Signs That There's Probably No More Misogyny In The Games Industry

• It's been like five years since the last video game about rubbing all over the bodies of underage girls to find out if they're witches.

• There are a lot of people on the internet who claim that misogyny is either non-existent or an insignificant issue blown out of proportion by cynical video game websites that don't actually care about the issue. Most of the people expressing this opinion seem very confident and wholly unwilling to reason with others. Sometimes they're even angry. Hard to imagine such a large group of passionate folks all being wrong about anything at all, much less a topic that doesn't directly affect them.

• Lara Croft's breasts aren't mega enormous any more. No big boobs, no misogyny. They are the canaries of the industry's coal mine.

• If women and other marginalized groups want to feel safe at the Penny Arcade Expo they can go stay in their own Diversity Lounge. Do straight white guys get their own designated space where they can be free from intolerance? Nope. Seems almost too fair.

• When someone describes a game's local second player input, they are far less likely to say "girlfriend mode" out loud.

• Some writer made an article about misogyny on one of those video game websites once. That addressed the issue, right? Said everything that had to be said? Good. Problem solved. Time to get back to previews and reworded press releases. All other types of articles are so-called "video game journalism" and you should interpret those quotation marks as VERY sarcastic indeed, my friend. True journalism is an article that takes a form you're comfortable with and reinforces your opinions.

• They let that Anita Sarkeesian lady keep making videos, and she's an admitted feminist for crying out loud. It's political correctness gone mad, I tell ya!

• We've reached a point where our society is so comfortable discussing the issue that when a woman is sexually harassed by a games writer in a remarkably gross and stupid manner, a prominent developer like David Jaffe doesn't hesitate to share his opinion that the victim should probably shoulder some of the blame.

Think about what it must be like to type those words and put them out there, where the world at large and the victim can see them, without feeling any shame whatsoever. We're obviously living in a very inclusive and safe time. Good on us. Let's pause to pat ourselves on the back.

• Like half of all recent games about reluctant scruffy dudes killing hundreds of people also feature ladies that they're protecting.

• No one has put out a decapitated bikini babe torso statue as a pre-order or special edition bonus since the Dead Island fiasco. That's remarkable, since the item would have been perfectly suited for a number of games such as Surgeon Simulator 2013, Viscera Cleanup Detail, and Dr. Luigi.

• Every game with overt objectification is now so over the top that it can't possibly reflect actual attitudes or be harmful to anyone at all. If you look up the prefix "hyper" in a dictionary, I'm pretty sure you'll find that when it comes before words like sexual or violence, it means "relax, we're no longer responsible so turn your brain off, dude".

• Wasn't Samus a woman? Yeah, there you go.

Might & Magic X
Hi, I'm the sort of person that restarts RPGs after ten hours to see what the different classes are like, and this game is destroying all of my brain. 8/10

– Dennis "Corin Tucker's Stalker" Farrell (@DennisFarrell)