The cheeky Brits at OXM made an amusing video about sexism in gaming culture which Rock Paper Shotgun aptly describes as “a splendid distilling of the arguments regarding both the lameness of the portrayal of women in games, the lameness of how the media discusses it, and most of all, the lameness of the gobshite apologists who will inevitably appear in the comments acting like the spoilt, privileged gobshite apologists they are.” Sure enough, those gobs were all over the video’s YouTube comments. Well knock me over with a feather.
The video stars Jon Blyth trying to save Alice Scoble-Rees (if she would just let him) and giving the business to strawman Matt Lees. Blyth also does a good job saying something I’ve thought but couldn’t articulate as clearly: “I’m too lazy, apologetic, and nervous to be a crusader. All I want is to not feel complicit, but that’s hard because it’s everywhere: girlfriend mode, booth babes at expos, Team NINJA’s teenage t!t physics, Hitman: Absolution‘s sexy nun trailer, press events at strip clubs, death threats sent by hormone-steeped psychopaths to a woman who wants to study how video games portray women, the background noise of sexual violence from people who just got shot by someone with a feminine-sounding gamer tag, every one of the seven million results for the phrase ‘Make me a sammich’, Penny Arcade throwing their righteous weight behind a card game where aliens ‘abduct’ schoolgirls. Men may have built this world, but the world we’ve built is sh-t.”