PDA

View Full Version : Game Controversies of 2015



IMPress Polly
01-11-2016, 06:34 AM
Last year, female video gamers went from composing 48% of the gaming population to 44%, which marked the largest single-year drop-off in the recorded history of the medium since the days of the original Nintendo Entertainment System. That drop-off is too large to be explained away in terms of more new players joining the game-O-sphere in a lopsided way. It can only be explained in terms of girls and women abandoning the medium. You might be asking yourself why. To answer this question, I've decided to include below a list of the great gaming controversies of 2015. And just to show you how objective I am, I'll even let Zoom In Games (an institution I don't at all respect) do the presenting. Here, divided between two short videos, are those they found to be the top 11 biggest ones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmyOTX1ewIE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bn2pumGwxFg

(Incidentally, there was no movement to get the latest Silent Hill and Dead or Alive: XTreme Beach Volleyball games cancelled or banned or whatever. Those were purely developer/publisher decisions.)

You might be noticing a pattern here more reflective of the mentality of the gamer community than that of game publishers at this point. Specifically, you might be noticing that gamers spent most of 2015 demanding things like more sexualization of female avatars (e.g. the option to manipulate boob sizes and movements), displaying more upset over glitches and more concern for Confederate flags and Hulk Hogan's representation than for that of an entire gender. It was a year of treatment like this (http://feministfrequency.com/2015/10/29/talking-publicly-about-harassment-generates-more-harassment/) across most gaming spaces, particularly for women who spoke out. It was the first full year of online social movements like GamerGate and so forth (which clearly won out, at least in terms of online popularity) and of news reports of them successfully shutting down discussion panels about online harassment of female players with threats of violence. It all has a cumulative effect on how girls and women perceive the medium. If only for commercial reasons, game publishers broadly seemed more gender sensitive this last year, by contrast. But that sensitivity is getting them in a lot of trouble with their fans...which tells you a lot about the fans, in my opinion.

I myself have grown very weary of the commercialism of the mainstream gaming scene, as you may have noticed, but for very different reasons having to do with the fan service model of business that the giant corporations that run this scene rely on, which clearly imposes severe limits upon the creativity of developers, to the point of basically compelling all developers, if they wish to be commercially successful, to make essentially the same game over and over again. Where I would prefer to see this medium progress creatively (especially in the range of thematic offerings), it seems like most game fans would rather see just the opposite: technical sophistication matched with the social relations and representation from "the good old days".

Well anyway, now you know why.