Anita Sarkeesian, the videogame critic whose Kickstarter project to analyse the role of women in games was responded to with an online hate campaign including a game about beating her up (as Helen says, “I like writing it like that, to emphasise the madness of it”), has released the second video in her “Tropes vs Women” series.
The video, part two of three examining the idea of the damsel in distress, delves deeper into the expression that trope has when combined with the “grim and gritty” aesthetic used in modern games. She explores ideas like comics author Gail Simone’s concept of “women in refrigerators”, which refers to the frequency with which a female character will be “killed, maimed or depowered”, nearly always to provide a motivation to a male character rather than as part of her own character arc. She also explores related tropes, again usually gendered in their application, like the “mercy killing” and the gleeful depiction of violence against women. Through the magic of the internet, the whole thing is embedded below. If you want to watch part one, it can be found here.
Of course, where there’s a woman with an opinion, there are hateful people trying to silence her. The first video in the series rapidly saw its YouTube comments become a cesspool – more than usual, I mean – such that Sarkeesian had to turn them off, saying “If you’d like to comment constructively on this video, please share on your own social networks.” This time, with the comments off by default, the men who get unbelievably angry at a woman critically analysing videogames (MWGUAAAWCAV, for short) resorted to “flagging” the video on YouTube, which marks it as having content inappropriate for the site – usually reserved for explicit sex or violence, not clips of AAA video games.
Enough of them flagged the video for it to get temporarily pulled for review. Then, somewhat concerningly, YouTube’s (human) review team confirmed that it violated “community guidelines”, removed the video, and put a strike on Sarkeesian’s account. The video was reinstated after an appeal 45 minutes later, but it raises the question of what, exactly, YouTube’s review team are doing if they can’t tell the difference between clearly malicious flagging and actually obscene content.
Still, it’s back up, and Sarkeesian has a lot more videos in her – the extraordinary success of the original Kickstarter means that rather than the five planned, she’ll now be making 13. Regardless of what the MWGUAAAWCAV seem to believe, that can only be good for videogames in general: the bizarre crossover between people who demand that games be viewed as art and people who say “they’re only games” when problematic elements are pointed out cannot last for long. The medium is only made stronger by everyone like Anita Sarkeesian. And Tropes v Women is damn good watching, to boot.
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