(no subject)
blargh AIM went down so just posting this here for the people who are helping me with my ethos/logos/pathos argument construction. Just scroll past this.
ethos
Despite claims that sexism is gone from our society, it is widely known that video games and the industry that creates them are sexist. Critics have called it a “boy’s club,” an apt nickname given the image it invokes of a group of elementary school children making a fort and hanging a sign on the entrance that reads NO GIRLS ALLOWED. This is certainly not the case now: video games have become much more mainstream. Their appeal to not just both sexes but to all ages is widely recognized. But like cinema during its fledgling years, video games run the gamut from covert unintentionally sexist tropes to overt chauvinism. From powering through platform levels as Mario to rescue the helpless, distressed damsel Princess Peach to the flagrant, in-your-face jiggle physics of Dead or Alive, the video game industry’s treatment of women as a gender and a sex is problematic, to say the least.
Of course, that is not to say it’s all bad. Lara Croft and Samus Aran may have pretty idealized physiques, but that does nothing to stop them from being fully capable characters in their own rights. And men don’t get a much better deal, often being portrayed as overly aggressive and even more overly muscular, though men’s roles are at least more varied and usually more fleshed out.
The industry has made attempts to cater to a more diverse market in recent years, but those attempts boil down to the age-old question: what do girls like? The industry’s answer to this question is a whole slew of “girl games,” which boil down to clothes, shopping, boyfriends, puppies, music, and the occasional puzzle. The target audience of blockbuster games is still men, and those games pander to the stereotypical notions about gender that developers believe still hold strong in that base. Machismo permeates the medium as a whole; gender equality is the exception, not the rule.
logos
Art has long served multiple purposes for society. It holds the potential to entertain, educate, evoke deep emotions in its audience, make political commentary, express the artists’ ideologies, instill moral lessons, challenge commonly-held beliefs, and even spark social change. And while the term “art” brings to mind canvas paintings hanging in drafty marble museums, it also includes everything from music, theatre, and literature to cinema, television programming, and other conveyors of modern pop culture. Art brings people to an intuitive, emotional understanding of its themes and symbolism.
For the past few decades, the video game industry has been struggling to receive recognition for its product medium as a form of art. It’s not just about graphics either, although anyone who has seen a PS3 game played on an HD TV will agree how visually stunning they are. But like books, poetry, theatre, movies, and television before them, video games are an evocative storytelling medium-perhaps even moreso, because they can do something no other storytelling medium can: without the player inputting commands, solving puzzles, completing missions, and actively interacting with a game’s environment, the viewpoint character cannot progress through the story, and the game cannot resolve itself. If the game cannot resolve itself, the story cannot reach its conclusion, and the story’s themes cannot be fully expressed. Instead they are left only partially articulated, giving the player no emotional resolution.
Other things can obstruct the quality of an artwork’s artistic merit, as well: poor craft, inadequate skill…and a lack of respect for the audience. The hip-hop music industry struggles to gain widespread acceptance of its music’s artistic merit, and this is largely impeded by rap’s reverence for gang culture and its affirmative disposition toward violence, drug use, and sexual exploitation and brutality. The video game industry suffers from this same problem: largely gone are the notions that games are only for teenage boys, but the pervasiveness of sexism throughout the medium continues to obstruct its potential to be accepted as a legitimate form of artistic expression.
pathos
Let's play a game of pretend: your identity--gender, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual--is now gone. In its place, you are one of the following: a middle aged Arabic Muslim; an Hispanic migrant worker; a gay black man; a transsexual person; a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Any presence your new identity has in mainstream media is frequently treated with suspicion or outright hostility, and fictional media such as movies and television programs do nothing to positively affirm your identity-if they even feature it. You have virtually nowhere to turn for social recognition of your differentiated status and non-normative identity. What effect must this have on your self-esteem to see that your identity group is considered by the mainstream media to be so unimportant?
Entertainment media allow people to escape the difficulties and confines of their real lives and experience extraordinary feats vicariously through someone or something else’s shoes. For girls and women who play video games, this means they get to escape a sexist reality where society pressures them to meet unrealistic standards of beauty, they are not legally entitled to earn salaries equal to what men earn, and where disproportionately female rape victims are frequently accused of “asking for it” by sin of clothing choice or alcohol consumption, into digital play worlds where they can play with make-up, ponies, and 2D boyfriends, be helplessly kidnapped and rescued by the masculine hero on his quest to save the kingdom, or beat up the bad guys (or girls) while the camera zooms in on the heroine’s curvaceous goodies. And of course, there is always the option of playing a man in an ultra-masculine world without a female body in sight. Rather than positively affirming female identity, the attitudes towards gender that the video game industry presents in its products dismantles it, simplifies it, and objectifies it.
ethos
Despite claims that sexism is gone from our society, it is widely known that video games and the industry that creates them are sexist. Critics have called it a “boy’s club,” an apt nickname given the image it invokes of a group of elementary school children making a fort and hanging a sign on the entrance that reads NO GIRLS ALLOWED. This is certainly not the case now: video games have become much more mainstream. Their appeal to not just both sexes but to all ages is widely recognized. But like cinema during its fledgling years, video games run the gamut from covert unintentionally sexist tropes to overt chauvinism. From powering through platform levels as Mario to rescue the helpless, distressed damsel Princess Peach to the flagrant, in-your-face jiggle physics of Dead or Alive, the video game industry’s treatment of women as a gender and a sex is problematic, to say the least.
Of course, that is not to say it’s all bad. Lara Croft and Samus Aran may have pretty idealized physiques, but that does nothing to stop them from being fully capable characters in their own rights. And men don’t get a much better deal, often being portrayed as overly aggressive and even more overly muscular, though men’s roles are at least more varied and usually more fleshed out.
The industry has made attempts to cater to a more diverse market in recent years, but those attempts boil down to the age-old question: what do girls like? The industry’s answer to this question is a whole slew of “girl games,” which boil down to clothes, shopping, boyfriends, puppies, music, and the occasional puzzle. The target audience of blockbuster games is still men, and those games pander to the stereotypical notions about gender that developers believe still hold strong in that base. Machismo permeates the medium as a whole; gender equality is the exception, not the rule.
logos
Art has long served multiple purposes for society. It holds the potential to entertain, educate, evoke deep emotions in its audience, make political commentary, express the artists’ ideologies, instill moral lessons, challenge commonly-held beliefs, and even spark social change. And while the term “art” brings to mind canvas paintings hanging in drafty marble museums, it also includes everything from music, theatre, and literature to cinema, television programming, and other conveyors of modern pop culture. Art brings people to an intuitive, emotional understanding of its themes and symbolism.
For the past few decades, the video game industry has been struggling to receive recognition for its product medium as a form of art. It’s not just about graphics either, although anyone who has seen a PS3 game played on an HD TV will agree how visually stunning they are. But like books, poetry, theatre, movies, and television before them, video games are an evocative storytelling medium-perhaps even moreso, because they can do something no other storytelling medium can: without the player inputting commands, solving puzzles, completing missions, and actively interacting with a game’s environment, the viewpoint character cannot progress through the story, and the game cannot resolve itself. If the game cannot resolve itself, the story cannot reach its conclusion, and the story’s themes cannot be fully expressed. Instead they are left only partially articulated, giving the player no emotional resolution.
Other things can obstruct the quality of an artwork’s artistic merit, as well: poor craft, inadequate skill…and a lack of respect for the audience. The hip-hop music industry struggles to gain widespread acceptance of its music’s artistic merit, and this is largely impeded by rap’s reverence for gang culture and its affirmative disposition toward violence, drug use, and sexual exploitation and brutality. The video game industry suffers from this same problem: largely gone are the notions that games are only for teenage boys, but the pervasiveness of sexism throughout the medium continues to obstruct its potential to be accepted as a legitimate form of artistic expression.
pathos
Let's play a game of pretend: your identity--gender, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual--is now gone. In its place, you are one of the following: a middle aged Arabic Muslim; an Hispanic migrant worker; a gay black man; a transsexual person; a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Any presence your new identity has in mainstream media is frequently treated with suspicion or outright hostility, and fictional media such as movies and television programs do nothing to positively affirm your identity-if they even feature it. You have virtually nowhere to turn for social recognition of your differentiated status and non-normative identity. What effect must this have on your self-esteem to see that your identity group is considered by the mainstream media to be so unimportant?
Entertainment media allow people to escape the difficulties and confines of their real lives and experience extraordinary feats vicariously through someone or something else’s shoes. For girls and women who play video games, this means they get to escape a sexist reality where society pressures them to meet unrealistic standards of beauty, they are not legally entitled to earn salaries equal to what men earn, and where disproportionately female rape victims are frequently accused of “asking for it” by sin of clothing choice or alcohol consumption, into digital play worlds where they can play with make-up, ponies, and 2D boyfriends, be helplessly kidnapped and rescued by the masculine hero on his quest to save the kingdom, or beat up the bad guys (or girls) while the camera zooms in on the heroine’s curvaceous goodies. And of course, there is always the option of playing a man in an ultra-masculine world without a female body in sight. Rather than positively affirming female identity, the attitudes towards gender that the video game industry presents in its products dismantles it, simplifies it, and objectifies it.