Only if you are a corporate drone who doesn’t actually know what the words mean. But you’re right, stupid entitled people should be given the power to destroy language.
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Yeah, I pretty much came to suspect the same, that not knowing what the words even mean was the real problem there. :-/
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It comes, I speculate, from the fashion of writing news for a 5th grade reading level. Complicated ideas never show up in popular media because it would break the corporate brand of the newspaper or site; the only exposure people get to the academic language used to process abstractions is also corporate, being used to make more of their ideas than is really there. So corporate marketing hurts the language from both ends.
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I don’t know. If it’s true that her examples are like reading a paragraph out of a book, her method of argument would be on par with that of Jack Thompson. On the other hand, she’s not campaigning around the country to various governmental bodies to censor things whilst mixing in extra bold faced lies with exaggerations. Reflexively, given that Hillary Clinton actually introduced legislation to censor games, that Republicans generally sound like they want to censor the internet, and many countries actually censor these things, it takes a very open mind to be able to listen to this kind of criticism. I think she makes the broad case pretty well, and find an odd sort of humor in her ability to compile all the worst possible instances she can find into a short video. If her target audience is primarily game developers and gamers secondly, do exaggerations insult their intelligence?
To be frank, that’s an excellent argument to systemically use these tropes. As a rule, you write to your target audience.
While it was not the whole message, the criticism of open world games as being sexist for being open-worlded is artless.
I don’t think it’s that women are portrayed as weak or strong, but that their sole value in these stories, regardless, are their physical attractiveness. That’s the problem, I think.
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Why that particular action? What was the artistic choice that went into that decision? If they had not given the player the ability to do that, what would have been lost in the game? Could the designers have turned that energy to some other small portion of the game?
Um, no.
Sleeping Dogs is an open world game where you are an undercover cop infilitrating gangs in Hong Kong.
In the game there are prostitutes. There are also cars with trunks. There is the ability to put NPCs in trunks. So you can grab anyone off the street and force them into a trunk. Since the prostitutes are NPCs, they are part of the class of objects that can be placed in trunks.
Asking “why did the game developers allow you to stuff someone in a trunk in a game about violent street gangs” would make sense, but the idea that they spent a lot of time specifically to allow prostitutes to be kidnapped is missing the context in which the trunk stuffing mechanic occurs in the game.
Your question is like asking “why did Maxis/EAspend so much time producing the ability to drown people in the Sims games”? What was the artistic choice that went into that decision?
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Whoa! How did you do the thing with the blurry? That is awesome!
The way I would word it is: female NPCs in open world games are so often based on one problematic archetype (what she calls “a non-playable sex object”) that it both limits the way players can interact with them and spreads pernicious stereotypes.
That being said, I feel it would be better to diversify female NPC behavior and make them less sexualized than to just limit player choice (e.g. contrast how Fallout 2 and Fallout 3 deal with the choice to attack child NPCs).
Furthermore, the rhetoric she uses concerning the way media influences society is dangerously close to what politicians say about the “evils” of violent video games. Drawing the distinction between interactive and non-interactive media does not make for a strong argument.
Are you suggesting there’s more nuance to a game like Hitman than she’s giving it credit for?
I think you have misunderstood the purpose of her video series. I’d suggest watching it with a woman present, like your mom or a sister, someone you’re not trying to get in the sack. See what they have to say about the video. I’m not even being snarky here.
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Doing this in practice might look like a joke in poor taste. Seriously, what would this look like in an open ended game? Close your eyes and visualize for a bit… World of the unsexy? Put all the female NPC’s in burkas or drag? Eliminate the possibility of any hetero romance whatsoever? If any female shows any trace of sexuality, then an open ended game will let you turn them into a sexual object. Contrast this with the male characters, which are by and large, disposable background nobodies to be killed or robbed.
Now, when it comes to open worlds… if you give a player a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If have a gun to shoot things with, everything is now a target. Shooting things and violence are the rewards system. I think it is interesting that some RPG’s, especially of the pen and paper variety, are able to at least alter the experience and rewards systems to not be tied to violence… Of course, you can go ahead and ignore every game that fits into the category of “Action” or “Shooter”.
More like “Do not understand why you’re making such a deal about this particular issue when far more toxic, far more pervasive forms of misogyny persist unchecked”
Bob forbid we’d discuss the broader topic. You can’t start a conversation and then expect everyone to just politely listen, particularly when you have to stretch the truth to make you points. Nothing is more intellectually dishonest than presenting things in ways that they aren’t in the hope that no one has enough energy to check and call you out on it. The Hitman scene is a fucking load of shit and it devalues the rest of her commentary because it introduces suspicion of the validity of the rest of her claims.
Stock online grammar error #776: capitalising Unnecessary words for seemingly No reason. Two can play at this game.
I usually constantly shoot the (usually) man giving me walkthrough instructions at the start of war video games in the face until the walkthrough ends and I can play the actual game. Does this make me a man-hater?
All true, but are you talking about war being sold to a population, or war being sold as a premise for a game? Because, like it or not world, there are certain triggers that we are all evolutionarily conditioned to respond to. Potential death. Sexualised imagery. If the end goal is to somehow deprogram that conditioning then I have some depressing news for them: it’s impossible.
The right thing to do, in my opinion, is not to remove these tropes from games because these tropes exist historically in all forms of media and as such they are indelible from storytelling’s broader consciousness. The way to smash their destructive capacity is to empower the player themselves to make their own virtual reality. The player should be able to choose the sex and sexuality of any of the characters, playable or non-playable. Make it a strip club with male dancers. Pilot an apache as a woman in a ball gown. If you can make the game your own form of absurd, then the dev’s preferred form of absurd is presented as such: not an actual representation of reality but someone’s own art direction.
Ah, gamers. Constantly reminding me why I no longer wish to be identified as one.
I mean, when hugely respected devs like Tim Schafer and Ken Levine are getting death threats for supporting Anita and the movement toward a broader gaming output - something is seriously fucked up in the state of Denmark.
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Are you really taking some sort of principled stand in favor of being lazy and abstruse?
That phrase (“subvert the dominant paradigm”) was already beaten into near meaninglessness circa 1990-something; I was sick of hearing it when I was like, 13. The destruction, as you put it, has been a done deal for roughly two decades. You can blame whatever group you wish, but that doesn’t absolve people from trying harder.
I know what the words mean. I just think they’re arranged in a trite and unhelpful fashion. As part of a concluding call to action, they are weak and toothless; basically, rhetorical white noise. As I already explained to you, when you didn’t know what the words meant (or more accurately, the vacuum of meaning that they have come to represent).
Writing and speaking for clarity has value.
It’s not my job to teach you how the world works. Learn for yourself. I made clear that whois records are public, so this is not by definition a d0x.
More irrelevant semantics games. It doesn’t constitute hacking. It does constitute a d0x. Whether the information IS publicly accessible or not is irrelevant, it’s whether the information is supposed to be public or not. A whois record is not supposed to be private. Ever. It’s part of the architecture of the internet.
If someone is doxxed from that (or from their IP address, or from their computer’s technical specs as reported by their browser), have they actually guaranteed their anonymity
First find me an example of that happening before we get into an in-depth discussion of it. That’s not the situation we’re discussing, It’s also not easy, but it is possible. I would say that it doesn’t classify as a d0x, since browser fingerprinting is imprecise, and your browser doesn’t broadcast information about the USER, it broadcasts information about itself. Why do you think it’s called a “user agent”?
even in your revised public-private framework?
I didn’t revise anything. Your misunderstanding was corrected.
Cool. You should tell robulus, too.
Why? Robulus understood what chellberty meant. My point stands.
Your intellectual superiority is so clear and self-evident
No one likes a gloater but I’m here to learn and teach, not to make friends. Let the record of our interactions stand as exhibits from which the audience can make that decision.
Did you read everything I wrote? Because you only pull quoted from my first statement (speaking specifically about the value of women in Sin City and media where sexuality will be part of the story), and in my next comment I said this:
Which I don’t agree with either. I also said:
In other words: You’re quoting me out of context, and misrepresenting my position.
Ha! Seems to be part of the BBS css… pretty cool @codinghorror
Google Chrome’s “Inspect Element” is a handy feature
PS: it’s [spoiler] and [/spoiler] to use it
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The professed grammar-and-definitions pedant is complaining about semantics?
You then went on to blame people who didn’t “actually guarantee” their anonymity.
It’s not that difficult to identify a user based on what their computer reports, and unless you use a different computer for each online persona (I hope you understand what that word means, but it assuredly doesn’t mean ‘user,’ as you seem to believe) it not difficult to re-associate those dissociated personae.
That’s fine, but saying things like “you’re intellectually inferior to me” is a bit different than letting the record speak for itself.
Yup. Pity you add so many other criteria, like the eye-rolling fashions of 13-year-olds. Make a meme of it and grumble on!
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You’re making some possibly unwarranted assumptions here.
