The Male Gaze

[DavidCaruso]

in violent videogames most people don't look upon them and think, "oh this violence is perfectly acceptable in a real-life situation". in videogames that reinforce sexist themes, however, the majority of people accept them as something that is Totally Normal in an everyday situation. i'm sorry that you're too fucking ignorant to realise that.

Can you name some examples of videogames that reinforce overt sexist themes, that the majority of people would accept as Totally Normal? I can't think of many off the top of my head right now; closest is DNF, but even with that I think most realized that the game's themes weren't Totally Normal at all (and also that it was a bad game to boot). Is an attractive female character reinforcing a sexist theme?

there's a difference between content and themes for one thing. most games, movies, etc... are full of actions which are in no way okay in real life, violence, murder, and such, but it is either made clear that it is wrong, or treated in a manner that is impossible to take it that the people behind the movie are endorsing it. with the male gaze, it is framed in a way that Women Must be Sexy all the time. on top of that, saying that the themes of a game can just be ignored because there's a gameplay aspect is just idiotic. are you saying a game with undertones about how cool child porn is is okay because its just games?

Well, define "undertones." For example, many of the new RPGs and 2D shooters from Japan have flagrant loli moe pandering (I remember there was a Cave shooter which actually listed the characters' ages on the select screen), but from what I've seen generally most fans of the genres are able to get over that (grudgingly) if the game content is great.

And I didn't say themes and aesthetics should be ignored, I said they should be secondary. When I look up a review for Duke Nukem Forever I don't want the majority of the review to be dedicated to how the game's attempts at humor are unfunny and offensive (how does the reviewer even know everyone else will be offended by it btw?) and just a few paragraphs describing how it's actually a bad game in addition to that - I just think that's a skewed sense of priority. So to clarify what I said earlier (which was kind of extreme and assholish in retrospect, and written quickly in response to a statement I interpreted as "a game's themes are more important than how it plays"), I don't think the commentary on that kind of stuff should be outright not mentioned, since it is still a major part of the game's aesthetics; it just shouldn't be the main focus. And I do think horrible aesthetics can ruin a game, or at least bring it down a lot, but those cases (for me, at least) are usually very rare and extreme. The examples you and Tyvon said would probably fall in that category.

For the child porn and hanging black people thing, yeah fair enough. I probably wouldn't play or enjoy those games very much either even if they were actually that amazing, because the aesthetics (more specifically "themes" in this case) don't appeal to me. However, I would want critics and/or people attempting to seriously talk about said games to at least acknowledge and praise their technical or mechanical excellence, even if they dock some points for child porn/hanging, instead of just moralizing about the themes and leaving it at that (which is what would likely happen in reality). Maybe then we'd get a fan-hacked version or the devs would do a rerelease or something, and then we'd have the best action game ever period instead of the best action game ever except the focus is on hanging black people.

Also I agree that ideally neither gender should be objectified in media, but the problem there is, where do you draw the line between idealization (using attractive and idealized people for the sake of escapism, with situations and people larger/better than real life) and oversexualization? I said earlier that with movies/TV I think the line would be when a scene or a character serves almost to no narrative purpose other than basically fanservice, but I don't think anyone responded to that.