But oh, if it only stopped there. The male party characters outnumbered female party characters in Inquisition two to one. I really can't blame Bioware for that, because what a developer does with a male character won't get them reamed out by Feminist Frequency. Female involvement in a game is necessary for Feminist Frequency's influential Tropes vs. Women series to criticize the game. If there are no tropes involving women in a game, there are no Tropes vs. Women in a game. Therefore, developers have much more freedom when creating male characters, because they're not under similar scrutiny. The Iron Bull runs around most of the game with no shirt and characters commenting on his man boobs. He's deliberately hyper-sexualized and self-objectifying. If he'd been a female character, "progressive" websites would have had Ser Pounce-A-Lot's kittens.

This is why I'm speaking despite the continued personal risk to my reputation: this increased scrutiny of female characters has the potential to hurt female representation in gaming, notably survivors of trauma and women in stigmatized professions. Meanwhile, the mainstream press often only cares about women in video games when some woman claims she's "fled her home," because the mainstream media loves to word-wank over female suffering. That is a trope versus women we actually should be taking a good hard look at. To do that, however, we require nuance. And nuance is lost in the brand of call-out culture practiced by radicals like Feminist Frequency's followers. I can't even make a satirical joke about my dog thinking he's a cat, but all cats are cats, without these people labelling me "transphobic." It's gotten that stupid. When humour dies, that's a sign that things have lost perspective. So why is anyone listening to this angry mob?

Feminist Frequency isn't held up as a gold standard for feminism because their ideas are particularly good. Feminist Frequency is praised because Anita's narrative is that of a "brave" victim of abuse. I don't know why she's considered unique in that: everyone who expresses their opinions about games on the Internet gets abused. The Internet is a really abusive place. I've been dealing with Internet abuse since I gave Halo 3 an 8/10 (instead of a 10/10) and said World of Warcraft should have a starter zone to cut down on ganking noobs. God, I've been doing this a long time.

Tropes vs.Women examines gender figures of speech in video games.

In my opinion, gaming does need to become more diverse, simply because the industry has saturated existing targeted demographics and needs new types of customers to grow. The viewers of my YouTube videos are 95% male, which is very strange for a feminist opinion writer who thought the lesbian coming-of-age game Gone Home was pretty great despite not being a traditional "video game." On top of this, hardcore gamers like me get bored playing another open world game, or another shooter. That doesn't mean we don't like open world games and shooters, it just means that we want variety. Diversity and variety go hand in hand. Therefore, diversity is good.

Unfortunately, our current "diversity" rhetoric is so loud and so vicious that it's shutting doors instead of opening them. Instead of approaching diversity as a business imperative, the focus is on hyperbolic criticism and personal attacks. No matter how good a game is, people will find the one nitpicky thing wrong with it and those are the headlines that end up grabbing attention. The criticism is no longer fair, because it's jumped from criticism of products to criticism of people. It's also jumped from the industry professionals that set trends to the consumers of games. Consumers of games don't have any direct control over what's in a game. We like some things in a given title, we don't like some things. Am I going to condemn the legitimately great single-player FPS gameplay in Metro: Last Light because of some awkward boobie shots? No. Did I like the awkward boobie shots? No. So it's silly to condemn someone for liking a game because a couple scenes were badly handled.

Whether we're told we're deviants or misogynist neckbeards, this culture war is no longer limited to a critique of artistic product. This has become an attack on people and groups of people. It's really unfortunate that the worst of the so-called "gamers are dead" articles was written by a woman, because the understandable objections to it were seen as "harassment of women". As much as I respect Leigh Alexander's chutzpah, she went way over the line in her attacks on the most devoted consumers of video games. Saying "gamers don't have to be your audience" regarding video games is like a automotive writer saying "drivers don't have to be your customers." Of course they do, because they're your core market!

By the way, gamers aren't an audience. Gamers are players. Important distinction, that. We'll get to that later.