Strategic butt-coverings in video-games

ebin banter m8.

Look up Godwins law

WIKIPEDIA:
Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule of Nazi analogies) is an Internet adage asserting that "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Jargon File:
[Usenet] “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin’s Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin’s Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful. Godwin himself has discussed the subject. See also Formosa’s Law.

2 Likes

I haven’t been paying attention, but thanks, excepting that I don’t Steam or console I only PC/Mac games and don’t play movie games at all. For instance the last game I played today was Banished, which I keep coming back to, and I check in on EVE occasionally, but the last time I had the kind of time to game required of most play-through games… I can’t even remember, I played Oblivion but never Skyrim, So it was some time ago. Gaming for me is like TV nowadays, 22 minutes or less.

So this is up for grabs, eh?

No, I was making the tremendous crazy logical leap from “things are slowly getting better” to “things are not getting worse.”

With that I had better withdraw from this conversation before I start namecalling.

1 Like

This is as bad as the Godwin’s law incident earlier. Are people dying because of pixel butts?

Never mind that despite the “near impossibility” of seeing batman’s butt claimed in the very text of the bb entry, you can get plenty of batt-butt views writhin a minute of powering up Arkham Knight. But you know, impossible because … reasons? Somehow it doesn’t matter if the examples used in the video are not just cherry picked and distorted to support a particular narrative but even flat-out wrong, because the cause is so noble and just?

Maybe I have too much of a logical programmer brain to let that go, but it bothers me, and has since the beginning. And it keeps happening in these videos.

Anyways. If you want to see an amazing, powerfully feminist take on Tomb Raider, one that has been near universally acclaimed by both feminists and plain old gamers like me, and is one of the most striking examples of videogames getting it right, which correct me if I am wrong but is the entire freaking point of these videos in the first place, just take me up on my offer for a free Steam copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider.

I do feel these discussions would be a hell of a lot better if the people involved had actually played any of the games being discussed. Hence my offer.

1 Like

Are the batt-butt views automatic, or do you have to work for them?

9 Likes

The creature stirred in his sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words, “Are the batt-butt views automatic, or do you have to work for them?” drifted across the conference table.

9 Likes

Silicon chips.

1 Like

Excuse me, do you know if these batt-butt views are locally sourced and fairly traded?

5 Likes

What you don’t have, in this entire thread, apparently, is an opportunity to learn something.

13 Likes

I’ma just leave some of this here




…and repeat the mantra that it’s not about being good enough to not get criticized, it’s about continually improving, every day, every game, every release, forever.

5 Likes

Yeah but that’s just Rule 34 at this point. Anything, no matter how reasonably presented, can be turned into porn.

I don’t know how you ever become “good enough” to be immune to Rule 34.

So to be clear your argument is that there is no difference between Tomb Raider (2013) and, say, Tetris, when it comes to objectifying women’s bodies, because both have been turned into fap fuel? These two are equivalent in their level of objectifying women’s bodies?

1 Like

You can disagree with someone without arguing in bad faith. I think we both know that’s not the argument being put forward

If not, then the Rule 34 point is a canard put out in bad faith. Nobody is arguing that something can’t be turned into fap fuel. There IS a debate about the level of objectification going on in this iteration of Tomb Raider. If one wants to argue it isn’t sexually objectifying the protagonist, the question becomes one of how you know when it happens. The evidence has been put forward that many people believe that it DOES, in fact, do that - those people in those videos, for some. My point is that it’s not “cherry picking” to consider that objectification - many other people consider 2013’s Lara Croft to be a sexual object. The open question is how the game encourages its audience to do that.

For that, I’d turn any legitimately curious minds to the Male Gaze, and visual design in general, including film and art studies. What does the composer of this scene WANT us to look at? What’s well lit? What’s in motion? What’s in the middle of the screen, or right along the angle of eyesight?

For instance, if you follow the line of sunlight on the title screen on the last video, it illuminates Lara’s waistline. She’s standing with her body swaying to the right, so that her ass (and the elbow, to some degree) is the final thing your eyes rest on. The visual language here says “this is important: her butt.”

5 Likes

I’m saying any game/media/thing with a woman in it, in any represented form, is heavily subject to Rule 34.

Games with only abstract objects, and no human forms, not as much… no. Is this really a controversial statement?

I did find this though, in about 30 seconds of google searching

I’m sorry.

You’re basically posting 4chan / MRA youtube videos as “evidence” for this position that Tomb Raider (2013) is sexualized. So in the case of “my data can beat up your data” I refer you to the many published reviews of Tomb Raider (2013) which frequently cite the positive feminist bent of the game, and often by female reviewers.

Please, examine both data sets and see for yourself. Not sure I’m too into clicking on videos with a published caption of “ass ass ass”, myself, but if that’s the data you want to bring to the table, er… OK?

Well, thank god you pixelated it.

Anyway, the fact that you can find positive reviews seems irrelevant to the point being made. You can’t categorize video games into feminist vs not - it’s not binary.

And it’s not cherry picking to find the overused tropes in a game that is otherwise quite good. If anything, it’s more significant that a game which seems to be taking deliberate steps to improve relative to earlier iterations nevertheless indulges in butt shots. The whole point of Tropes vs Women is to highlight overused tropes. If a game is included in one of these videos, that doesn’t mean it’s bad or anti-feminist. It doesn’t even mean that Sarkeesian doesn’t like it. It just means that it’s an example of the trope. And, in this case at least, it probably means that the people doing cinematics & in-game camera will at a minimum think about this video when making the next iteration

6 Likes

I can definitely agree that the Mass Effect camera angle examples are super egregiously bad. I was a little embarrassed to see those.

I just wish more examples like those were chosen, rather than the ones that were distorted and incorrect. It undermines the message, for me, and has throughout all the videos – but as I said maybe that’s just my awful programmer brain talking.

Funny how people want to be programmers. I personally advise against it, because I think it slowly breaks your brain – because you work with the world’s biggest pedantic asshole all day long (the computer), you eventually become one, or think that’s normal. It rubs off. Work with a pedantic asshole all day long, for years on end, you start to think that’s normal. And computers are, bar none, and without question, the worlds biggest pedantic assholes.

Don’t become a programmer.

6 Likes

too late - I program video games! not the camera, mercifully.

Basically, I would need to actually play the tomb raider game to have an opinion on whether I consider it to be a good example of the trope. And now that I’m primed to look for butts, probably butts are all that I’d see.