As for the rampant sexism in the video game industry... once again I continue to draw yet another parallel to Old Hollywood; it has taken the film industry 10 full decades (1920 - 2020) to reach the point where it is today and today is still not a good enough place for female actresses, directors or photographers or writers. It is still very much a male-dominated industry yet it is undeniable that there has been a lot of progress towards equal-opportunity in the past 7 decades of commercial film.
And keep in mind: films get the benefit of being considered culturally important.
The video game industry is barely, and I literally mean barely in its 3rd decade of full-blown commercial industry, and it is this very infancy coupled with the fact that it is battling the very same struggle for cultural relevance that the talkies and the moving-picture shows struggled with in the 1900's and 1910's and the better part of the 1920's and 1930's.
I would say, that just like with film, we already have our most important video games of historical significance: games like Wizardry, Doom, Mario, etc. Basically any video game that jump-started a genre and whose system mechanics have yet to be innovated upon. The new Doom, for example, is mechanically identical to the first Doom video game and the only difference is in the production values tied up in graphics and sound.
Does that sound in any way similar to what is the norm for modern day movies? It should. Movies like It Follows, for example, are a brilliant, brilliant example of how to do a perfect thriller/horror/psychologically-driven film yet it is absolutely nothing that was not done 50 years ago by Hitchcock. Same old bullshit with a new coat of paint.
A game like Baldur's Gate was mired in both artistic and in technical problems from the very beginning as it was a game that was shoe-horned on top of an already pre-existing system design that was deemed to be commercially unfit (or technically unfit) for release to the General Audience for whatever reason (I don't pretend to know what those reasons were); the BioWare doctors, like any good Hollywood entrepreneur, seized upon the chance to salvage the artistic heart of the video game they wanted to do (Baldur's Gate) by vying for and eventually appropriating the existing tech-engine of the RTS game that had been cancelled.
So right off the bat we have one huge problem with the fact that the very genesis of the video game Baldur's Gate was one of pure artistic compromise for the General Audience. There are a lot of people whom would argue that such things are necessary, as "at least this way we got to play it!".
To those people I say: you are wrong. There is no reason why anything needs to be made and released and if you feel that way then it is because of the conditioning inflicted on you by the decades of marketing that have saturated your ability to discern between something legitimately and technically good, and perhaps even artistically sound as well; but nothing is necessary.
As a video game player for over 30+ years I say give me a There Will Be Blood, give me a Serpico, or give me nothing at all. Give me Wizardry 1, give me Zelda 1, give me Fallout 1, or give me nothing at all.
