Body confidence campaigners try to redesign video game women

[Dystopia]

^Dead on

I also think that's what age ratings are there for. There is a reason why 18+ games are rated such. If you as a parent let your 6 year old kid play it and then find they're copying what they see, that's on you as a parent. It's not the job of the media to censor everything and not release anything that's unsuitable for kids, it's on the parents to use discretion in allowing their kids to see adult rated stuff and explain that it isn't reality.

I don't think people really understand the critique - Videogames are undoubtedly fantasy, but fantasy frequently treats concepts that have some degree of realism in it - The fact something is fantasy doesn't mean it can't affect our perceptions of reality. Videogames don't incentive violence simply because very few games actually portray it as positive - You can put 1000x acts of violence and create an anti-violence game if the context makes those acts seem wrong, and you can have a single act of seemingly weak violence and be very pro-violence. What matters is not the violence itself but context, as it shapes our perceptions. A character being raped in (I'm using TV series as a better example) GOT is not the same as the female character raped in Dexter, as the latter seemed a far worse and even dystopian scenario while in the former it kinda becomes frequent so peopel stop caring much about it - This is an example of how the same act can have different effects on the audience.

The problem with objectification of women is that everyone who contributes to it is fueling an already existing and troubling problem - For males the threat of sexual objectification exists but it is not as frequent, and all it takes is to collect pictures from male and female people in magazines for a few months to see how different portrayals are - It is easy for me to say it's not a problem because I'm not female and it's not like I have to be careful about what games I buy because I don't want to end up playing something that uses my gender for shock value and captivating audiences with no other purpose.

Of course, videogame characters are literally dolls to play with, so the word objectification kinda becomes oxymoronic - But that's just a semantics talk. The fact something is fantasy doesn't mean it doesn't affect how we view the world. Are you telling me that all the moral lessons I can learn from LOTR are invalid because it's fantasy? What about Harry Potter? Are you telling me it's wrong to think Harry Potter teaches kids to be moral and good to others?

I think people confuse attractiveness and sexuality with objectification - The latter is troubling, but the former is desirable and good. You can have lots of hot people without objectifying (excessively) any of them.