Banner from Anita Sarkeesian’s Tropes vs Women in Video Games Kickstarter campaign. First, she seemed to be challenging claims that she thinks games make people do things. When we critique violence against women, we’re often talking about violence in which women are being attacked or victimized specifically because they are women, which then reinforces or perpetuates a perception that women as victims and men as noble, brooding heroes... “Two, avoid violence against female characters in which there is a sexualized element.”, She praised BioShock Infinite’s presentation of a Columbia police force whose male and female cops wear similar uniforms. From what I've seen of it, The Puppeteer is a delightful upcoming PlayStation 3 game starring a boy. Games. Print. “Perils of the Princess: Gender and Genre in Video Games”. Your privacy is extremely important to us. Anita Sarkeesian Hypocritically Denies Role In Harassment of Liana Kerzner by Feminist Frequency Audience . Sarkeesian talked about how a more expansive range of female characters can open games up to new stories and experiences, but she doesn’t flat-out say that it’d make an okay game more fun. March 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anita-sarkeesians-interview-on-women-in-video-games/. Moi, Toril. IvyPanda. The provided reading is indeed relevant to my class, in the sense of stressing out media’s ability to convey hidden messages of sociological importance, intended to make the audience more/less comfortable with the currently dominant cultural discourse (Carter 41; Jones 9). We utilize security vendors that protect and For example, she said that impractically-sexualized costumes communicate that a female character’s “value and worth is tied to ability to arouse straight young men.” But she added that some of her critics say that male characters are sexualized, too. And she rejected clothing female characters in cleavage-emphasizing armor whose “only functionality is to titillate young straight male player base.” For the latter, she said the amount of skin shown wasn’t the issue and recommended that game designers look to the outfits of real female soldiers and athletes for inspiration. Anita Sarkeesian, Feminist Frequency "The … Sarkeesian is an advocate. Son mémoire s'intitule I'll Make a Man Out of You: Strong Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy Television . "Anita Sarkeesian's Interview on Women in Video Games." IvyPanda. Her material had rung true to me even as I’d recognized the complications of calling for diversity in creative work and even as I’d noticed that, sure, if you look closely enough, you can find an admirable female character even in a game that is frequently described as being insulting to women. "Anita Sarkeesian's Interview on Women in Video Games." Print. Her list was brand new. February 14, 2021. Giving players more playable female characters is the first step toward female characters, like their male counterparts, being defined more by who they are rather than simply by their gender.”, What Sarkeesian was talking about sounded like a quota, because, well, it is. TRIGGER WARNING: This video contains a handful of graphic scenes involving violence against women. In this video series, Feminist Frequency will explore five common and recurring stereotypes of female characters in video games Print. Record female character voiceover so that pain sounds painful, not orgasmic, Include female enemies, but don't sexualize those enemies. Anita Sarkeesian naît près de Toronto dans une famille d'origine arménienne . 1. “If you asked me at the time, I would probably have said I wasn’t a gamer,” she said. This is IvyPanda's free database of academic paper samples. And in my experience, confident creators could deal with this kind of critique, could take from it what they found productive and stand up for their authorial independence about what didn’t mesh. I used to hate her because I was young at the time and that's what I was told to do. “Don’t make the enemies or villains hyper-sexualized,” she said, “because again it creates a scenario in which violence against women is gendered and infused with elements of titillation. They are coming here to be, like, ‘oh my god, that woman, that horrible evil woman that’s ruining video games.’”, She said she’d written Gamergate off, that there was no convincing them. On Anita Sarkeesian, Sexism In Video Games, And Why We Need To Have The Conversation. The metal detectors, and the overall heightened security presence at Sarkeesian’s talk, were impossible not to notice. If I were in Sarkeesian’s position, I would have handled the situation in a similar manner with that of the interviewee. March 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anita-sarkeesians-interview-on-women-in-video-games/. It seemed like a subset to another argument about female character animation. The animation arguments were interesting but also demonstrated Sarkeesian’s emphasis on the critique of what players see, more than what they do. I’d met her in person briefly last spring, before she won an Ambassador Award at the Game Developers Conference for her work critiquing video games. So it’s easy to see how two people might sit through the same Sarkeesian presentation and think “This completely matters” and “This doesn’t matter at all.”. Four main playable protagonists, one of them female. Her supporters cheer the idea that her influence may transform the medium; her critics fear that. “It actually isn’t equal.” Her view of how women are seen in much of society and culture is fundamental to her arguments: “Women are thought of and represented as sexual objects to be used by and for the sexual pleasure of others in society, and men are not viewed that way. Anita Sarkeesian's Interview on Women in Video Games. 30 March. I’d seen most of her Tropes gaming videos, of course, and, frankly, not had much issue with them. They are all color-coded. (2021) 'Anita Sarkeesian's Interview on Women in Video Games'. “Racism and Sexism in the Gaming World: Reinforcing or Changing Stereotypes in Computer Games?” Journal of Media and Communication Studies 3.6 (2011): 212-220. Because of having read the interview, it will be much easier for me to recognize misogynistic tropes in video games – the interview’s main takeaway. March 30, 2021. https://ivypanda.com/essays/anita-sarkeesians-interview-on-women-in-video-games/. “Equal opportunity sexual objectification is not the answer here,” she said. For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. 2021. She described her relationship with gaming as “complicated,” credited the Wii for getting her back into gaming and showed a slide of Mario Kart Wii, World of Goo, Guitar Hero and Angry Birds. I’d previously reported about a bomb threat against Sarkeesian’s GDC acceptance speech nearly a year prior. The people who make Dragon Age didn’t get this kind of security. How do you balance creators’ freedom with the need or desire to open a game up to a broader audience? In conclusion, Anita Sarkeesian is no different from the radical Christians who attack video games for violence, never ending with there constant need to be heard despite the evidence not being on their side. She said that she knew that some people didn’t consider those “real” games but that she counted them as some of her favorites. Video Games. She has certainly been critical of the interactivity that leads players to rescuing damsels in distress, but if, say, developers changed many of the Eight Things she requested in her talk, it wouldn’t make games play differently, if at all. Web. If you agree with her worldview, you’re likely with her on many or all of these eight things. “It was released in 2013 for the Wii U. Gamers are obviously debating this. Were the founding fathers blatantly sexist and misogynist in the foundation period of our republic? That’s not really her point. That might explain why her criticisms of gaming occupy a different spot than other people’s criticisms about, say, free-to-play game design, game length, or downloadable content. Anita Sarkeesian breaks down the way video games portray women as "exotic" fantasies. After playing what she said was an audio clip of a female League of Legends champion in combat (above) she called for less sexualized female-character voice-acting/grunting—”start with trying to make pain actually sound painful instead of orgasmic”. “It’s as if the person directing the mo-cap session told the model to walk in the most seductive or sexy way possible rather than just asking her to walk the way a soldier or intergalactic bounty hunter or any ordinary woman going about her business might walk.”, Even sitting could be a gender issue, she showed. “Everything depends on framing, right? One: avoid violence in which women are framed as weak or helpless. So I’ll take a cue from my younger self and say I don’t care about being a “gamer,” but I sure do love video games. Video Games. Much of what she showed in them—the propensity for games to depict a disappointingly narrow range of female characters, of often using women in games as props to motivate players, of regularly sexualizing female characters to a comical degree—had rung true to me. Senior Contributor. According to Sarkeesian, the continuation of such a situation is hardly tolerable, because it contributes towards the proliferation of sexist prejudices within the society (Dean par. “There are small things that come up that, you’re like, ‘That’s awesome.’ And then five other things that come up that’s like, ‘Are we still doing this?’” Throughout her description of the eight changes she’d like to see, she repeatedly mentioned games that she thought were handling things badly, but she also routinely highlighted games that she thought were doing things well. There’s a pre-Tropes vs. Women in Video Games clip, after all, of her introducing a video about gaming by telling a college class in 2010 that “I’m not a fan of video games. Violence against female characters should never be sexy.”. They both infer a lot from her analysis of games, but at her NYU talk she left no ambiguity. Jones, Steven. If you are the copyright owner of this paper and no longer wish to have your work published on IvyPanda. “Happily, this is another easy one to solve,” she said, when lamenting the sexualized grunting that she often hears from female game characters who are supposedly engaged in combat. Would it be bad to have more playable female characters? You just don’t see anything approaching this variety of body types in weights and sizes with female characters.”, She pushed for more representation of women of color in games, and more that are neither reducing such women to ethnic stereotypes nor so divorced from their cultural history that it “is eased or invisible.” She praised Never Alone, a game featuring a female character from an Alaskan tribe. Therefore, the interviewee suggests that these references are there to legitimize the misogynist worldviews of some game developers. Occasionally, as she went through these suggestions, Sarkeesian would mention counter-arguments. They won’t move people who might linger on the likely fact that changing how characters sit in Destiny or walk in Arkham City probably won’t make those games play any better. Carter, Jimmy. There are seven main heroes. For the last three years, Anita Sarkeesian has been talking about how women are treated in games and has slammed the widespread sexism she sees in the portrayal of female game … Western Folklore 56.3/4 (1997): 243–258. Anita Sarkeesian is overall a pretty good feminist reviewer. It also could not escape my attention that some of the interviewee’s claims appear little too opinionated to represent an undisputed truth-value (Moi 1740). She also kept talking, surprisingly, about how easy change in gaming could be. I find Sarkeesian’s stance on the issue thoroughly admirable, although politicized to an extent. The main idea, promoted by the interviewee is that the manner, in which female characters are usually portrayed in video games, reflects a number of different male-chauvinistic/sexist assumptions about women (Sherman 250). Not sure where to start? I knew plenty of women played video games… If you’ve got a project or speaking event you think I’d be a good fit for please reach out! Sarkeesian’s list of eight things included several straightforward requests. “Motion capture and animations for female characters often have them looking like they’re walking down a runway at a fashion show,” she said. When the female character sits, she lays on the side of her legs. As Sarkeesian pointed to fan-art that imagined Team Fortress 2's cast as being all women I thought about her position as an advocate. Anita Sarkeesian is a Canadian-American feminist media critic and public speaker. “Fixing this is of course incredibly easy,” Sarkeesian said. (Update - 2:26pm: As a reader pointed out, a second is playable in the game’s DLC.) Anita Sarkeesian’s Interview on Women in Video Games, New Media and Political Communication in Asia, Was Ernest Hemingway a Misogynist? PMLA 121.5 (2006): 1735–1741. Perhaps most important to note is that Anita's videos aren't going to change anything in the industry. A lot of negativity has been published about Anita Sarkeesian’s video essay series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (TvW); there was negativity at the time, and there’s still negativity now. Retrieved from https://ivypanda.com/essays/anita-sarkeesians-interview-on-women-in-video-games/. The Meaning of Video Games, New York: Routledge, 2008. Sarkeesian responded to the misogynist intimidation by the mean of posting online some of the threatening messages, sent to her via email – hence, showing to the harassers that she is not afraid of them and that she will continue exposing the instances of male-chauvinism in video games. Little of this is bound to be easy, and each of her eight requests are likely to stir debate about what gamers want, what developers can or should do, and what makes for better video games that more people will enjoy playing. ensure the integrity of our platform while keeping your private information safe. Talk of gameplay brought Sarkeesian to her final point. “This is supposed to be a hardened space warrior and yet she is still sitting around like she’s Ariel from The Little Mermaid,” Sarkeesian said. Animate female characters to move the way normal women, soldiers or athletes would move. Sarkeesian is trying to combat that trend with Feminist Frequency’s other video series Ordinary Women: Daring to Defy History and an accompanying book, … Don't over-emphasize female characters' rear ends, not any more than you would the average male character's. An NYU security guard stood in front of the audience, watchful, as she spoke. Share this: Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window) More Video game publisher Devolver Digital, whose library includes Fall Guys and the Serious Sam series, has agreed to sponsor the latest fundraising effort for Anita Sarkeesian’s Feminist Frequency website, pledging to match up to $15,000 in donations as part of a … Anita Sarkeesian is a controversial figure, but her first post-Kickstarter critique of 'damsels in distress' in video games is right on the money. To contact the author of this post, write to stephentotilo@kotaku.com or find him on Twitter @stephentotilo. I heard a few attendees mutter about this being necessary or finding it absurd that a talk about women in gaming, of all things, required this kind of presence. She talks about issues that she feels have been entrenched in games but go under-discussed. Elle obtient une baccalauréat universitaire) en communication de l'université d'État de Californie à Northridge, ainsi qu'une maîtrise en sociologie et politique de l'université York. "Anita Sarkeesian's Interview on Women in Video Games." Throughout her NYU talk I was struck by both her negativity and her positivity. Inquiries. You are free to use it for research and reference purposes in order to write your own paper; however, you must. In a vacuum, this might seem strange, but the idea that Sarkeesian doesn’t care much about games has been part of the narrative against her. How do you assess which portrayals of women in games attract or repel male or female gamers? You can use them for inspiration, an insight into a particular topic, a handy source of reference, or even just as a template of a certain type of paper. Anita Sarkeesian is a pundit, videoblogger and media critic best known as the host of Feminist Frequency, a web series in which Sarkeesian reviews and analyses common tropes in popular culture from a feminist viewpoint. Media can inspire greatness and challenge the status quo or sadly, more often, it can demoralize and reinforce systems of power and privilege and oppression.”, And, second, it seemed to me she was being careful to clarify whether she loves games. “The male characters get to be short and stocky or heft gorillas or equipped with a massive power suit. Developers, publishers and gamers could hear and decide for themselves what’s best to do. Minutes after I walked through a metal detector—and some time before she was flocked by well-wishers at the best-attended gaming lecture I’ve ever been to at New York University—I recently listened to the media critic Anita Sarkeesian describe eight things she’d like to see changed in video games. I would also seek out the alternative ways to win people’s attention to the cause. The reading’s high points are concerned with the fact that it provides many in-depth insights into the discussed subject matter and explains in the thoroughly logical way why it is important to oppose the sexist stereotypization of women in video games (Peck, Ketchum, and Embrick 215). Those latter arguments clearly and directly pertain to whether a game would be more or less fun or engaging for any player, which for many gamers is the paramount gaming concern. “Because she’s the Smurfette, her personality is: girl,” Sarkeesian said. She ran clips of how male and female characters sit in Destiny, a game that imbues its heroes of either gender with the same capabilities. Image: feminist frequency By Rebecca Ruiz 2017-04-27 17:24:02 UTC. Essay example popular culture likely with her worldview, you ’ ve got a project or speaking event think... 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