Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

Overall poorly researched scaremongering with cherry-picked examples and little to no real insight into the material covered. It's so bad you'll assume its parody, but unfortunately its all too real.

Imagine if a movie reviewer covered Citizen Kane, watched a few minutes, concluded that "Rosebud" was a woman Kane was oppressing and then had the gall to publish such nonsense. If the series covered ancient cave paintings it would conclude that the depictions of women were pornographic and demeaned them, while the pictures of hunting scenes reinforced patriarchal toxic masculinity, and that's why the Neanderthals died out.

That is the level of quality you can expect from Tropes V. Women.

If you feel you have all together to much faith in humanity, this series will remedy your problem. If you want to feel outrage at games neither you nor the writers of this tripe "documentary" comprehend then this is the series for you. If you wish to form educated opinions based on real world evidence and credible sources this is not something you should bother to sully your eyes with, as it offers no new arguments, only rehashing the same "Moral Censor" nonsense that has pervaded entertainment for as long as there has been entertainment.

The 'Tropes vs. Women in Videogames' is a crowdfunded webseries which bills itself as a critical look at how women are often portrayed in the video game medium, but unfortunately suffers from some significant flaws.

The Kickstarter campaign was held during the summer of 2012, and the originally 5-episode series was expected to be complete by the end of that year. The campaign received over 26x(!) what they had asked for, and in response the webseries was to be expanded to a total of 12 episodes. Obviously, the project wouldn't be finished by the end of 2012, but here we are in mid 2015 and it's still far from complete.

Much of the game footage used in the series has been shown to be ripped from other Youtubers "Let's Play" videos. While this isn't an uncommon practice, it's rather troubling that they declined to provide the names of the channels they sourced the footage from. Additionally, given the enormous success of the Kickstarter I cannot help but feel that they must've had adequate funding to procure their own footage instead of using others'.

I'm not going to bother debating the legitimacy of the individual tropes, or the examples used for them. Those arguments have already been said enough times. Suffice it to say that much of her conclusions and critiques are questionable (at best), and seem to follow Feminist Frequency's motto of 'Listen and Believe'.

Another problem lies with their inability to provide a sense of scale as to how common these tropes are. Yes, they may be able to list a dozen or more games that use a particular trope, but how significant is that figure in the context of the industry as a whole? Are *most* games using these tropes, or is it a minority? If this is an issue, how big is it?

And then there's entire the issue of whether or not hypothetically sexist fiction can have an actual detrimental effect on peoples' perspectives in the real world.

Worst of all though, is the series message that videogames - which are indeed art - must align to a particular social ideology, or else be deemed "problematic". And Feminist Frequency wants this to be part of a classroom curriculum? This is propaganda by moral authoritarians. Nothing more, and nothing less.

I would not mind seeing a real discussion on the topic of women in videogames, but hopefully next time with a more neutral and thought-provoking approach.

This series is perhaps one of the most bigoted things I've ever seen. Labels all gamers as women hating individuals even states as fact that we are all affected by Video games even if we think we aren't.

This is propaganda worse than the stuff Jack Thompson tried to peddle to the media.

I can't rate the series a 0 and so a 1 will have to do. I would recommend searching on YouTube and you will find almost every argument made in this series rebutted.

I also feel bad for anybody who Kickstarted this video series as years later it has not been completed. Essentially scamming those who invested their hard earned money into something they believed in. I can't imagine many of those who supported this project would be happy at the blatant sexism that came to be of the project.

Sad

Where to start?

This series was supposed to be completed in 2012, but most of the videos have never been done, despite raising over $440,000 in 2014 alone. Backers were promised a completed series on DVD, which never happened. All comments and ratings are blocked/disabled on the videos. Anyone who questions the conclusions is labeled a harasser or a misogynist for not listening and believing.

The host Anita Sarkeesian and writer Jonathan McIntosh willfully cherry pick and go against game mechanics in an effort to prove that everything is sexist. In a game where the player is actively discouraged from harming female characters, Anita will purposely stray from the mission, kill, and drag around said characters, then claim the game encouraged her to and is designed for sexual gratification. If 10,000 male characters are killed and only one female, she will abuse that one female character repeatedly and try to say the game is misogynistic. She will complain that there are female prostitutes in a game, when there are also male prostitutes. She will complain that women are "background decoration" as thousands of faceless male characters are gunned down and slaughtered.

If you want to see seeing cherry picked clips and half-truths designed to make you think every game is made to harm women, then you might enjoy this. If you have any critical thinking skills or understanding of game mechanics, this will likely evoke a lot of groans.

Typically when I write reviews, I'll go back next re-watch whatever the review is for. Not with this.

I don't even know why I'm doing this you all already know how terrible biased and factually incorrect it is, and if you don't look up response videos on YouTube or just articles on Google. You'll find tons of things debunking every single one of her points.

Not only is tropes vs. women completely incorrect, it is both intellectually dishonest and was only created so that the head of feminist frequency, Anita Sarkeesian, could make money. First of all she said in the original kickstarter that she had been playing video games her whole life, but a while later someone uploaded a video of her from a few years before the kickstarter was released saying she does not play videogames. Why would someone who doesn't like or understand video games create a series reviewing them? Well it's simple they're currently topical and controversial, so it would be an easy way to make money.

But the lies and greed don't stop there oh no, there was obviously a huge backlash against her kickstarter when it was first released. So after the kickstarter had already been completely funded, she published a few tweets that were sent to her, and all these tweets did was insult her. And she said these few tweets proved that all gamers were misogynistic resulting in her getting over 100,000 dollars in funding.

Anita Sarkeesian has also disabled comments and ratings on her videos, because they are so terrible and asinine that they couldn't even stand up to the smallest amount of criticism or scrutiny. She also seems to think that if people disagree with her, it's harassment. She also thinks that people only disagree with her because she's a women not because what she says is idiotic. Both of which are just stupid statements.

Tropes vs women is very representative of feminism in modern day first-world countries. It's just a bunch of entitled privileged white women complaint that they're lives are so hard even though they're about as easy as they get.