Absolutely! (Destiny)

by narcogen , Andover, Massachusetts, Monday, September 28, 2015, 11:51 (3389 days ago) @ Cody Miller

It is a bigger problem! However, it starts with the balance. The first problem that a game can have is no portrayal at all. Then it can portray women as inferior or subservient, or use them merely as symbols for telling men's stories. Destiny avoids some of these but not all.

Balance is not nessesary within an individual work. If I have a story to tell about men, for men, there is nothing wrong with that. The problem exists when there is imbalance across a wider range of works. If some games tell male stories, some should tell female stories. That is the purpose of the bechdel test: not to vilify individual works that do not pass it, but to show in aggregate how women are under represented.

Counting women in an individual video game means nothing.

You cannot arrive at a count of characters across all of gaming as a whole without first counting the individual games.

My point is that when such imbalances are obvious even within a work that is nowhere near as overtly sexist as the worst of them, things can (and should) be much, much better than they are.