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

High hopes for this turning out a smart and civil discussion like the horror films why not thread, deep fears that it will descend into madness fyi

i think it's bc games are competitive experiences and competition brings out the worst in human beings

― Mordy, Wednesday, April 4, 2012 4:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

idk i obv have some pretty strong concerns abt that wrt online FPS screaming idiots and the like, but i dont think that has as much to do with the games themselves (i mean obv its part of the experience but it isnt internalized content per se)

some of it is cultural differences/lack of knowledge between Asia and the West.

do you guys mean disgusting behavior in players or the games?

i mean ive heard some commentary on this but a lot of the big arguments are a little facile and outsidery to me, like the idea that games are a juvenilized form of entertainment and thus more prone to juvenile thinking

xxpost yeah bnw that is def one of the things that i think factors in

the sexism is definitely audience targeting. and it is depressingly dead on.

i am talking abt the games, not the players, but obv there is going to be some reflection there wrt consumers influencing content etc

it's not just that consumers influence the content, it's also that game creators are gamers themselves and exist in the gaming community. they play on the same multiplayer servers and their customers, they're influenced by the same games...

-demographics.
-the fact that computer games, for fairly obvious reasons, attract less sophisticated writers than other forms of media.

was the new deus ex french? or french canadian? because thats def one of the weirdest examples of this - fairly thoughtful intellectual game and then whoa whats up with this homeless lady

to be perjorative a bit, nerds' poor socialization extends to society broadly, not just socializing. and they get reeeaaally defensive when called on their shit.

combined with a post-rockstar "it's supposed to be funny!" attitude w/r/t this kind of shit and it's a toxic brew

A big hook for many games is "by gamers, for gamers"; this means almost by design that a good chunk of regressive content is going to be present in the games since they are operating in this feedback loop where the social environment these games are created in is normalized to be incredibly shitty in a lot of ways.

For all of the equality for things like, say, making your character be male or female is a cosmetic change that doesn't affect your stats, you have things like all of the female iterations of the WoW races being as close to "busty cutie-pie" as the baseline skin will allow them to be (the undead and dwarf races are particularly comical re: this, but even the frickin' minotaur race has "sexy" female forms with cow heads).

xposts basically covered all of this but I am inflicting the concept of sexy cows on y'all anyway

some of it is sort of legacy racism from the earlier forms of media that fed VGs? D&D, action movies, etc

xp oh god WoW haha

how do you guys rank sexism/racism by systems? nintendo (the most juvenile) should come out looking better I'd think.

also, game content really not as important as ludic components (the best story can just barely redeem a game with terrible gameplay sometimes, while tons of beloved games have amazing gameplay and no story to speak of, or a really shitty story), so it's less important to designers to get stuff right with the content - which is where the racist/sexist stuff primarily exists

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcS7urpZRUNuGiOSBZiA0meTLKruJ8IIZQBNX-3kdzmdf2SDZmCO9ZhRbJcB

I mean... come on

actually feel like WoW held back a lot compared to some other games.

Skyrim has the same sort of issues. Like ... why does my lizard lady have tits.

nintendo (the most juvenile) should come out looking better I'd think.

have you ever played a Mario game??? also Punchout lololol.

theyre not?

mario racist against turtles?

well sure, WoW isn't like Duke Nukem, but the point is more that the whole "moving comic book" medium that their art direction is based upon is super normalized in how the genders should be represented, to the point where even for races where it doesn't make sense for the males to be burly he-men and the women to be curvy sexpots, they still are

also, there's the female night elf dance (which is based on the famous Alizee clips that were zooming around the Internet in the early 00s):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=taPuNAaMZ5w

copying this over from the other thread because i thinks it a very interesting and good point to think abt

i wonder if part of it is because games are often a solo experience (though not always of course) whereas movies, at some point in their release cycle at least, are experienced collectively? in other words, because the casual racism is easier for people to swallow by themselves as opposed to in a group?

― 1986 tallest hair contest (Z S), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 8:29 PM (25 minutes ago)

okay lol @ Mario being so mainstreamed that all of the "MAMA MIA" and "IT'SA ME, MARIO!" interjections don't even register as caricature anymore

i disagree w/ ZS's assertion esp bc i think the most racist/sexist behavior re video games happens in their most collective experience (multiplayer)

Yeah I think this is pretty easily chalked up to creators pandering to (and being born of) the overwhelmingly 15-35 male demographics of AAA game buyers. The women and men who like and play AAA games but don't like sexualized representations of women in these games (and also comic books) make their voices heard but the majority of the audience would be bummed if you took away their lizardwoman tits.

duh DJP you cant be racist against italians anymore, the godfather fixed that forever

it's well documented that gaming community demographics are a) incredibly skewed towards white males and b) fairly skewed towards people with poor social skills, which seems like a believable cause of misogyny and just general misanthropy all around

did Mario ever say those lines or are we forcing racism on the poor guy? are we blaming his video game char for his cartoon version? important issues in my work day

"it's a-me, Mario!" the sound of booting up Super Mario 64 iirc.

haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7jF8_badV4

lol gg then

fyi listening to that may drive you crazy

the Mario Kart one is also insane

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zszjSeK_F5Q&feature=related

"So long, gay Bowser!"

Alot of this sounds like hes sleeping with someone. *barfs*
PeachyzeldagirlXD 3 weeks ago

Do u say "ravioli!" when u fuckin?

did they really get roberto benigni to do the voices?

Everybody knows that Mario's wet dreams involve pasta and Bowser.

it's well documented that gaming community demographics are a) incredibly skewed towards white males and b) fairly skewed towards people with poor social skills, which seems like a believable cause of misogyny and just general misanthropy all around

I worked at a gaming geek/comic book store for a couple years and this kind of stuff is everywhere. the idea that females without massive bobs existed at some point is lost on these people

haha awesome typo

"I like the writer but does the artist have to make every female character's hair so big?"

i'ma luigi. nambar wan.

oh man my old college roommate used to say "yeah, peach has got it" in a squeaky ass voice all the time. mad nostalgia.

http://images.wikia.com/logopedia/images/6/63/Bobs1.jpg

I never played the Horde side of WoW with any regularity so I didn't realize that the trolls were all Jamaican until way way late in the game when I started a troll character because I was bored. Reading the quest text for most of the starter area was PAINFUL.

there's a ton of gender normalization in movies too, yeah?

im def not saying that movies are immune but i dont think you can make the argument that movies even approach the overt O_O aspects of video games wrt either of these

(I also used to play WoW with the sound off and either Vent or iTunes going, so I missed a good chunk of the voice acting)

oh yeah for sure, and movies as a genre are much more mature. but it seems to me that anytime you throw a lot of money at a project (either a blockbuster movie or a blockbuster game) you're gonna end up w/ some pretty unreasonable gender representations

re: relative badness of video games to movies, for that to be true then the racism/sexism would have to be toned down in game-to-movie adaptations, and it seems like in most cases it just got worse.

also feel like games HAVE to make gamers empathize w/ the game in a way that movies do not - movies can take more risks that way

Todd Solondz presents: Happiness, the Video Game

I always thought Tomb Raider the movie was made just to quiet all the feminist groups that complained about the video game, saying things like "no REAL woman could possibly look like that", well, lo and behold

also in movies you actually have real actresses whereas if you're making a game you can just crank up the boob slider

re: relative badness of video games to movies, for that to be true then the racism/sexism would have to be toned down in game-to-movie adaptations, and it seems like in most cases it just got worse.

Can you give an example of this? I think in many cases, it's more the medium of being presented something as a movie rather than a game making it easier to notice the source material's dodgier aspects.

i know i am probably missing some counterexamples here but it seems like the new fallout stuff has actually done a pretty good job of avoiding these pitfalls considering what a massive game francise its been

oh man I remember reading an interview with the creators of the first Tomb Raider game where the art director almost verbatim said "you're spending 20 hours staring at this character's bum so it might as well be a nice one"

also in movies you actually have real actresses whereas if you're making a game you can just crank up the boob slider

there are a few real actresses I'd like to introduce you to

casual sexism is pretty accepted in rap music, along with casual homophobia and racism in the form of anti-semitism

I remember an interview with the creators of Tomb Raider, a few months before it came out, where they were like "if you're gonna spend the whole game looking at a butt it may as well be a really nice ass, high five broooooooseph *jumping chestbump*"

WTF??? Xpost

hahahaha

ha there is probably something to the idea that the minute graphics got past the 8-bit stage the next logical progression was for game designers to think "oh shit now we can model T&A far more accurately"

has anybody ever seen Z S and DJP in a room at the same time before

boob slider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_or_Alive_Xtreme_Beach_Volleyball

also in movies you actually have real actresses whereas if you're making a game you can just crank up the boob slider

... why does my lizard lady have tits.

This thread is comedy username gold

wd play all the games with massive shadebobs

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=shadebobs&tbm=isch

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

pretty sure nolan will drop a few b-bombs when princess catwoman appears

btw I was on the metro a week ago around the time that school were being let out and when I was going up the escalator there was this group of kids behind me complaining about how all the good gamertags are always taken

that has nothing to do w/ this thread but this is the only game thread I have posted in in a while

"it's like dude you spend a month thinking of a good tag and then it's gone man"

agree with part 2 some places, disagree others. don't think you can ever pin down intent and I don't fully buy his equation for tone/context. but game maker is still responsible for how their work is interpreted. that's where I would concede it shouldn't be in there.

xposts i like the nolan movies but that has zero bearing on anything, imo.

why? what's your opinion? if the argument is that you need that word in your game to make it an appropriately gritty batman game, isn't another gritty batman game (especially a widely popular one) in a different genre a good way to evaluate that claim?

disagree because they are not going for the same tone

don't think you can ever pin down intent &
but game maker is still responsible for how their work is interpreted.

these two are kinda sides of the same coin

bnw, what kind of tone do you think that liberal use of the word 'bitch' achieves?

lego batman's sort of gritty to be honest. i don't think the nolan movies are a bad comparison in that it equally comes off as trash in places where it tries to be gritty (c.f. bale's VOICE)

bnw, can you elaborate about the differences you see in tone? i suspect that any differences you'll point out will not invalidate the point that the word isn't necessary in creating the tone of Arkham City

you gotta chill on that tact, dayo. i know its funny on the borad but it kills discussion dead.

i think there is more then 1 way to make a gritty batman story. arkham city is clearly not nolan's batman, takes about 5 seconds to grasp that. the judgment of whether it is "necessary" is where I get hung up. its not one I am comfortable with.

not excusing its use here per se but i have some suspicion that game makers that are shooting for a teen rating but want to make things gritty etc might have taken it into account that "bitch" is one of the few swears that are going to be allowed within those boundaries.

lol bnw sorry dude, you are hoisting yourself on your own petard most times

stuff like this tends to be a little more useful discussionwise when peeps dont try to get personal imo

but yknow ilx and all

mordy - i think you could probably define those differences in tone, but when you get to trying to measure or quantify any of that in such a way that you could add or subtract elements and still have the same outcome - that's where I lose confidence in the judgment.

i would like to see bnw mount a defense of the use of the word 'bitch' in the game arkham city, particularly as how it pertains to the game successfully transmitting its tone and voice to the gamer (assuming that the tone + voice is not 'sexist'). also, i'd like the defense to go beyond, 'i'm not defending the game's use, but i can see how if they lazily wanted to make it seem edgier, this was a pretty thoughtless way to do it.' or at least an acknowledgement that deferring to artistic choice, or to being non-judgemental (as though ppl never criticize all kinds of art for all kinds of things) is a copout.

xp does this hold true for all sorts of art? should i not give my opinion about a movie that includes a scene i think detracted from it? or a book from the 19th century with antiquated views on race (or a book from 2012 with the same)? i can see with some great works of art you might be loathe to start removing stuff (i love gogol and hate his anti-semitism, but i can't imagine excising it from his books), but c'mon, arkham city is not a great work of art, and the use of the word 'bitch' in it does not make it a greater than it would be without it.

btw who is the good guy that uses bitch in arkham city, because if thats supposed to be jack ryder or whatever (the reporter dude) i would say he only codes as a good guy because he is not a literal criminal? pretty sure he is never a sympathetic character or meant to be one

also the fact that arkham city is at best a minor offender when compared to like most other games that arent pokemon level content prob says a lot about this question even given the idea that it is problematic in a sexist sense.

i think you can argue it improves it or makes it worse. when you talk about removing it entirely, my radar goes up that you aren't giving credit to those ramifications. and then by saying - well nolan didn't need it - my radar really goes up that you are discarding a billion fucking factors that make my experience playing this game far far far far away from sitting and watching the dark knight.

For me, the problems in tone of AC are both in the sexualization of every single female character(incl. changing Harley Quinn's costume _again_) against either the history of the character or even their continually rebooted current selves, and the vibe/dialogue.

One can only shudder at what would have happened had they included Paul Dini's lifelong fetish, Zatanna.

I have more to say on this later, but there is a very definite difference between AC and Saints Row III(I haven't played SR2 past 10 minutes). SR3 is a deliberate and complete joke/cartoon/farce/parody/pisstake and a shitloada absurdist fun, whereas AC is a mash-up of takes on Batman that don't always work together and with a far darker and un-fun tone. There are bits in AC that read like what would happen if Frank Miller had done TDKR _now_, as opposed to how only slightly crazy he was 25 years ago.

I think it's really sweet (but also, yeah, a little creepy) that Paul Dini has spent his entire career writing about a thinly veiled fictional comic book version of his wife!

I think you got that the other way round; Paul Dini has been writing Zatanna for like 20 years now. He married Misty Lee sometime in the last 7-8 years.

here's her back in '06:

http://www.hyperborea.org/photos/comic-con-2006/img038.jpeg

God only knows how much Zatanna pr0n he asked Bruce Timm to draw for him.

oooh. 100% weird.

Correction: I have no idea what year they got married. I do know he got this own version of Zatanna published at Top Cow some years back, called Madame Mirage:

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&old=1&id=10406

Based on his wife, natch. What can ya say, dude has deliberately retro tastes.

kinda weird, but kinda makes sense, no?

Pretty much. Dude's livin' the dream.

His dream, as it were.

yup yup

but on the topic: i generally blame the same unfortunate demographic loop that happened with mainstream comic books, that for the most part, it's the young, straight male audience that is catered to with this kind of stuff, who then become the people making the games and so on. i say this as a collaborator, as I was and/or am still very much into modern games "for gamers by gamers" (thanks Interplay), if not necessarily the unfortunately attached sexism and racism that's already become a legacy

(once in a while, my mind gets blown though, like upon realizing that some of the people who composed my favorite soundtracks in the 8- and 16-bit eras were actually, gasp, women! at Capcom and Konami)

(side note: during the end credits of Saints Row 3 there are a load of production photos of the Volition crew - not surprised that there were a few women, but that any women at all were involved in that game lol)

racially it's generally the same kind of thing, add white to male (or Japanese, I guess, but it's not quite the same)

there needs to be more diversity in creators, a larger breadth of content and experiences drawing from more sources, and so on, which is slowly, slowly happening, i just hope it happens faster than it took for the movie and comics industries

but wait a sec - were we talking about the sexism/racism in the gaming "community" (unfortunately overshadowed by 12-year-old online FPS racist brats that don't represent me) or the systematic racism/sexism in-game content, stories, characters etc.? i was assuming the latter

i intended to talk about the latter, simply because there isnt any answer other than like electroshock in the controllers that can really fix the former unfortunately

also, Saints Row 3 vs. Batman is an interesting comparison i think, if only for the fact that they were both big AAA titles that came out at the same time, but tonally are completely different

Batman right off the bat, I felt a little uncomfortable at EVERY single woman in the game being referred to as a bitch, a rape target, or whatever (seriously). something about the misogyny being such omnipresent window dressing, that was never really addressed in the game at all except to say "that chick is hot" or "how hasn't she been raped yet?" or "she's a crazy bitch!" was odd. the Film Crit Hulk posts were pretty on point, I think.

saints row 3 though - the context is a lot lighter and it didn't bother me at all, though the sexism in it is probably much, much worse. one mission requires you to gun down a small army of strippers and prostitutes dressed as hot cops and bikini cowgirls. they have been "inivited" to a celebratory party for the Saints gang taking over a neighborhood. in the middle of one giving a lap dance to one of your gang members, she pulls out a pistol, to which your dude yells "THESE BITCHES ARE PACKING HEAT!" The name of this chapter? Trojan Whores. so, probably worse, but so silly and stupid as to get a pass?

at the same time i feel like i should feel some more outrage as i honestly do hate when people use that excuse "we're offending EVERYBODY!" as a pathetic excuse to use racist/sexist humor, ignoring their privilege

heh all too true jj

Who was it, even Talia al ghul has the exposed midriff deep hemline and skintight black leather

i really think stuff like this is way more damaging...
http://images.swap.com/images/vg/96/1139096.jpg

yes, all that shitty gender essentialist shovelware for girls

http://static2.cdn.ubi.com/ncsa/parentscorner/website/img/babyz-fashion.jpg

I'm not saying that's "worse" than anything that fedora guy in the odious IGN video would have devised, but it's definitely bullshit.

They both stem from the same problem of not really seeing grown women or young teenage girls as people/

Well more importantly re: the mechanics of this whole thing, as consumers I fear

I should expand on that a bit, if this stuff is going to change at any point, given that it is pretty much a 100% business/profit driven venture, all the female non-white designers in the world aren't going to make a difference as long as the publishers keep looking at the bottom line and seeing it as sexstarved basement dwelling mysoginist violent high fiving dudes

most of msntrm games guardedly transgressive misogyny seems less overtly harmful than the deep-seated misogyny of p much all major hollywood films, reality tv &c &c like the degree to which 'women in videogames' are divorced for actual real life women is so great as to render the whole thing sorta disgustingly ludicrous but ultimately less 'problematic' than the fucked up messaging in like 'friends with kids' or w/e

i mean idk i guess i think my problem is with the way the thread qn is posed cuz i dont think casual racism/sexism is so much less accepted w/in video games than that it manifest in different ways and even the baseline assumption that women as exist as things to project yr fantasies onto or w/e is sorta '...'

like i guess if im drunk on the internet throwing together an argument like: 'characters' (enh) in games exist to serve as fantasy objects/projections of desire in more personal/direct manner than characters in other media & so theres less purpose in portraying nuanced/humanized characters, most characters are either conduits or roadblocks to pleasure &c &c

"...hence, it exploits...people!"

all the female non-white designers in the world aren't going to make a difference as long as the publishers keep looking at the bottom line and seeing it as sexstarved basement dwelling mysoginist violent high fiving dudes

absolutely could not disagree more. the kind of decisions you are talking about are not made at the $$$ level -- there's no cigar-munching guy who doesn't give a shit about games going "WHERE'S THE TITTIES" or something. those hands-off money people want to see 1.) sequels to successful franchises 2) whatever's hot (multiplayer modes, microtransactions, etc.) 3) shit they can write on the back of the box. it's depressing to say but i don't think the sex/racism is cynical. i think i'd be happier if it were. but the bottom line is the people who are making those decisions are at the """creative""" level. writers, artists, designers, producers.

on the comic book point btw isn't it a little unfair to say that that whole industry is a shitpile? i mean maybe i don't know wtf i am talking about because my roommate buys a LOT of comics but they're all like Habibi and Hark a Vagrant and Chris Ware & non Marvel/DC stuff. It seems that there's a lot of that kind of non-creepy-superboobs-type stuff out there?

that's a side note though. TLDR i've worked with & for a few of the bigger companies (EA, Atari) & a couple of smaller ones in the industry & i can tell you that the people who make the shitty unfeminist creative decisions are usually writers, or maaaaaybe producers (who are fyi the second-lowest paid people in the industry on average behind QA!) or maybe artists. Not shareholders and suits.

i played an hour each of deus ex and arkham city at a friend's, having already heard the complaints about racism and sexism, and what i was struck by was that the writing was actually offensively stupid on every other level too

Haha, and to think, the two biggest sexist targets now are Arkham City and DC Comics.

By the way, it seems to me that blog isn't really getting any milage out of the hulk thing. Outside of the caps and occasional reference to self in the third person, there's like no "hulk" to the style.

and what i was struck by was that the writing was actually offensively stupid on every other level too

tbf this is a problem with videogames in general

FCH has said that it's a deliberate affectation that's gotten him far more attention than when he wrote straight. I like his stuff. Yeah, he varies the amount of Hulkness by the post tho

on the comic book point btw isn't it a little unfair to say that that whole industry is a shitpile? i mean maybe i don't know wtf i am talking about because my roommate buys a LOT of comics but they're all like Habibi and Hark a Vagrant and Chris Ware & non Marvel/DC stuff. It seems that there's a lot of that kind of non-creepy-superboobs-type stuff out there?

For the record, the earlier conversation point from Will has been deleted and the thread is indexed again.
Though I think we'd all be interested in seeing that other thread will.

rip my post

a lot of this handwringing is over a certain subset of things on any platform that seem to be mainstream exemplars, because that's what the specialty shops showcase, but they are actually a minority of the market. probably stuff like archie, disney comics outsell big-boobed grimace warrior stuff (hark a vagrant is definitely outselling frank miller's latest castatrophe), and the most popular videogames are more like angry birds, and that's only racist against pigs. movies and tv are still bigger offenders, relatively speaking.

Do they outsell in general, or just in places like Berkeley?

Angry Birds, just the first version, just on iOS, has done 12 million units, all versions and platforms 700 million downloads. Arkham City across all platforms ~5 million.

Smaller margins, but way bigger audience.

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,838 in Books

Holy Terror by Frank Miller
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #138,622 in Books

Ha ha, suck it, frank miller. pwned

i can say with some certainty that i will never need to buy a new frank miller book ever again

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

and yet they went with a butt shot

Plus all the male characters are still muscly male power fantasies and not you know

http://farm7.static.flickr.com/6173/6171158228_5b3c3e0991.jpg

lol or sigh?
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/04/potential-porn-site-sponsorship-causes-split-over-fighting-game-communitys-self-image.ars

I think the fighting game community is the same one that had a bunch of dudes earnestly defending trash-talking each other by shouting "get raped" and the like.

Did this get circulated around here or did I come across it somewhere else? I totally forget

http://www.penny-arcade.com/report/editorial-article/sexual-harassment-as-ethical-imperative-the-ugly-side-of-fighting-games

i saw that situation as a horrible example; that stuff does happen unfortunately, but the nature of most hardcore fighting games involving face-to-face situations leads to people being more respectful that you would guess, especially compared to online

good thread.

boring answer but i think this is mostly due to a) writing being secondary to gameplay (if this is even a consideration - v. often it is not) and b) videogame writing being completely terrible and embarrassing 100% of the time.

lots of folks have already said this stuff but i am serriously struggling to think of one well-written game and i have played roughly a billion of them. i don't think it's a coincidence that we're still in the dark ages when dealing with nuanced topics... we're in the dark ages PERIOD. so we get bad guys shouting 'bitch' at girls bc its easy shorthand for 'edgy'. lazy writing bc these people are lazy/horrible writers.

Earthbound & Mother 3 both well-written, you can count on me to parrot that anywhere.

the last express is better than agatha christie (but this is a once-in-a-decade game, for the most part yeah even/especially the games lauded for their writing do not have very good writing)

agreed on mother/earthbound, very sweet yet haunting games

last express was pretty damn cool, especially because of the way the action happens regardless of what you're doing, and how the game itself was designed around this real-time story with the rewindable clock and such

planescape: torment is legendary, though it could be the nostalgia talking... i haven't played it in about ten years. but i loved the plot/characters, and there was a beastly amount of sheer high-quality text in it

shadow of destiny has all the hallmarks of crappy video game writing - crap dialogue, shallow characters, environments, etc., and as a game it's not very good. but the plot structure is pretty unique and magnificent. basically the concept behind the game is that you keep getting murdered, and given the chance to rewind/alter your destiny, but of course things keep going wrong. then there's time travel involved and a whole bunch of different people and timelines start getting messed with, and a crap load of endings before you get the "true" one that ties everything together. but i'm a sucker for Groundhog Day-type plots

also, not as serious, but i think the comedy writing in the 90s Lucasarts games is very high quality, not just the dialogue but the creativity and general wackiness involved in the puzzles

i see the point there that the writing should be secondary to the gameplay, in general, though it shouldn't mean it should be sacrificed altogether...

Like with Grim Fandango and Tim Schafer, Planescape cemented Chris Avellone's legacy forever. I got at least one other Ilxor in this thread to play the game just by mentioned that Sheena Easton voiced the hot chick love interest in the game.

yeah i was about to point to Mother 3 as being incredibly well written, even before seeing abbott's post

Planescape: Torment's real genius doesn't even start until you pump tons of points into the Nameless One's intelligence and his dialogue choices become ridiculous

Shigesato Itoi who wrote the Mother games is actual proper writer though, isn't he? (also the dad in Totoro!)
The best written games do tend to be the "show don't tell" ones though like Portal, exposition through cutscenes needs to die

Arkham City was written by Paul Dini, the creator of Harley Quinn, which makes the treatment of her by the story an extra layer of creepy to me

also before this thread, I didn't notice the sexism of AC as being overt and off-putting, mostly because I spent most of my time leaping off of buildings and shouting "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE" at the television

I think you mean "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE I'M RACIST"

I will admit that Batman shouting "WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE I'M RACIST" when he leaps off of buildings in AC would make this my favorite game of all time

let's get ZS on the phone and make this happen

The best written games do tend to be the "show don't tell" ones though like Portal, exposition through cutscenes needs to die

yes, yes, YES.

some good good examples of well-written games that I hadn't thought of. a definite 'yes' to earthbound (esp. bc a lot of the good stuff here happens while bumbling around and talking to incidental characters - it's videogamey and not just blindly aping the style of books/films), haven't played mother 3, and was considering grim fandango. it impressed me heavily at the time but it's been so long that I honestly can't say anymore.

I do think it's telling that we've only come up with only a handful of games but I think everyone is in agreement that these games are the exception (and a minor one at that) and not the rule anyway.

also, wow @ itoi being the dad in totoro!

Mother 3 much better written than Mother 2/Earthbound IMO.
Wld argue all the Phoenix Wright games were well-written, funny and sometimes suspenseful. Good female characters in those, too! Though not without some vid game yuckiness eg Trucy's magic panties.

oh videogamepanties

hahaha

feel that Bungie's games, esp. Marathon, are usually well-written although obv a tremendous dearth of female characters

a big factor that hasn't been directly mentioned yet is JAPAN. Japan is a sexist society and most of their art also includes that. and their video games make up a big part of the market.

http://i.imgur.com/V593t.jpg

i know i am probably missing some counterexamples here but it seems like the new fallout stuff has actually done a pretty good job of avoiding these pitfalls considering what a massive game francise its been

― sfdgafhtehw (jjjusten), Wednesday, April 4, 2012 4:25 PM (2 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ha i have the feeling that the fallout games would be better if there was more racism and sexism in them! mostly because i have the cynical feeling that if a 50's dreamworld collapsed into nuclear terror things would get racialist and bigman-dominated really quickly. you get a few 'bad pimp' characters here and there, and some evil psycho rapist villains, and there's the lingering presence of bigotry against ghouls which kind of stands in for other kids of prejudice.

but really there are moments when i felt like the game's unspoken racial equality and gay-positivity felt like, idk, controversy avoidance more than anything? maybe i'm too deep in the liberal bubble.

the fallout world is free of the the kind of hatefulness we see irl. people want to kill each other but not for the reasons people want to kill each other now, if that makes sense.

that's where things get dicey. when to be culturally tolerant means tolerating bigotry/sexism/etc. xpost

That cooking mama comic would be a lot funnier if they didn't have her getting beat the fuck up in it, what the hell.

Plus it activates the ILX/grad school-induced part of my brain that wants to sneer at its unsophisticated understanding of 'power structures.'
But anyway lol, the punchline is: submission by violence.

Plus there is the reactionary 'modern Bust magazine is half about crafting feminist' part of my brain that says wtf is wrong w/being a cooking, crafting mama anyway. That after I libeled those Imagine Girlz Makeup games.

I thought cooking mama is a fun game; I like chopping daikon irl and on vid games.

ALSO I think it's wrong to say "JAPAN is sexist and that's the big factor," U.S. and Japan not in some kind of sexism contest, and if they were I don't honestly know who would win. U.S. is sexist too and to blame all this on Japan and not the ppl in the U.S. buying/supporting/etc this seems....not "casually racist," but...let me dial up Momus here, he would have some things to say about this.

i don't play many japanese games, doesn't seem that relevant to me.

the loci of video game sexism that i think of like penny arcade are US of A

Japan being sexist is a big factor on Japanese games being sexist. I am not commenting on games from other countries there.

I think that comic is more casually racist/sexist than Cooking Mama, is what I'm saying.

but really there are moments when i felt like the game's unspoken racial equality and gay-positivity felt like, idk, controversy avoidance more than anything? maybe i'm too deep in the liberal bubble.

― goole, Friday, April 6, 2012 12:27 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

i dont think its controversy avoidance so much as a conscious attempt to go against the grain! it certainly caused more controversy than if there hadn't been any gay characters in it at all. je sawyer wrote something cool on this topic:

http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/2011/06/platonic-forms-of-marginalized.html

http://i.imgur.com/L5lir.png

holy lol

gamers are so smart

haha damn ppl are so ignorant

i guess what i'm trying to say is, the game would have felt more real to me, and braver, if there was NOT ONLY a great gay character like arcade gannon, but also some asshole who's like "what are you doing rolling around with this faggot?" i can't fully understand why there wasn't tho

iirc there were some sublimated hints here and there that people think the Legion is a bunch of angry gays, right?

(i'll have to read that sawyer piece)

veronica mentions her ex-girlfriend's Brotherhood of Steel family not looking kindly on their relationship

what i dig in fallout are the NCR recruitment posters that say "LADIES! EVERY ONE OF YOU THAT SERVES IS A SLAP ACROSS CAESAR'S FACE!"

"the fallout world is free of the the kind of hatefulness we see irl. people want to kill each other but not for the reasons people want to kill each other now, if that makes sense."

i disagree that it is a gamemaker's responsibility to provide the hatefulness. that's the gamer's job.

abbs otm

yeah agreed.

yeah, lets dial up momus so he can justify his yellow fever over submissive women to us.

why did momus stop posting here

he was banned iirc

Too busy jacking it onto his girlfriend's face.

It's true; dude used to post about that unreservedly.

xp or that too

btw there are crazy japanese rape games that are not sold in the US iirc. so good luck putting that on the American consumer.

Part of why the racist/sexist bits can get downplayed in the Fallout world is that you have a clear external enemy that everybody could project their animus against: super mutants and ghouls. With supermutants running around actively trying to ice normals, and rabid ghouls serving in the place of zombies, those should easily fill the slot of "shit to fear & hate" before all the humans get around to going at other humans.

I hope in the upcoming Wasteland 2 kickstarter project, they keep a satirical or just funny tone to everything, only basing it on 80s ideas instead of post-war/pre-cuban-missile-crisis ones

are japan rape games really chart toppers though? i really think japan's cultural influence on video games esp w/r/t nintendo is more infantilization (and therefore inherently less racist, less sexist) there's really no way around being disgusting if you want games that are more "mature". if they're handled poorly, they're going to be disgusting, and even if they're handled well, they're still going to be disgusting.

I guess the only solution is to start importing vid games from all the world's many sexually progressive, wholly egalitarian countries.

utopiastan's video games are totally awesome

tbh if I lived in that country I wouldn't need the numbing escape of vid games

lol abbs otm again

i really think japan's cultural influence on video games esp w/r/t nintendo is more infantilization (and therefore inherently less racist, less sexist)

are you fucking kidding me

do you not really remember, for example, Barrett in FFVII, or all of the grossly exaggerated Italianisms from the Mario games that I posted upthread, or this:

oh no! SPANKING VIDEO GAME! oh no!

xp the reason they're totally awesome is because you live them

mario only gets progressively racist the more gritty and "real" he gets. you'd need to have 'call of duty' level mario to really get offensive.

Can I say the world's progressive/sexually explicit video games also sound boring and creepy?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_Life_%28video_game%29

"Night Life was marketed as an aid for the sex life of couples. It included such features as a schedule to determine a woman's period, and a catalog of possible sexual positions, with artwork consisting of black-and-white outlines."

Maybe just that one does.

Different aims of a product. when games are designed without the actual gameplay or game-ness forefront, you can get drops in quality. Its one of the reasons educational or advocacy games aren't as good; their primary focus is on teaching or advocacy, not necessary on badass gamery. Implicit messaging in a game because explicit, and subtext becomes text, tending to make you a helluva lot less likely to accept or consume it.

thus the boringness.

it makes more sense to compare those Japanese sex games to Japanese pornography, which it's very much in line with

Abbottttt were you also offended by the chappelle wayne brady skit

I was offended by the horrible cgi

i guess what i'm trying to say is, the game would have felt more real to me, and braver, if there was NOT ONLY a great gay character like arcade gannon, but also some asshole who's like "what are you doing rolling around with this faggot?" i can't fully understand why there wasn't tho

ha this was p much the source of my question about whether mass effect lets you roleplay a homophobe

ernest adams & the Straight Male Gamer http://www.nomorelost.org/2011/04/08/equality-in-the-gaming-industry-interview-with-ernest-adams/

innerestin'

Female games journalist vs E3:
http://www.kotaku.com.au/2012/06/513794/

dunno about that article but i will say that i'm kinda astonished E3 still does the booth babe thing
like how insulting and fratboy is that?

basically the maximum possible amount

couple of reactions to geek cultures:

http://squidygirl.blogspot.com/2012/06/lets-play-game-part-1-catwoman-and-lara.html

http://squidygirl.blogspot.com/2012/06/lets-play-game-part-2-women-vs-tropes.html

for a sec i thought that journo article was gonna be one of those freaky pro-ESDF things

then i finished it and was a little sadder

why is esdf better than wasd?

I'd assume b/c ESDF would have your hand in the homerow position but that's the first I've heard of this particular thing

i take no position on it, as a lefty anyway
http://use-esdf.org/

ugh the comments on that kotaku piece...

The Kotaku piece made me fucking boiling mad, and I havent involved myself in the games feminism thing that much as I'm not a huge gamer. But faaark, the patronising attitude is coming out all over the place lately, every time a woman pipes up and says "guys you know what? This shit actually isn't cool" they end up with a barrage of "die you bitch whore" abuse.

My male gamer friends are astonished at the vitriol. And that makes me even sadder, that they would be suprised it exists.

Laura Hudson, the recently ex-editor of Comicsalliance, was excellent at publishing stories that explored questions of gender and sexism in comics, and her reward was a never ending tirade of sexist bullshit in the comments boxes. Comics and Video Games fandom just seem really regressive and repellent to me; not sure if they're actually any worse that other realms of fandom, but they make no effort - or lack the self-awareness to - mask it.

Also, ex-ilxor, as she was the original mod on ILG with me

I think part of it is that geek and nerd subculture is full of geeks and nerds i.e. people who have a gradient of ASD/socialization problems.

And the Internet is a great way to express unfiltered idiocy. Like sports talk radio.

i wouldn't blame nerddom -- puzzle-game geeks and archie comic nerds aren't spewing ugliness.

Probably because those are mainly women in those categories

they're still nerds!

Yeah, I'll take a random enthusiast over a random Xbox player any day.

Well, yeah, no question there, but I think that if you want an area where unsocialized obsessive dudes wind up, nerd culture has a far lower physical barrier to entry than say football

ASD/socialization problems no excuse for being a totally vile misogynist

even if that is the case

I don't know that it's fair to suggest the two overlap

yeah, there's enough problems without adding on mysogyny

Not excusing it, just saying I ain't surprised

I dont think the kind of gamers who abuse people in comments boxes or over their Gears of War headset are nerds, is the thing to be honest. They're jock bullies, just like they would be on the footy field or at a bar. Its just that playing video games isnt uncool anymore - esp games like GoW, Halo, GTA etc.

uh, yeah they are nerds.

unless "jocks" are really into leaving comments on kotaku articles on your planet.

Actually I know plenty of pretty unnerdy guys who play video games, is all im sayin. Unless 'uses a computer' is all that makes someone a nerd!?

as do i, but they wouldn't even know what kotaku is.

The internet has made me hate "nerds".

I love nerdy shit but I haaaaaatttte "nerd culture"

I dont think the kind of gamers who abuse people in comments boxes or over their Gears of War headset are nerds, is the thing to be honest. They're jock bullies, just like they would be on the footy field or at a bar. Its just that playing video games isnt uncool anymore - esp games like GoW, Halo, GTA etc.

― Pureed Moods (Trayce), Friday, June 22, 2012 10:44 PM (5 days ago) Bookmark

nah ime these would be bona fide nerds

I don't know why we have to classify people into buckets like "nerds" and "jocks", lots of people have jockish tendencies if they don't have to back up things that they or risk getting their ass kicked.

frogbs are you a nerd or a jock

start a poll thread

jock'cuse!

uhhh take one guess dayo

I think bro or brah is a far better and less 20th Century designation than jock.

In tech, some bemoan the rise of 'brogrammer' culture

Okay the thing that really made me lol in that article aside from "bro down and crush some code" was the reference to Kick-Ass Cupcakes, which the author obviously does not realize is the actual name of a Boston cupcake bakery.

it's like the darkside of the Ace of Cakes folks in their baltimore hideout

come to think of it, the rise of gendered portmanteaus is what makes me most violent of all

what, like "brodown" or "manscape"?

ARGH

dudecum

jock'cuse!

― Philip Nunez, Thursday, June 28, 2012 1:44 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao

http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2012/10/14/starcraft-e-sports-hits-the-big-time

http://thephoenix.com/Boston/recroom/145892-one-womans-battle-against-the-anxious-masculinity/

Wow. Great read.

ugh, why do the ppl i share this hobby with suck so much?

excellent read.

^^

that was a v inoffensive read

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/11/01/halo_4_release_343_industries_bonnie_ross_and_kiki_wolfkill_decry_sexist.html

better ridiculously late then never

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sHp-iapqvo#!

not clicking

it's not bad, actually

not clicking

Suit yourself - it's log.

hah that was funny actually, assumed from the screencap that it was the opposite of what it was

^same here. and he IS a Charlie Brooker clone, but a pretty good one!

Lookee that, it's gone viral enough to make the Guardian:

http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/gamesblog/2012/nov/17/oxm-breakdown-review?cat=technology&type=article

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/12/04/hitman-facebook-promo-killed-must-have-had-small-tits
wow

good job square pr team

ex-TalkRadar folks talk about this kinda thing, mainly the #1reason

http://www.lasertimepodcast.com/2012/12/03/laser-time-1reason-fun/

I really hope someday speech-to-text tools are good enough to interpret these podcasts

I just hope people stop making fucking podcasts.

not to insist that a specious parallelism is the same thing as equality, but for what its worth acc. to pcgamer there was list of things you could say was wrong with dudes also

Female friends got to be called out on “awful make-up,” “annoying laugh,” “strange odour,” “muffin top,” or “small tits,” among others. Male targets, meanwhile, could be chided on their “bad hair,” “big ears,” “hairy back,” “big gut,” or “small penis.”

not included: "plays videogames"

what happened to the girls vs video game tropes project? It's hard to tell from the reddit men's movement.

She stole all the money, and lol at every dipshit who donated to that crap

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7274/7619451560_2371b4cffb_z.jpg

that looks a LOT like someone I know

that looks like $5 of gamestop credit right there.

I have that IKEA desk lamp

http://i.imgur.com/ZkAq3.jpg

jfc

http://i.minus.com/ib0B4pIriu03PJ.gif

good use of that gif

tom chick on this. he's got blinders on. http://www.quartertothree.com/fp/2013/01/16/dead-island-or-bust-the-case-for-tasteless-horror-tchotchkes/

yeah... sometimes that dude is just straight up wrong. it's a shame because the use of horror and unrestricted content in games is totally worth defending, but the actual bust - the thing we are talking about here - is just idiotic

rmde at that guy.

His response to 1) basically boils down to "the objectification of women in horror appeals to the people who should be watching it, i.e. MEN, so therefore it's fine". Great reasoning!

You can only claim it objectifies women if you also concede that Pirahna 3D objectifies women. You might not be wrong.

*steeples fingers*

the first dead island was the worst game i played to completion in 2012

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

kind of lol but mostly sad

But I find it disappointing that Deep Silver is caving on this issue for two important reasons. No, not those reasons. I’m going to be mostly serious.

After the jump, two important things. Not the ones you think I’m thinking of.

^^^what a knob

But did you realize it was also a joke?

shutters fall, new understanding is achieved

http://gameological.com/2013/01/it-belongs-in-a-museum/

This is probably the best reaction to that thing yet, which talks about it like it was a deliberate piss-take of the worst excesses of early 21st-C vidja game marketing

You could argue that the figure doesn’t deserve consideration as art, because it wasn’t created by an “artist” per se, and Deep Silver didn’t mean to send up the worst impulses of big-budget game studios. But that only makes it better. You’ve heard of outsider art? This is insider art, crafted by forces deep within the beast. The fact that it was meant to showcase the most appealing aspects of Dead Island is the cherry on top of the depravity sundae. It’s rare that we get to bear witness to an expression of awfulness this pure—it’s perfectly ugly. I hope to see it in a museum someday, as a relic of a bygone era.

that last paragraph you quote especially is tops

it BELONGS in a MUSEUM

haha

It BELONGS on EBAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6p5AZp7r_Q

most of the way through this, seems pretty women's studies 101
weird that they're not talking about japan v US takes on this stuff tho

this fucken guy is hysterical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfkS9YS_T0k

oh man i need to not look at youtube responses like ever

argh what a fucknut

"We, the audience, are not allowed to have an opinion, it seems"

Except by, you know, MAKING A RESPONSE VIDEO OF YOUR OPINION, POSTING IT ON YOUTUBE, THEN POSTING A LINK TO IT ON YOUR BLOG.

dude is very angry that he wasn't offered a chance to express his dissenting opinion, but has assembled a 9-minute video about the video which... does not express a dissenting opinion

I mean I'm sure he has a very cogent and rational counterargument to why this might be a slightly regressive trope, as must all the people going "lol rape" and "lol show tits" under his video, and am very sad that I didn't get to hear it, obv

MAKING A RESPONSE VIDEO OF YOUR OPINION, POSTING IT ON YOUTUBE, THEN POSTING A LINK TO IT ON YOUR BLOG.

You forgot "blogging about your opinion, making a response video reading out your blog post, posting it on youtube, then posting a link to it on your blog". Don't forget to put some purchase links for random you-related merchandise in the video description!

Yeah her video is pretty damn spot-on, and it's a testament to how big a problem sexism is in the culture that dudes are getting up in arms about something that has nothing to do w the content. That bit about them taking a female-centric game, scratching it, and demoting the lead character to a damsel in a new Starfox is pretty ugh.

that's the guy who did the /v/ga bit on her, right? that was a terrible fake awards show.

xp Yeah, that was definitely the most interesting bit of the video for me. I've never played any of the Starfox series and don't plan to start, but I'd love to play that original game.

Shigeru Miyamoto is a hero to most but he never meant shit to me so I'm kind of bummed out but she seems to have a reasonable case in calling him out in particular, too ;_;

This guy thinks his signature is worth $30 on top of the cost of the $19 for an unsigned copy of his book? Kind of the icing on the 'privileged white male just doesn't get it' cake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeXDNg7scyU

Awesome

See, I watch that and can only think "why were the second and fourth screens switched?" and "since when can you win the level by coming up to the left of Kong?"

lol i was thinking the same thing. also, how much i hate Donkey Kong deep down

http://www.themarysue.com/pax-tomb-raider-cosplay/

What happens when a game journo dude decided to play the "cosplay is consent" card with a group of Lara Croft cosplayers

Wizemann had been interviewed in the past and said everything seemed normal. That is, until the interviewer asked his first question, “How does it feel to be at a convention where none of the men could please you?”

meanwhile at GDC this week, "scantily clad female dancers" at developers association party
http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157266/igda-gdc-party-brenda-romero-resignation

these guyz :-( http://yetizen.com/

good thing they're a strategic keystone with an innovation lab

feels like it was only yesterday that "do you come with the car" "OH YOU" banter was pretty much the norm. when did that stop? when E3 was last open to the public?

i'm pretty sure it's still the norm at these international weapons dealer conferences except it's "do you come with that surface-to-air missile?" and "get out of my dreams and into my amphibious assault humvee"

flashbacks to http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/SwYQrHIVgaI/AAAAAAAAGQ0/0OrqMYy9Q-Q/s1600/DealCentury1.jpg

pretty much the most disheartening week ever for me. this whole thing is just disgusting. meagan is a friend and former colleague and frankly some of the stuff that happened to her was things that happened when i worked with her that i was unaware of. this shit is terrible and i'm not sure it will ever change. a hobby filled with mean, angry little boys. the comments she's been dealing with on her blog and various comments sections and facebook this week have just been unreal, i can't even fathom people anymore.

another blog from these week, more, complicated i guess, and even more depressing, can't even believe some of these stories

http://trixie360.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/sexism-in-games-a-mea-culpa/

but we've all been passively complicit in it, every fucking person in the industry myself included & i don't know where to even begin.

do u know who the journalist is?

no. i can't really get into specifics but we were involved in the reporting on an incident relayed in her original blog post regarding someone that worked for a publisher.

http://meagan-marie.tumblr.com/post/46396481491/what-would-you-do-if-you-werent-afraid#_=_

i did not attend pax

to my knowledge said person is not employed at that publisher any longer

fwiw, i sub'd to GI for many years bc it was not puerile, sexist, maxim in video game skins like all the other mags. a force for good imho.

i know you avoid posting on ILG m@tt since it runs a lil too close to your day job but i really appreciate you stopping by here to take a stand on this issue form an industry perspective.

that trixie360 blog post was good, wish I'd set myself on fire instead of reading the comments though

I mean I know this is basically the one constant truth of the internet but there I went

i feel like the funny ("funny") thing is that the motives of a lot of (not necessarily "most" but maybe?) people in industries that tend to traffic in casual sexism and even racism aren't taking part in advancing it because they themselves find it "admirable" but because they're cynical and feel like this is just giving the people what they want, and tbh their own careers matter more than mildly suggesting that such elements be toned down. i speak from another perspective in another industry which certainly has people working through the moral quandaries of sexism and the odd bit of winking racism, and unfortunately the ones who runs things immediately-to-far above my standing are the ones who more willingly embrace it.

anyway somewhat off topic.

i'll probably start an ilm thread but fwiw, i am producing this talk regarding (somewhat tangentially, we'll see) sexism in the performing arts programming industry:
http://www.housingworks.org/events/detail/noteworthy-a-conversation-with-women-at-the-forefront-of-the-nyc-arts-progr/

M@tt, are you going to Pax Prime this year?

Nah with a 2yr old I avoid travel if I can, e3 & gamescom for me this year, though I welcome our new once monthly pax convention overlords

But yeah like forks said I don't go to ilg because I'm way too glib & chatty on ilx & I think the only way to be a game journo anymore is to have complete & total paranoia about the internet, but yeah this the treatment of a friend in regards to this stuff was just so gross I had to vent

Bioshock is pretty great tho

is that a new game or something?

What's Gamescom like?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI

This video showed up in my related videos section. it sucks shit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6gLmcS3-NI

Sarkeesian is such an easy target for internet trolls. I honestly wish she were a little more challenging and interesting but she's still among the better video game essayists if only due to the low bar.

i am somewhat amazed someone made a ten minute video refuting zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

is casual racism a big issue in games? seems like sexism is a much more pervasive problem. not every game is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out.

yes

http://kotaku.com/5836692/that-weirdly-racist-npc-in-deus-ex-human-revolution

I've never gotten the clammy chill of racism from punch out, at least not to the extent I get from seeing actual boxing.

Because I've not played the game, I don't know (and the article doesn't say) whether there are other black characters in the game, which would seem to make a difference - if she's one of many, and the many don't sound like that, then saying "Surely there won't be anyone that sounds like this in 14 years!" is not in itself a good look.

Well the title of this thread is that it's more accepted in videogames than in other media. I'm not really seeing that. Feel like for every Deus Ex that gets called out people call out a Transformers.

Transformers is practically one long videogame cutscene

a good portion of it is the multiplayer/internet culture, but yeah it definitely feels like racism is more normalized in gaming

there's been good writing at kotaku on this issue

http://kotaku.com/5897227/come-on-video-games-lets-see-some-black-people-im-not-embarrassed-by

http://kotaku.com/5985340/this-is-how-we-get-more-black-people-in-video-games

http://kotaku.com/5987766/this-is-why-we-need-more-black-people-making-video-games

i disagree with the idea that video games need to follow the models of other media to fix racism/sexism since the other media is largely the source.

uh

not parsing u philip

the caricatures come from movies/tv/comic books -- which aren't doing a better job than video games at least on the commercial end.

lol that's a steaming pile

well, let me walk that back, i still dont understand what exactly youre saying

...

1) The caricatures come from more than just movies/TV/comic books; they come from music, they come from the stage, they come from historical scientific studies, they come from conventional wisdom, they come from old wives' tales, they come from EVERYWHERE

2) Tyler Perry has built a gigantic media empire off of a series of movies that encompasses a broad spectrum of the African-American experience. There was an entire renaissance of black filmmakers spearheaded by Melvin Van Peebles and continuing on through Spike Lee, the Hudlins, and John Singleton that explored different facets of black experience, to the point where modern movies have a spectrum of black characters to offer consumers, including some caricatures.

2) Ditto with television, where entire networks have dedicated themselves to showing multifaceted black characters (TV One, sometimes BET, OWN, Tyler Perry's terrible TBS show)

3) Comic books have been way out in front of this for a long, long time, stretching back to the introduction of characters like Black Lightning, Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm and the entire Milestone universe.

Basically you have no idea what you are talking about.

well specifically i'm saying tyler perry making video games would be counterproductive (having a milestone comics of videogames i'm less emphatically against, but there's other reasons why i wouldn't be optimistic about it), but i'm also generally against video games looking outward for a corrective in a place that doesn't look much better by comparison and is also the source of a lot of the problems.

so really what you're saying is "I can't read" because no one is actually advocating that Tyler Perry start making videogames

philip what it seemed to me that you wre saying is that strategie sthat have been used to pursue diversity/humanizing people of color in other medium (i.e. just introducing enough characters of colors to be able to express a diversity of common, humanistic sentiments) is not valid for video games because the video game industry makes more money nowadays than movies/tv/comics? i really don't understand

speak for yourself bruh, i'd play a LucasArts-style Why Did I Get Married? xp

I'd argue that this is functionally equivalent to arguing that Tyler Perry literally make video games. In the very least, Tyler Perry literally making videogames would have answered this call:
"I hope it'll be sooner rather than later, but as long as the industry maintains its focus on blockbusters over everything, it'll be a long time coming. Which means that what video games needs is not just Blazing Saddles, but Tyler Perry."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literal_and_figurative_language

as I said

If you look at "characters like Black Lightning, Black Panther, Luke Cage, Storm and the entire Milestone universe," they aren't marquee characters today, and it's telling when there's such a pent-up need for a Morales Spider-Man that comics have a long way to go in catching up to its audience.

what's your alternative, philip?

I'm saying that his figurative use has no functional difference in the same way that a figurative Tyler Perry would be just as damaging as a literal Tyler Perry.

re: alternative -- strip away narratives borrowed from other media/genres and concentrate on games as games, which just by that alone will be less racist/sexist.

lol so your answer is that the video games industry should just stick to remaking tetris

tetris is probably racist against slavs

what does concentrating on 'games as games' mean. are you saying video games should be 'colorblind.'

think he wants to shut down the whole avenue of narrative and hyperreal game design just so there won't be any humanoids to put racisms on

won't stop people who play in arcade fighter tournaments from shouting "rape" and "nigger" though!

um

i'm saying games ought to refrain from drawing in narratives obv. modeled after other media around it. If it does this, it would at least avoid the racist/sexist and all other baggage as a minimum.

xp sorry dayo I was trying to jocularly make a point about the audience being as much of a source of the problem itt as the creators

i mean games ought to do this anyway as a means of growth for the medium as a whole. the whole not bringing in 100 years of problematic culture in is a bonus.

this reminds me, I need to get onto marketing my new competitive fighting game Niggerrape

at least then the catcalls will be game-appropriate

I am going to now go off and do some massive penance for that joke

hehe "massive penance"

so philip, getting rid of RPGs would be a good first step right?

narrative is not something that's self-contained in literature/film/comics/tv, narrative is human experience related. you're being willfully naive here philip

unless your answer to reducing sexism/racism in video games is to make 100 more angry birds

RPGs are pretty broad but yeah Gygaxian RPGs don't really make sense on a video game platform.
I'd argue that in its purest form, video game narratives are incidental, rather than tacked on.
I'm in favor of games ditching its macho posturing audience as well (which i think is going to happen anyway with casual gaming)

and yes angry birds is a step in the right direction. next step will be slightly peeved birds, then indifferent birds.

ok now your arguments have now literally detached you from earth you are floating into space goodbye it was nice to know you

the video games industry should just stick to remaking tetris

this is an acceptable solution imo

narrative and worldbuilding are incidental in video games. that's why halo slash fiction literally doesn't exist. nobody on this planet except for maybe 3 people total have ever cosplayed. people only care about how fast their ping times are and whether or not they can pull off a 45-hit combo in marvel v. capcom 2.

i've seen sexist tetris though -- though i'd argue that's again borrowing from pinball cheesecake.

I would be down w more abstract and non-figurative games.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/genre/ios-games/id6014?mt=8

Don't have an iphone. Let's see EA spend tens of millions of dollars on an abstract game and I'll be there.

The top 10 retail video games in the United States in 2012:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops II (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)
2. Madden NFL 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, Wii U)
3. Halo 4 (360)
4. Assassin's Creed III (360, PS3, PC, Wii U)
5. Just Dance 4 (Wii, 360, Wii U, PS3)
6. NBA 2K13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, Wii U, PC)
7. Borderlands 2 (360, PS3, PC)
8. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (360, PS3, Wii, PC)
9. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes (Wii, 360, NDS, PS3, 3DS, PSV, PC
10. FIFA Soccer 13 (360, PS3, Wii, PSV, 3DS, Wii U, PSP)
(Source: The NPD Group)

clearly abstract/non-figurative games do great

Clearly alot of people paid to see Transformers.

what is this transformers argument

Dollars earned != good content

lol so your answer to addressing issues of sexism/racism in the video game industry today is to plug your ears and play tetris... cool

I'm glad you wrote it out for me.

Dollars earned = good business, which is the argument being floated to move against changing the narratives to have broader/more realistic minority characters

you guys are engaging in the most shameless "have your cake and eat it too" argument

also Closure is awesome re: abstract games; it's not even clear that the protagonist has a gender

Even if video games were purely a reflection of other aspects of culture, having a disproportionate number of them reflecting the most regressive parts of culture probably isn't desirable.

That list is why there aren't more games with female protagonists or protagonists of color.

Also it is a list entirely populated by sequels.

I mean, unless you only watch movies with guns, tits, and gangsters

oh god I've described half the audience for the top ten games listed

pretty sure there are people of color in Just Dance 4 #naturalrhythm

also lol at looking at a list that contains basketball, football and soccer games and having the first reaction be "why all the white people?"

lol

that's the first reaction because "acting ethnic" in a video game involves funny accents or stereotyped characters and basketball players in games don't talk, iirc

like, god forbid there be characters who are boring, normal people who are not white

my point in posting that list was that fully half of that list is dominated by narrative-driven gamers that heavily depend on worldbuilding to achieve their success, to spell it out

narrative worldbuilding and killing stuff

also lol at looking at a list that contains basketball, football and soccer games and having the first reaction be "why all the white people?"

Haha somehow I looked past all the non-narrative games on the list since they basically do not involve characterization, but this is a fair point.

putting aside the "macho posturing" of that list, is Assassin's Creed III the only one in that top 10 to have a protagonist of color?

xp My NBA2K13 MyCareer player "Mr. Clutch" would have to disagree with you, then slam his teammates at a press conference

Why is the top 10 list of games entering this conversation? Most of those don't really prove anyone's points

which btw are super clear

everyone's points, i mean

narrative is not something that's self-contained in literature/film/comics/tv, narrative is human experience related. you're being willfully naive here philip

Dollars earned = good business, which is the argument being floated to move against changing the narratives to have broader/more realistic minority characters

you guys are engaging in the most shameless "have your cake and eat it too" argument

narrative is certainly self-contained in movies w/r/t video games when it is being advanced by cut-scenes, for example. Most games you can pretty much pick apart in this way leaving very little narrative left to call its own.

i make all my characters black gay women in the character creator so i have multiple tiers of roleplaying going on do u c

um

on an unrelated note, I'm going to be thinking through my ideas a few times before typing them into ilx for a while

narrative is certainly self-contained in movies w/r/t video games when it is being advanced by cut-scenes, for example. Most games you can pretty much pick apart in this way leaving very little narrative left to call its own.

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, April 2, 2013 3:17 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark

this is both true and completely immaterial to this discussion

it's material in that within these often ham-fisted attempts at appropriating cinematic narratives into video games that sexism/racism come along for the ride, though apparently that arkham game decided to one-up its source material? lego batman seemed alright though.

appropriating cinematic narratives into video games

Games with linear plots or parallel linear missions that later reconcile to an endgame, which possibly has variations, are not necessarily comparable to cinema to a greater degree than they are to anything else! I mean, we aren't saying that books are sexist, so you can't blame video games based on books for being sexist. The idea that any particular medium can't determine it's own path because it's just a shadow of something else is stupid.

Would you agree that it's harder to forge your own path and escape a set of cultural and commercial expectations when it is under the shadow of that other thing, though?

no, because you are still within the culture that has all of the baggage

Video games aren't under the shadow of anything, any more than movies are in the shadow of the written word

Man I am so sad that Ms. Pac-Man was an inferior game and was not at all successful

I think I just backslid on my idea to prethink my comments, but I will not back down on my support of Ms. Pac-Man.

Ms Pac-Man is clearly the best of the Pac-Man games

Yes!

"Pacman displays all the patho-obsessive characteristics that are the special achievement of the first generation peasant. Pacman does not live, he survives. Pacman does not know the freedom and enjoyment of the drift; he is locked in a Malthusian trap without cheat codes, doomed to struggle ad infinitum to overcome his hunger in the knowledge that the next meal will be even harder to acquire. To eat more is to be chased with added vengeance.

For the ghosts work does not exist, their quest to find Pacman and eat him is purely recreational. Failure is without consequence, the drift is theirs and their collective wandering strategies are an inspiration to every algorithmic psychogeographer. Their scatter-chase-repeat routine is a wonder in itself but their swagger in blue mode, when suddenly they are prey and may be eaten by their dinner, is the unchallenged masterpiece in the arsenal of experimental walking techniques. Again the ghosts do not encounter real harm when devoured, rebirth comes as a guarantee. The ghost in blue mode is in trickster mode, they are urging Pacman to eat the freaky corner fruits out of self-interest but also out of benevolence.

Blinky, Pinky, Inky and Clyde are not attacking Pacman, evil is not a useful concept in their carefree existence. They are the Magister Ludi's of crazy cookie land, enticing the pupil to work harder and to move further, to new level-environments. It is not necessary to eat, it is necessary to travel."

I don't buy that games would necessarily be coarsened by the outside culture to the same extent without the prevailing influence of movies/tv/comics etc...

These are the top selling board games, for example:
http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Toys-Games-Board/zgbs/toys-and-games/166225011

So board games aren't immune to the kind of licensing/genre nonsense that dominate video games but just looking at it, it looks like they do a much better job at making board games qua board games at least on the top-seller level. (the kotaku list for best board games looked very different!)

confession: my favorite board game was the one based on pacman where you'd collect marbles in this pacman approximation that the designers solved the axis-orientation problem by having him eat through an orifice in its butt.

http://cardsagainsthumanity.com/

To be fair, Cards Against Humanity's offensiveness is anything but casual.

Would you agree that it's harder to forge your own path and escape a set of cultural and commercial expectations when it is under the shadow of that other thing, though?

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, April 2, 2013 5:27 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, because you are still within the culture that has all of the baggage

― the pheromones of hot clothing (DJP), Tuesday, April 2, 2013 5:28 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark

just gonna quote this response again, because it is otm

i'm with you guys on the inception matroska-ing of cultural shackles but to say they're equivalent or have the same influence at each layer...

Not really wanting to jump into this debate, but I thought this was pretty OTM:

it's material in that within these often ham-fisted attempts at appropriating cinematic narratives into video games that sexism/racism come along for the ride

Counter-example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_or_Alive_(series)

FWIW, I basically am in line with DJP's take here but sort of buy into Philip's initial statement, which I read not as ''games shouldn't borrow from cinema or comics'' as ''games shouldn't borrow from trash cinema and trash comics,'' which I think they kind of do, a lot. Superhero books have come a long way and there are a lot of talented creators consciously trying to fight the tide, but the tide is still there. I've read more stuff about gender biases (the way star artists are permitted/encouraged to draw women's bodies, the women in refrigerators issue, tokenism of female membership on superteams, the sheer numbers of men vs women working in the industry etc.) but I doubt the industry/community would do well on race either, see for example the shocking fan resistance to the idea of a non-white Spiderman in either comics or movies.

Again, there's been tons of progress! The internet brings out the worst in fandom but it also means there's been a visible push-back against all of this stuff. I would like to believe that today's male white geek is a little more self-aware than his equivalent twenty years ago, and that non-white non-male geeks find more material that doesn't alienate them. But there's still so much in geek-genre comics that should wither and die there rather than remain a continuing source of video game material. I'm sure that's true of other media as well but I do think comics are relatively speaking, behind the curve, if not AS behind as games.

(Outside superheroes it's another rodeo entirely. Would love to see a Dykes To Watch Out For game!)

(Catching up on those Kotaku links presently - good stuff, thanks.)

I think drawing off of trash cinema or comics is fine! It's just not the only thing that should get made.

I like trash, too! but better a game with original pooping mechanics than a boring adaptation of "pink flamingos"

answer to casual racism/sexism in gamse: develop original pooping mechanic

so I guess they were on the right track here: oh no! SPANKING VIDEO GAME! oh no!

just didn't go far enough

pii-u!

Holding out for the licensed Halle Berry ice-cream simulator, myself.

dying

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10567

no info available on the validity of the survey, whether it represents readers of the magazine or the industry at large, sampling methods etc. It's likely there's some kind of gender gap in salaries but this doesn't tell us anything likely to be useful or accurate.

you know i think i have needed a new screen name for a while, kinda tired of asking ppl to deindex

bbiab thread

i know that it's anecdotal but i have seen sort-of what would explain those numbers maybe. aside from the (very few) women i've known in places i've worked never ever ever ever ask for as much money as they're worth (there was this one place where my team of 6 had 2 women, and they were probably hour-for-hour the most valuable people on the team, myself included, and both were the lowest paid, bc the dudes came in puffed up w self-confidence). but also the wage gap is probably caused by the fact that females don't survive, because no matter how much the workplaces try to be inviting and equal, at the end of the day there are a bunch of dudes who work in games. And most of them are ok. But a few of them are creepy. And some of them are downright scary.

i am in a position of very very limited power (imagine the bottom of the food chain -- now imagine the person who writes plans for the bottom of the food chain -- there I am!) at a company that has it as part of their mandate to be inclusive and fair and inviting to everyone. And for the most part they're amazing about it. Far better than some places that I think I've complained about on previous threads (one place in particular where someone I know had his hours cut for COMPLAINING ABOUT SEEING HARASSMENT AT THE WORKPLACE) (and no it wasn't a white knight type thing, he was actually really really uncomfortable). But there's still sketchy shit. Casual homophobic, sexist shit gets said on the floor. I try to call people on it -- in fact, I've gotten kind of scary about it before -- but i'm getting fatigued. and i'm the only one calling people on it (in fact on a team of 11, i'd say 1 (me) actively discourages that kind of talking, 2 others dislike it but don't speak up, 1 more is maybe coming around on being a human being, and the other 7 just don't think there's anything wrong w/ the way we/they/everyone talks at the workplace).

this is kinda off topic bc this thread is about the content of games i guess, but since we're kinda talking abt the workplace i figured it was time to fucking complain

great that this display name was available also

I find that all quite germane! First of all, that climate matters and is important to the lives of people working in, near, or approaching the industry. Second, it'd be hard to argue that this wouldn't in some way impact game content, probably by quite a lot. What seems like a good idea or a well-rounded character or a funny joke in such a narrow environment with so mnay voices squeezed out, may prove to be...not so much when the game hits the streets. Or rather, it resonates with the marketplace which has itself squeezed out a lot of those same groups of people...self-fulfilling cycle.

Yeah you don't need to play more than about 5 minutes of something like borderlands 2 to realise that either there were no women at all on that team, or the women there had zero power.

(I'm only picking on borderlands because it's the latest in a very long line of games I've felt embarrassed to play in front of my girlfriend).

I remember seeing the end credits of Saints Row 3, where they have a crew photo slideshow, and being genuinely surprised that there were any women involved in making the game. There were maybe 3 out of 100? TBF that game is quite totally shameless about everything, not just its rampant sexism

Aubrey Norris ‏@Chupacaubrey 28 Mar

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Chewing through someone's skull is okay as long as they are wearing clothes.

what a vile culture of spoiled stupid little boys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYMOXSrpqCE&feature=youtu.be

what the fuck? Kill all involved.

what in the hell. how does that have a budget? how does that get made? who's sitting around writing that crap and narrating it and doing the titles and....christ

i'm afraid to ask, but what was that? the video went private

a Machinima.com "show" called Spanks & Shreds or something like that where model were dressed up as "rock chicks" and then spanked as they played Rock Band

Yeah, the preview image is still up, vid is down. I wonder how long before a copy pops up

youtube keeps "recommending for me" horrible anti-Sarkeesian videos with annoying names like "Feminism vs FACTS" and it's bumming me out to see them in my sidebar (also bummed out by whatever part of youtube's algorithm thinks I actually like these things) (Google does think I'm a guy apparently but I hope it's not showing these to everyone male because that would be even more depressing than being singled out for them)

so yeah, I probably shouldn't have clicked on that Spanks vid, it'll be another tick in the giant database of how much I love to watch creepy woman-hating gaming-related videos

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/06/misogyny-sexism-and-why-rps-isnt-shutting-up/

good article, I think? maybe a bit self-congratulatory in places but I guess the urge to say that is just the same as all those asshats shouting "white knight" so eh

btw recent internet shitstorms have shown me that my tomboyish childhood and my subsequent life as a computer geek are not the result of heroically rejecting male privilege so much as buying fully into male privilege with me as honorary male (itself a privilege of having comfortably-off scientist parents), rejecting womanly things as degrading

was gonna say more but it's tl;dr and off-topic since I'm not a games programmer, just a dumb database monkey who first learnt a smattering of bad programming because I liked games, and now two decades later I'm still on the bottom rung of a career I was never any good at but I never noticed because boys didn't talk to me (I can't be bad at programming - nobody else I know even does this stuff!)

(There's another woman programmer in my office. Are we teaming up to further the cause of women in technology? Hell no. We are competing for who can be more manlike, who can wring more pats on the head from the real men who do the "real work" and get the real recognition; both just trying to pretend we aren't women, that gender rules don't have to apply to us, but not making the same exception for the other. We're not helping anyone and I'm tired. Sorry for off-topic.)

do you want to make a game? this looked cool (though it is for flash)
flixel.org

that does look cool! tbh the ideas are missing as much as the programming talent and/or patience, but I still like to think one day the stars might align enough to knock out some crappy puzzle game, at least...