Another thread about sexism in video games.

[TheMysteriousGX]

Except I wasn't responding to that point, nor was Critical claiming that about Sekiro.

Sekiro had surreality to it I've come to expect in certain circles because it was the mere act of an American studio doing a game based on Japanese history that got people riled up. Not that it did it poorly or whatever, the MERE ACT.

That's not the same thing as criticizing D.Va as a character, because no-one has said (to my knowledge) that Blizzard should have never made characters from outside the US in its game.

Critical has argued that games shouldn't be criticized outside of the culture that created them; i.e. weird sexual stuff in Japanese games shouldn't be criticized from a non-Japanese perspective because Japanese culture might not consider it sexist (ignoring all the bits where people in Japan aren't all on board either)

So, while I'm glad Sekiro worked out, what would the argument be if they did a racism? Would Japanese audiences be allowed to criticize it or would they have to account for the standards for racism from another country?

It's a bad argument for a global medium is what I'm saying.

 

[Gordon_4]

Except I wasn't responding to that point, nor was Critical claiming that about Sekiro.

Sekiro had surreality to it I've come to expect in certain circles because it was the mere act of an American studio doing a game based on Japanese history that got people riled up. Not that it did it poorly or whatever, the MERE ACT.

That's not the same thing as criticizing D.Va as a character, because no-one has said (to my knowledge) that Blizzard should have never made characters from outside the US in its game.

To be fair, the care and research done by that studio puts them globally as an outlier. There was a better than even chance you were gonna end up with U-751 level history. Or Braveheart if you were lucky. So hats off to them for putting in the hard yakka.

 

[BrawlMan]

Critical has argued that games shouldn't be criticized outside of the culture that created them; i.e. weird sexual stuff in Japanese games shouldn't be criticized from a non-Japanese perspective because Japanese culture might not consider it sexist (ignoring all the bits where people in Japan aren't all on board either)

Thank you. It's shitty argument that boils down to "Don't criticize or analyze the things I like! Even though I am not Japanese either, so I am free to criticize, but in a different way!"

It's a bad argument for a global medium is what I'm saying.

This!

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Uhh, I mean, you said yourself that men are still dominating the main character space. So...yeah, problem still not solved.

And you're right, there's never a completion point on "better": because there's no such thing as perfect. Media is always evolving, and that's a good thing. Stagnation is death. Always criticize flaws

Dominating by like 5% lol

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

I don't know why you're asking all these questions. You already gave your answers a long time ago. If the boot fits. You're the one giving me the fussy attitude.

As that news relating to Matt, I don't know much about, but I will give you credit for. Now I wish you just do the same for all the other stories on certain things, you might get some. You can figure out what I'm referring to. Tata.

As I said before "Don't start nothing won't be nothing" and you chose to take your snide little shots and make claims about me. Don't get pissy when I call your bullshit out for being bullshit you can't actually support with evidence or justify you claims

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Critical has argued that games shouldn't be criticized outside of the culture that created them; i.e. weird sexual stuff in Japanese games shouldn't be criticized from a non-Japanese perspective because Japanese culture might not consider it sexist (ignoring all the bits where people in Japan aren't all on board either)

So, while I'm glad Sekiro worked out, what would the argument be if they did a racism? Would Japanese audiences be allowed to criticize it or would they have to account for the standards for racism from another country?

It's a bad argument for a global medium is what I'm saying.

This is why I said about the emulating said cultural elements vs setting something in said area but viewing it through the lens of another countries culture viewing said place.

E.G. Far Cry 5 which is basically a French creative's view of what the American West and rural areas are like.

Again it's like criticising a Bollywood film for having too much singing and dancing in it vs criticising a film that is trying to appear to be a Bollywood film but [insert some hugely negative stereotype about Indian people] or just completely botches it's understanding of some cultural element like I dunno as a silly silly example having Temples to the sacred cow in India with giant golden cow idols in the middle.

 

[Hawki]

No. Despite their hardware issues, I don't want Microsoft nor Sony to be the only console makers in the world. Fuck that shit. If that's the case, I might as well give up gaming altogether. I like having variety and a I want my Japanese games to stay.

That's a development argument rather than a hardware argument though. If Nintendo dropped out of the hardware race and focused purely on software, you'd have more Japanese games, not less.

Critical has argued that games shouldn't be criticized outside of the culture that created them; i.e. weird sexual stuff in Japanese games shouldn't be criticized from a non-Japanese perspective because Japanese culture might not consider it sexist (ignoring all the bits where people in Japan aren't all on board either)

So, while I'm glad Sekiro worked out, what would the argument be if they did a racism? Would Japanese audiences be allowed to criticize it or would they have to account for the standards for racism from another country?

It's a bad argument for a global medium is what I'm saying.

You're responding to points Critical made by responding to my own arguments - I think you need to check who you're arguing against.

But if you want me to answer that question, the short answer is that people of course have the right to criticize anything. If you're in the realm of sorting out who's "allowed" to criticize what, then you're running into all sorts of problems.

To be fair, the care and research done by that studio puts them globally as an outlier. There was a better than even chance you were gonna end up with U-751 level history. Or Braveheart if you were lucky. So hats off to them for putting in the hard yakka.

So if they're an outlier in a good way, why the amount of flak? It's basically a message that no matter how good your intentions are or how comitted you are to historical authenticity, you were wrong in doing it in the first place.

 

[BrawlMan]

That's a development argument rather than a hardware argument though. If Nintendo dropped out of the hardware race and focused purely on software, you'd have more Japanese games, not less.

My point still stands, I don't want them to dissapear to software only. Also, there an abundant amount of Japanese games on the Switch, thank you. That and tons of indie games. I rest my case.

 

[CriticalGaming]

However, the gripes remain as to how early on, Samus was strip-teased as a reward, and that phase of her having high heels with the suit.

I mean, just an example of people not able to let soemthing go from fucking 1994. Art made in a different era can't be held up to the same standards because norms change.

Also not sure what you mean by the themes.

I mean it fits the context of the universe. Basically the outfit makes sense for her to be wearing in the armor because it's better than her underwear from the afforementioned 90's game. So it's actually a good example of removing the sexuality of the character without censoring the character either.

Um, how have those risks worked out? The Wii had its motion control nonsense, the WiiU was an abomination, and the Switch can't hold a charge.

Said it before and I'll say it again - Nintendo makes great software, but terrible hardware, and I'd love for them to quit the latter so they could focus on the former.

Yeah okay. The point I argued against was that Nintendo doesn't take risks, and I simply pointed out that their risks take place in other areas besides the games.

2) Sure, why not? Gender doesn't actually matter, right? You can get as invested in a female character as a male character, yeah? Representation doesn't actually matter?

I actually prefer to play as female characters. You should know that about me by now. Whenever the game gives me the choice, I'm 100% picking to play the female character everytime. But I also don't get bitter if the game doesn't give me a choice, because I have basic grasps of the human condition so I can relate to characters despite not sharing genitals or skin tones with them. Kinda funny how some of you people and most gaming journalists seem to lack that simply ability.

But, like: most things are broadly okay. Hell, I like most games in general. I'm just not gonna stop criticizing things out of some cosmic sense of "good enough". That includes things I like.

And to be fair. I haven't really seen you express much problems with the state of things. You just tend to side with people who DO have problems with things. I've never seen you take a story like this, or other representation/diversity articles and disagreed with them as if they can never go to far with the critiques. But yeah, you don't directly ever seem to have too many problems overall if problems aren't pointed out by others first. Honestly I don't really have any problem with you on that regard.

I'm just tried of stuff like this and I'm desperately trying to find the line in which people start going, "Okay this is ridiculous now." Like bug-pronouns, and wolf-pronouns.

Critical also argued that Korean people couldn't criticize Overwatch's Korean character because the game wasn't made by Korean's for Korea, so double standard there

That wasn't my point at all. You and Brawlman tend to ignore the shit I say. My point was that we don't hear about Koreans complaining about the characters in KOREAN games. We only hear about Overwatch because it's a worldwide game that everyone would know of, which is why that article exists in the first place. Even if Koreans had problems with Korean games in the same way they have problems with D.VA, we wouldn't know about it because the article would likely never exist outside of the country. Therefore went looking at the character designs in Korean games, it's very difficult to accurate gauge how the intended audience response to characters that don't fly in the West.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

So if they're an outlier in a good way, why the amount of flak? It's basically a message that no matter how good your intentions are or how comitted you are to historical authenticity, you were wrong in doing it in the first place.

Well they got flak (and to be clear I think these are all bullshit) because:

• Cultural appropriation - White Westerners aren't allowed to do stuff in other cultures styles without paying said cultures for permission by hiring sensitivity readers etc but only ones from the approved pool activists endorse who just also happen to mostly be friends of said activists.....
• It offended Mongolian Americans by showing the Mongols as villains and savage not highly cultured individuals just coming to try and make the world a better place.
• It pandered to right wing ideas especially Japanese right wing ideals like honour, discipline and duty which are totally regressive ideas because reasons.
• Anti immigration because it portrayed the Mongols as an invading horde and activist read the message in that it was Anti-immigrant and would encourage people to push back against immigrants coming to where they live
• It wasn't historically accurate enough because some piece of cooking equipment was wrong - this complain was mainly due to some writers who were bitter people had criticised Battlefield V as historically inaccurate and were just looking to try and turn it round to own people.

Honestly one of the main reasons it was criticised in my view was it releasing shortly after The Last of Us Part II and activists saw it as a threat to the activist approved oh so progressive title of TLOU2 and because people were rejected TLOU2 the activist types had to try and make Ghost of Tsushima seem like a bad title and buying it was supporting some problematic thing. Also Sucker Punch hadn't pledged fealty to the Social Justice cause. There had been no big public statements from them about politics so it was a big game seemingly from an unapproved studio threatening to potentially cost TLOU2 sales.

It happens quite often in media journalism. See The people upset Ghostbuster's Afterlife didn't try to acknowledge Ghostbusters 2016 and just because Ghostbusters 2016 was set in a different universe was no excuse to not try and include it and acknowledge it somehow. Or how Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle got slammed because people were rejecting The Last Jedi at the time.

 

[Gordon_4]

That's a development argument rather than a hardware argument though. If Nintendo dropped out of the hardware race and focused purely on software, you'd have more Japanese games, not less.



You're responding to points Critical made by responding to my own arguments - I think you need to check who you're arguing against.

But if you want me to answer that question, the short answer is that people of course have the right to criticize anything. If you're in the realm of sorting out who's "allowed" to criticize what, then you're running into all sorts of problems.



So if they're an outlier in a good way, why the amount of flak? It's basically a message that no matter how good your intentions are or how comitted you are to historical authenticity, you were wrong in doing it in the first place.

Ghost of Tsushima is what proved them an outlier; prior to that there’s little evidence that I’m aware of that their studio would have done the work they did. So if their next game is also a work of historical fiction I feel the demented hooting will be kept to a minimum.

EDIT: we all know what I did there >.>

 

[Trunkage]

What you're saying is that art must tick a series of check boxes always.

- Is the main character an only slighty-decent look minority
-Are there enough LBGT characters sprinkled through out the story.
-Make sure nothing bad happens towards marginalized characters
-nothing resembling any sort of possible stereotype can exist (whether positive, negative, or neutral)

How can something be a creative piece of artwork if the creator must always make sure they are adhering to an imaginary social criteria that normal people don't think about on a day-to-day basis?

I disagree with things can always be better, because even if they managed to make the gender of characters so varied that it boarders on "perfect", there will always be another bug to pick. If it's not the sexualization of women, then any character in an action game will be called abuse-fantasy. Or some other such form of shit. The people who write articles like this are not doing so because they think there is a genuine problem, they are doing to generate clicks and inflate their socisl credit-score.

in 2019 59% of the games features women as the main characters (according to feminist frequency) And that wasn't enough because 41% of the featured games had males as the lead role. So even when the MAJORITY of game reveals where staring women, it wasn't good enough. So at what point will it be good enough? 75%? 99%? 100%? Should the games industry just not make male characters for a few years to balance out the discrepancy?

There is a reason why i always ask these questions, because nobody can ever give me an answer when I ask "at what point would you be satisfied?" Because the answer is never, like you said people in your camp will only ever admit to things being "better" but never good enough. So yeah, perfection doesn't exist because these people have no criteria for "good enough" let alone perfection. If you can't even get to an okay place, how can you ever hope to achieve perfection?

Just so you are aware that characters have ALWAYS ticked boxes

It why we got so many male characters. To tick boxes. The dev for Horizon had to fight fucking hard to have Aloy be female because the publisher wanted to tick a box

But hey. Whinge about ticking boxes again like you haven't been doing for decades. Because the ONLY reason you care about these boxes is that they didn't tick YOUR boxes

 

[CriticalGaming]

Because the ONLY reason you care about these boxes is that they didn't tick YOUR boxes

But Aloy ticks my box.....

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

Just so you are aware that characters have ALWAYS ticked boxes

It why we got so many male characters. To tick boxes. The dev for Horizon had to fight fucking hard to have Aloy be female because the publisher wanted to tick a box

But hey. Whinge about ticking boxes again like you haven't been doing for decades. Because the ONLY reason you care about these boxes is that they didn't tick YOUR boxes

1) Sony is the publier
2) No they didn't have to fight she was planned female from the inception and there wasn't any issue.
3) You're confusing Horizon with Remember Me where what you're describing did happen according to the developers who poke out about it.

Side note: The developers of Remember Me made the first two Life is Strange games

 

[hanselthecaretaker]

I disagree, while Nintendo may not take much risk in it's game department. They are rather risky with their hardware. The Wii, Wii-U, and Switch were all very experimental systems that went for a niche market rather than trying to compete on a graphical power level with Microsoft and Sony. They take risks, it's just in different ways.

They see an opening for differentiation and that’s where they know their strength lies. Not all have been hits *cough*Virtual Boy*cough*Power Glove* but their R&D team has a good enough track record with it that they don’t need to directly compete anymore. The investment there has a greater return than seeking out cutting edge silicone components that will ultimately be outdated anyways.

OTOH, Sony has typically kinda done both, by banking on the long game with things like new media formats and now faster storage to change up the game a bit further. Then there’s Microsoft, which has been more or less forced to dig down into software subscription services to continue competing. IMO the console space has never been more diversified.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

I actually prefer to play as female characters. You should know that about me by now. Whenever the game gives me the choice, I'm 100% picking to play the female character everytime. But I also don't get bitter if the game doesn't give me a choice, because I have basic grasps of the human condition so I can relate to characters despite not sharing genitals or skin tones with them. Kinda funny how some of you people and most gaming journalists seem to lack that simply ability.

And to be fair. I haven't really seen you express much problems with the state of things. You just tend to side with people who DO have problems with things. I've never seen you take a story like this, or other representation/diversity articles and disagreed with them as if they can never go to far with the critiques. But yeah, you don't directly ever seem to have too many problems overall if problems aren't pointed out by others first. Honestly I don't really have any problem with you on that regard.

Life is easier when you let bad opinions exist. And honestly, the only time I read game industry articles like this is when some dude holds it up and goes "How Dare!" and then I read the thing and it's 3 paragraphs of praise for games with an aside that's mildly incorrect at worst, subjectively.

Not exactly Phyllis Schlafly or Jack Thompson over here

I'm just tried of stuff like this and I'm desperately trying to find the line in which people start going, "Okay this is ridiculous now." Like bug-pronouns, and wolf-pronouns.

Well there's your problem: you're looking for me to give a shit about something I stopped caring about a lifetime ago. It's you reading "nobody can be hot" into this article, I just don't see what you're seeing. I might think the dude's kinda wrong on, like, Bayonetta, but I can see where he gets there

That wasn't my point at all. You and Brawlman tend to ignore the shit I say. My point was that we don't hear about Koreans complaining about the characters in KOREAN games. We only hear about Overwatch because it's a worldwide game that everyone would know of, which is why that article exists in the first place. Even if Koreans had problems with Korean games in the same way they have problems with D.VA, we wouldn't know about it because the article would likely never exist outside of the country. Therefore went looking at the character designs in Korean games, it's very difficult to accurate gauge how the intended audience response to characters that don't fly in the West.

Correct. So we shouldn't really be assuming things either way. But, if those games are being sold in the US, it's unrealistic to expect people to not judge them by US standards, whatever that means. You can try and sell spicy peppers all day long, but if the country you're trying to sell to doesn't like that kinda spice you're gonna have a bad time, no matter how much of a staple it is to you

 

[Dreiko]

Sekiro had surreality to it I've come to expect in certain circles because it was the mere act of an American studio doing a game based on Japanese history that got people riled up. Not that it did it poorly or whatever, the MERE ACT.

Are you thinking of Ghost of Tsushima?

Sekiro was made by from soft, a Jp dev, Activision just published the thing.


Also the biggest controversy regarding that game was that people were praising it over last of us 2 and not who made it.

Never. The goal post will always be moved to account for some other injustice. There are shitloads of non-sexuallized women throughout gaming history, but they don't count if they aren't the main character and star of the show. So you point out characters now coming out that don't have that problem, and it's not good enough because men still dominate the main character space.

Nobody who believes this is a problem is looking for a completion point. They are always looking for problems and will say whatever they need to say in order to make sure there is always a problem.

Didn't Moviebob make a video about feminism running out of dragons to slay like over a decade ago, before losing his mind out of his passionate nerdlove for lord Anita?


I guess that was where the goal post was originally.

 

[Gordon_4]

Are you thinking of Ghost of Tsushima?

Shit, we are indeed confusing Ghost of Tsushima with Sekiro. Somehow. Research kids, it’s not just for school papers.

 

[BrawlMan]

Didn't Moviebob make a video about feminism running out of dragons to slay like over a decade ago, before losing his mind out of his passionate nerdlove for lord Anita?

Yes, but Bob is a fucking moron that acts like he know everything and speaks for people who didn't ask for his help.

 

[Trunkage]

1) Sony is the publier
2) No they didn't have to fight she was planned female from the inception and there wasn't any issue.
3) You're confusing Horizon with Remember Me where what you're describing did happen according to the developers who poke out about it.

Side note: The developers of Remember Me made the first two Life is Strange games

Yes. There was an issue. Sony passed on Horizon and made the dev start on another game... solely based on Aloy being the protag. Sony demanded Aloy being male and the devs wouldn't budge. So, they weren't allowed to make it. Only when that second game fell through did Sony let them do Horizon

But hey. Go on with your lists of games because its just showing how cancelled female protagonist are. Because all your doing is HIGHLIGHTING the problem, not disproving. It shows how hard it is to get one through. How rare it is. And all of it is because some exec doesn't think female protags will sell