Anita Sarkeesian is a popular figure among the true gaming community for many reasons. Ever since taking the world of gaming to storm with her tropes vs women video series, she has inspired countless girl gamers who before had been neglected by major gaming studios.
Her popular series of videos about misogynic tropes in video games received plenty of coverage in media outlets throughout 2014. While not everyone agreed with all of her criticisms, it is true that there have been sexist tendencies in video games for a long time. Whether it’s unrealistic outfits for female characters or the lack of strong women in games, many examples can be pointed to. Without referencing a single thing cited in the Tropes vs Women series, I can list examples of my own:
The above image is of Patty Wurst, an antagonist in Destroy All Humans Big Willy Unleashed. Of course, since that game has you playing as an evil alien intent on destroying the human race, Patty is actually a hero. In this game, she bravely tries to warn humanity about the alien threat but is laughed at. In the end, she takes matters into her own hands, taking a tank and sacrificing her life to try and stop the player from destroying humanity. She is a cool character. But the developers ruin everything in her death scene, when she cries out: “I only wanted to get back at Daddy! I should have just dated a gardener.” At no point in any Destroy All Humans game is any male character’s agency wiped away so callously. And lest you think this is a one off (which would be bad enough), late in the same game we have the roller girls, a cool gang of teenage girls who attempt to fight back against the alien invasion and save their town. One common line when you as the player kills them is: Daddy warned me this would happen!” Again, no male character says anything like this. This is just plain old misogyny. Roller Girls pictured below:
You might be wondering why I spent so much time in this article talking about a video game that came out in 2007. Well, here is why: We can ALL list an example of a sexist video game that affected us. Big Willy Unleashed is not even a game mentioned by Anita Sarkeesian. That’s the point, there are too many examples for one person to list or to even know about. Big Willy Unleashed is the game I played where the toxic writing of the developers ruined the rest of the game for me. Many reading this article will have their own example they can list where this happened, and most likely those examples will not have been covered in Tropes vs Women because there Just. So. Many. Examples. So, to all those who say that Anita was not on to something, I would ask they get their heads out of the sand and face the real world the rest of us have been living in.
A pile of fake gamers attacked Anita for stating her opinions on games. These people included professional trolls like Milo Yiannopoulos, who prior to 2014 had dissed gamers as losers. Milo went on to write for Breitbart before being forced out for revelations too dark to mention here, look it up yourself, yet back during the internet culture war revolving around Tropes vs Women, he was the leader of the fake gamers upset at Anita Sarkeesian. A few years ago, Milo called gamers losers again. He has moved on to the next grift. Meanwhile, Anita is a person who loved games ever since she was a child and is a person who continues to be involved in the gaming community. Her, and indie game developer Zoe Quinn (another target of the fake gamers) won because they were right, and because they have a history of contributing positively to the gaming community. This blog used to be a haven for the fake gamers, but thankfully that has changed.
Anita has scored many victories and has influenced many games since the launch of her series, but in this article, I’ll talk about one you may be familiar with: Dishonored 2. If you liked playing for the awesome Emily (and I did) during your run, you can thank Anita:
“I was one of some voices that were very critical of [the first] Dishonored,” Sarkeesian said. “While it was a really impressive game, it wasn’t so good to women. So, it was such a treat to see Dishonored 2 come out and you can play as Emily, the marketing was Emily… and it was very clear that there was at least some kind of internal conversation that happened internally around that.” Smith said that Sarkeesian’s criticism of the first Dishonored made him defensive at first, but played a role in the way Arkane approached the way it wrote the women of Dishonored 2. “Your comment,” Smith said. “Which I will always remember and I’ll take it to my grave is … ‘While Dishonored is a game that does many things very well, the roles it has for women are very narrow.'”
The gaming world in 2023 looks very different than the one that existed pre-Anita. At least half of all gamers are women, and everywhere you look, from mainstream games like Control to indie darlings like Lost Ruins and Vernal Edge, you find strong women protagonists. No more is one out of every twenty games, now it’s more like nineteen out of twenty games. Thank you, Anita Sarkeesian. Thank you, Zoe Quinn. Thank you to the millions of women gamers who stood up to the fake gamers & the sexist gaming industry to demand fair representation. The next generation of gamers, men and women alike, thank you.
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