And despite all of that maturity, they still do male-gaze, heteronormative centric design.
In BG3, Type A halflings (male presenting) are all dumpy and kinda goofy-looking. Type B halflings are all banging smokeshows. Give me the dumpy looking halflings, man.
In Cyberpunk, the camera lingers on nude women, but hides or ignores male nudity, even if the player character is fem presenting and chooses a male partner.
There’s a YouTube video about this, but I can’t find it. I’ll update later if I do (and remember)
Bitching that sex sells is kinda just objectively stupid.
Doubly so when you cherry pick male centric entertainment and ignore female centric entertainment that does NOTHING but the female gaze.
Different groups of people flock to different entertainment and all of them for all of human history has sold themselves to their audience.
Video games objectively do get played more by men. And more men buy certain types of games over others on top of that
Don’t blame the companies on that one. Blame your fellow consumers.
There are games out there that do sell towards the male attracted audience. Hell I frequently hear straight women and gay men both say that the new god of war games are basically nothing but sex selling to them. For example.
Video games are marketed to men cause video games historically were marketed to boys… because toy stores were strictly gendered in the 80s, so they made the choice least likely to impact sales (girls can play with boy toys, but boys can’t play with girl ones)
Like, dude, preferences among genders are usually societally conditioned rather than distillations of some essential gender shit. Video games in the united states are majority played by women, if you’re not counting strictly console gaming.
Of course, they do the male gaze. The majority of the male audience loves it and the majority of the female audience doesn’t care enough to prevent a sale.
It’s a no-brainer to implement male gaze if your target audience includes males. It’s easy to do and yields a lot of goodwill from that part of the audience. Some gacha games make tons of money just doing the male gaze and literally slopping everything else. It’s absurd how well sex sells.
They sort-of have to pretend to be just funny because otherwise they get banned for bible belt reasons. They are easy to avoid, so I don’t care about them existing. It’s not the content I need uBlock Origin or SponsorBlock for to get it out of my face.
these games are taking inclusion steps. but that doesn’t mean they need to stop catering for the majority. its still art made by humans and their own preferences find a way in
Catering to the majority is a little wild of a statement. There are a lot of games I’d be embarrassed to play in public because they cater too hard to the lonely, horny dude demographic.
Its fine to put that stuff in but devs should be making it optional so people can play shit in public spaces.
The usage of the virtual camera in cyberpunk described above is textbook male gaze. Male gaze is specifically about how people aim cameras (in this case virtual cameras) with the assumption that the audience is primarily composed of cisgender, heterosexual men. It seems like you are making this same assumption here when you say “catering for the majority,” especially considering data shows a roughly 50/50 split: https://www.statista.com/statistics/326420/console-gamers-gender/
EDIT: I switched to a global link. The URL says console gamers. The graph title says any device.
Women gamers tho tend to clump up in very different genre perfences then men. So there is a lot of fucking nuance to that.
The majority of the biggest block buster games tend to be very dominated by games that land in the male dominated spaces.
Also men and women both almost always prefer female nudity over male even among straight women. Its a very common fun fact about sex marketing in media.
Been that way basically forever. Well before modern times even.
The “male gaze” is objectively just an unfortunate condition of how we’re wired. We all like looking at conventionally attractive women. Even straight women. So that will always be the default in any game with artists selected at random from the general artistic population.
Not how we’re wired, how patriarchy views both forms. Seriously, you can’t just put up a study that confirms an assumption of patriarchy without acknowledging that it is, on some level, circular logic.
Patriarchy is the dominant worldview, patriarchy says that beauty is a feminine trait, most people agree that women are more beautiful than men. All that proves is that most people accept the patriarchal definition of beauty.
If you conducted this same study in ancient Greece, would you expect the same result? If no, then cultural views of beauty play a big role in this. If yes, then why were the ancient Greeks obsessed with male nudity?
Actually yes the ancient greeks did preference the female form as more beautiful than the male form. Their mythology and gods and goddesses make that very clear.
Hell to depict a man as an aspect of beauty would have been blasphemous as that would be an insult to Aphrodite. Unless said man was blessed by the goddess and had her favor. Men were for all intents and purposes subservient to women for the purposes of beauty.
Most Greek statues also depict leaders and mythological folk heros. Which were men, but women are always equally treated with respect in art of that nature. Greeks just generally respected the human form in general.
You couldn’t have picked a literal worse example to try to prove your point. And it really makes you sound like you are just a misandrist and don’t want to straight say it out right.
If you conducted this same study in ancient Greece, would you expect the same result? If no, then cultural views of beauty play a big role in this. If yes, then why were the ancient Greeks obsessed with male nudity?
Why wouldn’t you? I’m not an expert but from skimming through a brief search they seem to adhere more or less to the same standards we do. Yeah, there’s more dudes but that can be explained by the fact that they’re sculpting heroes from mythology which are mostly men and they want to show off how buff they are. It’s like comic books of today, but unrestrained by censorship. The female statues are just as conventionally hot/naked.
Not how we’re wired, how patriarchy views both forms. Seriously, you can’t just put up a study that confirms an assumption of patriarchy without acknowledging that it is, on some level, circular logic.
This is a wonderful idea, it’s not a falsifiable theory though. This makes assumptions that Patriarchy in its current form is so deeply ingrained it affects every study on nudity preferences done at the subconscious level. So the only way your idea could ever be proven is if we, in a vacuum, develop cloned humans and developed a specific matriarchal society for them that we some how teach them without any possible contamination, and then repeat tests like these and see if there’s a difference.
Patriarchy is the dominant worldview, patriarchy says that beauty is a feminine trait, most people agree that women are more beautiful than men. All that proves is that most people accept the patriarchal definition of beauty.
Or alternatively, Patriarchy developed from common human traits in majority, which resulted in a preference for the female form in regards to beauty (it didn’t), which associated beauty as a feminine trait (it didn’t), and thus it’s not the tail that wags the dog, but indeed the opposite.
If you conducted this same study in ancient Greece, would you expect the same result? If no, then cultural views of beauty play a big role in this. If yes, then why were the ancient Greeks obsessed with male nudity?
Yes, actually. And more specifically it would benefit your argument if that study was done – since Ancient Greece was a heavily patriarchal society regardless of which period you pick and which society you want to pick within Ancient Greece. Arguably it was a more patriarchal society than today; with the fact women were not seen as sexual partners (Athens, Sparta, etc), just spouses meant to produce children.
We’d also have to broach the fact that outside a few renaissance artists imitating an ignorant variance of ancient Greece, there was not an obsession with male nudity over female nudity. They were just more open with both compared to later western societies that built themselves with Greece as a template.
Let’s face it, women are straight up beautiful. Like, outside of a sexual or “treating like an object” point of view, they do hold inherent beauty that men only seem to compare in Greek statues.
And despite all of that maturity, they still do male-gaze, heteronormative centric design.
In BG3, Type A halflings (male presenting) are all dumpy and kinda goofy-looking. Type B halflings are all banging smokeshows. Give me the dumpy looking halflings, man.
In Cyberpunk, the camera lingers on nude women, but hides or ignores male nudity, even if the player character is fem presenting and chooses a male partner.
There’s a YouTube video about this, but I can’t find it. I’ll update later if I do (and remember)
Bitching that sex sells is kinda just objectively stupid.
Doubly so when you cherry pick male centric entertainment and ignore female centric entertainment that does NOTHING but the female gaze.
Different groups of people flock to different entertainment and all of them for all of human history has sold themselves to their audience.
Video games objectively do get played more by men. And more men buy certain types of games over others on top of that
Don’t blame the companies on that one. Blame your fellow consumers.
There are games out there that do sell towards the male attracted audience. Hell I frequently hear straight women and gay men both say that the new god of war games are basically nothing but sex selling to them. For example.
Video games are marketed to men cause video games historically were marketed to boys… because toy stores were strictly gendered in the 80s, so they made the choice least likely to impact sales (girls can play with boy toys, but boys can’t play with girl ones)
Like, dude, preferences among genders are usually societally conditioned rather than distillations of some essential gender shit. Video games in the united states are majority played by women, if you’re not counting strictly console gaming.
Of course, they do the male gaze. The majority of the male audience loves it and the majority of the female audience doesn’t care enough to prevent a sale.
It’s a no-brainer to implement male gaze if your target audience includes males. It’s easy to do and yields a lot of goodwill from that part of the audience. Some gacha games make tons of money just doing the male gaze and literally slopping everything else. It’s absurd how well sex sells.
basically the entire anime and vtuber “cultures” have been nothing but horny bait for years now. What really gets me is how it pretends not to be
They sort-of have to pretend to be just funny because otherwise they get banned for bible belt reasons. They are easy to avoid, so I don’t care about them existing. It’s not the content I need uBlock Origin or SponsorBlock for to get it out of my face.
eh, sounds like an accidental noting burger.
these games are taking inclusion steps. but that doesn’t mean they need to stop catering for the majority. its still art made by humans and their own preferences find a way in
Lmao reminds me the stat where Larian said that the absolute majority played HUMAN WARRIOR :D
The majority of people are normal boring standard ass people.
The entire reason the queer community is called queer is because explicitly they are different from that over whelming mass of people.
You gotta have a base line to have differences after all. Someone has to be the boring ass NPC!
And there ain’t nothing wrong with that. Some people are vanilla as fuck others are fabulous as fuck. Some are both!
Catering to the majority is a little wild of a statement. There are a lot of games I’d be embarrassed to play in public because they cater too hard to the lonely, horny dude demographic.
Its fine to put that stuff in but devs should be making it optional so people can play shit in public spaces.
The usage of the virtual camera in cyberpunk described above is textbook male gaze. Male gaze is specifically about how people aim cameras (in this case virtual cameras) with the assumption that the audience is primarily composed of cisgender, heterosexual men. It seems like you are making this same assumption here when you say “catering for the majority,” especially considering data shows a roughly 50/50 split: https://www.statista.com/statistics/326420/console-gamers-gender/
EDIT: I switched to a global link. The URL says console gamers. The graph title says any device.
That’s too broad to be meaningful,since it ignores mobile vs console vs PC preference
You sound like a man.
Yeah, it’s the immediate assumption that the male gaze is the majority.
Women make up half of the gaming community.
Women gamers tho tend to clump up in very different genre perfences then men. So there is a lot of fucking nuance to that.
The majority of the biggest block buster games tend to be very dominated by games that land in the male dominated spaces.
Also men and women both almost always prefer female nudity over male even among straight women. Its a very common fun fact about sex marketing in media.
Been that way basically forever. Well before modern times even.
In most studies most women and most men prefer looking at female nudity.
The “male gaze” is objectively just an unfortunate condition of how we’re wired. We all like looking at conventionally attractive women. Even straight women. So that will always be the default in any game with artists selected at random from the general artistic population.
Not how we’re wired, how patriarchy views both forms. Seriously, you can’t just put up a study that confirms an assumption of patriarchy without acknowledging that it is, on some level, circular logic.
Patriarchy is the dominant worldview, patriarchy says that beauty is a feminine trait, most people agree that women are more beautiful than men. All that proves is that most people accept the patriarchal definition of beauty.
If you conducted this same study in ancient Greece, would you expect the same result? If no, then cultural views of beauty play a big role in this. If yes, then why were the ancient Greeks obsessed with male nudity?
Actually yes the ancient greeks did preference the female form as more beautiful than the male form. Their mythology and gods and goddesses make that very clear.
Hell to depict a man as an aspect of beauty would have been blasphemous as that would be an insult to Aphrodite. Unless said man was blessed by the goddess and had her favor. Men were for all intents and purposes subservient to women for the purposes of beauty.
Most Greek statues also depict leaders and mythological folk heros. Which were men, but women are always equally treated with respect in art of that nature. Greeks just generally respected the human form in general.
You couldn’t have picked a literal worse example to try to prove your point. And it really makes you sound like you are just a misandrist and don’t want to straight say it out right.
Why wouldn’t you? I’m not an expert but from skimming through a brief search they seem to adhere more or less to the same standards we do. Yeah, there’s more dudes but that can be explained by the fact that they’re sculpting heroes from mythology which are mostly men and they want to show off how buff they are. It’s like comic books of today, but unrestrained by censorship. The female statues are just as conventionally hot/naked.
This is a wonderful idea, it’s not a falsifiable theory though. This makes assumptions that Patriarchy in its current form is so deeply ingrained it affects every study on nudity preferences done at the subconscious level. So the only way your idea could ever be proven is if we, in a vacuum, develop cloned humans and developed a specific matriarchal society for them that we some how teach them without any possible contamination, and then repeat tests like these and see if there’s a difference.
Or alternatively, Patriarchy developed from common human traits in majority, which resulted in a preference for the female form in regards to beauty (it didn’t), which associated beauty as a feminine trait (it didn’t), and thus it’s not the tail that wags the dog, but indeed the opposite.
Yes, actually. And more specifically it would benefit your argument if that study was done – since Ancient Greece was a heavily patriarchal society regardless of which period you pick and which society you want to pick within Ancient Greece. Arguably it was a more patriarchal society than today; with the fact women were not seen as sexual partners (Athens, Sparta, etc), just spouses meant to produce children.
We’d also have to broach the fact that outside a few renaissance artists imitating an ignorant variance of ancient Greece, there was not an obsession with male nudity over female nudity. They were just more open with both compared to later western societies that built themselves with Greece as a template.
Let’s face it, women are straight up beautiful. Like, outside of a sexual or “treating like an object” point of view, they do hold inherent beauty that men only seem to compare in Greek statues.
Men are also beautiful and there’s a lot of male Greek statues.
ok
Bulverism