Visual Pleasure & Narrative Gaming

This video is an exploration of female gender in video games based on Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". I argue that despite a more 'active' portrayal, virtual women project "to-be-looked-at-ness", just as their cinematic counter parts have been doing for years.

Category:

Gaming

Tags:

• Visual
• Pleasure
• Narrative
• Gaming

[Thewildside]

Bayonetta is probably the best example of this concept I've ever seen (I wrote several essays on the role of gaming on modern society and their replacement of niches in society). I actually had to put the game down because the sex got in the way of good story telling or focussed gameplay. It was like wanting a good film and getting softcore porn. Have you seen the machinema's on the subject? They tend towards the dull (or the tediously obvious) but the underpinnings are fantastic.

[LFHughes]

@Thewildside I watched a lot of machinema on 'sexy gaming girls' in order to make this, because I wanted to get an idea of what constitutes 'sexy' in gaming-- interestingly Bayonetta was left out of many of the mash ups (I guess because people feel the same way you do, that she's just ridiculous and, to a certain extent, annoying). I'm also fascinated by the development of gaming in society, and would love to see more vids, are there any in particular I should watch?

[Thewildside]

@LFHughes Either way, the backlash is that selling sex is far more difficult than is generally acknowledged. Most of the purely sexualised games have very low sales figures because they fail to realise that gaming has to be intellectually engaging, otherwise the experience is as interactive as pornography (IE, only interesting up to aesthetic payoff, before one puts the game down and does something more engagin with their time)

[Thewildside]

@LFHughes I would still have Bayonetta down as interesting, as she does not match the voluptuous stereotype in gaming. Rather, she has a streamline and athletic build, which is uncommon in the standard gaming female build. I remember one called the Female Puppet, which was an academic machinama about Tomb Raider, though I remember finding it pretty uninspired. Ill see if I can dig out the one on the replacement of the hunter/gatherer niche in MMORPG's and relationship with addiction.