Extra Punctuation: Manly Vs. Macho in Gears

Avatar Roku

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warrenEBB said:
People don't seem to want to think about Gears, because the game hasn't asked them to.
snip
I know! You have no idea how much I've had to defend Gears 2 (haven't played 3 yet). Remember Act 3 of Gears when you were in the research station and the tone was pseudo-horror? Do you have any idea how many people I talked to who missed the point of that act entirely, Yahtzee included?

Christ, you barely even had to look under the surface to figure it out.

(incidentally, I always assumed that that facility was where the Locust were created and the Sires were a prototype of them, but I haven't played 3. Was I right?)
 

SnakeoilSage

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How about the Arbiter from the Halo series? Would he be manly, or macho? He has a character arc that could starts out Manly, but then it goes Macho and he just changes allegiances without any indication that he gave these choices any thought. And by Halo 3 he's just a background character, a mascot for the "Elites are Friends now" schtick.
 

Avatar Roku

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SnakeoilSage said:
How about the Arbiter from the Halo series? Would he be manly, or macho? He has a character arc that could starts out Manly, but then it goes Macho and he just changes allegiances without any indication that he gave these choices any thought. And by Halo 3 he's just a background character, a mascot for the "Elites are Friends now" schtick.
What do you mean "without indication"? That was basically the entire plot of Halo 2.
 

warrenEBB

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Avatar Roku said:
...(incidentally, I always assumed that that facility was where the Locust were created and the Sires were a prototype of them, but I haven't played 3. Was I right?)
There were collectible items in Gears2 (I mention this to point out that it was IN THE GAME, and you don't have to read the books to find this) which explain how that New Hope facility was experimenting in mixing human DNA with creatures they were finding underground, in order to get around the Rust Lung problem. This mostly led to the "failures" called "sires." but one collectible notes there was a single success, named Ruth, who was an almost perfect humanoid female (who one day, we can infer, would change her name to queen myrrah).

it's well laid out, over in this forum post(s): http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/991468-gears-of-war-3/60473916

Really irks me that Yahtzee is using gears as an example of "missed opportunity" in FPS storytelling, when it actually does some innovative awesomely subtle shit that he just overlooked.
 

SnakeoilSage

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Avatar Roku said:
SnakeoilSage said:
How about the Arbiter from the Halo series? Would he be manly, or macho? He has a character arc that could starts out Manly, but then it goes Macho and he just changes allegiances without any indication that he gave these choices any thought. And by Halo 3 he's just a background character, a mascot for the "Elites are Friends now" schtick.
What do you mean "without indication"? That was basically the entire plot of Halo 2.
It's poorly done; the Arbiter just kind of shrugs as those plot points come up. You didn't meet your "Kill all Humans" quota? Hey, it's no problem I'll take up the mantle of a suicidal warrior and avenge my honour. Rebel Elite says the Prophets lie? Whatever heretic, I'mma shiv you with my energy blade. Elites get pushed out of power? Hey's that's not cool... so what's my next suicide mission? Flood Gravemind calls him a ponce for following orders? "You make a great point I will instantly believe you and fight against the religion that has definied my life and species for centuries. But only for you, giant amorphous blob of biomass that talks in rhyme. Certainly not for the Master Chief, the guy I hate for killing my soldiers even though he's only defending a species I've helped to systematically wipe out for years now, burning away billions of lives because my bosses told me to, and I expect him to just accept me when I decide to change sides because this whole game is meant to make the Elites - who laugh when you die in the first Halo - into good guys by showing the player that we have sense of honour... but only when our superiors turn their giant douchebag powers on us, not when they're telling us to senselessly butcher an entire species because "the gods say so."

All of that just happens in Arbiter's head, or off-screen. Maybe it's 'cause I can't read "mandibles" but I didn't see him weigh the experiences of his life with the harsh truth's he's just discovered for longer than it takes to shift his head to the left.
 

Soviet Heavy

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The87Italians said:
Soviet Heavy said:
Zhukov said:
That reminds me, why exactly were the Locusts in Gears deemed evil?

Sure, they didn't exactly treat their pets nicely, but beyond that, what gave them the "bad guy" label apart from being slightly uglier than the average human soldier?
I wonder this too. They are stated to be the bad guys, but every action they have taken in the series has been a direct response to the Human's aggression. The Pendulum Wars before the games were lasting for decades, and the Locust were perfectly content to let the top dwellers to rip themselves apart. It was only after the Immulsion drilling and subsequent dumping of fuel into their hollows that they got fed up and attacked. They are the native species, defending their planet from the destructive colonists.

The Immulsion dumping awoke the Krill, the flesh eating bat creatures. God knows how many locust were massacred by them. This forces them to live near the immulsion for illumination to keep the kryll away, putting them between being eaten alive and horrible mutations.

Yet being large, brutish looking thugs, they are declared evil.
Humans were around a long time before the locust, they weren't colonists. I'd say the biggest reason the locust were characterized as "the bad guys" in the series was mostly because of that whole thing where the locust tried to commit mass genocide against the human race preemptively. Seriously, that was in the first ten minutes of the first game they went over that.
How are the Locust "new" to Sera? They were only made common knowledge after they appeared during E-Day. Nobody knows how long they were living below ground before that. Gears 3 Reveals that the Adam Fenix was aware of the Locust presence, and was trying to broker a peace with Myrrah, who was pissed that the humans were dumping the lambent spawning immulsion into their hollows. Adam never told anyone about the impending attack, and the Locust surprised everyone.
 

Woodsey

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Versuvius said:
Ratchet and Clank had the billion guns/silent gameplay/voiced cutscenes before Half Life >.> just saying.

(Also a better game series)
Ratchet and Clank came out in 2002. Half Life came out in 1998. Now, I might have failed A-Level Maths, but I'm pretty sure that means Half-Life came first.

And Half Life doesn't have voiced cutscenes (or cutscenes at all, for that matter, although you can argue it on a technicality), which makes your little brackets piece seem to be an out-of-arse assumption instead of a "I have played both and I prefer this". And 3000 other games had the massive inventory system before either of those anyway, as well as silent protagonists.

ironlordthemad said:
OK for what has too be the hundredth time on these forums, I'm going to point at the Gears of War novels by Karen Travis and say that "If you want to realy see whats going on under the hood of some of the best known characters in video gaming, read these books."
And for the 100th time, people will tell you that saying, "oh, its just because you haven't read third-party media pieces X and Y" is not a valid excuse for poor writing or characterisation.
 

Waaghpowa

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Woodsey said:
ironlordthemad said:
OK for what has too be the hundredth time on these forums, I'm going to point at the Gears of War novels by Karen Travis and say that "If you want to realy see whats going on under the hood of some of the best known characters in video gaming, read these books."
And for the 100th time, people will tell you that saying, "oh, its just because you haven't read third-party media pieces X and Y" is not a valid excuse for poor writing or characterisation.
QFT

Any game that needs it's plot to be better explained with additional 3rd party novels has failed.

It's very true that Capelli gets less time than he needed. I found that it was very annoying that the support characters wouldn't shut the hell up, and Joe just went along silently.
 

Kargathia

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Therumancer said:
Sometimes it bugs me how often Yahtzee can give biting insights, and other times he can miss a huge amount of the point almost entirely. Sometimes I thing he's just sounding off for the sake of sounding off.

I'm not a huge "Gears Of War" fan, but understand that we're dealing with characters who are career military, and a protaganist who is a hardened veteran before the game even starts, and has also done a fairly notable stint in a military prison.

Military training by it's very nature is supposed to strip away most signs of emotion and individuality, the idea being to replace everything you are with something better... well better in the context of killing people and breaking things in pursuit of a goal someone else decides on. Soldiers who recognize the enemy as having valid points of view, or being regular people with lives and families are kind of useless in reality. All arguements about politics and morality, when your fighting to win soldiers who pause to contemplate the inhumanity of war and what they are doing to their enemy in the midst of a battle can't do the job. The last thing you need is for the guy standing there protecting you to pause and go "OMG, I can't kill this poor unfortunate" while that guy proceeds to kill him and then turns around and massacres you and your entire civilization.

We could sit here and argue about the morality of this entire thing, and the nessecity of it, but I doubt I could do a better job of explaining it and WHY it's needed anymore than say Heinlan's "Starship Troopers".

When looking at a game featuring the military, especially characters who are supposed to be experienced veterans... yes, they are going to be fairly uniform. That's actually good writing since this is what the system produces. Take one of those guys, toss him into a military prison where emotion is a weakness (prison can be very dehumanizing on people who want to survive it, especially military prison), and then toss him back out into an apocolyptic war... and yeah... Marcus Fenix is pretty much what your going to get. If he was any other way it would actually have been bad writing given the backround which ties into the entire thing.... and this is a defense being made by someone who doesn't paticularly like the game in question.

Simply put the whole "Macho" attitude we see here, is kind of realistic for the kinds of characters we tend to deal with. In general people have differant mechanisms for turning out that way. Joking about everything and becoming a sort of macabre clown who takes nothing seriously while doing their job with lethal precisian, or becoming the aloof "Marcus Fenix" type are both very typical ways of dealing with this kind of life.


As far as cutting down bad guys who have legitimate points of view and/or justifications for what they are doing, that's pretty much reality. In general nobody wakes up and decides "we're going to be really evil today just for the heck of it" everything happens for a reason. Of course the Locust/Chimera/Muslims/Whatever have legitimate reasons for doing what they are doing from their own perspective, some of which might even seem fairly reasonable to the other side, if they didn't there wouldn't be a massive scale war. This is incidently exactly WHY you dehumanize your soldiers and strip away a lot of their empathy. In the end pretty much all wars come down to "us or them", "my side, and their side", the bad guy and the good guy are all matters of point of view, and when it's come down to a war only one side is going to be left functioning, and that's the side that gets to record history.

A situation where a bad guy goes off about how legitimate their cause is and then gets cut down by some grunting soldier who might have a personal vendetta is pretty much a summary of war in a nutshell. In the end the point of view of the loser doesn't matter, it's all about who wins.... and in "Gears Of War" it is very much an "us or them" type situation no matter who might have the overall moral high ground when you scrape all the muck away.

Honestly from what I know of the series "Gears Of War" set out to make a sort of commentary on the nature of war, and really from the plot points I've seen it's done a fairly good job of making the points it set out to do. Marcus Fenix might be stereotypical to some extent, but I suspect that's kind of the point, as is the simple point that once a war breaks out
the reasons behind it no longer matter, with it being the job of a soldier to end the war favorably for their side or die trying.

But then again, the realities of war have never really sat well with the left wing regardless of what name it uses in a given country.
Your point makes sense. It also is very possible to write a good story about a dehumanised soldier with petty grudges.

Gears of War, however, is not that - even if realism was any excuse for a shitty story.
 

DugMachine

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Versuvius said:
Ratchet and Clank had the billion guns/silent gameplay/voiced cutscenes before Half Life >.> just saying.

(Also a better game series)
Oh god I hope you're trolling. Not about being a better game series... cause I love them both but... oh sweet jesus I hope you're trolling.
 

Stoneface

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Therumancer said:
Sometimes it bugs me how often Yahtzee can give biting insights, and other times he can miss a huge amount of the point almost entirely. Sometimes I thing he's just sounding off for the sake of sounding off.

I'm not a huge "Gears Of War" fan, but understand that we're dealing with characters who are career military, and a protaganist who is a hardened veteran before the game even starts, and has also done a fairly notable stint in a military prison.

Military training by it's very nature is supposed to strip away most signs of emotion and individuality, the idea being to replace everything you are with something better... well better in the context of killing people and breaking things in pursuit of a goal someone else decides on. Soldiers who recognize the enemy as having valid points of view, or being regular people with lives and families are kind of useless in reality. All arguements about politics and morality, when your fighting to win soldiers who pause to contemplate the inhumanity of war and what they are doing to their enemy in the midst of a battle can't do the job. The last thing you need is for the guy standing there protecting you to pause and go "OMG, I can't kill this poor unfortunate" while that guy proceeds to kill him and then turns around and massacres you and your entire civilization.

We could sit here and argue about the morality of this entire thing, and the nessecity of it, but I doubt I could do a better job of explaining it and WHY it's needed anymore than say Heinlan's "Starship Troopers".

When looking at a game featuring the military, especially characters who are supposed to be experienced veterans... yes, they are going to be fairly uniform. That's actually good writing since this is what the system produces. Take one of those guys, toss him into a military prison where emotion is a weakness (prison can be very dehumanizing on people who want to survive it, especially military prison), and then toss him back out into an apocolyptic war... and yeah... Marcus Fenix is pretty much what your going to get. If he was any other way it would actually have been bad writing given the backround which ties into the entire thing.... and this is a defense being made by someone who doesn't paticularly like the game in question.

Simply put the whole "Macho" attitude we see here, is kind of realistic for the kinds of characters we tend to deal with. In general people have differant mechanisms for turning out that way. Joking about everything and becoming a sort of macabre clown who takes nothing seriously while doing their job with lethal precisian, or becoming the aloof "Marcus Fenix" type are both very typical ways of dealing with this kind of life.


As far as cutting down bad guys who have legitimate points of view and/or justifications for what they are doing, that's pretty much reality. In general nobody wakes up and decides "we're going to be really evil today just for the heck of it" everything happens for a reason. Of course the Locust/Chimera/Muslims/Whatever have legitimate reasons for doing what they are doing from their own perspective, some of which might even seem fairly reasonable to the other side, if they didn't there wouldn't be a massive scale war. This is incidently exactly WHY you dehumanize your soldiers and strip away a lot of their empathy. In the end pretty much all wars come down to "us or them", "my side, and their side", the bad guy and the good guy are all matters of point of view, and when it's come down to a war only one side is going to be left functioning, and that's the side that gets to record history.

A situation where a bad guy goes off about how legitimate their cause is and then gets cut down by some grunting soldier who might have a personal vendetta is pretty much a summary of war in a nutshell. In the end the point of view of the loser doesn't matter, it's all about who wins.... and in "Gears Of War" it is very much an "us or them" type situation no matter who might have the overall moral high ground when you scrape all the muck away.

Honestly from what I know of the series "Gears Of War" set out to make a sort of commentary on the nature of war, and really from the plot points I've seen it's done a fairly good job of making the points it set out to do. Marcus Fenix might be stereotypical to some extent, but I suspect that's kind of the point, as is the simple point that once a war breaks out
the reasons behind it no longer matter, with it being the job of a soldier to end the war favorably for their side or die trying.

But then again, the realities of war have never really sat well with the left wing regardless of what name it uses in a given country.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you see what you doing here is justifying WHY Marcus is a really boring macho twat...but you'r not DENYING that he's a really boring macho twat. Congratulations.
 

The87Italians

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Soviet Heavy said:
The87Italians said:
Soviet Heavy said:
Zhukov said:
That reminds me, why exactly were the Locusts in Gears deemed evil?

Sure, they didn't exactly treat their pets nicely, but beyond that, what gave them the "bad guy" label apart from being slightly uglier than the average human soldier?
I wonder this too. They are stated to be the bad guys, but every action they have taken in the series has been a direct response to the Human's aggression. The Pendulum Wars before the games were lasting for decades, and the Locust were perfectly content to let the top dwellers to rip themselves apart. It was only after the Immulsion drilling and subsequent dumping of fuel into their hollows that they got fed up and attacked. They are the native species, defending their planet from the destructive colonists.

The Immulsion dumping awoke the Krill, the flesh eating bat creatures. God knows how many locust were massacred by them. This forces them to live near the immulsion for illumination to keep the kryll away, putting them between being eaten alive and horrible mutations.

Yet being large, brutish looking thugs, they are declared evil.
Humans were around a long time before the locust, they weren't colonists. I'd say the biggest reason the locust were characterized as "the bad guys" in the series was mostly because of that whole thing where the locust tried to commit mass genocide against the human race preemptively. Seriously, that was in the first ten minutes of the first game they went over that.
How are the Locust "new" to Sera? They were only made common knowledge after they appeared during E-Day. Nobody knows how long they were living below ground before that. Gears 3 Reveals that the Adam Fenix was aware of the Locust presence, and was trying to broker a peace with Myrrah, who was pissed that the humans were dumping the lambent spawning immulsion into their hollows. Adam never told anyone about the impending attack, and the Locust surprised everyone.
I never said they were new to Sera, I said that the humans were around a long time before the locust were. Was it possible that the locust had been underground for thousands of years prior to human existance on Sera? Yeah sure, maybe. Apparently there was a collectible that said something about miners infected with immulsion created the sires whose children were the original locust, but I never found it. The gears wiki pretty much says the same thing here [http://gearsofwar.wikia.com/wiki/Imulsion].

Also, humans hadn't been dumping immulsion underground, it just evolved again and started created the lambent creatures (Adam even said something about that in the game). The only reason the locust attacked the surface was because they wanted to get the hell out of the hollow where the lambent were running rampant. It just got to the point where Adam ran out of time to create a cure for the lambency, so they decided to commit genocide against humans on the surface.
 

Avatar Roku

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SnakeoilSage said:
snip for space
It isn't really that Arbiter makes a choice, not until the very end. Up until that point, Arby is mainly interested in getting out alive and taking revenge on the Brutes, the Humans don't even enter the picture. It's only AFTER Arby knows what the Halos do that he decides to team up with Humans, and even then only out of sheer necessity.

I admit, I'm biased to like the Arbiter, both because he's more interesting than Master Chief and because he is voiced by Keith David. But that aside, he really isn't as bad as you say.
 

SnakeoilSage

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Avatar Roku said:
SnakeoilSage said:
snip for space
It isn't really that Arbiter makes a choice, not until the very end. Up until that point, Arby is mainly interested in getting out alive and taking revenge on the Brutes, the Humans don't even enter the picture. It's only AFTER Arby knows what the Halos do that he decides to team up with Humans, and even then only out of sheer necessity.

I admit, I'm biased to like the Arbiter, both because he's more interesting than Master Chief and because he is voiced by Keith David. But that aside, he really isn't as bad as you say.
No dude, I hear you, and I like the Arbiter too. I just think they didn't do him much justice. When Halo 2 came out, I was disappointed for two reasons. One, Bungie lied about fighting for earth and that is epic Spoony levels of Betrayal! Second, the Arbiter should have gotten his own spin-off game.

And now that you've said Arby I'm hungry for a beef n' cheddar...
 

geizr

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I think the phenomenon you are seeing, Yahtzee, is not really a "manly" versus "machismo" problem but rather a fundamental problem of some game developers not being able to think as holistically as they need to about a game's design and implementation. They see the parts that go into a game, but they don't see the interactions between the parts that go into forming the holistic, identifying structure of the game. Essentially, they miss the forest cause they are counting the atoms in the leaves.

It is a skill to be able to have that 1000-feet-up view and see how the different elements work together to create a singular, coherent structure whose overall behavior is an emergent phenomenon that does not exist within any of the particular parts. This ability is what separates the artists and craftsmen from everybody else.

Here's an exercise to understand what I'm talking about regarding the differences in thinking and perspective. The next time you take a flight, look out the window and pay attention, not to the individual things you see on the ground, but to the total patterns that are inscribed on the ground. Look at the pattern of flows of vegetations, of soil(yes, the soil has lots of patterns caused by water run-off and human activity), and of the building and house of cities you pass over. Look at the pattern of the clouds and see the flows of the atmosphere in their arrangements(can you pick out the large-scale clusterings of air masses?). You can not see these patterns in the individual objects; it is only in the collective structure formed from the interactions of the objects that you can see these patterns.

Every part of a game is important to convey the total identity of the game. If the parts don't work together, then the game just becomes a collection of random things to keep you busy, every bit as pointless as a child's Busy Center toy.

Or, maybe I'm just making shit up. Who knows; who cares.
 

Avatar Roku

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SnakeoilSage said:
Avatar Roku said:
SnakeoilSage said:
snip for space
It isn't really that Arbiter makes a choice, not until the very end. Up until that point, Arby is mainly interested in getting out alive and taking revenge on the Brutes, the Humans don't even enter the picture. It's only AFTER Arby knows what the Halos do that he decides to team up with Humans, and even then only out of sheer necessity.

I admit, I'm biased to like the Arbiter, both because he's more interesting than Master Chief and because he is voiced by Keith David. But that aside, he really isn't as bad as you say.
No dude, I hear you, and I like the Arbiter too. I just think they didn't do him much justice. When Halo 2 came out, I was disappointed for two reasons. One, Bungie lied about fighting for earth and that is epic Spoony levels of Betrayal! Second, the Arbiter should have gotten his own spin-off game.

And now that you've said Arby I'm hungry for a beef n' cheddar...
Ah, cool. I agree, Arby didn't get what he deserved: he was, to me, the best part of the game. I just still don't really think he was treated as badly as you said.
 

Anomynous 167

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SnakeoilSage said:
How about the Arbiter from the Halo series? Would he be manly, or macho? He has a character arc that could starts out Manly, but then it goes Macho and he just changes allegiances without any indication that he gave these choices any thought. And by Halo 3 he's just a background character, a mascot for the "Elites are Friends now" schtick.
He didn't have to give his changing of allegiance any thought, there was a civil war on which was based off of racial and class tensions. He happened to be of the type of person that could be labelled a rebel. Even if he hadn't chosen his position in the dispute, that position he took would of been forced upon him.
 

Space Jawa

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I've recognized that Fenix was a lousy character since game 1. The reason the guy was in prison in the first place was because he went AWOL to rescue his dad, an action that both got his unit killed and failed to accomplish what he set out to do in the first place. And yet for some inconceivable reason, the COGs decide to put him in a command position instead of someone who has a more reliable track record.

Then in game 2, in spite of the fact that he points out that he recognizes that this was a huge mistake, he still goes along with Dom to help him potentially make the same mistake and put the future of all humanity in unnecessary danger instead of arguing that if they die trying to save his wive, it won't matter if she's alive or not. Oh, yeah, and lest we forget, they weren't able to save her anyway (you know, just like what happened when Fenix tried to save his dad). Which means they put their mission at risk for nothing.

Frankly, as fun as the games are to play, I thought the writing itself was lousy. If you ask me, the reason that humanity was loosing so badly was on account of the COGs having terrible leadership as much or moreso than anything else.