8 Things Anita Sarkeesian Wants To Change About Video Games

The funny thing is, her original videos would have been completely forgotten if the moronic fedora tipping neckbeards of the internet didn't freak out so much about her.

I will say that there is nothing ridiculous about this list. Her original videos were annoying, nitpicky, and she didn't do a very good job of making many points. But this list seems completely reasonable, and I doubt anyone but the worst people would be bothered by any of these changes.

If these things change, it will be a literal double standard to character design because none of these things are thought about or applied to male character development. It just happens.
 
INB4 Azureth shows up and makes this thread go full retard.

Oh god no.

Anyways, these games will continue to exist with the skimpy female clothing and the damsel in distress themes because of the market. Who are video games' main demographic? Horny male teenagers/men. How many girls do you know that really plays video games versus how many guys you know that do?
 
Honestly, none of this will happen. In fact, the total opposite will happen just as a giant fuck you.
 
Please don't give this attention whore clicks. She needs to stop being fed attention.
 
I am a staunch Anti-Anita person, but these 8 points make sense.

Don't ignore the message because of the messed up messenger ;-)
 
She needs to play 'Last of Us', the new 'Tomb Raider', 'Bio Shock Infinite' or some of the other dozens of games that meet all of her criteria just fine.

Gaming is fine, people create art the way they envision it.
 
I have nothing against some games doing that. But I also don't think it is wrong for a game to put women in lingerienarmor and women who look good. You would not want to play a fat guy with a stained T-shirt and jeans. Unless that is the kind of guy you need to tell the story. And if you need a normal woman for the story you should make her realistic. But otherwise why not make her sexy? I bet many women rather play a sexy lady too. Games are about power fantasy most of the time. You want to kick ass and look good while doing it.
 
Another fun fact about this. Jade from dying light checked all of these boxes, Sarkeesian bitched about her because the character has to save her......just like she saved him. Developers are never going to win with her.

Yeah that is absolutely ridiculous. If she was really for equality should she would have seen how Dying Light portrays Jade as a hardcore bad ass champion fucking kick boxer, who could hold her own against any man. THAT is a strong female lead. While it isn't a playable character, she is still an ass kicker alpha female. And she isn't "sexified". Its a big fucking joke. This lady is a nutbag.
 
Yeap nothing wrong with Bayonetta, as that is actually a female power fantasy, but for many other games these points are rather sensible unlike her usual speech :-P
 
Can I just say how much I respect and admire her for making a career out of basically nothing. Every time I see her in the media, she constantly refines her message to straddle that line between, "oh well that's kinda sounds legitimate," to "omg neckbeard rage!!!"

From a failed academic to big name pundit. She is like the video games industry equivalent of Rush "making people so angry at manufactured outrage they send me money" Limbaugh. Well done. Well done.
 
Zzzzz......huh..wat? Oh, her again? Even Seattle doesn't like her and thats saying something
 
Man, these chollas with their hoop earrings are fucking disgusting.
 
Very long drama story short with this women = She wants the entire video games industry to do away with any games that involve women characters that are exposed/look/drawn/dressed and played like this


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Some context from a person attending one of her lectures on this very subject.
https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/2vov00/so_anita_sarkeesian_came_to_speak_at_my/

Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")
She points out examples of this in Left 4 Dead and Borderlands 1 & 2.

"Lingerie is not armor" (Dress female characters as something other than sex objects.)
She also goes on to criticize breast physics, with her explanation that it hurts in real life when they bounce up and down. Some good points are made, but the crux of her argument (as it usually is) is that video game reality has to always match real reality in context no matter what the game is. The idea of women showing skin in a fantasy world is that one of their most powerful weapons is their sexuality. Powerful male characteristics are exploited in the same way. While I think the "steel bikini" is pushing it a little too far, arguing that low cleavage is somehow objectifying women is disingenuous at best and misguided at worst. Sexualization != objectification.

Have female characters of various body types
She sounds to use a lot of logical fallacies in her arguments here, even misquoting one when it comes to the comparison of male characters. She is arguing that there is one standard model games use for all female characters with one example and then goes on to argue that male body types are diverse with no examples. I find it funny that she basically uses the same argument I do above about Kratos, except that there is no sexuality in Kratos at all :rolleyes:...

Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's.
The "male gaze" that feminists like to use as an example of objectification of women in media all the time. She ultimately argue that female characters never be shown below the waist in third-person, and again goes onto using false equivalency when comparing to men. Newsflash (or is it "trigger warning" these days...): men and women are biologically different.

Include more female characters of color.
Here Anita argues again that all women representation is hypersexualized, but includes this in a separate section to single out "PoC" (does she not think this is racist?). Speaking of racism, she goes onto argue that any use of a culture that is inherent to these "PoC" is appropriation and also needs to stop. It's like the one time someone in the same circle said a woman "PoC" sounded too black in one game, even though she was voiced by a black actress (found it: Where The Game Industry Fails Actors: An Interview With Amanda Strawn [Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Letitia]). Ultimately she says the solution is to not define these characters by their culture, but still incorporate the cultural background. Have to love the irony in that statement.

Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move.
One of her examples for this section included Catwoman from the Arkham series. This again goes back to sexuality being a statement of power. In Catwoman's case I actually think it goes more to her ego and arrogance. Her point about the difference in sitting positions in Destiny is an odd one. In all my experience in real life I have not seen many women who are comfortable sitting in the same manner as men. Someone in the Reddit thread I linked said it best. One of the first things [male-to-female] [transgender] people learn is how to walk and sit differently. Women sit differently because they are different, physically and biologically, from men. There's that shocking statement of fact again...

Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic
I could agree with this in some cases, although I can't think of any examples off the top of my head where this issue is so exaggerated as to be a problem.

Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies
So we're back to this problem again... I think I have said enough about this topic already. Despite popular belief, the word "sexualization" does not have a negative denotation.

sexualize: to make sexual; to endow with a sexual quality or character
sexual: of, relating to, or involving sex; of or relating to males and females

I think to sum this up: Anita once every female video game character to be one-dimensional and adrogynous.
 
Really? That's why you think we post stuff like this?

Yes. You, I and (hopefully) most people here understand how the click-based revenue system works; especially people interested in the GG debacle, since the whole media/industry relationship is one of the things that is such a huge focus of the debate.

The gawker network is huge, and by linking to them directly and/or using the exact same headlines in your own posts (which are merely links to them with a short comment) directly assists in giving you page clicks and resulting ad revenue. Googling the title puts you at #4 on my google results page, which is pretty impressive. One of the main contentions of "GG" is ethics in journalism and disclosure of who/how is getting paid for their reporting.

As a regular here for at least 10 years, I would hope my opinions are at least considered. I understand this might seem hypocritical (doesn't anita and kotaku deserve a voice too?), but you have a very long history of linking to them, and specifically linking to obvious click-bait titles, as well as both anita and kotaku having a history of "silencing opposing opinions". They're a shitty news network, and I've thought so WAY before this whole GG thing. I stopped visiting them around the time of their site redesign. Anita is a scam artist and any press you give her is legitimizing her professional victim routine.

This site has extremely good original content, but the main news page is full of absolute click-bait garbage.

I will absolutely stop bitching about you linking to Gawker (or anyone else I might not like) if you choose to specify in the story itself that's where it comes from, or even better, link directly to the source articles if one is available, rather than a more popular site's version of the source.

I can't possibly be the only person that is annoyed by this. But hey, just my opinion.
 
Wait a second she tried to use Borderlands 2 characters as Smurfette examples? >.< ... wow ... >.< well whatever, the spirit of the bullet points can be sensible, her? well, whatever, she is a lost case since the beginning because she is in this for the attention/money /shrugs.
 
I don't mind it. But what does bother me is why the news section seems to be focused entirely on these moot stories. For instance, this past week has seen a lot of leaks concerning the upcoming Galaxy S6, which I would imagine to be pretty significant. I don't think there's been a single post about it.
 
Wait a second she tried to use Borderlands 2 characters as Smurfette examples? >.< ... wow ... >.< well whatever, the spirit of the bullet points can be sensible, her? well, whatever, she is a lost case since the beginning because she is in this for the attention/money /shrugs.

You have to buy the expansion if you want to play the other Borderlands 2 female. Borderlands Pre-sequel is actually balanced with two ladies, a guy and a guy-like robot. Half life 1 and 2 have only one female each. Dungeon defenders is the same way. I don't think it would kill us to have just as many lady characters as guy characters in our games.
 
You have to buy the expansion if you want to play the other Borderlands 2 female. Borderlands Pre-sequel is actually balanced with two ladies, a guy and a guy-like robot. Half life 1 and 2 have only one female each. Dungeon defenders is the same way. I don't think it would kill us to have just as many lady characters as guy characters in our games.

Crap. Make that Left 4 Dead 1 and 2, not Half Life.
 
I'm sorry, I'm against censorship, I'd rather have games satisfy their target audience and make money, rather then bow down and conform to a belief system that the actual market does not want.

She's too ignorant to see all sides, or rather is simply so confident that she is correct, and we are all wrong, that we should submit to her world views, which in this case, seems like a list of demands.

Naive.
 
Avoid the Smurfette principle (don't have just one female character in an ensemble cast, let alone one whose personality is more or less "girl" or "woman.")

Um.... A female with a girl or woman personality? What does she want? FtM transgender people? There is a crossdresser in Super Mario 2... What about Samus in Metroid? She kicks ass, and no one knew she was a woman for a while.
 
I'm sorry, I'm against censorship, I'd rather have games satisfy their target audience and make money, rather then bow down and conform to a belief system that the actual market does not want.

She's too ignorant to see all sides, or rather is simply so confident that she is correct, and we are all wrong, that we should submit to her world views, which in this case, seems like a list of demands.

Naive.

This x 10000.

Bottom line is that if there was money to be made with her ideas there would be publishers lining up to produce games with ugly women in pants suits. If she's so confident why not put her money where her mouth is. If I'm an investor I want profit, some ignorant twit activist's agenda isn't anything I'm interested in or willing to risk my cash on.

IMO she's a non-contributing zero and she should be ignored. The faster she is forgotten the better off the world will be.
 
I'm sorry, I'm against censorship, I'd rather have games satisfy their target audience and make money, rather then bow down and conform to a belief system that the actual market does not want.

She's too ignorant to see all sides, or rather is simply so confident that she is correct, and we are all wrong, that we should submit to her world views, which in this case, seems like a list of demands.

Naive.

She knows what she's doing all too well. She went from a failed academic to being under the spotlight. All because of some random events that no one could have predicted. She's a capitalist through and through, and she has scored big with the nonsense she drums up. I'll bet she thinks it's nonsense too, but why would she stop? she's doing better for herself than she would have any other way.
 
It's a free country, so let her design games the way she wants them. It's also a capitalistic economy - supply & demand.
I have two daughters - they would like games with more variety of female characters. I'm cool with it - just don't try to make every game bend over backwards to conform.
 
American and European game developers have already done what Sarkeesian wants done. And usually if they are then so are the men. You still have your men with muscles as armor still in games. A sword can't pierce his muscular armor, amiright?

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Look at Skyrim for example. Without mods most of the women look like crap. Why you think there's so many female mods for Skyrim? If you're going to play that game for hours you might as well look at something pretty right?

Just look at this. OH GOD! The equality is too ugly
1395DarkElfFemale.jpg


But the Japanese don't give a shit. They want boobs with pretty faces. And already we're see them catering to our market. Besides white heros. So please leave the Japanese to continue to make women with over developed chests. Please think of the boobs.

Image on left for Western market. Imagine on right for Asian market.
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She was annoying, but not as annoying to the reaction to her. Which was so bad it actually made her less annoying in comparison.

So good work guys.
 
Some good points are made, but the crux of her argument (as it usually is) is that video game reality has to always match real reality in context no matter what the game is...

...men and women are biologically different.

Fine, let's make a completely realistic game to match reality. But one caveat. Women will no longer be able to be physical, as their biological differences make them weaker. That's just reality. No longer should a skilled woman have any chance at defeating a similarly skilled man in a fight, unless the man is significantly smaller in physical stature.
 
She was annoying, but not as annoying to the reaction to her. Which was so bad it actually made her less annoying in comparison.

So good work guys.

I agree... cept that I think she is annoying, rather than was.

And man, that asian version looks cute. Didn't even notice the breast size myself, until I read the sentence before it.
 
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