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One of my friends actually has this theory (which seems to be correct) that the more 'manly' something tries to be the more 'homo-erotic' it becomes. This pretty much applies to everything.

I want to say something, but im afraid to for all the mudslinging there is going to be in about 3 pages

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
I want to say something, but im afraid to for all the mudslinging there is going to be in about 3 pages

You could always PM it to the people you feel won't get p*ssed at it.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
One of my friends actually has this theory (which seems to be correct) that the more 'manly' something tries to be the more 'homo-erotic' it becomes. This pretty much applies to everything.

- that is some next level manliness, and if it comes off as homo erotic to you; that's all you.

You know what's interesting to me. As overly sexual and stupid as a lot of animes are in a sort of harem form seem to make the guy the least interesting character that is absolutely bland and useless. This isn't always the case but it happens a lot. I hear the point is to make the guy sort of an empty shell that the men watching can put themselves into. I think this has also been mentioned for bella from twilight. Funny thing is that just makes the character more hated by the fans from what I've seen.

Here's a show I enjoyed that actually had somewhat of a plot and made fun of harem animes and anime in general. Also the male character is freaking awesome which is a nice change in a harem even if it's a parody of them.




It's a pretty good show. Also the blonde haired one is a gamer that plays lots of yaoi games. At the end of the first season the story she made up around the main male character and I think it was meganekaro actually starts to happen as the made up character ends up being real and comes to their school. Then basically sugisaki (male character) tries not to set off signals to make said feminine guy fall in love with him.

I'm going to save time and copypasta something I wrote at a different forum on this topic:

Stargazer wrote:Ok, I probably phrased that wrong. BioWare is not necessarily lightyears ahead of Deus Ex HR or The Witcher; their protagonists being restricted to male characters is not a bad thing per se. I do think that if you're going to lock the protagonist into being male, it should be for story purposes. Alpha Protocol would lose nothing and gain a lot by having a female main character option. And being able to play as a female character is a pretty big selling point.

To which I say a similar thing I said the last time one of these threads came up:

Men and woman are not always interchangeable.

Mass Effect allows for a male or female Sheppard because their presence in the story, whilst central, is generic. It doesn't matter whether Shep is a man or a woman because they are essentially a blank slate, it changes nothing in the game's narrative, and the only real effect Shep's gender has is on the romance options (and even then you can flip-flop between straight and gay between games, so it doesn't even matter that much). Shep is a blank slate designed to be whatever the player wants them to be, and that's perfectly fine for some narratives. Same goes for, say, Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy where the character of Jaden Korr can either be a man or a woman (also voiced by Jennifer Hale, as it happens). Changes nothing about the story, just the voice. KOTOR, another Bioware game, allows for male or female Revan. Changes nothing except a slight romance subplot.

Others stories rely on their protagonists being a specific gender. Tomb Raider would lose a lot of what it is if it was Larry Croft. The Witcher doesn't with with Geralta of Rivia. The entire tone of The Last of Us would be different if it was Jody and Elliot (and people would then accuse that game of conforming/enforcing to stereotypes of motherhood - you can never win with these Social Justice Warriors; everything is sexist, even two things that mutually oppose one another). There's nothing wrong with specific genders being central to a narrative. To try and shoehorn both genders into everything, ignoring budget restrictions, would be pointless and really approach tokenism (which is always, always bad).

I've said before, there are problems in the gaming industry, the two most recent examples being not including Elizabeth on the cover to Bioshock Infinite and the fact that Naughty Dog had to fight to get Ellie on the cover of The Last Of Us. These sorts of things are what people should be rallying against, not whether putting a bow on Pacman and calling him Ms. Pacman is a great statement of the misogyny inherent in the gaming industry.

Skelron wrote:To which the reply is, very true, at times it makes sense to stick narratively to a specific Gender, but then the counter point, why is the default assumption Male as that gender>

To which I say one of two things:

1. Is it? I'm I'm not talking "default" in the sense that a character creator brings up the default male character model first before you select female. I'm talking in terms of narrative. Is it always the default? Furthermore "default" implies a level of choice. If the character is male by "default" then that tends to imply the option to change to female. If that option isn't there (and who is anyone to say whether it should or should not), then I have to ask what's "default" about it.
2. Context is king.

If the task involved in the game is something predominantly male dominated, then doesn't it make sense for the default to be a male in that circumstance?

I mean look at a few more recent games - X-Com and the newest iterations of the Battlefield and Call of Duty franchises. In all three instances it is possible to have a number of female team members/play as a female character. In the context of both games (fighting for the survival of Earth, so everyone pitches in/modern warfare, something women are having an increasingly active role in) it makes sense. Now look at one of the earlier Call of Duty games (1 or 2), which are set during WWII. No women there, except for a few during the Russian campaign (which makes sense, in context). In these instances the context drives both the narrative and the "default" gender choice.

I don't see a problem with a writer choosing to make the POV male. If that's the story they want to tell, and the male gaze (to use a term I haven't used since Uni) is the way to tell that story, then what's wrong with that? Where is the problem? The Last of Us tells the story of Joe and Ellie from Joe's point of view. The upcoming DLC tells a story from Ellie's point of view, with her as the POV character. Same applies to Bioshock Infinite. It's told from Booker's perspective due to his unique impact on the story (Elizabeth acts as a catalyst for the events, not the actual protagonist that drives the story). In the DLC for Infinite the first chapter is again from Booker's POV, and the second is from Elizabeth's. The narrative is what determines the 'default' POV, not some arbitrary "must be a man!" line of thinking.

Terrible game as it may have been, why was Nilin the main character in Remember Me? Because the narrative choice of the writers was to tell a story about a woman from the point of view of that woman. What about Chell in Portal? Half-Life 2 doesn't have Alyx as the POV character, it has Gordon. Is that bad to have that by 'default', or should the context and the narrative of the game be more important than whether or not it allows for equal male or female choices?

Again it comes back to tokenism. If you're just putting the choice of male/female in for no other reason than to have that choice, then it's not really a choice at all. It's tokenism. It's sacrificing narrative and contextual integrity for the sake of "inclusion". A games POV character should be derived naturally from the story being told (Half-Life, God of War, Tomb Raider), or that character should a blank slate who's presence as any gender makes little difference to the overall structure/story (Mass Effect, KOTOR, etc.).

 Ninjacommando wrote:
I present thee

*picture that makes my head hurt*

there are people like that out in the world. its scary.

Please Ninjacomando! Make the stupid stop!

 Slarg232 wrote:
Why can't we have our Tomb Raider/Remember Me/Metroids, but then turn around and have our Duke Nukem/Army of Two/Splatterhouse?

Because both are sexist... because of... umm... reasons, I guess.

Who knows. Logic and reason are the first things to abandon ship when emotional identity politics and Social Justice Warriors storm onto the deck.

 flamingkillamajig wrote:
You know what I never understand? Why don't men complain about '300' showing men in a blatant sexual way? I mean you have 300 oiled up muscled men fighting nearly naked. For me the female version of that is that the model-esque women in that one action movie that had all the women at a mental hospital or something and they wore some sexualized clothing in the fantasy world (god I can't remember the name of the movie but I never saw it).

Oiled up men with perfect bodies? Male power fantasy.
Overtly sexualised women? Male power fantasy.
[Insert almost anything here]? Male power fantasy.

Hell I once saw someone call Ico a "male power fantasy", and they said it with a straight face.

Oiled up men with perfect bodies? Male power fantasy.
Overtly sexualised women? Male power fantasy.
[Insert almost anything here]? Male power fantasy.

And yet the Oiled Up Men example has been called Homerotic, Male power fantasy, and Female Gaze Material.

Which considering the Spartan's were pretty hardcore about their male bonding love, it could easily be considered all three.

This is a topic that has really been rumbling on for far too long. Yes women should have more 'normal' role in games, and indeed all geeky media, but at the same time some people are reading far, far too much into fairly non consequential things like Pacman's sex while others are being massively misogynist. Things are changing though, largely because women gamers are being far more vocal and are being noticed as dedicated gamers in their own right rather than a demographic to halfheartedly market to. In a decade I think that this topic will have been put to bed, or at least will be bruhing its teeth.

 Medium of Death wrote:
I

That sort of thing is completely and utterly irrelevant. Its also rather dishonest which is quite ironic.

Didnt miss Pacman start as a hack because some guys daughter wanted a ms pacman?

 Palindrome wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:

That sort of thing is completely and utterly irrelevant. Its also rather dishonest which is quite ironic.

How is it irrelevant or dishonest? It shows actual footage of her saying as much.

Did you see how much money people put towards her project on kickstarter that she built up based on lies? She spins the same crap and talks about games from over ten years ago, then slates a game that actively tries to address the gender issue, Mass Effect, by clinging on to titles of "Shep" and "Fem Shep".

 Medium of Death wrote:

How is it irrelevant or dishonest? It shows actual footage of her saying as much.

Its irrelevant because it is merely attacking the messenger rather than the message and it is dishonest because it claims to have a definition of a 'real gamer'. She may have never played a game in her life, although I find this highly unlikely, but that doesn;t mean that she can't critique gaming culture or the role of women in gaming. Personally I am not a fan of her work as I find that she makes claims that don't fit the available evidence but that video is helping nobody.

found this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJeX6F-Q63I

 Bromsy wrote:

nomotog wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:
I'd love these people to pin down what they want their feminine character to be like exactly, or gives some relatively decent examples of what the feth their problem is.

You can't be exact because people don't want just one type of female character. People want verity. Fat, thin. Short, tall. Smart, dumb. This, that. The problem comes when women only show up in a small number of types.

I know it's an even greater concern for females, but it's not like we are always provided with a wealth of different male leads, too. When was the last time I got to play as a short lead? I want to be 5-4 pudgy Sam Fisher.

in GTAV Michael is kind of pudgy. Also Dead rising 2 off the record. You play frank again and he is pudgy. Well more pudgy he was a little pudgy in the first game too.

Also Sam Fisher is a good example of the verity that male characters have. Sam is old. Maybe not as old as old snake from metalgear, but he has graying hair and a full grown child. Try to think of a female version of sam. One with all the tropes that sam has. I can't think of anyone off hand. (Bayoneta is the only female character I can think of with a child.)

Sam gets younger in looks and movement in each game. Now even the voice is younger.

 Palindrome wrote:

 Medium of Death wrote:

How is it irrelevant or dishonest? It shows actual footage of her saying as much.

Its irrelevant because it is merely attacking the messenger rather than the message and it is dishonest because it claims to have a definition of a 'real gamer'. She may have never played a game in her life, although I find this highly unlikely, but that doesn;t mean that she can't critique gaming culture or the role of women in gaming. Personally I am not a fan of her work as I find that she makes claims that don't fit the available evidence but that video is helping nobody.

The thing that I find the most helpful out of the video that I posted up is the actual footage of her. She is dishonest and her conclusions shouldn't be trusted. She legitimises herself through lies and misrepresentation of information all rapped up in semi-professional videos. While you and I aren't convinced by her, it doesn't mean that others won't be.

Would you not agree that you should have a fairly broad knowledge of a subject matter before going into a "professional", funded, critique?

 carlos13th wrote:
Sam gets younger in looks and movement in each game. Now even the voice is younger.

I was aware. It was in fact one of the reasons I stopped playing the games. Still I like to give credit for the original idea being kind of new and unique.

 Medium of Death wrote:

Would you not agree that you should have a fairly broad knowledge of a subject matter before going into a "professional", funded, critique?

If she was reviewing individual games then certainly but that's not what she is doing. If you are talking about the culture surrounding gaming, especially using elements from the wider culture as touchstones then there is really no need to have played hundreds of games in order to draw valid conclusions. I have only ever watched one video of hers (the one linked in this thread) and it is well researched in terms of the number of relevant sources, so even if she isn't a gamer (which I still think is inaccurate) at least someone working on her videos knows what they are talking about.

Her Kickstarter made far too much money but that was mostly a counter reaction to the troglodytes that attacked the very idea of her video series in the first place. This I think is the main reason for her exaggerated claims, or at least on reason.

Accusing others of lazy design is the sort of thing to be expected from someone who got a degree in "women's studies" and now can't find work.

I'm sorry, but I watched the whole video, and what I'm taking away from it is that if I wanted to do an army of female space marines, I don't need to spend any real time on conversions, because everyone would know they were women if I painted them pink and gave them bows and eyelashes.

I feel like the target keeps shifting. First it's "there's no female characters". So, back in the dark ages of gaming, they made Pac Man. With one character. But when they did a sequel, and evened it up, so now there's a male and a female character, it's bad, because Ms. Pacman is just like Pacman, except she has 8-bit graphic tweaks to indicate that she's female.

I mean, how awful. And this is why developers don't take this stuff seriously. Because no matter what you do, you can't get it right, there's always some additional whining.

If it's not "there's not enough female characters", then it's "the female characters only stand out because they're given gender identifiers", then its "there's not enough trannies" (as though they're a significant percentage of the population as to warrant development budget on).

When they make games with female leads, they get criticized for how they represent them, or that they didn't make them obviously female, or that they made them too obviously female. Or that they put effort into reflecting how a female body actually moves.

Maybe these women's studies graduates should make their own game company and develop their ideal games, instead of expecting everyone else to change to fit their whims. And when it fails because less than 1% of the population is interested in the game with the trannie protagonist, it will be because we're all bad people, not because they have no understanding of the marketspace.

Should I point out the irony inherent in the presenter lamenting female gender signifiers such as ear rings, eye shadow, pastel colours, pony tail, and enhanced eye lashes when she has chosen to present herself in the same way for all of her videos?
And as far as the indie games she listed disobeying her female gender signifier rule it is clear that much of their artwork features the same things that she railed about colours, over large anime-esque eyes, feminine hairstyles, mid rif exposing clothing, and ear rings yet she fails to mention this.

 Jehan-reznor wrote:
I understand the stance against sexism in videogames, but going about the way characters were portrayed during the 8 bit era, stereotyping was the only to differentiate characters.

I eagerly await the video on sexist portrayal of toilet and street signs. Because well a simplified image of a human in a skirt is well stereotypical

I was having similar thoughts myself. When code space was very limited the easiest (and laziest way) to show that a character was female was to emphasise certain female traits so that the character could be better identified from a distance during the action on screen. It should go without saying of course that with much more code to play with that I'd like to see this change.

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Should I point out the irony inherent in the presenter lamenting female gender signifiers such as ear rings, eye shadow, pastel colours, pony tail, and enhanced eye lashes when she has chosen to present herself in the same way for all of her videos?

Silence, Agent of the Patriarchy!

It should be noted that we use these same traits to identify the gender of people we meet in the real world. Women have breasts and hips, men have squared shoulders and facial hair.

If you see a person wearing makeup - blush, eyeliner, lipstick, 99% of the time, that person is female. If you see a person wearing a skirt, they're probably female (or Scotish). We use these identifiers in our daily lives to distinguish the gender of the people we see in the street. But it's bad form to allow people playing a game to use similar differentiating characteristics for the same purpose?

 Lynata wrote:
]Really now? When his first example was "Duke Nukem"?

I guess you could call it a "First World Problem" in that people might regard it as less important than "Third World Problems" like widespread famine and civil war, but from the sound of it you were aiming for a less serious connotation - which kind of only reinforces the problem we have right now.

you linked duke nukem which is an over the top game about an over mucled man who goes around killing aliens and sleeping with tons of women because thats what his character is all about and no one should ever take that series seriously.



what about her? She kicks your ass in hand to hand, After your character gets tortured she helps you out because your to weak at the moment. Is she being opressed by the male lead?

Back at you: Should the outcome of a male soldier being captured be shown?

Yes because its shown all the time, he is tortured for information, mutliated, etc
While the following is not a military game is does show the outcome of being captured by an enemy.
Start around 6:20


If we went with a WW2 game would you want to see red army soldiers raping german women as they advance on berlin?

 Redbeard wrote:

And when it fails because less than 1% of the population is interested in the game with the trannie protagonist, it will be because we're all bad people, not because they have no understanding of the marketspace.

People would play a game with Poison as the lead (and yes poison is pre-op)

 Seaward wrote:

 Dreadclaw69 wrote:
Should I point out the irony inherent in the presenter lamenting female gender signifiers such as ear rings, eye shadow, pastel colours, pony tail, and enhanced eye lashes when she has chosen to present herself in the same way for all of her videos?

Silence, Agent of the Patriarchy!

In fact re-watching her opening video to the series when she talks about the un-released 'Dinosaur Planet' I can't help but notice that the main character who she describes as "pretty cool" exhibits a number of gender signifier features. Had this game actually been released I wonder what the chances would have been for her featuring as an example of gender signifiers

 Redbeard wrote:

If you see a person wearing makeup - blush, eyeliner, lipstick, 99% of the time, that person is female. If you see a person wearing a skirt, they're probably female (or Scotish).

One should be VERY careful making that assumption when in a bar in Monstrose (Houston, TX).

Paul Hogan from Crocodile Dundee careful.

My girl friend and I enjoy playing the board game Gears of War. It's a fun, cooperative board game based off of the video game that neither of us have ever played.

First time out of the box: "Why aren't there any female characters?" I don't know. Maybe there aren't any in the video game. Maybe they just made the most popular 4 characters and that's it. Still, to get around it, I'm painting up a Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope figure for her. I shouldn't have to, though. If I hadn't already owned the game before I met her and she knew there were no female characters, we might not have bought it.

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

 kronk wrote:


My girl friend and I enjoy playing the board game Gears of War. It's a fun, cooperative board game based off of the video game that neither of us have ever played.

First time out of the box: "Why aren't there any female characters?" I don't know. Maybe there aren't any in the video game. Maybe they just made the most popular 4 characters and that's it. Still, to get around it, I'm painting up a Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope figure for her. I shouldn't have to, though. If I hadn't already owned the game before I met her and she knew there were no female characters, we might not have bought it.

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

Yeah, that has to be some quirk of the game - I played the first Gears of War video game way back but I don't remember it well; every other board game I own has multiple female characters at least, usually up around 50%.

 kronk wrote:

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

Given the state of the male characters in Gears of War just imagine what a female character would look like.....

 Palindrome wrote:

 kronk wrote:

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

Given the state of the male characters in Gears of War just imagine what a female character would look like.....

They look pretty normal to me (well normal for a world filled with Belgian prize cattle men)

 Palindrome wrote:

 kronk wrote:

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

Given the state of the male characters in Gears of War just imagine what a female character would look like.....

They're not too bad...



Though... she might want to duck for cover a bit more than the others:

 kronk wrote:

 Redbeard wrote:

If you see a person wearing makeup - blush, eyeliner, lipstick, 99% of the time, that person is female. If you see a person wearing a skirt, they're probably female (or Scotish).

One should be VERY careful making that assumption when in a bar in Monstrose (Houston, TX).

Yes, I'm sure there are a great many micro-environments in which the standard percentages are skewed. This doesn't mean that they're bad percentages, just that those micro-environments exist.

If I hadn't already owned the game before I met her and she knew there were no female characters, we might not have bought it.

There are a ton of female board gamers out there. A little forethought from game designers would go a long way to sell their game.

You're making the assumption that the game designers did not use any forethought, and did not do any market surveys. It's entirely possible that they did put some forethought in, and that their market research showed that, for this particular title, the existence of female characters made a negligible difference in expected sales figures.


See, I think this is what all the people making these demands fail to realize. We live in a very market-based society. And the people who invest millions of dollars into developing a video game aren't fly-by-the-seat-of-their-pants types, they're educated business people making educated decisions about target demographics.

While I certainly don't claim that no women play X sort of game (of course some do), in terms of the number of women who would buy such a game, they may constitute a significant minority, such that spending additional development dollars to reach out to them doesn't make financial sense in terms of the expected return on that investment. Might that leave some women feeling disenfranchised? Sure. But it's a business decision based on market data that shows that those women do not constitute the market.

Know where you see a really good return on that development time? In the games that draw a consistent female market. RPGs seem very inclusive. My wife plays Skyrim and Final Fantasy, and watching the setups for those games, there are as many female characters as male, the NPCs seem well fleshed out and evenly split, with individual motivations and not just tropes. Because the market demands this.

But, even with a female lead, my wife isn't going to buy a kill-em-all FPS game. She's just not. And while many of her friends also play Skyrim, they're not going to buy a FPS either. There's not a lot of return on an investment in making cosmetic changes to appeal to women in a genre that largely does not appeal to women.

Far better than I was expecting