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

jesus, clicking around in there is unpleasant

Think about it in terms of strategic planning:

a) You know that the US/west EU games industry is going to undergo a full blown 1983 style collapse
b) You tried your best to remove Japan from the picture through Project Manhattan but failed after the Xbox 360 didn't beat the PS3 and the Xbone got raped by the Xbone
c) You had a backup plan: Reshape games to be hostile to the consumer and to be taken seriously by congress.
d) Have some sleeper "educational game companies" ready to be purchased by bigger game bodies ready
e) Force the collapse to happen, ask for a bail out to save educational games
f) Enjoy infinite profits for very little work, game crash averted.

....think about it guys

the Xbone got raped by the Xbone

This seems like it might be insane

d) Have some sleeper "educational game companies" ready to be purchased by bigger game bodies ready

i mean at a certain point any corporation is going to look at the possibility running a secret network sleeper cell of educational video game developers, but i don't get the sense that it happens as often as people think

It's funny how the stories these people tell themselves so much resemble video game stories.

gamergate commentary goes down easier if you read it in your head in the voice of duke nukem and add "oh yeeaaaaaaaah" to the end of every sentence

e) Force the collapse to happen, ask for a bail out to save educational games

they think that video games are as much of a linchpin to the american economy as major banks and the auto industry, and would surely be bailed out by a sympathetic congress

Well I mean look at how much of the U.S. economy is tied up in educational games, just think it through

brb watching twitch stream of Tut's Typer

meanwhile, in her volcano-based lair, Mavis Beacon is steepling her fingers and chuckling

Guys, we've been found out. Set off the Mavis Beacon, we're going underground

xp OH FUCK OFF :(

lol sorry, guess her cover's blown

my fault for writing the goof, walking away, coming back and hitting submit post

Is it too late for my Icarus Proudbottom joke

nope do it!

Trying to form Carmen Miranda joek and failing.

what was that company that had side-scrolling adventures with the character in the giant floppy red hat and blue jacket? I keep thinking they had "puzzle" or "knowledge" in their name. edutainment.

http://www.mobygames.com/images/shots/l/74730-super-solvers-treasure-mountain-dos-screenshot-the-beginning.png

http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/super-solvers-treasure-mountain

et al

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Super_Solvers_Treasure_Mountain_1990

I dunno, its no worse than anything Moore would do, whats the big deal?

uh wha? Even in The Killing Joke – which he has repeatedly denounced both on its own terms and the impact it had on DC over the following five years, let alone post-Johns/DiDio – blood is only shown in violence, as something shocking, the upsetting result and indicator of a vicious attack. The reader is meant to be upset, not titillated, not enticed to look beyond this image of blood finger-smeared across the lips of a frightened teenager*, not to smirk at the gun pointed at her crotch.

*Note also that Gordon in The Killing Joke was an adult librarian whose presence in the story was as a marker of comfort, familiarity, a symbol of family; she’d left a life of thrills and danger and was settled. The Batgirl on this cover visually looks like a teenager, but is also the recovered Barbara Gordon who, in real time, spent 23 years as a role model for differently abled readers and reclusive nerds. So the image is suggesting tearing down work on physical and mental recovery, and letting past traumas define and regress you.

I won’t buy anything from Avatar, so I don’t know how gruesome anything in Neonomicon is, but given that Moore himself dismissed the text years before anything had been drawn, it’d be hard to pin the results on him instead of Burrows. The other most startling and bloody event in his work is the death of Hawley in LoEG, which obviously shows no violence whatsoever, and achieves its horror through a sustained mood and gradual reveal in dialogue. The blood on the tablecloth there underlines the reveal, and again functions as an indicator of brutal physical trauma.

But in neither of these does Moore attempt to draw attention to the events with the cover at all, let alone a lurid, deliberately exaggerated cover. The Killing Joke’s cover becomes unsettling once you’ve read the story, but is not aiming for horror-titillation in its own right at all.

And part of Moore’s disavowal of the book is him deciding that it’s simply inappropriate to use themes and scenes like that with a children’s character like Batman at all. The Killing Joke was aimed at teenage-to-adult boys, and he decided that it was a bad idea, and was still more restrained on the cover AND the interior story itself. The current Batgirl comic, as I understand it, is one of the few texts in the entire Nu-52 64 80 105 that is aimed at a female audience, and especially teenage girls. It’s about female friendship and strength and self-reliance, at least as far as anything can be at DC now. To publish a cover like this on a book like that, in Moore terms, would be like having Tesla menaced, molested, and implied with the threat of rape on the cover of Tom Strong.

Also, while there have been the typical flood of alternatively-priced variants on at least the Johnston adaptations at Avatar, the only time Moore himself has been responsible for a variant cover on any of his work, to the best of my knowledge, was on Dodgem Logic #2; and there they weren’t retailer-and-consumer exploitative, but evenly distributed and individually orderable. An incentive variant would be something you’d expect him to denounce on principle.

(Not to mention, that not only would Moore not have done this, the artist responsible wouldn’t have – it was DC who made repeated revision requests to add elements of creepiness and fear, including the vaginally-pointed gun. One gets the impression Albuquerque was relieved to have a reason to request the cover’s withdrawal.)

Found it:

http://www.newsarama.com/8317-why-they-endure-d-oracle-remembered-by-creators-advocates.html

here's a bit about the Nu52 announcement of Batgirl, even talking to John Ostrander & Denny O'Neil:

While The Killing Joke was critically acclaimed, it was controversial — particularly among female readers — because it victimized a female character in order to forward the story of male heroes. That controversy moved two writers to transform her into the hero known as Oracle.

"My late wife, Kimberly Yale, and I were not crazy about how Barbara was treated in The Killing Joke," comic writer John Ostrander told Newsarama. "Since the Batman office had no further plans for her at the time, we got permission to use Barbara in Suicide Squad, [another DC title at the time]. We felt that the gunshot as seen in Killing Joke would leave her paralyzed. We felt such an act should have repercussions. So... we took some of her other talents, as with computers, and created what was essentially an Internet superhero — Oracle."

Because Barbara had been established as having a PhD in library science, Ostrander made her a genius at accessing computer information. She adopted the secret code-name "Oracle" as she used her intellect to assist heroes throughout the DCU.

Dennis O'Neil, a Batman editor for DC at the time, said Ostrander's respectful treatment of Barbara, allowing her to continue fighting crime despite her disability, made her a beloved character almost immediately among DC fans. "I think it was a real inspiration on John's part to come up with Oracle, and she became one of my favorite characters in the whole Bat-stable. She was unlike anything else," O'Neil said.

O'Neil eventually made it official in the comics that Oracle was Batman's sole source of information. "It was logical for her to be there in Batman's world," O'Neil said. "Batman would need someone like that."

The editor said he believes she has endured because with her change to Oracle, she gave the DC Universe a new type of hero.

"We had hoards of people in spandex beating up criminals," he said. "We didn't have anybody like Oracle, who overcame a disability and was just as valuable and just as effective in a way that didn't involve violence."

Oracle even shows up in the Arkham games(voiced by Kimberly Brooks, who also did Ashley in the Mass Effect series).

On another note, I hope the upcoming movie finally gets more attention to what Ostrander/Yale were able to do with their Suicide Squad run.

booming post sic

^ yup

otm.

http://i.imgur.com/JgetSM2.jpg

multi xxxxp, thanks silby! that is exactly what I was thinking of

can't wait for super solvers to come back and get a federal bailout

Shouldn't be long now, the amount of money the federal government loves to give to education.

current ad campaign for orphan black... anyone but me think this brings to mind #notyourshield?
http://41.media.tumblr.com/106e651f06ecc438d39ffc040eb5d241/tumblr_nm00hlr6541qzyx8yo1_1280.jpg

It does read a little differently given the context of the show

of course, but the marketing team for this show HAS to be aware of gamergate and it was the first thing that occurred to me

Or maybe they are taking an obvious theme from the show and putting it on a poster? I mean, it's a geek-central show and I'm sure they are aware of GamerGate but they're also making a show that is diametrically opposed to everything GamerGate stands for.

Right! Which is why it caught me off guard that they would nod in that direction in the first place!

the phrase "i'm not your..." is a good deal older than GG. if the posters had left out the "I am" bit then maybe, but otherwise no sale

I think it's time to climb out of the rabbit hole, forks

wtf is orphan black

man. that sounds terrible!

TWAIN Acquire - the ORPHAN BLACK thread

if you think it's down the rabbit hole to find an association between a scifi show about a collection of female clones fighting for their freedom with the slogan "I am not your weapon" and a collective of video game nerds claiming to do the same with the female contingent literally wearing #notyourshield

Except that only one of them is saying "I am not your weapon" and it's the one who was explicitly raised to be a killing machine; similarly, the one saying "I am not your property" is the one who lived the most free life and only recently found out that her genome is the patented property of a biotech company.

Correlation != causation.

it's impressive how strongly you feel about this; someone is looking forward to season three

forks this is like... GG-level speculation

anyway, whatever else these ppl are, they are just kind of weird

https://twitter.com/oliverbcampbell/status/581542951421022208

my god, they love this shit

https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/582350865283072001

to be clear, and to put the topic to bed as far as I'm concerned, i certainly don't think this is some sort of BBC plot to capture #GG demographic; i think it's accidental tin eared marketing and am marvelling it wasn't caught by someone on the assembly line.

RT'd by gamergaters, reactionaries, and glenn reynolds OF COURSE

xp maybe the ins and outs of GG slang don't really seem that important to anyone else

that and "i am not your x" is a pretty common locution of self-ownership, which is why GG aped it to begin with

The background for the foaming jugs - people horrified by developers paying attention to the wrong public.

I don't get any GG correlation with the Orphan Black stuff, either. Also, their phrases make sense unlike that "shield" terminology.

The background for the foaming jugs - people horrified by developers paying attention to the wrong public.

― Andrew Farrell, Monday, March 30, 2015 12:17 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

uggggh why do i ever read the comments

i love how it's always ALWAYS assumed that the people complaining must be outsiders - - - insincere white knights or PC police or something rather than, for example, people working at the company who understandably would be annoyed by a "from all of us" kind of thing that suggests it's just one big den of locker room bro-culture dudes. What a gross place to work.

Yeah come on forks, if we insist everyone stops using the word "your" after the word "not" then THE TERRORISTS HAVE WON.