LogFAQs > #946153549

https://www.vice.com/en/article/935eka/in-early-gamefaqs-the-subtext-was-often-sexism

Sadly, nostalgia often proves to be the gilded coat of paint that conceals less pleasant truths underneath. Time and time again, as I looked at character guides for RPGs or fighting game FAQs and movelists, I found a recurring motif: people being really weird about women characters in these old guides. It's little things, really. Comments about their appearanceor more commonly their sexual attractivenessthat aren't there for male characters. Notes that women characters often made it into a guide author's party because they're hot rather than because they were actually useful from a gameplay perspective. Individually, they may seem minor, but they stack up over time, and once you see one and are really aware of it, you will start to notice them everywhere. I think one of my favorites was one FAQ writer describing a woman character as being "beautiful and strong and she hasn't been given huge bosoms or anything to make her more appealing to shallow people," a statement so heavy with irony that I don't even know where to begin to discuss it. A build guide for Unlimited SaGa implies, for lack of better phrasing, the author receiving an imaginary face slap every time they comment on the weight or age of playable women. There's a "Female-only challenge" guide for the GBA Fire Emblem that the male characters make the game too easy: "Don't use them, and you'll have yourself a REAL challenge!" None of these examples are exactly four-alarm fires; they're microaggressions, as many things of this type usually are. It's not that any one example is usually anything more than off-putting, but seeing them happen repeatedly really starts to grate, at best, and at worst has the potential to be strongly upsetting.

A foundational Marxist theorist, Louis Althusser, describes a process called interpellation, where the structures in our culture "hail" us to identify ourselves relative to them. This is a simplification of a larger and more complex idea, obviously, but in many ways that's what this onslaught of microaggressive or objectifying comments and statements is doing. Surrounded by messaging that connects "women are sexy objects" with "we're talking to you, Gamers" means players are being told "Hey -- understand yourself as a gamer in relation to this framing." It doesn't necessarily presuppose that the person being hailed will agree, but it does mean that the boundaries of the discussion have been set before that person even gets a proverbial word in. FAQs like those found at GameFAQs are fan creations: made by players, for other players. It would be really easy to blame these weird, objectifying comments and asides on individuals or small groups, i.e. "well, these players are just being weird" or "what can you expect from video game culture?" The question we need to ask ourselves, though, is: what's building that culture in the first place? It's not like the idea "women are objects to be possessed/are there for your gratification" came from outer space on a meteor like a sci-fi virus. The answer is that a specific type of masculine identity has been sold to players (male or not) for decades; it's built into the marketing of games and the construction of an ideal consumer by the industry itself.

The takeaway here is clear: none of the weird sexualizing comments I saw in these old FAQs was somehow new or novel behavior, but rather just another form of a cultural shift that had been over a decade in the making at that point and which is continuing on in new and different forms and angles today. This is why the urge to say "well, this is all in the past" does serious potential harm: it lets us pretend that people nowadays are fine, it was just the old ways and/or the old people that were bad. What's the difference between a FAQ writer running down how hot the only playable woman in a fighting game cast is and a gacha game player's use of the cringe-inducing "waifu"? My intention here isn't to beat you about the head and shoulders with the "gamer men are evil!" stick. I do think, however, that it's important we confront these troublesome bits of our history rather than pretend they didn't happen. I think it says something that thinking back on my college days in the 90s, I legitimately do not remember noticing or even thinking about the sorts of things I found in FAQs coming back to them in 2020. It's not that they weren't there, but that at the time I likely didn't have the awareness or the skills to notice them and see them for what they were. All of this definitely makes me wonder, though: if you're in your late teens or early 20s now, what are you going to see coming back to look at this content 20-30 years from now? What will you notice then that you maybe aren't seeing now, just like what happened to me with these FAQs? Will we have learned from this recurring cycle of mistakes and problems?

Article had more characters than this site allows so didn't quote entire thing.



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