Porn games are not released from the accusation of sexism; however they are also not the target of this particular discussion, which is regarding games that are allegedly NOT porn games, yet include similar problematic content.
No, there is not. Censorship is when a government, by law, forces content or lack of it. Creators self adjusting due to moral criticism is in fact following market forces, or could also be a creator self adjusting because of their personal beliefs shifting.
Yes, the women posting here have expressed how harmful it is to be suddenly confronted with sexualized content when it is out of place. Ergo, it is harmful.
In the real world, women cannot be in the public eye without being judged on their looks. If you see a topic regarding female politicians, there will be responses about her looks. The internet historically has trended to responses such as "would", to any picture of a woman, without regard to context. Those are real women who didn't sign up to be treated as sex objects, and being in the public eye, sometimes by virtue of random viral internet content, exposes them to this sort of commentary.
Okay, so it's about sexualised designs contributing to the fact that women are judged on their attractiveness more than men. And that said judgment is harmful to women. Okay, I can see that argument. But again I'm not sure I agree.
Seems to me like society has always valued women's beauty more than men's, and that this is the reason why we see more sexualised designs of women in the media. It feels like a symptom of our cultural relationship between male sexuality and female beauty, not a cause. Would taking sexualised designs out of all video games really change the different way we see and judge male and females bodies? I can't see it. I don't think this is something you can actually legislate out of the human condition, to be honest. I think it's a natural difference in the genders. Men are more visual and value physical attractiveness higher than women do, thus women are heavily pressured to be attractive. Media reflects that pressure, it doesn't create it, though it can increase its reach or effect on a girl I suppose.
Obviously anyone verbalising judgment of a woman's looks to belittle her is guilty of harassment and a shitty person. But is said harassment caused by seeing sexualised women in media? Again, I don't think so, personally. I think this stuff arises from deep-rooted sexism that begins with behaviour observed at home.
As for censorship, from wikipedia: "
Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or "inconvenient" as determined by government authorities or by community consensus.
This is how I define it, and it's close enough for me to say that this kind of criticism IS related to censorship - bearing in mind the community consensus part of the definition. Trying to create a community consensus whereby people can't or won't make certain types of art - that's absolutely censorship.
As for your first point, I'm just trying to ask why it's alright to 'sell sex' in certain situations but not in others. I don't get that. That was the point of much of my post. Many people absolutely DO release porn from the accusation of sexism, as far as I can tell. I'm looking for some kind of consistent rule as to the sexualisation of women in games, I guess.
Dragon Age's entire existence kinda flies directly in the face of this logic. As it's near 50:50 split player base is most assuredly a direct result of them catering to so many types of people.
I always reckoned Dragon Age would have done better it wasn't 50/50 but I could absolutely be wrong. I certainly avoided it and that was one of the reasons why. There are so many games out that that pander exactly to my tastes that I'll almost always just choose one of those. Which I know is privilege in action and I'm fortunate to be in that situation, but there you go. Many other men are too. Are there any stats as to the gender makeup of Dragon Age players? Was it particularly popular with women?
But I suppose this example shows the difficulty of separating the gender issues from the game issues because many people whether or not they liked that idea of the 50-50 split would buy the game anyway because there aren't many blockbuster RPGs like it, in much the same way that a woman who doesn't like seeing female sexualisation will have suffered through Cindy in FFXV because it's Final Fantasy and there are no other RPG series like it. You can't really pin the entire sales fortune of a game on any one small issue like this which makes it tough to determine how much of an effect it has. It's just a little influence in a whole series of influences.
