So, a couple days after I announced my idea for this game project, Anita Sarkeesian went on the Colbert Report for an interview and basically said my idea during it.
That is a bit unfortunate for me; as if this project manages to be at all successful the assumption would be that I got the idea from watching her interview on television. I suppose it is lucky that I did make a post about the idea right away this time.
As far as Anita goes, I have to say that I am not a fan of her work. She does far too much finger pointing and complaining, with not enough constructive criticism or suggestions on how to make things better. One can only say everything is bad for so long before you start to get the feeling that a person is impossible to satisfy.
Since the mistreatment of females in gaming has been a pretty hot issue lately, I figured that making a game subverting a common trope rather than just complaining about the trope being wrong would be a more productive move.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the Damsel in Distress trope. The problem is more that we do not have enough games that subvert, or invert the trope yet to balance it out. In my opinion, punishing people for not making better female characters will just lead to an avoidance of female characters to avoid controversy. I feel like the solution is more to praise and reward people who make good female characters.
I have my fingers crossed pretty hard that I am able to actually make a decent female character in this game. It’s a pretty ambitious project, and I’ll be posting about more of the details fairly regularly now that I am not under such a heavy time crunch.