Quaid: "She straight up said the developers 'carefully concocted' a situation in which players would fetishize the dead bodies of sexualized women."
So? Developers have been "concocting" situations in which players savagely and brutally murder other people for years and years. Is this "malicious" on their part?
Quaid: "One could conclude that intentionally presenting situations of extreme social taboo (necrophilia) for the sake of selling copies isn't the most noble of acts."
Is brutal murder a "noble" act?
Quaid: "She says players 'can't help' but interact with them in this way, implying that players are encouraged to do so, despite active disincentive by the game systems. She recognizes herself that these acts are negative, calling the pleasure these hypothetical players take in these supposedly intentionally created situations 'perverse'."
Here's the line from the video you are referring to:
"The player cannot help but treat these female bodies as things to be acted upon, because they were designed, constructed and placed in the environment for that singular purpose."
This is an objectively factual statement. Every NPC, every powerup, every obstacle, everything that can be in any way interacted with is a "thing to be acted upon". They were ALL "designed, constructed and placed in the environment for that singular purpose". If they were not intended to be acted upon, you would not be able to interact with them. So the player cannot help but treat digital hookers as things to be acted upon in the same way they cannot help but treat digital vehicles as such, or digital cats, or digital police officers, or digital bottles on a bar... They are all placed in the environment to be acted upon. There is no value judgment on players here.
So why "perverse pleasure"?
Perverse: showing a deliberate and obstinate desire to behave in a way that is unreasonable or unacceptable, often in spite of the consequences
For the umpteenth time, gamers have made it crystal clear since at least GTA3 that they DO take perverse pleasure from killing hookers. The uninhibited glee on display in countless hooker-killing YouTube videos, along with gamer-created memes and, let's face it, common knowledge should be proof enough of this, but somehow none of the anti-Sarkeesian crowd ever seem able to acknowledge this point. Worse, as we have seen even on Rerolled, several will go out of their way to argue that this ISN'T the case, that hookers AREN'T the most popular non-aggressive NPC targets in GTA (next to random pedestrians, of course).
Quaid: "Sounds like accusations of malicious intent to me."
Not to me. Not to most developers we've heard from. Not to the majority of her audience who are actually interested in the topic and not just jumping to whatever conclusions allow the most righteous indignation. There is often more than one way to interpret something, which is fine. When one interpretation relies more on personal attacks to make its case than good-faith arguments that are backed up by facts, that's the side that's going to be seen as less valid by society at large. Sorry.
