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posted by janrinok on Saturday March 15 2014, @06:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the the-impossible-takes-a-little-longer dept.

lhsi writes:

"The Atlantic looked at a recent update from the developers of the game Desktop Dungeons to discuss problems with gender bias in gaming, asking 'can a work be racist or sexist if its creator doesn't mean for it to be?'

The developers of the game had recently been adding female character art to their game with the intention that they would be "adventurers first and runway models second." While actively trying to avoid doing everything the 'simple' way, they came into some problems due to subconscious shorthands creeping in.

"This adjustment turned out to be startlingly non-trivial - you'd think that a bunch of supposedly conscious, mindful individuals would instantly be able to nail a 'good female look' (bonus points for having a woman on our crew, right?), but huge swathes of our artistic language tended to be informed by sexist and one-dimensional portrayals. We regularly surprised ourselves with how much we took for granted.'"

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by naubol on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:25PM

    by naubol (1918) on Saturday March 15 2014, @09:25PM (#16956)

    So, I once wrote a post on LOL forums about how every female was either hot, curvaceous, or close to appearing to be hot, and highly sexualized in the poses on the cards. This is not done for the men.

    Once, when walking down a avenue in New York City, my companion, a heterosexual male, reacted with disgust to an ad that showed an attractive man who was heavily sexualized. The ad was obviously aimed at gay men. He said "why do they have to put it in our faces?". I exploded with derisive laughter and, all of a sudden on the defensive, he asks me aggressively, "What?!" I said, "Look around you." This being New York, there were tens of ads within visible sight that were sexualizing women. "We live in your world, and it seems like your world is a heterosexual male's wet dream. And you have the temerity to get mad that there might be something not aimed at you put in your line of sight?"

    I don't think the answer is to stop sexualizing or objectifying women. Rather, I think the problem is that there are many straight men do not know how to gracefully handle sexual aggression or deal with the kind of sexuality that doesn't turn them on. Consequently, they also don't understand just how bad what they're doing is. So, I say, let us objectify them more. Let this game make more of the male characters hot, beautiful, sexually interesting... This can be done while still showing an appreciation for the person's intangible talents.

    In real life, this also works. Once men feel the bite of being treated as nothing but a sex toy whose opinions and emotions are treated as meaningless and annoying, they seem to get better at not quite doing that to women. I'm also not saying there isn't space for ugly characters, but rather that this objectification really should be occurring both ways as it does in real life, whether men know it or not.

    Let's face it, if we try to desexualize everything, what a boring world and a ludicrous impossibility! What we should hope for is a world that maturely acknowledges that we're both lizard and primate, both about the shape and the mind behind it, and stop castigating people for being drawn to something that sexually turns them on. The real castigation should be reserved for people who only treat other people like objects.

    My post on LOL ended with the request that they make a lot more super hot male cards. Some people seemed to agree.

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  • (Score: 1) by ButchDeLoria on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:19PM

    by ButchDeLoria (583) on Saturday March 15 2014, @10:19PM (#16973)

    The proper method is to corrupt them into homosexuality, of course.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:52PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 15 2014, @11:52PM (#16996)

    I see plenty of advertising aimed at all walks of life.

    I don't know whether this relates to your point at all, but it annoys me - the advertising, not what it contains. Cheesecake? Don't care. Beefcake? Don't care. Neither? Still don't care. It annoys me. It's a distraction.

    However, I will note that I have seen women playing games in which they get to tweak the appearance of their characters. The results are usually attractive, stylish, and have moderate to exaggerated sexual features - the one exception I can call to mind was a militant nonegalitarian feminist, who deliberately made an ugly male.

    What a lot of people ignore is that the typical hero of these games, when male, represents an idealised male regardless of appearance - competent, strong, physically resilient, dominant, independent ... and the objectification doesn't bother me either despite the equipment dangling between my legs.

    Most of the people whining about this crap need a big steaming cup of Get Over It.

    • (Score: 2) by hatta on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:35AM

      by hatta (879) on Sunday March 16 2014, @01:35AM (#17031)

      However, I will note that I have seen women playing games in which they get to tweak the appearance of their characters.

      They generally spend more time doing that than playing the game.