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Volition’s creative director Steve Jaros has said that Anita Sarkeesian was right to criticise the Saints Row games in her latest video.
A video released last week examined the link between violence and sexualised female imagery in a host of games including Saints Row. Jaros linked to the video on Twitter, agreeing with the analysis.
"I think that [Sarkeesian’s] right in that case,” he subsequently told The Escapist. "I think it’s fair to be called out on your shit.
"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 sexuality and respect gender as much as we can, and sometimes we fail but hopefully we’ll do better and continue to get better.
"I think that it is a problem in the games industry. I think that we shouldn’t be portraying senseless abused women and I think that if I could go back and hop in a time machine I would have done things differently. But there’s also some things I didn’t any control over and also I think that people’s consciousness grew."
Jaros also argued that the team behind the series has made big strides in the area of equality, and also argued that some of its pro-female decisions have gone unnoticed.
"I think that there’s some things Saints Row does better than other games, and I think that there are other things that we could have done better," he added.
"I think that every time that we’ve done a Saints Row game we’ve gotten better at it. I think that we always wanted to make sure we do things with fairness, but we’ve gotten better at it as time goes on.
"It’s very minor but it means something to me. We never call a woman a ‘ho’ in Saints Row 4, we call them sex workers. We respect that that’s their position and we don’t take a cheap shot at them for that. It’s a minor thing, but it’s the right thing to do."
This something we all should be better at. Yes the orignial saints row is listed here. Yes it should be
http://t.co/iyENDNUVLK— Steve Jaros (@SteveJaros) August 26, 2014
