When I was much younger, there was this effort from certain outlets to try and elevate video games to a more ”respectable” medium. This was the age of MGS2, when gaming had come out of the closet and gained immense popularity thanks to the PS1, and the PS2 was doubling down on “mature” games, making Sega and Nintendo’s approach to gaming suddenly seem kiddy and obsolete in the span of a single gen.
20 years later, I fully embrace the idea of video games being, if not toys, just simple pastimes. Pure entertainment. Sure, some of them can be deeper than others. It’s usually not those that try too hard to be ”mature”, though.
I don’t know what pushes the desperate attempts to “elevate” games to something more than they actually are.
It reeks of a need for validation from people who were shunned in their youth for liking video games. I’m pretty sure it was exactly that for me, back then: “See? See? Vidya gamez are srs business, folks! I’m normal, I swear! I’m not a lonely nerd who’d rather spend hours in front of my TV than go out and meet people! I’m into something totally serious here!” Meanwhile, dubious “academics” were writing totally delirious books and articles about games and cinema, games and literature, games and society. I read some of those. For most of them, my time would be better spent playing games.
”Women” (it’s not only women, btw) aren’t wrong in seeing games as toys for boys. Games are that first and foremost, regardless of the effort of devs and journalists to make them “serious” and “deep”. If you need validation from the people who Alex is pandering to here, you still have a few things to understand about video games. A pretty doll in a fantasy game isn’t going to cause western society to become Afghanistan in a few decades - I’d be curious to get an explanation on how that would work exactly, anyway, seeing that we’ve had pretty dolls around for literal millennia and western women still have much more freedom than in many parts of the world.
And, one more time: the girl in this game is much, much, much tamer in her design than many other examples. The pearl clutching is completely unjustified.