There is one woman in the one minute, 22 second teaser trailer for Red Dead Redemption 2. She sits bored on the steps of a tobacco store, not doing anything at all – blink and you’ll miss her.
People were well primed for a male-focused RDR 2 trailer, given the seven male silhouettes from the teaser logo, and the creeping feeling that the criticism developers Rockstar have faced over their treatment of women characters over the years only makes them want to stubbornly tell even more male-centric stories.
A teaser trailer and a logo do not a game make. There may well be many great women characters in the final game, and certainly, the first Red Dead Redemption had some good, if underused characters in Bonnie MacFarlane, Abigail Marsden, and Luisa Fortuna.
But the thing that I really loved about the first RDR game was its basis in, and conscious continuation of the Western as a cinematic genre. In the lead-up to release, Rockstar released a great series of blog posts that detailed the influence of particular Western classics on the game. Playing RDR, film is all over the place: everything from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West (1968) to Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) and even contemporary classics like There Will Be Blood (2007).
So here’s the thing, then: if RDR 2 continues without any sort of major kick-ass woman, it’ll be actually far more male-focussed as a story than most classic westerns. Far from blindly continuing tradition, by excluding women, Rockstar will be betraying the genre.
Here’s ten films Rockstar might want to catch up on before Red Dead Redemption 2 launches.
1. Hannie Caulder (Burt Kennedy, 1971)
Pervy, and definitely a bit rapey, Hannie Caulder is nonetheless a classic spaghetti-western style tale of revenge that sees a woman rancher (Raquel Welch) in training to be a great gunfighter and avenge her family. Hannie Caulder was a big inspiration for Kill Bill, and Tarantino has referred to his love of it many times. Welch herself was in a number of other Westerns (Bandolero, 100 Rifles), and rarely played a straightforward damsel-in-distress role.
2. The Belle Starr Story (Lina Wertmüller, 1968)
Apart from being a gunfighting Western where the woman protagonist is absolutely taken on her own terms and abilities, The Belle Starr Story was also the only Spaghetti Western to be directed by a woman. Belle Starr was herself an actual historical figure, too – an outlaw who has reoccurred as a figure in dozens of films, television shows, and novels.
3. Johnny Guitar (Nicholas Ray, 1954)
An undisputed classic, Johnny Guitar is an intense, brilliantly stylized Western that essentially boils down to a conflict between the bar-owning, gunfighter defeating Joan Crawford, and Mercedes McCambridge as her rival. The film caused controversy on release not just for its untypical gender roles for 1950s Hollywood but for what would later be recognised as an implied lesbian subtext.
4. McCabe & Mrs. Miller (Robert Altman, 1970)
A deliberately revisionist Western, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a classic of the more personal and naturalistic ‘New Hollywood’ period that thrived in the early 1970s. Featuring Julie Christie as a sex worker who strikes a business relationship with Warren Beatty’s gambler, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is absolutely spellbinding.
5. Cat Ballou (Elliot Silverstein, 1965)
In this somewhat infamous musical comedy, Jane Fonda plays a rancher who hires the worst gunman in the west to protect her. It’s got some good songs and Fonda shows a lot of the acting skill that would make her one of the most famous – and political – actresses in the world in the decade that followed.
6. The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950)
Arguably one of the greatest black and white Westerns of all time, The Furies features the incredible Barbara Stanwyck opposite Walter Huston in a combustible relationship that ends in violence. Stanwyck gives as good as she gets in this film: as much ablaze and full of resourcefulness as any man in the Western genre at this time.
7. Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950)
Annie Oakley was a real gunslinger, but don’t expect the true story from Annie Get Your Gun. It’s a fabulous, glitzy, song-and-dance musical that hardly gets into the grit of Oakley’s real life, instead turning the Broadway musical of the same name into Hollywood confection. Great music and great characters, but do not expect sensitive depictions of Native Americans here either.
8. Gunsmoke (1955-1975)
Okay, this is technically a television series – in fact, America’s longest-running prime-time drama – but all the more reason to include its kick-ass woman, Kitty Russell. Russell, the owner of the local saloon (and in earlier seasons, a worker of a sort that could not be specified on national television), is tough as nails and frequently takes on the villain of the week – all the while as serving as a kind of proto-feminist hero on television for two decades.
9. The Hazards of Helen (The Kalem Company, 1914-1917)
The Hazards of Helen was the longest week-by-week serial series of the silent era, and while not always a Western per se, usually featured its hero, Helen Holmes, in death-defying Western-style situations. Week after week, Helen would defeat the mustache-twirling villains (who would often be portrayed as having underestimated women or being overtly sexist) while performing all her stunts herself. The above video is a famous example – watch as Holmes actually leaps from a water tower onto a moving train. She was, in most meaningful senses, the first action movie star.
10. And basically every Western since 2000
There has scarcely been a good Western since the year 2000 that hasn’t featured a woman as one of the leads, or sometimes as the only lead character. Think about it: the Coen brothers’ True Grit remake (2010), Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt, 2010), Cold Mountain (Anthony Minghella, 2003), Jane Got A Gun (Gavin O’Connor, 2016), The Missing (Ron Howard, 2003), and The Homesman (Tommy Lee Jones, 2013). The list could continue for some time.
So my advice to Rockstar: if you want to make a good sequel to Red Dead Redemption, follow your own lead. Watch some films –- and discover that the Western has always featured kick-ass women.
Comments
86 responses to “Red Dead Redemption 2 Needs Kick-Ass Women To Be A True Western”
Dan is a treasure. We are not worthy.
Before the usual jackals jump down his throat, I will say I don’t agree with everything he’s putting forward, if anything he’s giving Rockstar too much credit.
I loathe the GTA games. They’re playing at being Scorcese while in actuality they’re just Troma. I want Red Dead 2 to be something I can take pride in saying is the height of the medium, because I can’t say that about Rockstar.
I fell off of RDR around here: http://au.ign.com/wikis/red-dead-redemption/Pestilence – how far from the end was I?EDIT: Where is the love for David Milch’s Deadwood series?
I can’t poo-poo Rockstar and equally give HBO all the bouquets on this topic of course, but still that show was a quiet revolution for strong female characters.
Very close, why would you stop playing there???
The second half really start to drag.
I thought the middle act slowed down but first and third were really good (probably the same parts you mean honestly) MExico for me was boring as batshit honestly.
Like the show itself, it got up and left.
*popcorn*
*popcorn intensifies*
*yoghurt intensifies*
*Salted Popcorn and yoghurt intensifies…*
Oh god I think I need the bathroom!!!! Bad combination! BAD COMBINATION!
Wait, we can make assumptions based on little to no facts what so ever. God damn I love the Internet.
Yep. All those dudes in the trailer might get killed off in the first five minutes, leaving a gang of female outlaws to rule the Old West.
But yeah, we are in the age of concerned feminism, where if there aren’t women in X, Y or Z then arguments and outrage can and will fly.
For all the films that are listed above, there are many where women have only tiny ‘bit’ roles. The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, to name one. The Wild Bunch also featured few women, who were either objects to inspire jealousy, conveyors of information, or prostitutes. Still great films.
You could easily create a list of films without women in main roles and say that RDR2 shouldn’t include women if it wants to be a ‘true’ Western…lol.
All RDR2 needs is whatever the creators have in mind for it. Full stop.
If that’s women, awesome. If it’s all men, cool. They don’t have some sort of affirmative action responsibility to represent anyone in their story. I knew this article was coming as soon as I saw only men in the teaser image, but it doesn’t make me any less frustrated with it.
I’ll bet dollars to horses you’ve complained plenty of times when a dev made a choice you didn’t like. Graphics, story, systems — so many people are comfortable with any kind of criticism of devs as long as it’s not re: women characters. Only then suddenly it’s off limits. Please.
To be fair he’s not complaining that there is potentially women in the game.
He could very well still complain one way or the other, depending on the final product.
The two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.
Everyone gets frustrated with decisions in creative mediums. In fact, it was one of the reasons I started my band. A band I loved would break through with a killer debut, and then ruin it on the second go around with a flaccid and toothless sophomore. It would happen time and time again. I complained to my friends, sure, but at the end of the day I knew that it was not my band, it was theirs, and if I didn’t like it, i’d need to make my own and do it my way.
I offer the same advice to everyone else who has a problem with the things they love. Creativity is equal parts inspiration and frustration.
one of the seven riders looks to be female as well, the one with the yellow shirt.
*VIRTUE SIGNAL ENGAGE* GAWKERS NEVER DIE
I’m all for women having a larger role in this kind of media, especially from rockstar, but this article screams of tokenism. There’s nothing more dehumanising than lumping all women under one umbrella and demanding more of them, as though its a fan service or an item on a menu.
You want more women in media like this? Try educating people on the role that women can play in art – rather than just sticking a few “strong female characters” onto the poster with a hot glue gun.
Yeah it seems completely at odds with what movements like feminism argue for when a woman in a story you experience represents and empowers you because you might share the same gender as her. No other person, and specifically, no other man, represents me. We’re all individuals.
Specifically referring to this article, they don’t need to be “kick-ass” either. They could be flat out evil, or annoying, or worthless, or merely boring. Not accepting negative portrayals of these groups everyone seems so eager to place themselves in is not equality. This is wrong approach, we need to be treating audiences with more respect, not coddling them.
We also need some trans and gay people in RDR2, let’s not forget Asians and blacks.
Have we hit tokenism bingo yet?
Adding in various groups solely for the purpose of token representation does not help the cause.. Gawker seems to miss the point of what they try advocate for so often.
Well, if you really want to go that way
– Chinese migrants were a huge part of what we think of as “The West.” A lot of the initial wave of Chinese migration to the US and the shaping of western cities was through Chinese migrants.
– Similarly, black people were of course parts of the West, pre and post civil war.
This isn’t “token representation,” it’s “actually representing actual reality”
I’m not saying there can’t be legitimate reasons to include various groups. If there is, and it is a natural part of the context of the story it should be done.
Shoehorning in minorities for the sake of it detracts from both the work, as well as any real progressive cause.
Hell, a closet gay cowboy would be fine given the setting, but it needs to be a natural fit for the story.
Not tokenism. Tokenism is not progressive at all. Hell, it sends the cause backwards and creates opposition where there would be none.
Also, everyone knows women didn’t exist in the US prior to 1920.
Tumblr, is that you???
So would any women characters in the game be invincible? I wouldn’t want to have a woman getting shot and killed in a game, that might be violence against women which is a big no no these days
Relax, that will be for the online multiplayer, where you’ll be able to play as either male or female. The campaign will remain true to type, and feature a woman or women as (a) love interests, (b) sidekicks, or (c) objects to inspire revenge.
Well thank god for that.
Target is already looking at banning it i bet.
Let’s just let game makers do what they do best. Especially ones that do it better than just about anyone.
Just NO.
I can’t believe the arrogance in this article, its absurd. Rockstar can make what ever they want how ever they want and for you to try and bash them because they didn’t shoe horn in what you consider to be acceptable is the height of everything i hate about the current political climate. Especially when all your doing is making assumptions about literally everything.
I don’t care if the main character is a trans-gendered black woman trapped in a mans body, I equally don’t care if the main character is as stereo typical as a white american because its all irrelevant in that none of these things will make the game inherently better or worse.
What matters is how they write it, if they feel compelled to “force” woman characters into their story to appease the SJW demographic and it isn’t written well it will be a major detraction, which is basically what your asking them to do in this article (demanding they put more women in THEIR game).
Just as having 1 white man with equally bad writing will be a similar detraction from the game. I am just so sick of all of this crap, let artists make what they want and stop pushing your agendas. Nothing ruins a piece of art be it movies/tv or video games quicker than trying to force the latest agenda people are getting bent over.
*you’re
Diversity is good and helps create more interesting stories.
Plus you are not 100% of the audience.
Yes Rockstar don’t have to do anything, but as consumers we can say what we want more of.
Diversity is a good thing if it works for the story and/or sales. If you’re making art then make it how you want it. If you’re making it to sell the product then test the demographic. If the majority of the demographic wants white everyman then put in white everyman. If the majority of the demographic wants Asian superwoman then put in Asian superwoman.
All things aside, I have no doubt that there will be at least a couple of strong female characters in RDR2. Not because they’re appealing to a certain demographic, but because it will make the story more interesting.
The problem there is appealing to what you consider the majority of the demographic will always leave the minorities feeling unrepresented. Which is why these discussions often take on a smell of white male gamers staking out “their” territory.
Honestly I was young enough when San Andreas launched to have openly talked about how I didn’t want to play as a black protagonist, that I didn’t relate to him and that it wasn’t the kind of gangster I was interested in playing as.
I ended up loving that game, and it showed me an interesting different viewpoint. If (And this is a big assumption) we’re going down the route of GTAV and having multiple protagonists I’d really like at least one woman, in part because I love playing as a kick ass woman in games and in part because it’s something Rockstar games have been a bit inconsistent with.
If it’s a single character narrative? Yeah go with whoever you need for your story, but if you can’t have at least one female ensemble member with enough flesh to be a full playable character then you might have a problem with your story.
Definitely in the multiple character sense. If there’s multiple characters it makes sense to add a female if the female fits the narrative. Personally I don’t think a female character would have fit the story of GTA V unless you made Trevor a female which could have been fun, but I think if they are going to do multiple characters for RDR 2 then a female would make sense.
Personally I also like playing a female lead. The 2013 Tomb Raider remake is one of my favourite games of all time, and Mass Effect 3 the Fem Shep was a lot more interesting than the Man Shep. But I think that there shouldn’t be any sacrifice to force it. This is why they test the demographics and test the story. If they put in a female character and it doesn’t feel right with the story then they change her to a man. If it still doesn’t feel right they probably make the character a Dog ’cause everyone will love that. The important thing is to not force it ’cause if you do you’ll just end up making something that doesn’t sell and isn’t interesting from an artistic point of view.
I think if you added a female to GTA V it would have meant adding a fourth character, which considering how big of a gamble the multiple protagonists thing was seems like a bad idea.
Honestly there’s plenty of reasons I can see why they wouldn’t have added a woman in to that game, but if they aren’t looking to the future with an eye for allowing that diversity that’s something of an issue.
Not as big as some people on the pro-diversity side make it out to be, but I think they’re right to create a conversation on the issue. I just get rather annoyed at a lot of the reactionary other side and in fact had some bad experiences in the comments on the trailer for RDR2.
Not referring to you at all, your stance is very reasonable and much closer to my own than either of the extremes of the sides we’re both arguing for =P
Ps- Femshep is best Shep.
Both Shepards are terrible characters, let’s be real here.
True. But Fem Shep is terrible. Man Shep should have been shot and buried before the game started.
Unfortunately by definition, minorities will always be underrepresented. But let’s talk about minorities here. 80% of HD action game players are male (http://venturebeat.com/2013/09/19/gender-inequality/2/). 18% of people played with and completed Mass Effect with Female Shepard (http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/07/19/bioware-says-18-percent-of-mass-effect-players-choose-female-shepard.aspx). And before you shrug that off as “they probably just went with default Shepard”, the article also says that 87% of people customised their Shepard in some way. Female Shepard is one of the most celebrated characters online (god knows why either Shepard is celebrated though), yet the actual numbers are very grim. The fact that we are having this discussion makes us the less than 1% of people who play games that might consider these sorts of topics.
You said in a previous comment that “you’re not 100% of the audience” as if that needs to be considered, but with numbers like that, it’s not worth pissing off players like younger you who might say things like “i’m not playing if there’s a woman, i’m not playing if there’s a black person, etc.”. It is just a big financial risk. These people are trash consumers, but their money is just as good as anyone else’s to the publishers, and they are the ones who hold the purse strings for developers.
Again, I need to be clear that more female characters in games is only a good thing. But it’s gotta be on the creator’s own terms, not because they were strong-armed into it by the perpetual outrage machine online. They yell real loud, but there aren’t as many of them as they think. The ultimate solution to this is we need these frustrated people to channel that negative energy into something positive that actually fixes the “problem” (if you want to call it that, I prefer to call it the market), like, say, becoming creators themselves!
When I say underrepresented I mean based on their proportion of the population.
If 1 in 10 are a specific minority then in theory that same percentage would be represented in media portraying that society.
I’m not arguing that the majority aren’t white males, but that there is a potential market that aren’t that you could be appealing to some of whom would be turned off by the current status quo.
I wouldn’t personally argue about this until after the game is released, but I can’t stand people being attacked for asking for better representation.
Well said, couldn’t agree more.
Just putting in strong female characters does not instantly make something great, whether it be a movie, TV show, video game etc.
I really don’t care what sex (or race for that matter) the characters are. As long as it’s a great story and it plays well that’s all I care about.
I hope there’s just as many hilarious glitches as there were in the previous game though.
Rockstar’s really been knocking it out of the park with their storytelling since San Andreas so I guess for now I’m content to just wait and let them do their thing, see how it turns out before I start saying what I think it needs.
It’s true that their games don’t tend to feature many interesting female characters but I continue to be unconvinced this actually matters. A good story is a good story and not every piece of media needs to be a battleground for the portrayal of [INSERT YOUR PERSONAL FAVOURITE GROUP THAT IS, IN GENERAL, NOT WELL REPRESENTED IN POPULAR MEDIA].
I thought Bonnie was pretty interesting in RDR. Maybe i’m in a minority here.
She was, she was a fantastic character.
Yes you can make an interesting story without diversity, in fact for your story that might be needed.
Elsewhere I espoused the strength of Luke Cage for the diversity of it’s cast… But it’s only diverse when compared to Hollywood. Within itself it’s kind of the opposite, most of the cast are black or latino with very little white representation.
But the story was specifically about that community and those people so it made sense.
If your story is set in some frontier town where there’s actually no woman then yeah, they shouldn’t be there. But their absence in theory should be a major aspect of that story. (Note while this occasionally happened, usually they’d specifically ship women in because all male societies aren’t a long term proposition =P).
The fact that so few of our stories include women prominently when they make up half the population should be considered a bit disturbing. Are we suggesting they have no interesting stories? That we don’t care about them? Or that we don’t want to see them as people?
Minority representation is harder but follows similar veins.
Art is a mirror to society and it should be free, but it’s a mirror with distortions that show us our own issues. We should be looking at those issues to make ourselves better people and advance as a culture, if one solution is changing our representations in art that’s something we should be open to.
Art is not a shield to say “leave my entertainment exactly as it is” it’s about creating an opening discourse. If you don’t think that’s what games should be then I’m sorry but you don’t think they’re art, just entertainment.
I agree completely and don’t find this at all contradictory with what I said.
When the riders go by the camera in the trailer, the one on the far right I think it was looks like it could be a woman.
The worst thing about this article is that the author has assumed everyone’s gender in the trailer. Did the author take the time to ask them their preferred pronouns?
The entire things went for 1:22 as you said, blink and you’ll miss anything…
EDIT: Just had another look and it’s not even that long, only 1:08 and the first 7-8 seconds are the Rockstar logo…
What? Well primed? I thought most people were just ‘well primed’ for a damn western, pretty sure the only people who even cared to notice if they were male or female silhouettes (even looking now I think most could go either way) are people looking to create a shitstorm out of nothing (i.e. this article).
I’m all for more female characters in games but can we at least wait until we know a single damn thing about a game (outside the title) before we start the clickbait nonsense? If not, please at least contain it to buzzfeed and tumblr.
I’m sure it will have hookers you can tie to the railroad tracks.
Hopefully there will be eskimos.
Never any eskimos. #InuitLivesMatter
Inuit’s aren’t Eskimos. Yupik’s are seemingly okay with the term though.
It’s because they are racist.
#NotAllYupiks
I don’t feel its fair for me to sit here and presume to tell Rockstars writers how to do their job, just because one of the groups that I belong to is under-represented in video games.
Let the writers do their job.
Look at all those click$.
There’s a chance the horserider in the yellow shirt is a women.
Oh cool, a thread about westerns and RDR and… oh. Cool, yeah, ok.
Of course when the word “woman” is mentioned in an article about modern media, the MRA brigade has to roll into town. Christ.
Strangely you are the only person mentioning “men’s rights” so I assume you are referring to yourself “rolling into town” then?
And you are the number 1 flag bearer for them, my friend. Never let the international SJW conspiracy break you. Keep fighting the good fight for whatever it is you are scared of this week.
Shine on, you crazy diamond.
Really, its been how long and you still can’t find a post where I have stated anything MRA pokedud…
Fact is nobody mentioned it until you came in with your usual pretentious whine. Last I checked “game developers can do what they want” wasn’t an MRA issue.
But hey anyone that doesn’t agree with you is a misogyislamohomophobIMRA… Amirite?
Keep fighting the whiny fight for whatever you want to subject your pretentiousness into this week.
Except when a dev does what they want and it doesn’t align with your views, it’s SJW bullshit, right?
Right.
So you still haven’t given any evidence of “MRA bullshit” in the replies here. The game has a 1:22 trailer of vagueness and a silhouette image but hey its definitely time to scream about lack of women in the game right?
Most have basically noted Rockstar should do what they want. But hey artistic freedom is just more MRA bullshit right? Some even pointed out that RDR had Bonnie a strong female character…. But hey let’s not break your whiney false narrative.
Just say everyone you don’t agree with is an MRA.
Right.
I don’t think he actually knows what an MRA is.
Unless I don’t know what it is, and it actually means “person I disagree with”.
pokedad come on you don’t really have a leg to stand on here. Nobody’s talking about any of the things you’re talking about, nobody’s complained about any developer decisions that didn’t align with their views, and if they were going to, it’d likely be because of some sexist bullshit in their game. Every single comment here has very positive about female protagonists and very negative about pressuring creators to bend to any sort of vitriolic demands for specific representations, that’s all.
Only counted 1 dog in the trailer and it was just barking at some birds and wasn’t even in the silhouette.
Although I also saw a handful of birds in the trailer so I hope the dogs will have equal representation because otherwise this will just be a game about birds and I think they have had enough of the limelight in videogames (Skyward Sword, Banjo Kazooie etc).
But then again the birds seemed to be vastly outnumbered by cows, I hope this cow bias doesn’t make its way into the final game because I think there are still plenty of good stories to tell about birds.
But how about those horses being able to run faster than cows? You know, cows should be shown to be as equally capable as horses, just because they stand in a field all day eating doesn’t mean they can’t reach their full potential.
and how come only the humans get to carry guns? Why can’t a horse be armed to protect itself? Are they trying to say that only human lives matter and those horses can just go and get stuffed? Typical anti-horse agenda, showing a HUMAN riding an enslaved horse. Free the horses.
and then there’s the dog, sitting there all covered in fur. I for one am OUTRAGED that they want the dog to be warmer in winter than a human would be because they don’t have as much hair.
I forgot where I was going with this, I just want to complain.
Came here expecting “SJWs are ruining muh vidyagaemz”. Wasn’t disappointed.
RDR1 had a lot of awesome characters. One of them was Bonnie. It’d be cool to see more of that.
When the article’s title comes right out of the gate with a No True Scotsman fallacy, naturally you’re going to get people criticising it. It’s faulty reasoning, regardless of its substance. Personally I think it’s far too early for anyone to be complaining about representation in a game we’ve seen maybe 60 seconds of.
Bonnie was great, I agree, I’d definitely like to see more of that. I don’t care if a character is a man or woman, black or white, or anywhere in between. But I do care a lot about whether the character is written well and fits the scene/setting. If they can manage that, I don’t care about the rest.
Put up or shut up.
Kotaku AU takes pitches from its readership for content. Sometimes multiple offerings at once.
Write your own thoughts into long-form and present it to the editors, and within reason they might actually publish your:
retort to Golding’s writing
original piece on this matter or ones like it
smeared faecal stain of an internet comment
Show some conviction for what you purport to believe, do some research to back it up, put forward your argument, and have the guts to allow some critical thinking applied to your logic.
Go on.
I’m confused. Are you telling people not to comment in the comment section?
Only as much as people are commenting in the comment section the writer(s) shouldn’t write.
Valid point
Agreed. The author should be free to write whatever article they want without feeling pressured to change it, anything less is censorship. People should be free to express their disagreement, but the article should stand as it was intended.
All of that goes for the game, too. The conversation is worth having, and people are certainly free to disagree with what Rockstar has written, as long as they’re not pressured to change it.
That doesn’t hold water.
Rockstar should absolutely be pressured to:
make shorter games
hire smarter, funnier writers
apologise to me personally for Manhunt 2 Wii Edition
Why on earth would you want shorter games? I demand longer games! GTA6 needs to have a 400 hour campaign, damnit! I want content!
Put up or shut up.
The games industry takes pitches from anyone who wants to create a game. Sometimes multiple offerings at once.
Code your own game idea into a complete package and present it to the publishers, and within reason they might actually publish your:
Awesome game with novel ideas that is also financially viable
Indie game that nobody buys but still preserves your artistic statement for a small and passionate group of likeminded fans
smeared faecal stain of a game idea
Show some conviction for what you purport to believe, do some research to back it up, put forward your argument, and have the guts to allow some critical thinking applied to your logic.
Go on.
I can see why that took you until midnight.
Have an up-vote from me.
Actually it’s the time difference. I am in Perth so we’re always behind. In everything.
It’s so nice to have the privilege of saying diversity should not get in the way of art while knowing that the result will definitely appeal to my demographic…
And to think, it’s only Monday.
I know, right? The week is ripe with opportunities to overlook the benefits I’m afforded!
This whole “we want female protagonist or characters you sexist bastards” crap started this generation and i truly dont get it. Statistically most gamers are males and they want characters they can relate to. An optional female character or love interest is perfectly fine but a western game setting with a female protagonist is just ridiculous. Ps: Rdr did have a kick ass woman already.
Ever consider that the reason most gamers are male is this idea that they need to keep marketing directly to white male gamers?
Increased representation has been an issue in all media over recent years where we’ve seen that most of these companies have weird institutional biases and most critics want to see those actively addressed.
Again if it’s art it’s open for this criticism. If it’s a product then sure nobody has an obligation to do anything other than sell it.
Like you said, they were in the first. I see no reason for this article only to stir up controversy. They will be in the second.
>Abigail Marsden
>Marsden
>MARS
>DEN
“People were well primed for a male-focused RDR 2 trailer, given the seven male silhouettes from the teaser logo” Did you just assume their gender?
Did you just assume a silhouettes gender in 2016?
How do people like you get jobs as video game reporter? You are pathetic. Stop trying to create issues where there are none.
To be honest Dan I couldn’t care about your reasons for a less than male centered RDR2 if that’s the choice they make than that’s that. All these people crying that a woman isn’t in it or isn’t centered in the story need to grow up and realize that even if they don’t have a woman centered focus the game won’t be any less fun.
TLDR:. Who gives a shit it’s a game.
I agree, I am a woman and am not concerned about… “We need more women!” That’s idiotic, But this is y I stopped following them a long time ago. They dont care about good games, Just weather women and stuff is represented. There is a cool kick ass older woman I ran into.