You're right, it's too easy to get overly emotional about this and take personal offense/inadvertently attack each other. Sorry about contributing to the derail. I just felt like I should speak up from a female perspective since there aren't a lot of women in here. Let's segue back to video games.
There's no need to apologize, I think its only natural to have that sort of response, I think the thing we all need to try to remember is that X issue doesn't need to be *worse* than Z issue to be valid.
You've made some great contributions to this thread and I think that simply getting a female perspective on the issue/general polycount stuff(not just this thread!) is hugely productive for polycount and the games industry at large.
Obviously not all men are rapists. Few men are rapists! Relatively few men are even harmless creeps! You're twisting our argument into a bizarre extreme.
What me and shoes and ben are trying to say, I believe, is:
WOMEN HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT, however rare you think it is, its still something that every woman encounters. Even if she walked past 50 men every day and only one was a creep, that's still one too many.
I have to stop and explain to dudes I work with/hang out with that they're being assholes if they follow a woman just to check her out. But maybe thats just because I live in the south....
Then you aren't thinking hard enough. The idea is not to change only their visual appearance from sex doll to butter-troll, it's to change their personality so that it exists *at all*. They should have names, preferences and a history in your mind. They should exist as real people so that your design decisions reflect that instead of just trying to think how to get the perfect ass shape and narrow sexy waist. By all means do that as well, but if you are imagining her *as a full person with agency and a personality* not only will your design be stronger, but it will help you avoid a ton of pitfalls in making shallow lifeless fucktoys.
You can see this mentioned over and over and over at conceptart.org, or in any story writing class. Even if you aren't going to mention the character's backstory, you should have thought about it. Thinking up a short bio like:
What did his/her parents do?
What was his/her childhood like?
What are some defining moments of his/her adolescence that helped form them into the person they are today?
What is his/her favorite color?
How does he/she make their living?
What culture were they raised in?
By answering these questions, your character/vehicle/weapon will subconsciously take on more authenticity, and can even help you decide design choices you might have had to randomly grab out of a hat without otherwise writing this short bio.
There are a ton of physically sexy female characters that feminists (and gay men!) adore, because they are full people with agency. The annoying ones are those that have had thought put *only* into their sexual appeal and physical presentation. The idea isn't to subtract, but to add to.
I have to agree completely with you here. However my ambivalence towards actually being able to "solve" the issue, even with this proactive stance is because it rests on hope. We all hope that people will notice and/or care that effort has been made, or if even that is done properly, as while society has made it simply so that women have gotten the short end, such sexism is woefully easy to do. On both sides at that, with it being so easy to make something terrible, and so easy to be offended (as has been demonstrated here).
Snacuum social change doesnt happen over night, it's not 'solved' with a bandaid. Its solved by MANY people over a LONG time doing their part to make it happen.
Snacuum social change doesnt happen over night, it's not 'solved' with a bandaid. Its solved by MANY people over a LONG time doing their part to make it happen.
I know I know, hence the ambivalence. I believe that the industry as whole is learning and already applying what we're talking about, and therefore the slow change is in action regardless to how much we argue about it here.
Not only that, but it won't be "solved." Social issues rarely are and simply tend to morph and change into a new set of problems introduced be the newer perspectives.
"
“sexual assault” is not always the same as “rape,” and includes a variety of behavior that wouldn’t meet the legal standard for rape. So it’s not clear that there are actually more rapes of men than women, or more rapes of prisoners than non-prisoners
“Inmates” also does not translate to “men.” There are a whole lot of women in jail, and female prisoners are twice as likely to experience inmate-on-inmate sexual assault (male inmates are slightly more likely to experience assault at the hands of prison staff). So again, not so obvious that more men than women experience sexual assault.
"
sexual assault is not always the same as rape, and includes a variety of behavior that wouldnt meet the legal standard for rape. So its not clear that there are actually more rapes of men than women, or more rapes of prisoners than non-prisoners
Inmates also does not translate to men. There are a whole lot of women in jail, and female prisoners are twice as likely to experience inmate-on-inmate sexual assault (male inmates are slightly more likely to experience assault at the hands of prison staff). So again, not so obvious that more men than women experience sexual assault.
That's not exactly an unbiased source, being a feminist website. I'd like to see TYT's source, because the DoJ apparently did make a distinction between "rape" and "sexual abuse".
Honestly, this is why I can't take feminism seriously. The idea that mens rights issues' exist undermines the very core of feminism, the patriarchy. So if there are any mens rights issues', most feminists will stomp them out immediately and try to pretend like they don't exist. I don't like that. And that's why I'm against feminism... because I'm for absolute equality between the genders. Feminism is the idea that we can make both sexes equal by focusing solely on the issues of one of them.
Why not just move the posts into a new thread? Might be a good idea since this is a pretty interesting debate on a related, yet separate issue.
Because this is not rapecount, this is polycount. Any thread started to discuss rape, abortion, or any other flame-baiting hot-button political topic that has no relevance to polycount(art, games, etc) will be immediately closed.
Keep it on topic or go to a different website, certainly there are thousands on the internet where you can discuss such topics.
speaking of a topic relative or not to polycount, im sure there are alot more rape games out there than you might think, especially from the eastern part of the world, where people are not able to express thir feelings in usual ways because of lack of women. but ill doublt that the kind of artwork contained in said games is about to get posted here anyways
I think she need to make video games,
I know some women actually create and design video games. and actually play it. she doesn't look like as one, she just observe it.
there is tons tons of tons video game that doesn't involve sexism, or sex appeal or discrimination against women.
If women actually spend some more time on playing games, make some blog about it, more than boys, I believe developers would looove to make games for girls if that happen.
I've been raised by a woman who are boss, leader, and know how to handle herself, actually making products , and avoid gossips. ohh she doesn't have master degree in social politics wut ... ;3
speaking of a topic relative or not to polycount, im sure there are alot more rape games out there than you might think, especially from the eastern part of the world, where people are not able to express thir feelings in usual ways because of lack of women.
there is girl game about stalking(and taking photo) men having sex.
also there are some eroge for girl. yaoi also quite common.
Then you aren't thinking hard enough. The idea is not to change only their visual appearance from sex doll to butter-troll, it's to change their personality so that it exists *at all*. They should have names, preferences and a history in your mind. They should exist as real people so that your design decisions reflect that instead of just trying to think how to get the perfect ass shape and narrow sexy waist. By all means do that as well, but if you are imagining her *as a full person with agency and a personality* not only will your design be stronger, but it will help you avoid a ton of pitfalls in making shallow lifeless fucktoys.
You can see this mentioned over and over and over at conceptart.org, or in any story writing class. Even if you aren't going to mention the character's backstory, you should have thought about it. Thinking up a short bio like:
What did his/her parents do?
What was his/her childhood like?
What are some defining moments of his/her adolescence that helped form them into the person they are today?
What is his/her favorite color?
How does he/she make their living?
What culture were they raised in?
By answering these questions, your character/vehicle/weapon will subconsciously take on more authenticity, and can even help you decide design choices you might have had to randomly grab out of a hat without otherwise writing this short bio.
There are a ton of physically sexy female characters that feminists (and gay men!) adore, because they are full people with agency. The annoying ones are those that have had thought put *only* into their sexual appeal and physical presentation. The idea isn't to subtract, but to add to.
And back to this, so Ben your complaint isn't with artists but with writers then. Yeah sure we cane make the characters look real and have a history but if they are written by people with no care about non 2d characters then all is for not. I know as a env guy history is what were all about, giving spaces a lived in and not brand new feeling. But would it matter that we put all that art time in if you were say in a driving game where you were flying by at 200mph? No you wouldn't, just in the same way that you wouldn't notice all the love and history given to the characters that you "interact with". Gamer's don't like to be taken away from the action for very long so most all of that time has to be spent on moving the plot forward or some action event. So all your left with are NPC's that follow you around like puppies blabbing on about something causing the player to want to shut them up. Yes i do agree that we need more interesting characters, but when would we get the time to find out that they are deeper than a cardboard cut out?
@ Thegodzero, I think certain genres lend themselves to deeper characters better than others, just like they do for environments. You mentioned a lot of detail that gets lost going 200 mph, say in a racing game. But in a game like say Mass Effect, you get to appreciate the environments, just like you can appreciate characters with depth. Take Miranda for example. I won't spoil anything, but she's more than just a sex toy, she has depth to her that's made her who she is. RPG's are just more naturally inclined to providing that space for deeper characters. And maybe the character's depth doesn't have to be explicitly shown to the player in the game, it's just something to show the audience that the writers were thinking about it. I bring up Mass Effect again, since it's currently trending. Your team's depth only gets revealed if you talk to them and interact, otherwise they're just shells supporting Shepard (both male and female squad members mind you). So yes, I agree that it does come to the writers more than the artists, especially since the artists are making characters look more real and genuine. Give the audience the opportunity for depth rather than just not putting it there because some of them won't care, because some of them will and ultimately, it can create a better game experience, even for people who didn't initially want that depth.
Yes i do agree that we need more interesting characters, but when would we get the time to find out that they are deeper than a cardboard cut out?
Depends on the game really - Portal was structured in such a way that even tho the lead remained mute, her character felt very solid. I guess I am just trying to say that lengthy dialog does not equals good writing and solid characterization, and more often than not in games just like in movies the implied is stronger than the obviously stated when it comes to character buildup.
I would guess that lousy, useless dialogue and poor writing in games is likely happening in the case of projects where a writer is hired (or self-declared) to give the project higher production values, like in Heavy Rain - as opposed to the few gems where writing and gameplay are delightfully intertwined, like HL2, MGS, Megaman X, Super Metroid, and so on. This is where "the magic happens" when it comes to great game characters.
This is also why the main character in Braid is so painfully vapid - the books to collect where very "overwritten" and just slowed the game down to a crawl for no reason other than trying to be "deep'...
But it's also true that not all games need that. If there ever were playable female soldiers in a CoD multiplayer mode, I sure wouldn't want them to talk any more than the silent males...
She's exactly what you make her out to be, that's why she's the ideal. She has just the same amount of 'sexy' as the recent Lara Croft, but how they're played is what makes the difference.
on the note of Portal... and any first person game actually:
the more of a blank canvas the character is, the better it is for the player. it's why so many women like twilight... i can't remember if this was linked in this thread or another one, but it's right on the money for why certain characters are more easy to get to grips with than others, especially from a first person point of view.
First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn't described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward - a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this "empty shell," the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear. Because I forgot her name (I think it was Barbara or Brando or something like that), I'm going to refer to her as "Pants" from here on out.
anyway, bens points are all valid... but they don't affect me as an artist. not in the position i'm in now. if i'm handed a piece of concept work, i work to that concept, and that's that. i don't question it, and why should i? it was someone elses job to come up with it!
so when people say "that's all down to the writers", they're pretty correct. it's the writers who create the back story, the concept artists use that to create the image of the character, and then the modelers make that concept "come to life".
so i'm sorry, but since the majority of the stuff i do is based on existing concepts, all i can really do is go by what's there.
I can understand the philosophy behind the faceless cypher in a videogame, but that's the first time I've heard it put into use in a non-interactive medium. I'd be sceptical that such a thing was really possible, but I guess Twilight must have something going for it to push past all of its failings and attract millions upon millions of teenage girls where any number of other similar or better works have been relatively ignored.
I think it helps that Twilight has a ton of attractive young actors playing vampires and werewolves running around shirtless but maybe that's just the 15 year old girl in me talking. (Not that I'm particularly attracted to any of the guys in twilight except the Volturi in the films, but I can definitely see that being a factor.) I mean, when I was a teenager, I ate up vampire movies and books like no tomorrow. Fortunately I didn't even have Twilight, just The Last Vampire series which has a pretty cool female lead.
Hunger Games is actually incredibly popular, maybe even more popular than Twilight right now, and its main character (particularly in the book - the movie kind of mary sued her up) is the polar opposite of Bella in Twilight. In fact a lot of popular YA titles feature strong female protagonists that have great personalities and character arcs. Scott Westerfeld's books for instance. (The Uglies series, Leviathan, Midnighters), he's a dude who knows how to write great female protagonists. His Dark Materials is also amazing and written by a man.
edit: Oh, how could I forget The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix? Sabriel is like reading a Miyazaki film and has one of the best female characters in YA.
All of the games you listed are slower paced, so have the time to let you enjoy and fall in love with the characters around you. RPG's are perfect examples of this, where you can truly be sad at the death of one of your friends in game. It should be noted that female characters are not the only ones that have no depth in most games, in fact most AAA games all of the characters are about as 2d as it gets. The top selling games have the shittiest characters in terms of not being 2d. So as a dev studio what they see is less character depth and more killing = better sales.
Yea, I agree: that was the purpose of my post to show that it is possible without wrecking the game/wasting time. Like I said, some games can do this better than others, and I don't think that all games should try and create the same character depth that RPG's allow for. I do think that the character should be deeper than just 2 breasts, long hair, show the skin, done, even in a fast paced FPS game. Even something as simple as a player meeting a female commander, who's war-hardened from losing a family member. It's a few lines of dialog, and already the female is more than just the object of the male's affection.
The blank canvas approach I think also works well, and not just for female characters, but males as well (Link and Chrono for example) are silent, and the player can make them whoever they want them to be.
What's way more terrifying than being falsely accused of rape, is being actually raped, which is something women have to deal with every single day of their lives in practically every country on earth. Ask the women in your lives if they ever worry about being sexually assaulted.
You *can* technically just run into a court and accuse someone of raping you,but the chance of them actually getting put in jail for doing it is astronomically low without an external force at play (like racism). So first: medical examination, which provides most of your evidence. You MUST do that in order to get treatment at a trauma or rape crisis center (and in many US states, you must pay for this rape-test-kit yourself). If you decline for any reason you lose most of your evidence and you throw your story into question, even if it's because you are traumatized and don't want to be touched on your genitals/anus/etc by a stranger after what's happened. Then you file charges. This is not as easy as it sounds. You need to provide physical evidence, details, name and places they might be. That's before you even get to court, there you will have your accusation ripped apart, your sexual history dug into, your story called into question. Oh and that's if you were conscious, black out drunk? choked out? hit over the head? too bad. no suspect, no charges.
Not to mention that less than 8% of accusations of rape are found to be false in a court of law, whereas something like 32% of false insurance claims are fake. Combined with the FBI's own reports that sexual assault is hugely under-reported in the US (and similar figures of under-reportage can be found for the UK and most countries).
On top of that, I'm not sure television or sensationalist shows like Cops are a good source of knowledge for forming an opinion on such an issue.
What are you talking about? I was saying that your claim that there are less false claims than actual assaults not being taken seriously is completely false. I don't see the point of launching into a massively generalizing tirade. You think because the girl blacked out the cops send her on her way? Do you understand what cops do? Usually, they are an investigative authority. Like checking CCTV n shit. Stop making sensationalistic and hugely generalized statements.
OK, so you want a personal example of how I know women do this, because TV isn't good enough. In the last country I lived in there is a pretty big problem on public transport of scumbag kids playing scumbag music audibly through their phone speakers, to the extreme chagrin of all. We all just put up with it, cause it ain't worth the hassle right? One day an older gentleman told a pair of girls to STFU. These girls were in late teens I guess. This was on the first floor of the bus, and I was getting off, as the girls stormed downstairs, and informed the driver that this older gentleman had assaulted them, felt them up or whatever. Thank god it was my stop because the driver immediately turned the keys on the bus and called his controller to call the 5-0. Now; this guy is completely innocent, but I imagine he had to at the very least suffer the embarrasment of explaining all this to two cops in front of a bus load of gawking morons. And all because he did what the rest of us wanted to do.
There are hundreds of thousands of women out there that are complete scumbags, just like men. And then there are laws and procedures. I can GUARANTEE you, there are many many more false claims made than most likely genuine claims not being taken seriously.
Anyway, wtf are we even talking about. This is not what the thread is about.
thats a great doc, really nice to see people actually suggesting improvments and fixes rather than just bitching. On a side note though, whenever people point at street fighter and the lack of female diversity i always have to point at Makoto http://download.minitokyo.net/Makoto.546713.jpg
she's a great example of 'down to earth' female character design but is hardly ever shown or mentioned, i think its just a case of her character design is a bit forgetable, which is what tends to happen when you don't exagerate stuff. Also i'd mention the Beta for WOW where the female Trolls and Taurons were much more bestial but when they sat down and asked people about what characters they liked they found everyone was playing Elves and the like so they made the female bestial races more sexy and the outcome was more people started playing them but Blizzard got accused of being sexist. Sometimes you just can't win...
It's a sad day when the name Dildo Faggins represents greater objectivity though.
If traditional LEGOs don't appeal to girls, then obviously just rebranding LEGO City wouldn't work, and there needs to be a different approach. After asking girls what they'd actually want to play with: there you go, they don't want firetrucks, they want friendship and happiness. She completely misses that part, which more or less undermines whatever else she has to say.
Though to be honest I doubt LEGO will make some breakthrough. The core of LEGO products is that you take things apart and put them together, then take them apart and make dragons and monster trucks out of the pieces. From what I remember of my childhood, boys were much much more likely to want to take things apart and put them back together than girls (In elementary school we all played with Lincoln Logs and Erector sets at lunch, girls drew and played games), so the toy itself inherently caters more to boys than girls. But then that's "natural" and that's bad?
After watching some of her videos I can't tell if its one big Andy Kaufman-esque performance art piece. Dildo Faggins critiques are more intelligent and thought out than her bizarre videos on sexism. I guarantee this woman pockets 98% of her 150k. Good for her. Social satire at its best.
If traditional LEGOs don't appeal to girls, then obviously just rebranding LEGO City wouldn't work, and there needs to be a different approach. After asking girls what they'd actually want to play with: there you go, they don't want firetrucks, they want friendship and happiness. She completely misses that part, which more or less undermines whatever else she has to say.
Or moreover she didn't spend 5 minutes looking at the wikipedia article or the Lego website. There's a colossal haul of information available in both places regarding Lego's continued failed attempts at marketing towards young girls.
This will be the first and last post i make in this thread.
As the ulta liberal i belive that i am im going to bluntly state that private companies can make and sell whatever the f**k they want. Its their brand, their money their vision. They have no responsibility to live up to any political ideals if they dont want to.
If i dont wannt my daughter to play with a tripple boobed lamppost with lipstick instead of fingernails then im not going to buy her one.
Is this topic really worth 22 pages?
Also why does people bother with this youtuber asking for money on the internet? Cant she do whatever she wants with her life? If you dont agree with the cause then dont give her money.
His Dark Materials is also amazing and written by a man.
edit: Oh, how could I forget The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix? Sabriel is like reading a Miyazaki film and has one of the best female characters in YA.
when people say "that's all down to the writers", they're pretty correct. it's the writers who create the back story, the concept artists use that to create the image of the character, and then the modelers make that concept "come to life".
so i'm sorry, but since the majority of the stuff i do is based on existing concepts, all i can really do is go by what's there.
this seems like a really odd argument to make imo (its the same conclusion she comes to literally in every video is. "basically writers need to stop writing this and start writing this") as though its suggesting there's a huge conspiracy of creative writers that's actively keeping women down, and the rest of us are just doing what our misogynist writer overlords tell us.
reality most media is collaborative in nature and inherently there are other hands touching this work. additionally, the stories that get told are controlled by investors at the beginning. this is a big factor that blaming the writers completely ignores. im sure for every script with a red-headed seductress and a whore/sexpot supporting character there's another script written with valuable interesting female characters that doesn't get green lit or even acknowledged
because its not perceived as marketable. FOLLOW THE MONEY PEOPLE
Viceral your post kinda confuses me, it starts with a confession of your "Ultra" liberalism and is then followed with a fairly extreme conservative position.
so which are your if you feel the need to label yourself?
uhm, arent good stories about conflicts?
how could a storyline exist if everyone is treated equally and everything is fine?
also: the meaning of life is reproduction. and since women have stronger relationships with their descendants, because they carry them around in their bellies for about 9 months. it always worked better when the women cared for them. men could grow an equally strong attachment to the kids overtime, but usually tales longer. and the man experience no physical damage while his kids get boren, so he can still work/go hunting and stuff to feed his family.
long story short: if one gender refuses to play his role without a proper substitute, humanity dies out in the long run
uhm, arent good stories about conflicts?
how could a storyline exist if everyone is treated equally and everything is fine?
also: the meaning of life is reproduction. and since women have stronger relationships with their descendants, because they carry them around in their bellies for about 9 months. it always worked better when the women cared for them. men could grow an equally strong attachment to the kids overtime, but usually tales longer. and the man experience no physical damage while his kids get boren, so he can still work/go hunting and stuff to feed his family.
long story short: if one gender refuses to play his role without a proper substitute, humanity dies out in the long run
this doenst mean that all women need to be portrayed as 2 dimensional fuck pieces. folks are just asking for balance not prohibition.
long story short: if one gender refuses to play his role without a proper substitute, humanity dies out in the long run
I'm not entirely sure where to start with this approach, but games, at their heart, are about escapism and having compelling experiences. You could have a character capable of doing literally anything, limited only by technical restraints. Representation of women - or any characters - in games shouldn't be limited by someone needing to "play a role", and to be honest, that kind of view of the situation's... kind of scary.
Using the role logic, the only reason a woman might need a man to play a role in her game would be in the unlikely event that she wants a child. Then she'd just need him to spray his seed roughly in the right direction. And yet men aren't depicted as useless lumps with a prominent, throbbing penis.
I'm confused about the LEGO stuff. So she's pissed off that LEGO is mostly targeted towards boys and not girls, then they make LEGO for girls and she's pissed off that it's different to the LEGO for boys?
What I really don't understand is why girls can't just buy the LEGO the boys buy? I guess she could say that girls don't like the boy's stuff but isn't that going entirely against her argument that we shouldn't be trapped in gender roles?
To be honest I haven't followed all of this thread to closely and only seen a few of her videos, but from what I've seen she seems to nitpick everything way too much.
Lego makes bricks for kids. They look at the numbers and see that the bricks are mostly being bought for and played with by boys. So they say, "Oh my lordy-lord, we're missing out on nearly half of all the little children demographic! How do we try to appeal more to all the people who don't give a shit about brick-building?" And the result is to create a whole line of toys that appeals to girls.
Now here's the problem: the line of toys that appeals to girls isn't something that girls want to play with. It's the same thing that the current Lego fans play with (some of whom are boys and some girls), except it's all pink and ovens and shit. They haven't said to themselves, "Girls don't want to build stuff, what activities might they want to participate in?" They've said, "Girls like pink and ovens and sewing and being a little flirty and putting on make-up."
It's really just a stupid mistake. But the problem for girls is that it happens not just at Lego but all over the place, because a lot of people making decisions are men and a lot of the time they try to fit a man-designed product for women and just label it as the girl version and put hearts and pink all over it.
It's just a bad product designed by idiots but it makes a lot of women feel segregated and like they have special things they're forced towards, since they see it everywhere. "Being a woman is all about being pretty and wearing make-up and cooking." "There's this normal thing that everyone likes and then there's this special thing for women, who are unusual." They get it from the world that surrounds them and it seeps into a lot of the minds of the boys who grow up surrounded by it; so they get it from men, too, once they've grown up.
It's really not nit-picking -- the problem is that in each video she only tackles one thing, and as a single thing not all of her arguments hold up or can be seen in the context of the bigger picture. Basically the entirety of Dildo Faggins' rebuttal was that "hey, it's capitalism -- we can do whatever we want if there's a market for it." But when you see it against the context of the world at large, it's a "male-is-default", "lets-hire-a-programmer-oh-wait-shes-a-girl" society that tends to make women worry wayyy too much about how they look and how fat they are.
If we stop treating women as second-rate sexy-default characters in games and media then we might be able to help women feel less like second-rate citizens and less like they need to be sexy by default.
I'm confused about the LEGO stuff. So she's pissed off that LEGO is mostly targeted towards boys and not girls, then they make LEGO for girls and she's pissed off that it's different to the LEGO for boys?
What I really don't understand is why girls can't just buy the LEGO the boys buy? I guess she could say that girls don't like the boy's stuff but isn't that going entirely against her argument that we shouldn't be trapped in gender roles?
Did you watch both videos? Because the only part that matters is the last 7 minutes of video 2. It's a shame she frontloaded so much redundant garbage into the videos because I doubt many people actually have the patience to keep watching to get to the very end where she finally makes a point.
The premise of all of these videos is essentially that entertainment culturally indoctrinates everyone (both men and women) into filling our established gender roles.
You could buy legos for boys, but girls are going to respond less to them in general because they're equally poorly marketted, the issue is less about "girls don't like boys stuff" and more about "girls don't respond to boys marketting". Girls might respond just as well to it if they simply put girls in their commercials and made more female characters. No need to make a pink set with ovens and stovetops... Unfortunately the boys set is still also bad because it's just the opposite of the girls set, it emphasizes generic male roles and conflict themes (ninjas, cops n robbers, pirates, etc.) and things like friendship and coopration are not present.
Her solution isn't to make a better "girls" set of LEGOs or to market boys legos to girls, it's to get away from gender stereotypes period and meet in the middle, to make more product lines that AREN'T gender targetted.
The question is this: If LEGO does this will their sales actually improve? Because if all doing this does is alienate their male audience while girls resume their state of continuous disinterest what have they really accomplished here other than making less offensive commercials? You don't solve social problems by making products people don't want.
They tried gender neutral products/marketting before and shifted away from it. Why? One would have to logically assume this was more profitable. But then the world is a very different place now than it was in the 70s, and LEGOs are way more badass now, maybe things have changed enough that it would actually work... No ones going to know for sure until they try though.
The premise of all of these videos is essentially that entertainment culturally indoctrinates everyone (both men and women) into filling our established gender roles.
Forget entertainment, everything we do interpellates to others who and what they are. I mean if it's so much of a debate to say that LEGO dropped the brick when it came to marketing to women based on a) misunderstood marketing approach by men and b) misunderstood marketing approach informed by the current attitudes of women (and young girls) then we should take it back even further on this mission for equality.
Go into a baby accessories shop, look for gender neutral items. I'd guess there'd be very little and so from the very beginning: people as parents, friends, co-workers, the media, toys, games, books, a glance from a stranger tells us who we are.
A young girl is dressed in pink, because her mum used to dress in pink. The girl loves her mum and enjoys the things given to her, when she tries on her brothers blue pants her mother says "takes those off they're your brother's" she's now a stereotypic pink-loving young girl. A man who works for Lego asks her what she likes and she shows him some of her pink toys. She doesn't play with Lego because a) she has been so far enjoying fun pink toys that represent female associations such as fashion, friends, and motherhood and therefore not construction. Her brother plays with Lego and although she loves him she wants to show herself as a unique child who wouldn't just do what her brother does. c) Lego is so far marketed towards boys.
The man goes to work and is faced with the conundrum that boys love Lego but girls don't and knows that he must somehow make it attractive for girls. Since it has been a popular boys toy for generations his work is similarly populated by men who retained an interest in the product. Even if he asked the relatively few women who worked there what they thought, there's a good chance they did not play with Lego in their youth. With his current understanding of little girls, he creates the fancy new 'Pink Lego.'
It doesn't sell. Feminists find it incredibly sexist.
On that note I now feel like a terrible person because I gave my niece a My Little Pony toy and it wasn't because she like the show (it was because I did.)
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There's no need to apologize, I think its only natural to have that sort of response, I think the thing we all need to try to remember is that X issue doesn't need to be *worse* than Z issue to be valid.
You've made some great contributions to this thread and I think that simply getting a female perspective on the issue/general polycount stuff(not just this thread!) is hugely productive for polycount and the games industry at large.
Obviously not all men are rapists. Few men are rapists! Relatively few men are even harmless creeps! You're twisting our argument into a bizarre extreme.
What me and shoes and ben are trying to say, I believe, is:
WOMEN HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS SHIT, however rare you think it is, its still something that every woman encounters. Even if she walked past 50 men every day and only one was a creep, that's still one too many.
I have to stop and explain to dudes I work with/hang out with that they're being assholes if they follow a woman just to check her out. But maybe thats just because I live in the south....
I have to agree completely with you here. However my ambivalence towards actually being able to "solve" the issue, even with this proactive stance is because it rests on hope. We all hope that people will notice and/or care that effort has been made, or if even that is done properly, as while society has made it simply so that women have gotten the short end, such sexism is woefully easy to do. On both sides at that, with it being so easy to make something terrible, and so easy to be offended (as has been demonstrated here).
I know I know, hence the ambivalence. I believe that the industry as whole is learning and already applying what we're talking about, and therefore the slow change is in action regardless to how much we argue about it here.
Not only that, but it won't be "solved." Social issues rarely are and simply tend to morph and change into a new set of problems introduced be the newer perspectives.
More men are actually raped in the United States than women:
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http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/02/20/is-the-united-states-the-only-country-where-more-men-are-raped-every-year-than-women/
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“sexual assault” is not always the same as “rape,” and includes a variety of behavior that wouldn’t meet the legal standard for rape. So it’s not clear that there are actually more rapes of men than women, or more rapes of prisoners than non-prisoners
“Inmates” also does not translate to “men.” There are a whole lot of women in jail, and female prisoners are twice as likely to experience inmate-on-inmate sexual assault (male inmates are slightly more likely to experience assault at the hands of prison staff). So again, not so obvious that more men than women experience sexual assault.
That's not exactly an unbiased source, being a feminist website. I'd like to see TYT's source, because the DoJ apparently did make a distinction between "rape" and "sexual abuse".
Honestly, this is why I can't take feminism seriously. The idea that mens rights issues' exist undermines the very core of feminism, the patriarchy. So if there are any mens rights issues', most feminists will stomp them out immediately and try to pretend like they don't exist. I don't like that. And that's why I'm against feminism... because I'm for absolute equality between the genders. Feminism is the idea that we can make both sexes equal by focusing solely on the issues of one of them.
Why not just move the posts into a new thread? Might be a good idea since this is a pretty interesting debate on a related, yet separate issue.
Edit: I apologize, I didn't read that this debate was already going on nor did I see your warning. Just saw the top post, and reacted to it.
Because this is not rapecount, this is polycount. Any thread started to discuss rape, abortion, or any other flame-baiting hot-button political topic that has no relevance to polycount(art, games, etc) will be immediately closed.
Keep it on topic or go to a different website, certainly there are thousands on the internet where you can discuss such topics.
I think she need to make video games,
I know some women actually create and design video games. and actually play it. she doesn't look like as one, she just observe it.
there is tons tons of tons video game that doesn't involve sexism, or sex appeal or discrimination against women.
If women actually spend some more time on playing games, make some blog about it, more than boys, I believe developers would looove to make games for girls if that happen.
I've been raised by a woman who are boss, leader, and know how to handle herself, actually making products , and avoid gossips. ohh she doesn't have master degree in social politics wut ... ;3
there is girl game about stalking(and taking photo) men having sex.
also there are some eroge for girl. yaoi also quite common.
And back to this, so Ben your complaint isn't with artists but with writers then. Yeah sure we cane make the characters look real and have a history but if they are written by people with no care about non 2d characters then all is for not. I know as a env guy history is what were all about, giving spaces a lived in and not brand new feeling. But would it matter that we put all that art time in if you were say in a driving game where you were flying by at 200mph? No you wouldn't, just in the same way that you wouldn't notice all the love and history given to the characters that you "interact with". Gamer's don't like to be taken away from the action for very long so most all of that time has to be spent on moving the plot forward or some action event. So all your left with are NPC's that follow you around like puppies blabbing on about something causing the player to want to shut them up. Yes i do agree that we need more interesting characters, but when would we get the time to find out that they are deeper than a cardboard cut out?
Depends on the game really - Portal was structured in such a way that even tho the lead remained mute, her character felt very solid. I guess I am just trying to say that lengthy dialog does not equals good writing and solid characterization, and more often than not in games just like in movies the implied is stronger than the obviously stated when it comes to character buildup.
I would guess that lousy, useless dialogue and poor writing in games is likely happening in the case of projects where a writer is hired (or self-declared) to give the project higher production values, like in Heavy Rain - as opposed to the few gems where writing and gameplay are delightfully intertwined, like HL2, MGS, Megaman X, Super Metroid, and so on. This is where "the magic happens" when it comes to great game characters.
This is also why the main character in Braid is so painfully vapid - the books to collect where very "overwritten" and just slowed the game down to a crawl for no reason other than trying to be "deep'...
But it's also true that not all games need that. If there ever were playable female soldiers in a CoD multiplayer mode, I sure wouldn't want them to talk any more than the silent males...
She's exactly what you make her out to be, that's why she's the ideal. She has just the same amount of 'sexy' as the recent Lara Croft, but how they're played is what makes the difference.
*Puts fingers in ears* LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU.
the more of a blank canvas the character is, the better it is for the player. it's why so many women like twilight... i can't remember if this was linked in this thread or another one, but it's right on the money for why certain characters are more easy to get to grips with than others, especially from a first person point of view.
link: http://theoatmeal.com/story/twilight
anyway, bens points are all valid... but they don't affect me as an artist. not in the position i'm in now. if i'm handed a piece of concept work, i work to that concept, and that's that. i don't question it, and why should i? it was someone elses job to come up with it!
so when people say "that's all down to the writers", they're pretty correct. it's the writers who create the back story, the concept artists use that to create the image of the character, and then the modelers make that concept "come to life".
so i'm sorry, but since the majority of the stuff i do is based on existing concepts, all i can really do is go by what's there.
Hunger Games is actually incredibly popular, maybe even more popular than Twilight right now, and its main character (particularly in the book - the movie kind of mary sued her up) is the polar opposite of Bella in Twilight. In fact a lot of popular YA titles feature strong female protagonists that have great personalities and character arcs. Scott Westerfeld's books for instance. (The Uglies series, Leviathan, Midnighters), he's a dude who knows how to write great female protagonists. His Dark Materials is also amazing and written by a man.
edit: Oh, how could I forget The Abhorsen trilogy by Garth Nix? Sabriel is like reading a Miyazaki film and has one of the best female characters in YA.
The blank canvas approach I think also works well, and not just for female characters, but males as well (Link and Chrono for example) are silent, and the player can make them whoever they want them to be.
What are you talking about? I was saying that your claim that there are less false claims than actual assaults not being taken seriously is completely false. I don't see the point of launching into a massively generalizing tirade. You think because the girl blacked out the cops send her on her way? Do you understand what cops do? Usually, they are an investigative authority. Like checking CCTV n shit. Stop making sensationalistic and hugely generalized statements.
OK, so you want a personal example of how I know women do this, because TV isn't good enough. In the last country I lived in there is a pretty big problem on public transport of scumbag kids playing scumbag music audibly through their phone speakers, to the extreme chagrin of all. We all just put up with it, cause it ain't worth the hassle right? One day an older gentleman told a pair of girls to STFU. These girls were in late teens I guess. This was on the first floor of the bus, and I was getting off, as the girls stormed downstairs, and informed the driver that this older gentleman had assaulted them, felt them up or whatever. Thank god it was my stop because the driver immediately turned the keys on the bus and called his controller to call the 5-0. Now; this guy is completely innocent, but I imagine he had to at the very least suffer the embarrasment of explaining all this to two cops in front of a bus load of gawking morons. And all because he did what the rest of us wanted to do.
There are hundreds of thousands of women out there that are complete scumbags, just like men. And then there are laws and procedures. I can GUARANTEE you, there are many many more false claims made than most likely genuine claims not being taken seriously.
Anyway, wtf are we even talking about. This is not what the thread is about.
http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/854/the_aesthetics_of_unique_video_.php?page=1
Damn! that does own. I love how it isn't just theory but has accompanying models and concepts and design feedback.
she's a great example of 'down to earth' female character design but is hardly ever shown or mentioned, i think its just a case of her character design is a bit forgetable, which is what tends to happen when you don't exagerate stuff. Also i'd mention the Beta for WOW where the female Trolls and Taurons were much more bestial but when they sat down and asked people about what characters they liked they found everyone was playing Elves and the like so they made the female bestial races more sexy and the outcome was more people started playing them but Blizzard got accused of being sexist. Sometimes you just can't win...
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she offer no solution or positive argument in my perspective.
lightyears behind Extra Credits when addressing the same issue.
another one
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If traditional LEGOs don't appeal to girls, then obviously just rebranding LEGO City wouldn't work, and there needs to be a different approach. After asking girls what they'd actually want to play with: there you go, they don't want firetrucks, they want friendship and happiness. She completely misses that part, which more or less undermines whatever else she has to say.
Though to be honest I doubt LEGO will make some breakthrough. The core of LEGO products is that you take things apart and put them together, then take them apart and make dragons and monster trucks out of the pieces. From what I remember of my childhood, boys were much much more likely to want to take things apart and put them back together than girls (In elementary school we all played with Lincoln Logs and Erector sets at lunch, girls drew and played games), so the toy itself inherently caters more to boys than girls. But then that's "natural" and that's bad?
Or moreover she didn't spend 5 minutes looking at the wikipedia article or the Lego website. There's a colossal haul of information available in both places regarding Lego's continued failed attempts at marketing towards young girls.
Here's the current stuff:
http://friends.lego.com/en-us/default.aspx?domainredir=belville.lego.com
As the ulta liberal i belive that i am im going to bluntly state that private companies can make and sell whatever the f**k they want. Its their brand, their money their vision. They have no responsibility to live up to any political ideals if they dont want to.
If i dont wannt my daughter to play with a tripple boobed lamppost with lipstick instead of fingernails then im not going to buy her one.
Is this topic really worth 22 pages?
Also why does people bother with this youtuber asking for money on the internet? Cant she do whatever she wants with her life? If you dont agree with the cause then dont give her money.
Sorry for poor english etc.
http://dylan-brady.com/sabriel/dylanbradysabriel1.jpg
this seems like a really odd argument to make imo (its the same conclusion she comes to literally in every video is. "basically writers need to stop writing this and start writing this") as though its suggesting there's a huge conspiracy of creative writers that's actively keeping women down, and the rest of us are just doing what our misogynist writer overlords tell us.
because its not perceived as marketable. FOLLOW THE MONEY PEOPLE
Viceral your post kinda confuses me, it starts with a confession of your "Ultra" liberalism and is then followed with a fairly extreme conservative position.
so which are your if you feel the need to label yourself?
how could a storyline exist if everyone is treated equally and everything is fine?
also: the meaning of life is reproduction. and since women have stronger relationships with their descendants, because they carry them around in their bellies for about 9 months. it always worked better when the women cared for them. men could grow an equally strong attachment to the kids overtime, but usually tales longer. and the man experience no physical damage while his kids get boren, so he can still work/go hunting and stuff to feed his family.
long story short: if one gender refuses to play his role without a proper substitute, humanity dies out in the long run
this doenst mean that all women need to be portrayed as 2 dimensional fuck pieces. folks are just asking for balance not prohibition.
I'm not entirely sure where to start with this approach, but games, at their heart, are about escapism and having compelling experiences. You could have a character capable of doing literally anything, limited only by technical restraints. Representation of women - or any characters - in games shouldn't be limited by someone needing to "play a role", and to be honest, that kind of view of the situation's... kind of scary.
It's supposed to be pretty reasonable, yeah.
What I really don't understand is why girls can't just buy the LEGO the boys buy? I guess she could say that girls don't like the boy's stuff but isn't that going entirely against her argument that we shouldn't be trapped in gender roles?
To be honest I haven't followed all of this thread to closely and only seen a few of her videos, but from what I've seen she seems to nitpick everything way too much.
Now here's the problem: the line of toys that appeals to girls isn't something that girls want to play with. It's the same thing that the current Lego fans play with (some of whom are boys and some girls), except it's all pink and ovens and shit. They haven't said to themselves, "Girls don't want to build stuff, what activities might they want to participate in?" They've said, "Girls like pink and ovens and sewing and being a little flirty and putting on make-up."
It's really just a stupid mistake. But the problem for girls is that it happens not just at Lego but all over the place, because a lot of people making decisions are men and a lot of the time they try to fit a man-designed product for women and just label it as the girl version and put hearts and pink all over it.
It's just a bad product designed by idiots but it makes a lot of women feel segregated and like they have special things they're forced towards, since they see it everywhere. "Being a woman is all about being pretty and wearing make-up and cooking." "There's this normal thing that everyone likes and then there's this special thing for women, who are unusual." They get it from the world that surrounds them and it seeps into a lot of the minds of the boys who grow up surrounded by it; so they get it from men, too, once they've grown up.
It's really not nit-picking -- the problem is that in each video she only tackles one thing, and as a single thing not all of her arguments hold up or can be seen in the context of the bigger picture. Basically the entirety of Dildo Faggins' rebuttal was that "hey, it's capitalism -- we can do whatever we want if there's a market for it." But when you see it against the context of the world at large, it's a "male-is-default", "lets-hire-a-programmer-oh-wait-shes-a-girl" society that tends to make women worry wayyy too much about how they look and how fat they are.
If we stop treating women as second-rate sexy-default characters in games and media then we might be able to help women feel less like second-rate citizens and less like they need to be sexy by default.
The premise of all of these videos is essentially that entertainment culturally indoctrinates everyone (both men and women) into filling our established gender roles.
You could buy legos for boys, but girls are going to respond less to them in general because they're equally poorly marketted, the issue is less about "girls don't like boys stuff" and more about "girls don't respond to boys marketting". Girls might respond just as well to it if they simply put girls in their commercials and made more female characters. No need to make a pink set with ovens and stovetops... Unfortunately the boys set is still also bad because it's just the opposite of the girls set, it emphasizes generic male roles and conflict themes (ninjas, cops n robbers, pirates, etc.) and things like friendship and coopration are not present.
Her solution isn't to make a better "girls" set of LEGOs or to market boys legos to girls, it's to get away from gender stereotypes period and meet in the middle, to make more product lines that AREN'T gender targetted.
The question is this: If LEGO does this will their sales actually improve? Because if all doing this does is alienate their male audience while girls resume their state of continuous disinterest what have they really accomplished here other than making less offensive commercials? You don't solve social problems by making products people don't want.
They tried gender neutral products/marketting before and shifted away from it. Why? One would have to logically assume this was more profitable. But then the world is a very different place now than it was in the 70s, and LEGOs are way more badass now, maybe things have changed enough that it would actually work... No ones going to know for sure until they try though.
Go into a baby accessories shop, look for gender neutral items. I'd guess there'd be very little and so from the very beginning: people as parents, friends, co-workers, the media, toys, games, books, a glance from a stranger tells us who we are.
A young girl is dressed in pink, because her mum used to dress in pink. The girl loves her mum and enjoys the things given to her, when she tries on her brothers blue pants her mother says "takes those off they're your brother's" she's now a stereotypic pink-loving young girl. A man who works for Lego asks her what she likes and she shows him some of her pink toys. She doesn't play with Lego because a) she has been so far enjoying fun pink toys that represent female associations such as fashion, friends, and motherhood and therefore not construction.
The man goes to work and is faced with the conundrum that boys love Lego but girls don't and knows that he must somehow make it attractive for girls. Since it has been a popular boys toy for generations his work is similarly populated by men who retained an interest in the product. Even if he asked the relatively few women who worked there what they thought, there's a good chance they did not play with Lego in their youth. With his current understanding of little girls, he creates the fancy new 'Pink Lego.'
It doesn't sell. Feminists find it incredibly sexist.
On that note I now feel like a terrible person because I gave my niece a My Little Pony toy and it wasn't because she like the show (it was because I did.)