Anywhere else the answers out of people's mouths are predictable, but I am curious how people here'd view this matter.
There's been a spring of feminism vs gaming lately, be it in the form of The Quinspiracy or Anita Sarkeesian bitching about Females being Furniture, it's becoming a hot topic with time, and there's likely to be a spring of others with similar complaints wrung in their grasp.
Thoughts?
I don't see it as harmful really. The purpose of video games is to immerse the player into a fantasy world or scenario where he/she completes tasks and receives rewards accordingly. I think it's fairly common for a man to have women as background pieces and/or objects in his own fantasy. And let's be honest, most of those people who utilize their time hating and harassing women like that online are probably geeky basement dwellers that'll try to marry the first woman they lose their virginity to. No one should ever project that behavior onto all men and it would be ignorant to do so.
On a side note: Tomb Raider was my favorite game as a kid
^ Yep. The only danger there is that these boys might get the idea that video games are a good model to try to base their real lives on, and that argument verges on the absurd.
Any boy who goes into the real world thinking it's ok to behave like a character in one of these video games (eg: GTA) deserves to have his throat cut by a hooker. lol
No way would I bother wasting my breath trying to educate a kid who would be that foolish. Let him suffer the natural consequences of being an asshole. :D
Anita goes on about that sort of thing too with the example "Mass Effect 2", stating that even as a female character the story and scenery is geared in a male-focused fashion, showing both a male and female Shepard watching the same Asari dance around scantily clad.
If she did her research, she'd see the case is more complicated than a binary gender issue, as Asari, while female in appearance, are a race of mono-gendered aliens that can procreate with other species of all genders and genital makeups. What's birthed from the coupling is an Asari with subtle traits and characteristics of the partner, so it's largely seen as a way of strengthening their genetics. Their society has different values and their people go through different stages of development when compared to humans, so at best it could be seen as a lore-driven excuse to see a blue woman dance around, a fairly well fleshed out "excuse" at that. On top of that, they tend to behave in an empowered fashion as a sexually liberated species that doesn't even take matters of gender into account (hard not to feel empowered when your race is the most compatible with making people's brains explode), so the only real argument left is turning the focus towards the writers, and they wrote them to sound strong, not weak.
Lets be honest, if the writers really were aiming to make a "slutty race", people would have accepted it with open arms without so much lore, and the examples of them being slutty would be far more widespread.