how to “pander to sjws / feminists”: in depth characters and storytelling, non objectified female characters, characters of all manners of races, identities and backgrounds
how to pander to gamer boys: make titty wobble
Wow no wonder they don’t want to make games more accessible to women, they’d have to reveal their lack of actual talent.
Then they end up promoting the wrong people and we end up with this guy.
– wincenworks
Bringing this post back, since now the gamer boys directly accuse “pandering to SJWs/feminists” as the primary reason for anything they don’t enjoy about any game, like the glitches in Mass Effect Andromeda.
~Ozzie
Particularly worth mentioning that these same voices are generally for more accepting and forgiving when it comes time to apply a critical lens to games like Scarlet Blade, Haydee or asset flips… and who conveniently claim creators should be allowed to do whatever they want when a short skirt is involved.
As a blog focused on criticism, there’s something we come across regularly in responses to our writing – insistence that we’re “never happy” no matter how much better a particular example is than most media we feature on BABD.
Readers (though mostly detractors) question why we can’t qualify something (mostly games) as 100% positive example if it does one thing better than the rest in its medium/genre/etc.
Examples:
Samus Aran is a formidable fighter and legendary female game protagonist, so it’s totally not a big deal that with every iteration of the character she gets designed as daintier, more conventionally feminine and runs around in skin-tight undersuit and impossible heels rather than her classic power armor.
Overwatch has cast with diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, therefore we should ignore how, despite that, most of its female characters are a very slight variation on the same “pretty” character mold and have costumes and poses that put gratuitous emphasis on their boobs and butts.
NieR Automata’s creator admits the main character is another skinny chick in high heels and with boob window, because of his personal preference instead of some convoluted lore-specific excuse… and that honesty means her design is beyond criticism?
It’s quite disheartening to have the audience insist that we should settle for media to be tiny bit better than mediocre and call it a day. That a game or its creator not being as bad as they could deserve to be awarded and held up as an example for the rest of the industry.
We refuse to set our standards so low that “her battle costume isn’t a literal bikini” or “has characters who are female in it” or “shows a male butt/chest sometimes” qualify a title as good, equal gender representation with no room for improvement.
Being better than a random asset-flipping game with stolen artwork in their web ads isn’t hard. Being better than your last project and learning from its mistakes should be a given. Simply not makingasinine excuses for poor representation shouldn’t be applauded. No-one is asking for perfection, but all creators should be held accountable for the product they’re selling, with its good and bad sides.
BABD in particular, instead of doing comprehensive reviews, is focused on female costume and character design compared to male ones. Yet even such specific topic can’t be talked about from both angles without someone decrying unfairness. Does it really say more about us being negative and cynical or the fans being entitled and blind to any challenging point of view?
~Ozzie
*The link leads to a satirical @pointandclickbait article, but the satire is not really all that exaggerated. Yes, really.
So there have been a range of reactions to this, ranging from people celebrating that there is finally an auteur who can be honest about their decisions (rather than assuring us of the validity of breathing through one’s skin) to groans about how unsurprising given Taro’s last game (full size):
But really, this misses the larger conversation: In a medium where the people who are investing millions are understandably concerned about what they’re getting, what kind of decisions get approved and what kind get blocked?
Basically there are various creative decisions which will be green-lit without question (literally any excuse is good enough), but others which are dismissed or allowed a brief moment then cut down.
For such a short sentence, it also carries a lot of unfortunate subtext.
Like the implication that sexualizing female characters is okay, as long as you admit to liking girls/women, as if creator’s sexuality made any difference in this context.
Which also suggests that attraction to girls naturally leads to perpetuating female objectification, even though numerous creative people who are into women somehow manage to make projects without it.
Or just the fact that justifying a very generically sexy female design with “liking girls” in general implies that she represents all girls/women, despite the fact that most women look nothing like her.
As in, rhetoric about games that is garbage, not rhetoric about garbage games. (But possibly also that.)
Obviously inspired (and based off of with permission from the lovely Ozzie) by @bikiniarmorbattledamage, here is a bingo of terrible arguments against social justice style critiques of video games. I am clearly not an artist; if you want to pretty this up, go ahead, that would be super cool.
You can use this to your heart’s content for dealing with inane arguments.
Below the cut, a breakdown of the squares and why they’re wrong.
Inspired by Bikini Armor Battle Damage’s Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo, we present to you a special extra related bingo card this week, @feministgamingmatters ’s Garbage Games Rhetoric Bingo.
Fun for the whole family to play pretty much any time any major franchise receives even the slightest call out, critique or makes an independent effort to try to appeal to more people.
– wincenworks
(Edit: My apologies for originally tagging the wrong blog, this is why you shouldn’t prep blog posts at 1am!)
As yesterday marked Female Armor Rhetoric Bingo’s third anniversary, let’s celebrate by bringing back its cousin, Garbage Games Rhetoric Bingo!
Though it’s not the
happy
kind of celebration, considering the rhetoric collected in both cards is still alive and well among the anti-media criticism crowd. The bingos continue to be very much needed as tools against it.
So now and again we get people insist that x title shouldn’t be counted because it’s intended to be viewed as porn (especially if that product is from a country outside the English speaking world… because reasons).
Reasons for this assumption often include:
The presence of explicit fan service or sex scenes
The inclusion of ridiculous double standards
Fans having labelled it as an erotic product on their own wikis
The publisher having actual porn products in their catalog
But generally this just assumes that by shoehorning in some sexualized content a product immediately becomes excluded from criticism. Very few products exclude all content from their own genre (plenty of action movies have a romantic subplot for example).
Generally a lot of the cross genre trends have a pretty basic premise behind them, it helps improve the audience investment:
Comic relief in horror and thriller helps avoid the audience becoming desensitized or burnt out from the tension
Having a love interest can humanize a protagonist (or an antagonist) and increase your ability to get invested in them
Mixing a little mystery with your modern fantasy story reminds the audience of how little we really notice or know about the world around us and makes them more accepting to the idea of secret magic
So, what purpose does having ultrasexualized costumes for female characters and regular arbitrary fan service? Well, mostly it’s because of the general belief that certain demographics need a lot of reassurance that some products are okay for them, and in fact made exclusively for them:
That’s not to say that there aren’t products or stories where including sexual content gives it a boost, but generally you’ll want to do it in a way that makes sense and does actually improve the product and that still doesn’t make it porn.
You can physically eat a lot of things, but just as you wouldn’t call it food unless you buy it specifically to eat it, you shouldn’t call it porn unless you buy it specifically for sexual gratification.
So for those that aren’t aware, the trailer for Breath of the Wild shows a costume design for Zelda is pretty awesome:
Needless to say, many people were thrilled about this design and generally praised Nintendo for this step forward. Of course, there’s a few folks to who’s primary concern is that you know nobody cares… but there’s also a lot of folks who are very excited and have created cosplay and all kinds of fan art.
So basically the message to take away from this is that when certain people say “who cares” they really mean “I’m deeply upset that other people are enjoying a thing that wasn’t made exclusively for me”.
Let’s take a moment of thoughtful appreciation for the fact that they devoted an article to concisely sum up a huge chunk of our “creative freedom” tag.
~Ozzie
The ongoing saga of people getting outraged that Blizzard uses their beta period as a beta period and adjusts the game. It’s worth mentioning that Blizzard also removed a tasteless masturbation joke at the same time.
Ordinarily we wait longer before we bring back posts but it seems that there’s been a recent event involving a certain product we post about from time to time, and the response by certain demographics has been woefully predictable.
In case you missed it: Blizzard has revealed via a comic for people who enjoy Overwatch and want more fluff (x): Tracer lives with her female romantic partner. How did the aforementioned demographic reply?
So yes, predictably it turns out that the people who are used to being pandered to constantly don’t actually appreciate creative freedom – they just think it makes a cool catchphrase (or magic incantation in some cases).
There was, however, a bright side: the response from women who celebrated that Overatch’s mascot character was confirmed to a lady attracted to ladies, and loudly reaffirmed their appreciation of as well as their right to representation. That was truly awesome.
Given how regularly we get people rush in to tell us that we cannot question anything from outside the USA because of cultural reasons (never mind that neither of us is from the USA, or even near it) – this is kind of darkly hilarious.
Apparently Nintendo’s judgement is only unquestionable as long as they’re pandering to entitled straight men – as soon as that stops it’s an evil conspiracy to censor video games involving one or more of the following:
Everyone in politics from religious conservatives to liberal activists
“the Internet police”
The developers not “wanting the game to succeed”
the singular group of people who are the only ones who ever have concerns (except about censorship?)
Numerous groups zealot groups unique to western culture (as if God of War III was never altered for Japanese release)
Of course, it goes without saying that one can never include pandering in these video games – even when it’s fan service labeled “fan service” it’s always there for deep artistic reasons.
Speaking of which, my favourite part of the comments was this justification and insistence that these costumes are essential in a franchise which is about going around haunted houses, taking photos of ghosts with magic cameras:
