Slashdot Mirror
Sweden Considers Adding "Sexism" Ratings To Video Games
An anonymous reader writes A government-funded agency in Sweden is considering creating special labels for video games based on whether or not the games' portrayals of women are sexist. From the article: "Avoiding sexism and gender stereotypes in video games produced in Sweden will become a key goal for the association, which has been given a 272,000 kronor ($36,672) grant by Sweden's government-funded innovation agency, Vinnova. Inspired by the Bechdel test, which looks at whether fictional films or books feature at least two women talking about a topic other than men, Dataspelsbranchen will work with several game developers to analyze how Swedish video games portray female characters and gender issues.
I personally won't care a whit about this one but more detailed ratings can only be a good thing. I envision an ecosystem of metadata ranging from "suitability for playing in a car on a laptop" to "power usage profile" It's not like the world is short on disk space.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Time to get that dot eatting trollop. Running around with none thing else but a pink bow tie, not even strategically placed.
Not to mention the various displays she allowed of herself on the arcade cabinet.
Well it's about time...the vast cultural influence of Swedish video games here in the United States has just been too much. My brother got hooked on "Lutefisk Avenger," like he just can't stop playing it. I thought it was a bad sign when he re-designed his kitchen to look more like an IKEA showroom. Then he put mayonnaise in a toothpaste tube! If he starts becoming a computer hacker who fights Nazis I am going to have to take away his Super Nintendo.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Can we work systemd into the discussion?
OK, my fellow gamergaters, it's time to dox Sweden!
She lives just east of Norway and west of Finland. Make sure to visit that feminazi every day and teach her the consequences of trying to censor all games and force us to play Depression Quest!
Together we will fight to guarantee better ethics in game journalism.
it's time we tell them to man up and stop complaining about perceived sexism.
Irony? :-D
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
As far as I know, the Swedish game industry consists of DiCE (Battlefield series: faceless men with guns + bugs. Mirror's Edge: slightly poorly thought out controls + bugs), Arrowhead (faceless mages + bugs) and Coffee Stain Studios (goats + bugs). It seems like Swedish game developers have a huge struggle against writing code that actually does what it is supposed to, not in its representation of female characters. It has gotten to the point that until you see a Swedish game in the "bargain bin" at your games retailer that it is guaranteed that won't be patched to a playable state yet.
It seems that since King Gustavus Adolphus or whoever the hell it was convinced the vikings to stop going on voyages to rape remote villages and settle down to do "civilized" work that entire country has been writing code the way that IKIA builds furniture, by which I mean that it is good for the first ten iterations and then crashes hard thereafter. I have yet to play a Swedish game that has remained stable for long enough to degrade women before it runs out of memory, reads from/writes to a null pointer, totally screws up the render state or overwrites a vertex buffer with random garbage.
Seriously, look at your supposed "retard cousin" next door Finland, does Trine crash? Does Angry Birds crash? How about Crayon Physics, Super Stardust or Clash of Clans? No, they run beautifully and smoothly. And does anyone give a shit that the Theif in Trine covers her face and not her legs? No, not even Germaine Grier, Simone de Beauvoir or any of your feminist type authors would pick a deeply nuanced female character over one that actually runs for 10 minutes without crashing. I mean, how could you be a female role model while accessing a null pointer.
Seriously Sweden, you have to learn to code before you get all preachy on us all.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
This is people trying to do something productive about it.
No.
This is people trying to do something they BELIEVE will be favorable to their PERSONAL idea of a solution to their PERSONAL idea and PERCEPTION of a problem they PERCEIVE.
I.e. It is about as productive as me buying a large quantity of mice traps and positioning them at "strategic locations" around my home because I believe that my neighbor is spying on me with the help of trained mice. Which I know cause I've noticed that he does not particularly like cats.
An obsessive-compulsive action performed because "something has to be done" to fix a PERCEIVED aspect of a potential problem.
Which, even should the problem turn out to be real, is still a mere case of "ANY action is better than inaction".
Be it that my neighbor really is spying on me - or that Sweden has a clear and present problem of rampant sexism which requires warning labels on works of fiction, entertainment and art.
After all, "parental advisory" stickers on works of fiction, entertainment and art REALLY were necessary AND they have both reduced the exposure of youth to "inappropriate material" AND have either reduced or completely eliminated whatever it was that was poisoning the minds of the youth.
Which is clearly visible in the higher quality of humans born and raised since 1990.
They are simply better.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens