Jimquisition: Neutered
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Why is it when games come out with characters that all reality would never exist in real life, THAT's when people decide to bring up games need greater diversity.
90% of games have humans, 10% of games have robots. Why doesn't the robot game have humans it's got no diversity?
90% of games have humans, 10% of games have robots. Why doesn't the robot game have humans it's got no diversity?
People do criticize those movies for their gender politics. If they don't criticize them by name, it's because they're criticizing them under the general auspices of the Bechdel test.Mahemium said:
Your point here seems to be that you have less of a burden to choose your words carefully as to convey your exact meaning as precisely as possible than everyone else in the world does to already know what you're thinking. I find this position insupportable.MeChaNiZ3D said:
It's actually not weird at all.JimB said:
I know that 49% of gamers are female, but the thing is - for a company it doesn't really matter. It won't matter to them until percentage of female gamers will reach at least 51% (or in another scenario that I will explain below). Why? Because making those female-(or everyone-)oriented games will cost them a lot of money. And these expences will not be covered unless bulk of the gamers will be considering sexist games repulsive and stop giving them money as a result.
So the only choice here is somehow to convince most of gamers that such games are not good. And also convince them to stop buying these games.
Which is not going to happen because most gamers will find an excuse to buy (or pirate) a game they like, no matter what kind of views this game contains.
No, it really is. I get the whole "more men play video games, so let's try to get their money" thing, but why are they making it an either/or choice? Yes, men make 51% of the gaming demographic, but you know who makes 100% of it? Men and women. Why not aim for both? And if one hundred percent is impossible (which I think we all agree that it is), why not redefine the conversation along lines other than the properties of one's crotch? Why not aim for [people who like X] rather than [men or women]?Miroluck said:
It's super-weird. I do not get how it makes good business sense. How it promotes lazy thinking, sure, that I get, but how it makes good sense? I got nothing.
If McDonald's, TV and video games are places where your children are looking for answers in existential questions, hoping to form their identity, you are a bad parent. And if children really ask: "Oh Ronald! Why are we here?", I really hope, he tells them the truth in the creepiest of ways.JimB said:
That is only a part of the sentence. The key word being "many". "Many" of the greatest games in history. Not "all", or even "most". Many. This includes recent history as well, not just the 90s.Thanatos2k said:
No, I'm not saying that. That should be obvious if you can link the various points in my posts to a common point. When I say "alienation" I'm talking about black and white, someone can still love a game while still feeling alienated by it. I haven't played Dragon's Crown but I gotta say the art style throws me off as well, not just because of the women but because of all the characters look like some kind of disfigured freakshow. And yes, such an art style can really detract from the experience.
You might not have any problem with playing a female every now and then in a game, but imagine if EVERY game you played besides a rare few FORCED you to play as a female protagonist. You might still enjoy the games, but you might also feel like the people making the games aren't really doing it for you, or caring about how you feel, and it might make you seek out other hobbies instead. As I said in my first post, women may not have problems playing an everyman, but if they're not going to do or say much and the gender isn't ultimately that important in many of those older games, then why force women to play a male? It's usually because the developers and publishers are targeted men and boys, and make it more relatable to them.
Add in the caveat that, in this world where everyone is forced to play as female characters in games, all the men NPCs portrayed are wimpy, weak, insulting caricatures of what men are like in real life. You'd probably get pretty offended by that, and want to change it.
That's precisely what I said in the first post. Linear stories aren't necessarily bad things, and there have certainly been some really good stories that have been linear... but 8/10 times that's simply not the case. There's a reason why games have a hard time being taken seriously, and part of it is because not many devs put a lot of effort, time, or money into storytelling. When they try, it's usually mediocre at best. This goes double, even triple for the Japanese game market. While there have certainly been good stories within JRPGs, they've been stuck in a rut for a long time now and no amount of character creation or inclusitivity is going to fix the main problems in that genre.
I couldn't disagree more, but it is a subjective matter that depends on how you approach a story like Mass Effect. I can start out as a goody two-shoes Paragon with upstanding morals who slowly get disillusioned and becomes more Renegade-like, only to hold onto those values when they really matter in the end. No, the developers can't program every single emotional reaction one can imagine, but that's what your own imagination is for. This also goes for the SR series, even though you're more or less forced down a fairly linear storyline, you can come up with your own motivations and reactions to things, and adds to the experience. I'd much rather have something like that than the developer trying to tell me a story, because much of the time the story they want to tell isn't really worth it in the end and just makes me want to go back to shooting or beating up things.
I'd much rather have that freedom of a character "checklist" than have all those boxes already filled out for me with no choice, like the way it was in GTA games. I really love the GTA games, but story and really good main characters have never really been their strong suit, and yes, they could be much better games if I was given a bit more freedom as what to do with them. When I play Nico or CJ or Tommy, I feel like I have to have their motivations and their personality, limiting the experience in what should be an open-ended game. This is why the three interchangeable male protagonists in GTAV is a somewhat of a controversy, because no matter how good the rest of the game is, it will always feel like Rockstar is intentionally stifling my own creative input in the game so they can force their story down my throat.
Books, theater, movies, and other traditional art forms are one-way, a book's story and characters and writing style is all it has, and it better be good to be considered a good book. Games include so many different forms of media it's almost staggering, and along with that it is also interactive. Now that we have the technology to truly do it, developers should drop the idea that they should be telling the stories for us, as they have proven time and time again they simply can't do it as consistently well as other mediums, with only the occasional gem in a pile of crap. Instead, they should create platforms in which players can create their own stories, especially now since graphics have more or less plateaued.
Then what are "these people" (only put in quotation marks to indicate that I'm not sure whom we're talking about, not because I wish to imply derision) doing in positions of authority over these decisions? Profit only comes at the expense of taking risk. Who can look at the video games industry as it is, either from a social perspective as I do or from a business perspective as I would expect developers to do, and think, "This is a sustainable model that will serve to increase our profits?" It's just--it's lazy. That's the only explanation I can conjure here. It is too lazy to think critically and too lazy to be brave. Maybe I'm missing something, but laziness is all I got.Miroluck said:
The places they are looking are the world. Like it or not, McDonald's, TV, and video games are all part of the world; and like it or not, there is a lot more world to teach kids things than there is parents. Please do not sit here and argue that parents, that two individual human beings, should somehow be able to overpower the message the entire world sends without having to change that message first; it smacks of a complete abdication of personal responsibility.nuttshell said:
Well, positions I'm thinking about are usually taken by white straight rich men, and they are there because other w.s.r. men decide who's going to take those positions.JimB said:
Now that you've said that, I think that maybe, their own views are a little more important for them to reinforce than profit.
No. those people who scored Dragon's Crown lower than the general consensus weren't challenging its right to exist or demanding it be changed, they were expressing their personal disapproval, saying it wasn't for them and suggesting that maybe it isn't for everyone, that the aesthetic design could be a deal-breaker for some. And I think you'll find that score inflation pattern in the industry aside, ranking a game a six isn't the same as calling it trash and dismissing it entirely, certain themes, content, ideological perspectives or politics can substantially influence someone's opinion of a piece of media, for some, they won't be able to get past it, but for others, they can enjoy it in spite of an aspect they might see as a flaw, or they might be okay with it, but demanding that everyone be okay with it, that there be no discussion or dissent... well that's just boring.Eve Charm said:
Also, the endless call of duty clones out there and the endless popcorn big action movies that fail to get it right prove that you CAN homogenize art... you just really shouldn't, of course we could bring in what personal definition of art you're going by, whether you mean something as specific as high art or whether you're all-inclusive for it to mean any form of theoretically creative media, but that's a whole other can of worms. In any event, it's still a bit rich saying that diverging from the ludicrously over the top sexualisation that so many games seem to follow would be making things LESS homogenized.
Yeah, like Jim said a little while back, parody or not, when so much of its contemporaries use that kind of imagery unironically...
No one is trying to take away your toys or say that those games can't be made any more, don't even pretend that's the argument going on here, what we're asking for is the usual stuff AND a little more variety, this doesn't have to be an either-or mutually exclusive thing, maybe make some room by cutting out some of the focus-tested dreck that no-one likes anyway?
Hell, why do I have to reiterate so many of the points Jim has made over his videos to you? Do you just watch them to disagree or do you fail to even consider the points he raises?
Point the first: I believe you to be either blind or deluded if you're not seeing that hostility and willingness to harass anyone with two X chromosomes until they leave the game/forum in certain segments of the community, I might have hyperbolized a little, but it's there.Father Time said:
Point the second: She received hostility before she even started, before she had a chance to make her case, before anyone knew what she had to say, just because she was raising the possibility that it could potentially be a problem, I'd say the reaction more than proved her right, if male gamers are so insecure that they have to attack someone suggesting there's bigotry, I don't see it being much of a stretch to think they might be bigots, and what happened after she began to make her case? A substantial amount of her negative feedback continued to be mindless, tasteless threats and personal attacks, dismissals on the stupidest of grounds, and very little in the way of actual countering of her arguments. So yeah, damn right I consider that to be bullshit, you can disagree with someone, but be civil about it rather than yelling at them to die in a fire.
point the third: Annnd yet this video would seem to suggest that Saints Row 4 does that pretty well by letting anyone be the lord of the sandbox... heck, I can't recall Skyrim alienating anyone through potentially offensive viewpoints or deliberately exclusionary tropes, or Dragon Age, or Mass Effect, or Portal, or Planescape Torment, or the Fallout games, or Pokemon, or Persona 4, or Dust, or Minecraft, or Bastion, or Shadowrun just to name some that I'm most familiar with. Name me something from each of those games that'd alienate a viewer based on race, religion, sexuality, gender, or any of the other big ones, for extra points, try actually coming up with something someone might find offensive that isn't balanced out by the game trying to show the other perspective. Yes, it's almost impossible to make something that everyone will like, and there's people out there that can get offended about just about anything, but I think some games do alright with not actively sabotaging their chances with more than half the population of the earth.
Point the fourth: I think you're exaggerating a little, and I'll remind you that most of those more varied games come from the indie circuit, or for smaller riskier projects. The mainstream, high-profile, most visible games out there do seem to have a hard-on for gun-bros. Hell, irrespective of the quality of the final product, Remember Me's personal story does tell of a certain reluctance to bring in female leads, Lara only got her reboot because of delicious nepotism by her established brand, most of the games I can think of that'll allow you to play a female character do so because you create your own with both genders and a bunch of bodysliders as options, or choose/customize from the start, rather than ones where the female lead is the set established, fleshed out character, while white male leads being the set option in games is far more commonplace.
See it's stuff like this that prevent people from taking arguments against this seriously. I didn't play video games while growing up to find my place in the world. I played them to have fun and to experience interesting stories. End stop. I mean my god, people actually obsess over this kind of stuff?JimB said:
The size of the demographic isn't just about the overall population, it's about income and willingness to part with it. If one group are the majority for a console game with a higher profit margin while another prefers free facebook games, it's not hard to tell who a company would target. The same logic applies to who buys lots of DLC and who buys merchandise (more a Japan thing I know, but still, a game plus a bunch of statues and wallscrolls is better than a game in and of itself, and it also explains why so many pinup figures).JimB said:
Beyond that, there's a fear that the complainers don't represent a lost demographic, but the PC police that just want the option there so long as they don't have to financially support it. For all the hoopla, Remember Me sold like garbage, when you'd think for all the demand for that character type online, it would have done Tomb Raider numbers. Other medium can be looked at to see if the result differ, but it isn't always pretty. Comic Books get the same lack of inclusivity crap, but by July's sales, the highest selling female solo book is Batgirl, placing 56th selling short of 40,000 copies nation wide. Things like Wonder Woman, Captain Marvel and World's Finest staring Huntress and Power Girl do worse. World's Finest even gave PG an outfit without a boob window at first but gave it back to stop bleeding sales when the women they tried to appeal to didn't show up.
That, in a nutshell, is business: it isn't the largest pool you chase, but the one most reliable. Spending lots of money to chase after small sales that aren't guaranteed isn't a great strategy. It can create success, but also bankruptcy. If a company isn't sitting on piles of capital, it isn't surprising they'd pander to a crowd they know will show up for big boobs, and not risk their company that this time the internet means in when they promise to buy what they're begging for.
Spoken like people who don't know what they're talking about. I'll repeat what I said earlier:hentropy said:
There is a female character you can pick with unrealistically huge tits. There's a female character you can pick with an unrealistically huge ass. And there's a female character that.....doesn't have either of those. That looks completely normal. Same with the male characters. There's one with an unrealistically broad chest. There's one with unrealistically huge muscles and....an unrealistically broad chest. And there's one that is perfectly normal.
If you don't like the disproportionate characters you aren't forced to pick them. Go with the Elf or Wizard. Dragon's Crown is a wonderfully inclusive game. It has someone for every gameplay preference AND art style preference if that matters to you for some unknown reason. Just like Saint's Row 4.
It's sad that all you've heard was the bad things about the art style and believed them because you like to get outraged. The sexism brigade claimed another victim. Dragon's Crown is as inclusive as it gets.
Every game isn't like that now and hasn't been. Stop cooking up a world that doesn't reflect reality to try to make "WHAT IF!" arguments. What if there weren't any video games at all and people had to watch movies which also often don't have female main characters!? Wait, we don't hear this kind of nonsense screamed about movies do we, and they're pretty bad offenders. (You know, Bechdel test and all) Man of Steel just came out - why not WOMAN of Steel huh? I'm alienated!
Again, that doesn't happen now with female characters. Not in Dragon's Crown, not in most games. So what is there to change?
Could not disagree more. JRPGs seem to have gotten worse BECAUSE of feeble attempts at inclusivity for the sake of it. I mean hell, look at FF13.
I don't think your character is changing when you click the paragon choices in one conversation and the renegade choices in another. You can IMAGINE he's changing but those same choices pop up in the next menu anyways - all that you have is either an inconsistent character (you can at any time pick things contrary to their established personality up to that point) or an avatar that really has little character at all.
If you have to imagine the characterization of your character because the game can't or won't provide it then you can't have a real character arc.
So in books, movies, and traditional art forms it works but in games it doesn't work "80% of the time"? That's pure nonsense. You like create-a-character games that have weak characterizations and no character arc for the main character where the backdrop story is more important - fine. Nothing wrong with that. But when you start saying that every story should be like that because it's not "inclusive" otherwise it's spitting in the face of the people who enjoy linear character stories where they don't create their characters. Every game should not be the same.
Well that's why YOU play games. It may not be why OTHER people do. And that's the whole point, isn't it? The subjective experience you will get from a videogame will differ from the subjective experience that other people do.Thanatos2k said:
Take "FEAR". This game outright offended me. Now I've found the artistic viewpoints of media creators to be "offensive" but it's rare that I find myself saying "this offended me" because I don't feel that I, as the consumer of the media in question, am being "targeted". It's not personal. The creator of the media has no idea who I am and is making no assumptions about what I, as a person, would find acceptable or unacceptable on a subjective level.
FEAR, however, was different. The casual misogynistic language used when the token blonde "hostage" character was about just annoyed me. It was unnecessary to the gameplay, to the atmosphere, to the story, to the characters within the game. What I took away from it was: "The writers of this game are satisfied to write lazy misogynist dialogue because they think the people who buy their games are lazy misogynist assholes who'll buy into this." Sorry, but that annoys the hell outta me.
Now admittedly I hadn't had a great relationship with FEAR from the start. Honestly I think it's bad. Not mediocre, not possessing good points and bad points, just flat-out bad. It's not scary, the characters are uniformly unlikeable, the combat sucks (you can't lose if you use the slow-motion device, you can't win if you don't), it's repetitive to the point where it feels as if nothing interesting will ever happen, the player has no control whatsoever over the story and is constantly forced to act in ways that are dumb as hell and predictably end in disaster ever single damn time, and the plot (with a final twist about a character we know absolutely nothing about) is confused, uninteresting, and ends on an infuriating cliffhanger. All of this is enough to make me not enjoy the experience of playing the game. But I didn't really DESPISE the game until the bit with the hostage.
Would the game really lose anything if this crap was removed? - no. As discussed, it adds nothing to story, atmosphere or character (apart from making me dislike some of the characters a little more than I already do).
Does it risk alienating its potential audience by using casual misogynist language? - well I would say the fact that it's a bad game risks alienating its audience a lot more. But the language issue sure as heck isn't helping to widen the community of FPS players.
Is that necessarily a bad thing? - if you go on some of the more notable FPS communities nowadays, HELL yes. Overall... I would still have to say "yes". But most of all it just seems kinda stupid. Why write characters like this at all? What is gained by it?
Now I realise that there are a lot of people who enjoyed this game, and had no problem with the specific dialogue choices that annoyed me. That's fine. I'm glad that they had a good experience with this game (I plainly didn't). But that DOESN'T mean that I can't judge the developers and publishers for some of their choices, nor does it mean that I can't look for answers in terms of WHY those choices were made. And the answers I've found? Not pretty, and not complimentary to the gaming community as a whole.
I'll be honest, i just like being pandered to 
If that means big breasted depictions of women, i'm ok with that.
Will i go out and ***** at someone else who disagree? no, its too much effort lol
If that means big breasted depictions of women, i'm ok with that.
Will i go out and ***** at someone else who disagree? no, its too much effort lol
Are you agreeing with me? No, really, I'm asking. It's been so long since I've read someone agreeing with me that I'm not sure I can recognize it. This post doesn't seem like disagreement, but...Miroluck said:
Yes, you did. Everything we do is a learning experience, a series of lessons we internalize and apply to ourselves. The learning process is based almost entirely on imitation.Thanatos2k said:
Okay, so, what's the thought process here? There seems to be some algebraic equation of marketing that reads "disposable income + interest = penis" written in dry-erase marker on a board somewhere. Am I missing something, and if not, why am I seemingly in a minority for thinking that particular equation is goofy?Redd the Sock said:
I can't speak for anyone else, but I never heard of the damned game until Yahtzee reviewed it. Prior to that review, I had no awareness of its existence. I bought it as a birthday gift for a friend, and he has received it tepidly because he thinks it's kind of badly designed; I believe his primary complaints are how often the game takes control away from him for a cut scene and how badly the game conveys what are objects to interact with and what's just background sealed off by an invisible wall.Redd the Sock said:
I don't much like that book, so I'm kind of surprised it does that well.Redd the Sock said:
Wonder Woman is the only one of those I've read, and I'm not surprised it does worse than Batgirl because it is the worst book ever. Or, well, it was when I stopped reading it some months ago.Redd the Sock said:
Since the most famous examples of DC's treatment of women post-Nu52 are Starfire ("I have amnesia, which means I'm operating under a neurological handicap, but I run around posing for the viewer and have anonymous sex with people who should know better") and Catwoman (whose face didn't appear in the first issue of her comic book for what, three or four pages? but there were multiple loving close-ups of her ass and tits), I cannot blame anyone who doesn't choose to give DC credit for making Power Girl be an interesting character just because she's in an outfit that is painted over her boobs instead of an outfit that has a boob window.Redd the Sock said:
Not really, no. That's like saying you can't hate techno music because you don't like the completely artificial sound of it; that's a perfectly valid reason to dislike techno. Does that mean everyone should dislike techno? No, but it means if you get assigned a techno album to review, you're pretty obviously going to give it lower marks than someone who isn't averse to that entire style of music would. As long as you explain the reason for your low marks ("I can't stand the style") so that your audience is aware of how you arrived at that score, it's perfectly legitimate.uanime5 said:
If you didn't like the style of the music but tried to say the album was bad because of other reasons - poor composition, let's say - when that isn't the case, that's a problem. But that wasn't what happened here, as I understand it. The problem was stated, the game was marked down because of said problem (art style, depiction of women, whatever you want to call it), everyone moves on with their lives.
Why is this valid? Because if the art style dramatically effects your enjoyment of the game, it is an effect on gameplay. Not mechanically, but if mechanics were 100% of gameplay no one would bother putting effort into art style in the first place, right?
Think of it this way: would Bastion have gotten the high marks it did if, instead of the narrator it has, it was narrated by Gilbert Gottfried?
I doubt it.