MarsAtlas said:
A-D. said:
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.
What world do you live in? Because its not this one, apparently.
People are treated differently based solely on their gender, for numerous reasons.
Solely on their Gender? You have some gender-fixation going on? People are judged and treated differently based on a large number of factors, gender can be one of them yes, but it is not the sole differentiating factor in experiences, talents or expectations. Please name one example of a task that a Woman can not do in todays society, please stick with western society. Name one example where a woman is forced to do a specific task that is not expected of men to a similar degree. Name one example of experiences that a woman can have, that a man can not (lets leave out child birth because society cant fix biology yet)
Secondly, "insulted for being a girl". Okay how's that different from being insulted for being a boy?
You're mischaracterizing what I said. What I said was:
-Insulted
-Insulted for being a girl
Now if we include being insulted for being a boy, it expands into:
-Insulted
-Insulted for being a girl
-Insulted for being a boy
Which are now three separate conditions on how and why people are insulted.
And your point is..what exactly? That you can be insulted for everything? For being dumb, tall, short, fat, freckled, short-sighted, far-sighted, smart, athletic, lazy, having a clubfoot, skinny, the size of your breasts, the size of your earlobes, the size of your eyes, your haircolor, your eyecolor, the size of your feet, the size of your hands..do i need to go on with this list? How do any of these differ from being insulted for being female? How is it any different from being insulted for being white, or black, or a man, or any of the list i just gave up there? How does that bring anything to the discussion at all?
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.
You're really detached from the world, especially if you see these as all of these various forms of bigotry as being equally perpetuated and to the same extremes. The basis for what people are being mistreated for does, in-turn, effect how poorly they are treated. Do people get shit because they're unattractive? Yes. Do they get the same shit that another group gets? No, especially considering some groups face more extreme forms of bigotry at higher rates. Lets comparing the amount of people who have been assaulted for being ugly to the amount of people who have been assaulted for being seen s straying from "traditional" gender dynamics, and see which side has more. According to the FBI, over 20% of all hate crimes in the United States are the result of homophobia.
Are you really trying to play Oppression-Olympics now? No, being insulted for being female is not worse than being insulted for being black. Being insulted for being black is not worse than being insulted for having red hair. An insult is an insult no matter who is insulted or in which capacity. The same goes for treatment of other people. Just because a woman somewhere is oppressed, her "suffering" is not in any shape worse than the oppression that a man may suffer at the exact same moment in time. Both are suffering and neither needs to or should suffer. You know, Equality. Either nobody suffers, or we all suffer. Stop trying to turn this into a special-snowflake argument to play Oppression-Olympics.
Wanna know how to stop racism? Stop making race an issue.
Yes, because thats how anti-segregation reform happened. By ignoring it, and pretending that it wasn't an issue.
Sexism? Stop treating sex differently.
If everybody took this advice, sexism wouldn't really be an issue. But there are sexist assholes, they have influence on society, and ignoring that only allows for more damage to occur.
And we are still segregating now? Are we still expecting women to stay at home, be good housewives and raise the kids? No. We have changed things for the better already, but the more we make every issue about race or gender, even when its not, we simply drag it up again and again. We have reached a point where everything is somehow sexism, or raceism. These formerly oppressed groups wanted equality, they got most of it, not all mind you we still have a way to go on that, but now they are complaining because..why? Let me give you some examples here of this insane shit coming from feminists and anti-racist folks.
Anita Sarkeesian is or was in favour of gender segregation on trains in Japan because it "solves" the problem of women being sexually molested on trains.
Suey Parks has stated publicly that only white people can be racist.
Rebecca Watson, another Feminist, has said that a person who wishes to not hear about Feminism is worse than Rape Threats.
These people are supposed to be "role models"? I think not. They are just as bad as any sexist asshole you can think of, if not actually worse.
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.
We can't move on past it if we're not acknowleding that whatever "ism" still exists, or at least not acknowledge that the present day is quite different due to the effect these "isms" have had in the past.
We can stop making a big deal out of it, elevating the problem to some epidemic level. It isnt. Are there racists? Yes. Are there sexists? Yes. These problems dont deserve more of our collective attention than anything else. They are a problem to be fixed, but they are not the worst problem nor do they deserve special consideration especially when you have people, who i just quoted above, making the problem worse. To those people, everything is sexist, or racist, or misogynist or whatever-ist.
Women dont need to be coddled, or put on some pedestal where they are free from any criticism.
I'm not asking for that. I certainly don't know any self-proclaimed feminists that are campaigning for that.
I will point you to the 3 quotes above. There are many more making such statements and worse which will eventually set the whole issue back. They arent helping, they are harming the people they are supposedly fighting for. And you implied i am detached from reality.
You have a right to be offended by something, you dont have a right to tell the offender to stop talking.
Do you actually understand what "rights" are?
Yes, I have the right to be offended. I also have the right to yell at the offending party and suggest that they stop talking. I don't have the right to forcibly silence them from public forum, nor do I have the right to inflict legal repercussions on them because of their speech. At least, not here in the United States. I have every right to criticize them to my heart's content, and I will exercise that right
Yes i know what rights are. And yet ironically this is actually what happens, the "forcibly silencing them" part i mean. Maybe not by you, but by others. Say anything that isnt pro-feminist, a feminist will label you rape apologist, rape supporter, misogynist, gender traitor (incase you are female) and other shit. Now these are merely insults, but remember, words have power. Stigma stays with you.
But lets get to the game part, yes games can be about everything. So why do they NEED to imitate reality?
Because its a safe space to explore and discuss things about the world in which we reside? Again, this isn't to say that all games need to do that, but its certainly to the benefit of the artform if more games were to do so.
So instead of..learning about it through actual historic documents or Documentaries you want a videogame where you play a black man during the Watts Riots? Why? What do you learn that you didnt already know? Not everything about our history has to be remade for games. Games are Art? Art is not Reality. It is free of those contrains.
What if LA Noire was set in a fictional universe where racial tensions werent a thing?
Well then it wouldn't be a recreation of 1947 Los Angeles. They would've created their own world, which as I've said, is fine. Other games already do that plenty and get away with it.
And..maybe it was a fictional recreation of 1947 LA where Racism wasnt an issue? Just because you specify a date and a place does not mean this has to be an exact replica of history of that place as it occured. Why are we not allowed to examine our history without having to be 100% historically accurate? Why cant we examine how we MIGHT have behaved in that time if some problems never occured?
Because in our past there was that problem?
If we still tried to pass it off as 1947 Los Angeles and pretend that racism and misogyny wasn't a thing, then it'd history revisionism. Thats actually why many minority groups tend to get upset by conservative rhetoric about "the good ol' days" - because they weren't good for them, and pretending that they were is at best incredibily ignorant and insensitive and at worst deliberate revisionism and bigotry.
There is a massive difference between claiming something didnt happen and exploring the idea of a world where these things actually didnt happen. Games are free to explore these situations, unconstrained by our history as terrible as it can be. What if we had a Game, set in..say 1095. Now what if the Crusades never happened? Is this Revisionism or is it an opportunity to see what else could have happened in that time if the Crusades never begun?
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.
With that much of a major change, though, you might as well create an entire world, because that
would be an unrecognizable world. "Alternate history" is an understatement when you're talking about one of the major influences all throughout the existence of mankind back before we could even write, and at that point, the landscape of what would look like would be too different to make it resemble civilization as it exists now. Doing anything else would be essentially pretending that racism had a relatively insignificant effect on the world, and showing that things would still relatively end up how they are today, would be lying about its effect on the past and quite frankly everybody should be offended by that implication of historical revisonism.
Games, and all forms of Art, are not beholden to History. They are not constrained by these factors. Why can we imagine the proverbial "world of tomorrow" but cant at the same time imagine the perfect world of yesterday? Why must we make everything historically accurate? Why cant..oh i dont know, there exist a game where India never went independant of the British Empire? Where the USA lost the War of Independence? Where Racism didnt exist? Because you cant recognize the world? So what? Thats the whole point of it.
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.
-No structured narrative.
-No tangible win states and the very few lose states are dependent on bare necessessity (not having any food makes you starve, for example).
-No particular lifestyles or choices are really condemned or condoned, and are all equally valid in the eyes of the game (for The Sims anyways, the way SimCity is systemized favours sprawling metropolis over smaller settlements)
You ignored pretty much everything else but give me a cliffnotes version of game mechanics.
You earlier used Spec Ops as an example of a subversion. How is that a Subversion?
It goes against the grain of an entire genre, questions all of it by emulating all the tropes, but to an extreme and without glossing over the humanity of it like Call of Duty does. Additionally, it questions a lot of things about the way that games are currently constructed in the first place, like whether players have a responsibilty in the scripted actions that they undertake. Thats just a few things about it, anyways.
That still doesnt really make it a subversion, but rather a truthful telling. If anything Call of Duty would be the subversion of how War would actually be like. It points out that war is not fun, it isnt glorious and that every death is a tragedy to put it in the simplest terms, that doesnt make it a subversion because Call of Duty and its ilk were never a "genre" unto itself, they were..action movies, as games. Spec Ops being Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket or Platoon of these same hollywood movies.
Its Full Metal Jacket in Game-form.
Full-Metal Jacket, in my opinion, is more about instincts, assimilation and colonialization than it is about being an anti-war film.
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.
I actually never really got that anti-war vibe from Spec Ops, like I never got it from Full Metal Jacket. War is simply the background for the examination of human behaviors that exist outside of war. Spec Ops doesn't just question about orders being given to soldiers, but whether people of all stripes are responsible for the actions resulting from the orders given to them.
And..this can be entirely detached from the military setting? Sadly it cannot. You cant make Walker into a Cop, or a Teacher and tell the same story in the same way. You call it a subversion of the genre, yet you contradict yourself by claiming it isnt actually about war at all, which would be what it was subverting. You are literally having 2 arguments going at once which are opposing each other.
If anyone ever thought war was glorious, they are stupid to begin with.
"People with 'x' ideology are stupid"
Yes, thats truly an adult discussion.
"War is glorious" is not an Ideology. Please dont abuse the wrong word.
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.
Actually, I just watched the scene on youtube. There's not even any real implication that force powers are involved, especially considering that the history of the franchise shows that falling height still effects Jedi. Not to mention that there's never any implication that the gravity on Coruscant is any different than that on Earth, so we'd no reason to assume so, especially when everybody seems to walk and jump around like on Earth. Any hypothesis made about how it is justified is the result of the illusion being broken, and does nothing to solve the issue.
Im fairly certain we can all agree that the Prequels are stupid. I merely pointed out that there are force powers which arent hand-waving activated that can probably protect the guy. Plus he didnt fall that far anyhow. But to give an example, Blaster-fire blocked with a hand? Well, thats the force for ya. In any case just because something isnt outright stated doesnt mean you can assume real world laws apply when you have lightsabers, blasters, airships and a racist bunny-thing. One is impossible, one is improbable, hypermatter is very unlikely and the latter would be dead 10 times over due to natural selection.
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.
But if you're going to have different gravity,
have different gravity. Its inconsistent and jarring to the experience not to. Commit to it. For example, Dead Space implements zero-gravity conditions very well, and just about everything that one expects from a zero gravity condition exists properly. Things keep on moving, unless they have self-propulsion, because there's no friction, for example, and the rate of speed at which something moves is constant.
Again these laws may be in effect, however how often did a Jedi fall from an Airspeeder, down towards another in complete freefall in Star Wars? I count 1. Coruscant MAY have different gravity, that doesnt mean every planet needs to have the same gravity. Just like in real life where we count gravity by the only measure we can use, earth gravity, so every planet is considered in relation to that value, jupiter has more, the moon has much less.
Also, i must have missed where Walking Dead was about racism, rather than surviving the zombie apocalypse.
Besides that the game is trying to use the imagery of racial tension by setting it in the South, and with general angst and distrust behind every interaction due to upheaval in the social structure bringing major changes to people's way of life? Because racism still exists, and is even demonstrated within the game world, so you're given an additional reason to fear the prejudice of other people?
America's history is not the history of the world. Nor are your problems the problems of the world. I have never been to the South, im not from America nor do i currently reside there. I know about slavery, the civil war stuff etc, but to me, it may as well be set on Mars. To me Lee's color doesnt matter as long as he is a good and competently written character. If he were just another Jar-Jar Binks, i'd say so, he isnt. He is just a guy surviving in a 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.
I'm not talking about how the game makes you racist towards other groups, I'm talking about how it makes you distrustful of people of other races because deep down they may harbour racist sentiments against black people, a group which the protagonist falls under. Its a state-of-mind not too dissimilar to paranoia that many people live with, and for good reason. Take New York City's Sto-and-Frisk policy. 56% of people frisked are black, 29% are latino, and 11% are white. You're probably familiar enough with the population of the United States by race that I don't need to tell you that that is grossly disproportionate. Do you think it would be wrong for a person to suppose that the police officer that they're passing by on the street may or may not have racist intentions in regards as to whether you get stopped or not? Same thing with the game. General distrust based on damaging intentions that you're forced to suppose may be harboured by another person.
Xenophobia. We all have it. A instinctual distrust of people not part of our group. Thats where racism comes from you know. And again, not a US Citizen so the rest of your post to me is redundant.
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.
Punching people in the face generally isn't a good way to start. How about asking why they think you're racist? You might learn something if you do that instead. I know I have.
Might work, if they were listening. Usually they arent. And i have a low tolerance for stupidity. I explained this further up already in case you need a refresher once you get here, this thing is getting pretty damn long.
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.
I don't see anybody rational doing any of this. At the most, regarding rational response, I've seen others accusing others of being complicit with a condition that is favourable to them, which does exist among some people. Why would you want the status quo to change if while you're not ideologically invested in either side, you do benefit more from one particular side? It happens too. Most of the population of what would be the United States wasn't really ideologically invested in either freedom from or loyalty to the stewardship of England. Additionally, I don't really see people pretending that there aren't double-standards existent against men or that white people have never been the victims of racism. And that is definitely not how "xenophobia" is utilized in speech, at least not in any form of English that I've encountered.
I quoted 3 People earlier, by your definition these people are not rational. Glad we agree on this. Except we dont because apparently you make a distinction between accusing of being complicit with a condition and accusing of having that condition. They are fundamentally the same. What is the difference, in pure rational statements between the terms "Rapist" and "Rape Enabler"? There is none at the end of the day because both are bad equally. Label a person either (without justification) is damaging to them. Also i already gave a short overview over what i mean by Xenophobia.
In any case we have strayed much too far from the topic at hand already. So we may as well get back on the topic at hand which is simply, do we need more LGBTQ(WTFBBQFFS) Characters in games. No we do not. We need good and competently written Characters. Now if these characters happen to be black, or gay, or female, or fuck it lets say the character is a black lesbian, then thats good. But we dont need gay, black or female characters to fill a quota. We dont need to include them just so we can say "yep there's a female in that game". That aint helping anybody.
