of proceeding. Prepare for a wall. And then I'm off to sleep late once again, though it was a fun exercise I must say.
DiD and the Normative Example
The opening example Sarkeesian uses to introduce the Damsel in Distress trop (henceforth “DiD” demands close attention. Star Fox Adventures is certainly not an instance of this trope that would be situated chronologically or causally prior to the cases she will subsequently discuss; one might then assume that it is meant to serve as a paradigmatic example of the trope, meaning a case that would condense all of the basic features into a single illustrative instance for further comparison. But this would also be a mischaracterization, for whether or not SFA's use of DiD might be capable of offering a particularly rich and typical set of narrative features, any such elements are in fact not the focus of her attention. Indeed, rather than any examination of the functioning of DiD within the game itself or in its narrative, what she instead offers is an account of the genesis of these elements: in short, a brief tale of how Nintendo's Miyamoto took what should have been a powerful outing for a strong female protagonist and reversed it, putting her back into place as yet another trapped woman to be rescued by the player.
It is neither in my interest nor particularly feasible to engage in depth with this history of SFA's development, for the necessary resources and information simply do not exist; the bit of storytelling she gives us is one long-repeated tale in the gaming world, but depends for its crucial point (the intervention of Miyamoto) on the somewhat anecdotal evidence that he once suggested in an interview that this new game, then still titled Dinosaur Planet, would probably work well as a Star Fox entry. In any case, Nintendo does have a history of recasting new projects to fit into existing franchises (see Kirby's Epic Yarn, most recently), and something like that clearly happened with SFA, though we can only speculate as to whether the original female co-protagonist (one of two playable characters, the other male) had any impact on the decisions made beyond a desire to put the familiar face of Fox on the project.
But what may have gone on behind closed doors at Nintendo is not the critical component here. It is more important to examine how Sarkeesian uses this example to set up her video and introduce the trope, for it has tremendous repercussions for her analysis as a whole. If this particular case was not chosen as a chronological, causal, or even paradigmatic example of the DiD trope, what role does it actually serve? I would suggest that it should in fact be understood as a normative example. A normative example is one that carries an ethical judgment within it, bridging the particulars of description with the abstractions of ethics or justice, thereby making the latter concrete and thereby helping us to see not only that something is ethically right or wrong but also how it is so. A normative example might, for instance, take the form of a case study of the mistreatment of an elderly patient, offering a description of the manner in which this patient's treatment diminished his dignity; the outline of this case would then help the reader better see how human dignity is tangibly wronged by various real practices, offering an advancement over a purely rights-based or philosophically abstract ethical principle of dignity. The goal is to evoke the reader's sense of injustice and to make him or her begin to see what is ethically wrong here--not in the abstract anymore, but now given body in a fully-realized case--thereby effecting a shift in our future perception of related cases, connecting the ethical belief to our perception, much as a child learns to instinctively recognize different forms of immoral behavior rather than only to deduce them from rules and principles.
I certainly would not downplay the importance of normative examples, nor their power to forge new, rich links between various practices or features of our world and our sense of right and wrong. But their rhetorical power can also make them a dangerous or suspect choice if the analogical connection between the chosen normative example and those cases that are to follow is weakly supported--and that is in fact the case here. The story of SFA is structured to show us how the DiD trope can be seen, in this instance, as a removal of a female character from agency, a stripping of her power to be an active player, and a restriction of her role to that of a goal or a reward for the male protagonist. The salient features are: (1) a pre-existing, active role for the female character; (2) the direct intervention of a paternal figure of the genre, here represented by Miyamoto; and then (3) the introduction to DiD as a reconfiguration of this existing character's role, moving her from activity to passivity. One can feel the potential injustice here, and in that sense the normative example has been very well deployed: we might now begin to read DiD as an almost strategic technique of stripping agency from female characters. The next step is to carry this sense of injustice forward into the subsequent examples, to now align our vision such that all cases of DiD may be seen as direct offenses to the agency of what otherwise should have or might have been strong female characters. In Sarkeesian’s rather concise statement:
But is it at all accurate to read other cases of DiD in this manner? Each use of a narrative device or trope involves its own kind of decision and intervention, and should be read in large part as a response to a particular problem or question in context. To ethically read DiD as she suggests would mean that we implicitly assume its use to primarily be a matter of altering the role of a female character who pre-exists this decision (it also treats video games and their plot or character elements as inherently narrative rather than functional; more on this mistake later). But this reading is in fact greatly at odds with the cases of DiD in gaming that she will subsequently take on, and to present the ethical problem in this form only distorts the understanding of each of these cases in turn, attempting somewhat dishonestly to carry our sense of injustice onto each one in the service of building a comprehensive and decontextualized distaste for the trope.
I will examine her rather substantial misreading of the Mario franchise in detail a bit later, but for the moment, let's look briefly at Donkey Kong, the first of Miyamoto's DiD games and the origin of the Mario character. Sarkeesian notes that the game evolved partly from an attempt to create a Popeye arcade game. According to the NSMBWii Iwata Asks interview in which we hear a bit more detail from Miyamoto, this is true, although it would seem that the license for Popeye was already held by Nintendo in some form (having already produced playing cards), so that the proposed use of Popeye for their next game would appear to be more a matter of taking advantage of an existing license--one potentially very valuable given the high international recognizability of the characters--than it was a matter of Miyamoto selecting that franchise in a vacuum. As for why the negotiations for an arcade game fell though, there do not appear to be details. But Miyamoto makes a much more noteworthy point in the same interview:
And, a bit earlier, he gives an indication how Popeye might fit that goal:
Iwata then suggests that this latter description is a bit like Pac-Man (perhaps implying that spinach functions like the pellet power-ups in that prior title), to which Miyamoto enthusiastically assents. The important contribution here, however, is the definition of narrative within games. Particularly with these earliest of games, in which characters or other details could only be rendered in the simplest of shapes, the one and only consideration of plot or narrative elements was instant recognition: the player should be able to spot the goal and adversaries immediately, for gameplay is the core of the experience.
It is not surprising, then, that early games drew from the most instantly recognizable tropes and elements, those of comic strips and cartoons; early games were never to be understood as themselves contributing stories, narratives, or anything of the sort, but instead were simply gameplay concepts that used the most familiar of elements to make the goals and items clear to the player. To read the use of DiD in Donkey Kong as in any way continuous with the later tale of stripping agency from the character of Krystal is dishonest and misleading; this was not a device introduced into a story, nor an injustice enacted on existing characters. A simplified instance of DiD was itself at the origin, as a useful trope for establishing gameplay bounds, and the game’s characters were born from that device rather than subjected to it. To read the use of these elements as any kind of decision made regarding the female character’s agency would be akin to reading character-relevant meaning in Mario’s famous mustache, when it was only added as the easiest way to make a recognizable face with so few pixels--games of that era merely reflect, in shorthand, various simple elements that are immediately recognizable to the populace.
But one should not misunderstand this as a critique based on intentions. While tropes constitute a highly reductive and unscholarly form of analysis, I am more than familiar with the benefits of analyzing discursive elements and how their repercussions that go well beyond intent. Her implicit distortion of early games by imputing a kind of narrative choice, however, is actually a misread on the discursive level itself. It flattens the context and contribution of each game to its era, demanding that any instance of DiD be read as an entrenchment of classically repressive ideals; whether the DiD scenario pops us in war propaganda or in a comically distorted use at an arcade console, she would have us read the same effect, that of stripping agency. When she speaks earnestly from the privileged position of an analyst who can teach her audience about these dangerous tropes hiding in our games, the case of something like Donkey Kong should instantly raise questions as to the purpose of this kind of research. There is nothing to be uncovered or discovered in Donkey Kong on this point; the game consciously and openly uses DiD, and expects the player to recognize the trope; but when it does so in order to produce a comic game in which a small mustached man races to defeat a gorilla, this "trope" that might once have been put to use in utterly humorless propaganda now becomes a kind of lighthearted joke, and it's hard to imagine anything but snickering today at the sight of the same propaganda poster she showed (though Donkey Kong is surely only one of countless pop and cartoon reproductions that led this kind of imagery to feel inherently comic). Progress will never take the condescending form of demanding we recognize and cleanse our cultural items of tropes or themes deemed repressive, nor of lecturing a group or medium in this fashion; we recombine and reuse elements in ways that shift meaning at each moment, something that this half-normative and half-discursive reading based on tropes is condemned to miss every time. There are many problems with today's films, cartoons, and games, but they will neither be found nor ever remedied in the manner she attempts.
While many reactions were extreme and absurd, it's no surprise that many gamers reacted to this form of lecturing that loosely uses tropes to connect inflated normative examples to the rest of the medium; I suspect that she in fact chose to focus on Miyamoto in order to suggest that even one of the most kind-seeming paternal figures of the medium harbors regressive attitudes. There is more to be said regarding the Mario franchise and how the series went on to celebrate childlike qualities in manner directly counter to any classic power fantasies of DiD--and much more to be said about the inherent problems with using tropes for analysis--but it will have to wait for the next installment, if I keep up the motivation to write one.
DiD and the Normative Example
The opening example Sarkeesian uses to introduce the Damsel in Distress trop (henceforth “DiD”
demands close attention. Star Fox Adventures is certainly not an instance of this trope that would be situated chronologically or causally prior to the cases she will subsequently discuss; one might then assume that it is meant to serve as a paradigmatic example of the trope, meaning a case that would condense all of the basic features into a single illustrative instance for further comparison. But this would also be a mischaracterization, for whether or not SFA's use of DiD might be capable of offering a particularly rich and typical set of narrative features, any such elements are in fact not the focus of her attention. Indeed, rather than any examination of the functioning of DiD within the game itself or in its narrative, what she instead offers is an account of the genesis of these elements: in short, a brief tale of how Nintendo's Miyamoto took what should have been a powerful outing for a strong female protagonist and reversed it, putting her back into place as yet another trapped woman to be rescued by the player.It is neither in my interest nor particularly feasible to engage in depth with this history of SFA's development, for the necessary resources and information simply do not exist; the bit of storytelling she gives us is one long-repeated tale in the gaming world, but depends for its crucial point (the intervention of Miyamoto) on the somewhat anecdotal evidence that he once suggested in an interview that this new game, then still titled Dinosaur Planet, would probably work well as a Star Fox entry. In any case, Nintendo does have a history of recasting new projects to fit into existing franchises (see Kirby's Epic Yarn, most recently), and something like that clearly happened with SFA, though we can only speculate as to whether the original female co-protagonist (one of two playable characters, the other male) had any impact on the decisions made beyond a desire to put the familiar face of Fox on the project.
But what may have gone on behind closed doors at Nintendo is not the critical component here. It is more important to examine how Sarkeesian uses this example to set up her video and introduce the trope, for it has tremendous repercussions for her analysis as a whole. If this particular case was not chosen as a chronological, causal, or even paradigmatic example of the DiD trope, what role does it actually serve? I would suggest that it should in fact be understood as a normative example. A normative example is one that carries an ethical judgment within it, bridging the particulars of description with the abstractions of ethics or justice, thereby making the latter concrete and thereby helping us to see not only that something is ethically right or wrong but also how it is so. A normative example might, for instance, take the form of a case study of the mistreatment of an elderly patient, offering a description of the manner in which this patient's treatment diminished his dignity; the outline of this case would then help the reader better see how human dignity is tangibly wronged by various real practices, offering an advancement over a purely rights-based or philosophically abstract ethical principle of dignity. The goal is to evoke the reader's sense of injustice and to make him or her begin to see what is ethically wrong here--not in the abstract anymore, but now given body in a fully-realized case--thereby effecting a shift in our future perception of related cases, connecting the ethical belief to our perception, much as a child learns to instinctively recognize different forms of immoral behavior rather than only to deduce them from rules and principles.
I certainly would not downplay the importance of normative examples, nor their power to forge new, rich links between various practices or features of our world and our sense of right and wrong. But their rhetorical power can also make them a dangerous or suspect choice if the analogical connection between the chosen normative example and those cases that are to follow is weakly supported--and that is in fact the case here. The story of SFA is structured to show us how the DiD trope can be seen, in this instance, as a removal of a female character from agency, a stripping of her power to be an active player, and a restriction of her role to that of a goal or a reward for the male protagonist. The salient features are: (1) a pre-existing, active role for the female character; (2) the direct intervention of a paternal figure of the genre, here represented by Miyamoto; and then (3) the introduction to DiD as a reconfiguration of this existing character's role, moving her from activity to passivity. One can feel the potential injustice here, and in that sense the normative example has been very well deployed: we might now begin to read DiD as an almost strategic technique of stripping agency from female characters. The next step is to carry this sense of injustice forward into the subsequent examples, to now align our vision such that all cases of DiD may be seen as direct offenses to the agency of what otherwise should have or might have been strong female characters. In Sarkeesian’s rather concise statement:
But is it at all accurate to read other cases of DiD in this manner? Each use of a narrative device or trope involves its own kind of decision and intervention, and should be read in large part as a response to a particular problem or question in context. To ethically read DiD as she suggests would mean that we implicitly assume its use to primarily be a matter of altering the role of a female character who pre-exists this decision (it also treats video games and their plot or character elements as inherently narrative rather than functional; more on this mistake later). But this reading is in fact greatly at odds with the cases of DiD in gaming that she will subsequently take on, and to present the ethical problem in this form only distorts the understanding of each of these cases in turn, attempting somewhat dishonestly to carry our sense of injustice onto each one in the service of building a comprehensive and decontextualized distaste for the trope.
I will examine her rather substantial misreading of the Mario franchise in detail a bit later, but for the moment, let's look briefly at Donkey Kong, the first of Miyamoto's DiD games and the origin of the Mario character. Sarkeesian notes that the game evolved partly from an attempt to create a Popeye arcade game. According to the NSMBWii Iwata Asks interview in which we hear a bit more detail from Miyamoto, this is true, although it would seem that the license for Popeye was already held by Nintendo in some form (having already produced playing cards), so that the proposed use of Popeye for their next game would appear to be more a matter of taking advantage of an existing license--one potentially very valuable given the high international recognizability of the characters--than it was a matter of Miyamoto selecting that franchise in a vacuum. As for why the negotiations for an arcade game fell though, there do not appear to be details. But Miyamoto makes a much more noteworthy point in the same interview:
And, a bit earlier, he gives an indication how Popeye might fit that goal:
Iwata then suggests that this latter description is a bit like Pac-Man (perhaps implying that spinach functions like the pellet power-ups in that prior title), to which Miyamoto enthusiastically assents. The important contribution here, however, is the definition of narrative within games. Particularly with these earliest of games, in which characters or other details could only be rendered in the simplest of shapes, the one and only consideration of plot or narrative elements was instant recognition: the player should be able to spot the goal and adversaries immediately, for gameplay is the core of the experience.
It is not surprising, then, that early games drew from the most instantly recognizable tropes and elements, those of comic strips and cartoons; early games were never to be understood as themselves contributing stories, narratives, or anything of the sort, but instead were simply gameplay concepts that used the most familiar of elements to make the goals and items clear to the player. To read the use of DiD in Donkey Kong as in any way continuous with the later tale of stripping agency from the character of Krystal is dishonest and misleading; this was not a device introduced into a story, nor an injustice enacted on existing characters. A simplified instance of DiD was itself at the origin, as a useful trope for establishing gameplay bounds, and the game’s characters were born from that device rather than subjected to it. To read the use of these elements as any kind of decision made regarding the female character’s agency would be akin to reading character-relevant meaning in Mario’s famous mustache, when it was only added as the easiest way to make a recognizable face with so few pixels--games of that era merely reflect, in shorthand, various simple elements that are immediately recognizable to the populace.
But one should not misunderstand this as a critique based on intentions. While tropes constitute a highly reductive and unscholarly form of analysis, I am more than familiar with the benefits of analyzing discursive elements and how their repercussions that go well beyond intent. Her implicit distortion of early games by imputing a kind of narrative choice, however, is actually a misread on the discursive level itself. It flattens the context and contribution of each game to its era, demanding that any instance of DiD be read as an entrenchment of classically repressive ideals; whether the DiD scenario pops us in war propaganda or in a comically distorted use at an arcade console, she would have us read the same effect, that of stripping agency. When she speaks earnestly from the privileged position of an analyst who can teach her audience about these dangerous tropes hiding in our games, the case of something like Donkey Kong should instantly raise questions as to the purpose of this kind of research. There is nothing to be uncovered or discovered in Donkey Kong on this point; the game consciously and openly uses DiD, and expects the player to recognize the trope; but when it does so in order to produce a comic game in which a small mustached man races to defeat a gorilla, this "trope" that might once have been put to use in utterly humorless propaganda now becomes a kind of lighthearted joke, and it's hard to imagine anything but snickering today at the sight of the same propaganda poster she showed (though Donkey Kong is surely only one of countless pop and cartoon reproductions that led this kind of imagery to feel inherently comic). Progress will never take the condescending form of demanding we recognize and cleanse our cultural items of tropes or themes deemed repressive, nor of lecturing a group or medium in this fashion; we recombine and reuse elements in ways that shift meaning at each moment, something that this half-normative and half-discursive reading based on tropes is condemned to miss every time. There are many problems with today's films, cartoons, and games, but they will neither be found nor ever remedied in the manner she attempts.
While many reactions were extreme and absurd, it's no surprise that many gamers reacted to this form of lecturing that loosely uses tropes to connect inflated normative examples to the rest of the medium; I suspect that she in fact chose to focus on Miyamoto in order to suggest that even one of the most kind-seeming paternal figures of the medium harbors regressive attitudes. There is more to be said regarding the Mario franchise and how the series went on to celebrate childlike qualities in manner directly counter to any classic power fantasies of DiD--and much more to be said about the inherent problems with using tropes for analysis--but it will have to wait for the next installment, if I keep up the motivation to write one.
mullet2000
Member
I believe your post proves you haven't been reading the thread.
Outside of a few bad apples it's been quite civil.
ReturnOfTheRAT
Member
I went into the Youtube app on the PS3 and this is what I saw:
It's a sad fact that Lollipop Chainsaw is still Suda's bestselling game of all time. Worse is that Killer7 is one of the worst-selling.
Of course it is. No one wants you to dislike things you enjoy. Just take a moment to examine your hobby is all.
No once wants you to feel bad for liking Lollipop Chainsaw. Or at least I don't. lol
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