^ There have been numerous critique vids on youtube , some went through a list of games with female protaganists - look them up.
As ekianjo already pointed out, more is needed than just a female shaped/voiced protagonist in that context.
Also, there have been numerous critique vids of female feminists that rip into her crap - again look them up.
As for Lego, You need to watch all her vids as I mostly have - I'm surely not going to go through them again to find that quote for you..
I watched some of the answering videos too, and while some made valid stakes against her most of them just did not understand what she was trying to tell.I'm (honestly) too lazy to look through her videos, but I don't think thats necessary. I have no reason to not believe you, she said something undifferentiaed about Lego, I just gave an (on context) example that she has the ability to have a more analytic view on things.
thatgui, ever seen the quote function before?
I know that "thing" I'm just to stupid to use it right
Then the same can be said about 99% of movies made before. Very few have strong female characters. And you know what? I dont really care. In case you have not noticed we live in a Men's world, where Women try to get more power progressively. Obviously everything we see around is still strongly influenced by the centuries behind us. So what's surprising that everything being produced reflect that fact? Nothing, really. Should we fight to have more strong women representation ? Meh, why don't women make their own games and show us the examples, then ? As far as I know, many women who play games are fine with the games made for guys and don't care so much.
And its very obvious why games are the way they are: most game developers are guys and therefore have no idea (or probably very little) on how to write an interesting female lead (and no, Samus or Lara Croft aren't really strong female leads, you guys are totally wrong - these characters are just guys with breasts - there's nothing much female about them). Even Lara Croft was written to be a male lead in the first place, I don't invent anything.
What effect should this have on your discussion ? No one ever doubted that, sure it always the best solution if a "struggeling" person is able to help itself, but why not "lend a helping" hand now and then ?
Mouhaha (sorry) - because I don't think that's relevant to make games more interesting. Stories and character development are often just secondary in game. There are very few games where I genuinely manage to care about the characters - Most games are written by geeks who have no idea how to write characters in the first place and they barely manage to make good game mecanics already, so complaining about the storyline and characters is like telling you that there's a scratch on your windshield when you completely wrecked your car already.
It's just hilarious to focus on that.
So your basically saying that if something is boring don't start trying to change it unless you are certain there is a positive outcome ?
I do not want to imply that having self reliant, strong, confident, "not male with mammaries", etc. female characters will automatically lead into a bright gaming future. But I think it is worth a try, what could we loose in the attempt ?
Can we stop the crap "games are art", "games reflect culture", "games = society". It wasn't even very funny in the first place when the first arsehole online claimed this kind of thing, but now this is getting really old.
Games just reflect how lazy, uninventive the people who create the games are. Ever talked to game designers? Even seen them speaking ? Most of them may be good at what they are doing but not very smart nor interesting people otherwise. Even Kojima was just a frustrated guy who wanted to do movies but couldn't, so he wrote games instead. And it seems like he made a few good games by accident, if I trust his track record until now. The more he gets the financial means to do something else with "larger meaning", the crappier the result. I guess you understand my point, heh.
I dont consider games represent anything. And I certainly don't GIVE meaning to games that are obviously just produced to make money.
I have the feeling your mixing up a lot of things here.
We seem to have quite different definitions of "culture". Your approach seems to be if something is "art" then it belongs to our (or the respective society you are bound to) culture . But who defines what "art" is ?
Culture (in the modern sense) is just the sum of things that a defined group of people (eg.: population of a country, an ethnic group, etc.) is producing in a formative way. This is somewhat different from its orginal meaning in terms of bringing something foward (and even more from Kants later differentiation), but thats (as aggravating as it often is) just how it is.
So games (as movies, books, painting, etc) are part of our culture, even if you (or I) don't like it, and as that reflect back to us as beeing a lazy uninventive society. But thats just one side of the coin, and by denying that a part of our gaming culture is indeed interesting, intelligent, divers, reflective etc. you do exactly what a lot of people accuse her of : beeing biased.
Games are a passtime to have fun. That's the definition of a game. Stop looking for hidden messages behind Donkey Kong, there's none. Nobody purposely thought 50 hours about whether or not to put a female character stolen by a huge monkey. It's not because what she says POTENTIALLY makes sense that it's actually true, Oh no.
We definately approach games from opposite directions. For me Games aren't just a passtime to have fun. They can be, but only in a special context - like playing with friends, but then its not about having a passtime with a game but a passtime with my friends.I need to feel that a game progresses me in one form or the other otherwise I loose interest. Donkey Kong is a good example, I played a few levels, than lost intereset as it is just an iteration of the basic principle showed in the first level over and over again.
Sure there is no meaning in Donkey Kong (other then to make money), but that does not automatically mean that every game has not more depth into it than the screen it is displayed on. Take Bioshock for example - I didn't like the game mechanics at all, but I did like its popcultural approach on Ayn Rands "Atlas Shrugged" so I played it to its lousy end. Is it good game ? Depends on the players view on things. Is there something more than meets the eye/ear ? Definately ! Thus worth a playthrough for me.
I'm also somewhat irritated by the thoughts you present here: On one hand you seem frustrated by the stall the gaming industry is in, but on the other hand seem to think that games are just another way of passing time while gettings some amusement out of it. But isn't that a contradiction of some sorts ? While denying games to be of any "cultural" value also moaning about games beeing not inventive and game designers beeing lazy. But how is evolution possibly if they are already at the boundaries you concede to tem ?
The argument leads to... "why do you care if you are not fed with it in the first place?". It's all about Freedom. If people like games where women are viewed in this way, well LET THEM. If people like eating cheeseburger everyday well LET THEM. This attitude of wanting to correct every single wrong on the planet is very much alike to being oppressive and disrespecting other people's tastes. Example: People like the XBOXONE ? Great for them, for me it's not so hot. So I don't expect to buy one. End of story as far as I am concerned, and lost opportunity for Microsoft, as a previous client of their consoles. I am not going to post videos explaining why the XBOXONE is (probably) crap. I'm done already.
Leaving aside the fact that no one said that this sort of games should be forbidden or outlawed, you seem to have a rather selective definition of freedom. While the freedom to create/consume games of "any" kind (I guess we all agree there are some kind of games that should not be made) is something very precious, the freedom of critizing the current state of the gaming industry seems somewhat exclusive to its form (text is ok, video is not) and context ("gameing industry is lazy" is ok, but saying "it is sexiest" (please forgive me the "buzzword") is unnecessary).
So for this person we are talking about: you don't like video games portraying girls like that? Well good for you, there's a very easy way to avoid it ! Don't play games! Problem solved. And honestly if she really cares about the conditions of women in the world, there are SO MANY OTHER PRODUCTIVE things she could do right now instead of complaining about that super-minor-minuscule issue of women representation in games. As we speak there are women being literally enslaved in many countries around the world, and that has nothing to do about video games because they said countries don't even have money for games in the first place. Why not fight for that, instead ?
Hmm, people are dying around the world because of war, hunger, indifference every day. Which seems more important to me than human rights, privacy, environmental problems, beeing a victim of a crime, personal losses, having complaints about people making videos about super-minor-minuscule issues, etc. So we should put this all on hold till the bigger problems are solved ?
Of course she is perfectly entitled to have her opinion, and I am perfectly entitled to disagree with her as well. And being laughed at is always a risk when you go out in public. I guess you know what you face when you put a controversial video on youtube. If you don't feel comfortable with feedback, don't do it.
I don't remember her complaining about negative feedback in general, so this passage seems rather superflous to me
I can imagine, how big the difference is between Northamerica and Europe, especcially my area.
I highly doubt that (at least in that regard)
