Feminist critique is also about the culture that surrounds the game
Just because “market forces” or culture determine the content somehow, doesn’t justify the content within the actual game
Very much so, but the argument for unconscious bias is begging the question and doesn’t take into consideration the context of those depictions from any other place than feminist’s own.
Sexism is still sexism and it reflects back onto the culture which produces it
A tenuous hypothesis with an unprovable premise. At best sexism in media reflects the single media piece in question and even then the sexist attitude could only reflect the fictional character or world in question. Not all media has the same influence, no one necessarily watches the same media the same way and no one is molded by them the same, so the argument how “sexist media depictions creates sexism” is a very poor factor to prove anything statistically.
They are not great by any means, but she comes to her conclusions through fairly consistent and good logic
It might be if the standards stayed the same with a random sampling each time it was tested and there was no way to interpret the same scene as sexist from some other point of view. When “conservatively dressed female characters are a sign of the patriarchy” and “sexy fictional female characters are a sign of the patriarchy” can both be valid premises for feminist critique, something has to give. I dislike the Bechdel test for multiple reasons, but at least it has clearly defined measurements to follow.
And yeah Jim Sterling really is only consistent in anti-business in that he hates money grubbing CEOs, but when you really think about it, he doesn’t really fit within any dichotomy of “pro-business” “pro-consumer”.
Which was my point. Single label descriptions should only be tolerated for the sake of brewity and comprehension. The “anti-corporate” label was simply the best choice out of any other single descriptive label, in my opinion.