Guest post: Gender according to video games
Originally a comment by Papito on Unironically.
Unfortunately, most self-ID’ed NBs are deep in trans country, at this point, and thus utterly unaware of how much trans ideology actually is reinforcing the NB’s social discomfort by shoring up traditional gender roles in the first place. [Freemage]
This is a great insight. NBs wouldn’t exist without the trans cult, but it seems helpful to contemplate the exact relationship. Are NBs a product of the trans cult as a sub-variety of trans people, or are they (unknowingly) implicitly rejecting the trans cult – which, while proclaiming the erasure of binaries, is one of the most binary parts of society?
I feel for kids growing up these days. Gender stereotypes are pushed so much more heavily than they were when I was a kid. Growing up in the age of “free to be…” I would never have imagined things would get worse instead. And guest makes a good point as well: kids actually get out and see other people much, much less than they used to, so their visual contact with other humans is likely to be heavily mediated by television or video games, which present more fixed and stereotypical gender roles than actual humans do.
Look at the insanely exaggerated gender characteristics presented by video game characters. They go beyond what the comic books did; Superman and Wonder Woman are realistically proportioned humans in comparison. Video game men, unencumbered by the constraints of human anatomy, present as armored hulks bulging with anatomically implausible muscles and dripping with straps, bullets, and weapons, while video game women are proportioned like Barbie dolls, in skin-tight suits or miniskirts. Thank goodness for recoilless space rifles or they could never shoot with their knees knocking together.
What if NB really just means “neither of the above” to a kid deeply inculcated in this exaggerated gender binary? The trans cult tells kids they have to be in one of two exclusive boxes and can jump from one to the other, but the boxes are fixed. NB is the trans cult’s way of recouping the dissenters: if they don’t want to be in the boxes they can be categorized as NB, but still get to belong to the cult.
Maybe kids who want to break up the trans cult can hide themselves as a fifth column by identifying as NBs. If NB gets so big as a category that basically everybody is NB, then what happens? They can’t call NBs cis, right?
Childhood and adolescence are rough. You’re trying to figure out how to be, mostly by looking at other people in your peer group and at whoever your peer group identifies as a role model. Kids are and have always been assholes to each other when someone fails to measure up to whatever gender stereotype catches their eye. The problem is that it’s easier than ever to find those instances and subsequently to be little shits.
So I would put cell phones and the rise of social media into the list of contributing factors. As Haidt and Lukianoff note in The Coddling of the American Mind, giving kids—especially girls—access to cell phones and social media is tantamount to giving them access to a weapon. Granted, it’s a social weapon, but it is no less dangerous and can inflict wounds no less damaging.
And this ties into your point about kids’ not getting out and seeing each other in person as much. Their interpersonal interactions come via those dangerous devices and apps, so their digital personae are crucial to their own conceptions of self. Damage to the online image is not very far removed from damage to the self. Given that, it’s little wonder that gender is situated so strongly in their minds.
My son has told me in the past that he and his wife (they met online) can only converse through their phones. I don’t know which social media platform they use, as he appears to be active on several of them, but it strikes me as a sad and lonely way to live.
I constantly hear about how our youth of today have so much better relationships because they know people from all over the world, but I don’t see any signs that they know much of anyone, including the people they live with. I always thought I had bad social skills, but I look like the life of the party compared to a lot of these kids.
My Army pediatrician brother has been talking about the psychological harms of social media for years now. He sees it in their inability to read and send nonverbal cues. Never mind that online interaction doesn’t provide the same effects as in-person interaction.
I’m, not so sure there TBH.
Superman 1971
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sandman_Saga_(Superman)#/media/File:Superman_233.jpg
Ezio Auditore from Assassin’s Creed:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pinterest.com%2Fpin%2F333829391099244216%2F&psig=AOvVaw0N5TqfWd5zTMPRtr96zBRQ&ust=1597649744269000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCIjlw6Cbn-sCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
And then there is Link – who definitely isn’t a muscular type:
https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.businessinsider.com%2Fnew-legend-of-zelda-breath-of-the-wild-game-footage-2016-8&psig=AOvVaw3xGyOZyXq562mLhxUF7NOs&ust=1597650209519000&source=images&cd=vfe&ved=0CAIQjRxqFwoTCIi__f2cn-sCFQAAAAAdAAAAABAD
I considered going with Mario, because he’s about gaming’s equivalent to Superman in terms of cache, but Link I think is the more fair comparative given art styles.
For male characters, it isn’t far out of line with comic books.
Female characters, have it much worse. There are a few counter examples, Abby from The Last of Us 2, Mei from Overwatch, but a lot of female characters are of a very specific type.
And if you look at the VG industry – have any of you been following what has been going on at Ubisoft?
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jul/12/ubisoft-sexual-harassment-probe-claims-three-more-executives
Meetings held at strip clubs, sexual assaults, drugging employees, and a tendency to promote the worst offenders – all leading up to peddling the myth that female protagonists don’t sell.
At a company that claims:
https://i.imgur.com/fq2hvmn.jpg
And yes, this is one of the things I despise about wokeness, the performative aspect to it that doesn’t result in better behaviour.
Anyway, Ubisoft is not alone in this mentality. Activision Blizzard seems to be being investigated for example:
https://dotesports.com/business/news/activision-blizzard-employees-reportedly-contacted-by-equal-employment-opportunity-commission-over-allegations-of-discrimination
Go back to 2010, and they were pushing the same idea – that female protagonists don’t sell.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/120558/InDepth_No_Female_Heroes_At_Activision.php
And you’ll find similar stories in most of the other big game publishing houses. Look up Randy Pichford if you want to see more horror stories.
If you work in games development, you’re in an industry where a company will have mass layoffs when it reports record revenues, where a large chunk of the workforce is pressured into working crunch hours because they’re kept on contracts that don’t have to be renewed, and thus you’re going to see this sort of behaviour and not say anything because its your career and there is nowhere you can go where its any different. If you allow an exploitative power dynamic to remain in place, the exploitation will extend towards sexual harassment.
And it is across the industry, in part because we’ve got a generation of politicians who don’t really take videogames as a job all that seriously. We’re supposed to be in the information age, but there is precious little being done to deal with the issues that entails, issues like abusive working environments that are not commonly unionised.
Shoring up worker’s rights in the field is vital, along with issues such as loot boxes and micro-transactions. If I was a parent I wouldn’t be worried about graphic violence in God of War, I’d be worried about loot boxes emptying my bank account.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-48925623
But there is this sort of moral panic syndrome where, on the one hand politicians seem eager to blame videogames for violence (Despite all evidence suggesting there is no link between the two) while ignoring these far more serious issues in an industry run by predatory men.
Issues which are reflected in the games themselves, particularly where female characters are concerned. The games are made to the tastes of the misogynists in charge, who have been getting away with it due to their ubiquity in the industry as well as abusive work spaces that give them more power than they should have even as employers, and those tastes hold business meetings in strip clubs.
Note this isn’t “The Gamers” here, it isn’t even most developers, its a small minority that create this problem, buts its the small minority who happen to be in charge.
There idea that female protagonists don’t sell is probably the same variety of self-fulfilling “common knowledge” that made Wonder Woman’s success so shocking to many film industry types. Similarly, the film industry has apparently decided that it’s an incontestable fact that audiences aren’t interested in hearing heroes, only anti-heroes. Hence confusion when Captain America does well or when fans get pissed about Luke Skywalker’s treatment. Like, maybe there’s a reason the monomyth has survived through human history, hm? Maybe it’s okay to have your characters have, like, emotions and stuff without plummeting into bathos when things get serious.
Because they’re convinced certain types of content are destined to fail, they provide smaller budgets and less support in general than to other film projects. So of course the resource-starved ones perform poorly.