Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Damsel in distress

Damsels in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs. Women in Video Games
by Anita Sarkeesian



Part 2
(Note: Sarkeesian explores some realistic, gruesome, and emotionally charged violence in videogames)



2 comments:

  1. There's just something about Peach in a Mario costume that looks wrong, somehow. Not "there shouldn't be a female Mario", but "this is not a female Mario". This has to do with the fact that Mario is designed to be much cartoonier than Peach. Mario is short and fat (and although he isn't actually shown as a slob, exactly, you can't imagine him being fastidious about his appearance, either), so a truly gender-balanced reversal would be something along those lines as well. And the gender-balanced reversal of Peach would presumably be, oh, a male model in Victorian costume, somehow? (Tall, fastidiously-groomed, and deliberately old-fashioned.)

    (Zelda in hero costume, however, looks significantly closer to an actual possible game protagonist. In fact, I think some of the RPG-ish game series which are less well-known have characters that really do look something like that, although usually this is alongside of male characters who are "better" in some way.)

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  2. The computer gaming is very different from real life gaming. My daughter is into CosPlay - costume play acting - specifically the SCA (SCA.org) where she is a fencer, archer, battle archer, and a knight as are many women, and it is ego bruising (but a thing of pride) that not only are a number of men beaten by her but so is her dad. In fact she met her husband on the battlefield and 'killed' him.
    I wish the gaming industry would grow a pair and start writing in real female characters. After all most problems are solved by throwing money at them not grenades.

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