How Women Are Represented In Video Games

Delusional Social Justice Warriors whine about how women are represented in video games constantly. Whether they are complaining about virtual females wearing revealing clothing or how degrading it is for women to be rescued by men in “damsel in distress” situations, its apparent they desperately want to portray gamers as women hating misogynists and developers as encouraging and spreading this evil.

The average person who hasn’t played a game in the last decade and only hears about gaming through SJW propaganda outlets must be outraged at how games portray women as either pathetic weaklings or over-sexualized objects to be gazed at by basement dwelling, rapists-in-training.

Any honest person who has played more than a few popular games recently should know how much of a blatant falsehood this claim actually is. As a rational gamer, watching Anita Sarkeesian lecture game developers at a recent conference about how they can “disrupt the formula, and challenge the status quo” by “leaving behind the sexist representations and instead representing women as capable, complex and inspirational” boggles the mind at how the audience didn’t burst out in a fit of hysterical laughter.

How plenty of virtual women are actually portrayed

Consider the fact that Call of Duty and Battlefield 4 both featured playable women-in-uniform for the first time in their respective histories right after females were allowed into combat units in the United States Military. I had given up on both of those franchises before that year, in favor of the more authentic Arma 3, but naturally had some slight curiosity about how women were going to be portrayed in this brave new war-game world.

Battlefield 4

Sure enough, a gameplay video of the BF 4 campaign confirmed exactly what I had suspected. Watching a female superior officer deliver such cringe inducing lines as “You goddamn boneheaded sons of a butt-haired bitch, I’d kill you myself if I thought it was possible” then sternly warning a male subordinate “Watch your language with me son” while a different female member of the elite team looked on, made the developers intent clear.

In the BF 4 ‘game guide’ book it might as well have read “female soldiers can do battle just as good as men, if not better, but those tough girls are such intimidating, brutal warriors demanding respect, you better watch your mouth around them if you know what’s good for you”. Its almost as if the two companies were competing with each other to display the competent female in uniform more prominently than the other. If so, BF set a precedent that was going to be tough to match.

Shadow Of Mordor

A recent game I’ve been playing is Shadow of Mordor. Strangely, the only woman even around in the first half of the game was the wife of a fellow warrior that was taken prisoner by the Uruks. The player and other NPC men had to save her. Uh oh. She didn’t break free and slaughter thirty vicious orcs with her bare hands, either. Silly Juvenile Whiners might have been consumed by uncontrollable fits of rage and incoherent rambling followed by hysterical crying if they had played through this specific part without an accompanying “trigger warning”.

At this point in the game I was actually quite surprised that a certain character, that’s apparently rare in these “sexist” games I play so much, hadn’t been introduced. I could hardly fathom playing through the entirety of a modern game such as this wherein the only female character was a victim needing to be saved by men.

When I progressed to the second part of Mordor however, my surprise was alleviated as I was introduced to ‘Lithariel’. Her actual in-game bio describes her as “A tough warrior, she is resourceful and honorable to a fault. She has never surrendered in a battle, even when it cost those following her their lives.” That sounds more like a women straight out of a feminists wet dream than one featured in these supposedly “sexist” video games.

At one point during the story she is tortured for information by one of the games three main bosses and ultimately, he couldn’t get her to say anything other than a few insults and threats directed at him. “A tough warrior” indeed.

Witcher 3

A highly anticipated game I cant wait to get my hands on is the Witcher 3. Having personally never played any of the previous Witcher games, I am looking forward to my first experience with what will be the finale of the series. Considering the intended serious tone of the story and the fact it takes place in an era when men used swords and shields in warfare, I thought I could probably expect that there would be no women carrying heavy weapons and charging fearlessly into brutal combat right alongside the men.

So, I guess I should have been somewhat surprised, reading about the previous installment in the series, when I discovered that not only is there, apparently, going to be mythical “women warriors” but there was even one female character who, believe it or not, is called “Saskia the Dragonslayer”! I came across a description of this virtual heroine which described her as “a young girl known for performing miraculous feats of valor on the battlefield.” Reading further I found this gem: “History is full of women who led fanatically devoted hosts to victory” which brought to mind the feminists who recently tried to dubiously claim that “half of Viking warriors were women.”

This is yet another addition to the increasingly lengthy list of women characters in video games who are, far from being portrayed the way SJWs and their feminists allies claim, the absolute embodiment of the “strong, capable women warrior” they are demanding games start including even more of. Even though a lot of developers already include this, seemingly now mandatory, type of fantasy female, the people who want to dictate what is acceptable for the entire gaming community refuse to acknowledge it.

The Last Of Us

Ellie, the 14 year old girl from The Last Of Us, should be roughly what a SJW/feminist would want a young female in a video game to be. When the developers explicitly stated they “went out of our way to make her the most capable and independent and feisty person that she could be,” they weren’t lying.

She spends the majority of the game displaying how unbelievably brave she is. Whether the little girl is angrily yelling “Let go of me you chicken shit!” without the slightest hint of fear to a man who is dragging her away to murder her, stabbing grown men to death with a pocket knife, or courageously facing down, while completely at the mercy of a “rapey” white male who has kidnapped her and is about to torture, rape, murder, chop up and eat her not in any particular order, she is always unflinchingly fearless in the face of unspeakable horror to a degree that would put a captured Navy Seal to shame.

The absolutely absurd lengths that Naughty Dog went to in portraying her as “capable and independent” still wasn’t good enough for The New York Times “reviewer” who managed to complain about the “sickness” in the gaming community largely because you don’t get to play as her long enough.

Whether its a female bandit in Skyrim charging you with a huge two-handed battle-ax or ‘Cassie Cage’ from the upcoming Mortal Kombat X murdering a man with a brutal fatality, it’s apparent that not only are the majority of games not portraying most women characters as weak “fuck toys”, but they are instead going full-speed the exact opposite direction.

The “strong, capable” female is now basically mandatory

One of the few games that doesn’t feature the fantasy female that gamers have become so accustomed to is Grand Theft Auto 5. Rockstar’s record-breaking juggernaut seems to be one of the few exceptions in the current climate. The main target for anti-gamers everywhere has the backbone, thick skin, and obvious financial power to withstand a couple of snarky reviewers bemoaning the lack of “strong female characters” and all the usual tiresome attacks and smears, but the recent success of SJWs in Australia by getting it pulled from Target’s shelves may be an ominous sign of things to come. Any game that displeases the deranged fanatics will be demonized using any dishonest tactic in their playbook.

If a developer wants to create a game with believable characters, they should be able to do so without fear of hysterical hordes labeling them “sexist” because a certain game doesn’t cater to their delusions. Many gamers want to immerse themselves fully in a virtual world where absolute absurdities that are out of place can destroy the immersion far more than an intrusive HUD or badly timed button prompt.

The type of preposterous “strong and capable” female character being demanded, such as a 110 pound woman charging fearlessly into battle wielding a two-handed sword while slaying numerous men/monsters twice her size with ease, shouldn’t be mandatory for every game. The Last Of Us and Shadow of Mordor do have traditional female characters that appear only briefly. The protagonists daughter from the heartbreaking opening of TLOU and his wife in SOM are believable females who serve as powerful motivators to the player. But both games feel the need to compensate by featuring the mandated type of unbelievable female character also.

Some gamers want to play games that feature believable characters. Others might enjoy games in which women are fierce warriors without biology to limit them. Both should be welcome in a truly inclusive gaming community. As of now, I see women portrayed more frequently as “men with boobs only bigger” than “damsels in distress”. If the anti-GamerGate fascists get their way, these recent depictions of “strong and capable” women in video games will look more like a class on ‘sexual dimorphism in humans’ compared to their desired games of the future.

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