Tropes vs. Women in Video Games

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.

Do you find the idea of a man saving a woman in peril so disgusting and ludicrous that it should never exist in any video game under any circumstances? And if it does, then the only plausible explanation is that men hate women? Can you somehow reconcile the idea of a man saving a woman while simultaneously hating her and can you hold both of these ideas as being true without a hint of irony?

Do you believe that women should ALWAYS be presented as strong characters and any hint of femininity is the fault of misogynistic developers? Do you believe that almost no such game has ever been created?

Do you find the female form repulsive to the point where any display of sexuality renders you incapable of performing your most basic functions? Do you believe that men enjoy looking at beautiful women because they secretly hate them and wish to see them degraded?

Does the word propaganda evoke positive emotions? Do you have no problem with confirmation bias?

Then this is the series for you, my friend! All this and a lot more (well, 8 videos to be exact) can be yours, but only if you have no wish of conversing with the creator or leaving any sort of feedback. We all know that YouTube comments are a cesspool of c**p, so the creator of the series has generously turned off comments and the like/dislike bar, so as not to expose you to any bad thoughts!

You're welcome!

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.

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.

I watched out of curiosity only and knew the irrational brew of hypocrisy I was in for, but still had a hard time making myself keep watching. It's horrible. Anita Sarkeesian rather than being thought provoking just wants to provoke people with the sole purpose of personal gain through fame and money riding the coattails of whining first world feminist. If you somehow enjoy this film it can only mean your just as big of a bigot as she is. So many people who she describes as trolls rather than simply the majority of the population at large disagree with her so when she describes having an open debate she really means listen to me and bow down to my own personal views or else your contention to my points are not only invalid but you are a troll spilling hate speech towards simply because you don't agree with me. You can see for yourself if you look at her YouTube channel. She has disabled all ratings and comments on almost every video since she can't handle criticism, but she sure can dish it out.