Rock, Paper, Shotgun

15/01/2013 at 19:28 affront says:

Well, that is a lot of text.. let’s see:

1. I’ll interpret “more frequent misogyny” as “accounting for a higher percentage of the total products in the medium of games”, as there certainly isn’t a dearth of trashy movies/books – there are indeed more alternatives, though, as there simply is much more of it in total. You’re probably right, then.

2. Not sure what/if this has to do with this, but it’s true – although in my opinion significantly less so in genres that largely attract a playerbase of higher average age.

3. I didn’t really think about this at first, probably because I usually don’t care what the characters are – human, biological, AI, it’s all fine as long as the gameplay/mechanics are, too. I don’t expect to hate a hypothetical game where I play as a robot that mass-murders nothing but humans (or a woman on a men-killing spree). Your assumption may well be true for some, though.

5. I disagree. Yes, many game concepts and mechanics require conflict and thus usually violence, but they can just as well be (highly) abstract – I can’t think of many games whose mechanics absolutely require a realistic or even exaggerated depiction of violence. In the vast majority of games the level of detail used for depicting violence is gratuitous as they do absolutely nothing with the possibility of said violence causing moral impact. Thus I’d argue that violence, too, is most often included to boost sales.

6. True, that’s kind of repeating my original post, though. I was rather asking (or implying to, anyway) if they SHOULD be offended, and to what degree, if one were to approach both of these issues on even ground.

7. Here I also disagree – Hotline Miami is one of those abstract instances. It would be much less “funny” if said violence was shown via CryEngine or Frostbite or what have you and end up like a more realistic Postal, for which distasteful certainly applies.

Having thought about it further (and finally touching on 4.) I came to the conclusion that misogyny most likely does constitute a more insidious idea/thought pattern as, like you mentioned, the step from subconscious to acting upon it is less obvious. I’m still far from convinced that people who believe in equality from the get go have anything to fear (as in an unintended, creeping change of personal values) from fictional misogyny – but monitoring one’s thoughts a little won’t hurt.

That all said I do believe that an approach somewhat equivalent to that used with violence should be called for, as I’m pretty convinced that it would be more beneficial to all parties – I’d expect its “opponents” to react less harshly/troll-y and maybe really think about it instead.
I’d vastly prefer encouraging players’ self-awareness and honest self-observation of one’s pertinent actions, as one can not be absolutely sure if there are consequences to prolonged exposure to fictional misogyny, instead of the PITCHFORKS!!!!!!11 approach.

Of course one should simultaneously vote with one’s wallet if some especially egregious variant comes along, but a little moderation and a more analytical approach would be swell.

tl;dr
I concede that it is probably at least more insidious if not downright worse, yet the same methodology and standards should still apply when scrutinizing both issues as it’s far from conclusively proven that either case really influences one’s values.