You know what's not escapism? Having to wonder if any given game (or movie, or book) you pick up is going to include women primarily as prostitutes, murdered girlfriends, vulnerable daughters, and rape victims. I would love to have been able to play BioShock Infinite as an actual power fantasy instead of a story about a naive woman who, despite having literally world-changing powers, spends the game throwing health potions to a man. When Grand Theft Auto V comes to PC, I’m going to have to decide whether I’ll enjoy playing something where the people who look like me are brutalizable eye candy, not the ones hijacking cars and pulling off heists.

Oddly, when someone raises these issues, the people who have been stridently defending their games as "just games" switch to explaining why having women in other roles is unrealistic. A gritty, stylized world built on the corpses of women is defended as a way for gamers to escape from reality, but if someone points out that it makes them uncomfortable, they’re told that they’re supposed to be uncomfortable — after all, it’s just showing how the world really is. When my colleague Andrew complained that the female characters in GTA V had minor, one-note parts, someone explained that this was natural because "there are no women pulling bank heists or cold killing people on a massive scale in real life." If your first instinct was to mention Bonnie and Clyde, that’s beside the point. Nobody on earth is randomly hijacking cars in broad daylight and running over hundreds of pedestrians.

Realism is as much about what you leave out as what you put in

Games with realistic stories are still built on unrealistic mechanics and stylized environments — I’m not going to complain that Gone Home can’t talk about relationships because the protagonist doesn’t have to eat or sleep. But most action games are about pulp, not nuance. The Grand Theft Auto series is, overall, a broad pastiche of pop culture, and the tropes people like Anita Sarkeesian call out aren't "realistic." Prostitution is real, but a game that erases all women except prostitutes wouldn’t reflect our world. Realism is as much about what you leave out as what you put in, and an unfortunate number of games pare down the feminine experience to nothing except sex, childbirth, and vulnerability.

If you’re an author, writing down what you see is harder than riffing off things other people have already made, and even what we see is filtered through our preconceptions — in one of the best essays about writing I’ve ever read, author Kameron Hurley explains this idea with an extended metaphor involving llamas. If you’re playing a game, you’ll usually judge the story more by what you’ve seen in other media than by any real-life point of comparison. After a while, it becomes easy to say that something is unrealistic because you’ve seen it written differently elsewhere. Women in video games should be damsels and whores because damsels and whores are what women are in video games. There can't be female player characters in GTA because the movies GTA is aping didn't have female protagonists. It's a lazy, conservative, and boring way to think, no matter how much you dress it up by saying you’re writing about "the concept of being masculine."