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| This is Quiet from Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, pretty much perfectly exemplifying the sex appeal marketing strategy. I was so heavily tempted to flip the gender role and put up a picture of Snake in Quiet's skimpy clothing, but I decided to go with the image that wouldn't require intensive therapy. To those of you that want to see what I'm talking about and are foolish enough to look, here you go. I apologize in advance. Also, thanks to Techtimes for the image. Also I apologize for the long caption, but I thought it warranted an explanation. |
The Gamergate controversy may have more or less come to a close, but unfortunately for humanity, the exact same problem is repeating itself only a meager two years later. I'm specifically talking about the Donald Trump and Megyn Kelly conflict. I've heard of history repeating itself, but it usually has the courtesy to wait at least a decade.
One main reason that things like this keep happening is that no real lessons are learned. With the Gamergate fiasco come and gone, people have already dismissed it as a small group of online trolls. No real lesson was seemingly learned from this entire debacle, and attempts to bring an understanding to the situation sometimes fall flat on their face. The Verge discussed a Gamergate discussion panel at South by Southwest (SXSW), where the only female panelist admitted that she was not even a gaming journalist, and one of the male panelists was offensively dismissive of the subject. Instead of trying to offer an intellectual discussion of the Gamergate controversy, the panelists instead reinforced the negative belief that Gamergate adopted: females don't know what gaming is about and only men should play video games. Smooth.
If you want to find journalistic opinions of the Gamergate incident and gender in gaming, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet. Unfortunately since this is a very recent issue, the amount of scholarly work is still being developed. A recent scholarly survey did find that gender is not one of the significant topics learned in most video games. This actually makes quite a lot of sense. Video games are still treated as a masculine hobby by advertisers. As such, developers usually don't care too much about gender politics and don't try to include strong female characters or even try to be femininely appealing.
For the longest time the hot debate surrounding video games was violence. Granted, it's still a widely discussed topic, but from my experience, it dropped in popularity once Gamergate happened. However, I personally think the two topics are linked. I don't believe that video games cause actual violence, but it's hard to deny that violent video games also increases aggressive behavior. I've played enough online shooters to know that tensions rise quite easily and are as explosive as a red barrel. There are several surveys that also support this idea, such as this one. Are angry gamers known to actually make good on virtual threats and assault others? Not really. Did the women affected by Gamergate actually face physical violence? Again, not really. But their address was posted online and they were placed in actual danger. It isn't too much of a stretch to say that the teenage to adult male gamers that play violent video games develop aggressive attitudes, especially with the anonymity granted by online services, would also lash out against the female gamers that were targeted by Gamergate.
It isn't a no-hope scenario. For example, this experiment has students playing "Age of Empires 2" to learn history lessons. There are also some video games that do teach the importance of gender appreciation, and they are coming into mainstream light, so it isn't a hopeless cycle. But then again, this is also just one new subculture that's learning a lesson, versus an entire political party regressing back to middle school insults.
