Feminism + Games

Regarding the Anita Sarkeesian video we watched in class:

I like Anita a lot and don't have much to say about her videos other than I agree with her. Video gaming, as we know and love it, is just barely breaking out of its infancy and growing up in a few different directions. There are big budget titles, creative indies, simple and addictive apps, "interactive experiences", and everything in between. This recent outbreak of feminist analysis has already enriched some of these branches of gaming, like in Thomas Was Alone. The mere concept that a blue square can be female without slapping a bow or anything on it is mindbogglingly simple yet shreds up any preconceived notion we had on the representation of gender and gender roles we had in gaming.

I'd say 90% of the stories I encounter in gaming are cliched and dull. If developers and writers see Anita's videos, I'm fully confident that we will see fresh ideas, stories, and characters in future games. This limitation (among others) that went unheeded until now, I believe, was preventing a lot of mainstream critics from appreciating games as an art form on the entertainment level. Any form of storytelling needs to be able to tell every kind of story there is, and the abundance of "save your girlfriend and kill everyone" types of stories were kind of clouding out everything else that was available. Hopefully we will see those types of games shrink in their majority and the medium will become as varied and stimulating as movies or comics, if not even more so due to the bonus factor of interactivity.

On a tangent, I was really intrigued by the comments the class made about race in video games. Is Link from Legend of Zelda technically a Hylian or can we consider him a Caucasian? There are other examples of representation of races in other fantasy games, but ultimately I think analyzing game races in relation to reality races is somewhat pointless. A digital character has no actual creed or genetic history, the purpose of race in video games should only be to further increase the connection the player has to the player character. Character customization is an amazing tool to increase immersion. When a character looks like me or looks like how I want to look or even feel, my connection to the character is more solid. That's me running around Saints Row 2, lobbing grenades onto a freeway. When players can say that, I think they are more invested into the world on their screen. Since humanity is so varied and colorful, it is only appropriate that player characters follow suit. We don't need a chiseled Anglo Saxon man with short brown hair to star in every game where we get no input as to the what the player character looks like.

Instead of replicating race in games with mere cosmetic changes, I'd like to see more aspects of the cultures associated with the race represented in a game. Like there is an endless amount of creativity that can be channeled from every kind of human experience. Even with just separate mythologies as a basis, we can get amazing games like God of War and Okami out on the market. So instead of worrying about what color Link is, we should worry about getting as much great material mined from reality and see it represented in game in a new and unique way.