Rambly intro: Why so mad? (and why all those combustible lemons?)
I understand them. This was a second of two videos about women as background decorations. I remember that when I watched the first one, I had a constant feeling of disagreement throughout the whole video. I almost tried to write a tweet, a comment, something to point out the misleading nature of the content, but I waited it out, I waited for the video to end and the concluding comments are what made the difference between disagreeing and agreeing.
The second video, honestly, wasn't nearly as memorable to me, but the same mixed feelings resurfaced throughout.
So why the mixed feelings? What is "wrong" about those videos? Well, each is about an hour long, and contains selected footage from dozens of games. Multiply the "dozens" by the multiple-hours worth of content in each game, and what we're seeing is only two hours out of probably a couple hundred hours of potential gameplay (some of these are open-world, so they're even harder to quantify), with much of the content being optional, of events you can avoid or choose to prevent. There's a real danger that someone unfamiliar with the games will watch the footage and generalize it to the entire game. It's like extracting all the classroom scenes out of a Harry Potter movies and pasting them together, someone unfamiliar might think that it's all about student/teacher dynamics. Of course, that's not the point the video is trying to make, no one is claiming the games are a constant stream of sexist clichés, the point is merely that there is sexism in there. Moreover, quite contrary to being the main theme of the game, the problem is that a lot of the time we barely notice it.
Particularly, what sort of sexism is highlighted in the videos? We saw examples of women used as decorations (in the first) and violence against women as a decoration (in the second). Let that sink in for a moment---violence as a decoration---not even a plot device (although there were some instances of that in there too), that's insane, right? That should never happen, right? Well, this is what made people mad at the video. I break it up into two components.
- An emotional component: Generally, every person thinks that they are a Good Person (of course, there are exceptions, self-image is complicated, but for the most part, each of us is a Good Person somewhere deep down from our own point of view). Here I am told, nay, shown, in perhaps a too-convincing-for-comfort manner, that I enjoy something very fucked up, like casual depictions of violence against women scattered about a virtual environment, essentially for my entertainment. That is very upsetting: I know I am a Good Person, but I am getting evidence that I am a Bad Person. The two common ways to deal with that are either (a) to reject what you were just shown, or (b) to reevaluate your own behavior. (b) is Very Hard To Do, especially if you've never done it. I can tell you that I lived over 20 years without ever doing (b), and it took me getting to a very bad place to finally choose (b). So it's no surprise that hate and blame and accusations start flying in response, because that is what (a) looks like distributed across a large population of internet users.
- On an intellectual level, let's take this to logical conclusions: this content is harmful, therefore we should no longer make games with that content. I'll talk about why this is the wrong logical conclusion later, but for now, let's run with this conclusion. This limits what games can be made. This takes games that we loved out of production (no sequels, no similar games) and I can guarantee that every one of those games was loved by someone, many people, and enjoyed by a vast population. There's your harm to the industry, that people keep tweet-yelling about.
A place for violence
Ok. We can finally move on to the real thing, the title of the post, the fallacy in the "ban violent video games" (or more specifically "ban games with violence against women") conclusion. It's a simplistic conclusion that is easy to reach (or a message that is easy to incorrectly infer) from not paying too much attention to what Anita is saying, or from not watching the videos in their entirety. (And who has time to spend an hour listening about how something they love is actually a Bad Thing?)The problem identified in the videos isn't that they contain violence against women, abuse, depictions of assault and murder of women, sexualization of women, etc. The problem identified is that (a) in most cases, only women are sexualized and all women are sexualized, and (b) deaths/abuses of women are casual and inconsequential. This, in turn, means, that the logical conclusion is not purging games of this content (which would make the game world poorer), but that there are countless missed opportunities for developers. By missed opportunities I don't just mean the obvious new directions of e.g. making a game from the point of view of an abused woman, or creating a game that aims to educate about domestic violence (all good causes). But also more subtle opportunities to increase the decision space of the player, e.g. what if in Watch Dogs, you had to decide between helping the assault victim and killing the perpetrator? More subtle opportunities to add to the realism of a game by adding consequences, e.g. what if in ACII, letting those courtesans die reduced the number of courtesan spots on the map? These are just suggestions that flow directly from Anita's comments. Yes, this does take a bit more effort to program, but it takes more effort to program women as deliberately sexualized NPCs in the first place (you can always be progressive by laziness, using the same "guts" for your female NPCs and only making them look different), so if you're bothering with making a second class of NPCs, be interesting about it.
And then, sometimes, it's actually acceptable to use brutality to establish a scene/character/etc. Many games are about simulating an experience, playing something you're not. Sometimes you're the hero, the vigilante, sometimes you're playing an evil person, a sociopath, some games give you a choice between an evil path and a good path. In Bioshock 2 when you choose the evil actions the little sisters cower from you, there's an undertone of domestic child abuse in how they act. It's deliberate. It's supposed to shock the player. At the same time it doesn't condone child abuse or desensitize the player to child abuse. It's also consequential: for a linear game, the decision of how to act towards the girls is one of the few choices in it that actually changes the ending of the game. It's okay to have a game depicting abuse, or enabling the player to abuse. The harm is in minimizing or trivializing the significance of the abuse, not in depicting it per se. By making the violence significant and consequential a game can be greatly enriched. When it is inconsequential to the player and thus forgettable, on the other hand, the player tends to blow right past it, making us wonder if it was even worth the developer's time in the first place.
Violence, abuse, and sexism, are things we should try to purge from the real world. They aren't things we should try to purge from fiction. Instead, fiction allows a unique opportunity to really explore these things that we would never in our right minds want to experience. The problem identified with games isn't that these things are in there, it's that what is in games is a laughably misleading parody of these things.
