Randorama wrote:I would add that anyone* who would study tropes in shmups would discover fairly interesting tropes in the genre, such as a very early tendency to portrait women pilots as either player (Proco and Tiat from Darius, Taito 1986).
On the other hand, Darius won't win any awards for racial diversity in its representation of likely futuristic humans, with their idealized white-complected designs, nor will it gain the adoration of activists against human supremism, as it is essentially Jaws in space. Metroid is also from 1986, but its gender content is so slim that it's really hard to parse out whether it is trying to teach us a story about a female protagonist's struggles, or just reward us (as all the sequels have done throughout the years) with some male-oriented fanservice (the smart money is on the latter).
Tying in with what you write later, Darius is quite fairly linear. It seems more apt right to go for the heart of the matter and talk about games with social content. One can make a story about
geometric primitives; while it might escape certain tropes, it will also struggle to remain relevant to most people. The biggest problem here, for escaping the trope of dumb games catering to the lowest denominators, is that (to steal an idea from Red Dead Redemption) attempting to avoid making a choice is still making a choice; you can't escape being a part of the discussion. Some approaches attempt to sidestep the issue entirely, and wave it away; others confront it head-on and generally need to be fairly blunt (to the point of being forced and unnatural) in order to try to make an impact. Again, Red Dead Redemption has some good ideas in this area (with its many depictions of male misbehavior, and its fairly realistic portrayal of women in various roles in random events) but ends up getting history hilariously wrong. Of course, the fact that I even have to talk about Red Dead Redemption is sobering; despite the glory heaped on the game for being an "open-world" title, it is barely playable and clearly people are putting much more stock in that "freedom" and the story elements than any actual gameplay elements. Picking herbs in the wilderness? Have the world learned nothing since The Elder Scrolls III?
From the standpoint of games that have been catering to those dumb anglo jock stereotypes, I've always had fun trying to pick apart exactly what message Resident Evil 4's attempting to convey, as it offers a few challenging remarks which aren't undermined entirely by the fact that those challenges to American assumptions about the American place in the world are coming from deluded, hideous monsters.
Really, the key point that she fails to properly assess is that in progression ("story-based") games, where the programmer forces a linear progression on players, there has been a surge of old and ugly tropes to sell to a supposed demographic: dumb, mostly anglo frat jocks. Since this phenomenon does not apply to several historical gaming periods, emergent ("mechanics-based") games and non-frat markets, it cannot be said to be a key factor of how women are portrayed in videogames.
So would you deal with Ms. Pac-Man? Some people enjoyed that it attempted to cater to a different market; others resented the lazy and hamstrung implementation of a gender-dysphoric Pac-Man. The wise realized that it hadn't been necessary at all, except as a marketing gimmick to sell people on what was essentially a minor expansion of the original game. Even in its original incarnations, it seems that the designers quickly constructed a world around Mr. Pac-Man; he has a wife, a brat, lives in a town, and essentially acts more like a person than a pill with a mouth.
I think that this is a perfect example to show where I disagree slightly with your analysis - it's not that there are any genres or historical periods in gaming that have been immune from social considerations, but that some games have been more able to sidestep some issues than others, either due to scarcity of time for storytelling, or the general unsuitability of the material. There probably have been as many riffs on the anime Akira's rather clumsy take on the coming-of-age story in shmups (Master of Weapon, Esp.Ra.De, and Progear, clearly) as there have been cogent treatments of gender issue in games with content more developed than "oh look, a pilot is a woman!" I'm happy for your thesis, but Hellfire S's port turns the woman pilots into typical anime bimbos (and blows them away!), while Namco's Phelios and Capcom's Last Battle are more "guy saves the princess, in space" stories. The more game developers are able to say about these issues, the more it tends to slide back towards these assumptions, at least in some games. Frankly, I wonder where the most egregious examples are. I'm not qualified to talk about the typical pattern in the average blockbuster game, but to bring up Red Dead Redemption one last time, a lot of people seem to have played it and its GOTY compilation packaging crows about having received 160 GOTY awards - but otherwise it seems pretty much solely targeted towards the same "dumb anglo jock" demographic you mention.
Speaking of which, it would be a disservice not to mention the other fairly sizable demographics in other places that are at least as offensive as the "supposed dumb anglo jock" one, like pretty much any Japanese visual novel I've seen (but I think the counter-criticism is fair and should not be completely avoided - "you just haven't seen the right ones." Indeed, I've just happened to see all the strange ones with tentacles, enthusiastic bondage training, male pregnancies, and goodness knows what else.)
In a word I think that you are on the right track, but I have some issue with how you've tried to delineate the boundaries between games that succeed or fail in a treatment of these issues, and I also don't think (though I might be wrong) that you really are up-to-date on mass-market game attempts to deal with these issues, nor with the reality that probably the most "offensive" material is really being made for a niche audience.
