The state of videogames and the impact on boys and young men

slong35 · 2021-10-14T02:05:31+00:00

I understand the desire to make strong female characters but I entirely agree. They really don’t need to make them act so hostile towards the male characters though (nor make them slightly different versions of male characters). All it does is make them incredibly boring and cringe inducing In my opinion.

One recent example I noticed was when I tried out black ops Cold War and sometimes when the operator Powers kills a male enemy, she says “Male target eliminated, no big loss”. :(

Deadlocked02 · 2021-10-14T00:51:05+00:00

Gaming is still fun. Despite how crazy the industry is when it comes identity politics, the stories themselves still aren’t as influenced by idpol to the same extent as Hollywood is. But they still are and it’s getting worse, no doubt about that. If I had to rank the types of medias I consume, I’d say anime > games > live-action. If you like story driven games, you can still find good male characters that aren’t being humiliated/diminished for benefit of female ones.

Given that games are some of the few places where young men still feel comfortable, of course there’s a lot of people bothered by that. While I do think that r/Kotakuinaction tends to give too much credit to random idpollers that are not worth the trouble sometimes, they absolutely have a point about the grip that wokeness has over the industry and how predatory gaming journalism is against those guilty of wrongthinking. And it baffles me even more than Hollywood, because while idpollers are not the majority of the audience of their movies, some of them still generate a lot of social media engagement. But I don’t think gamers care about this stuff as much. So why is the industry so hellbent on pandering like this (like I said, isn’t as bad or obvious as Hollywood, but it’s still there. And getting worse)? Why on Earth are professional advocates like Anita Sarkeesian, who very clearly don’t understand anything about games, still so relevant in the industry? It’s beyond me.

LordMandrews · 2021-10-14T00:10:37+00:00

I did most of my gaming in the 90s and early 00s. Then there was a long period away from gaming, until about 2012 when I started getting back into it in earnest.

In my experience, it's nice to see things have progressed away from basic tropes (rescue the princess, super hot babe with zero personality or story arc, etc). Then again, Kerrigan was a pretty deep and powerful character back in StarCraft. So in some ways, things have improved.

Nowadays, things are all over the place. Some games are a bit pushy and preachy, with women being highlighted in ways that stand out as unusual. For some reason I remember a minor scene in FF7R where Tifa and Aerith make a big deal about being able to fix a sewer pump station without a man. The whole thing just seemed kind of forced. Other games are much more blatantly man hating. And there are games with one dimensional borderline pornographic portrayals of women.

Then there are complex relationships like Joel and Ellie in The Last of Us, (I haven't played TLOU2 yet, but I heard there were problems with it), or Nathan Drake and Elena in The Uncharted Series that really show how things have evolved for the better. So, kind of a mixed bag.

Quit_social_media · 2021-10-14T03:51:48+00:00

Lara Croft has always been a pretty well loved character in the video game industry. She was tough as nails, intelligent, athletic, and pretty witty. So don't think male gamers necessarily oppose strong women, it's more that modern video games aim to be anti-male in the quest to be pro-women - which just isn't needed. Characters like Lara Croft were pretty badass already; shot male enemies aglore as the gameplay allowed, but it was never politically forced. She wasn't deliberately antagonistic and anti-male for the sake of being antagonistic, like we do see with some modern games.

I also think it's sad and hypocritical that we're in the West are lax seeing blood, gore, and violence on the regular in video games (and we should be fine, it's personal preference and people should make their own decisions about what to buy), but as soon as a female characters is in any way sexualised, it's suddenly censorship galore! A lot of Japanese games are quite sexualised and as long as the games don't take themselves too seriously, I don't think it does any harm. Whereas when content is heavily censored, such as boob jiggles or removal of cleavages, it can legitimately hurt the experiences if that was what was originally intended from the game.

BloomingBrains · 2021-10-14T05:10:44+00:00

No, I don't agree with that characterization at all. I can't think of any single time I've seen a powerful female character being "disgusting with men". Not even sure what he really means by that to be honest.

If anything, I see gaming as a kind of refuge. Granted, I don't play the really mainstream games like Fortnight, Call of Duty, etc. I did play a ton of Doom Eternal all last year until my graphics card broke, though. But my point is that where is he seeing all this? From what I've seen, games are usually completely neutral about gender politics or they're doing the "damsel in distress" thing. And I actually see the latter as a positive representation of men, even though many would argue it taps into protector/provider tropes, because its humanizing them by showing them as altruistic towards women in a time when many people try to paint men as the opposite. I can see how the damsel in distress trope might bother some people, but the solution I'd propose to that is making more female protagonists rescue a male "damsel" in distress. Which is something you rarely see in games that have a strong female protagonist, oddly enough.

Rockbottom503 · 2021-10-14T08:34:00+00:00

I don't play. I have kids obsessed with them though, I get the escapism but if I were to let them, they would probably spend 15 hours a day on them and that's not healthy! My advice to anyone who does game is to make sure you self moderate and enjoy the other things life has to offer.

Title	The state of videogames and the impact on boys and young men
Author	Nath43673
Upvotes	47
Comments	43
Date	October 13, 2021 10:44 PM UTC (4 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/q7mkdw/the_state_of_videogames_and_the_impact_on_boys/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/the-state-of-videogames-and-the-impact-on-boys-and.1079681 https://theredarchive.com/post/1079681

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