but then she cites Dishonored as an example. And if you've ever actually played Dishonored, you know that the brothel level is effectively used as a tool to show how awful the game's setting is. It's a hangout spot for amoral rich kids, and the degrading portrayal of the prostitutes is represented as a bad thing. Nothing about it is titillating. Whatserface is just taking umbrage with the mere presence of women in a degraded role, nevermind the fact that it's an aesthetic element meant to make you dislike the badguys even more.
Yeah, but you're missing the point. Regardless of all of that, Dishonored is another game with another fucking brothel level. And an inordinate amount of big budget games have a brothel level or are full of prostitutes. Seriously, think about how many feature them? So, yeah sure, they may have been using it to highlight "how awful the game's setting is", but it's a pretty uninspired way to do it. It's a trope. And that's what the whole video series is all about, highlighting these tropes and how they collectively reflect badly on women. It's that simple. And while I haven't played Dishonored, the whole "degrading portrayal of prostitutes" that you mention sure doesn't sound like a step in the right direction. In fact, that's how every game unfortunately portrays them.
In the end what these pseudo "feminists" want is censorship to conform to their ideal view of the industry which annoys me as the feelings of some people shouldn't mean that everyone else should be censored and conform to them.
How did you come to this conclusion? Thinking that what people like Anita want is censorship is just a massive misunderstanding. They want balance, not censorship. And the only way you can inspire and bring about balance, is to bring attention to the current state of total imbalance. She's not even saying that all these games that feature these tropes are bad or wrong, but she's saying there are far, far too many of them. And she's right. This has absolutely nothing at all to do with censoring any kind of artistic censorship. And to be honest, most of these games are just throwing these tropes in, because well, they're tropes, I doubt all these devs have a kind of artistic fascination with providing terrible representations of the sex industry, for example.