threetoed wrote:I was expecting you to show that God of War followed a tradition of depictions of Greek life that showed topless women, not that the Greeks themselves did.
I thought I was showing both. One link was Greek art depicting it, another was various modern people depicting it.
Also, you keep saying that there is other, nonsexualized female nudity in God of War, but I can't remember any. Can you supply some examples, I want to be sure that we're on the same page if we're going to be discussing it.
I think that most of the female enemies (e.g. harpies, Medusa, Erinys, Sisters of Fate, etc.) are bare breasted and not especially "sexualized." I guess it boils down to whether or not you think that the presence of breasts are always already "sexualized." In a game where they are so predominant, it seems to me that they aren't necessarily so. This may be a key part of our disagreement about the definition of "sexualized violence" as well.
Lastly, how do you feel that critical game studies can engage with the evidence to help us understand how sexualized violence in games affects the players?
There's no good short answer to this, but I'd generally be inclined to point to critical research that explains how persuasion functions (especially in games), tracks rhetorical uptake, examines how players are positioned relative to social and cultural norms, how discursive formations shape and are shaped by the content in games, how moral behaviors are defined and policed, etc. I guess the short answer is that I ultimately reach a better "understanding" of the effects of any kind of media by applying methods derived from thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Kenneth Burke, Jean Baudrillard, or (specifically for games) Ian Bogost (or, for gender stuff in feminist criticism by folks like G. Spivak, Rosi Braidotti, or Judith Butler) than I do in in the work of social scientists studying small groups of players in laboratories.
