2013-05-29, 02:19 AM
Dusk Wrote:I liked this video better, but I feel that she skates around the issue with extremely excessive violence in video games in general. I know she touched on it, but she drew a different conclusion than I did. The fact is that many video games were not created with any intention of telling an intricate story, with most of the intention being focused instead on providing the player with a gameplay experience that primarily focuses on inflicting tons of violence upon their enemies. I mean, off the top of my head I can name five games that came out this year that are just 10-15 hour long rampages when you try to apply any real life context to them. Video games are mostly marketed towards men and there may well be an oversaturation of the damsel in distress trope and violence towards women, but I feel that that any issue with sexism or misogyny is overstated and the phenomenon is largely a product of what games currently are.
The point is that it's irrelevant. The mere inclusion of the tropes in a video game is enough to warrant outrage, because again, even if they're only the main focus of the narrative, but not the game, they still exist as part of the repeated psychological onslaught of media experiences that together form the modern version of the institution of sexism. And to top it all off, they're attached to gameplay scenes and elements that seek to, at their very root, capture the mind of the player by evoking a powerful emotional response of the primitive variety, appealing to sex and lust, flight or fight responses, and survival of the fittest domination and command.
If the stories are pointless and take the far backseat to the excessive violence of the gameplay, then why bother resorting to damsel tropes at all? Just write a pomegranatety narrative that doesn't dehumanize any character, making all flat, two-dimensional shadows. It's not that difficult if that's really what's important in a game.