Gender bias in MPQ

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  • dxanders
    dxanders Posts: 144 Tile Toppler

    @dianetics said:

    @Wyntre said:
    This is a interesting thread (even if zombified). Representation absolutely matters, but MPQ is of course hamstrung by the material from which it draws--and much of that material is in the past, when comics generally were much more sexist. Original Clea is a great example--incredibly powerful half-Faltine sorceress who exists primarily to be Strange's wifey in the 60s. Fortunately, she's been updated and is now an interesting character--powerful, nasty temper, and still loves deeply--but the early writing of Strange was cringe generally. At the birth of modern comics, the gender roles mirrored the expectations of their creators, oof. It's no coincidence that the world becomes more diverse and interesting as the creators do. Some of our best newer female characters now come directly from the MCU--DocThor, Agatha come to mind. No coincidence that Polaris was in The Gifted, either. Modern media audiences demand, if not equality (and it's definitely not), at least more than one woman per large group.

    The OP was right, but it's definitely been corrected here in MPQ by 2025.

    No it doesn't.
    No person has ever explained why representation matters.
    The only character that you mentioned that is remotely new is She-Thor who first appeared in 2014.............11 years ago.

    Identity politics suck and is a cop out for lazy story writing.

    We had great female characters decades before. We had great female characters decades before.

    Polaris 1968
    Agatha 1969
    Jean Grey 1963
    Invisible Woman 1961

    Some of the most loved characters are female and they have been in the comics since the beginning.

    You are looking at the previous works from a modern perspective. That is the same as calling Mark Twain a racist which is ridiculous.

    Modern media audiences don't want this **** that's why most of the media is failing. The modern Marvel movies are losing money and the newest marvel tv shows are bombing. Star Wars is essentially a rotting corpse. Beloved game franchises are crashing out.
    It is all because they put ideology above storytelling.

    People don't care about representation...they care about great story telling and good writing.

    Please tell me more about this historically great storytelling in video games.

  • WilliamK1983
    WilliamK1983 Posts: 1,068 Chairperson of the Boards

    Ocarina of Time, Halo, Red Dead Redemption, and Assassins Creed off the top of my head.

  • dxanders
    dxanders Posts: 144 Tile Toppler
    edited 26 February 2025, 23:50

    @WilliamK1983 said:
    Ocarina of Time, Halo, Red Dead Redemption, and Assassins Creed off the top of my head.

    I'm not saying "are there video games with good stories?" I'm saying "Since when is narrative the leading factor in whether games sell?"

    Because the history of video games is a history that (at least in the west) treated quality storytelling as a low priority at best and a liability at worst. Historically, the goal with games was to shovel out product marketed at teenage boys, as reflected in the glut of story-absent platformers and gray-brown shooters that followed. Do we really want to act like Halo pushed the units it pushed based on the quality of the story and not on the quality of 4-player split screen dorm room deathmatch?

    And when narrative managed to push itself to its place as a legitimate component of a game's development, it was frequently due to women managing to muscle their way into traditionally male-dominated spaces. To a huge extent, we can thank Roberta Williams for pioneering storytelling in games decades before it became a major thing. Amy Hennig for bringing us Soul Reaver. The Assassin's Creed series touted Jade Raymond and their multicultural staff practically from the jump, and Bioware was carving out niches for queer characters as far back as KotOR. Representation matters because a broad range of experiences on behalf of creators brings us a broad range of experiences on the screen.

    Diversity has been at the heart of quality narratives in video games since the jump, but to act like bad narratives are killing video games is laughable when you look at how narrative has been traditionally deprioritized in gaming and evaluating a modern landscape dominated by narrative-free live service games and sandboxes like Roblox and Minecraft. And the narrative games that most succeed (BG3, Hades, Last of Us) are dripping with those scourged "identity politics". If narrative games are flagging, it's not because of some identity agenda. It's because massive corporations realize they can make a lot more money hawking new cosmetics for their shooter than paying for the increasingly expensive and bespoke content of a single player narrative-driven-game. And the truth is despite there being some outliers of quality storytelling in games, strong narrative is the exception rather than the rule.

  • Scofie
    Scofie GLOBAL_MODERATORS Posts: 1,456 Chairperson of the Boards

    @Alfje17 said:

    @Scofie said:
    I wasn't even aware the forums existed when this thread was started - just got my 7th anniversary anniversary badge in the last week or so - so we have 3 options:

    @pepitedechocolat said:
    I vote for 4 : remove all new comments, martial law the bot llm account that did the necro out of the forums forever

    @Scofie I agree with @pepitedechocolat, any reason why that bot account is allowed to stay on this site? Every post he's made has included a possible scam link (including an online casino and a NSFW-site!), some have been removed, but several are still there.

    Thanks for flagging this @Alfje17 - I have removed those posts.

    It is an odd thing - their posts on the MtGPQ site do not have suspicious links and posting is very infrequent. It is definitely against forum rules though so will take the appropriate action.

  • dianetics
    dianetics Posts: 1,697 Chairperson of the Boards

    @dxanders said:
    Please tell me more about this historically great storytelling in video games.

    Final Fantasy 6, 7, and 9. Chrono Trigger. Earthbound.
    Planescape Torment.
    Halo 1 and 2.
    Knights of the Old Republic.
    Baldur's Gate.
    Grim Fandango. Day of the Tentacle. The Monkey Island Series.
    Silent Hill 2.
    Fallout 1 and 2.
    Warcraft 2 and 3.
    Max Payne 1 and 2.
    GTA Vice City and San Andreas.
    Arx Fatalis. Freedom Fighters.
    God of War 1 and 2.

    Have you been living under a rock?

  • dxanders
    dxanders Posts: 144 Tile Toppler
    edited 27 February 2025, 05:52

    @dianetics said:

    @dxanders said:
    Please tell me more about this historically great storytelling in video games.

    Final Fantasy 6, 7, and 9. Chrono Trigger. Earthbound.
    Planescape Torment.
    Halo 1 and 2.
    Knights of the Old Republic.
    Baldur's Gate.
    Grim Fandango. Day of the Tentacle. The Monkey Island Series.
    Silent Hill 2.
    Fallout 1 and 2.
    Warcraft 2 and 3.
    Max Payne 1 and 2.
    GTA Vice City and San Andreas.
    Arx Fatalis. Freedom Fighters.
    God of War 1 and 2.

    Have you been living under a rock?

    Mostly great games, sure, and games that cover an exceedingly broad period of time. But that's just the point isn't it? There have always been games with great stories, and they've always stood apart in a sea of narrative mediocrity. It's easy to point out the gems and just as easy to disregard the countless other games that weren't narrative showstoppers. And games with great narratives are still being released. Off the top of my head, Remedy 's dropped two legit bangers in the past few years. There's Pentiment and Baldur's Gate 3. Disco Elysium. I've already mentioned Last of Us 2 and Hades (with another sequel in the pipeline). Citizen Sleeper (and it's sequel)!

    The point is that there's never been a halcyon age where stories were widely phenomenal. It's always been a case of creatives pushing back against corporate pressures to monetize above all else, and the gold continues to happen in spite of those conflicting forces. There's no woke agenda forcing games to have bad stories. There's as many good stories in games as there's ever been. There are definitely issues with the creative-business push and pull. But go on blaming "identity politics" rather than corporate mismanagement, microtransaction-driven greed, and a c-suite-driven push for live service golden geese.

  • dianetics
    dianetics Posts: 1,697 Chairperson of the Boards

    @dxanders said:
    Mostly great games, sure, and games that cover an exceedingly broad period of time. But that's just the point isn't it? There have always been games with great stories, and they've always stood apart in a sea of narrative mediocrity. It's easy to point out the gems and just as easy to disregard the countless other games that weren't narrative showstoppers. And games with great narratives are still being released. Off the top of my head, Remedy 's dropped two legit bangers in the past few years. There's Pentiment and Baldur's Gate 3. Disco Elysium. I've already mentioned Last of Us 2 and Hades (with another sequel in the pipeline). Citizen Sleeper (and it's sequel)!

    The point is that there's never been a halcyon age where stories were widely phenomenal. It's always been a case of creatives pushing back against corporate pressures to monetize above all else, and the gold continues to happen in spite of those conflicting forces. There's no woke agenda forcing games to have bad stories. There's as many good stories in games as there's ever been. There are definitely issues with the creative-business push and pull. But go on blaming "identity politics" rather than corporate mismanagement, microtransaction-driven greed, and a c-suite-driven push for live service golden geese.

    You asked me to tell you about the historically great storytelling in videogaming. I did.

    I would say 97-2001 would be defined as a historically great era of videogame writing. Go through the lists and look at all the single player story driven classics that were released during that period.
    Comparing that period to 2020-2024 there are far more gems than turds.

    Identity politics makes stories feel inauthentic, because with the majority of games and media today the "diverse" characters are Mary Sue's. People don't resonate with characters like that.

    With the list you provided you proved my point. People don't care about representation they care about good stories with quality character development.

  • DAZ0273
    DAZ0273 Posts: 10,545 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 27 February 2025, 14:06

    @entrailbucket said:
    Counterpoint: Black Panther was about as "woke" as it gets, had a basically all-black cast, and made 1.3 billion dollars and is still one of the highest grossing movies of all time.

    Captain Marvel etc didn't bomb because they had women or minorities in them, they bombed because the movies were bad.

    Actually Captain Marvel made over $1.1 billion world wide. Bizarrely, at least in my opinion, it isn't anywhere near as good as the sequel which did bomb badly. Difficult to explain this one, especially as Ms Marvel who co-starred seems to have been received fairly well even if Brie Larson had her share of haters. Where did everybody go?

    Edit: Oh wait...there was the Infinity War after scene credit which sort of set up CM wasn't there (even though it didn't really as CM set in past)? So I guess that helped pump up CM numbers a bit but still, the drop-off is still straight off a cliff.

  • dianetics
    dianetics Posts: 1,697 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 27 February 2025, 13:51

    @dxanders said:
    I'm sorry, I have? Remedy's two recent games have a chosen one female protagonist and plop a deuteragonist into the story of the white male lead. Hades is aggressively queer. Ditto BG3. Disco Elysium is basically "leftists fighting on Facebook: the game", and CS is effectively a socialist manifesto on corporate greed with painstaking diversity in its characters. I suspect the creators of any of these games would laugh in your face if you told them diversity doesn't matter.

    Some stories are good, some stories are less so, but diversity helps open those stories to a broader range of perspectives. And without it, we wouldn't have stories like The Wire or Flowers of the Blood Moon. We wouldn't have Milestone Comics or the films of the L.A. rebellion. We wouldn't have Reservation Dogs. But clowns like you want to cherry pick stories you don't like and identify "forced representation" as the root cause. It's never anything more than a dog whistle.

    So...you can cherry pick but I can't? Gotcha.
    Hades 1 isn't aggressively queer. I have 100%'d the game 3 times. There's a bromance and a romance. Hades 2 is more in that vein though of being overtly queer.
    BG3 gives you the option to be gay or not. The characters are well written and aren't stereotypes. The game let's you roleplay the way you want and act in the manner you want.

    Compare BG3 to Veilguard and this is the difference I am talking about.

    Disco Elysium is a drug induced stupor that allows you to roleplay in a variety of manners.

    Alan Wake 2 wasn't a financial success. It wasn't a sales driver and using that as a success story is pretty funny.

    You can name call and browbeat all you want it doesn't change anything.

    Stories are successful because they have good writing and character development not because some character is trans or bisexual.

    The movie The Whale wasn't a success because the main character was gay. It was successful, because the character had to come to terms with his own flaws and mortality and admit them to the people who loved him.

    Euphoria wasn't good because one of the main characters was trans, it was because the character felt real. Trying to move through a world where they weren't accepted.

    Characters that are flawed and are challenged to overcome obstacles are what drives good and memorable stories.

  • dianetics
    dianetics Posts: 1,697 Chairperson of the Boards

    @entrailbucket said:
    @dianetics you're just arguing against tokenism. Cramming some black or trans character into a story where they obviously don't belong is not representation, and nobody thinks that besides cynical corporate suits. Of course a game or movie or whatever succeeds because it's good or bad, and not because it happens to star a woman or a black person -- again, absolutely nobody thinks the opposite. No one thinks pandering is good and no one thinks it's representation.

    Can you cite some examples of things that failed because they did what you describe? The problem is that your argument gets used by folks with...other...agendas, who regard any example of a female or minority character as tokenism or pandering.

    I don't care about race, gender, sexuality, or any of these other things as long as the character is written well and has a place within the story. Characters who are explicitly shown to have those characteristics and those characteristics being core to their identity fall flat.

    There are plenty of current modern examples of the sort of representation I'm talking about.

    I guess the most on the nose would be The Acolyte. It was such a difficult slog.
    You can compare Rings of Power and House of the Dragon and see the differences.
    In gaming, Veilguard is exceptionally bad at it.

  • entrailbucket
    entrailbucket Posts: 6,242 Chairperson of the Boards

    @dianetics said:

    @entrailbucket said:
    @dianetics you're just arguing against tokenism. Cramming some black or trans character into a story where they obviously don't belong is not representation, and nobody thinks that besides cynical corporate suits. Of course a game or movie or whatever succeeds because it's good or bad, and not because it happens to star a woman or a black person -- again, absolutely nobody thinks the opposite. No one thinks pandering is good and no one thinks it's representation.

    Can you cite some examples of things that failed because they did what you describe? The problem is that your argument gets used by folks with...other...agendas, who regard any example of a female or minority character as tokenism or pandering.

    I don't care about race, gender, sexuality, or any of these other things as long as the character is written well and has a place within the story. Characters who are explicitly shown to have those characteristics and those characteristics being core to their identity fall flat.

    There are plenty of current modern examples of the sort of representation I'm talking about.

    I guess the most on the nose would be The Acolyte. It was such a difficult slog.
    You can compare Rings of Power and House of the Dragon and see the differences.
    In gaming, Veilguard is exceptionally bad at it.

    You may want to be more specific when making this sort of argument in the future. I'm not actually familiar with any of the things you're citing, but again, it very much sounds like you are not opposed to authentic representation, you're opposed to corporate pandering.

    Representation matters when it's authentic. All those little kids who went to see Black Panther and saw a hero who looked like them...that matters.

    I think @dxanders is replying so forcefully because many of the same arguments you're making are used by others to argue that we shouldn't tell stories like Black Panther at all.

  • Wyntre
    Wyntre Posts: 55 Match Maker

    No person has ever explained why representation matters.

    Googling why representation matters gets over 600 million hits. The basic gist: if people see other people like themselves in stories, they broaden their perspectives of what they can be. Seeing people from other groups in stories reminds us to broaden our own expectations of others. But this is basic 101 college stuff.

    But on the off chance that you're genuinely open to hearing why representation matters, read or listen to this interview with Nichelle Nichols: https://www.npr.org/2011/01/17/132942461/Star-Treks-Uhura-Reflects-On-MLK-Encounter Pay special attention to her conversations with MLK Jr. and Whoopi Goldberg.

  • Zarqa
    Zarqa Posts: 386 Mover and Shaker
    edited 27 February 2025, 19:42

    Many people have explained why representation matters.

    There’s plenty of solid research literature on how an increase in lesbian and gay representation in American TV shows starting in the late 90s played a crucial role in broader acceptance of lesbian and gay people in US society.

  • BriMan2222
    BriMan2222 Posts: 1,427 Chairperson of the Boards
    edited 27 February 2025, 20:09

    @dxanders said:

    @dianetics said:

    @entrailbucket said:
    @dianetics you're just arguing against tokenism. Cramming some black or trans character into a story where they obviously don't belong is not representation, and nobody thinks that besides cynical corporate suits. Of course a game or movie or whatever succeeds because it's good or bad, and not because it happens to star a woman or a black person -- again, absolutely nobody thinks the opposite. No one thinks pandering is good and no one thinks it's representation.

    Can you cite some examples of things that failed because they did what you describe? The problem is that your argument gets used by folks with...other...agendas, who regard any example of a female or minority character as tokenism or pandering.

    I don't care about race, gender, sexuality, or any of these other things as long as the character is written well and has a place within the story. Characters who are explicitly shown to have those characteristics and those characteristics being core to their identity fall flat.

    There are plenty of current modern examples of the sort of representation I'm talking about.

    I guess the most on the nose would be The Acolyte. It was such a difficult slog.
    You can compare Rings of Power and House of the Dragon and see the differences.
    In gaming, Veilguard is exceptionally bad at it.

    It sounds like you care a lot about those things, because we can both recognize that there are always bad stories, but you seem hellbent on marking good stories with diversity as not actually interested in representation and bad stories with diversity as bad because of the diversity. When, in all likelihood, they're just bad stories that happen to be diverse. and the evidence of why these stories are actually bad is generally already out there. Veilguard is a game known for its torturous production history in a series that's gotten criticism about narrative since the second entry, and the evidence of poor management and executive fiat is exhaustively documented. But of course those factors couldn't be to blame. It's DEI.

    And I don't think that "I don't care about gender/race/sexuality" is the flex you think it is. Because what that sounds like is "I'm not curious to learn how other people's experiences are different from mine".

    I'm similarly puzzled at the premise that representation isn't a critical component of the DNA for The Whale or Euphoria. In the former, the main character's trauma is absolutely related to his experience as a gay man (and is reflected in the real life story it's based on). In Euphoria, they cast a trans woman and brought in a trans consultant to accurately reflect the experience of a trans high school student. In both instances, representation is a major part of the package. Stories, at least good ones, don't come from nothing. Compelling characterization and an interesting journey is critical to them, but they're primarily an attempt for someone to share their lived experience or to reflect the lives experience of someone they find interesting or underrepresented. Diversity matters because it gives the audience a perspective into experiences they otherwise wouldn't be privy too. And bringing in actual people who have experienced different perspectives lends authenticity to those stories. Diversity is variety, and I like variety in my stories. But I think there's a media literacy gap at play here, and I really don't want to keep beating this same drum.

    I didn't read what @dianetics wrote as "good stories with diversity don't care about representation", but rather good stories with representation focus on telling a good story first and use representation when it makes sense to do so and bad stories with representation focus on that aspect of the characters and force it in when it makes no sense to do so and the story seems like an after thought, such as Dragon Age the veil guard Or the TV series House of the Dragon (being an example of good use of diversity with good story telling) vs The Rings of Power (being the opposite).

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