Gender portrayals in video games are getting ridiculous

[Alorael at Large]

You can't play a game without looking at graphics, and many of the problems of portrayal go deeper than revealing outfits. The roles female characters get aren't the same.

 

Oh, and while I'm not sure how many high school dropouts make great games, Jeff himself dropped out after making Exile. Out of grad school, granted, but still.

 

—Alorael, who considered listing Aveline as a good female role. She's not unattractive, but her portrayal isn't sexualized (and she even gets decent armor!), her role in the plot is as a soldier and captain that men look up to, and her party role is macho tanking. She also could be replaced by a male equivalent with little disruption, but I think that itself, as long as the character isn't given excessive tomboyishness and "masculinity" to offset being female, isn't a gender problem.

[Sprinkles29]

Well it has to do with the fact that males are the risk takers biologically speaking. We can sit in an office building and pretend like men and women have the same role in life. Or we can be honest with ourselves.

 

I think that honesty comes out a bit in fiction. Women's bodies are different from men. A woman's body is a sactuary for the future generations and must be kept safer for longer periods of uninterrupted time than a male who can get many women pregnant then go off to war without risking the immediate well being of his many offspring.

 

This is why men have evolved to aspire to risk. While women have evolved to aspire to nest. There are many many exceptions but this is the general case. It might not even be the majority, it may only be the largest minority. However in general I feel that it is true. Otherwise the human fertility rate would have suffered too much in the past.

 

Anyway the psychology of a human being mimics their biological role. Even though violence is a miserable thing, young boys still tend to have completely unrealistic dreams about it.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

Well it has to do with the fact that males are the risk takers biologically speaking. We can sit in an office building and pretend like men and women have the same role in life. Or we can be honest with ourselves.

Are you a biologist? Because I am, and I can tell you that you're speculating wildly about stuff that there's frankly very little hard evidence about when it comes to humans. Just stop.

[Sudanna]

Well, since you brought up Aveline, I would count Leliana as well.

 

Whether biology has bearing on our actions or not (it does) is irrelevant; why should we let biology do that? Why should we do what it says?

 

Quote:

A woman's body is a sactuary for the future generations and must be kept safer for longer periods of uninterrupted time than a male who can get many women pregnant then go off to war without risking the immediate well being of his many offspring.

 

When that was a concern, that was a valid argument. When most men don't get all that much risk anymore and most women are safe during pregnancy anyways, the "survival of the species" argument really loses its weight. While such behaviors may be evolutionarily ingrained, that's not all there is to it, and I would point to culture as having the larger role in determining what constitutes gender.

[Aoslare]

They aren't even evolutionarily ingrained. "Going off to war" was not even a thing until long after our species evolved.

[Sudanna]

Well, going off to war is an expression of seeking glory and superiority. And bloodlust.

[Sprinkles29]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

Well it has to do with the fact that males are the risk takers biologically speaking. We can sit in an office building and pretend like men and women have the same role in life. Or we can be honest with ourselves.

Are you a biologist? Because I am, and I can tell you that you're speculating wildly about stuff that there's frankly very little hard evidence about when it comes to humans. Just stop.

Well that's a rude way to say anything.

Anyhow no I'm not a biologist but my best friend is an evolutionary biologist as a matter of fact and we have discussions about this type of thing whenever we can.

She's never told me to "Just stop" like some kind of ass. I have better places where I can go to consider this topic you. And go ahead and delete my account from this forum. This isn't the first time someone has been rude to me on here for no reason. It's not even worth logging back in. Can't say anything without some ass being an ass.

[Dintiradan]

I've heard the "men seek high risk, women seek low risk" argument before. I think it's held as 'conventional wisdom' the same way 'women are better at relating to protagonists of the other sex than men are' is.

 

Again, something to keep in mind is that our viewpoint might be very different than that of game designers. We think "society is too misogynist, media should be made that challenges this". It's very likely that they think "profits are maximized when we produce media that society has come to expect". Should there be some moral imperative when making games?

 

(The other very likely possibility is that game designers are

.)

 

(Make sure you pause so you can read all the bullet points.)

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

Well that's a rude way to say anything.

I'm not the one who made sweeping, insulting generalisations about men and women's "role in life". If people say things that are offensive and couch them in fake science, I'm going to call them out as offensive, and I'm not going to apologise for that.

[keira]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

Well that's a rude way to say anything.

I'm not the one who made sweeping, insulting generalisations about men and women's "role in life". If people say things that are offensive and couch them in fake science, I'm going to call them out as offensive, and I'm not going to apologise for that.

<333

I was going to say something in response to that, but then I figured Lilith would do a better job.

And she did.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

I think that honesty comes out a bit in fiction. Women's bodies are different from men. A woman's body is a sactuary for the future generations and must be kept safer for longer periods of uninterrupted time than a male who can get many women pregnant then go off to war without risking the immediate well being of his many offspring.

Evolutionarily speaking, though, women probably weren't protected especially well. Oh, some, but hunter-gatherers had to go out and hunt and gather, and large predators still required running very fast

Quote:

Anyway the psychology of a human being mimics their biological role. Even though violence is a miserable thing, young boys still tend to have completely unrealistic dreams about it.

Here's the real problem. We don't have access to the biological underpinnings of psychology. We can hypothesize, and your hypothesis isn't unreasonable even if some people don't like it. But since there's no way to separate out cultural pressures, which have also become deeply ingrained in psychology, it's a difficult question. Are men the warriors in most cultures? Yes, but not in all. Are men more aggressive in most cultures? Most, but not all. There are always exceptions, and then it's hard to say whether they're culture overcoming biology or whether biology is neutral on the subject and those are examples of divergent cultural evolution.

The real key, though, is that making generalizations about what men and women are like tends to offend people. Be very careful with it, especially when your claims are by no means even the consensus in evolutionary biology and psychology.

—Alorael, who thinks he's probably speaking to empty air. But it's worth pointing out that a conclusion isn't wrong even if it's highly offensive. In this case, it's unproven, which means soundly backing it isn't justified. There's a difference.

[Enraged Slith]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Sprinkles29

Well that's a rude way to say anything.

I'm not the one who made sweeping, insulting generalisations about men and women's "role in life". If people say things that are offensive and couch them in fake science, I'm going to call them out as offensive, and I'm not going to apologise for that.

Is he wrong?

You're the biologist. I'd honestly like to hear what the scientific community has to say about human nature. I've got my own theories, but they're pretty much pulled straight from my own experiences and motivations.

[Alorael at Large]

Scientists have all kinds of things to say. Consensus doesn't really exist on the deep motivational and evolutionary issues. Psychologists have isolated all kinds of quirks in our collective thinking and neuroscientists are beginning to pick the physiology behind it apart, but complex behavior like what motivates us, and how that's different between sexes? Not resolved. Not even close.

 

—Alorael, who will point out that man's closest evolutionary relatives are bonobos. They're matriarchal, fairly nonviolent, and have a social structure based heavily on sexual interaction. In other words, their culture isn't much like human culture. It could be that bonobos diverged... but it also means that humans have had the evolutionary time to become unlike other species, so the only good example is humans. Studying humans in a cultural vacuum is impossible, and even trying to study across cultures is difficult, and only becomes moreso as cultures mix and pick up each others' memes.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

Is he wrong?

You're the biologist. I'd honestly like to hear what the scientific community has to say about human nature. I've got my own theories, but they're pretty much pulled straight from my own experiences and motivations.

There's not even enough substance to his claims to call them wrong: he's making statements based on practically no evidence at all. "The scientific community" has very little definitive to say about "human nature" one way or the other. "Sorry, you're on your own here" may not be a comforting answer when trying to figure out how people should relate to one another, but it's the most honest one.

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

I'd honestly like to hear what the scientific community has to say about human nature. I've got my own theories, but they're pretty much pulled straight from my own experiences and motivations.

Biology has much less to say about "human nature" per se than psychology does, and the conclusions that psychology draws are pretty famously negative- think the Stanford Prison study or Milgram's Experiment.

Of course, psychology also tends to be less, ah, rigorous than most of the "hard sciences", so it's hardly like the debate's settled. Like Lilith said, you're pretty much on your own when it comes to drawing conclusions from the available material.

[Lilith]

The flip side of this, by the way, is that when people make claims about human nature, usually they're really making claims about what they want to be true. And it's absolutely legitimate to judge people based on what they want for the world. People who say with confidence that human nature is mutable may be on just as shaky epistemic ground as people who say with confidence that human nature is immutable, but I know who I'd rather vote for.

[Dikiyoba]

Quote:

—Alorael, who will point out that man's closest evolutionary relatives are bonobos.

That's only half the Pan genus, you troglodytes.

Dikiyoba is sorry for making that pun, but not sorry enough to not have made it.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Dantius

Did you know that both Milgram and Zimbardo went to the same high school? I just learned that a few years ago. Talk about coincidence.

Mind: blown.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Mind: blown.

have you ever seen the two of them together

makes you think

[Alorael at Large]

You're right, I left out the chimpanzees to make a point. Maybe it's better if I leave them in: if chimps and bonobos are equally close to humans but so socially distinct from each other, it's hard to stand on firm evolutionary psychology.

 

—Alorael, who heard rumors, just rumors, that Zimbardo kept hitting Milgram because someone told him to and Milgram had him sent to the principal, where he got sent to the world's worst detection.

[Student of Trinity]

I raised much this same biological gender roles notion in the daughter thread about literature. I acknowledged it as a speculative hypothesis rather than a fact, and it certainly wasn't a hypothesis to support what I want to be true. For me, rather, it's a threat assessment: how bad could the problem be?

 

Maybe there isn't much scientific evidence for the idea that men are risk-takers and competitors by biological instinct, while women are nesters and co-operators. But that's not because nobody has ever noticed any such tendency. It's because the question is about social roles, so it is inevitably hard to determine whether any observed effect is due to social or biological causes.

 

I'm not even sure it makes all that much difference, though. Biological instincts are not impossible to overcome; nothing biology could possibly tell us is going to mean that women have to stay in the kitchen. Long-standing social norms are not easy to alter; nothing social psychology is going to tell us is going to mean that changing society will be easy. Either way, there is a big problem, but there will be things we can do about it. The point is to understand the problem, not to excuse it or ignore it.

 

I'm a physicist instead of a biologist, so I don't necessarily look for decisive evidence first. I'm willing to propose an idea based on theory, try it, and see how it turns out.

 

Suppose that women do have some innate tendency to co-operate for the sake of security, rather than compete for excellence like men. "Some innate tendency" does not mean absolute determinism; but suppose it does mean something. What could then still be done to make better roles for female characters in games?

 

If one could identify a way to do that, under those assumptions, then I think it would be a good idea, even if the assumptions proved false. Games based on that idea would in that case still be a good thin edge of the wedge, that could thereafter expand.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I'm not even sure it makes all that much difference, though. Biological instincts are not impossible to overcome; nothing biology could possibly tell us is going to mean that women have to stay in the kitchen. Long-standing social norms are not easy to alter; nothing social psychology is going to tell us is going to mean that changing society will be easy. Either way, there is a big problem, but there will be things we can do about it. The point is to understand the problem, not to excuse it or ignore it.

It's not clear how distinguishing those two possible sources of the problem will change what we can do about it, unless you're proposing eugenics.

[Randomizer]

Evolution in action. Supposedly under Darwinism the survival of the fittest would mean that the idiots would kill themselves off except for two factors.

 

1 - The idiots tend to have a higher reproduction rate than intelligent well adjusted families. So more of them have a chance to survive their stupidity. Much like cockroaches and other vermin.

 

2 - The idiots are just as like to take the intelligent ones with them when they go. For example drunk drivers and all those other idiots that think just because they haven't had an accident doing something stupid, one won't occur.

 

It would take a few more generations to test the above and we might not survive the experiment.

 

On psychological experiments, back in the 1980s it was found that most test groups in university studies almost always consisted of sophomore students. This tended to bias experimental results.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

On psychological experiments, back in the 1980s it was found that most test groups in university studies almost always consisted of sophomore students. This tended to bias experimental results.

this is what happens when you post requests for experimental subjects on student noticeboards around your university

also when you offer free pizza as part of the payment for showing up

[Frozen Feet]

While humans are sexually dimorphic species and that must have some effect on our basic psychology, it's been noted that learned behaviours ("culture", though use of such specific term is not even necessary) can and do override instinct.

 

It's visible in every other animal as well. Vast groups of animals are capable of adapting to their surroundings, and depending on their surroundings, two groups consisting of same species can act very differently.

 

Historically, the role of women and men has been influenced more by economics than biology. This thing about women "staying in the kitchen"? It's pretty much comes from the industrial revolution. You see, when agriculture was the main form of living, both men and women stayed home, and did the same things. But when industrialization came about and work moved away from home, men had to leave the farm or "home" - and as someone had to stay behind to take care of it, it became the job of women. You can easily spot that there's a fair bit of arbitrariness going on here - if women had gone to work in factories instead, men would've assumed the role as primary "homemakers".

 

Besides, the whole idea of women being "homemakers" falls apart when you try to apply it to hunter-gatherers or other nomafic societies. Bluntly, there were no homes. Men moved in search of prey, and women moved with them. There might have been some predilection for ment to hunt and for women to gather, but when you think of the circumstances, it's clear the roles can't have been that set in stone. If a human tribe was short of men, why wouldn't women have taken up their roles, hmmm?

[Kreador]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

On psychological experiments, back in the 1980s it was found that most test groups in university studies almost always consisted of sophomore students. This tended to bias experimental results.

this is what happens when you post requests for experimental subjects on student noticeboards around your university

also when you offer free pizza as part of the payment for showing up

Yep. Self-selecting groups are automatically weighted. And attempts to draw from the general record as sociologists and some cultural anthropologists do is that it's nearly impossible to isolate for variables and prone to selecting samples based on the hypothesis (investigator bias).

The joking version of that, of course, is the Internet meme about heart attacks in various populations. The French eat lots of heavy creams and have fewer heart attacks than Americans, the Japanese eat almost no heavy creams and have fewer heart attacks than Americans. So what causes heart attacks is being American. ;-)

If the concept of the biological imperative of bearing live young and raising them to maturity were the root of the commonly held societal roles of males and females, it should be consistent across all species, and of course it isn't.

Unfortunately, the concept that "a woman's work is in the home" is not a relatively new concept from the industrial revolution, either. It exists in many societies across the world and down through history--though it isn't quite universal.

All of that wanders a long way back to the original topic that there is a great societal undercurrent that puts women in the roles of objects, though the current expression of that as "boobs-and-backsides" sex objects is different from the "bearers of children" images of many earlier societies. The latter speaks to the larger procreative drive, the former to the instant gratification of sexual release.

[Alorael at Large]

I think we've also wandered off after a red herring. It doesn't really matter what the statistics say on men and women. Characters in literature are often exceptional; in fact, probably more often than not. (And this goes back to Aristotle's Poetics: good protagonists are better than us, but flawed, and have been for thousands of years.

 

It doesn't matter whether women on the whole are mostly risk takers, risk averse, risk neutral, all different, or what the proportions are. What matters is that there are some in each category, and it's valid to provide recognition in literature.

 

—Alorael, who also notes that biological drive really can't be seen as an overwhelming motivating force. There are plenty of men and women who don't reproduce and don't seem to want to. Not majorities, but not negligible numbers, either. If you can spit in the face of evolutionary pressure like that, you can probably beat most of what evolution throws at you.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

I'm a physicist instead of a biologist, so I don't necessarily look for decisive evidence first. I'm willing to propose an idea based on theory, try it, and see how it turns out.

The problem is you can't really do that with biology (or psychology, for that matter), because confirmation bias is huge when it comes to interpreting animal behavior. That's part of the reason it was Jane Goodall, with her limited education and experience, who made so many discoveries about common chimpanzee behavior and society and not the scientists who studied chimps before her. That's why scientists were able to miss animals engaging in homosexual and bisexual behavior for so long only to suddenly discover that everything from beetles to bonobos do it. (I'm oversimplifying like crazy here, of course.) So it's bad science, because scientists get so caught up in their ideas about how biology should work that they completely miss how biology does work. And it's bad morals, because these ideas generally end up supporting racism, sexism, and all the other bigoted social norms of the day. So yeah.

To try to get this thread back on track, Heather Mason of Silent Hill 3 is an example of a strong character who just happens to be a woman.

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

The problem is you can't really do that with biology (or psychology, for that matter), because confirmation bias is huge when it comes to interpreting animal behavior. ....

This is an interesting point. But to avoid diverting this thread, in which I'm also still interested, I've responded to this post in the other thread, about gender roles in reality.