The Perfect Apolitical/Politics Free Video.

[BrawlMan]

I would argue that bigotry and idiocy are often the same thing.

You can be the smartest person in the world and still be a bigot. I don't ever make excuses for racists.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[Houseman]

Sure. But Battlefield was, from the very inception of the series, none of those things. It is virtual laser tag with a WW2 coat of paint on it. An equivalent would be to create a rollercoaster and call it "The Killing Fields" and pretend as if your amusement ride somehow captured the grim reality of the genocides in Campuchea.

Let me mention once again:

"In contrast, in the opening of BF1, where you played as Harlem Hellfighters, and then when each one of them died you get a overlay of the name and the years that they lived before jumping into the body of another. Yes, it was still a game that people played for fun, but they tried to make an effort to treat it with respect."

What I describe and what you describe as "virtual laser tag with a WW2 coat of paint on it", are clearly two different things, and you continually skip over this paragraph.

 

[deleted20220709]

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[Houseman]

So how much did you play BF1? I did, a lot. Over a hundred hours according to Origin. You know how much of that total time was spent with the somber introduction? About 5 minutes.

Yes, and it set the tone, one of mature respect for these people's lives and their story.
So did the ending cutscene:

And nobody complained because it was respectful. The marketing of BFV is in complete contrast to this.

That's why I'm skipping over that paragraph: Because the somber, reflective intro scene is not reflective of the actual gameplay.

Online is a completely different thing. The developers can't control that. It's unfair to accuse them of treating the source material with disrespect when it's actually the players themselves doing it. If you want to crack jokes, teabag people, and treat it as virtual laser tag, that's on you, not them.

What the developers can control, is what characters the allow you to create. Creating a red-haired woman with a prosthetic and a cricket bat is disrespectful for the reasons I mentioned in a previous post. This is fairly on the developers for allowing this. They allow unrepresented groups to represent themselves, and thus, "steal valor" away from the people who were really there. That's my only grievance with BFV, not that it's "unrealistic".

 

[Silvanus]

I also think it is a bit disegenuious to assume that the shitbags online are the reasoning for low sales and poor performance of a given thing. Ratings for shows, ticket sales, whatever. You still have to look at the fact that a lot of these things that people rage on for whatever flavor of wokeness they disagree with, are also often just bad products in there own rights.

Battlefield V, regardless of the opinions of women in the game, was a bad Battlefield by all accounts. Unfinished, unpolished, and nonsensical.

Soul Plane was a fucking stupid Tyler Perry movie, most of Tyler's movies are dumb come to think of it.

Batwoman was a terrible show last year, and it's even worse somehow this year.

It isn't the vocal minority of anti-wokers that are causing that. It's the fact that the things are bad to begin with. And like I said, they just use the outrage as an excuse. Much like a certain Tropes v. women producer.

And valid criticisms focusing on quality aren't the issue here.

They allow unrepresented groups to represent themselves, and thus, "steal valor" away from the people who were really there. That's my only grievance with BFV, not that it's "unrealistic".

None of the fictional characters in BF1 were actually there. Are the white guys also "stealing valor"?

It's a video game. It exists for fun. There's nothing respectful about making a war into a playground where you log in to have a romp around and farm headshots.

 

[Dreiko]

You can be the smartest person in the world and still be a bigot. I don't ever make excuses for racists.

I think smarts just differ in expression. Like, take Ben Carson, he's a brain surgeon, which you'd think means he's at least somewhat smart, but whenever he opens his mouth he sounds like an idiot. Some people are just smart in a very particular way and they hone it to the point where all the other ways other people are smart in have atrophied completely.

I think ultimately any sort of bigotry has to stem from a place of ignorance, of lack of information and of fear. So someone who is smart in one area can still be super ignorant in another one and that one can be things like cultural diversity or racial behaviors. I knew a ton of people growing up who are super smart but who just out of virtue of living in a monocultural place where you only ever saw different sorts of people on tv, had tons of various notions that make you scratch your head and would come off bigoted but were actually ignorant (like for example, the word for a housekeeper is "Philipenese", I dunno why, it just...was that, it was established before my time lol).

 

[BrawlMan]

I think smarts just differ in expression. Like, take Ben Carson, he's a brain surgeon, which you'd think means he's at least somewhat smart, but whenever he opens his mouth he sounds like an idiot. Some people are just smart in a very particular way and they hone it to the point where all the other ways other people are smart in have atrophied completely.

I think ultimately any sort of bigotry has to stem from a place of ignorance, of lack of information and of fear. So someone who is smart in one area can still be super ignorant in another one and that one can be things like cultural diversity or racial behaviors. I knew a ton of people growing up who are super smart but who just out of virtue of living in a monocultural place where you only ever saw different sorts of people on tv, had tons of various notions that make you scratch your head and would come off bigoted but were actually ignorant (like for example, the word for a housekeeper is "Philipenese", I dunno why, it just...was that, it was established before my time lol).

I already know all that. People are smart in different areas, but can be dumb or ignorant in others. Still does not make excuses for shitty behavior.

 

[Houseman]

None of the fictional characters in BF1 were actually there. Are the white guys also "stealing valor"?

They're stand-ins who represent groups who were there. Any Harlem Hellfighter represents them all.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Those same people that flip out for anything "political", because the person they are playing as is not white, female, trans/gay/lesbian, brown-skinned, or of a different race or religion.

And they tell us that Scarlett Johannson playing an Asian woman in Ghost in the Shell is good because "Hollywood needs bankable actors", but Idris Elba playing a Norse god in Thor is bad because "SJWs are destroying authenticity for political points".

Seems kind of disrespectful to the actual soldiers who fought and died.

The problem was that this argument was being made by people who wanted to bunnyhop across Omaha Beach with characters named xXx_420_Ganja_Ninja_xXx. How do you define "disrespectful"?

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

See, here's the thing. Do you remember when "the gamers" were moaning that video games had just as much artistic merit as any other medium? They didn't really care about that; they just wanted Mom to quit telling them to stop playing "those games for little kids" and go out and get a job. But the ploy worked too well, and people started critiquing video games like every other artform, examining their political and societal statements. Now "the gamers" are trying desperately to put the genie back in the bottle with their "bruh, it's just a game, stop being so critical" pleas.

Except we're in an age where a writer got upset that Cyberpunk 2077 treats women characters badly in it's future dystopian setting and wanted it changed.
We're in an age where again and again people seem to entirely miss he point of things.
Some people were upset that the revolutionaries in Bioshock Infinite turned out not to be perfect pure incorruptible bastions of goodness.
People are moaning about politics in games quite often and no it's not The Gamers™ doing it a lot of the time.
What keeps happening is people pushing just for their politics, like we saw with a number of writers or outlets salivating over the idea Far Cry 5 would be a Trump supporter murder simulator and then confused when it wasn't.

People want actual political examination with nuance not some strawman bashing highly partisan stuff Its allowed to exist but really we're not getting some grand well done political piece media, we're getting the video game equivalent of American Sniper for left wing people. And really is anyone calling for more movies like American Sniper to be made?

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

You better believe people complained about a black man being on a cover in battlefield 1. And note, Dice didn't say anything or comment at all about the cover. The same applies when those racist jackasses cried claiming no one black or people of color did not serve in World War I or World War II.

Once again I don't care how someone stupid is. Racism is racism. Sexism is sexism, there's no splitting hairs. These assholes make any excuses and move the goal post. If anything your "people are really stupid" excuse is a big cop out argument for such problems. It's more to it than something as pathetic as that. And people do care about what or who they're playing as. Saying people don't care is a lie. You're either ignorant or being willfully oblivious about the situation

The funny thing.

Battlefield 5s default assault was a black guy.
The main frontline troop for pushing tranches was a Black guy.
The characters most likely to be downed or killed.


No-one apparently spotted that kinda racist thing.

What some people did spot was Battlefield 5 players killing women and getting up in arms that female characters now being in the game meant they could be killed.

These are three distinct events. The first was the teaser/reveal trailer which featured the woman with the prosthetic arm, the Red Beret with a Katana and was generally just a weird mix and match of things that technically existed in WW2 all crammed into one battlefield looking like Arnhem. It caught a lot of flak for not being realistic with people going for the prosthetic, the katana and a bunch of other stuff. A lot of people also specifically went down the route of "Women did not fight for the British in WW2!".

A while after that EA revealed that yes, character customization would be a big thing and that included being able to choose gender and ethnicity. On cue the not very articulate crowd started harping on about how women didn't fight on the west front and how no black people fought for Germany (some even went down the "no black people fought in the West until the US intervened" and had to shirk back in shame). Around this time someone at EA (I want to say Söderlund but I'm not sure) said in an interview that he wanted his daughters to be able to play the game when they get older and feel like they were represented and welcomed.

And finally the cover art was revealed and there was furor all around because a woman was on the cover and women didn't fight in WW2. At some point, when you keep coming back to gender and race when fighting for "historical realism" and not stuff like wildly unrealistic weapons (including French WW1 prototypes, Swedish semi-auto rifles issued on an awkwardly small scale and improvised one shot "guns" intended for the French and Polish resistance and not frontline combat) or the uniforms that were weird amalgamations of all kinds of WW2, post-war and steampunk often without the choice of actually using an actual standard uniform.

Here's the cover art by the way, nary a prosthetic in sight:




People were given the reveal trailer without EA or DICE saying anything but "We are psyched to bring you this first look at BFV". The haters immediately jumped onto the thing they hated the most and it was the woman. Whatever happened after that is irrelevant, because the haters had jumped in head first with all the misogyny they could muster.



Bigotry should never be excused as idiocy. A person can be stupid and idiotic, but sexism, racism and all that other nasty bigot shit is not stupidity or idiocy. it is hate and contempt and should never be excused as "they don't know better".

And yet ironically it ended up more bigoted by not representing the middle eastern or Russian women who did fight and instead giving people Western white woman skins.

Also I note the "Historical authenticity crowd" changed their tune very quickly when the name of an Anti - Nazi fighter was use for one of the special Nazi officer skins. Suddenly historical authenticity mattered then lol.

But who decides what is propaganda and what isn't? And why does a certain group think that decades of American heroes shooting up brown villains in the middle east isn't propaganda, but two girls kissing in a trailer is?

I'll say again it was more the fact it was deliberately a church hall it happens in that I think people saw as more of a shot against people than merely them kissing.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

This is totally irrelevant to my argument, which is that the bigots came out in force as soon as they saw a woman (a disabled woman at that!) in their Battlefield game. BFV underperformed for a lot of reasons, but let's not pretend as if the furor the bigots kick up whenever they hear of women getting major parts isn't a contributing factor in turning the general public off of the product.

Yes clearly it was time for a strong female lead like no media franchise has ever had before.



I mean who'd play an FPS game with a female lead right/.s ?

 

[Houseman]

The problem was that this argument was being made by people who wanted to bunnyhop across Omaha Beach with characters named xXx_420_Ganja_Ninja_xXx. How do you define "disrespectful"?

I mean in terms of the marketing where the poster child is a prosthetic-arm, cricket-bat redheaded woman.
Online gameplay is something the developers can't control.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

I mean in terms of the marketing where the poster child is a prosthetic-arm, cricket-bat redheaded woman.

So, an arbitrary line you've drawn in the sand, then.

 

[Dwarvenhobble]

So, an arbitrary line you've drawn in the sand, then.

One is literally within their control. The other not.

I you're going to push the "Everything must be realistic or it doesn't count" argument then technically there can be no game. All battle must be pre-determined and you just have to play through to the win or loss with the game deliberately making sure the side that won in reality won or lost in reality lost. Oh and you only get 1 life per battle then have to either leave the game or spend 2 months in digital hospital

 

[Casual Shinji]

Ripley and Sarah Conner existed once, and sometimes we get one female lead for every ten male ones, which then sparks outrage over preceived SJW pandering; why are you complaining about lack of female leads?

 

[deleted20220709]

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[Dreiko]

And yet Battlefield is primarily a multiplayer game. Ergo, the developers are making virtual laser tag that can be considered disrespectful. That they make 10 minutes of somber material to "honor the fallen" doesn't change the fact that they then made a multiplayer shooter in World War 1 and thus presents WW1 as this cool time when real men rode on the wings of biplanes before jumping down, shanking someone in the back with a rusty kriss, stealing a tank to capture an Italian coastal fortress and then magically getting a ton of guys to join them there behind enemy lines to single handedly win the battle. DICE designed the multiplayer part and made it the centerpiece, let's not pretend as if the intro and epilogue of the campaign is the actual meat of a Battlefield game, neither of us is that dumb (nor are the people reading this).

Is there...something wrong with entertainment being disrespectful? Why should it be respectful? It's meant to be entertaining. And if the core audience of this game likes doing disrespectful things to entertain itself it's their job to provide that content, and they have to do this more than they have to fight for an equal world society and gender issues and what have you. In fact, every time they fight for those things, that too is in pursuit of entertaining some other sort of audience, they're not really for those things, they just think some other groups would be entertained by them.


If anything is truly disrespectful here it is the cynical use of issues people hold dear to hook them into an entertainment medium that never was for them up to that point, which still mostly isn't apparently if the info I see in this topic is accurate. They're using people's ideologies to trick them into getting their game, to make money.

Ripley and Sarah Conner existed once, and sometimes we get one female lead for every ten male ones, which then sparks outrage over preceived SJW pandering; why are you complaining about lack of female leads?

There's tons of female leads in stuff I play, but because they're more anime-themed and not feministy they do not get counted. I don't see people mention Estelle from trails in the sky, ever, and she's one of the most capable, awesome and well-developed chars ever. She's not particularly sexy or anything either, she's kind of a tomboy.

Atelier Ryza 2 just came out, I don't see people deriding the SJWs about our thicc alchemist existing and being a protag to the first ever atelier game to get a sequel with the same main character and not a new one.

 

[Houseman]

And yet Battlefield is primarily a multiplayer game.

People who were turned off from the game being disrespectful weren't turned off because of the multiplayer gameplay, but because of the marketing.

The argument you're making is like this:
> There's sugar on the steak.
> People don't like that.
> But there's sugar on the dessert too, but you like that, don't you? AHA! Double standards!

Just because the multiplayer is unrealistic, it doesn't mean that one should be okay with every other aspect of the game being equally unrealistic.