While I agree with what you said, why are we paying so much attention to what some angry, misguided, feminist posts to her Twitter about a video game? Is she like the "Queen Feminist" or something?
Tried to spend more than 10 minutes in VR with this game and I'm literally spinning. Feel like I'm going to throw up. The head tracking isn't quite right nor is the sense of scale and the speed and animation of the game are just too much for it. It's neat to see but, man, unplayable for me. Never felt this ill before from a VR experience.
She has a lot of people's attention right now.
Some of the things she says have merit but she is quite prone to incorrectly label things as well. What she claims about Dying Light is not correct, I believe. There is nothing sexist about the way this games story proceeds. It definitely shines some negative light on her methods in my eyes.
She's incisive, and a pundit; and I don't necessarily think she's misguided. I think her intentions are relatively sound and I'd happily self-identify as a feminist right alongside her under the broadest definition. Sometimes she gets things either a little off or wrong altogether in critiquing individual games, and you can't fault her
that much for it. Her aim is more than anything else to provoke heated discussion about it, and she's good at doing that even if occasionally it involves unnecessarily discrediting whatever recent release is getting press at the time.
I do think she has the habit of experiencing a game necessarily through the lens of how its contents relate to gender inequity and the historical subjugation of women both in and out of fiction. This isn't a bad thing so much as it may tip the scales a little bit with regard to finding examples of things to abhor, even if they're potentially imagined or coincidental. Sometimes a bigger picture is important and a lot of times I see examples that kind of "miss the point" a bit with regard to a scene's role in the framework of the game in question even if they superficially resemble the trope she's referring to.
To some extent, her desire is to generate controversy. Getting people talking about these issues isn't a bad thing, and actually creating videogames to explore a deconstruction of the trope in question would be intriguing. I just wanted to voice my opinion that Dying Light is a poor example and her damsel-breaks-out-of-jail game is a poor solution.
And what exactly is so bad about the "damsel in distress" concept being used one way or another in these works of fiction whether its in this game or not ?
Nothing... necessarily. I think it depends. But then you get into the matters of
1) what you're willing to a define as a damsel in distress. If it really is any female character getting kidnapped, then yeah, Dying Light has one
2) why it's used in the particular story it is used in. Details are important.
Context is important.
Her problem with the "damsel in distress" trope is that it "perpetuates regressive and patronizing myths about women." I really just don't think Dying Light's plot... thin and unimpressive as it is... does that in particular.
