I think the thing that bothers me the most about the "go play something else" argument is that it presumes that women are not hardcore consumers of the medium. If you play one or two games a year, then sure, you can probably limit yourself to games with little-to-no objectionable content. But if gaming is your main hobby, you're going to encountering sexualized designs and other issues on a regular basis.
This is a really good point, and one that needs to be repeated again and again, especially when you get drive-bys popping in, ignoring 37 pages of thread to say "designers know who their audience is." The thing is, with games, there's shaky data in all areas when it comes to buyers v consumers and no telling what people might play if there was more growth in some of these areas. Personally, I find myself buying more and more smaller titles and supporting super indies and just donating to creators, because they're out there experimenting and taking risks and trying new things. I understand that there's a lot of money on the line with big studios and AAA games, but there are examples of games that do just fine anchored by non-sexualized female characters (other issues I have with HZD aside, it is a good example of this) and at this point, I think it's harder to make excuses. Games will sell if women aren't reduced to love interests if it's a good game. Games can feature strong female friendships and journeys of discovery and still sell (see Life Is Strange). Games don't have to be any one thing. And yet.
But there is evidence that these things are changing, beyond just what we note in our various anecdotal perspectives, and I'm glad. I see different attitudes in my students as well, and many of them are seeking jobs in the industry, and that heartens me further.
Someones sexualized and can be another's empowered, and a good design to one can be a terrible design to another.
I think it's difficult to attach words like "empowered" to fully created characters, as they lack agency. There's a weird gray area here in film/television and a weirder gray area in voiced game characters/animation, but particularly when you largely have men creating women in games when women appear, I think this is a difficult argument to make. This isn't to say we can't see evidence of feminist (I mean this in the academic/methodological sense, not the ever-shifting mainstream application) game design moves in games created by men, but rather just to say that "empowerment" may not be the best word. Sam Barlow's Her Story is a strong example here. Sure, the story incorporates a lot of tropes (standard), but features a nuanced, woman-centered story (turns out talking about this is hard due to spoilers, though). Is the main character, however one wants to interpret that,
empowered? I don't know if I could say yes, unconditionally; that gets us into discussing if empowerment can be given or granted*. Empowerment is about claiming or realizing power.
*yes, one of the denotative meanings is "giving" someone the power or right to do something but that isn't the meaning used for discussing empowerment in this sense