I’m right there with you on the choosing character sex bit. It’s totally nonsense to not put that choice in, even if the dialogue sometimes gets clunky. IRT a game like GTA V there’s so much dialogue in it that there’s a practicality aspect and a production cost aspect that come into play but the choice should be there considering how much is spent on everything else.
There are ladies who enjoy maiming humans online, thats for sure. One of my good female friends and I have spent cumulative months killing people in the Halo series online. The same person and I used to play GTA II (the last birds-eye view one) for hours on a LAN back in the day as well.
I’ve played a bit of the GTA V story, but I much prefer online where you can play with others and amass a collection of toys that won’t disappear after a mission. I think the thing that people also misunderstand about GTA in general is that it’s a commentary on, not an endorsement of the modern world. The shit they say on the radio is funny because it’s a parody of the world we’re in. It’s a no holds barred effort to critique everything and everyone.
Also, I just think it’s hard to pigeon-hole gamers. I play GTA V online in the same clothing I spawned with originally because… why the fuck would I care what my guy is wearing if it doesn’t help me kill stuff more effectively. My friend OTOH plays as a female character who he frequently accessorises because he’d rather watch a female 3D butt run along a street if he gonna watch it for hours as part of the game.
You must know an awful lot of gamers to be able to make that claim.
GTA-IV, for example, sold 25,000,000 copies (according to wikipedia). You personally interviewed the (.999 x 25,000,000) 24,975,000 people who play the game the ‘right’ way?
Dude that’s playing meaningless semantics games which doesn’t do anything to further the discussion or in/validate her videos.
She does things in her videos and pretends that, or at the least doesn’t make clear that the game’s storyline in no way necessitates you having done that.
“Oh you can knock out a stripper and drag their lifeless body around a room and over objects in a disturbing way that isn’t required for any reason?” Yes, or you can not - just like real life!
It’s like Bungie or MS being pissed that Sarge from Rooster Teeth’s excellentRed vs Blue is using their game to portray a stereotypical, meat-headed, homophobic, army dolt. It’s a puppet that is literally out of its creator’s hands, yet she wants to tell a story using that puppet then claim it says something about the puppet’s designer.
You can focus on nitpicks of my comment or you could rebut the argument and actually contribute here. Your choice.
I am jely of your 4k goodness. Saw some screenshots. I don’t think the extra res adds to the game in ways that 1080p doesn’t already, but it’s sure as hell crispy and purrdy!
Even at 1080p on PS4 I can easily get lost in the world as convincingly real. On the weekend I was watching TV and thought for a second a scene from a TV show was actually from GTA V.
The problem with this argument is that someone had to code those actions into the game. “Just like real life” fails to stand up to scrutiny when other things you can do in real life are left out of the game. Can you call an ambulance for the knocked out stripper? Can you give a house to the homeless guy instead of running him over with a motorcycle? The devs had to choose what actions they could code into the game.
When the programmed response for female characters is always sexual in nature, and the programmed response for male characters is always not sexual in nature, don’t you think that indicates a… bias? preference? blindness? laziness? on the behalf of the coders?
Your argument relies on the idea that development funds, resource load and storage space are all infinite resources, which they are not.
I made it clear above that I think the user should be able to choose the sex of their character. I’m not even making a defence of this game or that game, I’m merely saying that Sarkeesian’s videos present video games dishonestly. Don’t you think that shows bias / opinion / deceit / laziness?
No, my argument (which follows directly from the argument Sarkeesian makes) relies on the idea that development time and resources are explicitly limited, and that the developers had to make choices of what to put in the game. The choices they make show up as biases that Sarkeesian exposes in her play sessions. She presents actions that the developers specifically allowed to happen, and shows the choices they made to leave out actions or reactions that result in the tropes she exposes.
You think it’s “dishonest” to present videos of people doing things that are specifically allowed in the game simply because YOU wouldn’t do them. I think that’s incorrect.
It’s not really a nit pick when it’s directly addressing what is basically the core of your argument. You have NO idea how many people play the way you do. About all you can say is that you and maybe the people you know don’t do those things. Or don’t do them often. Neither can AS, of course, but then she’s not making outlandish claims about how tens of millions of people play. She is making well supported claims about the content of games. Which makes sense, since her videos are about games. Not gamers.
I think that Red vs Blue (which I love, FWIW) is a really poor analogy here, because the RvB creators aren’t playing the game, but are adding a whole bunch of new content which is not part of the original game. AS is playing the game. She may not be playing games in the ways you do, or the ways you like, or the ways you approve of, but she is playing the game. And while she’s adding comment and interpretation, she isn’t adding any content.
She’s misrepresenting video games by playing them in ways that are possible but not intended by the designers. While making money. My “outlandish claims” are not being made in exchange for money… unless you wanna paypal me some cash?
She is making well supported claims about the content of games.
According to you. I think she’s being manipulative and dishonest.
but are adding a whole bunch of new content which is not part of the original game.
This is how I and many others see Sarkessian’s videos, and why the RvB analogy is right on the money. To claim the player doesn’t add content by playing is provably false. What is ‘glitching’ if it’s not users adding content? By playing with a thing it’s possible to make it do stuff that the designers never intended. The fact that the designers didn’t patch that or stop the user from doing obscure things in the game isn’t an implicit endorsement of whatever the user is able to make the game do.
She’s playing them in a clickbait-y way to demonstrate maximum perceived offense. E.g. you could kill and drag around any character’s body. This is no worse than any other clickbait-y political blog entry or YouTube video, though. It is not news, spin happens a thousand times a day on the Internet.
It’s designed to provoke a response, but to me it is akin to flipping through an issue of Maxim and pointing out that Maxim magazine tends to portray women as sex objects. While true, it is also missing the point.
(One thing games don’t tend to show or even allow is killing children. You will not see any kids walking around the streets of Los Santos and being run over or beat up in GTA 5.)
Anyway there are plenty of other magazines and games for everyone to read, and play. Smartphone games are plenty accessible to everyone without doing the traditional Hollywood budget and demographics thing.
Not really, in a sandbox game the “kill and drag body around” action would be available everywhere. The more like a sandbox the game is, the less this is true. For example in Hitman you get a lot more points for harder stealth kills, so sneaking around the strippers so they didn’t even know you were there, to get to the actual target elsewhere in the club, is the implied challenge. Can you choke them, kill them, teabag their corpses, shoot their bodies over and over? Yes, because the sandbox allows it. That is not at all the same as encouraging it or requiring it.
You seem to think that disallowing things in games is as easy as allowing them. Since designers first need to create a world (allow) before they can apply rules to it (disallow), your/her argument (who exactly am I arguing against?) exposes ignorance of the way these things are built.
I can tell that neither you or her have ever had to conceptualise this idea or design something that prevents “abuse” of the system. Judging from her education background, I’d say I’m right at least in her case.
Edit: I notice codinghorror has much more effectively summarised this idea than I did in the time I’ve been writing this.
Please don’t either of you lecture me on the difficulty of design/programming in this sort of thing, especially when you do it at cross purposes. It was easy enough to leave children out of GTA V after all, and Fallout NV has a flag on children characters that prevents certain actions against them.
How can you be sure the designers do not intend for people to (for example) shoot the sex workers in GTA V to get their money back after employing them? Seems like they took extra time/code to store the cash in the NPC inventory instead of just making it disappear.
She’s playing them in a way that illustrates her points. Much as I hope anyone would do if they are making claims about the content of a game.
What’s the point you think she’s missing? Because I keep thinking her point is that she’s exploring the way women are represented in (in this particular series) video games. If she was talking about how women were represented in magazines, I kind of imagine that: yes, she would point out how Maxim represents women.
Now lets talk again about where the devs choose to spend their time. Hitman is always mentioned, so let’s remind everyone about this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN4hyPg3SMI (it’s the sniper challenge. The reward? watching a women dance around in her underwear.)
This is the worst example you could have possibly used since money drops out of everyone you kill in GTA. Cops/hired goons/homeless people/enemies, everyone. So the programmers told the game: make random quantity of cash drop out of character when they die. Then they programmed in a thing saying: make these NPC hireable as such services are in the real world. So you can call a helicopter valet, and kill him. You can hire goons to go kill your enemy, and kill the goons yourself. You can procure the services of a stripper and then kill her. Money drops out of all of them.
Plus it’s missing the point since no one who is a gamer would do such a thing in GTA V because there are far better ways to make money fast and far more terribly violent things you can do. A personal favourite is going to the big jetty and moving down people indiscriminately or killing everyone I see who’s driving a Mini.
Much like the reward for reading Maxim is to look at women in bikinis (and cars / gadgets / male fashion choices), I suppose. Is that bad?
I don’t read romance novels, which are aimed at women. I don’t read Woman’s Day magazine, or Cosmopolitan magazine. I guess the broader point is this: is it OK for a game to be targeted at – even to the point of pandering to – a specific gender?
I think it is, though I agree that offering male and female avatar choices is the right way to go.
You keep making these sweeping proclamations of what other people would do. This time you’ve managed to combine it with a No True Scotsman for good effect.
Let’s go back to the source for a minute, shall we? You and Coding Horror keep talking about the actions that are coded for NPC regardless of gender. The only place in Tropes Vs Women in Video Games that mentions that is the first video in Women as Background Decoration.
She starts the segment by examining non-playable sex objects, and she begins with interactions that are not avoidable if you wish the game to progress. She gives examples from The Sabotuer, The Darkness 2, and Metro Last Light.
She then moves on to the concept of “Instrumentality” (the practice of using virtual women as tools or props for the player’s own purposes)
Now sure, you can use male NPCs for the same purpose, but these examples are in support of the application of Martha Nussbaum’s “objectification theory.” The fact that you can use male characters as tools or props doesn’t mean that using female characters is any less objectifying, although she does still talk about the dichotomy in the series (and she shows the men are almost never sexualized while the women almost always are)
Examples given here are Assassins Creed 4, and Hitman: Absolution.
Out of all the examples given up to this point, it’s only the Hitman one that can be performed with a dead male body as well as a dead female one.
After that there’s a lot examples of instrumentality being linked to commodification. The treatment of women as power-ups or stats-restoring services similar to potions. Sleeping Dogs and GTA are examples of this.
Next she gets into the part I think you guys are talking about:
Again, this is a pillar supporting the overall argument of objectification. The fact that you can do these things with male characters doesn’t make the argument invalid. And it sure as hell doesn’t make it dishonest.
