This is actually from 2022, but I missed it back in the day. This is quite important research imo, and very relevant lately. Link to the paper itself: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0747563222001637
Something, something, can’t prove a negative… While valuable research, it doesn’t prove no harm is done. It can only provide evidrnce that the harm they tested for didn’t appear to happen. That is a kind of important difference.
I mean sexualized movies with skimpy ladies and jacked dudes, and smut books are not harmful broadly speaking, so I don’t really see why video games would be different.
They are causing harm, but not by being sexual. By posing unrealistic standards
yes, sadly
I’m not sure why this is being downvoted because setting unrealistic body standards is absolutely terrible for society
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Who said that was a requirement? It’s still a fact that it causes harm
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Me arguing something can be harmful for society doesn’t mean I’m arguing it has to be abolished in its entirety. I’m not sure why you think everything has to be black and white since obviously there’s room for artistic use- remember you are the only one who thought that, or perhaps it just wasn’t obvious for you. And can you explain how unrealistic body standards is not bad for society? It isn’t far fetched seeing young people compare to beauty standards they are bombarded with. It doesn’t only happen in video games but in tons of visual media.
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I propose it’s not the fiction that’s posing unrealistic standards, but the people who can’t tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Fiction, is by definition, unrealistic.
You said sexualised movies, I thought you meant movies in which human actors are jacked, sometimes to an unhealthy extent. That’s also the problem with a lot of actresses and also influencers, who are after plastic surgeries, in the perfect light, with a lot of makeup on, posing unrealistic standards for impressionable kids
Somebody else said that, not me. But regardless, it’s still a problem with people not being able to recognize fact from fiction. Makeup is not the problem, the problem are people who expect you to to look like that without makeup. Boob jobs are not the problem, the problem are people who think there’s something wrong with you if you’ve not had one.
If they replaced everything with mocap tomorrow so actors didn’t have to look the part any more, the problem would still be that people look at Marvel and think it’s an accurate depiction of reality.
Then the problem surely is media literacy?
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Like I said in another comment
Yeah, I really think it’s a type of media illiteracy, and it’s much larger than just sexualization.
Fiction can easily be realistic- You’re thinking of fantasy which is unrealistic. Fiction means it’s not a true story, not that it can’t be realistic
Nah, fiction needs unrealistic elements. You can have realism in fiction, but fiction is defined by its deviance from fact. If a movie were completely realistic, itd be a documentary.
This can’t be your honest take…
What’s wrong with it?
Well, it’s inaccurate. Fiction does not require unrealistic elements. There’s just scads of fiction out there—across multiple genres—that’s set in a real time and place, and doesn’t involve anything fantastical.
It is possible to have a realistic story in fiction. For example, Mad Men is a tv series that’s pretty grounded in history but the characters and everything that happens to them are the product of the writers and their research. It’s not a documentary, it’s fiction, but quite realistic.
I envision ‘realistic’ as a spectrum. If it is 100% realistic, it’s a documentary, if it’s 100% unrealistic, it’s probably a fantasy movie or something, and most works of fiction fall somewhere between.
characters and everything that happens to them are the product of the writers and their research
Like, you understand this is my point, right? The plot is not real, and that’s what makes it fictional?
What you’re saying is sound and I agree the plot not being real is fiction; the only problem is you said fiction required unrealistic elements and most people see “unrealistic” as basically fantasy
“can be” ⇏ “has to be”
And it’s not fiction that sets high standards, but the people watching it, that are doing so.
Now you may say that the people are setting those standards only because they are watching said stuff.
But that is just rephrasing, “the people watching fiction are incapable of having their own imagination”.Back in school, I had a classmate that had a much greater height than others, due to steroid usage.
Now if you say that his parents did that because they watched “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure”, I’ll say it was not released yet and I have no reason to believe that they bought comic strips from another country and went ahead and made a ‘gag’ piece a basis for their standards.If you swap the words “fiction” and “fantasy” in your post, it makes the same amount of sense.
Have you ever read historical fiction? Stories like jane eyre are not real but they’re sensible. A story can be fiction and realistic. You can write a short story based on stuff you’ve researched and seen and it’s still fiction.
The issue is the many people who complain when a game or other media have women that look like actual women. Calling them men because they don’t look like the perfectly sexualized women in media that they’re used to.
Yes they can’t tell the difference, but they’re still doing real harm.
Banning sexualization is not the solution, but the prevalence of it in media to the point it is expected and people get angry when it’s gone is a problem as well.
Yeah, I really think it’s a type of media illiteracy, and it’s much larger than just sexualization.
Like, I grew up in the church, and remember when they adopted the Left Behind novels into church canon as prophecy. It’s the same kind of not being able to tell fact from fiction, and my parent’s church encouraged it because they were a bunch of con artists.
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no its the right wing influencers backed by russia doing this. they are responsible for getting men into Right wing politics, and by extension hating women is one of thier goals too.
right wing influencers are exploiting mistakes that the left did, they are filling in the role of fighters for male rights for example
Isn’t this just the equivalent of the “shooter game discussion” that we had a few years ago?
I.e., some people argued that playing shooter games would make the people more inclined towards gun violence and we’d see more shootings IRL. but that didn’t happen, as we know a few years later.
it’s quite straightforward then to assume that sexualized video games don’t really lead to more sexualization IRL, i guess.
The violence discussion comes and goes every couple years. It has since the 80s at least. It’s never had any ground in reality, it’s just fear of whatever media they don’t understand.
RFK Jr., noted brainworm host and multi talented repeater and innovator of quackery, said that shit within the last 24 hours lol
I saw, but this is the admin to bring back up such heinous bullshit.
Oh I was offering that as supporting evidence for your point lol. There’s roughly nothing (besides reason and compassion) these folks can shit out of their mouths that will surprise me anymore.
Fair enough and agreed. I don’t have much else to talk about with this, so have a great day, captain!
As for RFK, I hope he has has a horrible terrible fucking day, the cretin.
As a dude, I exclusively use female characters to get gifts in multi-player games
It’s almost like there’s another reason for censorship
Skimming their data tables (don’t have access to the journal outside of work), it feels like a really broad hodge pdge of semi-related studies (which the authors essentially admitted).
But it also kind of misses the point. The problem isn’t titties or dicks in video games. The problem is the culture around it and what it reinforces and it very much goes far beyond video games. Big jiggly titties? You are a mature game. Dick size slider so you can rock a magnum dong that needs a monster condom? You are progressive. What? Both of those are just more male gaze?
And all of that is normalized. You won’t see a significant change from the baseline because that IS the baseline.
You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink. We all made the same joke about Lies of Timothee Chalamet being one of the better souslikes of the past decade but it is also very telling that we mostly see our twinks in full stillsuits or twelve layers of Victorian clothing. Look, but have enough chastity belts that nobody needs to be worried about being able to touch. And the moment you have a woman who doesn’t have an hourglass figure? See: The Last Of Us 2.
Which is the issue. We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular (I’ll always cite that Yasuke was a recurring character in Nioh long before people turned him into a culture war).
Its like saying that gas stoves cause no meaningful decrease in air quality but having every study take place in the home of a pack a day smoker.
Maybe we need more women working in game design. I don’t know the figures, but I’m guessing they are underrepresented. We probably need more diversity in games generally. It feels like this should be obvious to studios too - the more diverse your team, the more likely your game is to appeal to a diverse audience = a larger pool of customers.
Maybe we need more women working in game design.
eardrums immediately shattered by screams of Gamergate reactionary media
If you have a way to make (qualified) women study software engineering and other game dev related fields, please do share. I would love that.
But you can’t fix lack of women and generally diverse people skilled in game dev during hiring. We have seen the results of trying multiple times.
Wow. Every dog in the tri-state area suddenly started barking. I wonder why…
But yeah. That is some bullshit that comes up every time anyone tries to address the diversity issues. “Well, if there were more intelligent black people, maybe we would hire a black or two” level comments.
In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself. Depending on how rigorous the program that can change drastically as the weeding out courses happen, but it generally is “close enough” by the time they are in the 400s and going to special guest lectures by us industry a-holes.
The problem is what comes after. There is a reason there are Black Engineering and Women in Engineering mailing lists. Because so many companies (and graduate programs) basically want a “diversity hire” and nothing else. So you might have a class that graduates with 40% women entering a workforce that will hire 5%, at best. And… the good groups talk about this and encourage people to have a plan B. Whereas men (at least up until recently) know that if they just keep trying they’ll get hired eventually because 95% of those jobs are for them.
And grad school (less an issue for game dev) has the added problem where so many advisers are complete creeps with tenure. But that is a different mess.
No. Whatever the field, if you actually work towards having a diverse hiring pool and actually hire on merit, you tend to have an employee demographic within a stones throw of the regional breakdown. Because, yes, socioeconomic and institutionalized racism do give certain ethnic groups a serious disadvantage. But when you are hiring for roles with undergrad or graduate degrees? The best of the best are the ones who actually DO tend to find a way to bootstrap themselves up (or have parents who did). And… long term that goes a long way towards fixing things. It isn’t the complete solution but it REALLY helps.
A very good friend of mine who I worked with heavily on doing exactly that at our old company loved to joke about it as “reverse-gentrification of the work force”. The idea that if you get a diverse foothold into a “neighborhood”, it spreads. Those pesky women are more likely to know other pesky women who are a great fit for a role. And the kids of the Walker family are suddenly growing up in Silicon Valley and going to private schools rather than fighting for scraps at PS 118.
Makes me think why those big tech corporations are suddenly supportive of that regime in DC.
The “good” news is that the vast majority of that has nothing to do with ideology. It is all about staying in fuckface’s good graces so they can get more government contracts or, best case scenario, have some legislature and grants built up specifically to benefit them musk-style.
As you go more towards the startup size of company (O(10) or even O(100) heads, including admin) things get a lot murkier and you have a lot more True Believers. But the zucks and Jensens of the world are pretty much the definition of apolitical in that they only care about what makes them more money in the short term.
I would like to add that why they’re so open for the scumfuck is because they want to ditch what they see as “troublesome” and “costly” progressive programs aka DEI; they would like to restore conservatism in the tech industry like in the 80s, the so-called “natural order of things” that is, white men in top positions while women and minorities clean up the mess.
Again, there are definitely the scumfucks who are true believers. And NOBODY liked “DEI” as a policy since it almost always manifested as all the worst elements of “affirmative action”. It was well intentioned but it was very much a bunch of white liberals behind it. Its why the republicans run on “anti-DEI” platforms so much. Yes, it is a dog whistle but it also is one of those things where it is hard to find anyone who actually wants to defend those poison pill initiatives. What differs is “Why would we want any fucking blacks in our company” versus “Let’s actually focus on making a diverse hiring pool so that our workforce is the best and the brightest and not just hiring the first person we can find so that we can check off a box”. The number of times I had to say the work safe equivalent of “I’m not with that nazi”…
But the thing to understand is that the mega corporations? They don’t give a fuck about white supremacy. Most are global affairs with a fairly diverse upper level management (albeit, with an over-representation of East Asia). They have zero incentive to actually want white supremacy to be a thing. But they DO have a lot of incentives to make token gestures and spend marketing money on placating the white supremacists who are increasingly in power globally.
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In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself.
I don’t know anything about other STEM fields or other countries, but where I live, most sw engineering courses don’t have above 5%. (And I guess even fewer men in the medicine field. Some fields just seem to attract specific genders, idk why.)
But yeah, dismiss reality I have seen with my own eyes as “The dog whistles! The dog whistles!” And then act surprised when no one outside your echo chamber takes you seriously.
That was always my experience. You can force people to do hundreds of hours of sensitivity training and explain to them why making the acronym for their solver “SLUR” is inappropriate. But if you just focus on increasing the diversity of your hiring pool and ACTUALLY hiring the best and the brightest, so much of that solves itself because now there is someone to explain that China and Japan may have a lot of shared culture and history but are very much not the same country or why that word is totally a slur and so forth.
I don’t know the actual metrics per studio (and most that DO report it are heavily skewed because they put the administrative staff in with the creative to juice their numbers). But, mostly, every time I think about “popular gamedev” it just reeks of startup culture. The idea that if you were part of a successful team then you should lead your own and that this game was made by one auteur rather than a giant team and so forth.
And that has the exact same problems we see at so many startups as a whole. The person who was real good at coding is HORRIBLE at management and has no understanding of what HR is even for and so forth. Which leads to the kind of shit that was deeply frowned upon in a conference room at 3 am becoming corporate culture and leading to “cube crawls” and the institutional abuse at companies like Blizzard or Ubisoft.
One thing that sticks with me that has only been vaguely alluded to by the more “woke” games media outlets. Ikumi Nakamura kind of became a sensation when she went full kawaii during a press conference for (I want to say) The Evil Within and all follow up interviews revealed she was a fricking genius with amazing ideas and really strong arguments for why certain features were there or not. Then she mysteriously disappeared. She alluded to it being the stress of game dev and “politics” but considering the next time we saw her (at a completely new studio) she was still doing horror but ALSO had a kid…
explain to them why making the acronym for their solver “SLUR” is inappropriate
I’m gonna need some context please
And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke” to the point that we don’t even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular
I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that’s what they put in the game. Early ‘bro’ devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.
And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.
TL;DR the root cause is billionares.
Like aways.
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A sexy twink.
Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.
We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is “ruining games” or “being woke”
I think in heated discussions about “DEI slop” people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular “male gaze” but it’s still widely beloved because it’s more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.
Funny you bring up gachas because in most of them the cast is overwhelmingly women.
Genshin has plently of male characters (F to M is ~1:2 iirc), and there is a variety of niches covered: cute twink-like types like Venti, hot tall guys like Diluc, etc. Anyway, vote with your wallet. It’s only natural there are more girl characters if that’s what larger chunk of playerbase want.
Even in your example there is way more women than men
I personally wouldn’t call 1:2 “overwhelmingly”, but even so, if there was just a single male Venti in the whole game, it wouldn’t in any way make the claim “Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such” untrue, because these games combined have a lot of sexy twinks to pick from.
You know what you almost never see (outside of those “problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes”)? A sexy twink.
So you never played JRPGs ?
You mean the homeboys that are almost always wrapped in about forty buckles and, at best, exist as a viewpoint character for the harem of big titty anime girls?
But yeah. East Asian media tends to have fewer massively jacked protagonists. But it is still the fundamental male gaze. It is just that East Asian dudes tend to be less likely to spend dozens of hours a week working on glamour muscles.
How dare you! You can’t throw facts at puritanical arguments; that’s illegal.
I was beating my meat to Natalya’s (Goldeneye 64) cone-shaped tits at age 10. It may have been arguably better for me than jerking off to droves of actual tits.
…Not that I wasn’t doing that also…
She had nothing on Xenia’s polygonal proportions
The Box Bra, by Croft.
the original cybertruck
Every now and again you’ll see a Tomb Raider cosplayer who has stuffed a box up her shirt and it’ll never not be funny.
I dunno if it’s just cause I’m older, but sex scenes in games and movies seem so unnecessary, what are they even there for? I was playing cyberpunk and nudity isnt a big deal but why were those sexually explicit ads necessary to the story?
Something basic like the Mass Effect series helps sell the idea that you really did form a fully fledged relationship over the course of the game. As for Cyberpunk, the setting is literally designed to be dripping with sexuality. It’s not necessary for the story itself, but if you removed all the sex ads the setting simply wouldn’t reach the same level of “megacorporations maximizing psychological exploitation techniques”.
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the setting is an important part of the narrative too. the tasteless commodification of sex is absolutely relevant to the overall story the game is telling.
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You have (cyberpunk 2077), you just failed to comprehend it.
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the fact that it made you uncomfortable, or at least thought that it was too much is the point. in the future the author/designers are making a comment on sexual exploitation for profit is commonplace and has been normalised
it’s there to make the setting similar to those familiar to us from universes like blade runner, altered carbon, (to a lesser degree) firefly. it’s the standard sci-fi canon that future corporatocratic society is filled with these things: the money buys whatever you like - the basest of desires are on the table no matter what
and it’s also there in all of those universes as a comment on exploitation and morality: just because you (or rather a select few) can buy it doesn’t make it right
it may not often be part of the narrative per se, but it’s an integral part of universe building: you can’t have narrative in a void, so you need to build a convincing universe to tell the story inside
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I don’t know that necessity is a relevant bar for inclusion in games. There’s certainly a discussion to be had, and maybe that’s the point.
I don’t know if you could have chosen a worse example. The sexual ads in cyberpunk are part of the worldbuilding and statement about society and capitalism. They absolutely are necessary to the story.
Well, they cause me harm, because I feel that the developers are trying a cheap trick to get me to play their games. And also, popping it open in some places is unacceptable.
Otherwise, there’s places for those types of games.
Okay but what games are considered sexualised and how many people are actually playing them?
Cyberpunk certainly qualifies both. It’s got explicit sex, and it’s got a large player base. But while uncouth and perverse things happen, you can’t really be party to them. You tend to show up after. Maybe your choices might lead to some, but you’re not there for it. The only sex involving the player is generally wholesome. Except, you know, the ghost of Johnny Silverhand riding shotgun and not necessarily consenting to it (especially when you hook up with the cop).
Then there’s Skyrim. Bigger player base but no sex outside of mods. And there are plenty of mods, but if you look at the player count among people using those mods… it’s nowhere near the player count of Skyrim as a whole, or Cyberpunk, or even a lot of the other games. And from there it drops off sharply.
So… what sexualised video games?
I’d also say the way sex is portrayed throughout Cyberpunk 2077 is important to the setting. Sex is everywhere, but none of it is particularly fulfilling. That the PC can find a healthy sexual relationship at all almost seems like a one in a million chance in Night City. Capitalism pushes forms of sexuality that can be monetized. Capitalism can get you laid, but it can’t get you happiness.
(I totally get the criticisms that the game is a mediocre experience. It is, but it’s not without value, either.)
Sexualisation is not the same as sexual content. Widowmaker in Overwatch is a sexualised character, because she is portrayed as sexually attractive, seductive and generally in such a way as to have her viewed as a sexual being. There are other characters who are not sexualised.
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You hear that, sexists? It’s all in you. Can’t blame the games. 🙂
Much as I’d predict support for that conclusion, I feel like there’s room to doubt the survey process used - as has often been the case for studies on gamer behavior.
This is meta-analysis.
Sure, it’s not a high quality study. But there is only so much effort countering this baseless fear mongering deserves. This study may already be more effort than it deserves.
The fear mongering doesn’t end. Violent movies cause violent behavior. No they don’t. Violent games cause violent behavior. No they don’t, actually research show gamers are less aggressive. Now it’s sexualized games that cause harm. And every time, they don’t even really care about the research anyway.
