Anita Sarkeesian and Women in Video Games

Unfortunately, it's simply a result of existance that every material thing in the universe becomes objectified by the human eye. It's a simple consequence of biology; and indeed, one that you already made. When you looked down the site page and saw this debate, for instance, your brain made a split-second decision on its own and discriminated towards this debate, making you click on it. Same thing happens if you're walking down the street and you see an attractive person; your brain has already decided that they are worth your time to look at, without your consent. Some would call that unfair, but its a reality. In addition, your argument that female characters are used to supplement the male hero is a pointless one; the argument can easily be flipped on its head and said that in any game where females outnumber males, that the males are only supplementary. This is universally true, and isn't a sign of sexism; characters that are lesser in some form, be it in strength, numbers or what-have-you, are supplementary to the protagonist by definition. It isn't a sign of any negative -ism, it's a consequence of being a secondary character. Nor is there anything wrong with being a secondary character; there are many great characters who weren't the protagonists in their respective stories. Also, as a personal fan of the Mass Effect franchise, you are grossly misrepresenting it. In every Mass Effect game, the player is given more than one option for romance, and it's not just treating sex as a prize to be won. Mass Effect prides itself on its immersion, and those romance options don't involve your characters "hooking up" just because they can; the romance subplots are about Shepard and your love interest falling in love. This only isn't the case in a few unique romances (Jacob in Mass Effect 2, for example), but that's made obsolete because continuing any romance through the trilogy results in those characters stating that they've fallen in love with Shepard. The game isn't treating sex as a prize, and only someone who is looking for an argument would draw that conclusion. Your statement, I'm sorry to say, is remarkably similar to one made on Fox News when the first Mass Effect was released, and Fox made the same strawman of saying "this game is treating sex as a prize to be won", among other things [1]. Most of your second paragraph is exactly the biggest problem with Anita's arguments; they're open to evisceration by Ockham's deadly Razor. For anyone reading this who doesn't know what the Razor is, it's a logical tool that states in a question of logic, the answer that makes the least amount of assumptions, or the least outrageous assumptions, should always be selected[2]. In this argument, you asserted that the gaming industry "tries to appeal to the white, heterosexual male audience [is] evidence enough that females are portrayed the way they are to reinforce male sexual and self-image fantasies for male players. ". In contrast, I'm asserting that game developers make their characters the way they do because they make characters they'd like to see, not because they're trying to appeal to any one particular group. What's more likely? That game developers, as gamers themselves, want to make characters that they think will appeal to them and their fanbase, or that they are actually making characters the way they do because they are discriminatory against women and want to appeal to only one part of their fanbase, which they think responds postively to this kind of treatment. This isn't a strawman, this is simple market logic; if you discriminate against someone, you are discriminatory by definition, and there'd be no reason for a profit-motivated industry to make characters the way they are if they didn't think that it would cause them to get more money. This is the Razor in action; yours makes a shaky assumption based on post-hoc evidence, and is subject to it. I hope you don't mind if I skip over most of the assertions in your next paragraph simply because it's not really relevant, although I will say that your Congress source, and by extension that entire argument that women are paid less, almost universally fails to take any factors into account. I've heard it repeated before, but all those kinds of observations do is look at median pay; it ignores any sort of nuance between the genders. The point I was trying to make in this paragraph is that despite her massive influx of money from her kickstarter, Anita's videos did not improve in quality (I'll link her pre-kickstarter and post-kickstarter videos as sources [3] and [4]), and nor did she appear to use any of that money for recording the footage she needed from the games, as the blogger Vicsor points out; Anita actually doesn't use any original footage in her videos. She simply finds Lets Play videos on YouTube and then takes their footage[5], she lied about liking video games since she was a kid [6], despite her claims in her TED talk that she's been playing video games since she was a kid, and she hasn't put out any statement regarding where it went. Taking a closer look at my statement, I can see I did put in a little too much ambiguity; if those comments were directed at her being a woman, you can say they were sexist comments. Of course then the argument morphs into whether or not that's indicative of her entire critical base (clearly its not, since I'm here), or that there exists a sexist culture in the gamer community. Since there isn't really a way to variably test or count the number of sexist to non-sexist comments, and my personal experience is invalidated due to its sources and my bias, this argument becomes a dead end. We can't definitively say that there's a culture of sexism; the only thing that we can say for certain is that a portion of Anita's critical base is sexist. But the bigger problem is that you think that how these games portray people actually has an effect on the world. You asserted that there are real-life consequences for this; that is absolutely no different than those who think video game violence correlates with actual violence (the simple counter for this is "what video game were people playing for the previous 2,000 years? "). Anyway; I've used up about two third of my characters, so I'd better close up. In summation, Anita's arguments are based upon more than a few fallacies, including post hoc reasoning and indirect foundational bias; the same tactic advanced by creationists, which is assuming a conclusion before gathering evidence, instead of assuming a conclusion from evidence already gathered. She, and her supporters, make far too many unfounded assumptions; namely that there is an entity called the gaming industry that is biased against them, when in reality, there are far simpler explanations that don't need to rely on unnecessary assumptions for the reason why some female characters are bland, and are left vulnerable to the Razor. She uses the example of Mass Effect 3's advertising in her latest video, citing the fact that the Male Shepard is used in most promotional material as an element that makes Female Shepard inferior to him[7], even though a far simpler, and more appropriate, answer can be found in the fact that it's cheaper for a company to produce only one version of advertising, and as Bioware themselves said, less than 20% of players actually play as female Shepard[8]. Anita mistakes simple story and editing choices, like flipping a characters gender, as sexism when in reality, there are easier explanations for this that make far more sense in an editorial context; like the fact that flipping a character's gender is a very easy way to create a new character without having to write in a backstory, especially in early games like Pac-Man when you only have a few pixels to work with. But in any case, that's all out of me. Thanks very much for the debate my friend, and I hope everyone reading this took away something constructive. So in my favorite author's immortal words: "So long, and thanks for all the fish".