Messages

As for games, specifically, I don't know if prostitution makes sense there. If it is targeted at male teens, all kinds of wild ideas about sex will find a fanbase

Well, I personally wold say portraying prostitution in a dark medieval/post apocalyptic setting as fun and sexy makes about as much sense as if a WW2 game would portray a German POW camp as a wild summer camp full of fun and games. 

Hi fellow agsers. 'Tis I BarbWire

I said, a while ago, that I would refrain from posting on this subject, but I just couldn't resist the temptation.

I've got a brilliant idea. Why don't we all stop playing games and watching movies (basically anything that gives us pleasure) and do
away with entertainment in general. This way there will be nothing to complain about 

Then how about instead of trolling people in this forum, you go back to troll the traditional way and go sit under a bridge?

[entirely different]

Prostitution is organized (also taxed) and legal in most european countries (although not all). It's not far-fetched to view it as another part of the world, and afaik most prostitutes do that difficult job because they want to get a considerable amount of money fast and then never look back.
Of course it is entirely different if you have illegal prostitution and trafficking rings...

1. Most of the video games I'm talking about do not take place in countries with a sound legal system and protections for the vulnerable, they explicitly take place in violent medieval societies or post-apocalyptic hellscapes.

2. Even today in the western world, there is a massive trafficking problem and most prostituted people are coerced into it, and about 90% would leave the sex trade if they could.
When it's this bad today, you can only imagine how horrible it must have been in historical times where no protections against stds or unwanted pregnancies existed and slavery was legal.

[However,]

If you want my personal opinion, no, I don't want a world where men are equally objectified because treating humans like meat sucks.

However, as things are decidedly NOT equal today and so many men will defend degrading portraits of women without question, making gender-swapped counter examples of men in the same position
serves as a way to cast light on the double standard and and attempt to show straight men just how ridiculous much of the objectification is.

So when you wrote this,

For example, I liked the first Metro 2033 game, and I looked forward to it's sequel, but when I read that there was going to be a mandatory cutscene where you saw the male protagonist have sex from a first-person view,
and the player would be encouraged to visit brothels and pay for lap dances, I immediately lost all interest and decided I do not want to play the game ever.

there are actually two different issues you take with the game? It's not wrong for a game to feature a POV sex scene, but you are annoyed that such scenes only cater to men and you never get to play one from a woman's perspective. Meanwhile, brothels and lap dances are just wrong and shouldn't exist, regardless of gender. Do I understand your perspective correctly?

Well, I'm not against all forms of sex scenes if the characters are portrayed respectfully, I thought Bioware made an OK job with the romances between crewmates in Mass Effect for example, and the sims series portray it as a natural part of romantic relationships for all parties involved, but from what I've seen of the Metro 2034 scenes, people complained that it came out of nowhere, and there weren't any women in the game who weren't sex objects.

As for brothels in games, I find it massively disturbing how many games will portray horrific worlds full of violence, slavery and oppression, yet still portray brothels ar harmless fun-houses filled with hot ladies who just love offering all kinds of services to strangers, despite in the real world, most people in prostitution face abuse and exploitation.

[However,]

Is it known what percentage of players are female by now?
Obviously in the old days it was negligible - I am sure it isn't negligible now, but possibly it's still a small minority 

You ought to read this article on how games started out gender-neutral but became marketed as boy toys.

So just to be clear, the issue here isn't with objectification and sleaze, it's the objectification and sleaze being one-sided?

Imagine a world where for every game that exists now, a gender-swapped version (with t-strings turning into loincloths, cleavage into abs, and so on) is also available. Is everything ok in that world?

If you want my personal opinion, no, I don't want a world where men are equally objectified because treating humans like meat sucks.

However, as things are decidedly NOT equal today and so many men will defend degrading portraits of women without question, making gender-swapped counter examples of men in the same position
serves as a way to cast light on the double standard and and attempt to show straight men just how ridiculous much of the objectification is.

[male]

Regarding the whole "sex sells" idea, it only sell to some horny dudes, but it will alienate just as many women.

For example, I liked the first Metro 2033 game, and I looked forward to it's sequel, but when I read that there was going to be a mandatory cutscene where you saw the male protagonist have sex from a first-person view,
and the player would be encouraged to visit brothels and pay for lap dances, I immediately lost all interest and decided I do not want to play the game ever. Even Angry Joe pointed out the tone-deaf absurdity of it.

Meanwhile, when Final Fantasy released a character design for a male character in a revealing outfit, they immediately had to re-design it because they acknowledged that it made male players uncomfortable.
And there wasn't even any nudity or sex scenes, he was just wearing a tight outfit that was still less revealing than that of many female final fantasy characters. The double-standard is obvious.

Plus there's the whole bit about how it's scientifically proven objectification literally makes it harder for viewers to see women as human if there wasn't reason to hate it already.

Good one!

Although women tend to be a little more sophisticated when it comes to drooling over medical staff

[imgzoom]https://i.ibb.co/t8RPRwf/clooney.png[/imgzoom]

Yes and no, it's not that in general women are less attracted to bare abs than men are to revealing outfits on women, it's that women are more aware of how silly it would look if men wore such outfits to work with a straight face! 

Seems like a pretty apt (and cringey) example on how to alienate female players form the narrator. 

I can see the cringe factor, sure, (I know from experience that, when waking up in a hospital, the sexiness of nurses is the last thing on your mind) but not really how this would alienate women any more than men. I hear the women I know regularly refer to other women as "lovely" or other variations of "hot", whether they be straight, bi or gay, so this off-hand remark of someone looking pretty doesn't seem all that gendered to me.

Well, a straight woman will have a hard time empathizing with a man describing how much he's into girls, so when it's written in such a cringey manner that effect is multipled tenfold.

For example, I can appreciate a well written romance and in the case of Farah from Prince of Persia or Elena from Uncharted, I can empathize with the male character falling for them because they are presented as interesting characters in their own right,
but when it's just "Oooh, look a pretty lady", well, I can't relate to that and that just feels like cringe.

Babar really hit the nail on the head there! 

Where does Tintin live? Who are his parents? It's not really important

I don't disagree with the overall point, but where Tintin lives is fairly well established: in most stories he lives in an apartmentâ€"regularly shownâ€"in a city that is explicitly or implicitly identified as Brussels (though Hergé sometimes takes liberties with the geography, for example giving the city a port in The Crab with the Golden Claws). In the later stories he appears to have moved in with Haddock at the Château de Moulinsart (Marlinspike Hall) as a more or less permanent houseguest.

Indeed, though I'd also argue a good way to tell how well defined a character is is asking weather you can tell something they do is out of character.

For example, with Tintin, if someone were to write him willfully bullying a kid, most would recognize it as vastly out of character because Tintin has always been portrayed as kind and willing to stand up for the weak and vulnerable.
Meanwhile, loads of video games star blank slates and amnesiacs because you can't break character if you have no character to begin with, and so it doesn't strike players as cognitive dissonance if they try to do a bunch of random stuff
playing with the game mechanics with their characters.

Hmmmmmmm 

(from the game It Came from the Desert)

Seems like a pretty apt (and cringey) example on how to alienate female players form the narrator. 

Meanwhile, compare to when the developers behind Remember me wanted their female protagonist to have a male love interest, and was for real met with this response from their publishers:

"We had people tell us, 'You can't make a dude like the player kiss another dude in the game, that's going to feel awkward.'"

And so, while Remember me got to keep a female protagonist, they did remove any reference to any romantic feelings she may have had in the final game.

It really bothered me as a child in the 90s to see that all mainstream kid's movies at the time had male protagonists, and the story was always told from their point of view, the exception being the Disney princess movies, but the only Disney heroine I could really relate to was Mulan,
because she was the only female protagonist I could remember from my childhood who got to be goofy, get dirty and messed up, and had her own story that wasn't centered on romance.

There also was "Xena Warrior Princess", but ofcourse it was much more dirty, messy and bloody compared to Disney standards .

True that, though I was older when I started to watch Xena. 

I can't say if the norm for males was to actually like the action characters. I certainly didn't - I wouldn't identify with He-man or similar ^_^ I almost always supported the "evil" characters anyway, and was more interested in the japanimation of the era (not as much because I was a proto-hipster, but probably more due to my own megalomaniac ideas at the time).

I can't speak for what men think of the heroes they grew up with, though I know a lot of kids of both sexes identify with or cheer on cartoon villains, partially because it can be fun to rebel, but also, at least with Disney, they make the vilains much more expressive and varied than the heroes, they're allowed to be much more distinct and memorable when they aren't constrained by ideas of being handsome/pretty and "good role models".

Spoiler

[close]

It come in my mind that the closest movie to pass the Flintenweiber test could be Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers ... but in the end is not a WWII movie.

_

Yeah, it's pretty much the only sci fi film I can think of that portrays 100% gender equality, with women with practical clothes in all kinds of societal positions and none of them being questioned for it,
compared to a great number of films and games that tries to portray a future world where race, gender and sexuality isn't an issue, yet either 90% of all characters in important roles are still white dudes,
or they have many female characters doing everything the guys do, but they have to do it in ridiculous fetish costumes, high heels, and a bunch of impractical gear that only serves to pander to straight men.

Usually the more specific traits a character has, the more people won't be identifying with them. There are ways to go around this, of course, but they mostly involve the character reacting to something more central (say Big Brother, in 1984; Winston is just a cog in the machine and a reaction to it; most readers would tend to react in a similar way)

I appreciate that, but what I'm getting at is that "being a woman" or "being black" are seen as specific character traits, with which fewer people can identify. The white male protagonist is often treated as neutral and universal, which clearly reflects a social bias.

Maybe this is so. I'd like to think that if the protagonist is black/female I'd just read the story the same way, as long as the writer presents them in a neutral manner (as with the generic male protagonist, who tends to be an avatar of the writer if they are male too anyway)

That said, I had no problem identifying with the (female) protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper, by Perkins-Gilman. It is a great story.

Well, it seems a lot of straight white guys can empathize with women and minorities just fine if they want to, the problem is that so many media creators never treat them as characters that could be empathized with in the first place.

It really bothered me as a child in the 90s to see that all mainstream kid's movies at the time had male protagonists, and the story was always told from their point of view, the exception being the Disney princess movies, but the only Disney heroine I could really relate to was Mulan,
because she was the only female protagonist I could remember from my childhood who got to be goofy, get dirty and messed up, and had her own story that wasn't centered on romance.

The problem with the older Disney princesses is that they are more preoccupied with being "good role models" than relatable characters, but I could never relate to how Snow White and Cinderella just loved singing and wanting to marry a prince,
and most egregiously, how they loved doing housework, Cinderella even singing as she's forced by her abusive family to swab the floors on her knees.

(Though if the Song of the south, the Roustabout song from Dumbo and the black centaur from Fantasia is something to go by, Walt Disney seemingly had a habit of portraying oppressed people as being happy and singing whilst forced to do labor and being servants... )

For that matter, an arguably great character like Batman is considered great because there are good stories about him, but there are just as many stories that are terrible. But the success of Batman will then spawn similar characters that try to outdo the original in some way, like using guns, being more violent or any of the other boxes you could check. These other characters will most likely not be as interesting.

I think a pretty apt illustration of the double standard is that when Batman and Robin bombed, executives decided it was simply because it was a badly made film and made a more serious reboot of Batman a short time later, but when Halle Berry's Catwoman flopped, Hollywood decided it was because audiences didn't want to see black or female superheroes, and it took decades before we got a female and a black superhero in Wonder Woman and Black Panther respectively, and they were both treated as a big political statement on equality when they came out.

One example of a game created by just one person (apart from the main music) is, of course, Another World. And there the main character was also something vague, let alone that there was just the one protagonist. But the game did have style and affected a lot of people - myself included

I agree that not all stories need a protagonist with a detailed backstory, however, there is a difference between making the protagonist a blank slate in order to focus on gameplay and/or worldbuilding,
and create a protagonist which does have a full name and backstory, give him lots of dialogues, and render him as detailed as possible, and still treat said protagonist like somebody everyone could and should be able to personally relate to.

I just thought I'd share the male protagonist bingo from this blog post;



Granted, it's mostly based on AAA video games, but I still think it's worth pondering in regards to how society tells stories about men.

Amazon is grinding my gears right now. I don't know if this is the same everywhere, but here you always get the option to tick a box so that your order gets sent in as few packets as possible. I always tick this box and Amazon still manages to send my order with 7 items in 5 parcels. Are you f... kidding me? (And before you ask, all articles were in stock and are all supposed to arrive on the same day.) And it seems to happen more and more often. Two years ago or so, the max number of parcels from one order was two and my orders are always around 7 to 10 articles.
I mean, I know this is probably due to the things being send from different warehouses, but it's still annoying.

Maybe they expect all their customers to make unboxing videos?

Hollywood age ratings in a nutshell:

Well, I can agree in the sense that the overuse of Godwin's law in US political discourse has made it easier for republicans to brush off actual fascist things Trump has done.

[HATE]

It grinds my gears that I keep seeing the same Cyberpunk 2077 ad everywhere.
(if you've missed it, see it at your own risk)
I never got into the hype and decided early on I didn't want it because it just seemed to be a bunch Cyberpunk cliches that has already been done in more original ways in dozens of games already,
a bunch of gritty crime tropes I detest, and sandbox gameplay, which is one of my least favorite genres, but what I really truly HATE about that game is it's poster/thumbnail that they put everywhere,
with the world's most generic guy standing in front of a neon-yellow single-color background so garish that it literally hurts my eyes watching it.

It's like somebody wished upon a monkey's paw to make AAA video games stop being so gray and brown and it fulfilled it in the most garish color possible.

No we won't. We'll just go with "worse than Trump!" And that says it all. 

And if someone is worse then that person, we'll just say "worse than *insert name of previous worst president here*."
You really can't run out of descriptions for terrible leaders. 

Yep, it's not like words are fossil fuel.

Also, strong feelings often require strong words. It's hard to call people to action with a bunch of "perhaps" and "maybe".

I just wanted to add that I wound up seeing the film Queen of the Desert which Reiter mentioned, and whilst I personally liked it and found it atmospheric,
I do understand that Werner Herzog films can be quite an acquired taste, and this film is mostly about taking in the mood rather than expecting a gripping story. 

What surprised me the most is how this film could slip completely under my radar for 6 years, especially considering all the famous actors involved.

Just bought it on sale on Steam!