IMPress Polly
09-17-2017, 10:11 AM
Warning: This thread revolves around the politics of video games. If you can't handle that, leave.
So traditionally we think of opposition to expanded and improved representation for women (or, for that matter, LGBTQ people, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.) in games as coming from a conservative place and mentality. After all, there was that whole alt-right Gamergate thing not very long ago, for example, which enjoyed the open and active support and participation of the likes of Breitbart News and The Daily Stormer, to say nothing of the larger online male supremacist movement (Return of Kings, etc.) and, sadly, turned out to be a microcosm for where our larger political culture was headed. But it's worth adding that the extremity of Gamergate drove away most of the online gaming community and provoked a backlash in video game development that has seen the game industry begin to expand its recruitment of female workers and, perhaps accordingly, has also seen the female representation in video games themselves expand noticeably. It is not disputable that, before 2015, the majority of major video games being released had male leads, for example, but here's the trend in player options for major games beginning with those given press conferences at E3 2015:
E3 2015: (https://feministfrequency.com/2015/06/22/gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2015/)
Gender choice: 46%
Male lead: 32%
Androgynous/no lead: 13%
Female lead: 9%
E3 2016: (https://feministfrequency.com/2016/06/17/gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2016/)
Gender choice: 49%
Male lead: 41%
Androgynous/no lead: 7%
Female lead: 3%
E3 2017: (https://feministfrequency.com/2017/06/14/gender-breakdown-of-games-featured-at-e3-2017/)
Gender choice: 52%
Male lead: 28%
Androgynous/no lead: 15%
Female lead: 7%
(It's worth highlighting that 7% of video games had female leads in 1997 as well, which shows you that that category has seen zero net growth in the last two decades.)
You'll notice a trend in that one of these categories -- gender choice -- increases every year and is now a feature of fully the majority of major video games that we can see on the horizon. There is a trend toward a liberal, i.e. inclusive, ethic that we can see emerging now, in other words. In general, this ethic expands its cultural reach at the expense of male-centered games since that's always such a huge category to reduce, but as we can see in comparing E3 2015 to E3 2016, for example, it sometimes also come at the expense of the consistently marginal, female-centered games category, and that's what I want to highlight and focus on here today.
When I speak of conservative, alt-right opposition to female representation in games and the games industry, I speak of movements that emerge to demand things like the systematic firing of women from game development or publishing companies, the removal of announced female game characters prior to a title's release, negative review scores for small games created by women, etc., typically with a conspiracy theory attached. That has traditionally been the main impediment to expanded and improved representation for women (and others) in gaming. But I propose to you that the trend toward liberalism, as manifested in-game in the form of gender choice, might eventually become the bigger problem if current trends continue. Let me explain more clearly with a couple specific examples that highlight what I'm getting at:
As you may or may not know, one of my favorite games of all time is the 2003 intimate adventure Beyond Good & Evil, which stars a poor, female photojournalist by the name of Jade who uncovers a government plot to keep a war going indefinitely by conspiring with the enemy in order to justify permanent military rule. It was a commercial flop in its own time, thanks largely to lack of marketing, but, being a quality title, subsequently developed a cult following large enough to justify a sequel in the publisher's eyes. Thus in 2009, Ubisoft released this preview trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrnuV-9FKLk
You'll notice that Jade remained the protagonist. We then heard silence from Ubisoft on the project until this year, when Beyond Good & Evil 2 resurfaced at this year's E3 trade show as a completely different game! The updated Beyond Good & Evil, it has been explained, will be a massive-scale MMO with a vast library of selectable characters, including the option to create your own; a fact that frankly promises to undermine the intimacy that made the first game appealing to me and which I believe constitutes selling out. After all, there is a profit motive involved in giving everyone a little something. The problem with giving everyone a little something though is that the story, the scenarios, etc. have to become interchangeable, indistinct, generic. The original Beyond Good & Evil was the story of a young woman and her loved ones as much as it was about the larger society around them. The sequel is shaping up to be the story of no one in particular. The humanity of the original is lost to marketing strategy. And while that might be one thing if you belong to a social group whose stories have always been told aplenty and continue to be, if you instead belong to one whose stories are scarcely being told as things are, well...I think that that's a problem.
To highlight a more prominent example that I think many people here on PF will understand and/or relate to on some level, the liberalization trend also recently hit Nintendo's famous, long-running Metroid franchise.
In 1987 (or '86 if you're Japanese), the original Metroid became the first console game to bring 2D open-world game play into the popular view, thus launching a mini-trend that produced material like Castlevania II, Blaster Master, and so forth. It also included a surprise at the end that stunned the gaming community: At the end of the game, the player character, Samus Aran, removes her full-body armored suit to reveal that...the muscular, bad-ass bounty hunter you'd been playing as the whole time is actually a woman! You'll scoff now at the pettiness, but that was actually a revolutionary moment in gaming in 1987 that made Samus a household name as, for a time, gaming's seminal feminist icon, enjoying a kind of Wonder Woman-like stature. Even today, Samus still polls as the second most-recognized female lead in video games, behind only Lara Croft of the later Tomb Raider franchise.
Over the last decade, Nintendo has been criticized for demeaning Samus to increasing degrees. First they did away with her muscles in their character designs. Then, with Metroid: Other M, they reduced her from a bad-ass bounty hunter to a servile shrieking mimsy who cannot even defend herself from attack without the express permission of a (male) commander of the regular military. These were the stages of character reduction that preceded the announcement of Metroid: Federation Force in 2015, which introduced Nintendo's broader cutesy ethic to the Metroid franchise (with giant-headed characters and so forth), abolished the franchise's traditional single-player game play...and replaced Samus altogether with a generic player character of subjective gender and a title (Marine) instead of a name and a real identity. Due to this backdrop, and also the fact that the game was supposed to commemorate the franchise's 30-year anniversary, the announcement trailer for Metroid: Federation Force yielded a legendary backlash: It generated a 90% dislike ratio on YouTube within 24 hours, soon thereafter a (then) record number of total dislikes for any YouTube video of any kind, and a Change.org petition calling for the game to be cancelled, followed by franchise record low sales upon its release. And lo and behold that two years later, we have a new, mostly-traditional type Metroid game just released with the unsubtle title Metroid: Samus Returns!
Metroid remains Nintendo's only female-led franchise. And that's what it took to retain even that one in today's climate of "inclusiveness". Do you see what I'm getting at? If current trends continue, yes overrepresentation of male-specific narratives will continue to decrease...BUT the underrepresentation of female-specific narratives will never be addressed, and may even get worse! I think on some level it matters whether girls and women see stories ABOUT US being told in this medium. The fact that there are so few of them tells the girls and women of today that we don't really matter as much as our male counterparts. We need our own stories too, not just generic, blah stories about generic, blah characters with no gender-specific experiences. To highlight what I mean another way, here's how games that use gender choice are typically marketed:
20018
20019
20017
You see what I mean? You'd never even know that you could play as a woman or women (as applicable) to judge by the box covers, or by the commercials for that matter! My point is that the industry is so male-dominated that almost WHENEVER there's a male character option, that option is considered the default and the female option(s) is/are marginalized and sidelined, often including in the games themselves, not just the marketing. Only games that actually revolve around females tend to do anything else.
What do you think? Is the current trend toward gender choice a long-term threat to meaningful female representation in video games? Do women (and other marginalized groups as well) need our own stories to be told in this medium or should every game include the option of choosing one's gender and possibly race and other demographic attributes, either directly or in the mind? In other words, should token representation become universal or should we expect more from time to time?
(As always, all are welcome to contribute (note though that I said "contribute", not "waste my time with BS"), but I am especially interested in the opinions of those who, to some degree or other, follow and are invested in geek culture. @AeonPax (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=1715), @Green Arrow (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=868), @Hal Jordan (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=994), and @CreepyOldDude (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=1158) readily come to mind.)
So traditionally we think of opposition to expanded and improved representation for women (or, for that matter, LGBTQ people, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.) in games as coming from a conservative place and mentality. After all, there was that whole alt-right Gamergate thing not very long ago, for example, which enjoyed the open and active support and participation of the likes of Breitbart News and The Daily Stormer, to say nothing of the larger online male supremacist movement (Return of Kings, etc.) and, sadly, turned out to be a microcosm for where our larger political culture was headed. But it's worth adding that the extremity of Gamergate drove away most of the online gaming community and provoked a backlash in video game development that has seen the game industry begin to expand its recruitment of female workers and, perhaps accordingly, has also seen the female representation in video games themselves expand noticeably. It is not disputable that, before 2015, the majority of major video games being released had male leads, for example, but here's the trend in player options for major games beginning with those given press conferences at E3 2015:
E3 2015: (https://feministfrequency.com/2015/06/22/gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2015/)
Gender choice: 46%
Male lead: 32%
Androgynous/no lead: 13%
Female lead: 9%
E3 2016: (https://feministfrequency.com/2016/06/17/gender-breakdown-of-games-showcased-at-e3-2016/)
Gender choice: 49%
Male lead: 41%
Androgynous/no lead: 7%
Female lead: 3%
E3 2017: (https://feministfrequency.com/2017/06/14/gender-breakdown-of-games-featured-at-e3-2017/)
Gender choice: 52%
Male lead: 28%
Androgynous/no lead: 15%
Female lead: 7%
(It's worth highlighting that 7% of video games had female leads in 1997 as well, which shows you that that category has seen zero net growth in the last two decades.)
You'll notice a trend in that one of these categories -- gender choice -- increases every year and is now a feature of fully the majority of major video games that we can see on the horizon. There is a trend toward a liberal, i.e. inclusive, ethic that we can see emerging now, in other words. In general, this ethic expands its cultural reach at the expense of male-centered games since that's always such a huge category to reduce, but as we can see in comparing E3 2015 to E3 2016, for example, it sometimes also come at the expense of the consistently marginal, female-centered games category, and that's what I want to highlight and focus on here today.
When I speak of conservative, alt-right opposition to female representation in games and the games industry, I speak of movements that emerge to demand things like the systematic firing of women from game development or publishing companies, the removal of announced female game characters prior to a title's release, negative review scores for small games created by women, etc., typically with a conspiracy theory attached. That has traditionally been the main impediment to expanded and improved representation for women (and others) in gaming. But I propose to you that the trend toward liberalism, as manifested in-game in the form of gender choice, might eventually become the bigger problem if current trends continue. Let me explain more clearly with a couple specific examples that highlight what I'm getting at:
As you may or may not know, one of my favorite games of all time is the 2003 intimate adventure Beyond Good & Evil, which stars a poor, female photojournalist by the name of Jade who uncovers a government plot to keep a war going indefinitely by conspiring with the enemy in order to justify permanent military rule. It was a commercial flop in its own time, thanks largely to lack of marketing, but, being a quality title, subsequently developed a cult following large enough to justify a sequel in the publisher's eyes. Thus in 2009, Ubisoft released this preview trailer for Beyond Good & Evil 2:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrnuV-9FKLk
You'll notice that Jade remained the protagonist. We then heard silence from Ubisoft on the project until this year, when Beyond Good & Evil 2 resurfaced at this year's E3 trade show as a completely different game! The updated Beyond Good & Evil, it has been explained, will be a massive-scale MMO with a vast library of selectable characters, including the option to create your own; a fact that frankly promises to undermine the intimacy that made the first game appealing to me and which I believe constitutes selling out. After all, there is a profit motive involved in giving everyone a little something. The problem with giving everyone a little something though is that the story, the scenarios, etc. have to become interchangeable, indistinct, generic. The original Beyond Good & Evil was the story of a young woman and her loved ones as much as it was about the larger society around them. The sequel is shaping up to be the story of no one in particular. The humanity of the original is lost to marketing strategy. And while that might be one thing if you belong to a social group whose stories have always been told aplenty and continue to be, if you instead belong to one whose stories are scarcely being told as things are, well...I think that that's a problem.
To highlight a more prominent example that I think many people here on PF will understand and/or relate to on some level, the liberalization trend also recently hit Nintendo's famous, long-running Metroid franchise.
In 1987 (or '86 if you're Japanese), the original Metroid became the first console game to bring 2D open-world game play into the popular view, thus launching a mini-trend that produced material like Castlevania II, Blaster Master, and so forth. It also included a surprise at the end that stunned the gaming community: At the end of the game, the player character, Samus Aran, removes her full-body armored suit to reveal that...the muscular, bad-ass bounty hunter you'd been playing as the whole time is actually a woman! You'll scoff now at the pettiness, but that was actually a revolutionary moment in gaming in 1987 that made Samus a household name as, for a time, gaming's seminal feminist icon, enjoying a kind of Wonder Woman-like stature. Even today, Samus still polls as the second most-recognized female lead in video games, behind only Lara Croft of the later Tomb Raider franchise.
Over the last decade, Nintendo has been criticized for demeaning Samus to increasing degrees. First they did away with her muscles in their character designs. Then, with Metroid: Other M, they reduced her from a bad-ass bounty hunter to a servile shrieking mimsy who cannot even defend herself from attack without the express permission of a (male) commander of the regular military. These were the stages of character reduction that preceded the announcement of Metroid: Federation Force in 2015, which introduced Nintendo's broader cutesy ethic to the Metroid franchise (with giant-headed characters and so forth), abolished the franchise's traditional single-player game play...and replaced Samus altogether with a generic player character of subjective gender and a title (Marine) instead of a name and a real identity. Due to this backdrop, and also the fact that the game was supposed to commemorate the franchise's 30-year anniversary, the announcement trailer for Metroid: Federation Force yielded a legendary backlash: It generated a 90% dislike ratio on YouTube within 24 hours, soon thereafter a (then) record number of total dislikes for any YouTube video of any kind, and a Change.org petition calling for the game to be cancelled, followed by franchise record low sales upon its release. And lo and behold that two years later, we have a new, mostly-traditional type Metroid game just released with the unsubtle title Metroid: Samus Returns!
Metroid remains Nintendo's only female-led franchise. And that's what it took to retain even that one in today's climate of "inclusiveness". Do you see what I'm getting at? If current trends continue, yes overrepresentation of male-specific narratives will continue to decrease...BUT the underrepresentation of female-specific narratives will never be addressed, and may even get worse! I think on some level it matters whether girls and women see stories ABOUT US being told in this medium. The fact that there are so few of them tells the girls and women of today that we don't really matter as much as our male counterparts. We need our own stories too, not just generic, blah stories about generic, blah characters with no gender-specific experiences. To highlight what I mean another way, here's how games that use gender choice are typically marketed:
20018
20019
20017
You see what I mean? You'd never even know that you could play as a woman or women (as applicable) to judge by the box covers, or by the commercials for that matter! My point is that the industry is so male-dominated that almost WHENEVER there's a male character option, that option is considered the default and the female option(s) is/are marginalized and sidelined, often including in the games themselves, not just the marketing. Only games that actually revolve around females tend to do anything else.
What do you think? Is the current trend toward gender choice a long-term threat to meaningful female representation in video games? Do women (and other marginalized groups as well) need our own stories to be told in this medium or should every game include the option of choosing one's gender and possibly race and other demographic attributes, either directly or in the mind? In other words, should token representation become universal or should we expect more from time to time?
(As always, all are welcome to contribute (note though that I said "contribute", not "waste my time with BS"), but I am especially interested in the opinions of those who, to some degree or other, follow and are invested in geek culture. @AeonPax (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=1715), @Green Arrow (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=868), @Hal Jordan (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=994), and @CreepyOldDude (http://thepoliticalforums.com/member.php?u=1158) readily come to mind.)