Hi everybody. New guy here. I'm a bit late to this party, but I have a question RE: the Hitman footage, aside from Thunderf00t and Anita's overall points.
Has anyone noticed that NOT allowing you to beat up/kill the strippers would basically break the game? And that allowing the player to do other things (such as talk, or bribe, or whatever other thing you want to do other than kill/avoid them) would completely break the game? You can't talk to every character in any game except maybe Skyrim, and even then you get 2-3 words out of an NPC's mouth. On top of that, in cutscenes, Agent 47 talks a bit like Hemingway writes: short and to the point.
I've been scoping this Anita thing (and pretty much only it, as I'm also studying for the LSAT) for two days, not saying a word, and no one so far has mentioned this. The amount of work needed to change what happens with the strippers (the actions, not the setting) would be to change THE ENTIRE GAME.
A good counter-argument for this is Saints Row. I just played through SR2 a bit ago as an obese, transgendered (I tried, at least, he got breasts), Cockney-accented mime-faced hooligan. It did not break the game because the game was set up so that none of those cosmetic choices matter.
In a game where you have a specific setting (like Hitman), it is impossible to allow change for JUST those NPCs in the strip club to be dealt with differently.
This isn't dealing with social justice. What I see here is a complete lack of understanding of how games/game development work. I actually think Anita has a pretty good point (if this offends you, please ignore it and just focus on my main argument). However, what she misses is that in order for games to be immersive, they have to follow their own rules the entire way through. Allowing clipped-sentence, sociopath, there-to-kill Agent 47 to somehow be sympathetic would be out-of-character, and would break both immersion and the character.
THIS POINT is why her statement that she is not a gamer matters. She says the strippers are there to do a certain thing, and that we can't do other things, which is evidence that the developers intend us to do the first thing. Well, it's actually the other way around. Even if the devs wanted to do something different, they would be hurting their game by breaking the flow of steath-based action. If 47 stood up and gave a speech to the strippers about how he is here to kill people and perhaps they should leave, I'd probably shut off the game right there. Not because I think women are there to be sexualized or whatever, because the game is broken. A comparison for this would be MGS. Imagine how that series would be criticized if it stopped for long, exposition-filled cutscenes that preach a certain viewpoint to the player... oh wait, that's exactly what happened. Hence, Hitman is a bad example for this particular argument.
Anita's argument is not invalid overall; it just needs to be modified with extra information. I do take umbrage with her not accepting criticism, because that's how these theories become bullet-proof and strong. You have to allow dissenting points of view to come in, otherwise you're just as bad as the people you claim are oppressing you. When I was in the more liberal art-y part of college, they call what Anita did a violation of the Parlor Analogy. Basically, if you try and write an academic article (a critique of Moby Dick, say), you can't just walk into the parlor where people have been having conversations for years and shout. You need to come in, meet some people, find out what the general feel is, and then add your opinion while acknowledging all the work that's been done.
This is NOT what Anita did. She took a subject that she was not familiar with, cherry-picked examples, and then put up a long series of videos addressing what she thought about her picked cherries. That is not an academic way to handle any subject. It is akin to saying the Bible is anti-gay based on Leviticus, completely missing that part in the NT where Jesus says "Love everyone as yourself." That she was surprised by the reaction is just another indicator of how far-removed from the subject she is. Do I really need to say I don't condone threats of any kind? But anyone who's been on the internet for more than 10 whole minutes will know you're not supposed to feed trolls, especially those of the anon variety.
There's a great deal of good discussion about this, and I tip my hat to Anita for kicking it off. But I watched her videos and her examples are horrible. While Poisoning the Well is a logical fallacy, it does weaken the argument automatically in one's mind. It'd be like going to Bible study thinking that the Bible is anti-gay based on Leviticus, hearing the Jesus said that, and then continuing (unmodified) to say the Bible is anti-gay. I don't deny that there is an issue in gaming with minorities. That's pretty well-known. But should we break pre-existing games for people who don't seem to want to play them anyway? New ones, yes. Ubisoft is pretty clearly BS-ing with their "cost" talk about female player-characters. It's incredibly fair to lob criticism at them. Gaming in the past was quite male-dominated, and I see no problem with pointing that out either. It might even be fair to lob that criticism at current games. However, it must be done in an honest way. Nothing about shouting into the parlor is honest. It's self-righteousness about self-importance.
