The name Anita Sarkeesian brings up a lot of emotion in gamers, having come to prominence of late for espousing feminist ideals in videogames. Sarkeesian is responsible for a successful video series that makes feminist critiques on videogames, and for better or worse, a backlash that has grown in scope and toxicity.
As I’ve already wrote on the matter, Sarkeesian has successfully ensconced herself in the fortified position of already taking on a subject that automatically incriminates itself. As much as videogames and its fans are resistant to change, it seems the social change pressured by Sarkeesian is going to be the change they may not need, but are likely going to get.
As she has done so in her videos and at conferences to a room full of scholars, the woman makes a good point. Sarkeesian brings up example after example of noted cases of sexism and gender disparity that pile up like a laundry hamper of full of embarrassing unmentionables. She’s got lists for days if you’ll just listen to her, and, the people are.
Sarkeesian uses very simple reasoning to make her argument. She makes a statement, say, women are always treated as damsels in distress, or women serve as sex objects in videogames and are predominantly of one body type, and follows it up with clear examples from a variety of videogames. But while this makes total sense to some academic who has lived a life of “Because A, therefore B”, but this isn’t the way that a gamer understands these games because they actually play them.
The arguments Sarkeesain makes are devoid of an appreciation of the media she is criticizing. At a recent talk, Sarkeesian asked her audience, “In the videogame The Wonderful 100, there are many protagonists differentiated by different colors. Can anyone tell me what color the female hero is?” After a short interchange with the audience, Sarkeesian replies, “Correct! Pink,” and the audience laughs a knowing laugh.
I’ve never played The Wonderful 100, nor even have a Wii U (I am totally willing to sell myself out to endorse one if I can get it for free), and so I’m not qualified to talk about the game and what it is. However, I can imagine that the developers of that game could have had several reasons for allocating the color pink to the female hero: maybe all the other colors were already used up for heroes with corresponding powers; maybe this game is an homage to the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers.
To continue would just be making excuses for the makers of The Wonderful 100, but it seems everyone is a critic when it comes to videogames, either ones with ratings out of 10 or social. The phrase “The people who made this game are idiots” is so commonly used by everyone that it’s clear that videogames are completely taken for granted. Somehow, making a videogame is a process that anyone can do, but is just left to lonely misfits with unresolved women’s issues. It’s not always a success, but a videogame is a process made up of many decisions that often result in “no”.
What videogames do for us as gamers is to provide a working world for its gameplay. It may be antiquidated, but this “game logic” that walking over a gun refills your ammo and pushing ice blocks into lava so that you can walk across it has been consistent for us. But not to an observer.
Sarkeesian has flipped back and forth on whether or not she’s a gamer, but it’s for sure that her arguments are not based on such a role. Her arguments and evidence are basically that of a person her picks and chooses incriminating examples of sexism and gender inequality without ever having played these games, the difference being that such a person (without implying that they need to be a hardcore devoted gamer) can appreciate a videogame in the context it presents itself.
To an outside observer, there’s no lack of incriminating evidence of sexism in videogames. No one makes the claim that sexism isn’t something that doesn’t exist in videogames, nor that during its short history as a burgeoning art form has such disparaging examples of sexism occurred on a frequent basis. But videogames operate on a different level of understanding that uses violence as a dialog and sexism as a shortcut. Videogames aren’t necessarily reflective of reality, and trying to put societal limitation upon them is to constrain videogame developers into making even blander videogames than they do now.
Sarkeesian’s use of examples of videogame sexism and gender inequality shows that she is advocating her agenda with a disregard to what the videogame itself is trying to say. You can do this with any one of her numerous examples, but here I’ll list the one that bothered me the most: the ending to Grand Theft Auto III (spoilers ahead for a 15 year old game that everyone has played).
Sarkeesian shows the very end of Grand Theft Auto III after the unnamed hero has shot down the helicopter with his traitorous girlfriend onboard, and is walking away with the woman he just saved, Maria. As the credits roll, Maria continues to natter away about this and that when the silent protagonist suddenly fires a shot, implying that he killed Maria.
To Sarkeesian and her converts, this is unspeakably evil, and a clear example of violence against women. To everyone who has played Grand Theft Auto III, this is incredibly awesome.
By playing Grand Theft Auto III, a person will come to understand the anti-hero that you control is a murderous psychopath with no loyalties whatsoever. For a game in which the unofficial way to play it is to cause as much mayhem before you get killed by the cops, it’s rather light on violence towards women. As memory serves, other cases of violence towards women are performed by other characters (the dog food factory, Asuka), while this is the first time it has happened during the story of the game.
As a character who doesn’t give a fuck, the anti-hero doesn’t care for the “damsel in distress” trope that is presented at the very end of the game when ex-girlfriend Catalina kidnaps Maria, a stand-in for a “girlfriend” who goes so far as to profess her love after being rescued. In a tense stand-off at the Liberty City dam, you must brave a gauntlet of Columbian gangsters in order to get your revenge on Catalina. Even though it’s presented as a cliché, saving Maria is not the point of the climax to Grand Theft Auto III —rather, it’s there to subvert the trope. Your character is silent, but speaks with violence; by shooting Maria, he’s living up to everything he’s been so far in the game. This is awesome.
We can all agree that violence towards women is terrible, and yet to criticize Grand Theft Auto III for this is to ignore the fact that it isn’t reality. Grand Theft Auto III is not reflective of reality when players can get arrested or killed and face no repercussions except to have their weapons taken away from them and face a hit in their virtual earnings. Weapons and collectibles aren’t scattered around the city in real life, spinning in place, surrounded by a glowing orb. Instead, it’s a fantasy, no matter how life-like, in which we can indulge our curiosities, whatever they may be.
The shooting of Maria is the ending of a narrative that doesn’t reflect the majority of its audience, but is the proper ending the story needed.
However, this doesn’t make for a good academic argument. Presenting this as evidence to a room full of scholars isn’t to make for a compelling argument. So as right and as righteous Anita Sarkeesian may be, she’s presenting a weak argument that gets accepted anyways. It would be nice to hear a stronger argument from hear so that she can make as much sense as her proponents thinks so does.
Play-a-Daystation 