I recommend you Dragon´s Crown

[kandrathe]

As nice as it would be to stop the practices in advertising and media, it's not going to happen anytime soon, no matter what we do. Changing this kind of thing takes time. What you can do in the shorter term is prepare your children to understand what's being done. Even tweens can see when they're being manipulated, if they're given the information and perspective to do so.

Over time the chic "image conscious" trends go away, then return some years or decades later. There is a huge amount of economy devoted to the glamor industry. Therefore, I fear your approach is one of the only ways to empower people (both genders) to see through it. Not only are women objectified for marketing purposes, but men are conditioned to "buy them" and are influenced by media to view women as objects.

I think only a minority of people know or care.

APA Task force on the sexualization of girls.

Video/Computer Games
The vast majority of children play video games: 87% of younger children and 70% of adolescents (Paik, 2001). A gender divide in heavy video game play exists, with 41% of boys playing games for more than an hour a day and only 18% of girls doing so (D.Roberts et al., 2005). Girls, however, spend an average of 40 minutes per day playing games online or on home systems (D. Roberts et al., 2005). Games made for specialized systems and those made for personal computers contain highly sexualized content and few strong female protagonists (Dietz, 1998). In a recent study, Haninger and Thompson (2004) sampled 80 “Teen”-rated video games from a population of 396 games in release in 2001.They observed sexual themes in 27% of games. Games were significantly more likely to depict female characters partially nude or engaged in sexual behaviors than to depict male characters in this way. When the authors expanded their definition of “sexual theme” to include “pronounced cleavage, large breasts, or provocative clothing,” the percentage of female characters so depicted rose to 46%. Beasley and Standley (2002) examined 64 games for sexualizing themes.Women were seldom depicted in any of these games (14% of all characters were female). When the clothing of female characters was compared with that of males, female characters’ clothing was more likely to expose skin. Dill, Gentile, Richter, and Dill (2005) found that in the 20 top-selling games in 1999, only female characters were portrayed as highly sexualized.

The assault on virtue has never been stronger, and the defenders of it are few and weak. And... to not confuse, I see this is as a culture thing, and not a religious thing. Most often anyone rising up to challenge this status quo is ridiculed, and soon excoriated out of the dialog (and I'm specifically thinking about Tipper Gore, and her involvement in the Parents Music Resource Center, or then Sen. Clinton and GTA4).

I'm afraid that in various quests to shatter cultural ruts and stereotypes, we've just shattered the culture, and in context to this discussion, the value of character and virtue. For example, womens liberation to me means that women should be encouraged and empowered, just as men are, to choose any (socially redeeming) path for themselves. However, it's taken some time, and brave women to reject the criticism of "feminists" who want to dictate feminism. Equally, men suffer too and are in need of liberation from cultural stereotypes (be that the bread winner, or the aggressive sexual beast). We are overworked, trained to kill or be killed, brutalized and subjected to blame and shame for being male. I've also commented before about the continuation of our workplaces remaining an enforced competitive patriarchy.

In terms of Dragon's Crown, I'd again return to the ESRB rating -- Teen (13 and up), and one could argue some of the more sexualized images might draw an M rating (17 and up). However, as I've hopefully supported with the APA study, the entire media industry flirts with the line.

Take Amelie's Cafe as an example, rated E - Everyone. Which, not only stereotypes young women (waitress), seems to be targeted toward women, and where the protagonist is also packaged as a sexualized object. I'm not a father of a tween girl, so I'm uncertain which game would be more "influential" to a young girls psyche.



... and in closing, to quote another gamer I also sort of agree with from an IGN forum...

Western game media is biased and hypocritical. If Japan has a bit of sexyness to their games (Big breasted sorceres in Dragon's Crown, Quiet in MGS5), than it's offensive and objectifies women, but if western games do it (banging slavegirls in God of War, Banging prostitutes and killing them to get your money back in GTA games, collecting sex cards for banging girls in The Witcher) then it's A-OK.

I think here we are calling out the mote(or log) in Vanillaware's eye -- and yet, there is an entire cultural problem with many mote's.

P.S. I apologize in advance for presenting the nail, which will attract the well worn old hammer (and/or sickle).