Way too many clips of Thunderf00t mugging for the camera, and the conclusion staggers home with a feeble “I’m not that kind of feminist” disclaimer, but otherwise, it’s nice to see the Phil Mason School of Logical Fallacies exposed so well.
It seems strange to see people defending a game called “Hit Man”, though. You aren’t required to murder those strippers
doesn’t exactly sound like an accolade — it’s still a game where you pretend to be a professional murderer.
Re: defending “Hitman”; the gaming industry hasn’t offered much in the way of games that don’t involve conflict. You’re either a “bad guy” killing people or a “good guy” killing “bad guys” or something in between. It’s Hobbes’ playground out there.
I’ve not watched blunderfart’s videos for quite some time (for obvious reasons), what strikes me from the clips of his ranting, is how far gone he is; he has started to believe his own bullshit.
Marcus, it’s true that the games industry puts out a lot of combat-oriented material, but there’s a lot of non-combat stuff as well, from puzzle games to racing games to strategy games (which are not all military-themed). For mine, I have no problem with the existence of a video game where you play the role of a hit man any more than I object to the existence of TV/movies that have violent criminal protagonists — the devil is in the details, and as I have not played (nor have any desire to play) Hitman the game, I am happy to rely on trusted sources that it has a strong misogynist streak.
I know, and it’s one of the reasons for my disinterest with gaming in general. I play minecraft, that’s about it. I saw my kids playing some playstation game with doll-like figures solving puzzles and building things, that looked good. I enjoyed “Gone Home”, but that was kind of a one-shot game.
There is a niche for games that involve struggling against a hostile environment to build things, rather than using a sniper rifle to make headshots against other players. Right now the market is dominated by the latter to the exclusion of any other option — it’s where all the big money is. And that’s too bad. A little GTA or Hitman or Assassin’s Creed (which my daughter played — and it was very pretty for the movement and planning and scenery, too bad it was all about killing people) goes a long way, a little more variety would be nice.
An excellent takedown. I can’t wait to ignore Thunderfoot’s response.
Hitman started on a shitty note when they released the dominatrix nuns being beaten to death by Agent 47 trailer.
Personally, I think that one game which managed to handle its “brothel sequence” well is Dishonored (for many reasons I won’t write here because it would result in a very tangential wall of text): the problem is not much the inclusion of prostitutes or maisons closes: it’s that such game segment are virtually always shoddily executed and disconnected from the plot and backstory, being here mostly for the supposed “titillating ” factor.
Thunderf00t usually doesn’t respond to channels smaller than his in any other way than just by ranting, shouting and ad hominems. I’ve never really seen him do a “reasoned response” style of video or admitted he’s been seriously wrong on any topic.
@laurentweppe Though I agree that the scene is better handled in Dishonored it did not need a brothel scene to begin with. Basically every game of that type has the obligatory brothel scene, so it would have been a nice change of pace if they didn’t.
Besides that, Dishonoured was a change of pace because despite being a stealth/assassin you can actually play through the whole thing without killing anyone at all, and the state of the city turns out better as a result.
Though honestly, some of the non-lethal resolutions for your targets do seem substantially worse than death. Especially for Lady Boyle.
With all this crap going on, I’m no longer feeling disappointed that I lost interest in most computer gaming back when the big budget first-person shooter style took over the world and destroyed almost every other genre. I still remember thinking of Doom as “Pac-Man in 3D with Guns” and I don’t really think there’s been much progress (apart from the technical details) since.
At least the indie game world seems to be doing a lot more to be inclusive. But the big games really dominate everyone’s attention.
I’d say that killing your marks was intended as the merciful choice: a way to trick the player seeking a “perfect” playthrough in doing things heinous and realizing later that by reasonning like a “gamer” and not like a denizen of Dunwall, he actually caused a lot of harm.
But dealing with the twins, the Lord Regent and the High Overseer non-lethally did feel quite just. Exposing the conspiracy by broadcasting it in his own words across the city and watching the guards take him away was a great ending, at least when I thought that was the ending.
For what it’s worth, The Sims 4 was just released.
Regarding games, I like iOS games because there’s a smaller investment for development and, so, it’s an accessible platform for more creative types. (This may be true for Steam, too, but I haven’t ventured into Steam yet.) I very much enjoyed Device 6 and also Sorcery!, which border more on interactive fiction. However, the popularity of non-traditional games will require that folks who don’t identify as “gamers” (1) become aware of the existence of these games, (2) start voting with their dollars, and (3) spawn/fund/become game developers, themselves.
There has been a certain stagnation in games over the past decade or so, I think principally due to game budgets getting larger and larger and publishers being obsessed with getting the next AAA+ game that leaves them rolling in money, which makes them very risk averse, so they like to bank on sequels – the next Call of Duty, the next Halo, the next Grand Theft Auto, the next Metal Gear Solid, etc, etc, etc. Another effect of this endless parade of sequels is the perpetuation of the idea that ‘gamer’ means straight white young man or boy, as previous games being tailored for that demographic means the sequels will be as well, which, of course, includes things like the tropes Anita Sarkeesian has been busy making videos about. However, what has been happening in the last couple of years or so is that relatively small independent developers have been managing to make games without the big-name publishers through raising development funds via Kickstarter, or using Steam’s Greenlight and/or Early Access. This might allow a wider range of games, including ones that veer away from the traditional model of ‘white, early 30s man running around killing various kinds of bad guy’, or the traditional tropes that appear in games. The recent resurrection of the ‘space flight sim’ genre, thought to be well and truly dead and buried, is largely due to indie devs going it alone, with Elite:Dangerous managing to get a little over £1.7 million through Kickstarter, before actually starting to sell digital preorders and beta access through their website, and Star Citizen getting about $50 million through various crowdfunding efforts, including Kickstarter, before they did something similar.
Glad to see people are still missing why Hitman was brought up at all. The video was about “Women as background decorations” and while you don’t need to kill the strippers in that little clip (indeed Hitman penalizes you for needless killings) they were still there as nothing but set dressing.
@ Marcus Ranum
A lot of literary scholars maintain that any form of storytelling requires conflict in order to maintain interest. If we accept games as a storytelling medium (not that they have to be), it makes sense for conflict-based games to saturate the market. Of course, there are more ways to invoke conflict into a story than physical violence or bloodshed.
I admit that the majority of the games currently on my bookshelf and my Steam account have the typical fixation on war, violence, and conflict. Back in the day I used to be a big fan of real-time strategy games (e.g. Age of Empires, Rise of Nations, or Rome: Total War) which were all about leading an army to crush your enemies and sack their cities. Nonetheless some of the most fun I had with those games came not from the actual combat but from fiddling around with the auxiliary map editor, which let you create worlds instead of destroying them. Speaking of creating worlds, I was also fond of simulation games like SimEarth and SimLife where world-building and ecosystem management were the main objects. Why don’t you see so many of those on the market today?
Yea, I definitely think there’s a saturation of violent games out there.
But that’s one of the reasons why indie games have been hugely on the rise recently. There’s all sorts of weird and silly games out there now. For instance, Costume Quest 2 is coming out this Halloween and I must have it.
@Peter Landers #10
Oh come on! Doom (1&2) are still basically some of the best first person shooters of any time. Gameplay immersion, amazing music (I can still set those tracks off in my head at any time) and most of all finally a game with tight controls that emphasized the skill of the player and the beauty of the mouse as a precision targetting device.
But then I’ve always found Pac-Man totally boring, alongside other “famous” and “timeless” classics such as Pong or Space Invaders.
faustus @2
He actually looks ill. If I were his mother I’d be very worried.
@19 & 20
Yeah, It’s hard not to be struck by the red-face, flop-sweat and nervous laughter exhibited by Mason and the way his eyes keep darting around the room. Especially in contrast to the calm, reasoned delivery of Sarkeesian and the maker of the Logicbomb video.
Actually, you do have to kill the strippers. If you get spotted, which *can* happen. If you don’t, you’ll fail that mission.
And still, that isn’t Anita Sarkeesian’s point, her point is that the strippers are just either background decoration or target dummies.
Also, picking just one exemple of the dozens shown it that video (I didn’t go and count them but Anita probably talks about over 100 games in the series) and claim that invalidates the whole series is… what’s that word I’m looking for… oh, right: bullshit.
Thunderf00t doing a biased sample? Shocked I tell you! Shocked!
@9 Callinectes:
Yes. That was icky enough to make me restart the mission and assassinate her instead – act of mercy, your honour! Dishonored was one of my favourite games from the last few years (usual problems with the depictions of women aside, sigh) – the stealth factor and rewards for staying your blade were refreshing, as were the supernatural powers and sweet gadgets (that I had to pay for, which mildly irked me – I’m meant to be some pseudo-Edwardian ninja James Bond and they’re making me cough up for toys! Bah). The look and feel of the universe was also something new and interesting, all swords and duelling pistols mixed with new-fangled electricity and the occult. I don’t quite know how to describe it – not quite steampunk – maybe Whalepunk? Whatever it was, it beats shooters-on-rails like Call of Duty: Killing All The Dudes Then Moving To The Next Checkpoint To Spawn Some More Dudes While Your Dozens of Bullet Wounds Heal Themselves with a lead pipe.
Back to the topic: TF’s gone from strength to strength as a champion of scenery-chewing, spoiled-brat misogynist asshat man-children everywhere – and his new double-fisted hatesturbate over Sarkeesian’s alleged and apparently unforgiveable missteps in observing that many games have problematic depictions of women in them has only made him more of a Brave Hero™ to them. Sadly, every PC Gamer post on facebook on this topic neatly proves Lewis’ Law (that comments on articles about feminism justify feminism), so there’s a ready-made audience of emotionally stunted adult males and short-fuse XBox adolescents out there for Phil Mason’s unique brand of pompous, petulant, poorly-written and frankly desperate critiques.
Thing is, I don’t agree 100% with Sarkeesian about everything she says, e.g. about the specific motivations of game designers & writers when including sexist content – I think a lot of them are just lazy and/or are naively playing to market forces which are in reality far less compelling than they may think (social and corporate inertia apply to gaming as much as they do to film-making and the comics industry). But that’s a minor difference and I don’t need to agree with her 100% to find her position convincing – all I have to do is reach into my 30+ year history of playing video games (not just ones with killing, honest, many have had racing cars and bubble-dragons!), starting with the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64 (greatest console of all time!) to right now where I’m writing this on a flaptop that’s also my gaming PC. And when I do that, I can think of endless titles that had female characters or NPCs who were abused, kidnapped, imprisoned, killed or mistreated in some way in order to motivate the usually-male protagonist, to illustrate the evil nature of an adversary or just to provide atmosphere for the universe – and out of all proportion to their male counterparts.
TL;DR: I love games more than I love movies and TV, but the industry undeniably has female expendability issues. Sarkeesian is right and Phil Mason is an arrogant, dogmatic little boyman without the ability to see beyond the ever-expanding yet fragile universe that is his ego. He might well have acquitted himself well in the past against a certain unnamed and possibly unhinged teenage creationist, but he’s out of his depth against Sarkeesian (who appears to embody Mason’s worst fears by being an educated and intelligent woman who says things he doesn’t agree with). She does her research and, even though she’s a gamer herself, pulls no punches on the medium. Would that Phil could be as honest.
I think
my biggest problem
with the whole
genre
of YouTube skepticism and atheism
is the near-complete lack of
anything
resembling reasonable
pacing. Just lots of unnecessarily long
pauses punctuated by frequently unscripted, unpracticed rambling. And one thing I remember seeing a lot in Thunderf00t’s videos and those of his ilk, which appears here, is repeatedly using your opponent’s quotes to make an unstated rhetorical point.
Repeatedly using your opponent’s quotes to make an unstated rhetorical point.
One thing I actually appreciate about the Feminist Frequency videos is the quality of editing and pacing Sarkeesian employs. I realize that any of these kinds of media, blogging included, require some measure of ego, and you wouldn’t do a video or podcast if you didn’t at least somewhat like the sound of your own voice. I much prefer for these kinds of things to be written, not recorded, since that makes them easier to cite and easier to consume at your own pace.
For the (valid) criticism Sarkeesian got in the last video for using anti-sex-worker language, it’s interesting to see the context of YouTube gamers who think “stripper,” “hooker,” and “prostitute” all “mean the same thing.”
Nopenopenopenopenope. Looked it up. No fucking way can a game redeem itself after something like that. Holy shit. How the hell did someone think that was a reasonable plot option in the game? I mean… your character is supposed to be a good guy, right? Like, what the hell?
There are lines that should not be crossed. That is one.
Figured I’d pop in to recommend Trine and Trine 2. There is some killing of monsters (goblins, undead) but most of the game is about solving puzzles and figuring out how to get to the next area. The physics in-game are pretty impressive, the scenery is gorgeous, the music is wonderful… and the ways in which you can accidentally kill your character in the game are often so ridiculous that you end up more amused rather than frustrated even when you’re trying a puzzle for the 30th time. It’s best played with 2 other people (one on a computer, two on controllers). Absolutely love those games.
@gmacs
Yes… and no.
Dishonored is a title that explicitly encourages gray morality, of twisting the line between the traditional white/black paths.
It’s not a game I’ve played (i’m not interested in the plot or the aesthetics), but I don’t really get up in a twist about violence in video games. I’ve played games AS violent and I still regard life with a great deal of respect.
I will admit, though, I am troubled by the objectification of women in video games, something that still shows no sign of ending. I speak as a dedicated and life-long gamer, too – this is something that needs to be fixed.
I’m with the fellow who pointed out that there’s a relevant niche for violent video games just as there is one for violent television shows. You probably wouldn’t let your 10 year-old child watch Game of Thrones any more than you’d let them play something like Hitman. Heck, at least a lot of stuff like Mario and Minecraft are cartoony and unreal. You watch the Sopranos or Game of Thrones and you’re seeing some stuff that can disturb even me with the level of grotesque and callous violence you’re dealing with.
Really, violence in video games runs a gamut from Mario bopping things on the head to the detached and bloodless Knights of the Old Republic on up to fairly sedate shooters and then on up to Assassin’s Creed, Witcher, Doom, etc (and finally the rather disturbing Mortal Kombat.)
Speaking of, you know something that pisses me off? In a lot of recent movies and TV shows, they’ll show a character playing a violent shooter, essentially as a shorthand to go “hey, hey, this is the badguy, they’re a violent sociopath and killer.” I’ve been playing first person shooters for some twenty years and I find myself just as sympathetic towards suffering as the next man and certainly no more inclined to pick up a gun – and that’s not me speaking as an exception, either, given that no good studies have linked the two.
The argument I tend to see is, “Well, these games were made with straight men in mind.”
Which is kind of an even more disturbing justification. It’s making the assertion that straight men are incapable of enjoying anything unless some aspect of it objectifies women. It’s treating the mistreatment of women as though it’s some kind of obvious, natural, underlying male need that’s required to be a part of all male-oriented entertainment.
Anita said it best at the end of her video: “The most common argument I hear is that these things are included because they’re a part of real life, and the world wouldn’t be as believable without them. However, for some reason you’re able to suspend your disbelief enough to operate in a world populated by dragons, magic, extra lives, and an invisible void where you can carry 15 weapons, but a world where women are treated as human is somehow too difficult to imagine.”
If you click through the embedded video to see its YouTube page, you will see a bunch of links in the description area. These are links to the articles mentioned in the video.
Two of them were interesting from an atheist and skeptic perspective, even thought they are about the world of video gaming. They basically say that that world is changing significantly now, becoming more accessible to people who don’t fit the old demographic. The rage may be coming from people who know that their dominion is ending. And as with atheism and skepticism, women are one of the key groups breaking the barriers.
It all sounded so familiar, and gave me hope that we might also be seeing the last thrashes of the dead-enders in other realms beyond video games.
http://kotaku.com/we-might-be-witnessing-the-death-of-an-identity-1628203079
http://dangolding.tumblr.com/post/95985875943/the-end-of-gamers
@Rob R #29: One point that gets a bit glossed over in this response video is that nearly everything you’re capable of doing in a video game has to be programmed in. When you’re able to listen to the conversations strippers are having, interact with those strippers, kill them, and hide their bodies, every part of that has to pass through multiple programmers, writers, voice actors, animators, and so forth. Anywhere along the way, different choices could have been made. What if you couldn’t interact with the strippers (plenty of games have had NPCs that you can’t interact with), what if you couldn’t kill them (plenty of games have had unkillable NPCs), what if you had more interaction options (plenty of games give you dialogue trees and allow you to make choices in your interaction beyond hide or kill)?
What if attacking one stripper meant they all came at you with huge amounts of hit points and damage? Even in games where you can interact with and potentially kill nearly every NPC, most will fight back or run away. In a game that requires you to be stealthy, it seems like a bunch of people running off to get help would end your level pretty quickly. A bunch of strippers armed with shotguns for just this kind of occasion probably would too.
These misogyny-in-games defenders make the same mistake a lot of sexism-in-comics defenders make: assuming that the characters are the ones making the choices (“Power Girl wears that costume because she finds it empowering!”) or that things couldn’t be otherwise, when in fact every aspect is dictated by writers and creators who, by and large, are straight men. They’re the ones deciding where you go in the game, who’s there, and what you can do to them, it’s not an inevitable consequence of the game’s physics engine or some other nonsense.
Ye know…. I actually liked the hitman series (well I liked “Blood Money” – the others were ho hum). I liked the mechanic of stealth by hiding in plain sight. I liked the planning, exploration, experimentation. I liked the idea that “perfection” was getting your target and ONLY your target and not otherwise being seen or noticed, or even making it look like an accident. Shootouts and mass murder were a failure to explore your options. The victims were in general pretty nasty people you generally didn’t mind killing anyways, and anyone else who got caught in the crossfire (literally or figuratively) had in-game consequences.
Doesn’t mean I can’t criticize it. Sexist tropes? Yep. Racism? Double-yep. Just like Anita says at the start of her videos – it’s okay to enjoy something and still point out its flaws. There’s no reason to get defensive!
PZ Myers:
I think Sid Meier disagrees with you about where the big money is, and how “niche” his target market is. There’s also this other guy called, um, Mario?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises
Three clicks on from my link above, your example of Minecraft being niche is also revealed to be incorrect. It’s the biggest selling PC game of all time. Excuse my Kanye, but OF ALL TIME.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_PC_games
One of the biggest problems with discussing games is the different selective biases people view the genre with – dismissing some games as novelties or niches, while other games are considered “real” games and get the headlines. Hype distorts the actual size of the markets for different games, and hence their impact or importance.
I love that Sarkeesian’s series, as well as highlighting the sexism, is just a constant barrage of criticism about lazy plots. That’s the nature of today’s entertainment industry, whether it’s film, pop music or games – copy whatever last made money for guaranteed bucks. To boost sales with free publicity, add in some shock value for journalists to latch on to.
Hence, there’s an endless repetitive cycle of shockingly violent games getting all the headlines and attention in media, while non-violent games are consistently selling in similar numbers but much more quietly.
Speaking as a developer, player and feminist…
Games are in a *very* weird place on gender equality. The most extreme representation of this I’ve seen is Saints Row 4, which manages to employ pretty much all of the tropes Anita Sarkeesian has been talking about, while ALSO displaying quite a surprisingly even-handed approach.
For example, the game has loads of blatently fanservice-y outfits for a female protagonist, but then they mix things up by allowing the male protagonist to wear them as well. And given the differences in body shape, that’s not a small thing. Somebody actually sat down and spent an hour or two making sure the cocktail dress didn’t clip with the buff male character model.
There’s lots of other examples of games finding a weird middle ground: Bioshock Infinite has female mooks, the Mass Effect series puts in the strip club trope in every single game while still having strong female characters (in the original game they weren’t even sexualised), Assassins Creed 4, features courtesans as a gameplay mechanic in addition to featuring a famous cross-dressing woman in a *mentor position* over the male PC…
… it’s all very confusing.
…
The single criticism I have of Anita Sarkeesian’s video’s is that they don’t give enough hope. I come out of them thinking we should just nuke the game industry from orbit and start the whole thing over.
But there *is* a slow trend towards gender equality and stronger female characters, as the industry finally wakes up to what the majority of it’s consumer base wants. Given the prevalence of “cross-playing” (deliberately playing a character of the opposite gender to yourself), it amazes me that it’s taken this long.
We’re not winning, not yet, but the tide is definitely turning.
It’s not a scene, it’s a whole level.
But the important aspect here is that in Dishonored it integrates well in the general plot and backstory:
Dunwall is not facing a black-death-type of epidemic, where no cure exists and the authorities are genuinely powerless to stop it: when the game begins, a cure for the rat plague already exists, the only problem is that it’s expensive to produce. And instead of using their quite obviously large wealth to insure that enough elixir is made, Dunwall’s “finest” prefer to waste it on lavish parties and on prostitutes and booze.
The black Cat sequence displays the decadence of Dunwall’s upper class, especially among the Lord Regent’s supporters, and his speciousness when he claims that he had the empress assassinated because Dunwall needs “strong leaders” to face its current crisis: a genuinely strong leader would have taken all the lazy egoistical high-born hedonists down a peg or five and forced them to assist the commoners for a change, not put them at the center of his network of supporters.
No: You are supposed to chose whether he is or not. The game makes you act like Corvo’s Ego: choosing whether to let his desire for revenge take precedence over his sense of duty as Lord Protector and morality. And apart from Hiram Burrows, all the non-lethal options are actually deliberately cruel retaliations: signs that you’ll letting Corvo giving in to the darker side of his soul.
I have to admit, I just don’t understand all the hate that Anita gets. I will happily play the Assassin’s Creed and Saint’s Row series – they’re fun games – but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s right, and any reasonable person has to see that. I mean, what is everyone afraid of? Worst case scenario is that some game developers actually start to produce games with better female characters – how is that in any way a bad result? A game with better female characters is, pretty much by definition, a better game!
Is anyone really afraid that this will mean there won’t be another Grand Theft Auto game, or that the next Saints Row will be a Tetris clone? Absolute worst case scenario is more choice, surely?
Tom Foss @ 31
Case in point: a guy in the Black Knighting thread actually claimed that the reason a particular female model in one of the games in question was laying on a bed with her legs spread and her back arched was because of technical limitations of the game engines. He then proceeded to describe how characters are modeled in 3D in the T Pose. He was actually claiming that a character which is not going to be animated is simply imported straight into the game in that position without first being rigged and posed. Which is absolutely laughable.
Tom Foss,
Your comment, good sir, has made my day. The only downside was that I read it in my head with Thunderf00t’s voice.
–
Regarding your comment @31, this was a point I tried to make elsewhere, that games stories don’t fall out of the sky. For something to make it all the way through requires many, many sets of eyes and validations. So, for those options to make it through with no one going, huh, maybe this shouldn’t be an option, says much about our culture.
quasar #35:
Related tweet from Steve Jaros, one of the Saints Row developers:
The attitude towards women in the Assassin’s Creed games is particularly confusing. On the one hand, you have a series of games that has things like female members of the Assassin Order being accepted without so much as an eyeblink, the depiction of Caterina Sforza as being an incredibly tough, strongwilled woman (one memorable scene had the situation where Forli, which she ruled over, was under siege, and her children were being held hostage and threatened with death to make her submit, so she simply flipped up the front of her dress and shouted ‘I have the means to make more’ – apparently based on something that the real Caterina Sforza did) and a particular scene that stands out in my mind as utterly subverting the ‘damsel in distress’ trope, where you, the master Assassin Ezio Auditore da Firenze, hears that your younger sister is going to be attacked by your enemies, so you rush over to rescue her, walk into the building and find her just calmly standing there, armed with a small knife, surrounded by dead bodies. On the other hand, the developers have ruled out the possibility of playable female characters in the forthcoming game, Assassin’s Creed:Unity, even in multiplayer, because it would take too much work.
@ Suido #34:
There’s a video I saw recently about the decline in quality in Japanese animation that made similar points: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AHo-_XEV6E
Basically, companies are increasingly targeting guaranteed niche audiences. And in both the anime and gaming worlds, that guaranteed audience tends to be men who will consume anything regardless of quality so long as it’s covered in boobs and violence. And in both markets, where even ten years ago you had a lot of diverse stuff coming out to choose from, nowadays you’re getting maybe one or two “fresh” titles a year, and the rest is Schoolgirls in Short Skirts Season 6 and Guys With Guns XII.
quasar wrote:
To give some small credit where credit is due, the developers made some serious improvements in this area over Saints Row 3, which featured things like hiring a porn star to do voice acting (there isn’t anything necessarily wrong with that by itself, but they actually advertised this), having a mission where you steal shipping crates full of women intended to be sold into prostitution and are given the option of either selling them back to the people you stole them from, or “owning” them yourself and getting constant income from that, as well as large quantities of pointless bits of sexism throughout the rest. The worst of the worst was gone in SR4, but they could’ve done better (and hopefully will in the future).
zmidponk wrote:
They did put a woman protagonist in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. I’m not sure it did terribly well because it was a PS Vita game, and the game platform itself wasn’t terribly popular. I’m not sure exactly what poisoned my opinion of the game. It could’ve been the main AC3 game (Connor being one of the stupidest characters ever written due to the game devs fawning over the American mythology about the revolution, and most of the game being “chase your target down” or colonial Rambo guns-blazing rather than trying to avoid detection and then disappear after the job is done), the imprecise controls of the Vita, or if it was the way the “dressing room” (disguise) mechanic was presented (which made Aveline seem like someone who was playing dress-up rather than a proper true assassin herself).
I wonder if that’s where Cosby got his “I brought you into this world, and I can take you out. Makes no difference to me; I can make another one that looks just like ya.”
ditto. I must have missed the elaborate non-answer to that obvious question somewhere, even though I know it has been asked a thousand times already in the gaming community.
I too cannot fathom what these fuckheads think would happen if games were designed to be more inclusive and less objectifying.
I think it’s just lazy fucking game writers to tell the truth.
Actually, there’s a lot of games out there that are going a different route. Only they’re not considered “games games” (probably because they’re popular among women): Neat little apps, that are honestly much better in every aspect than the “game games” I had for my first game boy (Yes, Fake Geek Girl that I am I still have a 1st generation Game Boy, including Super Mario and Tetris).
I recently read that Apps are actually the part of the industry that is making the money right now while revenue for traditional games has gone down despite their blockbuster budgets. Looks like actual gaming is changing.
I also hope that for a long time nobody is going to tell my daughters that they’Re not supposed to be good at puzzle, logic and construction games and that they must not enjoy them because they’re female…
Giliell@44 – regarding the revenue, that’s not what I would consider an entirely positive step. Assuming you’re referring to things like FarmVille or Candy Crush, there are players who have ploughed considerable amounts of money into these games; they’re designed to be exploitative (“sure, you can play for free, but if you give us just $5 …”).
Indeed, many more “mainstream” gaming companies are running with this now. Take a personal favourite of mine – the Sims. (And yes, I’m a heterosexual cis-male that is a huge fan of the Sims – it’s one of the few mainstream games that are not targeted at my demographic). In Sims 1 and Sims 2, the majority of new clothing, hair, and so forth was provided by fans (and in some cases at a modest fee, although there was lots of good free stuff). For Sims 3, EA cracked down on this and the majority of new stuff had to be bought at the online store (they even integrated it into the game itself); EA are on record as saying that all their games will have microtransactions from now on.
But EA are hardly alone. You can pay for new equipment in a lot of mainstream games now; the DLC is no longer always the traditional “here, you finished our game, have a little something to keep playing it” but all too frequently “hey, give us a bit of cash, and we’ll unlock something that’s actually on the installation DVD you used”.
However, none of that is to in any way decry the actual game content of puzzle games and so on – I love them myself. Lemmings is a classic for a reason, and there’s a great cheap game called SpaceChem that I’m really struggling with some of the higher levels on. I just wish that the modern combination of “game app” and “microtransaction” wasn’t so common.
garysturgess
I’m not saying it’s the best thing ever, I’m just noticing that players seem to want other things than shooter games, too
As you notice, the “give us some extra money” is hardly a phenomenon unique to app games
@garysturgess
EA are one of the worst, if not THE worst company for abusing the concept of DLC and/or microtransactions. Their now ex-CEO was talking about a model where gamers who’d been playing Battlefield suddenly found they had to pay EA $1 to reload their gun, and said ‘it is a great model and I think it represents a substantially better future for the industry’. DLC and microtransactions, when done right, can be a great addition or feature in a game. When it’s done wrong, though, it leads to the player feeling they’re being nickel-and-dimed and/or the ‘pay to win’ scenario.
“If I were to write the story of my life, I would shock the world.” Caterina Sforza. Sforza was one hell of a formidable person.
@ garysturgess
Slightly off topic anecdote: I’ve had several Sims 4 series appear in my Youtube sub box and several Twitch channels that I follow have been streaming it…I believe exactly one of those is female IIRC. They’re mostly people known for simulation/strategy games as opposed to FPS but at least one of them is primarily known as an FPS player. And that’s pretty standard for when any new game comes out in terms of what my followed/subbed Twitch/Youtube channels do. So it may not be targeted at your demographic but your demographic is playing plenty of it.
Seven of Mine@49 – indeed. But for reference, I am a member of a Facebook group for the Sims 3 Apocalypse Challenge and apart from me there’s only one other bloke in the group.
That my demographic is playing plenty of it regardless suggests that games without the offensive tropes Anita discusses can still be successful, even amongst the hetero cis male demographic that gaming companies still seem to be (wrongly) convinced are the only ones playing.
(Full disclosure: I haven’t played Sims 4 yet and probably won’t for several months, so I guess it’s possible they turned it into a GTA clone – but I doubt it).
Surely I can’t be the only one here who guilty-pleasure watched The Borgias? The scene described above was done really, really well.
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*Slinks off embarrassed by my pedestrian taste in TV shows.