MarsAtlas said:
Again, no i didnt answer my own question, because cultural expectations are still not something that IS defined as such and can be no other way. Your parents MIGHT expect you to do X, or people in your school might expect you to do X, that doesnt mean you have to do it. Nor would you really be treated less because you choose not to go with the flow.
Secondly, "insulted for being a girl". Okay how's that different from being insulted for being a boy? Which was the point i was making. How is it different from being insulted for having red hair? Green eyes? A crooked nose? Being "ugly"? Being "fat"? If a boy insults a girl in the way of "Ewww, girls are icky, go away", is that sexism? No it isnt and our culture seems to thrive on this stupid hyperbole to make everything about some Ism. Sexism, Racism, Ableism, and all the other shit tumblr seems to throw a hissyfit over. Wanna know how to stop racism? Stop making race an issue. Sexism? Stop treating sex differently. Every anti-racist or anti-sexist person is doing nothing more than keep the topic alive, keep this "evil thing" going. We cant move on, we cant move past it because everything now is racism, or sexism or whatever-ism.
Women dont need to be coddled, or put on some pedestal where they are free from any criticism. They arent exempt from being treated just like everyone else on account of their "feelings". You have a right to be offended by something, you dont have a right to tell the offender to stop talking.
But lets get to the game part, yes games can be about everything. So why do they NEED to imitate reality? What if LA Noire was set in a fictional universe where racial tensions werent a thing? Because in our past there was that problem? Imagine a world, just for a second, where racism was never a thing. Where slavery was never a thing, or sexism, or anything was made an issue of. Now take this world and set it in our past where all these things never happened. A game can do that, its called alternate history, where things may have gone alot differently than what actually happened in our time. We cant just adjust the future in Sci-Fi settings, we can also look back and explore what they world may have been like had certain issues never existed, how they came to that point, why it diverged and how this might influence the future.
Also using Sims and SimCity as an example of how you wish the world was..not exactly a good comparison. Especially since you then proclaim that you dont have to critically think about it, you absolve the players of these games of having to think about issues. Why do you imply that they dont, or wouldnt? And how are those games any different from a game which alters history, either past, present or future to suit the theme it sets out to explore. You earlier used Spec Ops as an example of a subversion. How is that a Subversion? Its Full Metal Jacket in Game-form. Its Platoon. Its an anti-war game, it simply highlights just how terrible war is, how even a good man can make terrible choices and how all these choices eventually affect him psychologically. The only subversion here was that it decided to show what War would really be like, rather than the Hollywood-style that Call of Duty and consorts offer. If anyone ever thought war was glorious, they are stupid to begin with.
Nerdmode: The Buildings of Coruscant reach up to the Stratosphere, literally. The buildings are so tall that you cant even see the ground, its a city spanning the entire planet, layer upon layer. So yes you can fall several thousand feet down without hitting the ground. Take the largest building in the world, remember its height, now imagine how often you'd have to stack that building on top of itself to reach our planets Stratosphere. Now ask yourself if gravity was less the further away from the planet you got (it is, to a small degree). Anakin surviving the fall is essentially explained by him being a Jedi, its a cop-out sure, but its as much of a cop-out as explaining that the Wizard is throwing the fireballs. Also there is no law that states every universe, fantasy or otherwise has to adhere to our laws of physics. They can literally run on their own laws because thats part of that universe, its fiction. Its not real.
You are implying it has to follow our laws, our history. It doesnt. Go back far enough and change something in history. Now think how that change could affect the next hundred, or thousand years. What if the colonial powers never discovered America? What if they never took slaves? How would the world be different because of it? Its a small change, but everything changes from that point forward. I will admit its shoddily done if a game doesnt set up the explanation that X didnt happen somewhere in the plot, hence allowing this fictional world to be different, but the implication of it having happened is still there.
Again, you dont get to pick and choose what is true and what isnt. What is the "norm" is not something you get to decide based on flimsy evidence of, statistically speaking, very small sample sizes. If one woman was raped in your neighborhood, right now, does that mean your neighborhood has a rape-epidemic? Or was it one isolated case which should be dealt with? The further we broaden the scope of an issue, the less real it gets because it is literally driven ad absurdum. It becomes, as you point out, parody.
Also, i must have missed where Walking Dead was about racism, rather than surviving the zombie apocalypse. It is human nature to distrust people you dont know, precisely because you dont know them. We have evolved several instincts based around this..suspicion of anything foreign, an innate Xenophobia if you will. You cant teach that out of people, you simply cant. At least not quickly, it takes time, maybe thousands of years for us to literally evolve past those instincts. Making progress to help that along is fine, but the more you demand results now, as if you had a magic wand in your pocket that could fix everything is not the right way to go about it because all you do is piss people off by implying they are racist, or sexist, or whatever-ist on some fundamental level when they arent. If you called me a Sexist, or a Racist, i would punch you in the face, because i will not stand idle to being told who i am by someone who does not know me, who has never interacted with me.
Now not saying you did, but thats the general idea of it, if you keep telling men that they are sexist..you arent doing yourself any favours. Telling white people they are racist, again not helping. They might be racist or sexist, but if you implicate everyone to be because "culture" or "society", you assign blame and then shift it onto something we cant change overnight. So you are left with blaming men for being sexist (all of them), or white people for being racist (all of them), because society and culture are these faceless masses, its like blaming the monster under your bed for stealing the cookies that you ate. Sexism and Racism go every way, blacks can be just as racist as any white slave-owner from the 16th century. Women can be just as sexist towards men as some men can be sexist towards women.
The moment you start assigning blame unilaterally to everyone in some group, you simply alienate them. You know, xenophobia.
