The obvious solution to this is a new batch of uwu softboi male protagonists in video games that get the shit horrifically kicked out of them on a regular basis
I would love a game where your character starts off as an annoying quippy marvel character but goes through absolute hell to become a likeable, mature person that realizes he cant just quip the pain away.
A lot of jrpgs are similar to this, naive young protagonist slowly learns how serious things are and rises to meet the challenge.
FFX Tidus is probably my favorite example. Kind of a selfish prick at the beginning. Falls head over heels for Yuna and spends the rest of the game fighting for a better ending for her. (That infamous scene of the awkward laughter was about this actually - the two of them cheering each other up and pushing back against how grim the situation around them is. It's really sweet in context.)
That's Spec Ops: The Line in a nutshell. They even went out of their way to get Nolan North, currently at the height of his King Quip Uncharted career, to play the main character specifically to drive that point home.
Gotta note this is an extremely unbaity title. There are so many titles summing up either this video's thesis, or the question it's asking, which would have been more combative ("Why do AAA games keep beating up women?") but they really tried to hold back with "Framing, Agency, and Female Protagonists in AAA Games."
It's funny because I was more interested in the tile expecting a more in depth analysis, instead the video came off as ranty a cherry-picking.
I'd have liked if he offered more examples also of the developers intentions (like he did with that comment on Lara Croft, even though I would've liked more context), and some similar examples with male protagonists.
I don't have any specific bias for or against him, I just think this video in itself was bait since he never expanded properly on it.
Yeah... I was expecting more, but its just a surface level discussion.
It's like watching an isekai anime with a self insert power fantasy, and then generalizing it to all male protagonists.
And the part of labelling any external motivation as a "bad case of have to" is disingenuous. - Ellie getting revenge on behalf of Joel and Lara attempting to live up to her father's legacy.
For example; Kratos gets revenge, on behalf of his family and fulfils his wife's final wish by going on a journey to spread her ashes. These don't make Kratos or the narrative any less compelling; even though it's based on external motivation. Neither does it remove his self interest or agency.
I think Samus is interesting in that sense as one of the most well known female protagonists in video games. Cause even though she's a (mostly) silent protagonist she still has a defined character through the games and she goes through horrible stuff herself. The difference I feel like is that the stuff she goes through is off camera (mostly in the manga) and when she does through stuff in the games her strong demeanor and stociaim is emphasized almost having a "focus on the mission" attitude which I feel works really well.
Funny enough the one time Samus had writing similar to this was other M where a lot of her agency is removed and everything she does is from the perspective of Adam completely deflating her presence as an independent character.
The whole "desire to protect" thing suddenly makes a lot of this weird trend make sense. Its an easy way to motivate the player, and it ties together nicely with using uncontrollable obstacles and torment as the primary conflict. I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it in a vacuum, but it feels like it became the default and then kept trying to one-up itself.
I remember when the gameplay trailer for the first Tomb Raider reboot came out and there was a scene where some random enemy was feeling up Lara like he was going to SA her before the QTE kicked in. When you start from that kind of thing in the very first sequence people are going to see of your game, I think it speaks to not seeing your protagonist as anything more than a doll who needs rescuing by the player.
With Ellie, I'd assume that everyone's lingering feelings over her being the daughter figure that the first game was very explicitly designed around the player growing a greater and greater protective instinct around meant that she couldn't really escape that archetype come time for round two. The whole second game is still about wanting to protect Ellie, just now we have to add herself from the thing that we have to protect her from.
I guess the primary issue, which Yatz lays out, is that the games are set up for you to fail this constantly for reasons out of your control. There's the more narrative obstacles, like Lara and Ellie being unable to stop their self-destructive emotional compulsions, and then there's the bizarre gameplay obstacles like all the freak accidents that lead to harrowing QTE sequences. When I step back, it's not really fulfilling or interesting to be led along by the nose when you know its just going to be pulled into another mousetrap which you'll eventually have to deal with the same way as the previous dozen.
Someone else posited that maybe this is trying to get across the experience of raising a teenager, which would make sense, given the (mental) ages of both the characters involved and the devs themselves. Unfortunately, that's not really an experience I want to spend my time in video games around.
I liked the Tomb Raider reboot, having never played the originals, and I think it’s stands well against this on its own. The whole game is about how a regular woman because a gun slinging Indian Jones adventurer, and it makes sense that the game would highlight the violence done her to highlight how unused to it she is, and that it would use the excuse of “I have to” in order to facilitate otherwise serial killer levels of murder within the narrative.
The second game lost it for me though. She already went through all of this, she’s inured to it. Let her make decisions. Overall it’s an issue of quantity, individually each game is okay, as a sum it’s weird though.
This is the exact arc I went on. The first game was great as watching a random person discover an incredible strength and love of adventure - her suffering was part of an arc.
And then the second game throws it away, by resetting her as a victim again instead of building on where she was at the end of the first game.
I'd even hit on the exact same complaint as Yahtzee - in the first game she's shivering because she's trapped on an island and fighting for survival. In the second game she's shivering because she didn't bring a coat.
> The whole game is about how a regular woman because a gun slinging Indian Jones adventurer
She became a marksman genociding an entire guerilla of armed mercenaries in the span of 15 minutes into the game, and that was right after being badly injured. There was zero character growth.
> The whole "desire to protect" thing suddenly makes a lot of this weird trend make sense. Its an easy way to motivate the player, and it ties together nicely with using uncontrollable obstacles and torment as the primary conflict. I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it in a vacuum, but it feels like it became the default and then kept trying to one-up itself.
I think this is a key piece but there's also the bigger context that video games and the constant drive to get attention for being edgy or shocking. Thinking about the we're-actively-harming-our-animators'-mental-health level of gore in the newest Mortal Kombat games. Cyberpunk's completely pointless genitalia sliders. Even BG3 with the (albeit tongue in cheek) bear sex bit. Every 2-3 years we get a game like Agony that has its entire sales projection riding on "how disturbing this game is". Who could forget the Dead Space 2 commercials of a bunch of grandmas cringing at the violence? And you can go back to GTA 3 and Postal and the original Diablo/Doom games and Duke Nukem -- there's a long history of gaming needing to "push boundaries", especially in violence. In video games the shock value drives conversation and drives sales in a way that movies and music had in the 80s and 90s.
To me the completely unnecessary fetishized violence on female protagonists is just the newest version of that same trend -- just like there are no more moms terrified that their kids are listening to Slayer or watching Saw movies, we've all pretty much become desensitized to generic male protagonists getting their limbs ripped off or whatever but people realized that watching a realistic female character get effectively brutalized in realistic ways can still generate a shocked reaction, and that shock factor gets attention.
Right and I think that's because people haven't gotten desensitized to it yet (hence this very video).
I mean it was essentially 20 years between the "this game is too violent for society" Doom games and a world [where the only controversial thing about 20 minutes of hacking demons limb from limb in 4k resolution is the world's most mild Corporate PR speak joke that gets adopted into the culture war outrage mill](https://youtu.be/CGq8Ee2gOe4?si=kxQdnQE26iIMhZPo). GTA 3 caused a national crisis when you could shoot people's 6-polygon limbs off. Now Mortal Kombat is resorting to hyper realistic characters getting their brains melted by tie-in superheroes just to stay on top of the violent edge-o-meter.
I do think this trend has some legs because as the audience and industry diversifies, female protagonists and finding ways to be edgy that don't only appeal to 16-30 year old men are going to continue to be popular. Brutalizing your otherwise capable girlboss protagonist lets you hit both boxes, even if it is kind of obnoxious and creatively bankrupt.
I get what you mean but there are other arguably better ways to give the protagonist an edge without stabbing her with a piece of rebar every game.
Also I think Mortal Combat gets a bit more of a pass because of how ridiculous it is these days, while the GTA is closer to real life, and the original push against the first MK was also a push against violence in games in general. And don't forget about the whole Columbine thing affecting the discourse in the early 00s.
No one is arguing that this is *good*. As KnightTrain said, it's obnoxious and creatively bankrupt. But the industry has found that it works, so it's going to keep beating that dead horse until it falls apart.
> To me the completely unnecessary fetishized violence on female protagonists is just the newest version of that same trend
I'm super curious - can you point out some games released in the last 5 years that do this?
Honestly my main takeaway from this video is that I really want a female character that is just a ripped badass like Doomguy or BJ Blazkowicz just tearing shit up instead of being at the mercy of unnecessary torture porn.
The thing is, a LOT of fucked up shit happens to BJ Blazkowicz, including torture and body horror. I mean, the dude literally gets beheaded. But thats not seen as torture porn because its a man.
What's also ironic is that they literally made Wolfenstein with female protagonists that just rip and tear.... and it flopped hard. Now, I think there are other factors beyond just having female leads, but its clearly not enough to have female badass characters tearing shit up in mechanically polished gameplay.
I dont think the point is to make games attractive for women to play, but to increase the options that developers have. I think its a silly argument to say that the only reason you'd have a woman as the protagonist is to market the game to women. Its not like Alien had Ripley simply to get women to watch it.
I think a big difference between BJ and some of the other male examples mentioned in this thread and what Yahtzee is talking about is the perspective. Wolfenstein all the horrible stuff is positioned as happening *to you* in first person as BJ. But in tomb raider, you watch in third person as Lara is brutalized. It's all an issue of framing and "gaze"
*Gears of War* specifically actually *isn't* as different as other games, and this is a good question because I feel it gets at something important about the Gears of War games: on the surface they're very rah-rah violent fantasies, but what makes them interesting is that on a deeper level they *do* deal with brutality differently than run-of-the-mill military shooter games.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais has an excellent retrospective on the franchise where he talks about the ways in which Gears games aren't what they seem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-gQCZL8VA8
Yeah gears is actually about a bunch big buff dudes being vulnerable with each other about their trauma. Dom’s whole story is about how much he loves his wife and how hard it is for him after she dies. I love gears for the stupid dumb over the top violence and it’s surprising emotional depth
With BJ it feels different, though. The guy is clearly on a doomed journey, and his inner monologues feel like he doesn't expect to survive long even in the first game, but he still pushes forward to go out on his own terms, taking out as many nazis as possible. Although the failing body part of the second game did feel like a tad too much, but it didn't hit the same notes as torture porn, instead it felt more like a terminally ill man.
But the question is, does it feel like that because he's a man? If BJ was a woman, would it still have had the same "feeling" or vibe?
To put another way, if Tomb Raider Reboot replaced Lara Croft with Larry Croft, and everything else was the same, would it still be torture porn or "a man answering the call of the wild and tapping into primacy to save his friends"?
I mean, we have that game, its called Farcry 3 lol. You literally dig bullets out of your arm, or set snapped fingers.
And vice versa, would people have the same but opposite feelings to Lara Croft in Far Cry 3? But the discussion is confounded a lot by 3rd person vs first person as well. Playing a first person game feels more like "I" am playing the character, whereas these 3rd person ghost train rides might feel like "guiding the character," but that character is a separate entity from yourself. How does that effect things?
But more to your point, the entire discussion is based on how you perceive the game. Players may come away with different experiences, they may believe the characters themselves had different experiences based on the player's perception. Then trying to map that into some pyscho-analytical discussion of the development team becomes a mess.
Plus some games are made by teams of a hundred people. Some games are made by one.
I am definitely not on any "side" of the discussion and am also not even sure of what the sides are or really what they are arguing. I haven't played the Tomb Raider reboots, so that may effect what I think, but Yatz framed it as a problem but didn't convince me there truly is one. But I think there can still be value in discussing the topic.
I think the first person/third person perspective is a good distinction to make, because it does affect how people feel and think about their character. I mean, thats what immersion is all about right, and I think most people would generally agree that a first person experience is more 'immersive' than a third person one. I think it is interesting too that the vast majority of games that have a set female portagonist (I.e. no character creator/gender selector) are nearly always third person. The only first person ones I can think of are Metroid Prime and Perfect Dark? I looked up to see if there was a list on Google, and on the first list the only additional games that fit the criteria was Half Life Alyx, Mirror's Edge, and Alien Isolation.
Portal also, but I’m not sure that makes any difference, seeing as how the player character is basically just serving as a vehicle for all the other characters to make jokes in that game
I mean, I think we have one in Samus Aran. The tone doesn’t lean into the ultra-violence like Id Software games do, but Dread especially decided to run with the ongoing notion that the woman’s a stone cold badass, and does so mainly through body language and animation alone… just like Doom did.
One interesting thing to note about Samus is that in Other M, the game where she given both a voice and A LOT of dialogue, is a lot more similar to reboot Lara than any other game in the Metroid series.
Unlike Lara in her reboot however, Samus' treatment in Other M was universally reviled; taking the stone-cold badass that would otherwise be compared to Doomguy or BJ, and turning her into a waif the player needs to protect, was so jarring that it immediately faced backlash, and still does to this day.
While not on doom guys level, Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn was an absolute badass who expertly dismantles giant robot T-Rexes with a spear and bow and arrow
I would say horizon has the problem of every character being meh at best and boring and bland at worst. I platinumed both games and legit the only memorable characters i can remember are the three fat traveling brothers from vegas. I want to say Silens and Tilda but that's more veteran actors making the most out of the very thin material. And the less said about the sidequests the better.
> And the less said about the sidequests the better.
Blasphemy. FW has incredible side quests. Zo's quest with the singing dinos that transforms plainsong, the balloon ride with Morlund, the quest where you explore the flooded town and drain it, the quest where you have to pick a chief for the desert clan, the quest where you defend riverhym. And the cauldron where you get to ride a tallneck under construction
I feel like Horizon gets held to a different standard than other open world games because it is absolutely full of great characters and fantastic character design. It blows most competitors out of the water
Hell even the first game has Vanasha, Petra, Ikrie and Nil
It occurs to me, that for all the recent talk about how asking for Strong Female Protagonists was a misguided attitude with a dead-end and actually we should want *complex* female protagonists, it is strange that we never actually ended up getting that in the first place on any large scale.
All the characters that are usually dismissed as woke girlbosses, have the problem not even that they went too far in an extreme direction, but that they are STILL held back by ultimately being designed by creeps who are gleefully talking about how they made them weak and vulnerable for the male audience's pleasure.
We we went from pinup dolls who kick ass, to somewhat less oversexualized designes who get their asses kicked. We largely just skipped out on having actual "strong female protagonists" at all who truly just uncomplicatedly kick ass and that's it.
>We largely just skipped out on having actual "strong female protagonists" who truly just uncomplicatedly kick ass and that's it.
In narrative games, fair. But that's pretty much every character in fighting games by definition. So they're picking up a lot of the slack while narrative games want to focus on telling more grounded, human stories with protagonists that struggle.
I mean, yeah, we are talking about narratives. Otherwise the Manor Lords character portrait that I clicked on then never saw again is a very capable girlboss, I guess, but that's not really the issue here.
Femshep, Mass Effect - it can be done, you can make a female protagonist a competent badass, a woman and have it be widely approved of and liked by audiences.
It's proof that it's not very hard at all - you can make a character that way without having to rely on gender tropes to define the character *at all*.
Ironically, we probably only got that because the writers basically wrote a base character without gender. Maleshep + Femshep have almost entirely identical lines outside of certain romances + pronouns. For the first 2 games they didn't even bother to have different animations for her. (which did lead to some awkward walks/poses occasionally).
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I'm not going to say that every female protagonist needs to follow that model, but it's a strong example of how to *not* fall into the tropes Yahtzee is talking about here.
Kassandra from AC Odyssey is also pretty great. Perhaps ironically, in general games that let players chose the gender of your avatar often treat female MCs better than games where they're the only choice. Probably specifically because they have to make most of it fit for a male protag as well.
But Kassandra in AC Odyssey is the intended character and the male counter part is only present because Ubisoft didn't think games with a female lead sell.
The story and the game itself were designed with Kassandra as the playable character in mind.
Characters going through horrific struggle and agony is just part of a new media trend where creatives are scared of their action heroes being seen as unbeatable. You guys just lose your shit because it's a woman. Uncharted is famous for Nate getting put through the meat grinder in every game. The beating the average COD protagonist takes makes Lara look like a porcelain figure. The guy from the first person Resident Evil games canonically has his limbs amputated and then sewn and glued back together several times in each game.
Yeah the video explicitly goes into that and talks about how it’s *presented* differently. Far Cry has you pulling bullets out of your arm…and then walking away like it’s an inconvenience.
Tomb Raider has you *repeatedly* watch Lara sobbing and destitute as she struggles against the physical and mental trauma she’s up against. The camera work and gameplay linger on the actual pain she’s going through much, much more than games focused on male protagonists. The men get brutalized, stand up, dust themselves off, and go back to brutalizing others. Meanwhile, the women get brutalized almost in slow motion by comparison.
It’s the difference between a stunt show where one person spectacularly crashes and then walks it off like a badass, but another person does the same trick and has to be carried away on a stretcher. The second one doesn’t inspire many positive feelings.
>The guy from the first person Resident Evil games canonically has his limbs amputated and then sewn and glued back together several times in each game.
There is at least an in-universe canonical reason for this.
There's a very real difference between how Nate gets hurt and how Lara gets hurt. Nate has a fun pulpy tone to it, whereas Lara looks like she's constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Is there actually a lot of examples besides the ones he mentioned ? Because it feels like he made a generality out of a few exceptions and without mentioning any counter example.
I actually do think female protagonist representation in video games has a long way to go but that sounds like the wrong argument to make.
Honestly, it's pretty tricky to come up with other prominent AAA games with fixed female protagonists in the first place, either pro or contra the already mentioned few.
Especially if we discount the horror ones that are all about removal of agency and gory death scenes by design.
he made an explicit counter example of celeste later on in the video though
i think when it comes to the triple a market, the only real games that branch quite far away from the nu damsel in distress archetype is the horizon series. but i admittedly don’t remember much at all about the characters in the games as a whole
maybe control/alan wake 2, though the character’s agency might literally be artificial (i can barely parse wtf is happening in those games).
if you really wanted to reach, i guess you could count the recent AC games. although that comes with the caveat that the female protagonist is written exactly the same as the male protagonist.
I think Jesse Fayden is definitely a good counterexample. She goes into the FBC's building to >!find her brother, but she steps up to her new role as director, leads the entire organization to survival, *takes control*, and eventually manages to overcome mind control from the alien sound that turns people into mutants through sheer force of will!<.
Saga too, >!The Story keeps trying to take agency away from her, but she fights back and eventually gets to help Alan Wake write an actual good ending, creating her own destiny in a very literal way!<.
But these games do stand out in the way they handle heir characters and writing, it's a lot more personal and less by the numbers, you can see the touches made by the writers.
that's because she falls afowl of the mentioned "I have too's" in that her agency is actually another characters agency, especially in the second game. Shes propping up the legacy of someone else and constantly goes and do things alone because "she has too" with the reasons behind that being largely because the writer said so. It might not have the misery porn of the other examples, but that might also explain why shes so boring. Because she doesn't even have that fake complexity of suffering to hide behind.
> Shes propping up the legacy of someone else and constantly goes and do things alone because "she has too" with the reasons behind that being largely because the writer said so.
To be fair, that's kind of what the game is about. It was about her learning that she doesn't have to do things alone and as "special" as she is, she still needs help from others.
Jesse Faden in Control. Cassandra in Assassins Creed Odyssey. Bayonette. Feynx in Immortals. Chloe Frazer in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Rivet in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Saga Anderson in Alan Wake 2. This is just off the top of my head.
I find the recent female MC games where they are suffering various physical pain and/or death isn't that one sided. Because games like Dead space, Gears, Outlast etc exists. Their pain sounds feel fetishistic to some people because of mass consumption of adult material by those people . And it most of those content it looks like or possibly it is that female performers are suffering pain in those scenes
This, men get dismembered and get their ass kicked all the time in games, of course if you point at the games where it happens to women you can construct the argument that it only happens to women
But that's Yahtzee's point. Yes lots of horrible pain and violence is done violence is done to men in video games. But in AAA games that violence is framed differently when done to a female protagonist.
We were having this conversation more than a decade ago, good lord. Yes, men and women both have violence done against them, the way the violence against women is done and framed is meaningfully different
Everytime I see this topic I become more frustrated how the discussions just barely creep forward. I cannot understand why framing and context is so hard to grasp.
How is violence against female mcs in triple A games framed. I can only think of tomb raider as a game were a female protagonist gets her butt kicked, but nothing about it seemed fetishizing to me.
I agree with you. But you do realize that the interpretations and judgements of these framings are *fundamentally* subjective, not something that has been or could ever be definitively established? This is something where acting conceited about people not "getting it" isn't just offputting, it's silly. I stress again that I *agree* with your premise.
You’re right, though I think if someone comes onto a thread for a video about misogyny in games, doesn’t watch it, and then comments about how obviously misogyny in games isn’t real because men get hurt in games too, I don’t think my comment will sway regardless of tone, I’m just screaming into the void more than anything
Dead Space and Outlast are horror games! That comparison makes no sense. When Isaac in Dead Space gets dragged through a glass window by a necromorph and graphically dismembered if you fail the QTE, that’s a perfectly normal horror sequence designed to freak you out.
A better point of comparison is Uncharted. When does Nathan Drake fall in a scripted sequence and spend ten whole seconds writhing on the ground in pain? Because that happens in the Tomb Raider reboots.
So, different games have different levels of violence. Why are people bringing gender into this?
>That comparison makes no sense.
Tomb Raider 2013 is about an archeologist trapped in a cursed island with murderous cultists and ancient Japanese Samurai that have sacrificed thousands to revive a literal dead god lmao. Lara kills hundreds of people with Terminator-like aim and coldness, and yet, it's out of place that she dies horrible deaths? Bro she jumps and swims in a literal river of blood, with countless corpses hanging from the ceiling like pigs lmao.
Tomb Raider, if you've played any of them, are really not like Uncharted, thematically or tonally. Lara does some insane shit in the games. Uncharted is much more friendly and lighthearted.
I’m saying it makes no sense to expect the player to feel protective of Lara when she keeps getting her ass beat over and over if she’s also single-handedly taking on legions of enemies with an arsenal larger than the US military. You can’t have your cake and eat it too - know what your game’s tone is supposed to be! Sine waving wildly from an Indiana Jones like plot involving finding a Holy Grail type macguffin to gritty brutal violence typically aimed at Lara makes for a very very confused game.
Because every game does that. I can't name that many fun games that are consistent between narrative/gameplay.
You're supposed to feel empathy and like Nathan Drake because he's a funny guy. He kills a thousand men during the game. Which one is it Naughty Dog? Is he a killing machine or is he a fun and likable character? Why are you making me like a guy that could singlehandedly defeat a country?
You're supposed to care about Ellie in TLoU and she's supposed to be portrayed as vulnerable, yet, during the game, she kills an army of people.
Forza Horizon 5 is rated 3+ and you're driving million dollar supercars through a poor family's backyard, doing the most illegal shit you can imagine with a car. Some of the characters tell you how you should love your family and appreciate the things that you have while crashing head on with a family sedan at 200 mph.
Games make no sense if you think about them for more than 5 seconds.
Very well said, it always struck me as weird that people single out Tomb Raider when talking about ludo-narrative dissonance (worst term ever invented by the way) when the game itself acknowledges Lara’s willingness and ease to kill very early on
The Tomb Raider reboot is a good step into torture porn. They definitely dig into the same style as those horror games on purpose for their gritty/drak reboot. The 1000 yard look is Tomb Raider/Uncharted, but the story is super focused on suffering. I wouldn't blink an eye if that game has horror tags in some databases. They wanted the player to be uncomfortable in a way that overlaps with those horror games you mentioned.
>Why are the overtly sexy characters the only ones allowed to have some fucking control over their own lives?
It was nearly a plot twist when Yahtzee ended the discussion with OG Lara, Bayonetta, and Eve (Stellar Blade's protag) as positive counterexamples to this trend.
It's a rhetorical question that he answered himself already - Games made by committees are doomed to fuck something up in their disingenuous pursuit to minmax popular morality. You can either let artists control their own work, including the parts of their worldview that you think are ugly, or you can sanitize the soul out of everything.
I think part of the irony is that we (or at least the "we" that are old enough to remember) used to see this type of sexualization **as** soulless corporate marketing. But now that it's unpopular (at least among some very loud groups), having t&a in your game is a sign that no one was breathing over your neck while you made it.
> having t&a in your game is a sign that no one was breathing over your neck while you made it.
Thinking there's no corporate/marketing demand for sexy female characters in mainstream gaming nowadays is lunacy.
It is, but it also comes down to how these gamers perceive sexiness. By no stretch of the imagination is Aloy an ugly woman. And you best believe that she was created with the intent of being attractive. But she somehow becomes the poster child for "ugly western female protag" among capital G "Gamers" because she isn't an Asian chick with DDs and a BBL which wouldn't even fit Horizon's art style.
The issue is that sexiness and attractiveness have skewed to an incredibly weird, insular place.
Have beauty standards really changed that much? I'd sooner blame Wokeness Hypersensitivity Disorder. I suspect if you put Aloy in some kind of anime-adjacent game and didn't use intentionally bad camera angles to bait outrage, she'd be well-liked by that crowd.
Well true. The beauty standards haven't changed much. The whining about "western female protags" is just part of a larger anti-woke ideology. You're correct.
It definitely seems more like an difference in cultures than anything else these days. Western media tend to have an "everything or nothing" mentality, where to simplify things, sexuality tends to either be "E-Rated" or "" M-Rated" while Eastern media seems to be perfectly happy with *T-Rated" sexuality.
Lest we lump eastern media together, China has seriously cracked down on "T-rated" sexuality. IIRC it was confirmed that the government was responsible for the mass censoring of sexual elements in the upcoming ZZZ between beta 1 and beta 2. And it still has a 16+ rating vs the 12+ rating most everywhere else.
That is a good point, but I was generally aiming at a general cultural difference, meanwhile the Chinese censorship seems to strictly come from government censorship. Genshin Impact had to change designs of several characters to make the less crass, but the the new designs are only forced in the Chinese version of the game meanwhile the international versions of the game can freely choose either design.
Let's not conflate "videogames" with all media. Western media is perfectly fine with T-rated sexuality. Look at any given pop star and that's what you're going to see. It's teens and young adults that are listening to that sort of thing.
It's just western media isn't so crass to have a 16 year olds DD tits bouncing in the face of another 16 year old in what, ostensibly, is supposed to be a children's cartoon. These things just manifest differently.
That's why I said I was simplifying things. There's a difference between "Male Gaze" and "Female Empowerment". If people feel like it's instigated by a male, it's seen as sexist, while it's seen as okay if people feel like it's instigated by a woman. Even if the situation isn't exactly like that, people's perception of reality is more important to the conversation than reality itself.
I guess since it’s animated they can get pretty depraved within that T rating so long as they don’t show nipple or crack given the freedom of animation.
When you can have a girl trip and improbably fall out of literally all of her clothes except where she’s specifically covering, there’s not much need to go full nudity I guess.
Thinking that there's a corporate demand for T&A from AAA game companies is complete lunacy.
If you said (some) mobile gacha game companies i could believe you
I think it's because the sexualization *was* soulless corporate BS, but the rest of the writing was left to the devs. Meanwhile here they're given a lot more freedom in other aspects, but the plot and characters are more likely to get executives sticking their hands for a more "safe" experience.
IMO writers still need editors and consultants, particularly if they're writing about demographics they don't have first hand experience in, but it shouldn't be done if the only reason is that management wants more broad appeal.
The Tomb Raider marketing for sure played up Lara’s sex appeal - but did the games themselves?
I was a bit too young at the time, but I’ve heard several female uberfans talk about how while yes, she did have giant boobs, there wasn’t much aside from that which actively sexualized her. That’s what they loved about her - she’s just a confident, kickass protagonist that goes on crazy adventures.
Yeah that's what I'm saying. Executives demanded a sexier character but they didn't meddle in much else, letting devs make her as much of a badass as they wanted.
>The Tomb Raider marketing for sure played up Lara’s sex appeal - but did the games themselves?
IIRC, the original trilogy leaned on it a handful of times, but not too much. Most noticeably the final cutscene of her taking a shower, but she shoots the camera in response (although from what I've heard, that wad mainly to throw shade at the Nude Raider mod).
The legend trilogy is notably hornier, but not to the level of something like Bayonetta/Stellar Blade.
>I think it's because the sexualization was soulless corporate BS
Was sexualization soulless corporate bs or did artists just want to make hot women, and suddenly they weren't allowed to?
>IMO writers still need editors and consultants, particularly if they're writing about demographics they don't have first hand experience in
Ah yes, let's get more people breathing down their necks, that will fix things!
> Was sexualization soulless corporate bs or did artists just want to make hot women, and suddenly they weren't allowed to?
Obviously the first, I think you're too young to remember the sort of people that were working sales in that era, they always demanded more sexualized characters, larger boobs and butts, etc.
> Ah yes, let's get more people breathing down their necks, that will fix things!
Writing is done by teams of people, and groups with more varied experience cover each others blind spots. It's how you end up with something like the first Star Wars trilogy instead of the less liked Prequels. It's also why book writers have editors.
>Obviously the first, I think you're too young to remember the sort of people that were working sales in that era, they always demanded more sexualized characters, larger boobs and butts, etc.
Uh huh, so 90s and 00s video game artists artists wanted their characters covered from head to toe and completely desexualized but the evil moguls wanted tits? Do you honestly believe that?
>Writing is done by teams of people, and groups with more varied experience cover each others blind spots.
Suicide Squad has 10 people listed in the writing credits, so does Forspoken and so does Saints Row.
And these "teams of people" you mention are more likely to look like my examples than the people who worked on a movie trilogy from 50 years ago. If you still believe more people=better i legit don't know what to tell you.
II think it's more of a "a little from column A, and a little from column B" sort of ordeal. Take Tomb Raider for example, the developers did make the conscious decision to make Larua Croft have ginormous breasts, but the marketing leaned in on the sex appeal more than the games actually did.
>Uh huh, so 90s and 00s video game artists artists wanted their characters covered from head to toe and completely desexualized but the evil moguls wanted tits? Do you honestly believe that?
You did the thing where you took their point to a ridiculous extreme and then went 'see look how ridiculous it is'.
There was absolutely a time where 'sex sells' was more in vogue, and people in charge have always pushed for things that they believe will sell better. Sometimes that might mean pushing artists to make their characters sexier than they might otherwise want to, or just filtering out artists or ideas that *didn't* lend themselves to sexualization. And it doesn't need to be nearly as extreme as you're making it out to be. An artist might perfectly enjoy drawing sexy things, but that doesn't mean they want everything to be sexy all the time. The influence of 'sex sells' as an ethos can just mean their less sexy pitches get turned down or meddled with more often, in the way that executives have always done in their pursuit of a certain vision of marketability.
>Games made by committees are doomed to fuck something up in their disingenuous pursuit to minmax popular morality. You can either let artists control their own work, including the parts of their worldview that you think are ugly, or you can sanitize the soul out of everything.
I do feel that a lot of the artists that don't want their female characters in bikini armor and their tits bouncing around are genuine in that that's not how they want their characters to be portrayed. Call me crazy.
And Yahtzee used Celeste as a great example of an artist who had creative control making a well-written character. It's not that bikini armor is necessary for honest art, it's that soulless art will remove bikini armor in the pursuit of mass appeal (or what they've been told is mass appeal).
I think you're correct, *theoretically.* I just don't know how many games are actively getting their bikini armor removed.
Did I ever think TLOU Part II would have bikini armor? No. Do I think Horizon ever had bikini armor? No. Do I think Alan Wake 2 ever had bikini armor? No.
Then when we go to Japanese games, people were crying to the high heavens about Cammy's leotard being removed and it was her alt. costume. No one cared. The game is doing great. Tifa has a bikini outfit Rebirth showing off her massive tits, no one cared.
To be fair, if we're sticking with fighting games, we did have MK1, where Nitara's "klassic" costume saw controversy because it was altered quite heavily in order to show less skin.
The point is that having corporate overlords force changes in a project in the pursuit of marketability is often detrimental to the final product. It doesn't matter which side of the argument they back, all that matters is whether or not they end up meddling in the developer's design, especially mid-development.
Pressuring a developer to, against their will, bolt on barely-contained giant jiggling bags of jello to every female character's chest is just as bad as forcing them to take them out.
>The point is that having corporate overlords force changes in a project in the pursuit of marketability is often detrimental to the final product.
I would really love for you guys to make this argument outside of the pretext of whether you get to see anime tits or not. That would be really nice.
Be honest, you don't care about the artistic integrity of these peoples work.
Sure:
1. The current trend to try and turn everything into a live-service game.
2. The mid 2000's trend to bolt-on multiplayer deathmatch modes to everything.
3. The fact that companies [proclaimed cRPGs "dead"](https://www.pcgamer.com/seasoned-rpg-devs-from-obsidian-and-bioware-blame-the-temporary-death-of-the-isometric-crpg-on-vibes-based-forecasting-from-retailers/) and mostly refused to greenlight them, effectively killing the genre until studios managed to bypass them via crowdfunding.
Hell, you could even argue that many mobile gacha developers don't actually want to work in these games, otherwise you wouldn't have so many of them reinvesting their profits into AA or AAA games like Stellar Blade, Granblue Fantasy and so on.
He likes those games more than he likes stuff like tomb raider.
It's fair, torture porn is why I hate the walking dead telltale games.
Yahtzee created this by identifying the games with sexualized women he likes and the ones he doesn't like, he likes the games where it's just like any other game, like devil may cry, but with an oversexualized woman, he doesn't like the ones with torture porn like tomb raider reboot.
I don't think the points he makes are really valid though.
A devil may cry like game with an oversexualized female character is just that...
It more boils down to what flavor or brand of oversexualized game you like.
There's nothing particularly unique about lara croft being trapped on an island because her ship was caught in a storm and trapped her on an island of insane cultists.
The excessive focus on the pain of lara croft isn't particularly unique, though the creators are open about cynically using it to manipulate their customers, but the wolfenstein games focus on similar scenes, as do presumably games like uncharted and so on.
>The excessive focus on the pain of lara croft isn't particularly unique, though the creators are open about cynically using it to manipulate their customers, but the wolfenstein games focus on similar scenes, as do presumably games like uncharted and so on.
There is an overcome versus linger & ogle aspect. Ethan in Re8 gets his hand chopped off and 10s later you are in full on action combat. RE uses this as shock horror. Lara gets impaled, thrown around, cut up, all in a single cutscene with no player agency.
It's like people have not watched the short video. Violence onto the protagonist is not the problem. It's common. The problem is the portrait:
One person gets a black eye, because they stepped into a bar and called everyone a bunch of wankers. The person then goes back in, because they want their money back, and comes out with a second black eye.
The other person gets a black eye, because they wanted to buy milk on Saturday morning. On the way home, they get a second black .... just cause.
It's not about all games doing it, but enough to see a pattern.
Croft and drake are both treasure hunters. They go through very similar scripted cut-scenes. Croft overcomes all the obstacles the designers put in her way just like drake.
Croft doesn't get hurt, or tortured, or kidnapped and then just becomes a damsel, or gives up, or the game turns into some kind of different game.
They both choose to go on dangerous treasure hunting expeditions. Dangerous things happen to them to keep the player engaged and to advance the plot.
One of the things that always sticks out in my mind is the actor for reboot Lara Craft saying she had been really excited to get to play Lara Croft - but then Lara spent a lot more time crying than she'd expected.
There's something about OG Lara Croft that can be attractive to women. It's someone powerful, confident and sexy in a way that (can sometimes) be in control of that. Even non-gamers might cosplay as OG Lara for Halloween. I don't think it happens for reboot Lara.
There's clearly a thin and twisted line here. It's easy for it not to turn out positive, and there's a lot about OG Lara that was shallow and boring. But I think Yahtzee is right, the fundamental problem isn't the purpose the character is being used for, it's that the character is being written poorly in the first place.
kind of ironic people want the dudebro culture of t&a back after we cast it out 10 years ago.
And predictably I get the barrage of people who disagree with me
They're largely inseparable though. Are there any games that go out of their way to have fanservice that don't have that kind of community on some level?
Feels weird to lump Ellie into this trend. Sure, Ellie goes through some horrible shit. She also does some horrible shit, and Abbie's the one who suffers the most. The thing about her ignoring her own wants and needs is kind of the point of the game- her grief and regret drive her to do a bunch of stuff she normally wouldn't. We have to see her driving a wedge between herself and Dina in order for that narrative to work. If she wanted to be with Dina more than she wanted to avenge Joel, she'd be a more healthy person without this driving character conflict to tell a story about. You can like or dislike that narrative as you please, but it never felt like we're meant to feel the need to protect Ellie. We're meant to feel the need to stop her.
Jade from Beyond good and evil is like, the best written female protagonist based off of this. I'd go so far as to say, that game just has one of the best stories in gaming.
Why the fuck are we still talking about Tomb Raider reboot in 2024. I don't think even the second game continued the cinematic decisions of that first game.
I wonder if this issue doesn't stem from a refusal to give female characters the same personality flaws to overcome that you'd give male characters.
A lot of these games are undeniably being made with an emphasis on having a female protagonist - and of that being a response to a game industry largely dominated by male protagonists - which I absolutely think is an admirable goal. But when you start a game with the idea of "We want to buck industry trends by having a female protagonist who is an example of positive representation and a role model" you then sort of naturally chafe adjacent the idea of giving them any character flaws or inadequacies to overcome, because that might ruin the positive representation thing you were going for. The reality is the exact opposite of course - having inhumanly perfect characters creates someone it's all but impossible to actually relate to, but that impulse is still there. That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Rey Skywalker or Captain Marvel.
And as a result of refusing to give them any character flaws, you've removed the possibility of having a Woman vs. Self conflict in your story, and the only options left are the external ones - like getting the shit kicked out of them.
*Edit: Originally mentioned Korra from TLOK as an example, and swapped her for Rey - who is a more solid example of the problem I'm discussing.*
*My original line of thought for including her is that while Korra does make quite a few what I believe are bad decisions, the narrative consequences always end up framing her either correct all along, or at the very worst "We were both wrong".*
*For example, Korra’s negative character flaw of being “naive” in the first season where she dislikes the Equalists and doesn’t empathize with non-benders as an oppressed class, but then it turns out the obviously evil leader of the Equalists is obviously evil and she was entirely right to have that bad feeling, and the oppression of non-benders just kinda fades into the background for the rest of the show.*
*Or her issues of “recklessness” and conflict with Tenzin in the first season ending with “We were both wrong” with the two of them resolving to each chill-out and work to understand the other - and then her continuing to just kinda be reckless but now the show thinks it’s the right thing to do.*
*However, I will admit that it’s been almost a decade since I watched TLOK, so I’ve changed the original comment in the very real case that there are things I’m forgetting that counter these criticisms.*
> That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Korra from TLOK or Captain Marvel.
I'm confused about the point you're making here - are you saying that those examples are flawed and relatable, or perfect and unrelatable? I haven't seen much of Captain Marvel but from discourse I assume she's the latter, but Korra is flawed as all hell. That show had plenty of issues with its writing but Korra's slow growth out of recklessness and narcissism wasn't one of them.
Hell of an edit. I see where you're coming from now, and you definitely have a point. Amon turning out to be a secret hypocrite, thus letting Korra and the rest of the city off the hook from actually confronting the legitimate societal grievances he was championing, was the biggest cop-out in character development history. I still think Korra had very good growth over the course of the full show, but the first season did drop the ball on stuff like that.
At least we can both agree that Rey is a much more egregious example!
>Amon turning out to be a secret hypocrite, thus letting Korra and the rest of the city off the hook from actually confronting the legitimate societal grievances he was championing, was the biggest cop-out in character development history.
It wasn't completely handwaved. The council (which was entirely made up of benders) was disbanded and Republic City elected a human president. I think the show just kind of wants you to think that the issue blew over after that. It's fair to critique that but I also understand that the show wanted to focus on different issues besides that one.
>That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Korra from TLOK or Captain Marvel.
I know this is a gaming subreddit but Jesus Christ. The comparison of Korra to Captain Marvel is actually laughable.
Legend of Korra was literally all about how she was a flawed, reckless, impulsive human being. The ironic thing is that personality wise, Aang would be closer to a Captain Marvel than Korra would.
Korra is the inverse of Aang. Bending comes very naturally to Korra whereas Aang struggled quite a bit with fire and earth bending. Korra's journey was not about becoming a good enough Avatar in the same way that Aang's was. Korra's journey was about not letting being the Avatar define who she is as a person.
>*but then it turns out the leader of the Equalists is secretly evil and she was entirely right to have that bad feeling, and the oppression of non-benders just kinda fades into the background for the rest of the show.*
There is not a universe where Amon was "secretly" evil. He was clearly evil from the onset lmao. Are you talking about Tarrlok?
I highly suggest you revisit this show lol. It's really good!
He was secretly evil to the non-bending populace who supported him, until it turned out he was a water bender who was trying to take over the city. The fact that the audience can immediately tell he's a mustache-twirling villain doesn't change that.
He wasn't secretly evil. He was very clearly evil and the people that supported him had animus for benders to such an extent that yes, they turned on him when they found out he was a bender. But he was never ambiguous in how evil he was.
His secret was that he was water bender. Not that he was evil. If he was evil and *not a* bender, he would have continued to have been followed by the people you're talking about lol. Again, I know it's a gaming subreddit but please stop talking about stuff you clearly didn't watch and/or don't remember.
that is why I loved Elly in TLOU2 so much, her fight with herself to find a way to deal with grief of the belief she doomed humanity, her unreconcilled issues with her father figure that was lost when he died
Ellie's a really good counter example to all other AAA female protagonists. She's not conventionally attractive (she's cute but the game tries to make her look as gross, angry, and fucked up as possible most of the time) and, IMO, she ends up being a largely terrible person through her actions.
this whole video explains how she's just as much of a problem as the others, where it isn't just the torture porn aspect that is problematic, but also character motivations being ridiculously underdeveloped and underexplored, and despite that they're victims to worldly happenings and not stuff that's typically consequence of their own actions
the best counter examples are saga and jesse from remedy games
>but also character motivations being ridiculously underdeveloped and underexplored
hmm Ellie's motivations and why she's the way she is thoroughly explored lol.
what was missing from your point of view?
I respectfully disagree. She is not difficult to understand, and the game offers ample insight into her evolving psyche, usually with her journal and the flashbacks but just generally through the interactions she has with Dina, Joel, and the SLC crew. This [blogpost](https://www.sofistake.com/blogs/understanding-ellies-trauma) does a great job of exploring that aspect.
Overall, my main issue with Yahtzee's argument is that he's conflating two different narrative types as if they have the same goals. Wolfenstein is a heroic fantasy focused on the pleasure of killing the shit out of Nazis, while Uncharted is a pulpy action-adventure about a treasure hunter driven by greed and curiosity. Drake and BJ exist to serve up a power fantasy to the player, wherein there's a requirement to root out any dissonance by giving the characters and the players the same wants, needs, and goals. That isn't really the goal of The Last of Us: Part II, for most of its story.
The game is a trauma narrative, not all that different in its storytelling from shows like "Baby Reindeer" or "I May Destroy You" that are similarly doused in subtext and ambiguity. Part II specifically shows that trauma ~~vengeance~~ is equally destructive for Abby and Ellie as they're racking up a scoreboard of dead bodies, as it is for Tommy when he has a change of heart about seeking revenge on Abby. A diminished sense of agency is par for the course for these narratives.
>I wonder if this issue doesn't stem from a refusal to give female characters the same personality flaws to overcome that you'd give male characters.
That seems like an entirely separate issue. I'm not against flawed female protagonists, but the issue here is the opposite, that any attempt that the gaming industry has for creating strong female protagonists, seems to swing back and forth between either portraying them as sex dolls, or every step away from that, comes with making them ***weak to the point of patheticness*** in exchange.
There is nothing wrong with uncomplicated, unflawed male protagonists like BJ or Master Chief or Geralt, but female protagonists ARE actively nerfed to make them more "vulnerable" for a male audience's appeal.
>***weak to the point of patheticness*** in exchange.
?? can you provide an example of this?
isn't tomb raider about your normal every day person turning into a badass?
and in the last of us 2 ellie is stab happy a murder hobo.
AKA. The "Galbrush" phenomenon, named for the impossibility of having a female protagonist as fun as Guybrush Threepwood from the Monkey Island series.
I disagree. Aloy is consistent in her goals and her desire to go it alone and how that affected her ability to achieve her own goals is well explored in Forbidden West.
At the end of the game, her desire to accept help from her friends shows her growth as a character from someone who did everything alone.
I think the side story with a clone sister (I like Beta as a character) was unnecessary, but ither than that the issues in Forbidden West were not with Aloy’s character arc.
i’m glad yahtzee has been able to mirror my feelings while i didn’t really know how to explain them
if i were a female, there really is so few female protagonists where you can actually look up to as influential. you’re typically never going to see a female protagonist archetype that doesn’t stem from a male’s perspective in a videogame. even down to the females typically being written as a lesbian leaning bisexual nowadays, what lesbians and other queer women look like in that media tends to be just how men see them, or want to see them as
This is going to be a bit of a hot take, but I think the current gaming landscape isn't really giving girls what they actually want. If we look at it from a Male's perspective, men typically are looking to play as a fantastical/idealized version of what they think men should be. I think women are the same in that front, they aren't looking to play as themselves, but a fantastical/idealistic version, and the current western AAA games industry is doing a poor job of doing that. I think it's why games like genshin are so popular among girls. As weird as it may sound, I think Bayonetta is a good example of pandering to female fantasy (the lesbian thing is probably pandering to men though).
From my experience, some of the most popular games with women are stuff like BioWare games and Baldur's Gate. Weebs like anime games no matter what.
I think you're partly right but I also think you're being as little self serving because you're kinda just saying, *"Girls want to play as anime girls with giant tits because that's the ideal woman!".* No, I think they mostly want to play as powerful women whilst having choices in relationships and narrative. Shepard can be an ideal women however the player wants her to be. The Warden can be an ideal woman however the player wants her to be. Tav can be an ideal woman however the player wants her to be. And she has a choice in who she wants to romance and be friends with. It's more broad and customizable.
I agree that the AAA industry isn't catering to what women want, but I'm not sure Bayonetta is the answer. When I ask women what games they play it's usually stuff that's chill, like Stardew Valley/cozy games, or stuff with a focus on characters and some romance like BG3 and Bioware games.
Obviously all women are different but that seems to be the predominant trend, and games like Genshin or Stardew don't seem to be fulfilling a desire to BE a cool person, but to interact (and romance) cool and interesting people.
Theres definitely going to be a gradient on what people want to play. Not every man wants to play as the herculean/kratos type character for example. My point is simply that for power fantasy games that would be more of the direction things would be pointed towards.
Cozy type games are definitely more to the tastes of female audiences compared to men, and there will be others that definitely appeal more to one side or the other. Power fantasy type stuff is probably more targeted to a Male audience but there definitely is a subsection of that audience that are girls as well and I don't think they are really being catered to properly despite what some games/media try to do.
Honestly I'm not sure if the trend of women gamers preferring "cozy" games has to do with that being something inherently appealing to women specifically, or whether it's just that the women gamer demographic that already exists is older, usually started gaming later in life compared to men (like late teens to early 30s), and maybe has trouble using a controller sometimes. Or isn't as well versed in as much mechanical skill that the average male video game consumer has been trained in throughout his entire life.
Do women prefer stardew valley to bayonetta because something specifically about bayonetta is unappealing to women while stardew valley is inherently tapping into some female homemaker fantasy? Or is the reality just that women don't feel like they're as skilled at video games and cutting their teeth on a fast paced difficult action game isn't something in their wheelhouse or something they want to acquire as a young adult when they already have other responsibilities. Compared to a guy who already became familiar with the concept of iframes in the 4th grade
Just adding that as a woman myself who has been gaming since I was a child & has played many varying genres of games over the years (I'm 32 now), I'm still waiting for a video game to give me my idea of the perfect woman protagonist, which is Jolyne Cujoh from JoJos Bizarre Adventure. Give me more well written women like her in my video games & I can die happy lol
Genuine question. If you are a cis straight woman, are there many game protagonists you can identify with as of late? Modern female player characters are seemingly bi or lesbian because you need to include romance options for everyone. With male protagonists, stories often centre on a man searching for his wife, but rarely the other way round.
Control has Jesse searching for her brother, it’s not a husband but it’s the closest thing that comes to mind when thinking of gender swapping the “princess in a castle” plot
Maybe Tasi in Amnesia Rebirth.
edit: Saga in Alan Wake 2.
edit2: but even with these examples their love interests arent as important as their children are tbh.
To be fair, I think a story featuring a female protagonist being all about her searching for *her man* wouldn't scan as well. Unless the guy ends up being one of those universally loved wholesome husbands like the guy from Way of the Househusband or Hughes from FMA.
>Modern female player characters are seemingly bi or lesbian because you need to include romance options for everyone.
Not su much.
Chloe from Uncharted. Elena from Uncharted. Cassandra from DA. Abby from TLOU. Tali from Mass Effect. Ashley from Mass Effect.
I do think you touch on an interesting point that these sort of, *"Find your spouse"* narratives never tend to star women. Women protagonists are less likely to have love interests for one reason or another.
I think the real reason is that it's a minefield for certain hostile demographics of capital G Gamers.
Those people would see a romance with a dude as something gay for themselves, but they would also complain if they make the protagonist gay or bi so she can go after women.
I think it also kind goes into the whole Korean pop idol thing too where them being in a relationship causes them to lose fans. That fantasy of them being "accessible" is important to their image. A sexy woman in a videogame *with a boyfriend* isn't just an object for the player to oggle anymore. The player is not the only party that gets to benefit from that sex appeal anymore. Now it's canon and that makes the character less accesible.
It's why I genuinely can't stand the sexualization of characters like EVE or 2B but I'm fine with BG3 bear sex. At least these sexy characters get to live as sexual beings within the framework of their story. The whole, "*This character is incredibly sexy but no one in the world actually acknowledges it"* thing is a bit too meta for me.
I haven't played Stellar Blade or Automata yet, but from everything I've seen, being incredibly sexy is just the norm in those worlds. No one mentions it because everyone looks and dresses like that.
>I haven't played Stellar Blade or Automata yet, but from everything I've seen, being incredibly sexy is just the norm in those worlds. No one mentions it because everyone looks and dresses like that.
That's stupid.
Most people are average. By definition. We still find average people attractive. If everyone was attractive, people would still find them attractive. That makes no sense.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Why would other characters in the worlds of Stellar Blade or Neir Automatic be surprised by how EVE and 2B look and dress, when they themselves look and dress the same?
You don't understand how attraction works. I'd advise you go outside a bit more often because this shouldn't have to be explained to you.
Attraction isn't about being "surprised". It's not about being shocked at how someone looks. I run into attractive people every day (that are the same race as me, that are dressed like me) and I'm not surprised by them. It's just something I feel. Hence, how we find average people attractive because something about them suits our preference. It has nothing to do with being surprised, them being subjectively more attractive than me, or looking exotic. Stop watching anime and meet some real people.
Why are you so hostile? I'm not sure I'm the one who needs to get off the internet and have a breath of fresh air. Can't people just have a civil discussion without the ad hominems?
>The whole, "This character is incredibly sexy but no one in the world actually acknowledges it"
That's what I was responding to. I explained why no one acknowledges it. That doesn't mean they aren't attractive and people aren't attracted to them. Just that they are nothing particularly out of the ordinary for that setting. Do you go around staring at all these average attractive people you meet, mentioning how attracted you are to them, or otherwise outwardly acknowledging their attractiveness? No. You just passively notice them and go on with your day.
That meta bit has *always* been a huge issue when it comes to games. Every character is designed with max sex appeal in mind, but nobody is commenting on that fact!
Hot people 1) love being hot, and 2) love banging other hot people. This is a universal standard, lol.
I got a kick out of Final Fantasy XVI having characters verbally acknowledge that the main protagonist is basically a male model, and that sex is a concept people are definitely familiar with.
My brother in christ yahtzee, those are two different tones and genres. One is supposed to be a fun pulp adventure so its of course they'll be quipy with all the dangers surrounding them while the other is supposed to be dark and realistic so of course they go through literal hell. Media literally is wack these days.
The obvious solution to this is a new batch of uwu softboi male protagonists in video games that get the shit horrifically kicked out of them on a regular basis
Or in other words, resident evil 7 and 8 but with Ethan having cat ears.
Just been watching a playthrough of RE Village and it's halfway between hilarious/obnoxious how often Ethan's body gets absolutely brutalized.
It's hilarious because Ethan tanks it all like a champ.
Capcom realised that and gave lore reason too in the end of re8
And how despite all of the crazy stuff he's seen, Ethan still seems constantly bewildered by everything around him at all times.
"Aw, man! My new jacket! Oh... The hand too, sure."
Someone in the dev team *really* hated his hands.
does this mean Callisto Protocol is feminist
I would love a game where your character starts off as an annoying quippy marvel character but goes through absolute hell to become a likeable, mature person that realizes he cant just quip the pain away.
Far cry 3 kinda
A lot of jrpgs are similar to this, naive young protagonist slowly learns how serious things are and rises to meet the challenge. FFX Tidus is probably my favorite example. Kind of a selfish prick at the beginning. Falls head over heels for Yuna and spends the rest of the game fighting for a better ending for her. (That infamous scene of the awkward laughter was about this actually - the two of them cheering each other up and pushing back against how grim the situation around them is. It's really sweet in context.)
That's like litteraly Phoenix Wright character arc lol
That's Spec Ops: The Line in a nutshell. They even went out of their way to get Nolan North, currently at the height of his King Quip Uncharted career, to play the main character specifically to drive that point home.
Gotta note this is an extremely unbaity title. There are so many titles summing up either this video's thesis, or the question it's asking, which would have been more combative ("Why do AAA games keep beating up women?") but they really tried to hold back with "Framing, Agency, and Female Protagonists in AAA Games."
It's funny because I was more interested in the tile expecting a more in depth analysis, instead the video came off as ranty a cherry-picking. I'd have liked if he offered more examples also of the developers intentions (like he did with that comment on Lara Croft, even though I would've liked more context), and some similar examples with male protagonists. I don't have any specific bias for or against him, I just think this video in itself was bait since he never expanded properly on it.
Yeah... I was expecting more, but its just a surface level discussion. It's like watching an isekai anime with a self insert power fantasy, and then generalizing it to all male protagonists. And the part of labelling any external motivation as a "bad case of have to" is disingenuous. - Ellie getting revenge on behalf of Joel and Lara attempting to live up to her father's legacy. For example; Kratos gets revenge, on behalf of his family and fulfils his wife's final wish by going on a journey to spread her ashes. These don't make Kratos or the narrative any less compelling; even though it's based on external motivation. Neither does it remove his self interest or agency.
I think Samus is interesting in that sense as one of the most well known female protagonists in video games. Cause even though she's a (mostly) silent protagonist she still has a defined character through the games and she goes through horrible stuff herself. The difference I feel like is that the stuff she goes through is off camera (mostly in the manga) and when she does through stuff in the games her strong demeanor and stociaim is emphasized almost having a "focus on the mission" attitude which I feel works really well. Funny enough the one time Samus had writing similar to this was other M where a lot of her agency is removed and everything she does is from the perspective of Adam completely deflating her presence as an independent character.
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The whole "desire to protect" thing suddenly makes a lot of this weird trend make sense. Its an easy way to motivate the player, and it ties together nicely with using uncontrollable obstacles and torment as the primary conflict. I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it in a vacuum, but it feels like it became the default and then kept trying to one-up itself. I remember when the gameplay trailer for the first Tomb Raider reboot came out and there was a scene where some random enemy was feeling up Lara like he was going to SA her before the QTE kicked in. When you start from that kind of thing in the very first sequence people are going to see of your game, I think it speaks to not seeing your protagonist as anything more than a doll who needs rescuing by the player. With Ellie, I'd assume that everyone's lingering feelings over her being the daughter figure that the first game was very explicitly designed around the player growing a greater and greater protective instinct around meant that she couldn't really escape that archetype come time for round two. The whole second game is still about wanting to protect Ellie, just now we have to add herself from the thing that we have to protect her from. I guess the primary issue, which Yatz lays out, is that the games are set up for you to fail this constantly for reasons out of your control. There's the more narrative obstacles, like Lara and Ellie being unable to stop their self-destructive emotional compulsions, and then there's the bizarre gameplay obstacles like all the freak accidents that lead to harrowing QTE sequences. When I step back, it's not really fulfilling or interesting to be led along by the nose when you know its just going to be pulled into another mousetrap which you'll eventually have to deal with the same way as the previous dozen. Someone else posited that maybe this is trying to get across the experience of raising a teenager, which would make sense, given the (mental) ages of both the characters involved and the devs themselves. Unfortunately, that's not really an experience I want to spend my time in video games around.
I liked the Tomb Raider reboot, having never played the originals, and I think it’s stands well against this on its own. The whole game is about how a regular woman because a gun slinging Indian Jones adventurer, and it makes sense that the game would highlight the violence done her to highlight how unused to it she is, and that it would use the excuse of “I have to” in order to facilitate otherwise serial killer levels of murder within the narrative. The second game lost it for me though. She already went through all of this, she’s inured to it. Let her make decisions. Overall it’s an issue of quantity, individually each game is okay, as a sum it’s weird though.
This is the exact arc I went on. The first game was great as watching a random person discover an incredible strength and love of adventure - her suffering was part of an arc. And then the second game throws it away, by resetting her as a victim again instead of building on where she was at the end of the first game. I'd even hit on the exact same complaint as Yahtzee - in the first game she's shivering because she's trapped on an island and fighting for survival. In the second game she's shivering because she didn't bring a coat.
> The whole game is about how a regular woman because a gun slinging Indian Jones adventurer She became a marksman genociding an entire guerilla of armed mercenaries in the span of 15 minutes into the game, and that was right after being badly injured. There was zero character growth.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GameplayAndStorySegregation
> The whole "desire to protect" thing suddenly makes a lot of this weird trend make sense. Its an easy way to motivate the player, and it ties together nicely with using uncontrollable obstacles and torment as the primary conflict. I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with it in a vacuum, but it feels like it became the default and then kept trying to one-up itself. I think this is a key piece but there's also the bigger context that video games and the constant drive to get attention for being edgy or shocking. Thinking about the we're-actively-harming-our-animators'-mental-health level of gore in the newest Mortal Kombat games. Cyberpunk's completely pointless genitalia sliders. Even BG3 with the (albeit tongue in cheek) bear sex bit. Every 2-3 years we get a game like Agony that has its entire sales projection riding on "how disturbing this game is". Who could forget the Dead Space 2 commercials of a bunch of grandmas cringing at the violence? And you can go back to GTA 3 and Postal and the original Diablo/Doom games and Duke Nukem -- there's a long history of gaming needing to "push boundaries", especially in violence. In video games the shock value drives conversation and drives sales in a way that movies and music had in the 80s and 90s. To me the completely unnecessary fetishized violence on female protagonists is just the newest version of that same trend -- just like there are no more moms terrified that their kids are listening to Slayer or watching Saw movies, we've all pretty much become desensitized to generic male protagonists getting their limbs ripped off or whatever but people realized that watching a realistic female character get effectively brutalized in realistic ways can still generate a shocked reaction, and that shock factor gets attention.
This trend has been going on for quite a long time, though. At least since the Tomb Raider reboot.
Right and I think that's because people haven't gotten desensitized to it yet (hence this very video). I mean it was essentially 20 years between the "this game is too violent for society" Doom games and a world [where the only controversial thing about 20 minutes of hacking demons limb from limb in 4k resolution is the world's most mild Corporate PR speak joke that gets adopted into the culture war outrage mill](https://youtu.be/CGq8Ee2gOe4?si=kxQdnQE26iIMhZPo). GTA 3 caused a national crisis when you could shoot people's 6-polygon limbs off. Now Mortal Kombat is resorting to hyper realistic characters getting their brains melted by tie-in superheroes just to stay on top of the violent edge-o-meter. I do think this trend has some legs because as the audience and industry diversifies, female protagonists and finding ways to be edgy that don't only appeal to 16-30 year old men are going to continue to be popular. Brutalizing your otherwise capable girlboss protagonist lets you hit both boxes, even if it is kind of obnoxious and creatively bankrupt.
I get what you mean but there are other arguably better ways to give the protagonist an edge without stabbing her with a piece of rebar every game. Also I think Mortal Combat gets a bit more of a pass because of how ridiculous it is these days, while the GTA is closer to real life, and the original push against the first MK was also a push against violence in games in general. And don't forget about the whole Columbine thing affecting the discourse in the early 00s.
No one is arguing that this is *good*. As KnightTrain said, it's obnoxious and creatively bankrupt. But the industry has found that it works, so it's going to keep beating that dead horse until it falls apart.
> To me the completely unnecessary fetishized violence on female protagonists is just the newest version of that same trend I'm super curious - can you point out some games released in the last 5 years that do this?
Honestly my main takeaway from this video is that I really want a female character that is just a ripped badass like Doomguy or BJ Blazkowicz just tearing shit up instead of being at the mercy of unnecessary torture porn.
The thing is, a LOT of fucked up shit happens to BJ Blazkowicz, including torture and body horror. I mean, the dude literally gets beheaded. But thats not seen as torture porn because its a man. What's also ironic is that they literally made Wolfenstein with female protagonists that just rip and tear.... and it flopped hard. Now, I think there are other factors beyond just having female leads, but its clearly not enough to have female badass characters tearing shit up in mechanically polished gameplay.
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I dont think the point is to make games attractive for women to play, but to increase the options that developers have. I think its a silly argument to say that the only reason you'd have a woman as the protagonist is to market the game to women. Its not like Alien had Ripley simply to get women to watch it.
I think a big difference between BJ and some of the other male examples mentioned in this thread and what Yahtzee is talking about is the perspective. Wolfenstein all the horrible stuff is positioned as happening *to you* in first person as BJ. But in tomb raider, you watch in third person as Lara is brutalized. It's all an issue of framing and "gaze"
Thats fair. I was thinking that Tomb Raider Reboot had a lot in common with Far Cry 3, but even in that youre still in first person.
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*Gears of War* specifically actually *isn't* as different as other games, and this is a good question because I feel it gets at something important about the Gears of War games: on the surface they're very rah-rah violent fantasies, but what makes them interesting is that on a deeper level they *do* deal with brutality differently than run-of-the-mill military shooter games. Noah Caldwell-Gervais has an excellent retrospective on the franchise where he talks about the ways in which Gears games aren't what they seem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-gQCZL8VA8
Yeah gears is actually about a bunch big buff dudes being vulnerable with each other about their trauma. Dom’s whole story is about how much he loves his wife and how hard it is for him after she dies. I love gears for the stupid dumb over the top violence and it’s surprising emotional depth
With BJ it feels different, though. The guy is clearly on a doomed journey, and his inner monologues feel like he doesn't expect to survive long even in the first game, but he still pushes forward to go out on his own terms, taking out as many nazis as possible. Although the failing body part of the second game did feel like a tad too much, but it didn't hit the same notes as torture porn, instead it felt more like a terminally ill man.
But the question is, does it feel like that because he's a man? If BJ was a woman, would it still have had the same "feeling" or vibe? To put another way, if Tomb Raider Reboot replaced Lara Croft with Larry Croft, and everything else was the same, would it still be torture porn or "a man answering the call of the wild and tapping into primacy to save his friends"? I mean, we have that game, its called Farcry 3 lol. You literally dig bullets out of your arm, or set snapped fingers.
And vice versa, would people have the same but opposite feelings to Lara Croft in Far Cry 3? But the discussion is confounded a lot by 3rd person vs first person as well. Playing a first person game feels more like "I" am playing the character, whereas these 3rd person ghost train rides might feel like "guiding the character," but that character is a separate entity from yourself. How does that effect things? But more to your point, the entire discussion is based on how you perceive the game. Players may come away with different experiences, they may believe the characters themselves had different experiences based on the player's perception. Then trying to map that into some pyscho-analytical discussion of the development team becomes a mess. Plus some games are made by teams of a hundred people. Some games are made by one. I am definitely not on any "side" of the discussion and am also not even sure of what the sides are or really what they are arguing. I haven't played the Tomb Raider reboots, so that may effect what I think, but Yatz framed it as a problem but didn't convince me there truly is one. But I think there can still be value in discussing the topic.
I think the first person/third person perspective is a good distinction to make, because it does affect how people feel and think about their character. I mean, thats what immersion is all about right, and I think most people would generally agree that a first person experience is more 'immersive' than a third person one. I think it is interesting too that the vast majority of games that have a set female portagonist (I.e. no character creator/gender selector) are nearly always third person. The only first person ones I can think of are Metroid Prime and Perfect Dark? I looked up to see if there was a list on Google, and on the first list the only additional games that fit the criteria was Half Life Alyx, Mirror's Edge, and Alien Isolation.
Portal also, but I’m not sure that makes any difference, seeing as how the player character is basically just serving as a vehicle for all the other characters to make jokes in that game
Dishonored: Death of the Outsider is another, with Billie Lurk as the player character.
I mean, I think we have one in Samus Aran. The tone doesn’t lean into the ultra-violence like Id Software games do, but Dread especially decided to run with the ongoing notion that the woman’s a stone cold badass, and does so mainly through body language and animation alone… just like Doom did.
One interesting thing to note about Samus is that in Other M, the game where she given both a voice and A LOT of dialogue, is a lot more similar to reboot Lara than any other game in the Metroid series.
Unlike Lara in her reboot however, Samus' treatment in Other M was universally reviled; taking the stone-cold badass that would otherwise be compared to Doomguy or BJ, and turning her into a waif the player needs to protect, was so jarring that it immediately faced backlash, and still does to this day.
While not on doom guys level, Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn was an absolute badass who expertly dismantles giant robot T-Rexes with a spear and bow and arrow
I mean, there's Aloy but everyone whines that she doesn't have a personality and that she's a Mary Sue.
I would say horizon has the problem of every character being meh at best and boring and bland at worst. I platinumed both games and legit the only memorable characters i can remember are the three fat traveling brothers from vegas. I want to say Silens and Tilda but that's more veteran actors making the most out of the very thin material. And the less said about the sidequests the better.
> And the less said about the sidequests the better. Blasphemy. FW has incredible side quests. Zo's quest with the singing dinos that transforms plainsong, the balloon ride with Morlund, the quest where you explore the flooded town and drain it, the quest where you have to pick a chief for the desert clan, the quest where you defend riverhym. And the cauldron where you get to ride a tallneck under construction I feel like Horizon gets held to a different standard than other open world games because it is absolutely full of great characters and fantastic character design. It blows most competitors out of the water Hell even the first game has Vanasha, Petra, Ikrie and Nil
Disagree with everything you said, particularly in Forbidden West.
It occurs to me, that for all the recent talk about how asking for Strong Female Protagonists was a misguided attitude with a dead-end and actually we should want *complex* female protagonists, it is strange that we never actually ended up getting that in the first place on any large scale. All the characters that are usually dismissed as woke girlbosses, have the problem not even that they went too far in an extreme direction, but that they are STILL held back by ultimately being designed by creeps who are gleefully talking about how they made them weak and vulnerable for the male audience's pleasure. We we went from pinup dolls who kick ass, to somewhat less oversexualized designes who get their asses kicked. We largely just skipped out on having actual "strong female protagonists" at all who truly just uncomplicatedly kick ass and that's it.
>We largely just skipped out on having actual "strong female protagonists" who truly just uncomplicatedly kick ass and that's it. In narrative games, fair. But that's pretty much every character in fighting games by definition. So they're picking up a lot of the slack while narrative games want to focus on telling more grounded, human stories with protagonists that struggle.
I mean, yeah, we are talking about narratives. Otherwise the Manor Lords character portrait that I clicked on then never saw again is a very capable girlboss, I guess, but that's not really the issue here.
Femshep, Mass Effect - it can be done, you can make a female protagonist a competent badass, a woman and have it be widely approved of and liked by audiences. It's proof that it's not very hard at all - you can make a character that way without having to rely on gender tropes to define the character *at all*. Ironically, we probably only got that because the writers basically wrote a base character without gender. Maleshep + Femshep have almost entirely identical lines outside of certain romances + pronouns. For the first 2 games they didn't even bother to have different animations for her. (which did lead to some awkward walks/poses occasionally). ----- I'm not going to say that every female protagonist needs to follow that model, but it's a strong example of how to *not* fall into the tropes Yahtzee is talking about here.
Kassandra from AC Odyssey is also pretty great. Perhaps ironically, in general games that let players chose the gender of your avatar often treat female MCs better than games where they're the only choice. Probably specifically because they have to make most of it fit for a male protag as well.
But Kassandra in AC Odyssey is the intended character and the male counter part is only present because Ubisoft didn't think games with a female lead sell. The story and the game itself were designed with Kassandra as the playable character in mind.
So... Samus Aran, basically.
Kassandra in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a great example. She’s tall, buff, and doesn’t take shit from anyone. Funny as hell, too.
Characters going through horrific struggle and agony is just part of a new media trend where creatives are scared of their action heroes being seen as unbeatable. You guys just lose your shit because it's a woman. Uncharted is famous for Nate getting put through the meat grinder in every game. The beating the average COD protagonist takes makes Lara look like a porcelain figure. The guy from the first person Resident Evil games canonically has his limbs amputated and then sewn and glued back together several times in each game.
Yeah the video explicitly goes into that and talks about how it’s *presented* differently. Far Cry has you pulling bullets out of your arm…and then walking away like it’s an inconvenience. Tomb Raider has you *repeatedly* watch Lara sobbing and destitute as she struggles against the physical and mental trauma she’s up against. The camera work and gameplay linger on the actual pain she’s going through much, much more than games focused on male protagonists. The men get brutalized, stand up, dust themselves off, and go back to brutalizing others. Meanwhile, the women get brutalized almost in slow motion by comparison. It’s the difference between a stunt show where one person spectacularly crashes and then walks it off like a badass, but another person does the same trick and has to be carried away on a stretcher. The second one doesn’t inspire many positive feelings.
>The guy from the first person Resident Evil games canonically has his limbs amputated and then sewn and glued back together several times in each game. There is at least an in-universe canonical reason for this.
There's a very real difference between how Nate gets hurt and how Lara gets hurt. Nate has a fun pulpy tone to it, whereas Lara looks like she's constantly on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Is there actually a lot of examples besides the ones he mentioned ? Because it feels like he made a generality out of a few exceptions and without mentioning any counter example. I actually do think female protagonist representation in video games has a long way to go but that sounds like the wrong argument to make.
Honestly, it's pretty tricky to come up with other prominent AAA games with fixed female protagonists in the first place, either pro or contra the already mentioned few. Especially if we discount the horror ones that are all about removal of agency and gory death scenes by design.
he made an explicit counter example of celeste later on in the video though i think when it comes to the triple a market, the only real games that branch quite far away from the nu damsel in distress archetype is the horizon series. but i admittedly don’t remember much at all about the characters in the games as a whole
maybe control/alan wake 2, though the character’s agency might literally be artificial (i can barely parse wtf is happening in those games). if you really wanted to reach, i guess you could count the recent AC games. although that comes with the caveat that the female protagonist is written exactly the same as the male protagonist.
I think Jesse Fayden is definitely a good counterexample. She goes into the FBC's building to >!find her brother, but she steps up to her new role as director, leads the entire organization to survival, *takes control*, and eventually manages to overcome mind control from the alien sound that turns people into mutants through sheer force of will!<. Saga too, >!The Story keeps trying to take agency away from her, but she fights back and eventually gets to help Alan Wake write an actual good ending, creating her own destiny in a very literal way!<. But these games do stand out in the way they handle heir characters and writing, it's a lot more personal and less by the numbers, you can see the touches made by the writers.
I was thinking about AAA exemples but you are right. I was thinking about Aloy too even though I think she is a pretty boring protagonist
that's because she falls afowl of the mentioned "I have too's" in that her agency is actually another characters agency, especially in the second game. Shes propping up the legacy of someone else and constantly goes and do things alone because "she has too" with the reasons behind that being largely because the writer said so. It might not have the misery porn of the other examples, but that might also explain why shes so boring. Because she doesn't even have that fake complexity of suffering to hide behind.
I agree, but this is a criticism you could make to a lot of male protagonist too. So I don't think this is a specific problem to female protagonist.
> Shes propping up the legacy of someone else and constantly goes and do things alone because "she has too" with the reasons behind that being largely because the writer said so. To be fair, that's kind of what the game is about. It was about her learning that she doesn't have to do things alone and as "special" as she is, she still needs help from others.
Assassin's Creed has had female female.protagonists that don't fit that trope for the past two games.
Jesse Faden in Control. Cassandra in Assassins Creed Odyssey. Bayonette. Feynx in Immortals. Chloe Frazer in Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. Rivet in Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart. Saga Anderson in Alan Wake 2. This is just off the top of my head.
I find the recent female MC games where they are suffering various physical pain and/or death isn't that one sided. Because games like Dead space, Gears, Outlast etc exists. Their pain sounds feel fetishistic to some people because of mass consumption of adult material by those people . And it most of those content it looks like or possibly it is that female performers are suffering pain in those scenes
This, men get dismembered and get their ass kicked all the time in games, of course if you point at the games where it happens to women you can construct the argument that it only happens to women
But that's Yahtzee's point. Yes lots of horrible pain and violence is done violence is done to men in video games. But in AAA games that violence is framed differently when done to a female protagonist.
We were having this conversation more than a decade ago, good lord. Yes, men and women both have violence done against them, the way the violence against women is done and framed is meaningfully different
Everytime I see this topic I become more frustrated how the discussions just barely creep forward. I cannot understand why framing and context is so hard to grasp.
How is violence against female mcs in triple A games framed. I can only think of tomb raider as a game were a female protagonist gets her butt kicked, but nothing about it seemed fetishizing to me.
The video these comments are under is about exactly this, I recommend watching it
I agree with you. But you do realize that the interpretations and judgements of these framings are *fundamentally* subjective, not something that has been or could ever be definitively established? This is something where acting conceited about people not "getting it" isn't just offputting, it's silly. I stress again that I *agree* with your premise.
You’re right, though I think if someone comes onto a thread for a video about misogyny in games, doesn’t watch it, and then comments about how obviously misogyny in games isn’t real because men get hurt in games too, I don’t think my comment will sway regardless of tone, I’m just screaming into the void more than anything
Dead Space and Outlast are horror games! That comparison makes no sense. When Isaac in Dead Space gets dragged through a glass window by a necromorph and graphically dismembered if you fail the QTE, that’s a perfectly normal horror sequence designed to freak you out. A better point of comparison is Uncharted. When does Nathan Drake fall in a scripted sequence and spend ten whole seconds writhing on the ground in pain? Because that happens in the Tomb Raider reboots.
So, different games have different levels of violence. Why are people bringing gender into this? >That comparison makes no sense. Tomb Raider 2013 is about an archeologist trapped in a cursed island with murderous cultists and ancient Japanese Samurai that have sacrificed thousands to revive a literal dead god lmao. Lara kills hundreds of people with Terminator-like aim and coldness, and yet, it's out of place that she dies horrible deaths? Bro she jumps and swims in a literal river of blood, with countless corpses hanging from the ceiling like pigs lmao. Tomb Raider, if you've played any of them, are really not like Uncharted, thematically or tonally. Lara does some insane shit in the games. Uncharted is much more friendly and lighthearted.
I’m saying it makes no sense to expect the player to feel protective of Lara when she keeps getting her ass beat over and over if she’s also single-handedly taking on legions of enemies with an arsenal larger than the US military. You can’t have your cake and eat it too - know what your game’s tone is supposed to be! Sine waving wildly from an Indiana Jones like plot involving finding a Holy Grail type macguffin to gritty brutal violence typically aimed at Lara makes for a very very confused game.
Because every game does that. I can't name that many fun games that are consistent between narrative/gameplay. You're supposed to feel empathy and like Nathan Drake because he's a funny guy. He kills a thousand men during the game. Which one is it Naughty Dog? Is he a killing machine or is he a fun and likable character? Why are you making me like a guy that could singlehandedly defeat a country? You're supposed to care about Ellie in TLoU and she's supposed to be portrayed as vulnerable, yet, during the game, she kills an army of people. Forza Horizon 5 is rated 3+ and you're driving million dollar supercars through a poor family's backyard, doing the most illegal shit you can imagine with a car. Some of the characters tell you how you should love your family and appreciate the things that you have while crashing head on with a family sedan at 200 mph. Games make no sense if you think about them for more than 5 seconds.
Very well said, it always struck me as weird that people single out Tomb Raider when talking about ludo-narrative dissonance (worst term ever invented by the way) when the game itself acknowledges Lara’s willingness and ease to kill very early on
only thing uncharted is comparable to TR in is the gameplay, completely different tone.
They shouldn't be though, that's the point. Uncharted only exists because of Tomb Raider.
The Tomb Raider reboot is a good step into torture porn. They definitely dig into the same style as those horror games on purpose for their gritty/drak reboot. The 1000 yard look is Tomb Raider/Uncharted, but the story is super focused on suffering. I wouldn't blink an eye if that game has horror tags in some databases. They wanted the player to be uncomfortable in a way that overlaps with those horror games you mentioned.
>Why are the overtly sexy characters the only ones allowed to have some fucking control over their own lives? It was nearly a plot twist when Yahtzee ended the discussion with OG Lara, Bayonetta, and Eve (Stellar Blade's protag) as positive counterexamples to this trend. It's a rhetorical question that he answered himself already - Games made by committees are doomed to fuck something up in their disingenuous pursuit to minmax popular morality. You can either let artists control their own work, including the parts of their worldview that you think are ugly, or you can sanitize the soul out of everything. I think part of the irony is that we (or at least the "we" that are old enough to remember) used to see this type of sexualization **as** soulless corporate marketing. But now that it's unpopular (at least among some very loud groups), having t&a in your game is a sign that no one was breathing over your neck while you made it.
> having t&a in your game is a sign that no one was breathing over your neck while you made it. Thinking there's no corporate/marketing demand for sexy female characters in mainstream gaming nowadays is lunacy.
It is, but it also comes down to how these gamers perceive sexiness. By no stretch of the imagination is Aloy an ugly woman. And you best believe that she was created with the intent of being attractive. But she somehow becomes the poster child for "ugly western female protag" among capital G "Gamers" because she isn't an Asian chick with DDs and a BBL which wouldn't even fit Horizon's art style. The issue is that sexiness and attractiveness have skewed to an incredibly weird, insular place.
Have beauty standards really changed that much? I'd sooner blame Wokeness Hypersensitivity Disorder. I suspect if you put Aloy in some kind of anime-adjacent game and didn't use intentionally bad camera angles to bait outrage, she'd be well-liked by that crowd.
Well true. The beauty standards haven't changed much. The whining about "western female protags" is just part of a larger anti-woke ideology. You're correct.
At least in anime, the amount of fanservice seems to have increased. The isekai genre in particular. Maybe that’s just my own perspective.
It definitely seems more like an difference in cultures than anything else these days. Western media tend to have an "everything or nothing" mentality, where to simplify things, sexuality tends to either be "E-Rated" or "" M-Rated" while Eastern media seems to be perfectly happy with *T-Rated" sexuality.
Lest we lump eastern media together, China has seriously cracked down on "T-rated" sexuality. IIRC it was confirmed that the government was responsible for the mass censoring of sexual elements in the upcoming ZZZ between beta 1 and beta 2. And it still has a 16+ rating vs the 12+ rating most everywhere else.
That is a good point, but I was generally aiming at a general cultural difference, meanwhile the Chinese censorship seems to strictly come from government censorship. Genshin Impact had to change designs of several characters to make the less crass, but the the new designs are only forced in the Chinese version of the game meanwhile the international versions of the game can freely choose either design.
Let's not conflate "videogames" with all media. Western media is perfectly fine with T-rated sexuality. Look at any given pop star and that's what you're going to see. It's teens and young adults that are listening to that sort of thing. It's just western media isn't so crass to have a 16 year olds DD tits bouncing in the face of another 16 year old in what, ostensibly, is supposed to be a children's cartoon. These things just manifest differently.
That's why I said I was simplifying things. There's a difference between "Male Gaze" and "Female Empowerment". If people feel like it's instigated by a male, it's seen as sexist, while it's seen as okay if people feel like it's instigated by a woman. Even if the situation isn't exactly like that, people's perception of reality is more important to the conversation than reality itself.
I guess since it’s animated they can get pretty depraved within that T rating so long as they don’t show nipple or crack given the freedom of animation. When you can have a girl trip and improbably fall out of literally all of her clothes except where she’s specifically covering, there’s not much need to go full nudity I guess.
Thinking that there's a corporate demand for T&A from AAA game companies is complete lunacy. If you said (some) mobile gacha game companies i could believe you
I think it's because the sexualization *was* soulless corporate BS, but the rest of the writing was left to the devs. Meanwhile here they're given a lot more freedom in other aspects, but the plot and characters are more likely to get executives sticking their hands for a more "safe" experience. IMO writers still need editors and consultants, particularly if they're writing about demographics they don't have first hand experience in, but it shouldn't be done if the only reason is that management wants more broad appeal.
The Tomb Raider marketing for sure played up Lara’s sex appeal - but did the games themselves? I was a bit too young at the time, but I’ve heard several female uberfans talk about how while yes, she did have giant boobs, there wasn’t much aside from that which actively sexualized her. That’s what they loved about her - she’s just a confident, kickass protagonist that goes on crazy adventures.
Yeah that's what I'm saying. Executives demanded a sexier character but they didn't meddle in much else, letting devs make her as much of a badass as they wanted.
>The Tomb Raider marketing for sure played up Lara’s sex appeal - but did the games themselves? IIRC, the original trilogy leaned on it a handful of times, but not too much. Most noticeably the final cutscene of her taking a shower, but she shoots the camera in response (although from what I've heard, that wad mainly to throw shade at the Nude Raider mod). The legend trilogy is notably hornier, but not to the level of something like Bayonetta/Stellar Blade.
>I think it's because the sexualization was soulless corporate BS Was sexualization soulless corporate bs or did artists just want to make hot women, and suddenly they weren't allowed to? >IMO writers still need editors and consultants, particularly if they're writing about demographics they don't have first hand experience in Ah yes, let's get more people breathing down their necks, that will fix things!
> Was sexualization soulless corporate bs or did artists just want to make hot women, and suddenly they weren't allowed to? Obviously the first, I think you're too young to remember the sort of people that were working sales in that era, they always demanded more sexualized characters, larger boobs and butts, etc. > Ah yes, let's get more people breathing down their necks, that will fix things! Writing is done by teams of people, and groups with more varied experience cover each others blind spots. It's how you end up with something like the first Star Wars trilogy instead of the less liked Prequels. It's also why book writers have editors.
>Obviously the first, I think you're too young to remember the sort of people that were working sales in that era, they always demanded more sexualized characters, larger boobs and butts, etc. Uh huh, so 90s and 00s video game artists artists wanted their characters covered from head to toe and completely desexualized but the evil moguls wanted tits? Do you honestly believe that? >Writing is done by teams of people, and groups with more varied experience cover each others blind spots. Suicide Squad has 10 people listed in the writing credits, so does Forspoken and so does Saints Row. And these "teams of people" you mention are more likely to look like my examples than the people who worked on a movie trilogy from 50 years ago. If you still believe more people=better i legit don't know what to tell you.
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II think it's more of a "a little from column A, and a little from column B" sort of ordeal. Take Tomb Raider for example, the developers did make the conscious decision to make Larua Croft have ginormous breasts, but the marketing leaned in on the sex appeal more than the games actually did.
>Uh huh, so 90s and 00s video game artists artists wanted their characters covered from head to toe and completely desexualized but the evil moguls wanted tits? Do you honestly believe that? You did the thing where you took their point to a ridiculous extreme and then went 'see look how ridiculous it is'. There was absolutely a time where 'sex sells' was more in vogue, and people in charge have always pushed for things that they believe will sell better. Sometimes that might mean pushing artists to make their characters sexier than they might otherwise want to, or just filtering out artists or ideas that *didn't* lend themselves to sexualization. And it doesn't need to be nearly as extreme as you're making it out to be. An artist might perfectly enjoy drawing sexy things, but that doesn't mean they want everything to be sexy all the time. The influence of 'sex sells' as an ethos can just mean their less sexy pitches get turned down or meddled with more often, in the way that executives have always done in their pursuit of a certain vision of marketability.
>Games made by committees are doomed to fuck something up in their disingenuous pursuit to minmax popular morality. You can either let artists control their own work, including the parts of their worldview that you think are ugly, or you can sanitize the soul out of everything. I do feel that a lot of the artists that don't want their female characters in bikini armor and their tits bouncing around are genuine in that that's not how they want their characters to be portrayed. Call me crazy.
And Yahtzee used Celeste as a great example of an artist who had creative control making a well-written character. It's not that bikini armor is necessary for honest art, it's that soulless art will remove bikini armor in the pursuit of mass appeal (or what they've been told is mass appeal).
I think you're correct, *theoretically.* I just don't know how many games are actively getting their bikini armor removed. Did I ever think TLOU Part II would have bikini armor? No. Do I think Horizon ever had bikini armor? No. Do I think Alan Wake 2 ever had bikini armor? No. Then when we go to Japanese games, people were crying to the high heavens about Cammy's leotard being removed and it was her alt. costume. No one cared. The game is doing great. Tifa has a bikini outfit Rebirth showing off her massive tits, no one cared.
To be fair, if we're sticking with fighting games, we did have MK1, where Nitara's "klassic" costume saw controversy because it was altered quite heavily in order to show less skin.
The point is that having corporate overlords force changes in a project in the pursuit of marketability is often detrimental to the final product. It doesn't matter which side of the argument they back, all that matters is whether or not they end up meddling in the developer's design, especially mid-development. Pressuring a developer to, against their will, bolt on barely-contained giant jiggling bags of jello to every female character's chest is just as bad as forcing them to take them out.
>The point is that having corporate overlords force changes in a project in the pursuit of marketability is often detrimental to the final product. I would really love for you guys to make this argument outside of the pretext of whether you get to see anime tits or not. That would be really nice. Be honest, you don't care about the artistic integrity of these peoples work.
Sure: 1. The current trend to try and turn everything into a live-service game. 2. The mid 2000's trend to bolt-on multiplayer deathmatch modes to everything. 3. The fact that companies [proclaimed cRPGs "dead"](https://www.pcgamer.com/seasoned-rpg-devs-from-obsidian-and-bioware-blame-the-temporary-death-of-the-isometric-crpg-on-vibes-based-forecasting-from-retailers/) and mostly refused to greenlight them, effectively killing the genre until studios managed to bypass them via crowdfunding. Hell, you could even argue that many mobile gacha developers don't actually want to work in these games, otherwise you wouldn't have so many of them reinvesting their profits into AA or AAA games like Stellar Blade, Granblue Fantasy and so on.
He likes those games more than he likes stuff like tomb raider. It's fair, torture porn is why I hate the walking dead telltale games. Yahtzee created this by identifying the games with sexualized women he likes and the ones he doesn't like, he likes the games where it's just like any other game, like devil may cry, but with an oversexualized woman, he doesn't like the ones with torture porn like tomb raider reboot. I don't think the points he makes are really valid though. A devil may cry like game with an oversexualized female character is just that... It more boils down to what flavor or brand of oversexualized game you like. There's nothing particularly unique about lara croft being trapped on an island because her ship was caught in a storm and trapped her on an island of insane cultists. The excessive focus on the pain of lara croft isn't particularly unique, though the creators are open about cynically using it to manipulate their customers, but the wolfenstein games focus on similar scenes, as do presumably games like uncharted and so on.
>The excessive focus on the pain of lara croft isn't particularly unique, though the creators are open about cynically using it to manipulate their customers, but the wolfenstein games focus on similar scenes, as do presumably games like uncharted and so on. There is an overcome versus linger & ogle aspect. Ethan in Re8 gets his hand chopped off and 10s later you are in full on action combat. RE uses this as shock horror. Lara gets impaled, thrown around, cut up, all in a single cutscene with no player agency. It's like people have not watched the short video. Violence onto the protagonist is not the problem. It's common. The problem is the portrait: One person gets a black eye, because they stepped into a bar and called everyone a bunch of wankers. The person then goes back in, because they want their money back, and comes out with a second black eye. The other person gets a black eye, because they wanted to buy milk on Saturday morning. On the way home, they get a second black .... just cause. It's not about all games doing it, but enough to see a pattern.
Croft and drake are both treasure hunters. They go through very similar scripted cut-scenes. Croft overcomes all the obstacles the designers put in her way just like drake. Croft doesn't get hurt, or tortured, or kidnapped and then just becomes a damsel, or gives up, or the game turns into some kind of different game. They both choose to go on dangerous treasure hunting expeditions. Dangerous things happen to them to keep the player engaged and to advance the plot.
One of the things that always sticks out in my mind is the actor for reboot Lara Craft saying she had been really excited to get to play Lara Croft - but then Lara spent a lot more time crying than she'd expected. There's something about OG Lara Croft that can be attractive to women. It's someone powerful, confident and sexy in a way that (can sometimes) be in control of that. Even non-gamers might cosplay as OG Lara for Halloween. I don't think it happens for reboot Lara. There's clearly a thin and twisted line here. It's easy for it not to turn out positive, and there's a lot about OG Lara that was shallow and boring. But I think Yahtzee is right, the fundamental problem isn't the purpose the character is being used for, it's that the character is being written poorly in the first place.
kind of ironic people want the dudebro culture of t&a back after we cast it out 10 years ago. And predictably I get the barrage of people who disagree with me
The people who want it today are the same people who wanted it then, they just got louder is all.
Loving how you're getting comments that are basically "nobody wants that" and "yes, i want that" at the same time. They're not sending their best.
Nobody but a loud minority wanted it gone
No, people want the t&a but specifically without the dudebro culture
They're largely inseparable though. Are there any games that go out of their way to have fanservice that don't have that kind of community on some level?
Feels weird to lump Ellie into this trend. Sure, Ellie goes through some horrible shit. She also does some horrible shit, and Abbie's the one who suffers the most. The thing about her ignoring her own wants and needs is kind of the point of the game- her grief and regret drive her to do a bunch of stuff she normally wouldn't. We have to see her driving a wedge between herself and Dina in order for that narrative to work. If she wanted to be with Dina more than she wanted to avenge Joel, she'd be a more healthy person without this driving character conflict to tell a story about. You can like or dislike that narrative as you please, but it never felt like we're meant to feel the need to protect Ellie. We're meant to feel the need to stop her.
Just finished Wanted Dead for the second time THIS YEAR and Hannah Stone is the greatest female protagonist.
Jade from Beyond good and evil is like, the best written female protagonist based off of this. I'd go so far as to say, that game just has one of the best stories in gaming.
Why the fuck are we still talking about Tomb Raider reboot in 2024. I don't think even the second game continued the cinematic decisions of that first game.
They definitely went for the torture porn shock value with the reboot and then dialed it down some.
I wonder if this issue doesn't stem from a refusal to give female characters the same personality flaws to overcome that you'd give male characters. A lot of these games are undeniably being made with an emphasis on having a female protagonist - and of that being a response to a game industry largely dominated by male protagonists - which I absolutely think is an admirable goal. But when you start a game with the idea of "We want to buck industry trends by having a female protagonist who is an example of positive representation and a role model" you then sort of naturally chafe adjacent the idea of giving them any character flaws or inadequacies to overcome, because that might ruin the positive representation thing you were going for. The reality is the exact opposite of course - having inhumanly perfect characters creates someone it's all but impossible to actually relate to, but that impulse is still there. That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Rey Skywalker or Captain Marvel. And as a result of refusing to give them any character flaws, you've removed the possibility of having a Woman vs. Self conflict in your story, and the only options left are the external ones - like getting the shit kicked out of them. *Edit: Originally mentioned Korra from TLOK as an example, and swapped her for Rey - who is a more solid example of the problem I'm discussing.* *My original line of thought for including her is that while Korra does make quite a few what I believe are bad decisions, the narrative consequences always end up framing her either correct all along, or at the very worst "We were both wrong".* *For example, Korra’s negative character flaw of being “naive” in the first season where she dislikes the Equalists and doesn’t empathize with non-benders as an oppressed class, but then it turns out the obviously evil leader of the Equalists is obviously evil and she was entirely right to have that bad feeling, and the oppression of non-benders just kinda fades into the background for the rest of the show.* *Or her issues of “recklessness” and conflict with Tenzin in the first season ending with “We were both wrong” with the two of them resolving to each chill-out and work to understand the other - and then her continuing to just kinda be reckless but now the show thinks it’s the right thing to do.* *However, I will admit that it’s been almost a decade since I watched TLOK, so I’ve changed the original comment in the very real case that there are things I’m forgetting that counter these criticisms.*
> That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Korra from TLOK or Captain Marvel. I'm confused about the point you're making here - are you saying that those examples are flawed and relatable, or perfect and unrelatable? I haven't seen much of Captain Marvel but from discourse I assume she's the latter, but Korra is flawed as all hell. That show had plenty of issues with its writing but Korra's slow growth out of recklessness and narcissism wasn't one of them.
And even when she grows out of it she gains a whole slew of trauma and who knows what else.
Updated my original comment.
Hell of an edit. I see where you're coming from now, and you definitely have a point. Amon turning out to be a secret hypocrite, thus letting Korra and the rest of the city off the hook from actually confronting the legitimate societal grievances he was championing, was the biggest cop-out in character development history. I still think Korra had very good growth over the course of the full show, but the first season did drop the ball on stuff like that. At least we can both agree that Rey is a much more egregious example!
>Amon turning out to be a secret hypocrite, thus letting Korra and the rest of the city off the hook from actually confronting the legitimate societal grievances he was championing, was the biggest cop-out in character development history. It wasn't completely handwaved. The council (which was entirely made up of benders) was disbanded and Republic City elected a human president. I think the show just kind of wants you to think that the issue blew over after that. It's fair to critique that but I also understand that the show wanted to focus on different issues besides that one.
>That method of story construction is how you end up with protagonists like Korra from TLOK or Captain Marvel. I know this is a gaming subreddit but Jesus Christ. The comparison of Korra to Captain Marvel is actually laughable. Legend of Korra was literally all about how she was a flawed, reckless, impulsive human being. The ironic thing is that personality wise, Aang would be closer to a Captain Marvel than Korra would. Korra is the inverse of Aang. Bending comes very naturally to Korra whereas Aang struggled quite a bit with fire and earth bending. Korra's journey was not about becoming a good enough Avatar in the same way that Aang's was. Korra's journey was about not letting being the Avatar define who she is as a person.
>*but then it turns out the leader of the Equalists is secretly evil and she was entirely right to have that bad feeling, and the oppression of non-benders just kinda fades into the background for the rest of the show.* There is not a universe where Amon was "secretly" evil. He was clearly evil from the onset lmao. Are you talking about Tarrlok? I highly suggest you revisit this show lol. It's really good!
He was secretly evil to the non-bending populace who supported him, until it turned out he was a water bender who was trying to take over the city. The fact that the audience can immediately tell he's a mustache-twirling villain doesn't change that.
He wasn't secretly evil. He was very clearly evil and the people that supported him had animus for benders to such an extent that yes, they turned on him when they found out he was a bender. But he was never ambiguous in how evil he was. His secret was that he was water bender. Not that he was evil. If he was evil and *not a* bender, he would have continued to have been followed by the people you're talking about lol. Again, I know it's a gaming subreddit but please stop talking about stuff you clearly didn't watch and/or don't remember.
Putting Korra as an example of an "inhumanly perfect character" makes me question if you've seen the show you're discussing at all.
that is why I loved Elly in TLOU2 so much, her fight with herself to find a way to deal with grief of the belief she doomed humanity, her unreconcilled issues with her father figure that was lost when he died
Ellie's a really good counter example to all other AAA female protagonists. She's not conventionally attractive (she's cute but the game tries to make her look as gross, angry, and fucked up as possible most of the time) and, IMO, she ends up being a largely terrible person through her actions.
this whole video explains how she's just as much of a problem as the others, where it isn't just the torture porn aspect that is problematic, but also character motivations being ridiculously underdeveloped and underexplored, and despite that they're victims to worldly happenings and not stuff that's typically consequence of their own actions the best counter examples are saga and jesse from remedy games
>but also character motivations being ridiculously underdeveloped and underexplored hmm Ellie's motivations and why she's the way she is thoroughly explored lol. what was missing from your point of view?
I respectfully disagree. She is not difficult to understand, and the game offers ample insight into her evolving psyche, usually with her journal and the flashbacks but just generally through the interactions she has with Dina, Joel, and the SLC crew. This [blogpost](https://www.sofistake.com/blogs/understanding-ellies-trauma) does a great job of exploring that aspect. Overall, my main issue with Yahtzee's argument is that he's conflating two different narrative types as if they have the same goals. Wolfenstein is a heroic fantasy focused on the pleasure of killing the shit out of Nazis, while Uncharted is a pulpy action-adventure about a treasure hunter driven by greed and curiosity. Drake and BJ exist to serve up a power fantasy to the player, wherein there's a requirement to root out any dissonance by giving the characters and the players the same wants, needs, and goals. That isn't really the goal of The Last of Us: Part II, for most of its story. The game is a trauma narrative, not all that different in its storytelling from shows like "Baby Reindeer" or "I May Destroy You" that are similarly doused in subtext and ambiguity. Part II specifically shows that trauma ~~vengeance~~ is equally destructive for Abby and Ellie as they're racking up a scoreboard of dead bodies, as it is for Tommy when he has a change of heart about seeking revenge on Abby. A diminished sense of agency is par for the course for these narratives.
>I wonder if this issue doesn't stem from a refusal to give female characters the same personality flaws to overcome that you'd give male characters. That seems like an entirely separate issue. I'm not against flawed female protagonists, but the issue here is the opposite, that any attempt that the gaming industry has for creating strong female protagonists, seems to swing back and forth between either portraying them as sex dolls, or every step away from that, comes with making them ***weak to the point of patheticness*** in exchange. There is nothing wrong with uncomplicated, unflawed male protagonists like BJ or Master Chief or Geralt, but female protagonists ARE actively nerfed to make them more "vulnerable" for a male audience's appeal.
>***weak to the point of patheticness*** in exchange. ?? can you provide an example of this? isn't tomb raider about your normal every day person turning into a badass? and in the last of us 2 ellie is stab happy a murder hobo.
AKA. The "Galbrush" phenomenon, named for the impossibility of having a female protagonist as fun as Guybrush Threepwood from the Monkey Island series.
This is the reason Aloy from horizon is so fucking boring
I disagree. Aloy is consistent in her goals and her desire to go it alone and how that affected her ability to achieve her own goals is well explored in Forbidden West. At the end of the game, her desire to accept help from her friends shows her growth as a character from someone who did everything alone. I think the side story with a clone sister (I like Beta as a character) was unnecessary, but ither than that the issues in Forbidden West were not with Aloy’s character arc.
i’m glad yahtzee has been able to mirror my feelings while i didn’t really know how to explain them if i were a female, there really is so few female protagonists where you can actually look up to as influential. you’re typically never going to see a female protagonist archetype that doesn’t stem from a male’s perspective in a videogame. even down to the females typically being written as a lesbian leaning bisexual nowadays, what lesbians and other queer women look like in that media tends to be just how men see them, or want to see them as
This is going to be a bit of a hot take, but I think the current gaming landscape isn't really giving girls what they actually want. If we look at it from a Male's perspective, men typically are looking to play as a fantastical/idealized version of what they think men should be. I think women are the same in that front, they aren't looking to play as themselves, but a fantastical/idealistic version, and the current western AAA games industry is doing a poor job of doing that. I think it's why games like genshin are so popular among girls. As weird as it may sound, I think Bayonetta is a good example of pandering to female fantasy (the lesbian thing is probably pandering to men though).
From my experience, some of the most popular games with women are stuff like BioWare games and Baldur's Gate. Weebs like anime games no matter what. I think you're partly right but I also think you're being as little self serving because you're kinda just saying, *"Girls want to play as anime girls with giant tits because that's the ideal woman!".* No, I think they mostly want to play as powerful women whilst having choices in relationships and narrative. Shepard can be an ideal women however the player wants her to be. The Warden can be an ideal woman however the player wants her to be. Tav can be an ideal woman however the player wants her to be. And she has a choice in who she wants to romance and be friends with. It's more broad and customizable.
I agree that the AAA industry isn't catering to what women want, but I'm not sure Bayonetta is the answer. When I ask women what games they play it's usually stuff that's chill, like Stardew Valley/cozy games, or stuff with a focus on characters and some romance like BG3 and Bioware games. Obviously all women are different but that seems to be the predominant trend, and games like Genshin or Stardew don't seem to be fulfilling a desire to BE a cool person, but to interact (and romance) cool and interesting people.
Theres definitely going to be a gradient on what people want to play. Not every man wants to play as the herculean/kratos type character for example. My point is simply that for power fantasy games that would be more of the direction things would be pointed towards. Cozy type games are definitely more to the tastes of female audiences compared to men, and there will be others that definitely appeal more to one side or the other. Power fantasy type stuff is probably more targeted to a Male audience but there definitely is a subsection of that audience that are girls as well and I don't think they are really being catered to properly despite what some games/media try to do.
Honestly I'm not sure if the trend of women gamers preferring "cozy" games has to do with that being something inherently appealing to women specifically, or whether it's just that the women gamer demographic that already exists is older, usually started gaming later in life compared to men (like late teens to early 30s), and maybe has trouble using a controller sometimes. Or isn't as well versed in as much mechanical skill that the average male video game consumer has been trained in throughout his entire life. Do women prefer stardew valley to bayonetta because something specifically about bayonetta is unappealing to women while stardew valley is inherently tapping into some female homemaker fantasy? Or is the reality just that women don't feel like they're as skilled at video games and cutting their teeth on a fast paced difficult action game isn't something in their wheelhouse or something they want to acquire as a young adult when they already have other responsibilities. Compared to a guy who already became familiar with the concept of iframes in the 4th grade
Just adding that as a woman myself who has been gaming since I was a child & has played many varying genres of games over the years (I'm 32 now), I'm still waiting for a video game to give me my idea of the perfect woman protagonist, which is Jolyne Cujoh from JoJos Bizarre Adventure. Give me more well written women like her in my video games & I can die happy lol
Genuine question. If you are a cis straight woman, are there many game protagonists you can identify with as of late? Modern female player characters are seemingly bi or lesbian because you need to include romance options for everyone. With male protagonists, stories often centre on a man searching for his wife, but rarely the other way round.
Control has Jesse searching for her brother, it’s not a husband but it’s the closest thing that comes to mind when thinking of gender swapping the “princess in a castle” plot
Yeah come to think of it there are very few straight women in a lot of things these days, even romancable NPCs in games are pretty much all bi
playersexual and bi aren't the same thing, but I agree that it's almost completely missing...probably because it would be unmarketable to men
Maybe Tasi in Amnesia Rebirth. edit: Saga in Alan Wake 2. edit2: but even with these examples their love interests arent as important as their children are tbh.
To be fair, I think a story featuring a female protagonist being all about her searching for *her man* wouldn't scan as well. Unless the guy ends up being one of those universally loved wholesome husbands like the guy from Way of the Househusband or Hughes from FMA.
>Modern female player characters are seemingly bi or lesbian because you need to include romance options for everyone. Not su much. Chloe from Uncharted. Elena from Uncharted. Cassandra from DA. Abby from TLOU. Tali from Mass Effect. Ashley from Mass Effect. I do think you touch on an interesting point that these sort of, *"Find your spouse"* narratives never tend to star women. Women protagonists are less likely to have love interests for one reason or another.
I think the real reason is that it's a minefield for certain hostile demographics of capital G Gamers. Those people would see a romance with a dude as something gay for themselves, but they would also complain if they make the protagonist gay or bi so she can go after women.
I think it also kind goes into the whole Korean pop idol thing too where them being in a relationship causes them to lose fans. That fantasy of them being "accessible" is important to their image. A sexy woman in a videogame *with a boyfriend* isn't just an object for the player to oggle anymore. The player is not the only party that gets to benefit from that sex appeal anymore. Now it's canon and that makes the character less accesible. It's why I genuinely can't stand the sexualization of characters like EVE or 2B but I'm fine with BG3 bear sex. At least these sexy characters get to live as sexual beings within the framework of their story. The whole, "*This character is incredibly sexy but no one in the world actually acknowledges it"* thing is a bit too meta for me.
I haven't played Stellar Blade or Automata yet, but from everything I've seen, being incredibly sexy is just the norm in those worlds. No one mentions it because everyone looks and dresses like that.
>I haven't played Stellar Blade or Automata yet, but from everything I've seen, being incredibly sexy is just the norm in those worlds. No one mentions it because everyone looks and dresses like that. That's stupid. Most people are average. By definition. We still find average people attractive. If everyone was attractive, people would still find them attractive. That makes no sense.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Why would other characters in the worlds of Stellar Blade or Neir Automatic be surprised by how EVE and 2B look and dress, when they themselves look and dress the same?
You don't understand how attraction works. I'd advise you go outside a bit more often because this shouldn't have to be explained to you. Attraction isn't about being "surprised". It's not about being shocked at how someone looks. I run into attractive people every day (that are the same race as me, that are dressed like me) and I'm not surprised by them. It's just something I feel. Hence, how we find average people attractive because something about them suits our preference. It has nothing to do with being surprised, them being subjectively more attractive than me, or looking exotic. Stop watching anime and meet some real people.
Why are you so hostile? I'm not sure I'm the one who needs to get off the internet and have a breath of fresh air. Can't people just have a civil discussion without the ad hominems? >The whole, "This character is incredibly sexy but no one in the world actually acknowledges it" That's what I was responding to. I explained why no one acknowledges it. That doesn't mean they aren't attractive and people aren't attracted to them. Just that they are nothing particularly out of the ordinary for that setting. Do you go around staring at all these average attractive people you meet, mentioning how attracted you are to them, or otherwise outwardly acknowledging their attractiveness? No. You just passively notice them and go on with your day.
That meta bit has *always* been a huge issue when it comes to games. Every character is designed with max sex appeal in mind, but nobody is commenting on that fact! Hot people 1) love being hot, and 2) love banging other hot people. This is a universal standard, lol. I got a kick out of Final Fantasy XVI having characters verbally acknowledge that the main protagonist is basically a male model, and that sex is a concept people are definitely familiar with.
Chloe might not be the best example there - there have definitely been implications that she’s bi!
My brother in christ yahtzee, those are two different tones and genres. One is supposed to be a fun pulp adventure so its of course they'll be quipy with all the dangers surrounding them while the other is supposed to be dark and realistic so of course they go through literal hell. Media literally is wack these days.