Excessively Excessive

[OtherSideofSky]

"The entirety of human culture as a whole"

Really?

Really?

Can we please stop assuming the contemporary anglosphere is at all representative of the entire contemporary world, much less all of human history? Leaving the ignorance of history and anthropology aside, his media references hardly hold true across cultures. For example, what he says about comic books falls apart in Japan, where I am currently living. I can look up at the shelf above my desk and see Fuyumi Souryo's "Cesare: The Creator of Destruction", Yu Itoh's "shut Hell" and "Imperial Guards", and some old Keiko Takemiya collections. Beside them are several works by Naoki Urusawa, Ryouji Minoagawa and Ryoichi Ikegami, all notable for drawing realistically proportioned characters with a variety of body types and detailed, situation-appropriate clothing. If I bike down to the largest bookstore in the city and walk through their massive comics section, I will find the work of a wide variety of female writers and artists as well as shelves of comic books specifically targeting a female audience which take up roughly half the floor. For every cover adorned with a scantily clad woman, I will find one with a man posed to appeal to a female readership. To someone in my position, the whole suggestion seems absurd. If I were not also familiar with mainstream American comics, I would think he was just making shit up.

The lessons to take away from this are that you should be aware of what you don't know and that you should qualify your statements to reflect those limitations.

 

[ms_sunlight]

No, you clearly didn't. Otherwise you would have seen my post about the Bechdel test being, in the first place, narrow and standardized, and thus, pointless.

Just because I disagree with you, doesn't mean I didn't read what you wrote.

I still think you're wrong. Apples and oranges. You're trying to say that the Bechdel Test fails at something that no-one is saying it ought to be able to do in the first place.

 

[lord.jeff]

Yahtzee too you? What the frak, is Escapist going to become nothing more than feminist&gay-rights hole? I'm not treating my lady like shit, so fuck off already with all that lecturing.

Right, let's go and make a Godfather remake where women will have an equal role in the mafia. And also let's make that 'best' mandatory and ban movies which won't pass it. Because everything has to be equal every time everywhere. Great.

Yahtzee has always been an ignorant hipster cynic who thinks he needs to save gaming from itself, and seeing trends where there are actually statics. His reviews are amusing. His opinions are painfully ignorant.

His article about anyone who shots people in the nuts in Sniper Elites is some super sick sadist that should seek help, proves how much he over states his opinion but I found this article pretty fair myself. The game industry is rather obsessed with out doing itself at every turn and it is a problem.

As for the Bechdel test it's does not test the quality of a movie, nor does every movie have to pass it, no one has ever said that. It's only meant to point out a problem, for every hundred movies out only 4(random statistic but I know the number is on the low side) have a scene not about males, that's it it's just pointing out a problem, people need to stop exaggerating what it is.

 

[I.Muir]

It takes alot of time for a publisher to rethink it's approach
However mass effect 3 hamfisted insertion of an ending which at most contains only only superficial elements of art heralds a disturbing new trend in video game development for me
Hopefully it does not come to pass but I can easily imagine many games attempting to force some deeper meaning into an otherwise shallow but no less enjoyable game
Maybe in 30 years publishers will realize being a hipster was popular at some point and will ironically make games about them

Also it seems to me that when feminists achieve true equality and I'm not about to stop them, that it just won't be enough for them. In any case the video game tropes vs women isn't a bold new step for feminism but rather somebody with a bone to pick and not a hint of constructive criticism, anything new or any in depth research in sight. It's only unfortunate that the group opposed to the creation of this dribble was spearheading by people with their heads stuck so far up their own rectum that they are incapable of not 'talking shit'.

 

[hermes]

Not to discredit Yatzhee's opinion, but his views seems to be limited to the medium. In truth, every medium has problems with excesses, it is just that most of them don't have technological jumps that can be count every few years. We should all remember how a lot of "in your face" scenes started to popup at the same time IMAX and 3D became more prominent, or how The Wizard of Oz uses colors to certain extremes, because technicolor became a more standard technology. When movies started having speech tracks, the more prominent genre were musicals, so that dozens of people could be heard at once.

At the same time, its not limited to technological jumps, but sequels has that problem too: Hangover has a baby, so Hangover 2 has a monkey (and Hangover 3 might have two baby monkeys); by the end of fellowship, our heroes battled hundreds of orcs, so by the second movie, the number was upped to tens of thousands, and the third could be counted on the millions; Goku fought robots, then demons, then aliens, then alien demons, then future robots, then future aliens, then alien demons, then alien robots, etc...

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's not the excess that bothers me. It's the dumbing down that goes along with it. Most games are no longer challenging. Instead of focusing on challenge they are focusing on big cinematic experience. You can see this perfectly in the latest Resident Evil 6 gameplay videos, or just about any military FPS. And everything is scripted. It pisses me off. I hate when developers add that pathetic "press button to turn around and watch this awesome explosion". Fuck off! I would use a mouse to turn around if I wanted to see it you fuckin' morons. OR those stupid in-game slow motion sequences. They ruin the immersion. Why the fuck would anyone want a slow motion sequence in the actual gameplay? Save it for cutscenes for fuck sake.

And then there's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a shining beacon of hope, in the sea of stupidity and mediocrity. I just hope they make another one like it, with better boss battles and a better ending though.

 

[Arcane Azmadi]

He's got a good point. Maybe Ivy was always a bit on the slutty side, but look at what the Soul Calibur series did to SOPHITIA. We went from this:

...to THIS:

Nauseating, isn't it?

 

[Bob Chinn]

everyone needs to shut up about the 'bechdel test', beecause you're distracting from the most important thing ever posted onto the escapist. this business of MORE is a cancer in our world. did we REALLY need >60 million xbox 360 consoles, >90 million wiis, and >60 million PS3s? to generate all those tons of trash, dig all that raw materials out of the ground and ship them across the globe?

 

[Katya Topolkaraeva]

My point being this: women who hang out with other woman generally spend a lot of time talking about things that would make "feminists" cringe. Women who have intelligent things to say generally tend to prefer male company.

I think that's probably more to do with your circle of acquaintances than women in general. I talk about other stuff - politics, the economy, films, music, society, technology - with women I know all the time.

I'd like that to be the case. What i said though is based not just on my personal experience but also on many conversations i'v overheard other females have. A lot of different kinds of females (still personal experience, but you know what i mean). I am sure, obviously, this is not always the case, i just happen to think it tends to be the case rather startlingly often. Also i suspect it may be less the case in other countries. When i was in Europe i had much less problems having descent conversations with women.

 

[Katya Topolkaraeva]

I do agree with what he said that the industry is interested in outdoing itself. However i don't really think it's a problem. I just think it may be a bit better if they concentrate on outdoing themselves on things like, say, good game play or storytelling rather then big titties.

 

[mrnomas]

This push to excess is, I believe, driven almost solely by the lack of game designer's ability to tell a decent story. What is more compelling to the player - blowing up a city they've heard of or watching a character that they've connected with emotionally be murdered? Look at the beginning of tons of action movies (and a staggering number of Disney cartoons). That's exactly what they do (with Disney, it doesn't pay to be the parent of a protagonist - especially their mother).

With video games, you play a faceless character so that you can "put yourself in their place" in some way but the rest of the characters are all 2D cardboard cutouts of tropes. Do male players find scantily clad chicks titillating? Sure. But the same feelings (or even stronger ones) can be evoked with well written and fully clothed female character. It all comes back to story and how well the characters are written - a point that Yahtzee and others have harped on for years.

 

[MB202]

I love these columns, Yahtzee shows his true, intellectual colors.

 

[Casey Goddard]

I think the video game industry is suffering from a sever case of conservatism when it comes to non-indie titles. Rather than trying to integrate new concepts they just stick with existing ones. So where do you go when you make a sequel? More of the same just cranked up to 11. Go check out the Dead Space series if you don't get what I'm talking about. Either that or read this blog post on Aliens: Colonial Marines

http://caseygoddard.blogspot.jp/2012/06/less-is-more.html

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

Amnesia was somewhat overblown on it's tales of torture and violence, but oddly enough that was one of the weakest features. The atmosphere and badly rendered monsters that would 2-shot you were far more frightening.

The endless clamour for attention is worth the mention, and it's sad when derivative tactics get the most hullabaloo. It'd be nice if people would simply say 'huh, a stupid premise' and move on rather than filling internet forums with arguements that will generate awareness of a product, and consequentlly potential customers.

 

[Aureliano]

If only being good was what made video games a guaranteed success. Tell that to Bulletstorm. Or Psychonauts. Or Anachronox. Or anything by Zynga for that matter (from the other side, of course).

To quote Gene Wilder as regards who we're dealing with, slightly out of context, "You've got to remember that these are just simple [consumers]. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons."