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Skimming their data tables (don't have access to the journal outside of work), it feels like a really broad hodge pdge of semi-related studies (which the authors essentially admitted).
But it also kind of misses the point. The problem isn't titties or dicks in video games. The problem is the culture around it and what it reinforces and it very much goes far beyond video games. Big jiggly titties? You are a mature game. Dick size slider so you can rock a magnum dong that needs a monster condom? You are progressive. What? Both of those are just more male gaze?
And all of that is normalized. You won't see a significant change from the baseline because that IS the baseline.
You know what you almost never see (outside of those "problematic gay games that turn the kids into litter boxes")? A sexy twink. We all made the same joke about Lies of Timothee Chalamet being one of the better souslikes of the past decade but it is also very telling that we mostly see our twinks in full stillsuits or twelve layers of Victorian clothing. Look, but have enough chastity belts that nobody needs to be worried about being able to touch. And the moment you have a woman who doesn't have an hourglass figure? See: The Last Of Us 2.
Which is the issue. We have a cult of toxic misogyny that insists everything MUST be male gaze and the only acceptable nudity is big titty girls and guys who look like Ahnold. And any divergence from that is "ruining games" or "being woke" to the point that we don't even GET those games outside of the rare case of a game nobody cared about becoming popular (I'll always cite that Yasuke was a recurring character in Nioh long before people turned him into a culture war).
Its like saying that gas stoves cause no meaningful decrease in air quality but having every study take place in the home of a pack a day smoker.
Plenty in gachas, jrpgs, and such, imo.
I think in heated discussions about "DEI slop" people mostly complain about women being desexualized rather than anyone else being sexualized. Do you have any examples of games where in addition to women being sexualized there were twinks or someone else being sexualized and people insisted that only women should be sexualized but not those other groups? Think of BG3 - it goes beyond regular "male gaze" but it's still widely beloved because it's more inclusive to wide range of appeals including regular ones.
Funny you bring up gachas because in most of them the cast is overwhelmingly women.
Genshin has plently of male characters (F to M is ~1:2 iirc), and there is a variety of niches covered: cute twink-like types like Venti, hot tall guys like Diluc, etc. Anyway, vote with your wallet. It's only natural there are more girl characters if that's what larger chunk of playerbase want.
Even in your example there is way more women than men
I would argue the origin is sales. E.G. the publisher wants the sex appeal to sell, so that's what they put in the game. Early 'bro' devs may be a part of this, but the directive from up top is the crux of it.
And that got so normalized, it became what gamers expect. And now they whine like toddlers when anyone tries to change it, but that just happens to be an existing problem conservative movements jumped on after the fact.
TL;DR the root cause is billionares.
Like aways.
No, that is not the cause of the problem they are talking about. They're NOT talking about how those details are the norm. They are talking about the bro culture that many CHUDs have where deviation from those "acceptable" forms of sexualization are directly demonized. They're not talking about general attraction, but the active vitriol some dumbasses have for non-hot characters.
So you never played JRPGs ?
You mean the homeboys that are almost always wrapped in about forty buckles and, at best, exist as a viewpoint character for the harem of big titty anime girls?
But yeah. East Asian media tends to have fewer massively jacked protagonists. But it is still the fundamental male gaze. It is just that East Asian dudes tend to be less likely to spend dozens of hours a week working on glamour muscles.
Maybe we need more women working in game design. I don't know the figures, but I'm guessing they are underrepresented. We probably need more diversity in games generally. It feels like this should be obvious to studios too - the more diverse your team, the more likely your game is to appeal to a diverse audience = a larger pool of customers.
That was always my experience. You can force people to do hundreds of hours of sensitivity training and explain to them why making the acronym for their solver "SLUR" is inappropriate. But if you just focus on increasing the diversity of your hiring pool and ACTUALLY hiring the best and the brightest, so much of that solves itself because now there is someone to explain that China and Japan may have a lot of shared culture and history but are very much not the same country or why that word is totally a slur and so forth.
I don't know the actual metrics per studio (and most that DO report it are heavily skewed because they put the administrative staff in with the creative to juice their numbers). But, mostly, every time I think about "popular gamedev" it just reeks of startup culture. The idea that if you were part of a successful team then you should lead your own and that this game was made by one auteur rather than a giant team and so forth.
And that has the exact same problems we see at so many startups as a whole. The person who was real good at coding is HORRIBLE at management and has no understanding of what HR is even for and so forth. Which leads to the kind of shit that was deeply frowned upon in a conference room at 3 am becoming corporate culture and leading to "cube crawls" and the institutional abuse at companies like Blizzard or Ubisoft.
One thing that sticks with me that has only been vaguely alluded to by the more "woke" games media outlets. Ikumi Nakamura kind of became a sensation when she went full kawaii during a press conference for (I want to say) The Evil Within and all follow up interviews revealed she was a fricking genius with amazing ideas and really strong arguments for why certain features were there or not. Then she mysteriously disappeared. She alluded to it being the stress of game dev and "politics" but considering the next time we saw her (at a completely new studio) she was still doing horror but ALSO had a kid...
I'm gonna need some context please
eardrums immediately shattered by screams of Gamergate reactionary media
If you have a way to make (qualified) women study software engineering and other game dev related fields, please do share. I would love that.
But you can't fix lack of women and generally diverse people skilled in game dev during hiring. We have seen the results of trying multiple times.
Wow. Every dog in the tri-state area suddenly started barking. I wonder why...
But yeah. That is some bullshit that comes up every time anyone tries to address the diversity issues. "Well, if there were more intelligent black people, maybe we would hire a black or two" level comments.
In my experience, most first year undergraduate courses for STEM related degrees more or less match the demographics of the university itself. Depending on how rigorous the program that can change drastically as the weeding out courses happen, but it generally is "close enough" by the time they are in the 400s and going to special guest lectures by us industry a-holes.
The problem is what comes after. There is a reason there are Black Engineering and Women in Engineering mailing lists. Because so many companies (and graduate programs) basically want a "diversity hire" and nothing else. So you might have a class that graduates with 40% women entering a workforce that will hire 5%, at best. And... the good groups talk about this and encourage people to have a plan B. Whereas men (at least up until recently) know that if they just keep trying they'll get hired eventually because 95% of those jobs are for them.
And grad school (less an issue for game dev) has the added problem where so many advisers are complete creeps with tenure. But that is a different mess.
No. Whatever the field, if you actually work towards having a diverse hiring pool and actually hire on merit, you tend to have an employee demographic within a stones throw of the regional breakdown. Because, yes, socioeconomic and institutionalized racism do give certain ethnic groups a serious disadvantage. But when you are hiring for roles with undergrad or graduate degrees? The best of the best are the ones who actually DO tend to find a way to bootstrap themselves up (or have parents who did). And... long term that goes a long way towards fixing things. It isn't the complete solution but it REALLY helps.
A very good friend of mine who I worked with heavily on doing exactly that at our old company loved to joke about it as "reverse-gentrification of the work force". The idea that if you get a diverse foothold into a "neighborhood", it spreads. Those pesky women are more likely to know other pesky women who are a great fit for a role. And the kids of the Walker family are suddenly growing up in Silicon Valley and going to private schools rather than fighting for scraps at PS 118.
rofl that is NOT a dogwhistle, you actual dipshit... Software engineering, to this day, is infact, in actual living reality, underrepresentative of women and minorities. As a matter of fact.
You can bitch about reality not matching your expectations, but many of us work in the fucking industry and you're working off a mountain of shitty assumptions.
Makes me think why those big tech corporations are suddenly supportive of that regime in DC.
I don't know anything about other STEM fields or other countries, but where I live, most sw engineering courses don't have above 5%. (And I guess even fewer men in the medicine field. Some fields just seem to attract specific genders, idk why.)
But yeah, dismiss reality I have seen with my own eyes as "The dog whistles! The dog whistles!" And then act surprised when no one outside your echo chamber takes you seriously.
You speaking of the culture around is really important. That culture is part of the coomer and gooner problem which seems innocent and harmless/inoffensive to others but it is much more insidious. It essentially creates less of an actual reason to interact and a false sense of body expectations.
Essentially the otaku/neet problem japan is facing. People don't know how to interact with the opposite gender and when they do, they do so with their sexual interest as the prominent reason. Most people innately reject this forwardness based on appearances and the rejected will not understand how it is their fault they got rejected. There is little to no decorum or respect.
It's essentially a self feeding, lust-driven antisocial cycle that creates angry and dejected incels. It feeds into the other frustrations and creates a very spiteful and resentful person. I personally believe this is intentional after observing 4chan trends, as it creates easy people to manipulate. (Fappening grand invitation on Fox news, then the pepe dogwhistle to embolden those who are racist, while outraging those miscontrued - which eventually just is embraced)
Extreme emotions create easy to predict reactions, just point them at the person you want them to blame.
It's not innately videos games or media, but creating an entire culture that completely surrounds them does. Lust is one of those material prisons that is naturally inclined as it gives you good feelings. The internet overall has allowed kids to get endulged into this culture without any real risk or entry cost, long before they are of adequate age to understand the intimacy of reality.
So
This reads to me like a very heavily christian-biased thing. The christian bible says the original devil in the world took the shape of a snake (representing lust) that led eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and then they were kicked out of paradise.
What you're forgetting is that lust is a part of the natural world that was already there before god existed. The christian bible says sth along the lines of "the world was created 6000 years ago" and what it really means is that humanity or the human spirit was created 6000 years ago with the rise of the first civilizations and empires.
But the natural world did already exist way before that (nature is billions of years old), and lust was a natural and essential part of that. It is not so much that lust is a "mistake of god's creation" and kinda "sneaked in" or something, rather, god declared lust - which was already present - a sin, and by doing so, they tipped the natural balance of things. Maybe that is a thing to consider. It is not so much that lust is an invader and offender in the world, rather it is the human spirit that tipped the balance and therefore caused a millenia-old war against the serpent. And that has something to do with what you're saying, even though you're packing the arguments into very modern language.
I forget nothing, it is natural and that is why I am arguing against overindulgences and not the basic principle. Then again you can only see materiality in the context of god because your inner self is so small.
I am saying that overindulgence and fixation in lust becomes a prison. Why?
Look at marketing and media, it becomes a distraction for people and their vested interest. Intentionally meant only to distract and detract, afterwards one can lead you anywhere. Even to stagnate when look at waves at all current fascist developments but if you are so well versed then you know the Christian narrative is deeply against it. We literally get the fascist pig insult from the demon Legion, a commentary on the brainwashing the Legionnaires/Rome as a state pushed unto their citizens via fear and deprivation.
Only difference is now the person willingly goes to it because they wanna see some fat titties online with no effort, so when they try and fail to get real fat titties - they become angered at the disullusionment and blame the person rather than their own ineptitude. Division is good for those in power.
Lust is only called an invader or offender in your words. I call the culture that constantly pushes this into media and marketing as detrimental. Along with how easy it becomes for kids who are alone, with 2 working parents who can hardly raise a kid, they will fall into sheol and toss away years because it is immediately rewarding in their brains.
Let me make the example clear. Sugar is good for you, it is the most easily bio-available form of food for your cell. Protein needs energy to digest and fat is not soluble alone nor immediately usable. So it is a great thing, it even feeds your gut biome!
Now how can it bdcome bad? Over indulgence. Sugar causes a dopamine hit, kids bored at home regularly snack and eat a lot. If not some countries (you know the one) add sugar to their breads, peanut butter, and almost anything else. Why? Addictive and makes it taste better, it's why medicines go down easier with a spoon of sugar or however the saying goes. Well, this bombardment of sugar overfloods your dopamine receptors, raising the levels of dopamine they need to actually trigger joyous feelings.
It is inherently harder to feel happy, not a good thing. Even though sugar is a good thing.
Sex is fine, lust is fine, it is the overindulgence and ineptitude that is wrong with incel culture. They are gooners who blame others and take no responsibility nor do in moderation. They feel only rage.
Explaining this made me realize it also feeds into that cycle, as it is a big factor. I would jork my shit until I was shooting dust and aching, but kept going. I was massively overweight and had diabetes, both kinds. I was killing my pancreas and building a resistance to insulin. Why does it feed into it? If you are unhappy, jorking it gives you a fleeting and immediate controlled dose of happiness when you are a depressed sack of shit like I was.
I just want to make it abundantly clear I am not with this person.
Titillation is good. Masturbation is good. Sex is good (when between consenting parties).
The issue is not that there are tits and hints of dicks in games. The issue is that there can only be the kind that caters to a very specific male gaze and anything else unleashes a holy war.
Sweet fucking Eothas
I never disagree with that, it should exist and should be allowed. However, it flows abundantly and becomes the primary reason for a lot of gamers.
At least in the past it took some effort to mod as they followed some form of decorum. Allow the nudity and it changes no difference.
Yes, lust is a material prison to gooners. It literally is how we get the incel problem who feel they are mandated sex for being male yet understand little about actual social situation.
Not because of games, but because they are facilitated to get that release and enjoyment constantly with little to no trouble. Specially vulnerable are the young who suffer from a lack of understading for the higher value in self control and moderation.
Then again, you focus on video games and not the culture spoken of. Get defensive if you want, I can at least acknowledge my own pitfalls and spread the awareness I was made of aware of through my own tribulations with this. What I see develop online further and grosses me out as it was a culture I participated in and now I see the harm.
you could also easily turn this the other way around and say
who decides what is good and what is not? the people should decide it themselves.
Incels have as much to do with sexual desire as rape does. Because that is inherently what the incel mindset is. It is that others (almost always women, sorry, "females") don't deserve any agency and must exist solely to service people with the abrahamic god given right to sex. It isn't about getting your rocks off. It is about asserting power and dominance over someone by raping them.
Horny people jack off. They go to bars to hook up. Hell, they even go to rub and tug joints. Incels get angry that (again, almost always) women aren't servicing them and that they are forced to "goon". And there is one endstate when it comes to deciding that someone needs to have sex with you regardless of their consent.
Exactly, and the material prison I speak of with lust is this mental state with the incels. Surround someone with nothing but sex that is purposely meant to sell you something and dxploit your basic animal desires, you create a situation in which you make it easy for incels to form.
Incels forming in large clusters supports and pupports these bad habits of each other, then enabling the behavior further. In turn also normalizing and trivializing it as a subject matter.
You for some reason are making this about you and other normal people who have the cognicent ability to be rational. The issue isn't you nor is it video games or any one thing specifically. It is the bombardment that exists in marketing which in turn leads to the media as well being overblown with it to sell. My argument essentially is the same as sugar that the rest of the world would criticize America with.
You put sugar in everything. It is causing a dopamine constant release, in turn raising the bar for it to actually make you happy. Hence, most people with sugar overload have a harder time finding joy. Most people don't reslly understand the biochemical response to things we ingest, and much of it is the same with porn.
If an incel ever actually had sex with a woman he didn't pay, he would realize how starkly different reality is. That porn is edited and made perfect with angles that cant really be matched and is a completely different experience. They don't enjoy sex or jerking off as much as they enjoy the momentary disullusionment with their reality.
Video games just have a bigger influence with porn fixation due to it allowing direct 3D models and translation into SFM or blender animations. Along with it being fully fictional and having the same effect as hentai, being fully digital allows full control about what is and isnt. Losing the flaws of reality that make it beautiful. There is a reason hentai is more popular with kids, just how games are.
Sex is great but this glorification and marketive exploitation is not that. I don't know why you felt the need to involve any gods in the dialogue of human pitfalls due to corporate gain and political actualization. It's almost as if the same group who I blame for facilitating, and using, the issue to their benefit are the same followers of the name you invoked. I wonder(the answer is yes) if they have made outcries and dogwhistles that specifically speak to these folks.
Anyways if you do not like the god that is, make a god that isnt.
Look at gacha games. There's an entire industry revolving around selling anime girls, and when you realize that's what the business model is, it's not surprising how toxic their fanbases have become. I've suspected that some of these devs are even deliberately trying to filter their audience to the most desperate gooners.
Oh absolutely, I am a huge gooner. Had 12tb in an organized server with sections and whatnot. /r/playitfortheplot is legit just a bunch of gooners who give no shits but for sex and often miss the point of games.
A dude literally called Nier Automata a gooner game. Like bro it is one of the deepest games about what it means to be human. Sacrifice and duty. Yet the dude only saw tits and cared not at all for the narrative or reason. Mindless ghouls.