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If Gamers Want More Powerful Women Then Stop Being Afraid Of Them (www.thegamer.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

33 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Lae'zel and Shadowheart can be mean sometimes, and it's okay to embrace women in video games like them.

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[–] [email protected] 93 points 11 months ago (11 children)

Nobody's afraid of them. This article created its own problem to complain about.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (9 children)

You never met one of those capital G Gamers who have never seen a woman that's not their mom? The ones that get mad if there are black/gay/trans people in their videogames because of "muh escapism"?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago (4 children)

Sure, but I've also just read about a black gay Trump voter. Extremes exist, it is upon the one presenting a theory to show the extend of the problem.

I'll readily believe that focus testing and the safety-only design of companies such as Ubisoft augments any problem massively but it's still easy to accept "Oh it's because gamers are too afraid of powerful women in their games!" as a rhetoric without having anything indicating it's actually happening.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (2 children)

The whole gamergate thing lends some credence to the words of the author I would think. A lot of the big gaming influencers are toxic, racist and misogynistic. Remember when people freaked out about some unflattering screenshots of female characters in a lot of games? Like Aloy in Horizon: Forbidden West, MJ in the new Spiderman game or even Abby in The Last of Us 2. There are surprisingly many people that don't like any western games because they "push their woke agenda" or some such bullshit.

It is the same in many online games, although that has gotten a bit better over the years, where you get berated, insulted and catcalled if you dare to have a feminine voice.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Of course, I'm not saying that it cannot be the case, but it's also not something I'd leave just standing.

Just from the examples you list, the same issues essentially show up:

First to show that the influencers (as a whole) and their gaming audience (in specific) aren't just a hyper-specific echo chamber that gets amplified in volume due to suddenly being actively reported on. Like the "Only 1% of players ever will let you know if they're unhappy", it's difficult to know whether for every angry idiot manchild basement dweller there's 99 or 999999 happy gamers that didn't even realize something big was happening because their life has bigger issues than something posted on Twitter or in a blog post.
And then second to also show that this is still relevant. Gamergate was in 2014. GamerGate was closed to Half-Life 2 than to today, and consider just how different gaming as a societal landscape was back in the HL2 days.

Again, totally not saying that it's not very much a relevant comment that is being linked to here, but to me what is weird is that it presents an idea as fact with absolutely no evidence that the basis that fact would need to be true even exists. "Gamers" is not a single group of people. And the implication that this in turn affects game design is also entirely unverified and not something a reader can verify or falsify for themselves.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

gAmErS were shitting their pants over the mere possibility of choosing "they" as a pronoun in Starfield. Also apparently voice actors having accents is "woke"