ism
Sexism and racism - or, at least, their elements - are prevalent everywhere, even in places that aren’t immediately obvious.
Pac-Man was designed around an eating theme (and given colorful, non-threatening graphics) because the designer was trying to appeal to female players, who were an untapped market at the time. He couldn’t come up with a good game idea about dressing up or dating, but he knew girls liked to eat desserts.
I’ve already covered how EverQuest is endemically racist by having black people and humans as separate races, just like how Huck Finn thought the real world worked until Jim bled red.
Portal and Portal 2 are both lessened by multiple instances of the antagonist insulting the main character about her weight. This kind of talk is, at its heart, objectifying, as it is founded on the harmful notion that the main responsibility of women is to be physically attractive.
Someone threw up a red flag at the racism in Ridiculous Fishing. In that game, upgrades are bought from a boat merchant in a coolie and robes. In a brief blog exchange, the lead artist defended his decision by stating he thought boat merchants fit the game and were neat in general, and that image-searching showed Vietnamese boat merchants still wear that getup (especially the hats, which are quite functional). Other posters with more first-hand experience in that region begged to differ on the robes. They also pointed out that regardless of whether that attire is accurate in isolated instances, it perpetuates an unflattering stereotype, and thus the mature thing to do would be to realize the error, apologize, and change the art in the next patch, not defend it.
Then there’s Antichamber, a sexist first-person shooter. “Wait, no,” you say. “Antichamber isn’t sexist at all. It’s an abstract 3D puzzle game. There aren’t even any people in it!” To which I reply, a) it’s done in first-person view, b) you shoot out (and draw in) puzzle cubes with your puzzle cube gun, and c) look at this spoiler-free compilation of most of the wall signs you encounter in the game:
So there are people in it. Lots of them. And notice how nearly every time the designer wanted to depict a human, he drew a man? That mentality - that men=people and women are exclusively women - lies at the heart of a lot of sexual inequality. Oh, and it sure doesn’t help that the only situation with a clearly female character involves physically rejecting flirtatious advances at a singles bar until being mollified with flowers.
Of course, if those examples feel too contrived for you, or you feel I’m more of a kook or a radical than someone with a legitimate reason to believe what I believe, I could pick the low-hanging fruit that’s lighting flamewars right now: Dragon’s Crown, and how all the oversensitive feminists are making a big deal out of one character being exaggerated in sexual ways in a game where all characters are exaggerated in some way or other and the art overall has an undeniably high quality.
I mean, in any creative act, there is exactly one entity in the whole universe who has even the slightest iota of legitimate input into what gets created or how, and that’s the creator. Anything else is censorship, right? Art exists to say what the artist wants to say, not what the viewer wants to hear. It doesn’t matter whether X hurts you; it’s still wrong to say, “Hey, maybe people shouldn’t do X so much.”
I’m having a hard time buying that, though. Maybe I’m not educated enough?