Lol, no, I didn’t. I was trying to think of ‘legitimate reasons that women characters would not appear in games’. I also compared it to the early scouting movement but I see you let that one slide…
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It’s indicative of the scale of the problem that a female commenter feels she has to lay out her credentials in gaming before stating an opinion. If she thinks you’re younger than you are, that’s your problem, not hers!
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Hey, wang-folk is already a much misunderstood musical genre. Please be more sensitive about it.
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Yes, it’s just that the Bechdel test crossed my mind when I was thinking about that scene.
In general, in role-playing, I think that it’s best to leave oppressive features of a culture as external problems for the player characters to confront, without requiring or expecting player characters to make concessions to oppressive norms. I.e., you don’t want to prohibit the players from creating a maester who is a woman, but you could certainly have NPCs react to that unusual fact.
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No, it’s art. Possibly satire. Certainly entertainment.
Misandry would be an internal state of mind or model of the world that unfairly ascribes negative characteristics to all men or men in general. There’s certainly not enough evidence from the content of the gif to fairly diagnose misandry in its creator. It could for example only refer to the subset of men who really are like that.
As a man, I can assert with a high degree of confidence that I haven’t ever seen serious misandry in the wild. Usually some utter tool is dissing women (perhaps unconsciously, which isn’t really better, if you think about it) and gets called on it. Ascribing specific negative characteristics to one particular arsehole who is clearly exhibiting them is not misandry.
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Lucky you. There’s plenty out there.
See I’m of two minds about that. Yes, you want to accommodate your players. OTOH, you want to be true to the setting; a female maester would be highly remarkable. Even a young lady undergoing maester training would be remarkable (which you’re probably aware of having read the book). So if a female maester were introduced to the party, I would expect skepticism from other player characters unless some kind of prior relationship to this character has been established as part of character creation. And yes, trust between characters would be something that I would expect to be developed over the course of roleplaying. No, it would not be a pleasant experience for the character, but all female characters who’ve aimed for roles that are considered unconventional be Westerosi standards have had a pretty rough go of it in the novels, with the exception of certain historical Targaeryans. (I’m not considering Wildlings to be conventional here).
LOL, is luck in these matters the same as privilege?
Updated: seriously though, citation needed. Not that there is any, but that there is plenty, excluding interactions of the type I have outlined above.
Except that you just doomed half the population to always play vicariously 100%, while the other half can think, “me, but in a different time/place.” No matter how farfetched the idea that their "me"would turn out that way is.
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That depends on how tight-fitting the armour is. Most real armors worn by real women could have easily been worn by men.
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Well, I’m assuming in the case of traditional table-top gaming, there’s considerable flexibility, you can negotiate exceptions to the rules, and you can have an understanding that this player character is the only known case of a woman becoming a maester.
By contrast, there’s a lot less flexibility in small scale online gaming, and almost none in the case of MMOs and singleplayer CRPGs. With CRPGs or MMOs, game designers would have to either prohibit characters from playing gender non-conformant roles, or allow them, without any real flexibility. In the former case, they’ve just established Snake Pit of Sexism Online, and that’s just going to get worse; in the latter, most players won’t even think about the issue at the point of character creation, and it’s only in “story” missions and the like where sexism as a feature of the game setting will emerge. And that’s the case I had most in mind with arguing that it would be best not to impose the restrictions on the player characters at the point of creation, and instead only feature problems of sexism as external challenges.
The trickiest case, but perhaps most interesting, is the small scale online role-playing games, in which the admins could grant exceptions to extraordinary roleplayers, at the expense of accusations of favoritism and endless requests for further exceptions.
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But I'm A Nice Guy from Scott Benson on Vimeo.
Stupid video didn’t embed. I can never get used to the variety of markup languages used on discussion boards.
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“Man, if there’s one thing I can’t stand in magical time-travelling monster slaying stories, it’s unrealistic depictions of women’s fighting abilities.”
Yeah! And, no… The reader is only going to allow so many willing suspensions of disbelief. That’s among the
reason that MarySues improbabilities are willingly suspended when the reader is the author.
are you fucking kidding me.
But you could be a high priestess (the “Red Witch”) or a warrior queen with dragons at her command. I think they’d balance out.
Instead of throwing a temper tantrum, why not just start making games?
It’s really not that hard to make games, let alone a best seller.
I bought a Saturn when I was young. I shouldn’t have, it wasn’t a very good car. A wheel fell off & that was an unwelcome feature not in the brochure.
Did I complain? No.
I built my own car instead, using odds & ends I found around my house.
Is this story true? No.
Is it a rational alternative to discourse or expression? Not really.
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That post is just…wrong. If regressive gender attitudes bother you, then shift the blame to Japan, where such are still prevalent, which the author of the original post, Brenna Hillier, would have known if she was actually interested in gender issues. The comment has very little to do with the attitudes with in the whole gaming subculture. Comments that are at best, amateur translations of a different language than the one author undertands. VG24/7, like it’s competitors, likes to stir controversies for clicks. This rant is latest in the line of hundreds of ineptly conceived, poorly researched diatribes by half-literate idiots who have hitched themselves to this latest bandwagon. There is a lot to be said about gender portrayal in video games, which is still rather unexplored besides Anita Sarkeesian’s video series on tropes. Instead we have this cheap troll-bait.
There’s a huge crowd of pseudo-feminists who have hijacked this conversation, either because they are trolls or they are sadists. Far be it for me to say that Rob Beschizza is wrong to highlight but it fails my comprehension that somebody of his experience can not see the piece for what it is.
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Well did you try to get it returned? Did you take them to small claims court? You should take Capcom to a small claims court for this game that doesn’t yet exist and that you haven’t yet bought, though if you feel that none of the cars in the marketplace are up to your standard of gender progressiveness you can build a car that isn’t so cis-biased to show the world.
By the way, do you know what a non-sequitur is?
The unusual level of tolerance we’re allowing today for mansplaining and general manly condescension notwithstanding, if your contribution to this thread is to explain to “hysterical” women how they should talk if they want to be taken seriously, your contribution to this thread will have its balls crushed by a giant flashing GIF (then deleted)
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