Jimquisition: Neutered

[Stabby Joe]

Saints Row IV seems to be receiving a lot of "pre-hate", at least what I've seen so far, mostly because of story and gameplay changes. Despite that though I wonder how much it will come up here.

I haven't seen this myself but i have to ask. Why? Saints Row is made to be over the top, outta this world, ridiculously raunchy and fun. Why would it get hate for doing what it's been doing all these years and getting good review for? Not to mean I'm directly asking you my friend I'm just asking in general and quoting this so I don't get people confused.

I don't really understand the hate either actually. There is an understandable degree with the Third in regards to certain aspects that many liked, like separate gang arcs and great clothes customization but even now with 4, it seems to be coming from elsewhere.

I think some don't like that it dumped the gang warfare aspect more so but what some call dumped I'd say evolved. Gang war is overdone and the old hip hop themes of the first two are passed their prime by now in my opinion. I'm glad it's mixing things up and even if people don't like it, at least you can't call it stale unlike many popular franchises today.

 

[Redd the Sock]

The size of the demographic isn't just about the overall population, it's about income and willingness to part with it.

Okay, so, what's the thought process here? There seems to be some algebraic equation of marketing that reads "disposable income + interest = penis" written in dry-erase marker on a board somewhere. Am I missing something, and if not, why am I seemingly in a minority for thinking that particular equation is goofy?

Don't get lost on the specific demographic here. The concept could apply to why women are the market focus for cosmetics at the expense of the few men that want skin cream, or why grandma isn't targeted for gangster rap music. It's just an element of knowing who your market is while ignoring ones it aren't to a noticeable degree. Your responses to my examples are the kind of things that make companies feel people aren't serious about wanting more women characters in gamines and comics. Not knowing about about a game (particularly one that had news stories about having to fight to have a female protagonist) says you only pay attention to big marketed games and thus your complaints hold little validity because, well, you really didn't try and find things with more variety outside the AAA. Complaining things doing what you want suck says quality trumps gender politics so ignore the gender politics. When you get down to pre-judging and ignoring a potentially good book for months due to the actions of other books, the company starts thinking that trying to appeal to a chronic complainer isn't worth their time. Nothing sours one on a demographic quite like trying to appeal to them to see the complaint e-mails pile up faster than the bank account.

I'm not saying it's the desirable outcome to have, just that if you want to know why one group or another aren't treated as a demographic, before vilifying businesses, try asking what exactly they've done to be treated as a demographic other than exist. If they ignore / overlook things meant to appeal to them and complain about things that don't, it won't be a surprise when a company goes to the group handing over cash for digital breasts.

 

[Bruce]

It's actually not weird at all.

No, it really is. I get the whole "more men play video games, so let's try to get their money" thing, but why are they making it an either/or choice? Yes, men make 51% of the gaming demographic, but you know who makes 100% of it? Men and women. Why not aim for both? And if one hundred percent is impossible (which I think we all agree that it is), why not redefine the conversation along lines other than the properties of one's crotch? Why not aim for [people who like X] rather than [men or women]?

It's super-weird. I do not get how it makes good business sense. How it promotes lazy thinking, sure, that I get, but how it makes good sense? I got nothing.

The size of the demographic isn't just about the overall population, it's about income and willingness to part with it. If one group are the majority for a console game with a higher profit margin while another prefers free facebook games, it's not hard to tell who a company would target. The same logic applies to who buys lots of DLC and who buys merchandise (more a Japan thing I know, but still, a game plus a bunch of statues and wallscrolls is better than a game in and of itself, and it also explains why so many pinup figures).

There is a problem with this line of thinking - why Facebook and casual games in general are that way. These games specifically set out to be inclusive, they build a heavy reliance on getting your friends into them, building a community which means they cannot go the route of AAA.

And those games are making a fair chunk of cash, so much so that the AAA guys are trying to think of ways to tap into the same business models they've got.

Now compare that to AAA development and publishing in general.

You have publishers having to be forced by the developers to include women in their focus tests, you have developers telling us about how publishers don't want games with female protagonists, you have games like Dragons Crown where frankly the depiction of women is grotesque and criticising it will have an avalanche of comments acting like being put off by the aesthetics is some great crime in games criticism, like a visual medium shouldn't be criticised for being visually unappealing.

And this happens every time a woman mentions how she is put off by female NPCs or some sexist sidequest, or the lack of strong female characters in a game. Criticisms which are perfectly valid because they reflect how she experiences the game, and then the avalanche of comments.

Those Facebook games have that audience because frankly they don't treat women like shit.

And think about this for a second - how many Bronies are there around? Now I don't watch much TV so I haven't seen the show but these are grown men who have built an online identity and community based around a series for little girls. Why do they exist? For the same reason we have women on these boards who like games marketed to men, because good is good.

It doesn't threaten us if good AAA games are developed to capture the female market that has been up until now largely ignored by publishers, if those games are good we'll enjoy playing some of them too.

Just like how some grown ass men enjoy watching a cartoon show about magical little baby ponies.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

Why do gamers defend their favorite titles from criticism with such volatility? According to some, it's because they don't want to see their genitalia removed.

I just wanted to say, once again, that I thank the gods for you, Jim Sterling. This video was excellent and you should feel proud for making it and enlightening those who went previously unenlightened.

As an already enlightened individual, I wanted to say as well that if I wasn't already sold on Saints Row 4, this video would have sold me on it. I have always felt welcome and included in the Saints Row games, but learning that I can now have my characters engage in "romantic" relationships at all, much less gay/straight/bi/trans/etc. all optional, is icing on the cake. Saints Row really is the most inclusive game out there, and I intend to support it at release.

Thank you and thank the gods for you, once again.

 

[JimB]

It's just an element of knowing who your market is while ignoring ones it aren't to a noticeable degree.

I think it's more an element of deciding whom your market is.

Not knowing about about a game (particularly one that had news stories about having to fight to have a female protagonist) says you only pay attention to big marketed games and thus your complaints hold little validity because, well, you really didn't try and find things with more variety outside the AAA.

Seriously, where were these news stories and advertisements? I never noticed them.

Complaining things doing what you want suck says quality trumps gender politics so ignore the gender politics.

I think that's a deliberately skewed interpretation. All it says is I can criticize one aspect of a game, or at least in my case repeat the criticisms of someone who has played it since I never have. I don't own a PS3.

When you get down to prejudging and ignoring a potentially good book for months due to the actions of other books, the company starts thinking that trying to appeal to a chronic complainer isn't worth their time.

DC has an editorial staff and an editorial policy. The books don't have absolute autonomy; their stories are at least partially dictated by editorial mandate, as evidenced by the absurd number of crossovers Nu52 piled up before the continuity had been around for a single year. In other words, just because a news article is written by X author doesn't mean I need to give my business to Newspaper Y, whose policies have continuously disappointed me. And as someone who pays slightly more attention to comics than I do to video games, I can't help thinking that if World's Finest had been promoted as a feminist book (or whatever you're suggesting it is), I'd have heard something about it...but then again, apparently there were entire news articles on Remember Me that I don't know about, so who knows.

I'm not saying it's the desirable outcome to have, just that if you want to know why one group or another aren't treated as a demographic, before vilifying businesses, try asking what exactly they've done to be treated as a demographic other than exist.

It is at least possible that I am just a grumpy old fart, because I remember a time when businesses were supposed to attract me to them rather than the other way around.

 

[Something Amyss]

There's little that Marston's appearance impacts in terms of narrative.

No, there's nothing directly in the narrative that references Marston being a moderately-sized person with a gruff, scar-ridden face wearing typical cowboy clothing, why would there? Or did I miss the part where the story shifts because you changed your clothing?

There is, however, elements in the story that reference him being male. The game is set in the end of the wild west in the early 1900's, where women were still seen as properties of their husbands and were mostly kept as housewives, the themes of the game include things like fatherhood and the tone is realistic (the zombie add-on isn't canon). Ever seen the movie True Grit? A lot of that movie is about the female main character having to deal with constant discrimination from males when trying to get anything done, because that's what it was like at that time; now imagine a game that tries to be historically and tonally accurate like RDR having a female protagonist who's gender all the men ignore. It'd be like a WW2 movie where a Jew in Nazi Germany doesn't face any problems because of their religion. You'd either have to add in all of that and dilute the story with things that don't pertain to any of the themes, or make it an incredibly jarring story.

Yes, the last thing we want in a fictional wild west with many made-up contrivances for convenience would be a female protagonist.

Actually, the thing is that by the 1900s, it would be a more common sight than you give it credit. Maybe not universally accepted, but certainly not the "player piano stops and everyone grows quiet" moment you seem to think it would be. Why, they even had cowboys of colour by then, believe it or not!

Actually, you seem more interested in the Hollywood version of the Wild West. Which, you know, ignoring the fact that it was a different age, it was still largely fiction. It's just fiction you've come to accept. Same with Martson himself, from the chief superpower of slowing down time to his conversations with the man in black. When you say "historically and tonally accurate," you're saying nothing of consequence because it's not really true. The game already takes liberties; to pretend taking liberties would be bad or different is just absurd. You don't want historicity.

In a way, it would be very much like a Jew in Nazi Germany, in that if they've already had a black gay atheist walk through the streets, it probably doesn't matter much. In a more meaningful sense, not so much. But that's irrelevant, because the game rarely conforms to the period's treatment of other folks in the first place.

Except, you know, where convenient to the narrative. And at the end of the day, arguing one liberty taken is different from another is just inane.

And really, is fatherhood that persistent a theme? There's very little I can recall that is male-line only material. Hell, Marston's family is sifted off to the side for most of the story anyway.

 

[Something Amyss]

You've ignored that Dragon Crown's score was lowered because of what some female characters looked like, not because of the art or graphics. I suspect you did this because you lack a real argument.

Art should only score badly because it makes the game harder to play, not because a bigot doesn't like the way certain characters look.

I didn't ignore it because it's not true. I suspect you didn't read the reviews where the low scores were given, as they argue their points and defend them well. In fact, they don't seem to vary that much from the positive reviews in terms of argument. The way the women are drawn is never given as a sole reason for lowering of the score. You'd know this if you'd bothered to read them instead of going off second-hand information.

Of course, maybe you're ignoring that because you "lack a real argument."

"Art" lowers the score when a game looks bad, period. People don't care about functionality in art most of the time. A low graphics score in a magazine often derives from it having last year's textures, not a crime of functionality but of aesthetics.

You are free to have your own criteria, but understand they do not mesh with the general public's criteria very well.

Lara Croft had her breasts reduced for this reason, so it is happening.

I'd ask for evidence, but I know none is forthcoming because that would require it exist.

Well you are complaining about large breasts without providing any reason why they're bad.

No, I am demonstrating the fallacy in a particular argument. Forget the DC review. I'm not even sure you read the post you're responding to.

 

[nuttshell]

I know someone made the points about Sarkeesian allready but whatever. The point where she lost my respect for her, was when I learned two things:
1. She might have spammed 4chan with links to her kickstarter video. If she didn't, she still used the gained publicity as a marketing device. (her project didnt get much initial backing)
2. No ingame footage she used until now is her original work.
There are other things I found where I questioned her motives but these two were the biggest for me. I applaud her intellect and courage for pulling something like this in plain sight but I still think it is foul.

The places they are looking are the world. Like it or not, McDonald's, TV, and video games are all part of the world; and like it or not, there is a lot more world to teach kids things than there is parents. Please do not sit here and argue that parents, that two individual human beings, should somehow be able to overpower the message the entire world sends without having to change that message first; it smacks of a complete abdication of personal responsibility.

I agree with you, to a point, I believe. If a child looks at McDonald's, TV and video games in search for moral guidance, then the problem might not be entirely the parents'. It could be reasonable that these parents just got them a pretty stupid kid. And they surely change their reasoning pretty quickly as they mature and get other input. But they surely aren't going to base their reasoning on such specific binary deduction like you did in your roleplay. Now, I know anecdotes aren't really a great support for psychological studies and theories but if you care to hear it: I played Mortal Kombat 3 when I was about 9 years old with my own Sega Megadrive (bad parenting imho) and I was still able to understand that trying to rip someone's spine out of their body would be a bad idea. When I was 5, playing Super Mario, I couldn't care less who Peach or Mario were and I didn't think eating some mushrooms will make me an empowered person.

 

[Something Amyss]

Examples and sources please.

All I have heard of are a couple of developers claiming that unnamed publishers didn't want them having female characters the prominent character on the box art. The Last of Us and Remember Me being the two games. I have genuinely not heard of a single game where a publisher has denied the rights to have a female character.

Remember Me was given as an example by Jim Sterling not long ago citing in interview with the developer. The dev is supposed to have had to fought to have a game with a female protagonist and been rejected based on the female protagonist and the concept that a female protagonist might actually kiss a dude. That, they supposedly said "would be awkward."

I don't know if there's another example of the actual protagonist part, however.

 

[Steve Haigh]

Personally I'd prefer GTA IV to have allowed me to choose my gender, but at the same time, if all games did this we wouldn't have icons like Mario, Lara Croft, Niko Bellic, etc. Even the name Super Mario Bros. would have to be Super Mario/Maria Brothers/Sisters. This shows in the Saints Row series as the signature characters are the secondary ones.

 

[IgnisInCaelum]

This argument is stupid and Jimothy should feel bad for even trying to make it.
-snip-

Brilliant!

Also, leaving out the rant on how ridiculous it is to freak out about language usage as if we (including women) are all being intentionally or even subconsciously sexist, prohibiting oneself from certain methods of achieving a goal requires using (and, if they're not known at the time, finding) other ways to achieve that goal. Saying that rejecting any 'exclusionary' language increases creativity is complete bollocks (in this context) as it's not inclusivity itself that has anything to do with that change. Maybe I was wrong to take Jim's promise of avoiding reason as a joke.

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Jim, my dearest Jim, WHERE THE FUCK DO YOU GET AL THESE STOCK PHOTOS OF COSTUMES, or at least where did the idea come from.

At the end I was thinking the same thing. Well that and I want that sword.

 

[leviadragon99]

Oh dear Christ... this phenomenon is actually a thing? People really use that argument? Goddamn...

It's just another way for the ingrained bigotry to try and find excuses for itself.

Ingrained bigotry is people who like having big boobed women in their games?

Honestly the people who make games don't owe you anything, they are not obligated to make games that appeal to you.

No, the ingrained bigotry is people trying to chase female gamers out of the community,

Not happening.

it's the ludicrous level of hostility Anita Sarkis-whatever gets for even suggesting that maybe some games out there might not have the best depiction of women,

How dare she receive backlash for her opinion that things are sexist and/or cause real life sexism.

it's the rape threats on twitter, the "make me a sandwitch" meme, and the idea that a game has to alienate people to remain pure and creative.

I can't think of a single game that doesn't alienate someone for whatever reason.

And they are indeed not obligated, where in my argument does it say that? But it might just help them out if they did make games that genuinely appeal to a market beyond the brogrammer demographic from time to time.

Oh they do. Quite a lot. Thing is whenever a game gets made that does people have to act like it's personally responsible for bringing sexism to gaming or alienating women. There's already a variety in games. NOTHING is stopping you from avoiding those games and still having a ton to play. So at this point it's 'some women will judge all of gaming because of Dragon's Crown and we need to make sure those ultra-judgemental people are fans of gaming'

Point the first: I believe you to be either blind or deluded if you're not seeing that hostility and willingness to harass anyone with two X chromosomes until they leave the game/forum in certain segments of the community, I might have hyperbolized a little, but it's there.

Certain segments? Kind of vague. The only thing I can think of is anonymous Live/PSN harassment but that's not a community getting together and agreeing to push out women, that's a handful of assholes and everyone who doesn't do it looks down on them.

Point the second: She received hostility before she even started, before she had a chance to make her case, before anyone knew what she had to say,

She's made videos before attacking tropes and she had a list of tropes she was planning on doing for the game series. Put those two together and you can make a reasonable prediction of what the videos would be like. And some of the hostility came from 'why do you even need money to do this'. I think she could've done this by watching Let's Play videos myself, but that's beside the point.

just because she was raising the possibility that it could potentially be a problem, I'd say the reaction more than proved her right,

Her point was that certain tropes cause sexism (even if only a little) or in general cause problems in the real world. Her getting a partially sexist backlash doesn't mean it was caused by those tropes.

if male gamers are so insecure that they have to attack someone suggesting there's bigotry, I don't see it being much of a stretch to think they might be bigots

It is a stretch. People don't like it when you call something they like sexist/racist or whatever. And if you disagree that is sexist racist and if you think they're looking for sexism/racism well...

, and what happened after she began to make her case? A substantial amount of her negative feedback continued to be mindless, tasteless threats and personal attacks, dismissals on the stupidest of grounds, and very little in the way of actual countering of her arguments.

I saw some. I made some. Not all of it was mindless bashing.

So yeah, damn right I consider that to be bullshit, you can disagree with someone, but be civil about it rather than yelling at them to die in a fire.

What if they're a pheonix. Wouldn't telling them to die a fire not be so bad? I don't really have a point, it just popped into my head and now I'm curious about it.

point the third: Annnd yet this video would seem to suggest that Saints Row 4 does that pretty well by letting anyone be the lord of the sandbox... heck, I can't recall Skyrim alienating anyone through potentially offensive viewpoints or deliberately exclusionary tropes, or Dragon Age, or Mass Effect, or Portal, or Planescape Torment, or the Fallout games, or Pokemon, or Persona 4, or Dust, or Minecraft, or Bastion, or Shadowrun just to name some that I'm most familiar with. Name me something from each of those games that'd alienate a viewer based on race, religion, sexuality, gender, or any of the other big ones,

It doesn't need to alienate people based off that. Some people don't like sex jokes, some people don't like gore. Some people don't like certain genres or games that do not have an end goal (Minecraft). Why is it suddenly worse to alienate someone because you don't have a female playable character vs. alienating someone who doesn't like gore? There's never going to be a game that alienates everyone of a certain sex/race/whatever unless it blatantly says those people are bad.

Point the fourth: I think you're exaggerating a little, and I'll remind you that most of those more varied games come from the indie circuit, or for smaller riskier projects. The mainstream, high-profile, most visible games out there do seem to have a hard-on for gun-bros.

How mainstream we talking? If you mean games non gamers have heard about, well we got COD (that's 1), WOW, the Sims, Halo (which has all fictional weapons anyway) and to a lesser extent Minecraft. Oh and Nintendo's franchises. There's lot of franchises that don't try to appeal to the stereotypical frat boy, even if they do have men in the lead roles.

I thought you meant variety you meant variety as in 'are they trying to market to men and only men' thing.

1: I'm not saying it's a unified front by the community, far from it, it's a handful of misanthropes, but they're still numerous and loud enough to be a problem, to do everything they can to drag down the image of the rest of the community with them.

2: Oh yes, because knowing the topics someone is going to speak about is all you need to pre-emptively rebut them. Wait for someone to actually say what they're going to say before jumping in arguing about it, because HOW they talk about the points may surprise you, and then your commentary ends up irrelevant. Going by past experiences of their work is not absolutely reliable, as someone can still do something different, take a different viewpoint since they've grown as a person, or as the situation has changed, or tackle different aspects of the issue that you didn't consider instead of the old ones she didn't feel need to be said. And are you really trying to say that people on the internet shouldn't be allowed to make money from the content they produce? Where does that end? Who decides what's "worth" someone getting revenue from? And again, none of that excuses how much the hostility manifested, a stream of threats, open sexism and general wailing and gnashing of teeth that had nothing to do with challenging the actual merits of what she was saying.

3: Well it proved that there was sexism in those that attacked her... I agree that it's specious reasoning to try and infer a direct cause and effect link there, but it's certainly possible.

4: Y'know, people who immediately assume someone is talking about them when there's accusations running around about certain people being douches without naming any names or trying to paint everyone with the same brush? Yeah, those kinds of people do tend to be either the ones the accusation were talking about, or so pathetically unable to work out that the calls of sexism aren't directed at the whole community that they may as well be, and again, the sexist nature of many of those replies does go a fair way into more than implying the sexism of those that replied in that particular way.

5: Yes, there was thankfully some more civil and intellectual discourse... eventually. But you can't deny that a significant amount, perhaps even the majority was mindless pettiness.

6: Well that all depends whether you're being metaphorical or literal, and how exactly the process works out for them, given that the majority of people truculent enough to say that mean it literally... yeah that's not helpful to anyone.

7: See... having a game that caters to certain likes or dislikes, preferences of content or type of play, is incredibly different to having one that outright makes it clear that someone isn't wanted, or just has little enough thought put into the mechanics and narrative that it comes off that way, like Call of Juarez, the Cartel, that gave an achievement for killing a lot of black people, and misrepresented real-world events in a way that reinforced racial stereotypes while also glossing over modern-day tragedies. Or the new Metro game, where a female character that initially seemed capable and interesting turns up later as radically changed to being dependant and far less interesting, not to mention the entirely gratuitous and juvenile strip club scenes that added little, many women gamers are used to having to play a male lead, but if they see their own gender represented so badly and one-sidedly... see metro could have gotten away with that strip club scene if other female characters in the game had been more (consistantly) capable and interestingly, it's all a balancing act. Or hell, what about all the modern military shooters that have little to no female presence at all? Despite the military's shaky policy on women serving as front-line personnel, they are still there in warzones today in all sorts of roles, they just don't get a lot of recognition, something games like those only serve to reinforce with the faux-realistic machismo.

8: How are Cod and Halo NOT prototypical gun-bro games exactly? And something like the Sims is a little different, and hardly makes up the majority, also it's an established brand now, one built on a combination of an established reputation of a sim-maker from an earlier era and EA's indifference to the initial product, letting it just happen and then greedily raking in the surprise profits, hell, the sims also arguably comes from a time before the games industry got caught in a rut, or at least so deeply in it. In WoW's case, MMO's are a little different to current-gen, one-and-done franchise-baiting triple-A releases that are the main offenders of this pattern. I would call Minecraft a game that was initially indie and grew from there, and Nintendo has always been something of a wildcard, one of the few survivors of an even earlier era, a company primarily based on another culture's perspective, and one that exists primarily on long-standing franchises, saying they buck the trends is no great surprise.

 

[EnglishBlues]

Ultimately, I think that it's always better to have more options instead of less, creatively speaking. Who doesn't see the obvious benefits of having a deeper well to draw from, even if it turns out to be a shallow bucketful?

That being said, I have played more than one game that could've benefited from a bit of this so-called "neutering."

 

[JimB]

I agree with you, to a point, I believe. If a child looks at McDonald's, TV and video games in search for moral guidance, then the problem might not be entirely the parents'.

Just so we're clear on this, it's understood that I used those three examples to be representative of, well, pretty much the entire world, right? That I only wrote those three so I wouldn't have to keep writing "and movies and billboards and magazines and music and books and comics and [blam! I just shot myself in the head out of boredom at having to type all that]?" Just checking.

I played Mortal Kombat 3 when I was about nine years old with my own Sega Megadrive (bad parenting, IMHO) and I was still able to understand that trying to rip someone's spine out of their body would be a bad idea.

The difference is, that's a behavior, not an identity. Behaviors are easy to train out of kids, because behaviors carry easily observed consequences they understand. Identities don't really work like that. Also, I think this specific example isn't terribly analogous, since society is pretty clear about expressing that casual dismemberment is not cool but is not nearly as responsible about the messages it sends regarding gender politics...which is a sentence I know I need to unpack but I just can't bring myself to have this argument again right now. If you care enough to ask, I might get into it tomorrow.