Jimquisition: Creative Freedom, Strings Attached

[Lightknight]

No other media even puts itself up for these kinds of demands. Movies, books, art, the audience sees these after the fact and are only upset when they're based on some other work and unwarranted changes are made. I understand the defense of the question being able to be asked, but I don't think it's a very good one. Would we ask why Lucky Number Slevin cast a male lead or why Harry Potter was male? No, it's part of the writer's story and is meant as such.

The demand of a media to be customized around us is unrealistic in most places and I think it can really be unrealistic in some narrative driven games. Asking why Nathan Drake can't be a woman and demanding it even would be silly. The question can absolutely be asked but it's not wholly unlike demanding Picasso to put a little bit of red in those blue period paintings of his because some people like red and would rather see it.

I like the idea of games increasingly including females as an option to play as. I don't care what other people choose when I'm given a choice. But pressuring writers to alter their vision is a wrong in my opinion. Deciding not to purchase a game because you can't play your own sex is a choice. Deciding to support or not support a game based on such arbitrary concepts is fine. But demanding that the story should be different is just nonsense. That's not to say it hasn't been historically successful with titles like Great Expectations that actually edited their ending due to public outcries. Just that it's silly to demand those alterations like they're deserved. Sometimes a story is just going to be about a guy and that's that.

 

[FoolKiller]

If I were a content creator, I wouldn't even answer questions like "Why is it a male" with anything other than This is the story that I wanted to tell.

The problem is not sexism. It's just human nature. If I were a content creator, I would always be secretly casting myself as the hero as I perceive him. Yes, I said him. I said him because I'm a guy. When I daydream or write stories, I'm the hero of my story. Or at least an idealized version of how I see myself. It's like the matrix. Your persona inside the matrix is a residual self-image. And I think many content creators start with something this simple. They have a fantasy and make it. There is no malice or sexism. Just one person with a story to tell.

The other problem is you have these wonderful creative people that think of all these wonderful things and instead of talking to them about their creations and their love of their art, the media starts asking questions as if the creator was making a political statement. So of course their responses aren't well thought out or such because they don't have any sexist agenda. They just want to create.

 

[mike1921]

Personally, though, I'll admit that as a girl gamer I'm disappointed by GTA sticking to men only, especially when Saints Row is letting me be an amazingly awesome female gang lord.

Really, I don't find them comparable, Saints Row's boss is basically a blank slate. You can be basically anything. If they say, gave me the power to turn Niko Bellic into a busty 20 year old white girl, the narrative would've likely suffered for it. Could they have made one of three protagonists in 5 a girl? Yea probably. Is it as simple as it is in Saints Row? No

 

[jluzar20]

I wonder if Hemingway ever had to deal with people asking why Ahab wasn't a chick.

I'm always irritated when this kind of argument is put on a pedestal, and I strongly disagree that the discussion adds to the creative process in the way Jim is implying.

End of the day, if you don't like it, make your own game and show the world how it's done. Talk is cheep.

 

[Smurf McSmurfington]

So... Jim has lost quite a bit of weight. Or at least it seems like that's the case.

 

[PunkRex]

Great ep Jim, artists should create what they wish but NOTHING is beyond critisism and debate... except Timesplitters.

 

[Marohen]

After PAX and what happened there, I think we can all agree that this needed to be said.

What DID happen there?

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/06/pax-krahulik-transphobia/

 

[Wilco86]

I remember some people complaining that the players didn't have the freedom to choose the face and gender of the Nameless One in Planescape: Torment, even though it was a Western RPG and those options are common in other WRPGs. The story is so compact and certain NPCs are so gender-specific that giving an option to choose gender would force to write many parts of the story from scratch.

 

[Tanneseph]

Amen on the vid.

Can someone clue me in on why he uses the picture of the shrimp (and now lobsters?) often? I feel like I'm missing something super obvious, and it drives me nuts every week!

 

[Lilani]

Edit: What I'm saying is that if Half-Life 2 is played by someone identifying as female, Gordon Freeman is female in that case. If played by someone idenifying as male, Gordon is male.

As a female, I've got to say...not really. This isn't how it works at all. I don't know what it feels like to "be" a man, but I still felt like Gordon Freeman playing HL2 and I was perfectly fine with everyone else calling me a male, and with Alyx hitting on me every now and then. And when I was playing the Walking Dead I didn't feel like a female Lee, I felt like Lee. I made my decisions based on my perceptions of his character. I wanted him to fall in love with Carly, and I encouraged him to be fatherly to Clementine. As I saw his relationship with Clementine develop, it felt like a father-daughter relationship, not a mother-daughter. And I loved that--I just loved the honesty and tenderness there. It reminded me of my dad in many ways.

To say it's impossible for a player to play as the opposite gender without "imagining" they're the same gender is like saying a person can't watch a movie or read a book about a character of the opposite gender without mentally changing them to be the same. That just isn't how it works at all. Perhaps if the character is nameless and there's no narrative like Minecraft or something, but if the character has a name and if they're an active participant in the narrative then that defines them. All throughout Bioshock I was aware I was playing a man, and I felt no need to change that. I was too busy exploring the narrative and seeing where the characters and story were going to go. It's just the same as the way I got through Harry Potter just fine without turning him into Harriet Potter in my mind. It's the same principle, really.

 

[Lilani]

There's no hermaphrodite gender, as a person is either male or female (there's a huge number of scientific studies on children with both genitals which proves that there's no third gender, they children are always male or female).

Intersex [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex] people exist, and roughly 1.7% of human births are intersex. While it may not be a "third gender" per se, but some countries have adopted "X" as a valid alternative to "M" or "F" for these people who are biologically neither male nor female.

Gender isn't cultural because gender roles are the same in all cultures. Women prefer roles that are people orientated, while men prefer STEM subjects. If gender could change hourly then you'd have women who had spent 30 years as a nurse suddenly wanting to become an engineer and vice versa.

There is a whole discussion we can have here about implied gender roles; the way children are exposed to toys which in some ways "tell" them what they should like, and what effects this can have on what activities they pursue in the future. For example, boys are typically surrounded by building and construction toys, while girls are typically surrounded by dolls and domestically-related toys, and media constantly tells them these are the things they want. They're told before they can even comprehend any of it that girls like baby dolls and boys like trucks. I think we need to look very carefully at all this before we decide any of these are "inherent" traits.

Finally male and female traits are common in all cultures. That's why there's no human cultures where the women hunt and the men raise children.

Though many matriarchies [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matriarchy#History] have existed and continue to exist today. Again, you're simply taking the traits of your culture and assuming that not only are they universal, but also that they are "correct." Ethnocentrism is never helpful in a discussion like this, and if you want to argue facts then I think you need to brush up on a few more before coming back here.

Also take the idiot quip out of the beginning of your post, lest the mods incur their wrath. There's no need for name calling.

 

[carnex]

Hmm, seriously one of the better episodes. But my which is that he went just one step further. Just one more mention. And that is thus:

Invoking social justice in your criticism is not criticism of work, it's criticism of author based on his work. Invoking social justice is not just criticism, it's specifying something as objectively bad or even harmful, it?s invoking need for censorship. Therefore you can call something offensive, but not harmful or socially unacceptable. No matter how socially unacceptable games is it has right to exist.

 

[RJ 17]

Personally, I prefer playing as a female in games where gender is an option purely because I enjoy the thought of a strong female character being the hero. I like the thought that Shepard is a bad-ass woman saving the galaxy rather than a typical male space marine.

That said, I'm not going to ignore a game if gender isn't an option. Good game = good game. No need to get all picky about it. As Jim said, it's "fair enough" to question WHY the creator of a game might have been so emphatic that the main character be one gender or the other, but in the end I'll still play the game if it looks fun/interesting/entertaining/etc.

 

[Goliath100]

snip

You do get that it's the characters that change, not you? And it only apply to playable characters?

 

[Erttheking]

Why should a game be criticised or scrutinised simply because it doesn't have a female protagonist?

Why shouldn't it?

Well it does make it harder for developers to make the game they want when people are criticising it simply because it doesn't meet a gender quota. I have no doubt that many female characters and minorities were added to games simply to appease the white knights, rather than to enhance the story.

First of all, White Knight is getting to be an old term. Second of all, yes it's true that female and minority characters don't always enhance the story to a game. The problem is that male characters don't always enhance it either, but it doesn't stop the flood of them. No one is asking for a gender quota. We're asking for people to step out of their safe zones and to make a character besides a white brown haired white man in his mid 30s. SOME of them are good, but 90% of them kinda suck.

Most of the bad games with a brown haired, white man, in his mid 30s sucked because the story was boring or the gameplay was bad; so a different main character won't fix these problem.

The character has very little influence on the story; which is why no one ever says that a game would been better if the protagonist had been blond, black, a woman, or a child.

But this kind of raises the question of if these characters are so unimportant to the story, why can't they be something else? I mean clearly their identity isn't really that important. It's like Jim said. "Why a guy?"

 

[Lilani]

snip

You do get that it's the characters that change, not you? And it only apply to playable characters?

The way I understand what you're saying is this: When a female is playing Gordon Freeman, she imagines him as a female instead of a male, or when a male is playing Lara Croft he imagines Lara as a male. I'm saying this is wrong, because I've played many games fully aware that the character I control is a male when I am not a male. Again, the only time I've done otherwise is when the character lacks both a name and a role within a set narrative, like Minecraft.

 

[orangeapples]

Leave it to a Brit to tell Americans what the First Amendment actually means >_>

 

[Goliath100]

snip

You do get that it's the characters that change, not you? And it only apply to playable characters?

The way I understand what you're saying is this: When a female is playing Gordon Freeman, she imagines him as a female instead of a male, or when a male is playing Lara Croft he imagines Lara as a male. I'm saying this is wrong, because I've played many games fully aware that the character I control is a male when I am not a male. Again, the only time I've done otherwise is when the character lacks both a name and a role within a set narrative, like Minecraft.

You do get that's completely wrong? And I don't even get where you got that from?