There is some guidance from the developer, of course. I mean, this is not a game called Life in General, but a game called Hitman. When you purchase such a game, you expect that some virtual people will get hurt. But within these walls of a game about a professional hitman, a whole room of possibilities awaits. Be a mass murderer, or never hurt a civilian — it’s up to you.

As I mentioned it before, the game does try to move the needle towards the “good-hearted silent assassin” (score punishment for killing an innocent, achievements and unlocks for stealth, etc.), but there’s still enough freedom in the game to maintain a proper player agency and a sim tag.

Assuming that the strippers exist in a game for a “sexual arousal connected to the act of controlling and punishing representations of female sexuality” is a very unhealthy projection and tells me more about McIntosh and Sarkeesian than it does about the developers of the game.

Worse, it also exposes the lack of basic understanding of what a simulation video game is.

I mean, what is the alternative here? That we never show strip clubs in a game about a seedy underworld? That we remove women from the game? Or that attacking a woman always magically alerts both the police and the thugs?

Please explain to me how to make a simulation of an assassin in today’s world, one in which any negative interaction with another human being is severely punished and does not stop the game from being a plausible — even if the technology limits that plausibility — mirror of the reality.

For example, each level includes multiple ways to kill each target. It’s essentially a playground for creative violence. In fact, the only options provided for interaction with most characters are either murder them or subdue them. Neutralizing NPCs is the core mechanic in the Hitman series. It’s often necessary in order to clear a path to objectives or prevent a character who has seen you for raising an alarm.

You know what are some other core mechanics? Disguises. Finding alternate entry and exit points. Sneaking. Hiding. So you can get past people without harming anybody.

In this stage, for example, there’s a specific challenge that explicitly encourages players to knock out a stripper and draw her body out of the line of sight. This action then allows the player to hide inside the stripper cake and wait for the targets to arrive before popping out and murdering them in slow-motion.

Another challenge requires the player to save two civilians. Not kill them, not subdue them, not avoid them. Save them. Can I cherry-pick that challenge and claim the game is about saving NPCs?

The whole point of the game is to offer a wide range of possibilities for experimentation which is why even if you murder civilians you don’t get a game over. Saying that this game doesn’t want players to interact with civilians in the only ways that are provided is like saying that GTA discourages players from stealing cars, because sometimes they get a police wanted level for doing so. The developers obviously put a tremendous amount of work into designing and implementing these systems. They didn’t do so with the hope that no player will ever use them. As I said in my original video on the topic, game systems and everything in them including sexually objectified female characters exist to be played with. So there’s absolutely no truth to the allegation that I misrepresented this game.

Forgetting that the whole objectification nonsense for a second, who objectified these characters? Is Sarkeesian saying here that the strippers in the game are the creation of the developers, something invented? Is there any chance this is a representation of reality? That strip clubs with connections to the criminal underworld exist in our world? Or is that a silly fantasy?

But let’s go back to the misrepresentation:

Those who repeat these false claims do not understand my argument or perhaps more likely they’re just trying to pass off bad faith strawman argument as legitimate criticism, while making no real attempt to engage with the substance of my analysis.

On the contrary.

Sarkeesian cherry-picked the one thing from the Hitman segment that she thought some gamers got wrong, focused on it for three minutes, and whitewashed her own video by claiming it talked about “attacking civilians” and not “female bodies as things to be acted upon”.

The real problem everybody opposing these videos and this fragment in particular had, was that Hitman was presented as a sexist game. Presenting a fragment of the game without giving it context or top level view is exactly the misrepresentation that Sarkeesian dismisses.

With such an approach, I can take the desert section of Uncharted 3 and claim the game is like Dear Esther or Gone Home, or I can take the car scene of Titanic and claim the movie is soft pornography. It’s just not how logic and professional honesty work.

If we took a comprehensive look at Hitman and discussed whether it’s okay to produce a murder simulator or not — sure, that is a fine discussion and disagreements to have. But cherry-picking a fragment and consciously hiding a vital info — like the fact the hitman never cares what gender his victims are — is a textbook example of manipulation.

The sad thing is that Sarkeesian accuses their critics of “no real attempt to engage with the substance of my analysis”, which is not only a lie, but also exactly what she did in her speech. She took the easy target, a shallow issue — but even that was not enough, to help her case, she misrepresented her own original video — and never engaged “with the substance” of the critique, which was the disagreement that Hitman or its fragment is a good example of a sexist design.

Obviously, good faith, respectful, constructive criticism of women’s work can be useful and valuable. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. Accusing women, who are in fact experts in their field, of ignorance or intentional deceit because you don’t like the conclusions they reach in their work is used as a way to discredit and discount perspectives that challenge the status quo. Automatically assuming ignorance when women speak on video games, technology, science, politics or other subjects typically associated with male-dominated arenas is a form of sexism.

Does sexism in the world exist? It does. Regrettably, it does. Like many other things that make our world worse. But in this case, the resistance towards whatever Feminist Frequency duo produces is not a result of sexism, but a result of actual knowledge of video games. Dismissing that critique as “sexist” is nothing but a shameful attempt to shield one’s self from any critique. An attempt that actually only reinforces the image of Feminist Frequency as incompetent social activists, and not serious video game critics.

Feminist Frequency duo has never engaged in any debate with their critics, and never addressed any reasonable or horizontal critique of their videos. When they fail to defend their work even when they cherry-pick and talk about something on their own terms, now it is clearer why.