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[Mongrel]

I don't get why you're engaging in this "Ubiquitous vs. Banned" binary.

I'm not. When I said "retain" that applies to any volume of use for that trope.

The thing is, if rescuing kidnapped people becomes too much of a hot-button topic, then game companies will just sidestep the issue by ceasing to use it at all.

I mean the idea here is that the trope contributes to negative stereotypes, so if it's not binary then how do we decide what consititutes an "acceptable" number of kidnappings?

Disclosure: I don't really care about the possibility of an effective ban other than it seems a bit silly. I'm not running around worried that game companies are going to ruin my male dominance fantasies or whatever.

[Mongrel]

That's another interesting question. I wonder how many truly different simple motivations you can give a hero there are? I'm talking really basic one-sentence napkin plots.

- Loss of a loved one or loved ones ("A" version is Kidnapping, and assumes a rescue quest, "B" version assumes death and a revenge quest.)
- Loot or reward
- Defender (save your friends/town/planet from invasion or attack)
- Glory and fame
- It's your job/religious belief (possibly counts as two separate motivations)
- Penance, debt repayment, or the discharging of some other sort of obligation

I'm sure there's more than that, but I'm doing too many TPS reports to really go all in on brainstorming here. What else is there? Because I bet it's actually a relatively short list.

[Classic]

"Curiosity" is a good one, but maybe too broad.

[Doom]

Look at all these people with bad tastes in video games.

Paper Mario - Chapter 2 - Peach Interlude

Yeah it's not really a new or complicated thing to have a "different perspective" sequence that is interesting, fun and delivers information to the player that wouldn't be possible from the main protagonist role!

Mass Effect 2 - Joker Gameplay

Hell it doesn't even have to be a lady but I wanted to thumb my noses at y'all for not playing more Paper Mario before I said anything about Tropes Vs Women, of which I ain't got much to say. I'd hope she'd encourage game developers and writers to simply tighten their stories up and offer more interesting things and varied set-ups that perhaps make us emphasize and relate to damsels in distress or what not, rather than simply condemn the early majority of a brand new medium for using cultural values that have been relevant to humanity for 90%+ of it's existence.

But I guess if the Internet offered me $150k to play video games and make videos with Thesaurus-mouth I'd do it too.



so brave and noble

Man I find myself nodding along with the entire Zelda segment but then wincing every time she thinks she can take Mario down a notch. I'd say "pick your battles" but as far as I can tell Tropes vs Women doesn't really have a goal beyond "informative youtube videos", which is a Gold Medal in the "posting on the internet to pretend to fight for social justice" Olympics.

[Classic]

Again:

...simply condemn the early majority of a brand new medium...

Doesn't she make her, "you can enjoy this stuff even if you're critical of them" disclaimer in the first minute? Yeah. There it is.

Though this bugs me:

for using cultural values that have been relevant to humanity for 90%+ of it's existence.

Are you forgetting that the pre-history of homo-sapiens way outweighs the recorded history, which is all we can use to confirm tropes? I'm not sure we even have the evidence to make a guess at that assertion. More importantly, you can't be saying that this legacy somehow excuses (rather than explaining) the choice to use DiD?

EDIT:
Trying to fix some typos and being a jerk.

[Thad]

So in what ways could you show someone (male or female) being kidnapped and have them still be an objective for the main protagonist, but still give the victim agency? How much time would a game need to spend to flesh out that character?

It seems like if the victim is going to remain the secondary character, then sequences where escape is attempted aren't really the best idea (it could be frustrating to the player to have to play out a pointless escape attempt which they know will fail).

Not that BITCH Arkham City BITCH is a shining beacon BITCH of non-sexist BITCH portrayals of female characters in BITCH video games, but it at least gets the Batman/Catwoman dynamic by having him save her first and her save him later.

"Curiosity" is a good one, but maybe too broad.

Yeah, I was just going to chime in with the Second Doctor's "I was BORED!"

[Mongrel]

Another I thought of briefly was "MacGuffin retrieval", but that's really not an ultimate motivation (why are you getting this MacGuffin in the first place?). I guess that could be a standalone motivation in and of itself for a SUPER-basic game where they don't even bother with story, really.

[Classic]

It seems like with the taxonomy you've already created, that goal is split amongst other motivations. Loot/Reward (maybe Greed is a better summation of this one?), Power/Fame (I like Pride for this one), and Job\Religious Motivation (I'll call this one Duty) could be the motivating force for the NetHack Protagonist.

[Mongrel]

Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking.

And Duty is a much better word there, yeah.

[Ted Belmont]

BioWare's David Gaider gave a talk at GDC about sexism in the games industry.

From the comments:

If we don't have a problem with playing female main characters then they shouldn't have a problem with playing with male main characters.

If it has a large female playerbase then I don't see why they feel like they have to cater to women anymore since they seem to be doing fine. Or maybe they are lying and they want more female gamers?

Anyways I would just like to say that I'm getting tired of this kind of articles. If there were truly a lot of women who wanted to game, then why are the majority of the community here male and if you go to any other game forum or website, you will see mostly males.

We could say that plenty of American women want to play American football but yet you never see any real attempts for women to form their own NFL simply because there isn't enough demand for it. It is different for gaming but it's just an illustration. If women really wanted in, they would be in by now. They've been able to get everything else that they wanted.

Have a good life and I hope someday you will wake up from this sexism delusion. It's just as bad as the blacks who pull out the racism card every time a black person dies in a game.(emphasis mine)

[Mongrel]

Ohhhhhhh wow.

That is some tone deaf shit alright.

[A²]

For a moment I thought those quotes were from the talk itself and was about to wonder, did the rage cause some kind of quantum singularity to form, and that's why I never heard anything about it from friends that went there.

From the COMMENTS makes much more sense.

[Mongrel]

Oh man, I made the same mistake, thinking those were actually David Gaider lines. Hahah whoops.

That is still some tone deaf shit though!

[Classic]

So one of the people I subscribe to through youTube liked this heap of trash:
RE: Damsel in Distress: Part 1 - Tropes vs Women in Video Games

On the plus side, I've pruned my subscription list a little bit.
On the downside, I've got "The Amazing Atheist" coming up in my recommended videos feed now and don't know how to kill it.

[Ted Belmont]

You can pretty much kill an atheist the same way you'd kill any other human.

[Classic]

I- I more meant how youTube is recommending that I should watch his videos since I was sick of his sexist BS back in '06 or '07.
... But if there's no other way.

[Büge]

Youtube should have some algorithm for keeping things you dislike (as in click the dislike button) out of your recommended watch list.

[Mongrel]

This seems like as good a place as any to ask this:

I saw Tomb Raider is 50% off on Steam this weekend. Now, I'm going to wait for the eventual $10 sale if I do pick this up, but I wanted to ask: So is it a worthwhile game in the end? And is it an actually good fun game to play?  (Reviews for the latter seem to be okay, I guess?)

[Niku]

It's pretty good, and actually longer than many big budget games are these days when it comes to bang for you buck (just doing the main story and occasional side stuff got me like 15ish hours of gameplay as far as I remember?).  There is some deeply annoying and dumb shit in the game, and it basically ditches everything that made the LAST Tomb Raider reboots good (i.e. tombs) but moment to moment it's pretty fun for a third person shooter / semi-explorey game.

The biggest narrative problem is the fact that they drop the whole "realistic survivor character" thing in about twenty seconds at the nearest opportunity to turn Lara into a remorseless murder machine, and not doing that would have made for a far more interesting game to boot.  Oh well.

[François]

Hoho wow, I almost bought it a couple days ago at the big Squarenix sale for like 12$ off, but I never got the account activation e-mail and went "eh, fuck it". So, I guess I'm glad their forcing me to get an account got in my way long enough to save me twice the money.

In other news. The most recent kerfluffle about Dragon's Crown (if you haven't heard of what's been going on, this Kotaku piece is a good place to start if you allow a broad enough definition of the word "good") gave me a thought. Said thought probably needs refining but let's see.

Where was everyone when Odin Sphere and Muramasa had good strong female characters and positive plot developments? Vanillaware's women have historically been pretty rad. (I'mma spoil the shit out of those games now. Be warned.)

-Gwendolyn is a valkyrie, a proud warrior who views an eventual marital life as a fate worse than death. Her father Odin eventually allows her to be shackled to a love spell on account of ancient tradition, a fact which makes him out to be a coward and which causes him no end of guilt and regret. However, the man she is promised to, Oswald, refuses to activate the brainwashing part of the spell because he finds the process loathsome, and instead allows her to make up her own mind about what to do with her life. Eventually, every character who was okay with the custom of giving women away as prizes ends up dead, and the world is left in the hands of Gwen and Oswald who both have first-hand experience about how that stuff is complete BS.
-Mercedes is a little fairy girl who ends up leading her nation to war against Fantasy Viking Land and she is a right badass.
-I don't remember much of Velvet's story but I'm pretty sure she Got Shit Done too.
-At the end of her story, Momohime has the opportunity to go through with an arranged marriage to a man who admitted to not loving her. She essentially goes "I've seen Heaven and Hell, my arms have beaten gods and killed demons and banished ghosts, I have way the fuck more interesting shit to do than to sit around your castle and make anyone's babies, see you never, you asshole". Except she doesn't actually say that because she is a classy lady, but you know she's thinkin' it. She does start out as a bit of a wet noodle on account of her upbringing but she is faced with some crazy stuff and it does not break her.
-Torahime is a warrior-priestess who raises an army of giant undead samurai in order to assault the capital and depose the emperor, who has murdered her clan and stolen an evil sword. The male protagonist of the story assists her, but though he loves her dearly, he does so not because he thinks it'll earn her love, but because he hopes it'll earn her forgiveness.

You know what? If George Kamitani wants to make one game with a giant amazon who is so hella tough she doesn't even need armor (male warrior dude almost passes for some wuss in a tin can by comparison if you think about it for one half of one second), I say we let him. Guy's got some credit in the bank. And if someone starts going on about the designs being unrealistic, well they're gonna have to look for their realism in games that aren't about people with magic powers fighting dragons. (I don't know what DC is about but it seems like it fits that sort of bill.)

Now do I think the world needs more games without 9 foot tall half-naked women in it? Yeah of course that is quite clearly the case, I am not a dang moron (most of the time). But that goal ain't getting reached by making sure the world has less games with 9 foot tall half-naked women in it. It is accomplished by making sure the world has more games with women that have a reasonable amount of clothes on and the body of a possible human being. It is possible to compete against sex appeal and win, and if someone believes otherwise then they are part of the problem. If these games are made and they are any good then I reserve the right to buy the f out of them, and you can take that to the bank, ladies.

(Yes I do own Beyond Good & Evil and Mirror's Edge and Recettear and a bunch of Metroids and probably a lot more that I'm not thinking of because seriously I buy games because I think I'm gonna like them not because their main characters have dongs or no dongs.)