The Videogame That Finally Made Me Feel Like a Human Being

THE Dave Sim, creator of the Cerebus comic book?

How do you kick off an article with a bold statement like that, and not include at least a link to an interview or something? Is he like, the founder of some kind of Men's Rights Advocacy group or something? Does he run a political action committee?

Is he quoted anywhere as explicitly stating anything like:

  Hello, my name is Dave Sim, and I hate women. Yes, all of
  them, and as a general rule. You may know me as auhor of 
  the independently published comic book, Cerebus. At this
  time, I'd like to go on the record about my opinion of 
  women: I hate them. Make no mistake. Much like racists 
  hate other races, my hatred of women is similarly general, 
  and all-encompassing. To reiterate, I, Dave Sim, am a 
  self-proclaimed misogynist.

Anyway, this is apparently a DLC pack to a ludicrously well received game called The Last of Us, which honestly I had not heard of before. I can't help but think the reviewer is overly dramatic here, though.

Finally, I want to address this:

Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable.

This is a fallacy as it only takes up the raw total percentage and completely ignores some critically important details: gender distribution by genres. That makes a huge difference.

For instance, women make up very high numbers for things like casual games, World of Warcraft, The Sims and others.

On the other hand, a lot of major AAA titles like Grand Theft Auto, Devil May Cry and Mass Effect enjoy only small female audiences (14-22%).

That's why there's not much of an incentive. Don't just grab the whole percentage and throw it around like a gospel of injustice when you're going to voluntarily ignore the complexity and fragmentation of the market.

Find the error...

If you want to do things, don't buy stuff, do things. If you feel you need to buy stuff to do things, you have already lost.

In fact, she was so good at being "just" Ripley that it wasn't until I saw Sigourney Weaver in other movies did I realize, "Huh, Sigourney Weaver is a woman and she is hot"...She is the only female character I can think of in which her gender has no real bearing to how she acts, what she says, or how she is presented on screen.

I challenge anyone to think of any other woman character who follows Ripley's mold:

1. Does not overtly seek a romantic relationship

2. Sexual tension is not a compelling foil or conflict for the character

3. Is not thrown into an action role purely for the spectacle of a woman kicking ass

4. Is not shouted down or treated differently specifically because she is a woman.

5. Is not shown in a gratuitously sexual light (she is in her underwear the same time everyone else is logically in their underwear).

6. Is unequivocally the hero of the movie. In fact, in both movies [spoiler alert for 20 year old movies], it's quite notable that she is literally the last human being standing, and she wins on her own terms.

No other contenders, that I can think of, meet this standard, especially in the action film role: Catwoman, Aeon Flux, Tomb Raider...nope. Clarice Starling...even if you want to argue that no sexual tension exists between her and Hannibal Lecter (even though he specifically refers to it), much of the non-gruesome psychological conflict her character faces is precisely because she is a woman in a (tall) man's world. Beatrice in Kill Bill...great role, but again, it only works because she is a woman and it is a spectacle, even if empowering (i.e. could you imagine Kill Bill being made with a man in the role?)

The only woman character who comes close to the unisex appeal of Ripley is Marge Gunderson in Fargo. Other than that, it's pretty slim pickings...whereas for males, there are too many to count.

Anyway, I sometimes wonder how much growing up with Alien/Aliens affected how I think about gender roles and imbalance. Those being among the first and the most interesting of the action movies I'd ever seen (then, and today), I kind of think that the idea of a woman action hero was completely normal to me. And yet, as far as I can see, no one like Ripley has since been written...

Except for in Other M.

i.e. In recent years, several brewers have attempted to market beer to women with pink packaging and, in some cases, pink dye in addition to supposedly "girl friendly" qualities such as being low-calorie, not too strong tasting, etc.. The problem is, women who don't want to drink beer won't, and women who like beer want good beer, not beer made for women who don't like beer. So far these girl-branded beers have all been abject failures.

Would more female gamers play blood-and-guts action games if they were gratuitously girly, or would it barely be more than those who don't mind playing as muscle-bound brutes when they crave a bit of the ol' ultraviolence? I'm not saying that the industry shouldn't do more to marginalize misogynistic characterizations, but I do suspect that male protagonists and testosterone driven character interactions tend to give blood-and-guts games more credibility even with female audiences. That should change slowly with time, as we're seeing in cinema, but we should also recognize that this is the present we're currently dealing with. Women aren't an audience that are being ignored. It's what they want that's the problem!

It's also worth noticing that we are very selective about what we define as "guy stuff" in male dominated video games. It's definitely not "older guy" stuff. e.g. When was the last time you saw a male protagonist blow thousands of enemies to bloody giblets and, in the next scene, talk about his prostate problems, the virtues of fiber, and his receding hairline? Really, these games are about violence. If a woman does the slaying, it doesn't bother most male gamers at all. It's when they start talking about the female analogues to "old guy stuff" that everybody, males and probable females alike, start to get itchy trigger fingers.

This tendency of most video games to sate adolescent desires for violence while ignoring more mature material is, in my opinion, of equal concern to both genders. Any game that makes male-female relationships a part of core game-play instead of an optional bolt-on is instantly branded as a weird Japanese dating simulator for Otaku's who never leave their houses. Games that focus on drama or exploration without "sufficient" violence are frequently viewed as having "boring gameplay". Video games are no longer an emerging art-form. Their gross sales have surpassed that of cinema! However, video games are still stuck in the Nickelodeon era. Practically everything is gratuitous violence with a smattering of sex. However, only now are adult audiences starting to outnumber adolescent ones. The next few decades for video games may well be remembered similarly to the early twentieth century when cinema progressed from being a low-brow diversion to an art-form that fascinates all!