a looking-glass book

a reply to ashley's statements

i am replying to ashley's piece, located here. (havent mastered the talkback portion, perhaps it could help me in an instance like this. but i bet not.)
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while i don't disagree with everything you state here, i think you make a lot of assumptions and overlook a lot of facts.

"I want to look at how little presence in women and other minorities could perpetuate this aggressive behavior and/or negative attitudes and beliefs."

there is absolutely nothing in what you say about how not including genders or races in games could lead to aggressive behavior or negative attitudes. in fact, everything you state is about how the way they _are_ included causes issues.

you make this mistake several times and i think there is a huge distinction between the two.

in a society with so many kids who come from households where their sole parent or both parents are working out the house, computer use should decrease isolation (and by decreasing isolation, increase interpersonal communication/relationships, decreasing depression and aggressive attitudes)

the prevalence of game play in the lives of men and women may not be equal. suggesting that game play reduces interpersonal interactions may not be entirely erroneous. however, girls, especially those of adolescent age (the age when depression rates climb for females and remain steady for males) depend more on validation through interpersonal relationships to bolster their self esteem. if female teens and young adults could learn to integrate more rewarding and distracting activities such as game play into their daily lives, there might be incredible benefits, such as reduced depression through alternate coping means (distraction--video games, rather than ruminative coping).

[thanks to rachael for the previos two paragraphs full of thoughts on the subject. they were too good to go unmentioned.]

furthermore, you point out yourself how females tend towards puzzle games over action games. then is it any wonder that there are fewer leading female characters in action games? you say you gave up on games when you were a teen, playing super mario brothers. this fact seems to tie into your statistic about teen girl players. you played then, so is it really so tough to believe that girls that age continue to play video games?

these companies know their audiences, they know who are buying their games. and to assume they are going to make games with equal representation when their audience is skewed to one demographic is naive. i think 16% is a pretty good number considering. it also makes me wonder exactly what gets counted in that - there are plenty of animal characters (crash, spyro, all the newer ps2 characters whose names escape me at the moment). sports games traditionally do not include women characters (much like real life). these facts are going to drive that percentage down.

women were portrayed as bystanders 50% of the time? then 50% of the time they werent. come on, thats an absurd statistic.

more likely to scream? again silly.

and wearing less clothes? of course they are wearing less clothes. if you are selling a game to a 15 year old boy, what is he going to want to see? half naked women. thats a given. is there a reason maxim does so well? and is this a bad thing? i would argue no. you might argue that it creates unfair standards in the minds of the viewers which can lead to self-esteem issues in women. but if you use that argument, let's turn it around as well. the heroes in games, mostly male, are certainly not built like i am. they are much bigger and stronger than i could ever hope to be. it works both way.

look at fighting games. they contain a variety of characters of both genders (and some other fanciful beings usually) that cover a wide spectrum of body types and attitudes.

I wont try and defend your statistics about minorities, but I would like to ask how many other video game characters are hurt in games. I know for a fact that female African-american characters are not the only ones who get attacked or hurt in games and showing a statistic like that out of any sort of context is unfair.

from your genderspace post:
“Having said that, I often wonder how many gamers are avid porno-watchers. I wonder this because the women in both pornograhic films as well as games have the same look. Just look at the pictures of the women that the author posts within her article - all are beautiful, big-breasted, smiling and posed perfectly for the male pornographic gaze.

I can't say that if game companies started paying attention to this sad reality, thus creating believable female characters, that I would be any more inclined to play games. The truth is that I lost interest in gaming years ago ... sometime shortly after Mario Bros. for the Super Nintendo. While it's hard to determine exactly why I lost interest, I feel confident in saying that, like most women, games simply don't appeal to us like they do to men. This is decently obvious given the unfeminine goals of games: shooting people, raping prostitutes, racing cars, making tons of money, conquering the world, etc. Personally, it all seems like a waste of my brain power to sit in front of a TV, push buttons, and get upset, for no meaningful reason.”

1. I can think of absolutely NO game which has you raping prostitutes or anyone else. I believe you are referencing GTA3, which allows you pick up prostitutes and then later, if you wish, beat them up. the game lets you attack anyone though. to eliminate this ability for one character would be jarring. the game never actually encourages you or asks you to attack or even pick up these women. how is this different from real life?

2. see my previous comments about women in games and how they are portrayed. society has determined a basic level of surface-level beauty. this is reflected in pornography, video games, movies, the media in general. it is something we are all aware of and videogames on a whole does not stand out as any worse then these other mediums.

3. the end of this quote, you mistake the medium for the content. that’s a mistake. just because you don’t want to ‘conqueror the world’ doesn’t mean that someone else doesn’t. and it especially doesn’t mean that the media itself is at fault or flawed. it means that there hasn’t been content you appreciate yet. that’s like saying ‘i don’t like paintings because I don’t like pollack.’ its ill-informed.

“This research team found that between 90 and 95 percent of test participants showed an unconscious bias against blacks. We can only assume that those beliefs are the same with respect to gender, age, people with disabilities, etc.”
no we cant. there is no evidence that this unconscious bias comes from video games. youre extrapolating data and making assumptions which are a little tough to swallow. “the test participants discriminate against anyone who is different then they are.” i don’t buy it.

you seem to get extremely worked up about how women are being oppressed. id really like to see you also tackle the other half of this equation and see how women can and are empowered by games and how many of the facts you consider as negative, could, in fact be taken as positives as well.