This post is dedicated to someone I follow on Twitter Ms @sennydreadful who posted this eye-opening link to a forum board with a thread entitled "WTF is with empowered women in video games now?"
Here's the original "rant" from user "I Am" posted shortly after the new year :
I am starting this thread because I see a new trend in the video/computer game world and that is the increase in strong playable female characters.
Now, I am no hardcore gamer but I do play computer games often and the recent one I have been playing recently is Shogun 2 total war. Now for those who don't know what this game is, it is a strategy game based on the military of feudal Japan. I recently bought an upgrade for the game the other day and guess what one of the strongest military units was? Nuns. I shit you not. The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game. Somehow I doubt that in real life a nun would have swung a sword or used a spear faster and harder than a feudal warlord, and this game was based on history.
I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? I seen some similiar patterns on the game advertisements on television and the internet recently and want to know if anyone else is seeing the pattern?
I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us...wait they already do that.
End of rant.
The first thing I'd like to point out is that in Asia there are plenty of women who kicked ass - in feudal Japan and elsewhere. I can personally trace my ancestry on my Korean side to one of the Wonhwa female warriors that predated the hwarang (male warriors). The Wonhwa (Original Flowers) were women who studied not only weapons and martial arts fighting, but they were also taught ethnics and swore an oath of loyalty, filial and fraternal piety, and sincerity.
My ancestor who came from the great "Yu" clan was reknown for her skill with a bow and arrow while on horseback. So were her six other sisters.
But this guy specified feudal Japan.
In feudal Japan many women were trained in fighting. Why? The simple reason being that feudal Japan was sort of a big complicated game of Kick the Clan with lots of blood, politics, highly trained warriors with the world's sharpest swords for weapons, and a little King of the Mountain thrown in for good measure. Not only did you have to basically katana slice your way through an entire samurai army (with lots of paid ronin mercenaries mixed in) of the shogun to get power in feudal Japan, but you also had to seize property.
Considering that women were usually the last defense of the good ol' castle homestead, they were trained to fight and die.
And sometimes they even led armies of their own like Tomoe Gozen. She was beautiful, talented in archery, an expert with the naginata (a sort of spear with a sword blade at the end), and deadly with a katana. There are historians who claim that Tomoe Gozen took a head in the Battle of Awazu and then brought it home for her husband the daimyo.
Now that we've cleared up the historical inaccuracies and the spelling error (it's s-i-m-i-l-a-r sweetie), let's get on to the good stuff. Oh just one last thing, it's "i" before "e" except after "c". There's exceptions, but I won't nitpick (neighbour, weight, height, & freight just to name a few).
The core of the OP's rant is that the women characters are too strong 0 that they're stronger than the other characters. "The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game." He's not really ranting because they're female, not really. Scrolling down a little further gets you to the good stuff - and by the good stuff I mean the posters who take the original guy's crazy and then run across the fucking country like Forrest Gump with it.
Here are some of my favourites:
xtc: It would be hilarious to portray the female characters realistically. If you chose the female character in your FPS she would have to move very slowly, dragging the gun around. You could build in some extra shake to the crosshairs to represent hopeless accuracy. Every time you needed to reload your gun, instead of just pressing a button, you'd have to find a male character and go through some flirting dialogue options to persuade him to do it for you. One out of every four missions the game would tell you that you were sitting out this one due to 'women's issues'.
goldenfetus: I've spent the last 3 years in Iraq and Turkey. It's nothing like what you read about in your women's studies classes. Women have it far, far easier in these countries, just like everywhere else. Now I don't know about Saudi Arabia, but I imagine it's the same story there. All you're going to hear about is isolated cases of women being 'abused', because that is the narrative of the people who control the news. You think women being 'forced' to stay home and take care of the family is a BAD thing? The home is a fucking refuge. While women spend their time there, men have to go out in the brutal world and compete for a living. It's 100 times easier to sit back and be provided for than it is to go out and earn the provisions.
And my favourite of all, again from goldenfetus:
Then there is social realism; how close the characters are to reflecting human nature. Women in real life simply do not do the things they do in video games, not only because they lack the capacity to, but also because they lack the will. Women don't care about anything but themselves. If the world needs saving, they're going to send their husbands or brothers to do it while they stay at home. In the Gears of War example, Anya is thin and she is not a soldier, yet she is fighting with exactly the same ability as the battle-hardened male Gears. That is ridiculous in the sense that real women lack that capability, but also in the sense that her presence on the field would be a positive hindrance for social reasons. Real women don't rush into combat and cut aliens in half with chainsaws - they shake and cry and gasp and scream and piss themselves while they're paralyzed from fright, screaming for the males to stop shooting and save them, which many men would do (and thereby compromise the mission).
The point is that there is no gameplay reason to portray females in socially unrealistic settings or with unrealistic personality traits. It's not done for the same reason that med kits instantly heal you or hours pass in minutes or the protagonist can absorb bullets like sunshine. It's done for political reasons - to appease feminists and draw females who have glutted themselves on delusions of grandeur in the real world. And it comes at the expense of the enjoyment of the males who created the industry through their devotion, industriousness, and imagination, and who just want to sit back and relax in one god-damned corner of the world without having the thought police shove a diarrhea funnel down our fucking throats.
Now I don't think I'm some kind of exception to the cliché that gamers are predominantly male or anything. I came to video games through computers. I wrote programs in Basic & DOS as a kid and the love of all things techie meant that I wound up in one of the best engineering school's in the world basically trying to make Transformers and Bubble Gum Crisis go from my fantasy world into the real one.
I was a tomboy with a nice rack who loved martial arts, studied engineering, and had a four digit victory to a two digit loss record playing Chun Li in Streetfighter 2. I was proud of my console collection. I had a working Atari 2600, Nintendo, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and a chipped PS1 to play bootleg Japanese games.
When Soul Edge came out I was immediately addicted simply because there were female characters I wanted to play. I played at the arcade so much I ended up dating a guy who worked there. He taught me how to play cribbage, gave me unlimited free games, and dumped me for a much prettier girl who didn't even get through her first opponent during the statewide Soul Edge competition, which I won playing Taki.
But I played each and every character in that game. I loved them all. I learned, as any gamer does who likes to play fighting games that Character A was better against Character B and then boned up on my Rock, Paper, Scissors skills to be the person who got to choose their character last (there was no Rock, Paper, Lizard, Spock back then).
Now I didn't create the industry. I didn't devote my imagination and energy to creating video games. But I know plenty of girls who have and some from the very beginning. Carol Shaw was the first female game designer who created 3D TicTacToe for the Atari 2600. Dona Bailey created Centipede.
We've been there from the beginning boys. Maybe not hogging up all the space in the arcade walking around like we owned the place but some of us have.
I've camped out. I've pre-ordered. I've been to Japan and bought 50 games at once. I've played each and every Final Fantasy more than once and have made boys cry after many a "flawless victory". Ever seen Grandma's Boy? No? Then watch it because I'm that good at Dance Dance Revolution.
You don't hear us gamer girls bitching and moaning about all the bullshit male characters or masculine themes in video games, which are despite your complaints still made for you boys that can't get your ding-a-lings sucked on a Friday night.
We just play. That's what gamers used to do. We bought games and we played them because there wasn't that much to choose from that was worth playing. Nowadays none of us have this problem. There's more consoles out there, more games, and the games look, play, and are more realistic than they were when I was playing Pokemon Stadium.
So sorry if we girls have intruded on your "boys club", but we're here to stay. If you don't like it, take your game and fuck off.
End rant.
Here's the original "rant" from user "I Am" posted shortly after the new year :
I am starting this thread because I see a new trend in the video/computer game world and that is the increase in strong playable female characters.
Now, I am no hardcore gamer but I do play computer games often and the recent one I have been playing recently is Shogun 2 total war. Now for those who don't know what this game is, it is a strategy game based on the military of feudal Japan. I recently bought an upgrade for the game the other day and guess what one of the strongest military units was? Nuns. I shit you not. The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game. Somehow I doubt that in real life a nun would have swung a sword or used a spear faster and harder than a feudal warlord, and this game was based on history.
I think I have the right to ask steam and other gaming companes: WTF with the subliminal brainwashing? What now when I buy or play a game women will be doing all the ass kicking? I seen some similiar patterns on the game advertisements on television and the internet recently and want to know if anyone else is seeing the pattern?
I call bullshit on this subject. Video games are the last place for guys to hang out and now women are taking over. Why not just save us the trouble and instead of eliminating our fantasy world just throw us in work camp to provide for thier bastard children (literally speaking) while they shit all over us...wait they already do that.
End of rant.
The first thing I'd like to point out is that in Asia there are plenty of women who kicked ass - in feudal Japan and elsewhere. I can personally trace my ancestry on my Korean side to one of the Wonhwa female warriors that predated the hwarang (male warriors). The Wonhwa (Original Flowers) were women who studied not only weapons and martial arts fighting, but they were also taught ethnics and swore an oath of loyalty, filial and fraternal piety, and sincerity.
My ancestor who came from the great "Yu" clan was reknown for her skill with a bow and arrow while on horseback. So were her six other sisters.
But this guy specified feudal Japan.
In feudal Japan many women were trained in fighting. Why? The simple reason being that feudal Japan was sort of a big complicated game of Kick the Clan with lots of blood, politics, highly trained warriors with the world's sharpest swords for weapons, and a little King of the Mountain thrown in for good measure. Not only did you have to basically katana slice your way through an entire samurai army (with lots of paid ronin mercenaries mixed in) of the shogun to get power in feudal Japan, but you also had to seize property.
Considering that women were usually the last defense of the good ol' castle homestead, they were trained to fight and die.
And sometimes they even led armies of their own like Tomoe Gozen. She was beautiful, talented in archery, an expert with the naginata (a sort of spear with a sword blade at the end), and deadly with a katana. There are historians who claim that Tomoe Gozen took a head in the Battle of Awazu and then brought it home for her husband the daimyo.
 |
| I bet no one ever told Tomoe Gozen she wasn't as strong as a man. |
The core of the OP's rant is that the women characters are too strong 0 that they're stronger than the other characters. "The nuns had an attack 20% -40% higher than most units in the game." He's not really ranting because they're female, not really. Scrolling down a little further gets you to the good stuff - and by the good stuff I mean the posters who take the original guy's crazy and then run across the fucking country like Forrest Gump with it.
Here are some of my favourites:
xtc: It would be hilarious to portray the female characters realistically. If you chose the female character in your FPS she would have to move very slowly, dragging the gun around. You could build in some extra shake to the crosshairs to represent hopeless accuracy. Every time you needed to reload your gun, instead of just pressing a button, you'd have to find a male character and go through some flirting dialogue options to persuade him to do it for you. One out of every four missions the game would tell you that you were sitting out this one due to 'women's issues'.
goldenfetus: I've spent the last 3 years in Iraq and Turkey. It's nothing like what you read about in your women's studies classes. Women have it far, far easier in these countries, just like everywhere else. Now I don't know about Saudi Arabia, but I imagine it's the same story there. All you're going to hear about is isolated cases of women being 'abused', because that is the narrative of the people who control the news. You think women being 'forced' to stay home and take care of the family is a BAD thing? The home is a fucking refuge. While women spend their time there, men have to go out in the brutal world and compete for a living. It's 100 times easier to sit back and be provided for than it is to go out and earn the provisions.
And my favourite of all, again from goldenfetus:
Then there is social realism; how close the characters are to reflecting human nature. Women in real life simply do not do the things they do in video games, not only because they lack the capacity to, but also because they lack the will. Women don't care about anything but themselves. If the world needs saving, they're going to send their husbands or brothers to do it while they stay at home. In the Gears of War example, Anya is thin and she is not a soldier, yet she is fighting with exactly the same ability as the battle-hardened male Gears. That is ridiculous in the sense that real women lack that capability, but also in the sense that her presence on the field would be a positive hindrance for social reasons. Real women don't rush into combat and cut aliens in half with chainsaws - they shake and cry and gasp and scream and piss themselves while they're paralyzed from fright, screaming for the males to stop shooting and save them, which many men would do (and thereby compromise the mission).
The point is that there is no gameplay reason to portray females in socially unrealistic settings or with unrealistic personality traits. It's not done for the same reason that med kits instantly heal you or hours pass in minutes or the protagonist can absorb bullets like sunshine. It's done for political reasons - to appease feminists and draw females who have glutted themselves on delusions of grandeur in the real world. And it comes at the expense of the enjoyment of the males who created the industry through their devotion, industriousness, and imagination, and who just want to sit back and relax in one god-damned corner of the world without having the thought police shove a diarrhea funnel down our fucking throats.
Now I don't think I'm some kind of exception to the cliché that gamers are predominantly male or anything. I came to video games through computers. I wrote programs in Basic & DOS as a kid and the love of all things techie meant that I wound up in one of the best engineering school's in the world basically trying to make Transformers and Bubble Gum Crisis go from my fantasy world into the real one.
I was a tomboy with a nice rack who loved martial arts, studied engineering, and had a four digit victory to a two digit loss record playing Chun Li in Streetfighter 2. I was proud of my console collection. I had a working Atari 2600, Nintendo, SNES, Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, and a chipped PS1 to play bootleg Japanese games.
When Soul Edge came out I was immediately addicted simply because there were female characters I wanted to play. I played at the arcade so much I ended up dating a guy who worked there. He taught me how to play cribbage, gave me unlimited free games, and dumped me for a much prettier girl who didn't even get through her first opponent during the statewide Soul Edge competition, which I won playing Taki.
But I played each and every character in that game. I loved them all. I learned, as any gamer does who likes to play fighting games that Character A was better against Character B and then boned up on my Rock, Paper, Scissors skills to be the person who got to choose their character last (there was no Rock, Paper, Lizard, Spock back then).
Now I didn't create the industry. I didn't devote my imagination and energy to creating video games. But I know plenty of girls who have and some from the very beginning. Carol Shaw was the first female game designer who created 3D TicTacToe for the Atari 2600. Dona Bailey created Centipede.
We've been there from the beginning boys. Maybe not hogging up all the space in the arcade walking around like we owned the place but some of us have.
I've camped out. I've pre-ordered. I've been to Japan and bought 50 games at once. I've played each and every Final Fantasy more than once and have made boys cry after many a "flawless victory". Ever seen Grandma's Boy? No? Then watch it because I'm that good at Dance Dance Revolution.
You don't hear us gamer girls bitching and moaning about all the bullshit male characters or masculine themes in video games, which are despite your complaints still made for you boys that can't get your ding-a-lings sucked on a Friday night.
We just play. That's what gamers used to do. We bought games and we played them because there wasn't that much to choose from that was worth playing. Nowadays none of us have this problem. There's more consoles out there, more games, and the games look, play, and are more realistic than they were when I was playing Pokemon Stadium.
So sorry if we girls have intruded on your "boys club", but we're here to stay. If you don't like it, take your game and fuck off.
End rant.
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