Celes is the one whose uniform was a bathing suit, right (although it looks like the remake gave her an outfit closer to her Amano concept—and yes I know you couldn't tell much in a pixelated sprite)? And I haven't played Heavenly Sword but this concept art is the character we're talking about, right? The one wearing the bottom 1/10th of a pair of pants?
Prime was better, but then the zero suit was introduced and the next non-Retro game added wedge heels and was a general travesty for Samus. Soul Calibur games went from modest proportions to increasingly ridiculous ones advertised with fliers (later pulled!) like (potentially NSFW) this and (also potentially NSFW) this, which makes it pretty clear what they're selling.
Just because there's HL2 (2004), Portal (2007), Mirror's Edge (2008), and Tomb Raider (2013) doesn't mean we're clear. We should probably have enough of these that there aren't just a couple standout examples that we have to lean on all the time. I agree with you that things are getting better! Especially recently now that more awareness and conversation is occurring at all levels about this sort of thing. That's not to say the other issues you touch on aren't important—they definitely are!—but on the other front I don't think we're approaching the summit yet.
I think we're still working toward Base Camp 1.
It's fine to think I'm exaggerating the advances made; I can't really prove otherwise without a ridiculously comprehensive assessment of the industry, which isn't something I really have the resources to do. Likewise, I think you're exaggerating the problems with the above and those still existing, though I can't really prove anything about the existing stuff without that same comprehensive assessment. I offer a viewpoint worth considering rather than a statement I can establish as fact.
Regarding your comments on the specific examples, I have to disagree. I don't really know if Celes (FFVI) had a bathing suit or not, but we can compare her to Rosa (FFIV), who probably had a comparable outfit, and still note the advancements made in terms of representing a female character. Sexy outfit or not, she was a much stronger character and illustrated the beginning of the improvement trend that has (thus far) culminated in FFXIII.
Regarding Heavenly Sword, it's better to play the game than grab some concept art. Memory may fail me, but I'm fairly sure the in-game model is better covered from the back. She's also part of a tribal group in a warm environment that all wear fairly minimalist clothing, men included. Most importantly, she isn't sexed up in the game. There's no romance plot, there's no exploration of vulnerability, there's no silly poses or awkward camera angles, and she's flat-chested. This demonstrates improvement over God of War, exactly as I said.
SCV may have slipped backwards (I know nothing about it), but SCIV was a landmark in terms of improvement within the fighting game genre, even though it also advertised a hilariously hyper-sexed Ivy.
There is a notable curve of improvement that shows no sign of slowing. There are more games than ever before with strong, independent, realistic female characters, and I only see that trend continuing to expand. That's not saying that everything is now devoid of sexualization, and I don't even think it should be. In fact I think it's more harmful to marginalize sex than anything else despite the oft-quoted studies in this thread series. But that's another discussion to be had.
I don't suggest that my examples of the "good stuff" are exhaustive. My examples of the "bad stuff" certainly aren't exhaustive since you can cite basically every game in the NES era and most of them in the SNES era. But you can't do that anymore, not even close. And since most of the examples to the contrary are actually coming out of Japan and Eastern Europe (Dragon Crown, SCV, Two Worlds II, etc), which are socially behind Western Europe and the US/Canada, I'd say the West is doing pretty damn good in video games nowadays. And it's only going to keep getting better.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
I feel like the way to get things done isn't necessarily by clamoring about how developers should do things different, it's to get different developers. I realize that the industry is harsh towards women, and the neckbeards working in it make it rough. I think you'll have better luck, hiring more women, and having their work shine through to create positive change in female game characters from the inside. It may be tough to get neckbeards to respect the women, but I think it's easier than telling the neckbeards that they should just be making more modest designs.
What's really lulzworthy is people assuming that just because some of us feel uncomfortable with someone being personally attacked because of some unfortunate drawings we are somehow against women and their rights and are the "Tits or GTFO" type of people. Or think that the drawings should not be criticized at all.
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
The weirdest thing about all this to me is that games are actually getting better. A lot better.
If we assume that that's true, and not just based on a deliberately generous selection of games, why do you suppose that is?
If I were to hypothesize I'd offer the following (combined, not as choices):
1. Creative endeavors are a reflection of society (and/or a comment upon it). As our society advances, so too does our creative media.
What, if any, impact does art criticism of the sort that people are doing in this thread have with respect to the advancement of society?
I tend to view it as another reflection of society. Part of the mix rather than a driving factor of change. Sometimes something random like this can spark a huge fire, but you have to already have all the fuel for that fire pulled together and ready to go, and in that case just about any spark will do.
Triptycho: A card-and-dice tabletop indie RPG currently in development and playtesting
What's really lulzworthy is people assuming that just because some of us feel uncomfortable with someone being personally attacked because of some unfortunate drawings we are somehow against women and their rights and are the "Tits or GTFO" type of people. Or think that the drawings should not be criticized at all.
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me and awesome all my posts then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
You are, perhaps, being overly reductive here. I say that a lot, but it's often true.
Disagreeing with a person's position and disagreeing with their phrasing are not the same thing.
More, you cannot expect one of us to be offended, much less implicated, because of a comment made by someone on Giant Bomb or NeoGAF or wherever.
+1
kaliyamaLeft to find less-moderated foraRegistered Userregular
I actually think that at least one thing we can all agree on is that it's bad to be mean to people in a general way.
What I don't get is that the very people who are so vehemently arguing that it's actually societally destructive to be mean to artists, are also arguing that no one can say shit about artists whose art is mean and destructive.
You... you kind of have to pick one or the other. You don't get to claim both. Well (I see the need to specify here) you do get to, because that's freedom of speech, eh? You just don't get to make those claims without looking like a lunatic.
If that's in reference in part to me, my point this: if you're going to call somebody's art societally destructive, those comments, in the aggregate, will have a chilling effect on art and lead to self-censorship or corporate unwillingness to produce that kind of art. It has the effect of silencing the artist and removing their art. That doesn't mean one can't or shouldn't do it, though I personally disagree with any moral panic over art (even the bad art of Dragon's Crown, or the truly horrifying dismembered torso of Dead Island). My disagreement with Tycho here is that he was writing as if that kind of criticism won't have the same practical impact as state censorship in the long run as the chorus of voices making that criticism grows.
But I am not implicating you, nor I did at any moment. I was mostly talking about, for example, the Kotaku guy. It's just that I think is one thing to pan the drawing and say it's not acceptable in a modern society and another to start talking about the mental age of the artist. Which for all that we know could be mostly doing what he is told (remember the women saying they were made to draw bigger tits?).
And I say this because once a place like Kotaku gets the snowball rolling the internet tends to burn people at the stake before thinking, and before you know what we have is a discussion about the artist and how a terrible person he is, which doesn't help the artist and weakens the position of the critics. So nobody wins with that behavior.
What's really lulzworthy is people assuming that just because some of us feel uncomfortable with someone being personally attacked because of some unfortunate drawings we are somehow against women and their rights and are the "Tits or GTFO" type of people. Or think that the drawings should not be criticized at all.
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
Define we.
Also, based on the bolded from your last post
I don't care what art critics say, or anyone for that matter, if they don't like the art that's fine, I don't like it myself because overall it all looks pretty ridiculous to me. But that STILL does not justify engaging into personal attacks against someone you don't know because he drew something you don't like. Yes, I think personal attacks are out of line and an overreaction in this particular case. And I'm not going to turn this into a long-drawn argument because it's not going to get us anywhere. You think it's fine and dandy to insult people over things like this, I think you have no right, and that's that.
You aren't exactly trying to have a constructive discussion anyway.
Never mind you say in the same quote that people have no right to say mean things about someone who makes art that insults people which frankly is just kind of baffling.
But I am not implicating you, nor I did at any moment. I was mostly talking about, for example, the Kotaku guy. It's just that I think is one thing to pan the drawing and say it's not acceptable in a modern society and another to start talking about the mental age of the artist. Which for all that we know could be mostly doing what he is told (remember the women saying they were made to draw bigger tits?).
And I say this because once a place like Kotaku gets the snowball rolling the internet tends to burn people at the stake before thinking, and before you know what we have is a discussion about the artist and how a terrible person he is, which doesn't help the artist and weakens the position of the critics. So nobody wins with that behavior.
So you're saying people who contribute to a sexist institution are at risk of sexist contributions eventually being frowned upon by said institution.
To elaborate on my previous post, take the Dragon's Crown artist (Kamitani). Technically I feel like he's a good artist with an interesting style who can exaggerate the body in interesting ways.
However, most of his exaggerations of the female body include very large breasts. Very few slim women have breasts that large. Now, there's nothing wrong with liking large breasts, but you've got to take into account that it is uncommon for slender women to have such large breasts. Take into account that images of slim-yet very large breasted women are very rare prior to this point in history; I don't think its unreasonable to assume that Kamitani developed his appreciation of unusually large breasts from seeing similarly large-breasted depictions of women by other artists, who themselves were probably also influenced by depictions of large-breasted women, etc. It's big bazongas all the way down, back to whatever sparked the modern big breast obsession seen both in American and Japanese media.
Previous posters have said things like "surely most people find the Sorceress' breasts as grotesquely oversized as I do", but unfortunately in...Japanimation...right now female characters with breasts the size of the Sorceress' are not uncommon, and in fact there have been several recent televised shows that depict even larger breasted women, so there must be an audience for it. There comes a point where this undeniably becomes a sexist caricature, where you can't defend this stuff by saying "but there are women with bodies like that in real life!" because any real woman with breasts that large would be in desperate need of breast reduction surgery. Given the ever increasingly large-breasted depictions of women in many Japanimation shows (not to mention the unbelievably ludicrous levels of male gaze pandering that effectively take the Mass Effect Miranda's Ass-Cam and use it for nearly every character in nearly every situation, or the prevalence of shows that feature a premise of one guy with an entire harem of women inexplicably attracted to him) I wouldn't be surprised if many individuals in the next wave of male Japanese artists created female characters with even larger breasts and even more shameless male gaze pandering. Maybe artists should have a responsibility to present realistic women as attractive and non-objectified so that the young men watching these shows will grow up finding real women attractive instead of substituting them with sexually-objectified caricatures of women?
If you're wondering "why are you talking about Japanimation in a video games thread", it's because the Japanimation industry is an example of why it is important to fight rampant sexual objectification in the games industry. We shouldn't want the games industry to follow the Japanimation industry into hypersexualization, because the latter industry is about as close to a post-apocalyptic misogynistic nightmare world as you can get. There are dim beacons of civilization in that wasteland, with some shows that only have slight problematic features (for example, a recent show had one female protagonist with a realistic body type who was sexually empowered without exploiting her sexuality for titillation and a second female protagonist who, despite having large-yet-not-freakishly-large breasts, generally kept them completely covered-up, no "boob window" or anything) and a precious few that might be considered progressive (for example, another recent show featured a cast comprised primarily of women who were all significantly outside of the beauty norm and featured as a central theme how society made them feel like second-hand citizens for not being pretty enough), but as a whole the state of Japanimation has gotten so bad that we can't even have a general thread about it on these forums, and rightly so. Mentioning Japanimation at all, even if you hate the sexualized majority of it while loving the rare gems lost in all the garbage, gets you lumped in with all the misogynistic perverts willing to shell-out fifty bucks for a two-episode DVD of a show just because it includes a "special feature" of one of the female characters exercising in her underwear while the camera focuses on her boobs, butt, and crotch (this is not a hypothetical; this is something that exists).
I don't think the games industry will get that bad, and thank god it actually looks to be getting better now that people are being more outspoken in their criticism of sexist elements. Thank god these people exist and are brave enough to face sexist dipshits who respond to things like "Tropes vs Women" by photoshopping Anita Sarkeesian into sexually disempowering situations or sending her death threats. Without them the games industry could slide into the black hole that the Japanimation industry has been sucked into, and that would be regoddamndiculously awful.
+5
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Well yes, people as a society changing their minds about what is acceptable does have basically the same effect as censorship, I guess? Except society is always changing what it finds to be acceptable, all the time continuously, and most of the time normal people do not go into a panic about how society changing it's ideas is censorship of all things. Certainly you'll have the older generation talking about how things were better before, and not understanding why so many things they dislike are now common. Such older generations might even make arguments about how life in their more racist, sexist times was also more moral and virtuous.
But the idea that changing artists perspectives on things is the same thing as government regulation telling them not to art is pretty cray, you guys.
What's really lulzworthy is people assuming that just because some of us feel uncomfortable with someone being personally attacked because of some unfortunate drawings we are somehow against women and their rights and are the "Tits or GTFO" type of people. Or think that the drawings should not be criticized at all.
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
This is the definition of putting words in my mouth.
What's really lulzworthy is people assuming that just because some of us feel uncomfortable with someone being personally attacked because of some unfortunate drawings we are somehow against women and their rights and are the "Tits or GTFO" type of people. Or think that the drawings should not be criticized at all.
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
Define we.
Also, based on the bolded from your last post
I don't care what art critics say, or anyone for that matter, if they don't like the art that's fine, I don't like it myself because overall it all looks pretty ridiculous to me. But that STILL does not justify engaging into personal attacks against someone you don't know because he drew something you don't like. Yes, I think personal attacks are out of line and an overreaction in this particular case. And I'm not going to turn this into a long-drawn argument because it's not going to get us anywhere. You think it's fine and dandy to insult people over things like this, I think you have no right, and that's that.
You aren't exactly trying to have a constructive discussion anyway.
Never mind you say in the same quote that people have no right to say mean things about someone who makes art that insults people which frankly is just kind of baffling.
Sorry, I phrased it wrong, that's why I don't want to get in a drawn-out argument. My English is not good enough that I will be able to speak without people centering in some ambiguous phrasing and taking it in the worst possible way.
I didn't mean that you haver no right, as in "the government will imprison you", it was meant in the broadest sense of "you need not act like a jerk".
And it's one thing to feel insulted by the drawing, but it's not like the artist was purposefully trying to offend you, which is exactly what people do when they call him a 14 year old.
Look, I'm going to leave this because I know that people here is more centered in looking for a weak point in my phrasing than in understanding my actual point. So I'm just going to say: "being critic with art is fine, being intolerant with objectification is fine, being a douchebag isn't".
An artist gets called a 5 year old in comments: OMG OUR ART IS UNDER ATTACK FULL BATTLE STATIONS
Many females in gaming get insulted and abused in comment threads constantly, everything from "TITS OR GTFO" to actual rape threats: Everything is fine here, move along.
I'm putting words in people's mouth? Then I must be going crazy because going by this you would think "you don't think the artist should be insulted therefore you do not care about rape threats" is something that is being said here.
If that's in reference in part to me, my point this: if you're going to call somebody's art societally destructive, those comments, in the aggregate, will have a chilling effect on art and lead to self-censorship or corporate unwillingness to produce that kind of art. It has the effect of silencing the artist and removing their art. That doesn't mean one can't or shouldn't do it, though I personally disagree with any moral panic over art (even the bad art of Dragon's Crown, or the truly horrifying dismembered torso of Dead Island). My disagreement with Tycho here is that he was writing as if that kind of criticism won't have the same practical impact as state censorship in the long run as the chorus of voices making that criticism grows.
Corporate unwillingness to produce art? No one said you're entitled to a corporate platform for your ideas, that isn't what free speech means at any level. The NY Times refusing to publish an op-ed I mail in isn't censorship. Plus, there's ALREADY tons of corporate unwillingness to produce art, like female protagonists, because of the culture we're talking about. Culture and market forces intersect and push and pull and this goes back and forth, but at no point is it anything like censorship, and saying that people can't criticize something on moral instead of aesthetic grounds is a very curious thing to say. To hear your view, it sounds like you think people not approving of racist caricature anymore is just as bad as state censorship.
Also I don't think chilling effect is really appropriate because that term generally refers to people being deterred from doing something by the threat of a lawsuit or other legal consequence (popularly DMCA), and that's exactly what isn't happening here. Similarly, like I mentioned before, moral panic is just loaded language without being justified. You disagree with moral panics? Well, I guess that settles it! Who would agree with a moral panic, after all?
I actually think that at least one thing we can all agree on is that it's bad to be mean to people in a general way.
What I don't get is that the very people who are so vehemently arguing that it's actually societally destructive to be mean to artists, are also arguing that no one can say shit about artists whose art is mean and destructive.
You... you kind of have to pick one or the other. You don't get to claim both. Well (I see the need to specify here) you do get to, because that's freedom of speech, eh? You just don't get to make those claims without looking like a lunatic.
This is a reasonable point. I can say that for me, it comes down to social pressure on artists seeming to have more of an effect than social pressure from art.
The narrative of the artist being robbed of agency by societal pressures seems very coherent and stable to me. I can find lots of examples of artists who weren't able to make what they wanted because social pressures made it impossible. I can find lots of examples of society repressing things it shouldn't have through social pressure, and that form of repression seems to work very well when it comes to creating art.
Meanwhile, the narrative of societal decline due to artists having too many freedoms or not enough social pressures strikes me as incoherent. Understand, people have always been afraid that art will cause societal decline, and I can't find a historical example where they were right. I also can't find any data reliably supporting the idea that its happening even now - there are some studies in the OP that look at brain chemistry and how people react to certain things in a lab environment, but there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation drawn between fictional bad things and real bad things. When media got more violent society got less violent. When media got more sexualized society got less sexist. So I don't find it obvious at all that fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism; it seems just as likely to me that the sexism is coming from other places, like parents and teachers, or real-world experiences that reinforce themselves.
With Dragon's Crown specifically, I feel like it's worth defending because it's a small niche studio and I get wary when I see big powerful organizations bullying small niche studios because they don't like the content of their games. When I look at that situation, I see a big powerful organization (games journalism in this case) rolling up to George Kamitani and demanding his lunch money, which in this case takes the form of a public apology and a lot of people shitting on his game and using him as a symbol of sexism. They are demanding that an artist, instead of producing art that resonates with them, become a spokesperson for a cause. He was scared of them and so he caved. No one thinks it's a sincere apology, nor does anyone really care, they just want his lunch money.
Dragon's Crown isn't my cup of tea, but there are some games that are full of things that others would find offensive. I love Edmund McMillan games, for example. If Edmund McMillian ended up being scapegoated and bullied as part of a cause, or if the only response he could get to his games was "These are gross and Edmund McMillian is a shithead and if you play them you are a gross shithead" I think that would be a loss. I would rather we let niche indie games stand on their own as pieces of art instead of trying to put them all into the box of speaking for social justice causes.
No, it wouldn't be an issue because "grossness" is a vague subjective thing. People in this thread have presented the negative effect the industry has had on women hiring.
It also wouldn't change his artstyle or force him to do game shows or something. He'd do DIFFERENT ART.
Actually, my question was "Why the fuck are you calling it Japanimation?"
I figured I was already pushing my luck mentioning it in the first place (although I feel like the way I tie it to the games industry as a cautionary example of sexism at mindbogglingly awful extremes makes it relevant to this thread) it would be best to assume that the banned phrases in the previous thread carried over to this one (after all, SpaceKungFuMan isn't prohibited from participating in this thread like he was the last one, but he still hasn't shown up).
I actually think that at least one thing we can all agree on is that it's bad to be mean to people in a general way.
What I don't get is that the very people who are so vehemently arguing that it's actually societally destructive to be mean to artists, are also arguing that no one can say shit about artists whose art is mean and destructive.
You... you kind of have to pick one or the other. You don't get to claim both. Well (I see the need to specify here) you do get to, because that's freedom of speech, eh? You just don't get to make those claims without looking like a lunatic.
This is a reasonable point. I can say that for me, it comes down to social pressure on artists seeming to have more of an effect than social pressure from art.
The narrative of the artist being robbed of agency by societal pressures seems very coherent and stable to me. I can find lots of examples of artists who weren't able to make what they wanted because social pressures made it impossible. I can find lots of examples of society repressing things it shouldn't have through social pressure, and that form of repression seems to work very well when it comes to creating art.
*snip*
Like who?
Lilnoobs on
0
CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
I actually think that at least one thing we can all agree on is that it's bad to be mean to people in a general way.
What I don't get is that the very people who are so vehemently arguing that it's actually societally destructive to be mean to artists, are also arguing that no one can say shit about artists whose art is mean and destructive.
You... you kind of have to pick one or the other. You don't get to claim both. Well (I see the need to specify here) you do get to, because that's freedom of speech, eh? You just don't get to make those claims without looking like a lunatic.
This is a reasonable point. I can say that for me, it comes down to social pressure on artists seeming to have more of an effect than social pressure from art.
The narrative of the artist being robbed of agency by societal pressures seems very coherent and stable to me. I can find lots of examples of artists who weren't able to make what they wanted because social pressures made it impossible. I can find lots of examples of society repressing things it shouldn't have through social pressure, and that form of repression seems to work very well when it comes to creating art.
Meanwhile, the narrative of societal decline due to artists having too many freedoms or not enough social pressures strikes me as incoherent. Understand, people have always been afraid that art will cause societal decline, and I can't find a historical example where they were right. I also can't find any data reliably supporting the idea that its happening even now - there are some studies in the OP that look at brain chemistry and how people react to certain things in a lab environment, but there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation drawn between fictional bad things and real bad things. When media got more violent society got less violent. When media got more sexualized society got less sexist. So I don't find it obvious at all that fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism; it seems just as likely to me that the sexism is coming from other places, like parents and teachers, or real-world experiences that reinforce themselves.
With Dragon's Crown specifically, I feel like it's worth defending because it's a small niche studio and I get wary when I see big powerful organizations bullying small niche studios because they don't like the content of their games. When I look at that situation, I see a big powerful organization (games journalism in this case) rolling up to George Kamitani and demanding his lunch money, which in this case takes the form of a public apology and a lot of people shitting on his game and using him as a symbol of sexism. They are demanding that an artist, instead of producing art that resonates with them, become a spokesperson for a cause. He was scared of them and so he caved. No one thinks it's a sincere apology, nor does anyone really care, they just want his lunch money.
Dragon's Crown isn't my cup of tea, but there are some games that are full of things that others would find offensive. I love Edmund McMillan games, for example. If Edmund McMillian ended up being scapegoated and bullied as part of a cause, or if the only response he could get to his games was "These are gross and Edmund McMillian is a shithead and if you play them you are a gross shithead" I think that would be a loss. I would rather we let niche indie games stand on their own as pieces of art instead of trying to put them all into the box of speaking for social justice causes.
Here's the problem I don't feel like you're seeing in all this.
You can see that me being negative to the artist making big titty witches inc. can pressure him away from making stuff that he wants to make.
Why can't you see that the pressure of the games industry always putting out big titty witches for it's art puts pressure on female* artists who might want to make something different but are constrained by the industry? We have linked personal stories of women being embarassed about characters that they worked on in games, because those characters had to conform to the industry defaults whether the artist liked it or not.
So the general question is why do you think that my negative input, someone who has no hiring power in games, is more powerful and harmful to artists than the industry's negative input?
*I realized that I specified female artists here, but there's no reason to suppose that male artists aren't also embarassed about the type of art they are pushed to make, and wishing they could make more varied and interesting designs.
Here's a thought experiment for everyone who thinks that the prevalence of large-breasted female characters isn't something to worry about:
Imagine if all of a sudden the games industry decided to cater exclusively to foot fetishists. Imagine that the majority of games began to feature women almost exclusively with lovingly detailed bare feet. Imagine that instead of jiggle physics you had wriggling toe animations. Imagine that you had entire fictional cultures created to justify every female character being barefoot. Imagine that the camera often focused on close-ups of a woman's perfect little feet every time you were interacting with her in-game. Imagine that the game takes every opportunity it can to shove a woman's bare feet right in your face.
Would you feel uncomfortable knowing that you're looking at this guy's sexual fantasy all the time?
When media got more violent society got less violent. When media got more sexualized society got less sexist.
Society also became less sexist with the rise of hot pockets. For someone who mentions data so often this is a strange line.
Why do you talk about fiction "causing" sexism? Those other things reinforce it, too, yeah! But what on earth makes you think that media is somehow immune? It's all influenced by it and in turn reinforces it when reproducing it. It's not like you doubt whether media influences people, do you?
+2
MortiousThe Nightmare BeginsMove to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
I love how that picture is "arguably" cheesecake because she is "pretty fugly." That picture is two feet of clothing away from being pornography. And I love the idea that people who got bent out of shape about it were "more of self-appointed media watchdogs" than "civilized critics." Show that shit to a legitimate art critic. See how long it takes them to stop laughing - at least, those who don't just immediately ignore it as the work of a juvenile mind.
Yes, it's bad art. The critique here isn't that it's bad art, the critique is that it perpetuates certain ideas about gender, and is bad for people, so people shouldn't do it any more. Three discrete threads of critique here:
(1) A narrow view of censorship as some state-imposed rule prohibiting the publication of something. Everybody, except for Nuzak, is against this.
(2) Critique of the work as bad aesthetically. Nobody thinks this is going to "silence" an artist - see Thomas Kincaid, Uwe Boll, etc. This is what you claim you are doing and, tellingly, it is the position you take in response to claims people are advocating censorship.
(3) Critique of the work as bad morally, or for the health of the consumer. This critique says: this work hurts people. If the implication of that isn't "stop doing the work, and society should shun you if you don't." If that isn't silencing, I don't know what is.
Some examples:
(a) This contemporaneous far-right/libertarian defense of Hollywood blacklisting: http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/museum/blist.htm ("The blacklisting of pro-Communist screenwriters, actors, and so on was particularly appropriate as an act of cultural self-defense. I daresay that if Hollywood had been largely pro-Nazi, World War II would have sparked a massive wave of firing of not only American Nazi Party members, but anyone vaguely sympathetic to their views. And what would have been wrong with that? They still have the right to express their views, just not on the payroll of people who deplore them. ")
(b) A gallery cancelled a Mapplethorpe show because "of the possible offensive nature of some of the photographs" and "concern that the controversial nature of the exhibition would cause the museum to become part of a political controversy over Federal financing of artistic work that many might find offensive." http://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/01/arts/crowd-at-corcoran-protests-mapplethorpe-cancellation.html
To be clear, you as a free individual, have every right to argue that games like this shouldn't be made, and if they are made, they shouldn't be bought, and the people that make these games are bad and they shouldn't be employed unless they change their art/speech. You can use your market power as a consumer to do that, just as employers did in (a) and the general public did in (b). But to pretend that the critique isn't intended to (a) get them to either repent or to shut up, (b) that you wouldn't be happier if games like this were never made again, and (c) that regardless of your intent, the critique will have a small but real silencing effect, is incredibly disingenous.
Can I ask what the opposite of (3) is then.
I mean if an artist creates a work that hurts people, isn't being shunned the natural response from the people being hurt/those that care about them?
Telling them that their work is harmful sounds like just giving them a heads up that it might not be well received. Sounds like a bonus.
So if we're dead set on attempting to shame individual artists for perpetuating sexism until they stop drawing the things we find objectionable is it okay to yell at booth babes and tell them how awful they are for perpetuating sexism until they stop taking modelling jobs we don't like?
I think we as a society really dropped the ball on that whole IGDA scandal. We neglected to find out the names of all the models who showed up at that party so we could tell them what horrible people they were and to try to convince them that they should never take any modelling job that might be construed as sexist. Someone should have slapped the drinks out of their hands and told them to GTFO in no uncertain terms.
Or... on the other hand, we could not try to single out individual artists and models and instead concentrate on the companies that subvert their works into the media avalanche that actually is the problem. Basically, instead of shaming the artists, let's shame the game companies until they stop asking artists to draw this stuff.
Artists who only like drawing big tittile gun witches can do so on their own time without having shame heaped upon them, women feel less excluded, developers get a bigger market to sell their games in... everybody wins.
Or... on the other hand, we could not try to single out individual artists and models and instead concentrate on the companies that subvert their works into the media avalanche that actually is the problem. Basically, instead of shaming the artists, let's shame the game companies until they stop asking artists to draw this stuff.
You're right! We should really be annoyed with the company producing the art here. If they hadn't offered the artist the money he never would have done it!
Let's just look up Dragon Crown's development studio. Ah, Vanillaware whose president is... George Kamitani. Lead artist for Dragon's Crown.
I actually think that at least one thing we can all agree on is that it's bad to be mean to people in a general way.
What I don't get is that the very people who are so vehemently arguing that it's actually societally destructive to be mean to artists, are also arguing that no one can say shit about artists whose art is mean and destructive.
You... you kind of have to pick one or the other. You don't get to claim both. Well (I see the need to specify here) you do get to, because that's freedom of speech, eh? You just don't get to make those claims without looking like a lunatic.
This is a reasonable point. I can say that for me, it comes down to social pressure on artists seeming to have more of an effect than social pressure from art.
The narrative of the artist being robbed of agency by societal pressures seems very coherent and stable to me. I can find lots of examples of artists who weren't able to make what they wanted because social pressures made it impossible. I can find lots of examples of society repressing things it shouldn't have through social pressure, and that form of repression seems to work very well when it comes to creating art.
Meanwhile, the narrative of societal decline due to artists having too many freedoms or not enough social pressures strikes me as incoherent. Understand, people have always been afraid that art will cause societal decline, and I can't find a historical example where they were right. I also can't find any data reliably supporting the idea that its happening even now - there are some studies in the OP that look at brain chemistry and how people react to certain things in a lab environment, but there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation drawn between fictional bad things and real bad things. When media got more violent society got less violent. When media got more sexualized society got less sexist. So I don't find it obvious at all that fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism; it seems just as likely to me that the sexism is coming from other places, like parents and teachers, or real-world experiences that reinforce themselves.
With Dragon's Crown specifically, I feel like it's worth defending because it's a small niche studio and I get wary when I see big powerful organizations bullying small niche studios because they don't like the content of their games. When I look at that situation, I see a big powerful organization (games journalism in this case) rolling up to George Kamitani and demanding his lunch money, which in this case takes the form of a public apology and a lot of people shitting on his game and using him as a symbol of sexism. They are demanding that an artist, instead of producing art that resonates with them, become a spokesperson for a cause. He was scared of them and so he caved. No one thinks it's a sincere apology, nor does anyone really care, they just want his lunch money.
Dragon's Crown isn't my cup of tea, but there are some games that are full of things that others would find offensive. I love Edmund McMillan games, for example. If Edmund McMillian ended up being scapegoated and bullied as part of a cause, or if the only response he could get to his games was "These are gross and Edmund McMillian is a shithead and if you play them you are a gross shithead" I think that would be a loss. I would rather we let niche indie games stand on their own as pieces of art instead of trying to put them all into the box of speaking for social justice causes.
What's this about "societal decline"? I don't think the point here is that sexism in entertainment media will necessarily cause an increasing amount of interpersonal sexism over time. I think the point is that there are varying forms of sexism in the world at the current point in time, and that some forms of sexism are currently exacerbated by entertainment media that is sexist. Progress is being made and may continue to be made with regards to decreasing the total amount of sexism in the world. Because entertainment media can shape and influence the views of young people on appropriate levels and expressions of sexuality it stands to reason, absent evidence to the contrary, that one useful means of addressing sexism in the world as it exists today is the criticism of entertainment media that perpetuates sexist stereotypes and social norms.
I'm not sure that anyone believes that "fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism", whatever "primary cause" and "societal sexism" mean. However, we're posting to a forum based on a webcomic steeped in videogame culture, in the subforum dedicated to videogames, in a thread about sexism in the videogame industry. If it seems like sexism in videogames is a major focus of debate here, I submit that it's not because the posters necessarily feel that it is a primary concern when considering sexism in a global sense. Rather, people focus on videogame sexism here because this is the perfect place to focus on that one narrow slice of the sexism pie, as it were.
Also, I have to laugh at the idea of "games journalism" as "a big powerful organization".
Or... on the other hand, we could not try to single out individual artists and models and instead concentrate on the companies that subvert their works into the media avalanche that actually is the problem. Basically, instead of shaming the artists, let's shame the game companies until they stop asking artists to draw this stuff.
The flashpoint behind most of the discussion about artists was Dragon's Crown, in which case the artist was also the designer; if your name is well-known along with the art you're probably not just an artist cog. No, people don't want to just yell at employees doing what their bosses tell them, recognizable in posts like Cambiata's referencing the links about artists embarrassed by some of the stuff they had to work on, and yes, people want to yell at the bosses who are behind it. Samara, for example, had better concepts available but they went ahead and picked "strawberry catsuit surprise" anyway.
People are talking about artists generally because the censorship argument that keeps boiling up from people who are unironically suggesting "you shouldn't tell people what they shouldn't do" is an argument in abstract about the right to expression and society's role in it instead of specifically about commercial art where the argument becomes ridiculous because you draw what your boss tells you to and if you can't refrain from drawing huge racks when asked you'll be fired for sucking at your job.
There's a difference between being used as part of a societal routine of objectification and happily participating in it without even questioning what is going on.
And yes, the standards will be different for men and women in this regard. I'm much more likely to give a female artist (or any woman hired to feel incredibly uncomfortable for the benefit of a bunch of journalists) the benefit of the doubt if she's part of an otherwise mostly male team than any random male member of that same team.
Booth babes can and will be fucking fired for little to no reason. You're a part of the overly privileged crowd, it's on you to step up. You risk significantly less and have greater influence with the majority of your peers than a member of a discriminated against group.
Edit: Just to be clear, step up often means shutting the heck up and letting somebody else talk. Or stopping the habit of treating ideas that don't reflect your own experiences as if they're lies to be destroyed rather than perspectives to consider.
OneAngryPossum on
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CambiataCommander ShepardThe likes of which even GAWD has never seenRegistered Userregular
Generally speaking, when we look at the art and say "this contributes to the problem" we don't even know who the actual artist is who is responsible, aside from the company who made it (thus when we talk about Miranda cam, we are talking about Bioware. We don't even know the name of the person or persons responsible for Miranda cam). "This looks like a 15 year old drew it" may be a mean critique, but it's still a critique of the actual piece.
The Dragon Crown thing is slightly different in that the owner of the company is also the one who designed the art for the game.
Here's a thought experiment for everyone who thinks that the prevalence of large-breasted female characters isn't something to worry about:
Imagine if all of a sudden the games industry decided to cater exclusively to foot fetishists. Imagine that the majority of games began to feature women almost exclusively with lovingly detailed bare feet. Imagine that instead of jiggle physics you had wriggling toe animations. Imagine that you had entire fictional cultures created to justify every female character being barefoot. Imagine that the camera often focused on close-ups of a woman's perfect little feet every time you were interacting with her in-game. Imagine that the game takes every opportunity it can to shove a woman's bare feet right in your face.
Would you feel uncomfortable knowing that you're looking at this guy's sexual fantasy all the time?
I think we've lost the plot somewhere.
But let me replace your hypothetical with mine.
Women characters are no longer protagonists. They are always (or at least 90%) the mcguffin to be rescued. They have no agency, and only exist as a foil to the male or gender undefined player character.
There we go, and I didn't even sexualize it. All I did was reduce an entire gender to a single one-dimensional aspect.
I mean, the women could be really important, or really powerful (but neutralized in some way to require rescuing) but it doesn't matter, because that's not their one defining characteristic.
Overall, games (and media) are saying that you can be anything, as long as you're also X.
Generally speaking, when we look at the art and say "this contributes to the problem" we don't even know who the actual artist is who is responsible, aside from the company who made it (thus when we talk about Miranda cam, we are talking about Bioware. We don't even know the name of the person or persons responsible for Miranda cam). "This looks like a 15 year old drew it" may be a mean critique, but it's still a critique of the actual piece.
The Dragon Crown thing is slightly different in that the owner of the company is also the one who designed the art for the game.
Shouldn't the message be: "Don't put this in your game." Instead of "Don't ever make this kind of art."?
An individual's work is harmless. It only affects people when it completely saturates a form of media.
Generally speaking, when we look at the art and say "this contributes to the problem" we don't even know who the actual artist is who is responsible, aside from the company who made it (thus when we talk about Miranda cam, we are talking about Bioware. We don't even know the name of the person or persons responsible for Miranda cam). "This looks like a 15 year old drew it" may be a mean critique, but it's still a critique of the actual piece.
The Dragon Crown thing is slightly different in that the owner of the company is also the one who designed the art for the game.
Shouldn't the message be: "Don't put this in your game." Instead of "Don't ever make this kind of art."?
An individual's work is harmless. It only affects people when it completely saturates a form of media.
There's a difference between being used as part of a societal routine of objectification and happily participating in it without even questioning what is going on.
And yes, the standards will be different for men and women in this regard. I'm much more likely to give a female artist (or any woman hired to feel incredibly uncomfortable for the benefit of a bunch of journalists) the benefit of the doubt if she's part of an otherwise mostly male team than any random male member of that same team.
Booth babes can and will be fucking fired for little to no reason. You're a part of the overly privileged crowd, it's on you to step up. You risk significantly less and have greater influence with the majority of your peers than a member of a discriminated against group.
Edit: Just to be clear, step up often means shutting the heck up and letting somebody else talk. Or allowing that maybe you should approach new ideas with less skepticism if they're not coming from your own experiences.
Aren't booth babes contributing to sexism by just accepting the job in the first place? They don't actually work for the companies they model for. I thought they were independent contractors who choose which jobs to take. Maybe not 100% of the time, but I thought that's mostly how that business deal worked.
Here are some game developer salary survey results conducted by Gamasutra, 2011 2012 2013
As the 2013 results were published this April, you may congratulate yourself for the great strides made
and
let me suggest low sample size to help you rationalize any dissonance you may encounter.
This is what bugs me about those reports. From the 2013 edition:
Across all disciplines, the men surveyed are more likely to have more experience.
So, why not give the data of how men vs women with equal experience match up? Almost half of the men responding have over 6 years experience, while none of the women did. The note goes on to say:
So, yes, a higher proportion of highly-experienced male devs means we’d expect higher salaries for men than women overall. To me, this seems to reflect what we as an industry already know; it’s not a particularly hospitable industry for women (as indicated by the meager gender ratio), meaning they’re less likely to stick around than men are.
That's true, and what we're talking about fixing, but it doesn't excuse the unfair interpretation of the data. Without a comparison of equal experience, the chart is useless.
Here are some game developer salary survey results conducted by Gamasutra, 2011 2012 2013
As the 2013 results were published this April, you may congratulate yourself for the great strides made
and
let me suggest low sample size to help you rationalize any dissonance you may encounter.
This is what bugs me about those reports. From the 2013 edition:
Across all disciplines, the men surveyed are more likely to have more experience.
So, why not give the data of how men vs women with equal experience match up? Almost half of the men responding have over 6 years experience, while none of the women did. The note goes on to say:
So, yes, a higher proportion of highly-experienced male devs means we’d expect higher salaries for men than women overall. To me, this seems to reflect what we as an industry already know; it’s not a particularly hospitable industry for women (as indicated by the meager gender ratio), meaning they’re less likely to stick around than men are.
That's true, and what we're talking about fixing, but it doesn't excuse the unfair interpretation of the data. Without a comparison of equal experience, the chart is useless.
Maybe because that data doesn't exist?
Potentially the sample size would be down to 4 men and 4 women, so then we would do the roundabout with "small sample size!" Repeat ad nauseam.
Posts
Regarding your comments on the specific examples, I have to disagree. I don't really know if Celes (FFVI) had a bathing suit or not, but we can compare her to Rosa (FFIV), who probably had a comparable outfit, and still note the advancements made in terms of representing a female character. Sexy outfit or not, she was a much stronger character and illustrated the beginning of the improvement trend that has (thus far) culminated in FFXIII.
Regarding Heavenly Sword, it's better to play the game than grab some concept art. Memory may fail me, but I'm fairly sure the in-game model is better covered from the back. She's also part of a tribal group in a warm environment that all wear fairly minimalist clothing, men included. Most importantly, she isn't sexed up in the game. There's no romance plot, there's no exploration of vulnerability, there's no silly poses or awkward camera angles, and she's flat-chested. This demonstrates improvement over God of War, exactly as I said.
SCV may have slipped backwards (I know nothing about it), but SCIV was a landmark in terms of improvement within the fighting game genre, even though it also advertised a hilariously hyper-sexed Ivy.
There is a notable curve of improvement that shows no sign of slowing. There are more games than ever before with strong, independent, realistic female characters, and I only see that trend continuing to expand. That's not saying that everything is now devoid of sexualization, and I don't even think it should be. In fact I think it's more harmful to marginalize sex than anything else despite the oft-quoted studies in this thread series. But that's another discussion to be had.
I don't suggest that my examples of the "good stuff" are exhaustive. My examples of the "bad stuff" certainly aren't exhaustive since you can cite basically every game in the NES era and most of them in the SNES era. But you can't do that anymore, not even close. And since most of the examples to the contrary are actually coming out of Japan and Eastern Europe (Dragon Crown, SCV, Two Worlds II, etc), which are socially behind Western Europe and the US/Canada, I'd say the West is doing pretty damn good in video games nowadays. And it's only going to keep getting better.
Celes was in a leotard with pauldrons in sprite form; in Amano's art and every depiction of her after that, she's wearing some kinda fantasy pantsuit
Wait, it's not lulzworthy, it's worrying and also pretty offensive. This is a typical example of the "if you don't agree completely with me then you are defending a diametrically opposed position" attitude, which is not helpful at all to any discussion about anything.
You are, perhaps, being overly reductive here. I say that a lot, but it's often true.
Disagreeing with a person's position and disagreeing with their phrasing are not the same thing.
More, you cannot expect one of us to be offended, much less implicated, because of a comment made by someone on Giant Bomb or NeoGAF or wherever.
If that's in reference in part to me, my point this: if you're going to call somebody's art societally destructive, those comments, in the aggregate, will have a chilling effect on art and lead to self-censorship or corporate unwillingness to produce that kind of art. It has the effect of silencing the artist and removing their art. That doesn't mean one can't or shouldn't do it, though I personally disagree with any moral panic over art (even the bad art of Dragon's Crown, or the truly horrifying dismembered torso of Dead Island). My disagreement with Tycho here is that he was writing as if that kind of criticism won't have the same practical impact as state censorship in the long run as the chorus of voices making that criticism grows.
And I say this because once a place like Kotaku gets the snowball rolling the internet tends to burn people at the stake before thinking, and before you know what we have is a discussion about the artist and how a terrible person he is, which doesn't help the artist and weakens the position of the critics. So nobody wins with that behavior.
Define we.
Also, based on the bolded from your last post
You aren't exactly trying to have a constructive discussion anyway.
Never mind you say in the same quote that people have no right to say mean things about someone who makes art that insults people which frankly is just kind of baffling.
So you're saying people who contribute to a sexist institution are at risk of sexist contributions eventually being frowned upon by said institution.
I can see the cause for concern.
However, most of his exaggerations of the female body include very large breasts. Very few slim women have breasts that large. Now, there's nothing wrong with liking large breasts, but you've got to take into account that it is uncommon for slender women to have such large breasts. Take into account that images of slim-yet very large breasted women are very rare prior to this point in history; I don't think its unreasonable to assume that Kamitani developed his appreciation of unusually large breasts from seeing similarly large-breasted depictions of women by other artists, who themselves were probably also influenced by depictions of large-breasted women, etc. It's big bazongas all the way down, back to whatever sparked the modern big breast obsession seen both in American and Japanese media.
Previous posters have said things like "surely most people find the Sorceress' breasts as grotesquely oversized as I do", but unfortunately in...Japanimation...right now female characters with breasts the size of the Sorceress' are not uncommon, and in fact there have been several recent televised shows that depict even larger breasted women, so there must be an audience for it. There comes a point where this undeniably becomes a sexist caricature, where you can't defend this stuff by saying "but there are women with bodies like that in real life!" because any real woman with breasts that large would be in desperate need of breast reduction surgery. Given the ever increasingly large-breasted depictions of women in many Japanimation shows (not to mention the unbelievably ludicrous levels of male gaze pandering that effectively take the Mass Effect Miranda's Ass-Cam and use it for nearly every character in nearly every situation, or the prevalence of shows that feature a premise of one guy with an entire harem of women inexplicably attracted to him) I wouldn't be surprised if many individuals in the next wave of male Japanese artists created female characters with even larger breasts and even more shameless male gaze pandering. Maybe artists should have a responsibility to present realistic women as attractive and non-objectified so that the young men watching these shows will grow up finding real women attractive instead of substituting them with sexually-objectified caricatures of women?
If you're wondering "why are you talking about Japanimation in a video games thread", it's because the Japanimation industry is an example of why it is important to fight rampant sexual objectification in the games industry. We shouldn't want the games industry to follow the Japanimation industry into hypersexualization, because the latter industry is about as close to a post-apocalyptic misogynistic nightmare world as you can get. There are dim beacons of civilization in that wasteland, with some shows that only have slight problematic features (for example, a recent show had one female protagonist with a realistic body type who was sexually empowered without exploiting her sexuality for titillation and a second female protagonist who, despite having large-yet-not-freakishly-large breasts, generally kept them completely covered-up, no "boob window" or anything) and a precious few that might be considered progressive (for example, another recent show featured a cast comprised primarily of women who were all significantly outside of the beauty norm and featured as a central theme how society made them feel like second-hand citizens for not being pretty enough), but as a whole the state of Japanimation has gotten so bad that we can't even have a general thread about it on these forums, and rightly so. Mentioning Japanimation at all, even if you hate the sexualized majority of it while loving the rare gems lost in all the garbage, gets you lumped in with all the misogynistic perverts willing to shell-out fifty bucks for a two-episode DVD of a show just because it includes a "special feature" of one of the female characters exercising in her underwear while the camera focuses on her boobs, butt, and crotch (this is not a hypothetical; this is something that exists).
I don't think the games industry will get that bad, and thank god it actually looks to be getting better now that people are being more outspoken in their criticism of sexist elements. Thank god these people exist and are brave enough to face sexist dipshits who respond to things like "Tropes vs Women" by photoshopping Anita Sarkeesian into sexually disempowering situations or sending her death threats. Without them the games industry could slide into the black hole that the Japanimation industry has been sucked into, and that would be regoddamndiculously awful.
But the idea that changing artists perspectives on things is the same thing as government regulation telling them not to art is pretty cray, you guys.
This is the definition of putting words in my mouth.
Sorry, I phrased it wrong, that's why I don't want to get in a drawn-out argument. My English is not good enough that I will be able to speak without people centering in some ambiguous phrasing and taking it in the worst possible way.
I didn't mean that you haver no right, as in "the government will imprison you", it was meant in the broadest sense of "you need not act like a jerk".
And it's one thing to feel insulted by the drawing, but it's not like the artist was purposefully trying to offend you, which is exactly what people do when they call him a 14 year old.
Look, I'm going to leave this because I know that people here is more centered in looking for a weak point in my phrasing than in understanding my actual point. So I'm just going to say: "being critic with art is fine, being intolerant with objectification is fine, being a douchebag isn't".
I'm putting words in people's mouth? Then I must be going crazy because going by this you would think "you don't think the artist should be insulted therefore you do not care about rape threats" is something that is being said here.
Corporate unwillingness to produce art? No one said you're entitled to a corporate platform for your ideas, that isn't what free speech means at any level. The NY Times refusing to publish an op-ed I mail in isn't censorship. Plus, there's ALREADY tons of corporate unwillingness to produce art, like female protagonists, because of the culture we're talking about. Culture and market forces intersect and push and pull and this goes back and forth, but at no point is it anything like censorship, and saying that people can't criticize something on moral instead of aesthetic grounds is a very curious thing to say. To hear your view, it sounds like you think people not approving of racist caricature anymore is just as bad as state censorship.
Also I don't think chilling effect is really appropriate because that term generally refers to people being deterred from doing something by the threat of a lawsuit or other legal consequence (popularly DMCA), and that's exactly what isn't happening here. Similarly, like I mentioned before, moral panic is just loaded language without being justified. You disagree with moral panics? Well, I guess that settles it! Who would agree with a moral panic, after all?
That's just rhetoric.
This is a reasonable point. I can say that for me, it comes down to social pressure on artists seeming to have more of an effect than social pressure from art.
The narrative of the artist being robbed of agency by societal pressures seems very coherent and stable to me. I can find lots of examples of artists who weren't able to make what they wanted because social pressures made it impossible. I can find lots of examples of society repressing things it shouldn't have through social pressure, and that form of repression seems to work very well when it comes to creating art.
Meanwhile, the narrative of societal decline due to artists having too many freedoms or not enough social pressures strikes me as incoherent. Understand, people have always been afraid that art will cause societal decline, and I can't find a historical example where they were right. I also can't find any data reliably supporting the idea that its happening even now - there are some studies in the OP that look at brain chemistry and how people react to certain things in a lab environment, but there doesn't seem to be a direct correlation drawn between fictional bad things and real bad things. When media got more violent society got less violent. When media got more sexualized society got less sexist. So I don't find it obvious at all that fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism; it seems just as likely to me that the sexism is coming from other places, like parents and teachers, or real-world experiences that reinforce themselves.
With Dragon's Crown specifically, I feel like it's worth defending because it's a small niche studio and I get wary when I see big powerful organizations bullying small niche studios because they don't like the content of their games. When I look at that situation, I see a big powerful organization (games journalism in this case) rolling up to George Kamitani and demanding his lunch money, which in this case takes the form of a public apology and a lot of people shitting on his game and using him as a symbol of sexism. They are demanding that an artist, instead of producing art that resonates with them, become a spokesperson for a cause. He was scared of them and so he caved. No one thinks it's a sincere apology, nor does anyone really care, they just want his lunch money.
Dragon's Crown isn't my cup of tea, but there are some games that are full of things that others would find offensive. I love Edmund McMillan games, for example. If Edmund McMillian ended up being scapegoated and bullied as part of a cause, or if the only response he could get to his games was "These are gross and Edmund McMillian is a shithead and if you play them you are a gross shithead" I think that would be a loss. I would rather we let niche indie games stand on their own as pieces of art instead of trying to put them all into the box of speaking for social justice causes.
It also wouldn't change his artstyle or force him to do game shows or something. He'd do DIFFERENT ART.
I figured I was already pushing my luck mentioning it in the first place (although I feel like the way I tie it to the games industry as a cautionary example of sexism at mindbogglingly awful extremes makes it relevant to this thread) it would be best to assume that the banned phrases in the previous thread carried over to this one (after all, SpaceKungFuMan isn't prohibited from participating in this thread like he was the last one, but he still hasn't shown up).
Like who?
Here's the problem I don't feel like you're seeing in all this.
You can see that me being negative to the artist making big titty witches inc. can pressure him away from making stuff that he wants to make.
Why can't you see that the pressure of the games industry always putting out big titty witches for it's art puts pressure on female* artists who might want to make something different but are constrained by the industry? We have linked personal stories of women being embarassed about characters that they worked on in games, because those characters had to conform to the industry defaults whether the artist liked it or not.
So the general question is why do you think that my negative input, someone who has no hiring power in games, is more powerful and harmful to artists than the industry's negative input?
*I realized that I specified female artists here, but there's no reason to suppose that male artists aren't also embarassed about the type of art they are pushed to make, and wishing they could make more varied and interesting designs.
Imagine if all of a sudden the games industry decided to cater exclusively to foot fetishists. Imagine that the majority of games began to feature women almost exclusively with lovingly detailed bare feet. Imagine that instead of jiggle physics you had wriggling toe animations. Imagine that you had entire fictional cultures created to justify every female character being barefoot. Imagine that the camera often focused on close-ups of a woman's perfect little feet every time you were interacting with her in-game. Imagine that the game takes every opportunity it can to shove a woman's bare feet right in your face.
Would you feel uncomfortable knowing that you're looking at this guy's sexual fantasy all the time?
Society also became less sexist with the rise of hot pockets. For someone who mentions data so often this is a strange line.
Why do you talk about fiction "causing" sexism? Those other things reinforce it, too, yeah! But what on earth makes you think that media is somehow immune? It's all influenced by it and in turn reinforces it when reproducing it. It's not like you doubt whether media influences people, do you?
Can I ask what the opposite of (3) is then.
I mean if an artist creates a work that hurts people, isn't being shunned the natural response from the people being hurt/those that care about them?
Telling them that their work is harmful sounds like just giving them a heads up that it might not be well received. Sounds like a bonus.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I think we as a society really dropped the ball on that whole IGDA scandal. We neglected to find out the names of all the models who showed up at that party so we could tell them what horrible people they were and to try to convince them that they should never take any modelling job that might be construed as sexist. Someone should have slapped the drinks out of their hands and told them to GTFO in no uncertain terms.
Or... on the other hand, we could not try to single out individual artists and models and instead concentrate on the companies that subvert their works into the media avalanche that actually is the problem. Basically, instead of shaming the artists, let's shame the game companies until they stop asking artists to draw this stuff.
Artists who only like drawing big tittile gun witches can do so on their own time without having shame heaped upon them, women feel less excluded, developers get a bigger market to sell their games in... everybody wins.
You're right! We should really be annoyed with the company producing the art here. If they hadn't offered the artist the money he never would have done it!
Let's just look up Dragon Crown's development studio. Ah, Vanillaware whose president is... George Kamitani. Lead artist for Dragon's Crown.
What's this about "societal decline"? I don't think the point here is that sexism in entertainment media will necessarily cause an increasing amount of interpersonal sexism over time. I think the point is that there are varying forms of sexism in the world at the current point in time, and that some forms of sexism are currently exacerbated by entertainment media that is sexist. Progress is being made and may continue to be made with regards to decreasing the total amount of sexism in the world. Because entertainment media can shape and influence the views of young people on appropriate levels and expressions of sexuality it stands to reason, absent evidence to the contrary, that one useful means of addressing sexism in the world as it exists today is the criticism of entertainment media that perpetuates sexist stereotypes and social norms.
I'm not sure that anyone believes that "fiction is a primary cause of societal sexism", whatever "primary cause" and "societal sexism" mean. However, we're posting to a forum based on a webcomic steeped in videogame culture, in the subforum dedicated to videogames, in a thread about sexism in the videogame industry. If it seems like sexism in videogames is a major focus of debate here, I submit that it's not because the posters necessarily feel that it is a primary concern when considering sexism in a global sense. Rather, people focus on videogame sexism here because this is the perfect place to focus on that one narrow slice of the sexism pie, as it were.
Also, I have to laugh at the idea of "games journalism" as "a big powerful organization".
The flashpoint behind most of the discussion about artists was Dragon's Crown, in which case the artist was also the designer; if your name is well-known along with the art you're probably not just an artist cog. No, people don't want to just yell at employees doing what their bosses tell them, recognizable in posts like Cambiata's referencing the links about artists embarrassed by some of the stuff they had to work on, and yes, people want to yell at the bosses who are behind it. Samara, for example, had better concepts available but they went ahead and picked "strawberry catsuit surprise" anyway.
People are talking about artists generally because the censorship argument that keeps boiling up from people who are unironically suggesting "you shouldn't tell people what they shouldn't do" is an argument in abstract about the right to expression and society's role in it instead of specifically about commercial art where the argument becomes ridiculous because you draw what your boss tells you to and if you can't refrain from drawing huge racks when asked you'll be fired for sucking at your job.
And yes, the standards will be different for men and women in this regard. I'm much more likely to give a female artist (or any woman hired to feel incredibly uncomfortable for the benefit of a bunch of journalists) the benefit of the doubt if she's part of an otherwise mostly male team than any random male member of that same team.
Booth babes can and will be fucking fired for little to no reason. You're a part of the overly privileged crowd, it's on you to step up. You risk significantly less and have greater influence with the majority of your peers than a member of a discriminated against group.
Edit: Just to be clear, step up often means shutting the heck up and letting somebody else talk. Or stopping the habit of treating ideas that don't reflect your own experiences as if they're lies to be destroyed rather than perspectives to consider.
The Dragon Crown thing is slightly different in that the owner of the company is also the one who designed the art for the game.
I think we've lost the plot somewhere.
But let me replace your hypothetical with mine.
Women characters are no longer protagonists. They are always (or at least 90%) the mcguffin to be rescued. They have no agency, and only exist as a foil to the male or gender undefined player character.
There we go, and I didn't even sexualize it. All I did was reduce an entire gender to a single one-dimensional aspect.
I mean, the women could be really important, or really powerful (but neutralized in some way to require rescuing) but it doesn't matter, because that's not their one defining characteristic.
Overall, games (and media) are saying that you can be anything, as long as you're also X.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
I'd just like to interject here that "Fantasy Pantsuit" is a fucking fantastic phrase, and I thank you for presumably coining it.
Shouldn't the message be: "Don't put this in your game." Instead of "Don't ever make this kind of art."?
An individual's work is harmless. It only affects people when it completely saturates a form of media.
Yes. Good job.
Aren't booth babes contributing to sexism by just accepting the job in the first place? They don't actually work for the companies they model for. I thought they were independent contractors who choose which jobs to take. Maybe not 100% of the time, but I thought that's mostly how that business deal worked.
This is what bugs me about those reports. From the 2013 edition: So, why not give the data of how men vs women with equal experience match up? Almost half of the men responding have over 6 years experience, while none of the women did. The note goes on to say: That's true, and what we're talking about fixing, but it doesn't excuse the unfair interpretation of the data. Without a comparison of equal experience, the chart is useless.
Maybe because that data doesn't exist?
Potentially the sample size would be down to 4 men and 4 women, so then we would do the roundabout with "small sample size!" Repeat ad nauseam.