Hi, I'm pretty obviously anti-GG, but can we have a discussion about this? I feel that your argument doesn't work in a bunch of cases.

Number 1: the obvious California-american-centric viewpoint.

Nothing is really California-specific as far as I can tell (what even constitutes that? being very "SJW"? New York has plenty of social justice types, too). US-centrism in social justice is a real problem, that is true. Nuance is important. However, I'm not sure how it applies in this context.

I'll keep pointing this out, because it doesn't reflect the vast majority of people on the planet.

So your saying she speaks for her interpretation and not for 7 billion people's collective take on things? That's a truism, not a substantive argument.

Most of what she states, which can be proven to be, is her opinion. Not fact.

Opinions are essentially small, personal hypotheses. However, Sarkeesian goes to the trouble of combining feminist theory, media theory, TV tropes and backs it up with evidence from games - whether you agree with it or not, Sarkeesian is presenting a theory that is supported by evidence. Saying "it's an opinion" means you want to dismiss and invalidate it because it's got no basis - that however is not the case, it's a valid theory achieved through careful interpretation of evidence. You need to actually come up with a substantive critique in this case. Which is what you're doing right now! So I'm not really sure why you'd include that in the first place?

I point this out as it is important to note that the use of TV tropes do not apply to video games. This is blatantly obvious by the name. "TV".

1. North Korea is officially called the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". It's not democratic at all. The point is that unless you're arguing about names themselves, they're just indicators that can be misleading. In this case, TVTropes is in a more general sense about narrative tropes which are employed in almost all narrative media, culture, entertainment. TVTropes.org itself talks about films, anime, manga, games as well as TV. Since games 90% contain a narrative - either by design or through emergent narratives in gameplay resulting from the game's designed structure - narrative critique by pointing out narrative tropes is a totally valid thing to do.

then the damsel in distress could easily be switched in terms of what gender they are. HOWEVER. This HAS been done before, there are a multitude of Mario games where Peach is a playable character, if not the main character.

IIRC she is mostly playable in Kart games (which feature almost all Mario universe characters), and she only had one standalone game, that was really crap and didn't sell well at all due to its sub-par quality. She is definitely a neglected character. I'm no expert on the Mario series, so please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong! To contrast with an example of doing it right, an optional female character that is actually meaningfully advertised as being part of the appeal (and not just an alternate option to the "default", thus being relegated to play second fiddle symbolically speaking) is the new female protagonist in Dishonored 2, on whom the trailer focussed heavily.

... the decade it was made in. During that time, we had reached the high point for Real women's lib, as in, a women's lib that didn't focus on female supremacy. Not only that, children's story books were still based on the ideas of the fair maiden in the tower and the brave knight rescuing them.

1. History is not a linear progression towards good stuff - as you can see by abortion rights activism, it's a constant push and pull. IIRC, In the early days of video games, the main demographic was "family entertainment", and there were many prominent women developers. Heck, the earlierst software developers were mostly women because it was seen as a "secretarial" job, compared to the more "masculine" hardware side of things. Cultural conceptions and stereotypes heavily influence things, and they fluctuated wildly in just a few decades. It was only after the first big VG crash and in the 80s action boom that the advertising started targeting the young male demographic heavily. So arguably, in Mario's time there was a reasonable possibility of not having that trope. That said, I'm under the impression Sarkeesian brings it up mostly to demonstrate the long, long history of video games relying on sexist tropes - it's not 1 instance that's the problem, it's the sheer volume and acceptance of it as totally normal (as if women were not able to save men, or able to save themselves, etc etc) that's the problem.

Real women's lib, as in, a women's lib that didn't focus on female supremacy

You have your history a bit wrong here. You realise that some of the most controversial feminist activists were 2nd wave feminists in the 80s? E.g. Andrea Dworkin's Intercourse (which was wrongly accused of saying "all sex is rape" - she made a much more subtle, though still quite radical, point) came out in 1987, Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex was a big (though controversial) hit with the 2nd wave, and much of the Anti-Porn campaigning (with which, FWIW, many modern feminists now disagree) happened then, too. Arguably, third wave feminists have mellowed quite a bit and through intersectionality brought a lot more nuance. Also, you might well think that "feminism has gone too far" (that's your right to an opinion), but there's no prominent contemporary feminist theorist that actually advocates female supremacy.

As we can see from recent Mario games, this formula has changed.especially with peach being a playable character more than often. This claim of damsel in distress would have worked...

Again, being playable doesn't mean equal representation in a series revolving around Mario and the Mario brand.

Hitman series: Simple, the theme of the game is based on the life of a professional hitman, very similar to a spy in the case of the hitman series.

Remember that the developers created both the game and the backstory. The lore is not a justification - the lore is the excuse developers create to let you do things in a game. I mean this in a neutral way - e.g., Fallout comes up with massive retcons all the time to compensate for differences in games and bugs and other technical quirks all the time. But it's a mistake to think that because a game is about x, it has to include y and that the devs just had no other option. They chose to have y in there, and they always have the option of not putting it in there.

As for the killable strippers: Yes, they are evadable. But as Sarkeesian showed in in the original TvW video, the game was advertised heavily with an ad campaign featuring non-sexualised men of all ages and sizes with a bullet in the head, and very scantily clad, sexualised young women with a bullet in the head. This game was designed to include sexualised violence, and to be advertised as having that option.