Sorry to pull from the first page to respond here, but the amount of these videos that have to talk about these same topics over and over again just really show how much hammering of the same points really needs to be done to get some things through...
Monxeroth said:
Its really only neutering in some cases in the sense that: Oh, we dont get to have a G-cupped playable character in this game, OH NOES MY CREATIVITY.
Then again on the other hand in some cases it does have a fair point to dismiss the criticism when its not relevant in any way to the actual game.
For example: Does the sorceress breasts somehow lower the quality of the game? No, no it does not. Only mechanics and actual faults with the game can lower a games overrall quality in my opinion, not subjective personal nonsense like the artstyle not being appealing or the music not being received well by some. Whether you like something or not, its not a valid reason to critique a game for.
"How dare someone make a game with an artstyle that i dont find personally appealing, this game sucks"
Legion said:
I both agree and disagree.
I agree with the point you are making, but at the same time you seem to be countering a point that doesn't seem to be exactly the one being made (at least from what I have really seen).
When I see people complain about games being restricted I don't see them meaning in the sense that they will have less creativity. They tend to mean that they will have less creative freedom. That by caving into people saying "This is bad" or "You shouldn't be doing that" they are paving the way for people to dictate what developers can and cannot do. That would be stopping developers from making the games that they want to make and they will end up only making games that the loudest people want made, so as not to get any backlash from it.
I suppose the Mass Effect 3 ending is a good example. They chose to make the ending as it was originally and people complained about it extremely vocally. So they released the extended cut. Many people argued that by caving into the people complaining the developers gave up their creativity, because they didn't make the ending that they thought the game should have, they gave in and created the ending that the complainers wanted.
I think the fear is that if enough people start complaining about certain features in games, it will become considered socially unacceptable to have those features at all. In some ways that is actually a valid point. If people complain non-stop about sexy female characters, then eventually they are going to stop being made at all, because developers don't want the constant outrage over it from tarnishing the games reputation and giving it negative press.
It is a similar point to the one you made last week in fact. Developers don't want their fans ruining their success by harping on at a single negative review, and likewise I sincerely doubt that the creators of something like Dragons Crown wanted people only going on about the female character designs. They put a lot more into the game than titillation (I am assuming here, I haven't played the game nor do I particularly want to) so by people only dragging down the discussions to complain about the boobs, they might be put off creating such designs in the future.
People often say they don't wish to stop these kinds of things being made, only to have more choices and variety when it comes to games. A much better way of doing this is to praise the ones you like, rather than rant and rave at the ones that you don't. If people who like buxom characters praise them, games will have them. Likewise if people prefer their female characters more reasonably proportioned, then they should be discussing them and praising developers when they do make them. This will encourage them to make more.
Which doesn't happen very often to be honest. Even when developers do make decent characters to appeal to a wider audience they still get complaints. Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us all got sexism complaints based around how they created their female characters, and how is that going to encourage more variety? It's just going to put people off and in many ways that does dampen creativity.
Holy Hell that post was a lot longer than I originally intended.
To get to Monxeroth's point first, here's the thing: It really DOES matter that the sorceress in Dragon's Crown has breasts larger than her head. It does matter that the dwarf and the amazon look more like cosmic horrors made of muscle than humanoids. I'm completely not interested in playing that game because of it. (And to answer the person a few posts above mine, yes, those two characters do offend me, as well.)
The art style, simply put, makes me sick, and I'm not going to play the game for that specific reason.
And this, in turn, leads me to the larger issue that Legion talks about...
This sort of criticism DOES matter, and so does the conscientious effort of people like Jim to avoid using sexually-loaded terms as if they were completely natural. In the most abstract sense, it matters because what's the point in having a website based on criticism of games and movies if criticisms that talk about how bad choices were made in making some game or film are somehow INHERENTLY wrong?
The core argument you're making assumes that the creator of a game is always right, and no criticisms should EVER force a change. Even if Mass Effect 3's reception was overblown, why, exactly, is it wrong to say so when you think the reasoning of the starchild at the end was obtuse, ridiculous, or otherwise detracted from your enjoyment of the game? The effect that the players of the game were SUPPOSED to have gotten from the Synthesis ending was that you had accomplished your objective of saving the universe from the Reapers, but the cutscenes, as they were actually SHOWN to the players conveyed that the players had actually failed, and everything the players were trying to protect was destroyed. That's a failure of storytelling to convey the actual message they were trying to convey - and that's probably a graver sin than a game-breaking bug, in terms of a story-driven game.
If you take this sort of slippery-slope argument seriously, what you're basically arguing for is an even worse censorship of criticism than there is going on of art, in the name of "protecting art from criticism", when, as Yahtzee put it, criticism is a force of good. Criticism is the correcting, nurturing force that shows artists how to overcome the flaws in their works. If BioWare had really, truly thought the original version of the game was the only true way to express their vision of the game, they probably wouldn't have changed it the way they did. And the way they changed it was to try to tell people that, "no, no, really, we didn't mean to show that everyone died, and we completely forgot that we previously said that an exploding mass relay would completely annihilate the Earth, so that didn't happen either."
But really, we all know that's not the real reason this argument for "freedom" here... What this is about is a certain sub-set of people wanting to keep having their fanservice-filled softcore porn games even when they know that's exactly what it is they are defending, and that there's really no place for it in our culture in general.
If, for example, we were arguing that no creator of media should ever have to answer to criticisms of their work, it opens up questions of just what works you really would accept: How many people here pine for the days that Minstrel Shows with blackfaced actors making just one overly long joke about how stupid black people supposedly are? How many people bemoan the lack of "creative freedom" we have to make flagrantly racist or anti-semitic jokes or screeds? Or, for that matter, "Separate But Equal" water fountains? Because the people who used to make those things sure did bemoan them... because they were racists and anti-semites.
Now, no, I'm not calling you racists, and I'm not making a 1:1 comparison on how much "wrongness" there is in liking blackface and liking games that are only a half-step from softcore porn, but the basic problem here is an utter lack of empathy for the other side of the argument on these things. The notion that maybe these things do genuinely offend people who aren't easily dismissed as "just easily offended people who make a living off of stirring up controversy" is the core reason WHY this topic seems to need to keep being hammered home.
The basis of the argument Monxeroth makes explicitly, and is fairly omnipresent in the subtext of most of these arguments is that, if YOU don't find something offensive, then it's wrong for anyone else to find such things so.
But, again, just a couple generations ago, overt racism was considered perfectly natural and acceptable in casual conversation. Nobody then really wanted to question whether their overtly racist and Social Darwinist theories were simply myopic points of view brought on by an unwillingness to consider that maybe some point of view other than trying to pretend whatever little sub-set of the population was the absolute perfection of humanity, and all mingling with "lesser" types would damage their "purity", either. I'm just saying maybe CONSIDER the notion that what you grew up being used to having the license to say and do isn't necessarily right JUST BECAUSE you could get away with it before, and you don't feel like changing.
This is really all about not wanting to share the clubhouse because you've never had to share it before, not wanting to care about others because you've never had to care before.
To get back to the point about this argument always ONLY applying to the waterballoons in chainmail bikinis, I'd like to just point back to how little of the argument there was about how people complaining about how they don't want to play Saint's Row because it's all a bunch of immature scat jokes never got the same amount of backlash as the ones about people not liking a game because it's art style is best described by just saying "BOING! BOING! BOING!" with a pair of cantaloupes smuggled in their shirt. It's perfectly accepted for people to say they don't want to play games for those reasons, but not for the blatant sexuality they put in games, which really deflates the attempts at argument that try to put this as standing up for some grand, abstract principle that only ever seems to apply to this one specific sticking point.
This is a topic where people use these absolutes and abstractions to try to dodge the real issues at play, here. Yes, I agree that just sticking a female character into GTA V for no reason other than "DIVERSITY" would have been a mistake. Yes, I agree that just having a character gender selector isn't really going to help matters. That doesn't make for an excuse to say that no standards should be set or that nothing should change, however.
There isn't any reason that a female character couldn't be put into any GTA game that wouldn't have ADDED to the game or the story. These stories weren't exactly sacrosanct works of unblemished art to begin with. In fact, GTA IV's story was pretty much a total mess, since it tried to portray someone who would happily run around in the streets firing off automatic weapons just to get the Army to chase him to win a medal for the longest time spent with "six stars" as somehow being someone TROUBLED by all the violence he had seen, and in some way trying to get away from it. (The tone of Saint's Row and even older games like Vice City is at least more consistent as they would have the characters out-and-out declare THEMSELVES to be psychotic and loving it, since that actually fit how players were expected to act.)
To bring up another game as an example, while I suppose Skyrim can get SOME credit for allowing for all characters to be bisexual, at least in theory, it was done in the laziest possible way. (As far as I could see, this had to do with the dev team just not caring about getting it done right and releasing on time...) In that game, there was absolutely no regard at all for your gender or your partners, or even the fact that you got married at all. (One merchant woman character will even happily wish you well on your unwilling wedding to a hag creature in a daedra quest even if she's already supposed to be your wife with no lines changed.) Yet, for all this seeming utter gender equality, there isn't a single other character apparent in the game that is gay if you aren't the one involved in the relationship.
Compare this to, say, Dragon Age: Origins, where, if you play a female, they pretty deliberately made the devout religious woman the bisexual romantic interest for a lesbian player character, while the dark and borderline "evil" witch woman was strictly straight. They chose not to go with the obvious stereotypes of depraved bisexuals. (Although, granted, the male bisexual elf assassin kind of undermines that argument a little from the other angle, at least they spent some effort on it.) They tried to make up rationales for which characters would be willing to participate in what relationships. The sexuality was part of the story, there to enhance the effects of your choices you make with relationships to the other characters, rather than just being blatant eye candy.
It's not like there's no way to handle sexuality, the way that some people are trying to protest, it's just that there are far more mature and entertaining ways to actually include it in a game.
The Ar Tonelico series can actually serve as an example of both the right and wrong ways of sexuality. In Ar Tonelico 1, you have plenty of Getting Crap Past The Radar sexual references, but it becomes the most overt when, in the course of gaining the trust of the heroines, your hero goes on a Journey To The Center Of Their Minds, gradually working through the different layers of the heroine's psyche, and comes across what is, bluntly, their sexual sides when he goes deep enough into the mental world. There, the heroines (whose relationship is pretty much overtly boyfriend-girlfriend by the point she would allow the hero that deep in,) stop beating around the bush and flat-out try to seduce the hero directly. Because, you know, sexuality is a part of their humanity. (Or partly-humanity and partly-magic-cyborg... oh forget it, you get the point.) Actually talking about that isn't at all a negative thing.
On the other hand, the reward for going through those segments, aside from uncovering parts of the mystery of the character's background and new, upgraded spells, was a new costume, which notably contained some absurdly skimpy costumes for the heroines. (The seduction plot point gives the most overt example - making the heroine fight in nothing but a bath towel.)
The series really fell off a cliff with the third game, however, when they clearly went for more overt sexuality, and actually went as far as adding "combat stripping" as a game mechanic. If you want an idea of what audience they thought they were doing it for, they added a "panic button" you could push to hide the scenes when dialogue (and potentially the much more racy cutscene images,) and then added a trophy specifically for pushing it a lot named, "Nothing, Mom!" Note the "mom" part. They don't expect anyone who plays their games to have girlfriends or roommates, but to be prepubescent teens. Because that's the only audience they bother to cater to in that game. While not every one, almost all the failings of that game can be traced directly back to trying to pander more and more towards the 13-year-old crowd, and away from the headier topics of psychology that made the original games interesting.
For that matter, not all "sexiness" in character design is off-limits when you're designing for an audience besides just 13-year-old-boys, and I could point to characters like the main characters from the Atelier games, (from the same company, whose character designs really do go all over the place,) like Totori, as characters who are obviously designed for the purpose of attracting women gamers rather than male ones, and that involves throwing all the heroines in mini-skirts and far more insubstantial outfits than any serious adventurer would wear. (Although how utterly unsuited Totori was for adventuring could arguably be part of the point.)
Likewise, there was the outcry of "censorship" raised over Mugen Souls was over the company cutting out a scene where the player was tasked with tickling virtually nude underaged girls in the bath with various objects as a side game. When it was removed, as some of the critics pointed out, they had to actually look up what was missing from the game online to even notice it, since it added so little to the game as a whole.
In short, removing the absurdly pervvy part probably actually made Mugen Souls a better game for most people who WOULD feel really uncomfortable with a mini-game where they are tasked with rubbing dildos on underaged girls while they moaned. Because, you know, those people DO exist, and they aren't all "EVIL FEMINISTS OUT TO DESTROY ALL FUN" sorts.
And yes, sometimes there will be people who over-react. I haven't played the new Tomb Raider, but from what I hear, that argument was overblown. However, the invalidity of any one argument or any one arguer never applies to every argument remotely related to that topic. By the same token, nor does making an argument in defense of these games make you the same as the most overtly abusive people who rise up to defend these games, or does it make you "as bad as" the racist counter-example I put forward earlier. (Which would bring me back to this persistent "Anita Sarkeesian is EVIL, therefore sexism can't possibly exist" argument I keep hearing... but this post is long enough as-is.)
