Women and gaming

Actually, I meant after Blood Gulch and through seasons 8-10. I love Tex to the bottom of my heart, she was my favorite through Blood Gulch. When she came back at 8, she was violent, aggressive, and murderous. Which she wasn't in during seasons 1-5, yes, she was the best of the group, but she also had the most humor in my opinion with how she used it and how she just rolled with the punches and worked with a bunch of idiots who failed out of the program.

If you look at all the female characters since Blood Gulch and before if you count season five. They run into three categories: Violent, aggressive and murderous: South, Carolina season 10, Tex (Except FBG and after the fight with Carolina.), category 2: Jealous, bratty and temperamental: South and Carolina season 10. And Category 3: Sister. (Enough said about the last one.)

Granted, I liked Carolina before season 10, I thought she was one of the best female characters that was ever made through the series. Then all of a sudden she fell into the stereotype that is listed above. I liked CT, I think she was an excellent character. But right now, a lot of the time it angers me how the women are suddenly treated in the rest of the series.

I also don't watch RWBY, I'm basing it off what I watch. Maybe it's because of the fact it's a different thing altogether. One person did comment on my complaint this is how women act in real life playing games. Hence this thread.

Sadly it seems like a common misconception, even some of the comments in the thread seem like it. As a female gamer who mostly ends up playing with guys, I hope it changes.

 

I think the stereotypes that are put in place for "gamer-girls" are rather stupid, personally, and yes, they do need to be broken. However, I don't think it's all the media's fault, or the fault that it's been a male-driven industry for the better part of 30 years. Girls themselves are also to blame, they mold these stereotypes into existence. They're the ones taking the half naked pictures of themselves and, and it makes the entirety of the female gamer demographic not taken seriously. It's an unfortunate side effect, but it's true. If women want to be taken seriously and have things leveled out on the field, so to speak, they need to stop using their sexual organs and mammaries to set themselves apart from us men. Unfortunately, a large number of girls enjoy the fact that in the Gaming/comic/etc industry they can get away with "tits=win".

 

And all the male characters are stereotypical idiot characters used in archetypal comedy, with Tucker being child like, Grif being the guy who gets physically hurt (primarily in the groin) and all of them in some capacity suggest, say or do stupid things. But I don't think it's misrepresentative of the male gender, I think it's just comedy archetypes being used for comedic effect, same with the women.
Comedy specifically plays off of our cultural ideas and laughs at them, like comedies about nerds (The Big Bang Theory) or gay couple (Modern Family) and so many other archetypes, for humorous effect, not to misjudge or be misrepresentative. Comedy offends some people because it plays off of our pre conceived stereotypes, taboos and other social norms that we feel comfortable in, I wouldn't say Burnie writes any differently than other comedy writers, it just took him several years to hire female voice actors to play female characters he couldn't write before.

I think comments about stereotypes in general are a little redundant, since in some capacity with will conform and challenge the stereotypes of our gender.
A female stereotype is that women like babies and find them cute, which I know a lot of women that do, but I know some of those same women love to watch sports on TV and cheer along, a primarily stereotypical male thing to do. I know a lot of men into doing some type of manual labour at home like wood or metal work, yet a number of them like to do cooking and/or cleaning around the house.
I myself love the art of fighting but i'm an emotional cry baby who will cry during movies or games or something. In the end we all fall into our gender stereotypes, because that's how we've been socialised, but it doesn't mean it's sexist, racist, or any other type of inequal stance, it's just a part of who we are.

 

The identity around being a "gamer girl" has always thrown me off a bit. You are female and you enjoy playing games and you ... flaunt this identity. Okay. If you wish, then. I suppose I understand the request in representation. I do not mind it but I can understand people thinking of it as obnoxious, possibly on the same level as the "dudebro" stereotype. But not all female gamers are like this, similarly to how not all male gamers are dudebros.

While it is entirely possible a select few may utilise the so called sex appeal, I do not believe the majority of female gamers which make up 47% or nearly half of the gaming market all do this and act sorely based on the idea of sex appeal. It can also be argued that the very existence of this is because of the male-dominated industry; female sexual objectification is much more rampant than its male counterpart, and it breeds the environment were this perpetuates. Perpetuates very much so.

I hardly believe that the lack of female representation in games is explicitly the fault of female gamers rather than it is the industry -- mainstream gaming industry itself, that is -- which we can agree has been, in the past, a male dominated institution. That being said, the gaming market has also perpetuated stereotypes about race, sexuality, and other social factors besides gender, and we can agree that it is not a clean-cut representation of its expanding demographic at all; a fledgling media market, still young and new. These stereotypes perpetuate in gaming as an extension of society's stereotypes. Gaming did not start any prejudice against women or homosexuals in gaming itself. The prejudice has existed for hundreds of years in the past and the institutionalized discrimination carries on through the media. What reasoning is there behind it? There is no one reason of course, and in fact everything is extremely convoluted lest we get into sociological debates. People do not take the female gamer demographic because of this well-entrenched, institutionalized stereotyping, not because female gamers have sorely been working on their sex appeal instead of their actual gaming skill. There has been many a time where I have seen a female gamer -- rather good at her gaming, at that -- who has been cast aside because of ... what exactly? She is not being overtly sexual. She is being a human being who enjoys playing games. We are all human beings who enjoy playing games, but we reside under a system that at best is changing slowly in terms of its media content.

Are individual women to blame? No. Are individual men to blame? No. Are all women or all men through history to blame? Non, non, non. What is to blame? Well, shall it be said we can blame our institutions and our past? We blame it for every other problem on the planet, after all, and it only makes sense -- we look back and we see the past and we realize, "hey, we can make this better than it already is". It means we can grow.

 

There's two reasons I respectfully disagree with you, first of all: Grif, Tucker, Sarge, etc... Have at some point broken out of the stereotypes. They have developed, they're falling back into it, yes. But for a while, they actually showed different facets of their personalities. The second time I watched it I caught it a lot more than I did the first time, Grif is a tank with a ton of common sense, Church is a good leader who cares for his teammates, Tucker despite hitting anything that breathes is a excellent fighter, Simmons is a genius with computers, including hacking Freelancer, Sarge is extremely brave and makes sometimes crazy, but well-laid plans that works, (aka: Grif running over Wash with a jeep to get Simmons back), Caboose despite being a dumbass sometimes figures out things better than anyone else, like finding a tank and figuring out that it would let them go into Freelancer, and he's great with mechanical parts.

They all have and sometimes still do break their roles. I have rarely seen this happen with the female side.

The second issue I have is: The Freelancer arc was never supposed to be a full-blown comedy. It was supposed to be a serious arc about what happened with the program. Hence the reason why there shouldn't have been stereotypes. The second reason is that some characters were shoved into the stereotypes WAY much later so it seemed out of character for them to suddenly change to that stereotype. Take Carolina for example: I already said I loved her character during season 9 and part of ten. During the second half, she became bratty, jealous and prone to tantrums. Whatever respect I had for her came to the same respect I have for South. And I really don't like South's character, despite going into it with an open mind in season 9.

Tex came at the same level, worse but for another reason all together that's not part of this debate. She was an excellent, strong character in Blood Gulch. I would say she wasn't a stereotype at all in Blood Gulch, and the most well-rounded characters of the group. She came back in season 8 with murder in her eyes and rarely changed from that until admittedly season 9 in Fake Blood Gulch, but when she was in Freelancer, she practically was the same person that she was in 8. In ten, she was another character I liked, until episode 21 where she was degenerated back to what she was in season 8. Tex has had so many flips of character from stereotype and back again it actually annoys me.

You want to see a well-balanced female character in Red vs Blue? Take CT, yes, she betrayed everyone. But she had strong reasoning behind it. She also deeply cared for her teammates and even tried to warn Wash about the program at the risk of herself. Everything she did was to try and stop the program and help keep her teammates from jail. Yes, we see the "Insurrection" fighting the Freelancers, but it's so horrendously vague that it could be a different reasoning to who those people were and what really was going on. She could've been trying to get her friends out of there and get help.

And I'm getting way off topic here.

Female gamers might have a bad rap, but it's not just the media and female gamers themselves. A lot of males think of it as a private club sometimes. It's the same with a lot of things, I know women work alongside men, but how often do women don't get paid as much as men for the same work? It's slowly changing, but it's still there. There's stereotypes for women as there are for minorities out there. Hell, look at Final Fantasy and how they treated African Americans since the beginning. I remember one person reacting in shock when an African American spoke normally in a game. It's not just women, it's a lot of things, sadly.

 

This is, again, a well use of comedy writing. Characters that are idiotic and comical will have the 'genius' trait in some sort of area, where they are uncharacteristically good at something when they typically are terrible in all areas. This is a subversion of the characteristics and subverting our norms of characters is somethjng comical. There will always be something funny about a childish idiot who can't write an e-mail, who also has a PhD in Aquatic Engineering, Nuclear physics and Child psychology. Because it subverts our initial preconceptions of a character, our 'stereotype' of said character, if you will. The genius-idiot comes from historical stereotypes of certain figures, whom with all their knowledge and intelligence sometimes can't do the simplest of thjngs like cook or who gets conned into buying something they don't need. Comedy is centered around cultural stereotypes and subverting them, which is why you'll find stereotyped characters in them.

There are stereotypes in all sorts of writing genres, even 'serious' ones. Like crime dramas, you'll have the stereotypical detective who has some sort of addiction (smoking, alcohol, drugs, sex) because of some life altering event (partner was killed, wife left him, tortured). You'll have cops who stereotypically love donuts, who beat suspects, who play the whole 'good cop, bad cop' interrogation. Serious characters have tons of stereotypes too, in all sorts of fictional media. We base stereotypes from behavioural trends, it's not like stereotypes are 'evil' or wrong, they're just who some people are.

What stereotypical do you see as these characters doing to be stereotyped as female? Tex being murderous doesn't seem too much of a feminine quality, more a male one in my eyes.

I'm presuming you're talking about stereotypes in the gaming industry? Women have been entering the market slowly but surely, the thing is video games were created by men, enjoyed by them and marketed to them for years, as much as Barbie is marketed to girls. It's changing now to simply be marketing to the biggest market (like new consoles showing off CoD because it's recently the most popular game series, or FIFA/NFL because of a big sports gaming demographic) and not exclusively for men, and the inclusion of more female characters in general has helped this, the industry is not stagnant, for sure.
So you have female gamers who want to work in the gaming industry, and i've not found the industry sexist in hiring, since usually people are hired for their talent, which is what any company should do. The reason for the mainly male demographic is because more men are studying to work in the gaming industry and not women, not because of sexist hiring or firing, i can presume. Not to say there aren't 'bro' teams, who want to keep the atmosphere the same, but with the laws in place around the world and the speciality of some jobs in gaming development, they can't afford to on average, not hire women because they don't want them there.
If we talk about inequalit in certain industries, hairdressing is majority female with minkrity male, bt that's because more women aim to be hairdressers than men, it's a cultural thing primarily.

And if you mean in games... I'd blame it to bad writing and characters. Video games still need to improve as they become even more mainstream media, expect it to alter.