I may be retreading heavily trodden territory here, but this is a blog darn it and I'll use it to rant.

Alright, so one of my favourite personalities in gaming is TotalBiscuit.  I watched his casts of StarCraft II before I had even played the game and it brought me into it.  He does opinion pieces in his weekly mailbag and tends to get involved in the online community more than he should, since that community is often terrible.

A recent Twitter exchange of his popped up on Reddit's /r/gaming subreddit, saying he was "telling it like it is"



/r/gaming took this in the wrong direction, so TB tried to clarify on /r/girlgamers, and oh boy did he ever miss the point.

We've had this discussion at length here, but it is frustrating from my end because it seems like a giant *whoosh* over the heads of everyone.

TotalBiscuit said:

There are legitimate concerns about the portrayal of female characters in videogames. Some of this is rooted in the obnoxious character designs of old, some of it persists to this day. Personally I would not view this as misogynistic specifically, that would imply some kind of specific agenda behind it. Misogyny is a serious thing and should not be diluted and misused by simply saying "this character is attractive, has large breasts and is wearing revealing clothes, ergo misogyny". That's disrespectful to the issues at hand not to mention intellectually dishonest.

Misogyny as far as I'm concerned requires context.

misogyny
noun dislike of, contempt for, or ingrained prejudice against women: she felt she was struggling against thinly disguised misogyny

I would really, really like to know how he can post the former followed by the latter.  The entire point is that the character design is part of the ingrained prejudice.  I don't get why this is so hard to grasp.

TotalBiscuit said:

Mortal Kombat has skimpy outfits because the universe has always been over-the-top and unrealistic. It's not trying to say anything about women and it's certainly not trying to claim that women are inferior

Maybe I should try a different tact.  Make things more relatable by making it a matter of sexism directed towards men.

There had been a trend through the late 90s and 2000s on TV to portray men in comedies as bumbling idiots.  The lovable fool.  Imagine this character foil in the majority of media.  Kind of sucks doesn't it?  It wouldn't mean whoever was making it meant to say that all men are idiots, but by continuing the pervasive trend, it becomes a harmful negative stereotype and affects people's perceptions.  When you design female characters entirely for the consumption of male audiences, it creates a cultural bias of objectivity.

It's a matter of laziness if nothing else.  When you get lazy with character design, you use archetypes.  It just so happens the archetypes used for women are sexualized stereotypes.  That's symptomatic of the aforementioned ingrained prejudice, and entirely why it's a problem.