Why is casual racism/sexism more accepted in video games than other forms of media (these days)?

Seriously didn't see that since I'm Zinging it and I'm slow. that interview was apparently very influential for us!

The Dead or Alive series spent an inordinate amount of time working on a super accurate physics engine just so they could claim to be the fighting game with the most realistic breast bounces

lol this was xposted by dayo

there's something to the argument that the fleshing-out of things is responsible, and that more sophisticated graphics/sound enables greater racism/sexism, but the dodgier aspects of movies are made dodgier by the movie. it's not as if it somehow revealed ugliness lurking beneath, e.g. casting leguizamo as luigi in super mario movie.

They didn't really say broseph - it was a more innocent time.

there's some interview w/ the doa creator where he says he cares about the physics so much because he considers all the female characters his daughters or something

wait, why is Leguizamo worthy of mention but BOB HOSKINS isn't

hoskins transcends race and racism?
i'm pretty sure battleship: the movie is going to contain all sorts of jingoism and boobplay that wasn't inherent in the game.

IGN: Is there by chance a trampoline game in DOAX2? We think that would be an excellent addition to the mini-games.

Itagaki: So we have to pick from a long list of minigame ideas and I'm pretty sure trampoline minigames were part of the initial list, but we didn't pick it. That's because of the kind of game that DOAX2 is; we have to be really careful not to make it seem vulgar. Certain activities show the women in a negative light.

So it's not so much about bouncing per say. The key to the game is love. When they love the character, how do they feel when they see the character do whatever she's doing? We don't want to make them feel bad.

(Laughter.)

GN: It seems like that game is ripe for a wet t-shirt contest.

Itagaki: Well, it becomes the issue of love again.

IGN: So that's too far?

Itagaki: You don't want your girlfriend being seen in a wet T-shirt contest, right?

IGN: No, not mine. But it's OK for me to see other people's girlfriends... (Laughter.)

btw here is the male figure you get if you set the "body type" dial all the way to its biggest setting on Star Wars: The Old Republic, and then there is the female option at the same chunkiest setting
http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/6995/000grzxh.jpg

don't know if you guys can see the slight disparity, i mean it is pretty subtle

http://img27.imageshack.us/img27/6995/000grzxh.jpg
sry, am bad at ilx

lol Battleship: The Movie is maybe stacking the deck a tiny bit, considering the video game context in which this conversation started

DOA3 is actually the only game I'm embarrassed to own; I bought it because the fighting got good marks (and it was a decent fighting game, if not really comparable to the Big Games) and shortly afterward they announced the beach volleyball game and I basically just wanted to die

one thing i can definitely say about saints row 3 is that it is absolutely neutral when it comes to making characters morbidly obese

the gameplay footage of Saints Row 3 make it seem to be flat-out insane

also I am lolling pretty hard at SW:TOC's pie disparity

oh ha trust me, SR3 is def insane. its also insanely racist and sexist while at the same time weirdly seeming completely not either. this is hard to explain.

well part of it is that if you just go over the top offensive towards EVERYONE, it's hard to feel like anyone is getting singled out

yeah thats pretty much it, when you are rolling around town beating anime nerds to death with a huge purple dildo the gloves are already off

well part of it is that if you just go over the top offensive towards EVERYONE, it's hard to feel like anyone is getting singled out

― God, Music and Romeo and Juliet (DJP), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 4:45 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

except that this is exactly how horrible d-bags excuse their horribleness all. the fucking. time.

wait jjjusten you are degloving nerds with a giant purple dildo?

I'm watching gameplay footage of SR3 and it's just a lot of crotch punching

like basically the difference between the GTA series and the Saints Row series in how they come across to me in their presentations is that I feel like GTA is trying to Tell A Story that I really have no interest in and also find at its core somewhat offensive, whereas Saints Row is basically just an excuse to string incidences of mayhem together with little concern for logic, character identification or plausibility

having not played either game series, I don't know if those impressions actually make sense

except that this is exactly how horrible d-bags excuse their horribleness all. the fucking. time.

in most cases, those horrible d-bags aren't horrible to, say, their white bro friends, which massively undercuts their excuses

there is also a difference between humor in entertainment and behavior in polite society and how a comment may be true in one of those contexts and false in the other

So, Mario was voiced by Ahmed Best all along?

IGN: No, not mine. But it's OK for me to see other people's girlfriends... (Laughter.)

plz god remove IGN from this earth thx.

IGN: How about having the opportunity to have sex with the DOA characters?

Itagaki: Well, we felt that would disrespectful to the characters.

IGN: Haha, yeah. How about forced sex?

Itagaki: What is wrong with you?

IGN: Haha, nothing. Haha.

Haha, nothing. Haha

that ign stuff does bring up a good question, which is why very little mainstream/conventional game review attempts to deal with these sorts of issues, let alone even mention them? like it kind of makes sense for somebody to have at least mentioned some of the crazy stuff that pops up time to time in these games, but frankly the only time where i see this stuff mentioned is on uh ilg tbh.

b/c mainstream/conventional game reviews are all getting beaucoup payola from the publishers and again primarily written by the same poorly socialized rape culture audience

Here is a picture of the interviewer:

https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net/profile_images/841283041/DougPerrywdaughterVivi_1.jpg

call CPS imo

idk silby i dont think that mainstream game reviews are that tacitly dumb/unpleasant - again i wonder if it comes down to fear of the audience. like if you say that resident evil 5 might have a tiny smidge of racism the nerds are going to bum rush your forums looking for blood or something

Oh wait this thread is reminding me: have we mentioned the massive shitstorm that erupted when Film Crit Hulk put out that first post deconstructing the weird misogynist shit in Arkham City?

http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/2011/10/19/goddammit-video-games-the-first-few-hours-of-arkham-city-is-lots-of-fun-but-super-duper-sexist/

oh man, that led to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb5ev2Dp4I0

there was definitely some over-sexualization of the female chars in arkham city -

the sexist dialogue gets back to what i thought about the deus ex character: can you have a racist/sexist character in a video game? certainly you can do that in a way in books and movies and people don't jump on the writer as being a racist.

meaning can you have a racist/sexist protagonist?

there are ways that an author frames/contextualizes the racism/sexism of the character that implies+creates distance between the author and the protagonist. the less of a distance between the authorial voice and the protagonist's, the more you have to wonder whether the protagonist is speaking for the author (or that their ideologies, at least in this regard, are aligned cf. joseph conrad). this requires an author who has a strong command of his own voice, and the voices of his character, or else even unintentionally they will collide, interfere with one another, other voices will show up (bakhtin says this is a feature of lit, not a bug). video game writers lack the sophistication + skill at writing to draw these differences carefully. that's the favorable interpretation. the unfavorable one is that their ideology is inseparable from their characters.

That ign video ***holy shit***

i think part of the bigger question for me is why movies/books have largely moved on from racist (sexist less so) portrayals of characters but thats kinda frequent in VG world

like why are video games still long duk donging it in the 2012 basically

I'm kinda glad that I got out of gaming by the time GTA3:SA rolled around

it definitely requires more skill if its the protagonist. but the thugs in arkham city are criminals that you beat to a pulp and you can do it with catwoman.

xpost to jjjusten - thats why I am less inclined to worry about my point. audience obv doesn't need any more exposure to racism/sexism.

bnw you should read part two which addresses both of those points

http://filmcrithulk.wordpress.com/2011/10/21/hulk-vs-arkham-city-round-2-bitches-be-trippin/

still, if the punishment delivered to the thugs ever seemed like a response to their sexism, or the game in some other textual way discussed their sexism, ie if the sexism was used discursively in any way, it might've been different. instead, at best it's just a very shallow way to sketch out their character, and left undiscussed it becomes problematic itself. ie: using sexist language to indicate that these are bad guys submerges the sexism as just a heuristic instead of its own very real thing. moreover, i think the hulk's point (i haven't read his piece in awhile) was that the sexism in AC becomes this rote form of titillation - repetitive, constant, until its on equal footing with other banter that it should not be on equal footing with.

i think what i'm saying is that you could write a video game with a sexist character, and have that character be distinct from the author(s), but a) sexism would have to play a more major, central role to the story than in Arkham City (you can't just have a sexist character and not have it mean anything larger for the themes of the game), and b) it would have to demonstrate the more serious consequences of sexism (the structural consequences, the violent consequences, the consequences for relationships and real women), instead of just leaving it with a bunch of thugs saying the word 'bitch' every 5 minutes.

this thread is starting to make me hate ppl

might have something to do w/ the fact that making a compelling game is arguably harder than making a compelling record or film or painting or whatever else -- not "harder" in that "there's less to them" but in that there is a greater barrier of entry to making a game -- meaning that the people who can make games are the ones who have to go through the traditional systems of education, where that kind of sexism and racism are institutionalized. we also have a generation starting to make games now who are going to kind of be the worst -- the early millenials who have "been into games" since they were young at least in NA are largely white, and largely male, and largely priveleged, because they are the ones whose parents would be most likely to be able to afford/be willing to buy game systems for their tykes. The elitism that comes out of that, where it's like Bob is more "legit" because he had a nintendo and Sally is less "legit" b/c she only started w/ games when she got a PS2 as an adult w/ her own money is a part of that previously-mentioned institution.

That said as more kids are able to get computers in USA these days and it's less of "a thing" maybe the next generation of developers will be cooler about this stuff (even if only a small minority of them vs NONE AT ALL of them) and we can get some compelling equalist works.

sorry if this idea got posted above, i just kind of plopped it out right now b4 going out of the house.

gamers are the worst, and gaming culture is the worst. games tho are awesome bc they drip endorphins into your brain drip drip drip until your nervous centers explode with pleasure.

i dunno, if you want "gritty" batman video game experience, i think you're going to have to accept that it's probably going to come out as more trash than moral uplift. lego batman is pretty sexism/racism free i think.

hulk makes the point that over two batman movies christopher nolan was able to make sufficiently gritty batman experiences without the word 'bitch.'

now, u know, nolan may just be our generation's greatest writer and thinker. or maybe not being a loud obnoxious sexist asshole is a very low bar that most gamers and game designers still can't clear