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Rainbow Six: Siege to include male hostages, too
Rainbow Six: Siege was the surprise finale of Ubisoft's E3 conference, featuring a team of players descending on a suburban home where a woman was held hostage by a group of heavily armed bad guys. The woman cowered while the house exploded around her, and she was referred to as "The Hostage" throughout the demo, passed back and forth between enemies and rescuers as if she were a flag to capture. The apparent objectification of the woman didn't sit well with many viewers – but the game will also feature men as hostages, Technical Artist Oliver Couture told RPS: "We're also gonna have male hostages. That's part of the plan." Ubisoft decided to use a woman hostage in the E3 demo for a specific reason, Couture said. "I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo. I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage. We wanted people to want to protect her. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that's the design we chose." Men aren't worthy of empathy, apparently. Couture described the technical aspects of the hostages in Rainbow Six: Siege as the epitome of next-gen. "We're trying to define next-gen with the hostage," he said. "We call that a 'living hostage.' So she'll react to explosions and things like that. It's pretty cool. She'll cough because of the dirt in the air, she covers herself when there's shooting – those sorts of things. We want the player to be able to move her into different positions, for there to be fluid controls. It's a balance between player comfort and reality." [Image: Ubisoft]
Damsel in Distress: Part 3 of Tropes series discusses 'dude in distress'
The third installment of Anita Sarkeesian's Damsel in Distress video series explores the "dude in distress" mechanic, the use of ironic sexism in retro-inspired games and wraps up with a look at games that subvert the damsel in distress idea. Sarkeesian notes that games featuring female heroes saving male counterparts – the dude in distress – are rare, with only 4 percent of games placing a woman in a leading role. Even then, the damsel in distress trope perpetuates a longstanding notion that women are inherently helpless and need saving, but the few dudes in distress don't negatively impact society's view of men, since there is no preconceived belief that men are powerless to save themselves because of their gender, she says. This is the final Damsel in Distress video, and the first completed video mini-series in Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games project. Tropes was funded via Kickstarter, raising $159,000 of a $6,000 goal, and expanding the series to 12 videos. Next up, according to the Kickstarter, is a section called "The Fighting F#@k Toy." Sarkeesian prefaces each of her videos with the same guiding principle: "It is both possible (and even necessary) to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects." Note that it doesn't say, "while also violently cussing out people who disagree with your views." Please, enjoy your critical analyses.
Tropes vs. Women in Video Games digs into the damsel in distress idea
Damsel in Distress: Part 2 of Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series discusses three "trope cocktails" that she says developers use to spice up the bland "save the girl" plotline: the woman in the rerigerator, the disposable woman and the mercy killing. Sarkeesian introduced the issue of the damsel in distress throughout the history of video games in her first video; the second installment notes that some modern developers recognize this trend and try to make the narrative "edgier" with graphic depictions of violence against women. Each trope cocktail has the effect of victimizing female characters, and using them only as motivation for the real story – the male character's quest, Sarkeesian argues. Damsel in Distress: Part 2 went live at 1 p.m. PT today, but by 2:30 p.m. the video was pulled from YouTube. It was restored within the hour, though Sarkeesian's official Feminist Frequency Twitter account said the removal was from an influx of bogus reports of YouTube terms of service violations. "An hour after our video went live I got an email saying, 'The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate,'" Feminist Frequency said. Sarkeesian does note that the video contains "some depictions of violence against women" and advises viewer discretion. This wouldn't be the first time Sarkeesian was the subject of internet harassment, following a high-profile Kickstarter that drew ire from a vocal group of people online. Damsel in Distress: Part 2 is live now, available for anyone and everyone to view and discuss. Civilly, if we have anything to say about it.
