"Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it." - Bertolt Brecht
Tropes Vs. Women, Part 3!
Part 4 came out earlier this week, which reminded me that I hadn't done Part 3 yet. D'oh! Well, better late than never I suppose. Subtitles are on the video in multiple languages.
This video touches on one of my major pet peeves in common defenses of clueless mass culture: It's all a joke/satire/parody! Don't be so sensitive! Gosh! Except that it's not "just a joke." Popular culture defines us as a whole, even when we think it doesn't. And popular culture frequently reflects the uglier side of sexism and racism in a way that inflames it.
But slowly it appears to be changing. The wild popularity of The Hunger Games series is a step in the right direction. Katniss does get manipulated quite a bit by Haymitch and the rebels in the later two books, but she never waits around for someone to rescue her. She's a badass who can shoot, fight, survive in horrible conditions, and even rescue Peeta and the others. And the fact that the series is so popular puts a dent in the belief that "everybody knows" stories driven by women don't do well, money-wise. If there's a modicum of effort put into it, they do just fine. I know this may be a surprise to some people, but ladies have money in addition to lady-parts, and we do spend it on entertainment on occasion. Call the Midwife is one of the most popular shows on BBC, and its cast is almost entirely made of women. It's well-written, well-directed, and well-acted, and the characters are actual people, not fem/sex-bots.
I hope this trend continues, and gets more traction. Even stories with "strong women" still often relegate them to Damsel Mode (Jane in Thor and Thor 2, sigh), and it gets annoying to constantly see women who ostensibly could be awesome and drive their own stories having to be rescued by their heroes all the time. Why not let them be their own heroes?
Catching Fire comes out this weekend, and it looks like it'll do well. I hope so, because hopefully a blockbuster series with a female person (not a fembot) who is not a damsel will pave the way for future female heroes. Moar plz.
Part two of Tropes vs. Women In Video Games! Full transcript here.
I like how Anita shows the recurring patterns, like "In ____________, your wife is brutally murdered and you then have to rescue your daughter." Usually people will try to claim that it's just that one game, but these sorts of violent themes are pretty ubiquitous in video games. Which reminded me of an article I read a few years ago: 5 Reasons It's Still Not Cool To Admit You're A Gamer.
Favorite part:
But damn, we're about to hit the 40-year mark on video games as a form of mass media. Forty years after movies were invented (the late 1930s), Hollywood was making The Wizard of Oz--a
movie that people are still renting and buying 70 years later (they
even re-released it back into theaters in 1998 and it made about $20
million--there were people still willing to leave the house and buy a
ticket to see it).
Will people still be playing Bioshock 70 years from now?
Hell, hardly anybody is playing it now. Sometimes I pop it in and it
makes me feel really smart for five minutes, then I spend the next hour
firing a flame thrower at a giant mutant with drill hands.
Gaming needs to evolve its storytelling mechanisms and ideas. People can only play so many shoot-em-up games before they become pretty much indistinguishable from each other. Pretty much every other form of media has a huge variety of types of stories (action, mystery, romance, etc.) that enjoy a wide audience. And no one insists that people who mainly watch film noir or romance movies aren't "real movie-goers", they way that some people who say casual gamers aren't "real gamers".
Even my beloved Nancy Drew games have used the Damsel in Distress a couple times. In The Final Scene, you have to rescue your friend who's being held hostage in a theatre that's about to be demolished and you have to rescue her before the building comes crashing down. And in Ransom of the Seven Ships, Bess has been kidnapped and you have to meet the kidnappers' demands in order to get her back. And, honestly, I don't really like either game. They just don't feel as engaging as the other games, and I really don't get into them as much as the other games. Especially in RAN, it seems like once they had the "OMG RESCUE THE VICTIM" plotline, the developers just stopped and didn't bother to flesh out the rest. It was a very confused game, and no one really seemed to like it. Since then, they've been a lot better about making the plots feel more complete and even though they used a sort-of DiD type of plot in the latest game, it still felt like a full Nancy Drew game, complete with deep philosophical musings about learning from vs. forgetting the past, mental health issues, and how we remember the dead. (I swear, there is at least one person on that team with extensive knowledge of philosophy/sociology/psychology/anthropology and I LOVE THEM for it. Seriously, whoever you (all) are, you are awesome. Keep it up.)
Video games have a great potential for exploring the deeper themes of human existence, since the medium is so active (I consider movies and books to be more passive, except for the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books). The first-person-shooter type games have their place, but hopefully deeper games will gain more traction and gain a bigger audience.
This video needs to be watched by everyone who ever has or will play a video game, or anyone who knows someone who has or will play a video game, and everyone they know.
I'm a unabashed, unashamed, in-your-face feminist. It is a major part of my identity and something I feel extremely strongly about. I am also a gamer, albeit a fairly casual one, and have been playing video game for a long time. For a while, one of my favorite possessions was a red Gameboy Color, and I played the crap out of Pokemon and Super Mario Bros. I also used to play Legend of Zelda once a year at the hotel in Little Amana, Iowa and got very good at the first two hours (you had to pay by the hour). Now my games consist of Angry Bird, horse games, and Nancy Drew on my PC. I don't own any special consoles (although now that I found out that Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is available on the Wii, that may change), nor do I spend vast amounts of time gaming. But I do consider myself both a casual gamer and a feminist.
In my experience, there are two types of games: level-up and storytelling. Level-ups are fairly straightforward: you increase your skills and try to keep moving up the levels until you beat the game. They're not necessarily easy (Angry Birds tends to frustrate me frequently), but they tend to be fairly simple. Storytelling games still have the level-up component, but there's another layer of "why". You're not leveling up for it's own sake, you're leveling up in order to find out the rest of the story, and the gameplay tends to be a bit more complex. Angry Birds and about half of my horse games fall into the leveling-up category. The other horse games and Nancy Drew fall into the storytelling category. Personally, I tend to prefer the storytelling games. I like being given a "why" beyond simply beating the top level. And so those are the games I end up playing the most.
The leveling-up games tend to be gender neutral. The horse games allow you to choose the gender of your character at the beginning of the game and I don't think the Angry Birds or Pigs have been assigned genders. So, not a lot of feminist influence. But the storytelling games I play tend to be feminist friendly. The main character is always a young woman, either trying save the family farm/horses or lead her school to victory, along with increase her and her horses' skills. There's almost always a love interest (which turns out VERY badly in one of the games. Good lesson on being careful in relationships), and in the end, our heroine leads her team to victory and/or saves the ranch/horses. Very positive role models. And Nancy Drew? Nancy kicks ass. She goes on all sorts of adventures, from a ranch in Arizona to a manor in England to a haunted inn in Japan. She always finds the culprit and brings them to justice, mostly using her wits and skills. And the games are always well-researched (the game that heavily involved horses impressed me quite a bit. All the horse related information was extremely accurate. Colic and founder information? Always check your cinch/girth before mounting up? Horses aren't machines, so don't ride them too hard? Pinch me, I must be dreaming). Nancy is also a great role model.
And we need more female role models in video games. It's a multi-billion dollar industry, with lots of people playing many different games on many different consoles. It's a HUGE industry that can appeal to a wide demographic which includes women. But it's so hard to find positive and strong female characters in games, and they're more the exception than the rule. And it shouldn't be that way. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 47% of gamers are female and women over 18 is the one of the fastest growing group of gamers. But many games seems to developed for and marketed at guys under 30, with any other group of people who may also be playing these games a mere afterthought. And if you try to point out that many video games contain bad stereotypes of women, some people freak out. The woman in the video, Anita Sarkeesian, became the target of horrifically vicious harassment and abuse when she simply created a Kickstarter to fund the Tropes vs. Women in Video Games project. It was astounding how cruel these people were. But in the end, she raised nearly $160,000 for the project (she started with a goal of $6,000) with nearly 7,000 backers. Obviously people want to this issue is important and want to discuss it. And I'm one of them.
I'll be following the series and posting the videos and transcripts as soon as I can. So far, this is the only video that's been released, but I'm very excited to see the rest. I'm very happy this project is going forward.
