Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy:
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>This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality?
You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differences between the sexes." Nowadays it seems we are only allowed to celebrate their sameness, or their inversion. This makes me sad.
Vive la différence!
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This kind of put into words an odd feeling I was having about the whole "war of the sexes" vibe that this seems to generate. I'm not sure the motives of the father or the site need questioned at all - it's a thoughtful gift to his daughter, and a very clever hack at that. Certainly worth covering in any case.
What I don't understand is how one of the most common storytelling tropes in history (we're talking Shakespeare and then some) has suddenly become uncool to use, or why we're making a harmless part of videogame history a political and social justice issue.
I think it’s pretty normal if you are tired of the constant portrayal of women as weak, helpless and passive in certain media.
What’s so wrong with calling out lazy storytelling based on dumb stereotypes? How can you even have a problem with that?
I also like how you just declare something harmless. Why, exactly? It’s a part of video game history that lives on and is anything but harmless.
Calling out crap is wrong – why exactly? Or is the portrayal of women as weak, helpless and passive – especially in a world where this is a popular stereotype – not crap?
Nobody wants to burn cartridges or rewrite history or ban old games. People (for the most part) don’t even demonize anyone for this or blame anyone for acting maliciously. Is pointing something out (or privately doing something about it) really such a big deal?
I really don’t get contrarians like you. Your arguments make no sense at all. (Except if you believe that women really are naturally weak, helpless and passive, i.e. hold sexist beliefs.)
>What’s so wrong with calling out lazy storytelling based on dumb stereotypes?
What exactly do you hope to accomplish by calling out arguably "lazy storytelling" (more like a homage to King Kong if some stories are to be believed) 32 years later?
It's like complaining about racism in the early Bugs Bunny cartoons. What exactly are you hoping to accomplish other than a gripe? Damn Nintendo for using a common story trope three decades ago!
What does this teach anyone? How horrible Nintendo is? What?
>I really don’t get contrarians like you. Your arguments make no sense at all. (Except if you believe that women really are naturally weak, helpless and passive, i.e. hold sexist beliefs.)
This was utterly unnecessary. If I'm a "contrarian", you are someone who searches for things to be offended by.
Let's see.. Pretty sure Peach has her own game on which the entire concept is getting the Mario Bros. out of trouble (the name is eluding me right now, it's on the DS).
She's personally helped save the world more than once (Paper Mario 2 comes to mind).
There are other female characters too.. Timpani from Super Paper Mario has a huge dynamic with the primary antagonist of the game.
And if you look outside of that particular franchise, you'd be remiss not to look at Samus Aran (minus one almost universally panned game with an outsourced plot), arguably the poster child for strong female leads in video games.
Super Princess Peach is quite possibly the worst game to use as an example of an inversion of the trope. Peach's main power is essentially four mood swings called "Vibes"[0]: Joy, Rage, Gloom, and Calm. Granted, Japan isn't known for being very women-friendly[1], but that doesn't mean we should excuse Nintendo for making Peach's debut gameplay center around her being "emotional".
Finding a tiny handful of female protagonists really doesn't change the fact that video games are pretty much a sausage festival, where women are typically presented as helpless prizes to be won or rescued.
Despite what the high-budget video game developers think, video games are not played exclusively by guys. Girls play them too. And maybe we'd like to have some fantasies where someone like us gets to kick ass and save the world, or at least the day, too.
If you're unhappy with the games that exist today, perhaps you could make one that suits your creative desires? (That is essentially how all of the existing games came to be.)
Peach had one game, outside the franchise mainline (hell outside the franchise) 8 years ago. There have been 6 mainline Mario platformers since (and there was a 7th the same year as SSP) (though one of the 6 was the 25th anniversary re-release of AllStars) and in all of them the plot was the same "Peach gets kidnapped, mario goes and saves her"
Yes, the Princess Peach game where she has to cry to save Mario. Vomit.
You know, subverting the trope a little bit (sometimes) is maybe nice, certainly, however, not enough when you use it all the fucking time, to this day.
First, women are smaller and weaker than men, on average, and there's nothing wrong with that. Sometimes reality has a conservative bias, you know? (But it would be more accurate to say that traditional ideas often have some basis in reality.)
Second, I don't see why you have to demean all the men and women who are weak and passive. Their lives are perfectly worthwhile too, and they have something to contribute other than brawn and testosterone.
Third, boys embraced video games as a pastime when most girls thought it was stupid crap for loser nerds. I think it's great that many more girls are into video games now, and that all the big companies want to make money by selling video games to girls. But don't act as if the large back catalog of boy-oriented games is some sort of social injustice. When the first GI Joe doll for boys (aka "action figure") came out, did people start whining because almost all existing dolls were designed for girls? No.
Fourth, there are many girls (but also boys) that would be better served by something other than a simple sprite swap on the same action game idea. But your ridiculously limited ideas of what's good and valuable (big, strong, person! Death to enemies! Woe be the weak!) would leave them high and dry.
1) Its not the physically smaller or weaker part that is the problem - how often really do women need men to come rescue them? Is it any more than men needing women to rescue them? Why then are most of the video games, even the puzzle based ones where brains not brawn are the deciding factor, all about saving the women? It seems to me that there is certainly a curious imbalance there.
2) Strawman - parent is not demeaning the "weak and passive" so much as pointing out that a lot of video games present a wide variety of male types, but only the weak and passive female type. This is strange. The women I know seem to fall on a scale ranging from weak and passive to "alpha as fuck", just like the men.
3) Goalpost moving, true scotsman, and strawman rolled up into one: There is no argument here about orienting the games toward a gender, only the portrayal of genders within the games. If you think they are the same, then there is perhaps something else going on as well... basically there is some sort of assumption that games oriented towards boys should only portray men strongly. Which is weird, because how the hell would it appeal less to boys if some of the characters were strong women?
4) Actually a good point. Unfortunately mixed up in some sort of strawman - you are angry that people would like to see strong female characters in action games, so you are accusing the parent of only wanting action gams for kids - which is not evident in that post - and therefore hurting the chance for girls (who apparently can't like action games) to get good games for them. (I'm guessing that your conservative basis in reality suggests that means they need games about vacuuming, cooking and ponies).
(going to continue the above structured 4 bullet points)
1) Stories are today more homogeneous then ever before. People used to joke that you could set your clock to a james bond movies, and know what plot, what characters and what events will unfold. Then other movies copied it, and they too could be set to that same clock. Asking for originality is what we consumers should do but it is not what sends money to the bank if you are a producer. I would not know how we even could began fixing this.
2) video games do not present a wide variety of male types. Since when did you see a undecisive, meek, emotional erratic male protagonist? How often is he a gear of wars massive hulk made of 99% muscles, with so low base sounding voice that he likely has a serious sickness in the throat? How often doesnt he act like an emotionalless robot, creating a flood of corpses and steals anything that's not nailed down?
3) while I am not a game developer, I doubt that having strong women would lower the numbers of sales to boys. I don't see anyone arguing this. I do however think that the industry is lazy, and is not going to change their products if they don't have to. Movie producers and game producers are in this aspect very similar, and focus on what ever sold the most yesterday. In media, only books tend to have reached a level of diversity that we as a society is happy with.
4) I don't think the commenter is angry. That would imply intent in a very few written lines. I also think you are missing the point. Stories are complicated, and good stories require more than simple resprite work or pronounce changes. This goes same for making games that present role models for boys as well as girls.
Anecdotal evidence on movies and games :). Mostly based on reviews.
StarCraft II was one of the most silliest examples of this. The characters are one-dimensional to the point of being laughable. This is a game which had almost unlimited budget, and they just fail horrible at having an original story. I dare people to watch the cinematics say that the male roles are typical of the human male population.
But the more telling part, is that I would have to dig into the indy scene if I even wanted a bit originality in the story. I can't find a single AAA game that have original and well fleshed out characters, and a interesting story. At best, one would have to look at the walking dead which copies that from the TV-show.
Movies... pre-2000, we had a bunch of james bond copies. After that, we got the expendable? The new die hard? Any of the teenage vampire movies?
The one with good story and good character looks to be mostly remakes of older movies or comic/book made-movie, or animations. Wreck-It Ralph is a clear example of good characters.
It's not that most current AAA games or movies are good, it's just that I think we tend to see past ones with rose colored glasses, and to compare best of "the past" (decades) with "the present" (a few years), which is clearly unbalanced.
I was never a big fan of playing games for their stories or characters; I value gameplay over almost everything, preferring mindless fun (e.g. Metal Slug) or multiplayer games, but Portal 1 & 2 are certainly better than most of the big budget games I remember playing.
As for movies since the 2000, sure you have crap like those, but you also have decent movies like (from the top of my head) the Coen brothers', the Eternal Sunshine, Mulholland Drive, Children of Men or Crash. Were the previous decades much better? I don't think so.
I think it was pretty clear that I was not talking about muscle strength, you know. (And if you want to get down that route, I’m willing to bet that in general, overweight plumbers have less jumping ability than fit women.)
Also, I’m a shy introvert and I certainly do not want to demean anyone who is also that – I don’t think I did, actually. There is nothing wrong with shy and introverted characters, even weak characters or passive ones. That is not the problem. Those characters can all happily exist. The problem is that those characters tend to overwhelmingly be women.
In that light, I believe you misinterpreted me completely. I want better storytelling and more complex characters. I have really no problem with that. I do not want video games to again and again and again pick up on the same old lazy stereotype of women as being passive and weak. That’s it.
Nintendo's Metroid franchise has already been mentioned, and then there's the Zelda franchise (where despite the fact that the main character is male, Zelda is actually a strong character who tends to be a victim of circumstances beyond anyone's ability to control, and in some instances fights shoulder-to-shoulder with the protagonist), and others outside of Nintendo as well (Tomb Raider?). It may seem like a larger problem than it actually is if you only pay attention to the examples that bother you.
You are ridiculous in bringing that up as a positive example. I’m baffled. Also, Tomb Raider has quite the problematic history (that the new game luckily avoids).
Obviously, counter-examples do exist. It has been getting better. All that is true.
Yes I'm sure in a videogame it's very important it be informed by reality. You know, in a video game where the antagonist is a giant ape throwing barrels at you.
Why, whenever someone does something simple like this, does someone feel it sooo important to come and remind us about how on average women have blah blah blah properties.
instead of focusing on groups why not focus on individuals. women as a group maybe have specific characteristics, but when was the last time you had to deal with women as a group? you deal with individuals, so why not focus on individuals?
I'm sure i could find a woman that's stronger than you, in that circumstance, it doesn't matter that men as a group are on average stronger than women as a group.
Yes, let's be realistic here. Men are a lot more likely to end up in situations where they'll have to save someone from a giant gorilla. To put sexual dimorphism into question by suggesting that a woman could as well save a man from the giant gorilla is a slap in the face of biology! That would be unrealistic and unfair to men, women and giant gorillas alike.
If you'll take his word at face value, the father didn't really have any motives aside from making his daughter happy.
"My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games. Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particular Mario game, she seemed really bummed out by that. So what else can I do? I'm up at midnight hacking the ROM, replacing Mario with Pauline."
> This kind of put into words an odd feeling I was having about the whole "war of the sexes" vibe
What vibe?
> we're making a harmless part of videogame history a political and social justice issue
Who is doing that?
> What I don't understand is how one of the most common storytelling tropes in history (we're talking Shakespeare and then some) has suddenly become uncool to use
What are you trying to say?
I thought I read a story about a dad who wanted to make a game fun for his daughter. I read the article, I read it again, yep, it's a story about a dad making changes to a game for his daughter. What story did you read?
I don't know the father's motives aside from the article, but I have a 4yo daughter and try to do whatever I can to encourage her to have, "I can change/fix that" as her first instinct when she runs into obstacles or problems. Whether there's a "war of the sexes" or not, boys are encouraged to hack way more than girls, so I'm more concerned about my daughters getting encouragement than my son (hypothetically... He's 1 so I don't really know yet).
So I saw the article in that light: a father wanted to hack donkey kong so that he could show his daughter that hacking donkey kong to make the princess the hero is a totally normal thing that she should expect to learn to do as she gets older. Maybe I'm projecting too much onto the story.
I don't know. I have two young daughters and they would want to be the girl character - just because. They're too small to know or care about social injustice. Sometimes, people are just having fun.
Well one of the problems is that nearly all the stories follow that trope. What's wrong with expanding the number of stories we can tell? Why do we have to have the same story all the time?
(Additionally, it's debateable if the dearth of females saving males in a genre is "harmless").
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>This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality?
You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differences between the sexes." Nowadays it seems we are only allowed to celebrate their sameness, or their inversion. This makes me sad.
Vive la différence!
--
This kind of put into words an odd feeling I was having about the whole "war of the sexes" vibe that this seems to generate. I'm not sure the motives of the father or the site need questioned at all - it's a thoughtful gift to his daughter, and a very clever hack at that. Certainly worth covering in any case.
What I don't understand is how one of the most common storytelling tropes in history (we're talking Shakespeare and then some) has suddenly become uncool to use, or why we're making a harmless part of videogame history a political and social justice issue.