I've been digging into 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Saints Row The Third Remastered over the past week, and it's mostly just as good as I remember it. The core game is still a riot and a half, with great mission var🍰iety and a compelling city takeov🎐er meta-game. It's also a pretty solid remaster, with a snazzy visual overhaul that adds some stylish new flourishes for modern consoles.
But o𓄧ne part of the game has aged a📖bout as well as milk in the open sun: its depiction of sex work.
Granted, video games have a historically mixed bag when it comes to sex workers. And when I say "mixed bag," what I'm really saying is, "Jesus Christ, how is this so bad?" Sex work is not only trivialized in most mainstream games, but stigmatized in largely harmful and insidious ways. Open-world crime games often treat sex workers as props, cannon fodder, or something to be exploited for profit, and even RPGs like Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines don't do great jobs, either.
While I'd be remiss to say, "play💙ing a video game makes you want to kill people," art does have consequences. The consequences of depicting sex workers as sexed-up cannon fodder is that it contributes to a widespread disregard for human life. It reflects regressive cultural attitudes towards sex workers, and in some ways, reinforces them. When a sex worker getting killed or slapped around is treated as a joke, it reaffirms a mentality that gets real people killed on the daily.
So, then, why hasn't Volition changed a literal thing about Saints Row The Third?
It would be different if the developer hadn't demonstrated any growth or maturity in the past decade - but they have. Not only do Saints Row IV and Agents of Mayhem have stel🅠lar female characterization, but the former was a hugಌe improvement in terms of depictions of sex work. In fact, , and promised improvement going forward.
Related: 168澳洲幸运5开奖🌠网:New Saints 𒁃Row Game Officially In Development
Fast forward seven years, that promise has rang hollow. While I understand that updating a seven-year-old game for an end-of-console-cycle remaster might be a bit much, they already put the effort into tweaking the visuals and the physics of the game. Why not, then, update some of the dialogue surrounding the game's sex workers? Why still call them "hoes" in the i🐽n-game menus? It's not only a baffling choice, but a harmful one.
What I'm asking for isn't censorship. What I'm asking for is a developer to make good on a promise - to grow and learn as a group of creators. To release Saints Row The Third as it was in 2011, back when I was in high 🍨school, shows a complete lack of understanding that cultural values have shifted just a bit since. While the game still does offer some compelling insight into sex work, especially with the character of Viola (played to sardonic perfection by the iconic Sasha Grey,) it drops the ball so utterly in some areas. Those areas could've been smoothed over or reworked, and none of the bite would've been lost.
But what we're left with, ultimately, is a good game with a huge blind spot. It's a product of its time, but when releasing that product i﷽n 2020, an iota of ♔cultural awareness couldn't hurt. Don't take my word for it, though - Steve Jaros had some choice words about this very subject in 2013.
"I think it's fair to be called out on your shit," he told The Escapist. "I think that it's a sad man that can never be self-reflective. I think that we tried to go and carry ourselves with respect, and try to respect s𝕴exuality and respect gender as much as we can, and sometimes we fail but hopefully we'll do better and continue to get better."
Consider this, then, us calling you on your shit.
Our review of Saints Row The Third Remastered will be up shortly.
