Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it,
follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.
Our rules have been updated and given
their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!
[PA Comic] Friday, June 1, 2012 - Turnaround
Posts
Right. It's just that, for example, I rarely, if ever, seem to hear disgusted reports from media moral guardians about material in film which is at least as objectionable, let alone distraught soul-searching from people within the film industry. I will qualify that, like you, I do not follow film as a "sphere," though I may enjoy movies a great deal, so perhaps there is some of that that I just don't see.
However, it does seem to be the case that video games are the only medium which is not actually recognized and understood as simply a medium, as Tycho discussed in his news post - more so than with any other form of media, any single video game which exists is somehow presumed to be representative of the whole. Nobody denounces film as a medium, and yet one entire branch of the film industry (and one of the most profitable branches, I think) is the pornography industry, an overwhelming part of which is material that, it could be argued, is sold more or less entirely on the basis of objectification of women.
Tycho's newspost, while well written, paints the 'complainers' with the same broad brush that a lot of the people complaining paint gamers with. And to be fair, they're both right to a point. People sometimes just want to be mad.
For those who say the trailer was clearly not intended to be titillating, why then did it go all 'leather'? Why not, as was mentioned, have the women in fatigues under their habits? I get that it's supposed to be over the top, but there's this male/female distinction that always seems to be distinct in the same way.
I suppose, Gaslight, I'm not so much offended as I am tired of it, and the offense people seem to be taking to this trailer in particular allows me to express how tired I am. Perhaps that's misplaced and we should gawk together at all the people (on both sides) getting their undergarments in a bunch.
Wii: As soon as I look it up.
He says that it stops being sexual once it becomes violent, and therefore it's sexualized violence only to a small group of snuff porn fans. That's not really what I mean by sexualized violence. I, and I suspect most others, know that the message isn't "killing women is sexy." It's not going to trick you into liking necrophilia or whatever. But it is a mindless and/or irresponsible objectification that perpetuates females, in our media, as things to look at or things to hit. The trailer inclines you to first get turned on, and then get excited that the thing turns you on gets what's coming to 'em, and that appeals to the worst in people. It's not that I have suffered personal offense and I want to white knight about it, but I do expect things I like to be more competent in how they use their cultural influence.
Also, the less art v. more art, I completely agree, and I don't recall anyone calling for a ban. This is something that gets confused all the time. Whenever a controversy about offensiveness arrives, the assumption is that, well, they must want it banned, those uptight, PC nazis. In reality, it's a cultural conversation. That's why more art is always a solution, it adds to the conversation. But so do the responses to the art. The goal isn't to get certain offensive types of imagery to be forbidden, but to explain to the audience why this kind of thing is bad for our society, so that others, in the art they create, make their own personal decision to avoid the same mistakes.
1. Take a fairly minor and very temporary controversy
2. Pretend it matters more than it does
3. Make fun of people who hold this made-up point of view
It's a bit of a straw man. They did this with Draw Something, and are doing it again with Hitman: "Stupid people are going completely apeshit over this, so it must be silly by nature." It's not terribly interesting, as I feel like we're talking about some "other" internet that I don't exist in.
The Hitman trailer is obviously tripe. But is this really causing that much of a stir, and do we care? I just don't see as much outrage as the comic claims exists. Plenty of people are doing the reasonable thing here: write off the game as lost, a Dante's Inferno-scale franchise-breaking marketing blunder, and move on. Folks raising a more violent ruckus aren't really worth paying attention to, and certainly aren't worth the amount of energy we're expending talking about them.
Pornography involves real people making decisions with their free will on what to do with their lives. There's a lot of pro-pornography in different types of feminism. Video games and other media like comics, these things are different as they are male dominated industries creating depictions. Their creative teams are responsible for the depiction of every group that is not them. They put out ideas of women, which is what people critique.
True.
I'm aware of that.
And porn is not a male-dominated industry? It is certainly male-dominated in that male consumers are what drives the market, probably just as much as video games and comics (certainly some women enjoy porn, but they are not the bread-and-butter demographic).
I came here to express some reservations about the newspost, but then I found out that Lux did it for me.
Oh and Gaslight, if you are not interested in discussing your terrible opinions on Affirmative Action maybe you should not bring them up? Or have less terrible opinions. Either way works.
I was not the one who brought up affirmative action. Someone else (Malyonsus) used it as an analogy to the current topic, so I responded with how I viewed it in parallel to the current topic. I have no desire to derail the thread into a discussion of affirmative action, and Malyonsus seems to have respected that.
Please be assured I feel suitably chastened now that you've declared my opinions terrible, though, and I'll get right to work on fixing them.
Wii: As soon as I look it up.
So this I don't really get. Like, I understand all the words, but I can't quite put the pieces together. Are you saying that the provocative nature of their dress is supposed to make them getting blown apart more satisfying to watch, and that will somehow engender similar feelings in me with respect to violence to sexy women? Or do you mean that if the viewer is already predisposed to violence towards women / abuse, then the trailer panders to that by having the women dressed as they are? Or what?
I think what's confusing me is specifically the phrase "...and then get excited that the thing [that] turns you on gets what's coming to 'em...". Is that a thing? I might be reading too much into one piece of your argument, in which case, I apologize.
then you are going to have a really simplified view of the world, which ignores a lot of the important nuance. ignoring history and power is going to leave you a bit blinkered, mate.
Which is why it's so frequently frustrating when defenders of "controversial" media accuse critics of wanting to censor any art that they disagree with, only to turn around and plug their ears to any dissenting viewpoints. It comes off less as a sincere defense of artistic expression in the medium of gaming, and more as a wagon-circling defense of the status quo of the games industry on behalf of Us Gamers.
seen some stuff on twitter, i think
I think the question is more complicated than those two choices, but basically, there's nothing wrong with sexiness or lust. Those are natural feelings and repressing them doesn't do any good. But there are ways to go about it that are more humanizing. In the case of porn, it's not perfect, but the fact that it's a human being making a choice takes off some of the objectification edge.
Yeah, but my reason for bringing in the male-dominated fact is that in a purely creative medium without any willing participants, you're dealing mostly with ideas, and these ideas come 90% from one gender.
It's a good question though. It's hard to critique the porn industry as mass media, because it is and it isn't, and it's hard to say that certain types of fetish porn are bad for society because it engenders bad ideas, because if there's one place for people to get their weirdness sorted out it's in their private porn tastes. I would say that it has to do with different standards with different mediums, too. We don't want our video games industry acting as our porn industries, if everything has its own place.
If you're brought up well enough you don't have to worry about being tricked into liking violence against women. The fact that it might appeal to people who like violence against women is probably a concern somewhere, but if we live in the society I think we do, I don't know if that's the top of the list. But the other effects of using imagery like this, even though unintentional, is that it breeds other forms of anti-woman biases. Thinking of women as objects, or pedestrian resentment toward the perceived power of attractive women, are pervasive, institutionalized ideas in our mass media/society that are touched by things like this. It builds those cultures and makes them more commonplace.
As someone trying to come up with scathing rhetoric for a environmental ethics paper right now, I'm in fucking awe of the last paragraph. It's going to be incredibly hard not to let "the devil dances in hell" creep in somehow.
I see the opening of the trailer as sexualized, and the rest as violence. I never saw a moment where the trailer wanted to turn me on via violence - if someone could point these moments out i'd appreciate it.
edit: I want this clear: A man being attacked by flamboyantly dressed people who either come off homosexual or as transvestites and then killing them is deeply problematic.
It would either read as humorous or homoerotic, depending on how camp the fetishwear was. But obviously if you change the sex of the characters, you change the sexual dynamics.
but in the context of video games, things take on a certain "urgency". fair or not, video games do have a lot more attention and finger-waving directed at them. for every positive example (Quantum Conundrum, Portal, Beyond Good and Evil, Journey etc.) you have games like Hitman that just reiterate the whole stereotype of games being violent and chauvinist. gives persons like the Jack Thompsons and the Joe Liebermans and the Leland Yees of the world more grist for their mills.
i'm not against violence or sex in games; adults play games, and they should be able to view and experience adult themes. but, if you're gonna make a game, or even promote it, don't just settle for dumb. example: the numerous times Catwoman is called a "bitch" in Arkham City? there's really way too little thought going in there, other than "huhuh huh huhhu this will be so cool huhhu." honestly, we all should be demanding better, smarter. yeah, all games can't be AAA level. but being smart and really adult about these subjects don't even require AAA budgets or massive development times. just requires a little thinking beforehand.
as for the sex and violence thing, i don't think the main argument is that people are "getting off" on seeing sexy nuns get brutalized. the argument is, the trailer is just another cliched example of treating women as idealized objects rather than as humans. the scene would have been just as cool had it been a mixed group of interestingly-dressed people, both men and women. the designers could have given each attacker a quirk that would have the audience intrigued about why they're tracking down 47 and what the whole deal is.
instead, they created big breasted fembots in nunnery outfits. the audience is all but invited to treat these folks as pieces of the set. objects. the main objection is that, fer chrissakes, video games have treated women like objects since Custer's Revenge on the Atari. it's not just offensive or misogynist anymore. it's trite. it's insulting to the audience. we're smarter than that.
anyways, this is what happens on a slow Friday afternoon when i'm trying to not fall asleep from lunch. i write diatribes about Hitman.
google+ | facebook | twitter | steam | Guild Wars 2: fightinfilipino.8914
This sounds like forgetting what it's like not to be a celebrity. Yes, you can be "heard" in that you can upvote or downvote things, and if you write or upload something there is a nonzero chance that somebody may at least glance at it. His assertion is technically correct. But I wonder when he last talked to someone who was trying to get their very first blog, comic, video series, software project, or other creative endeavor off the ground. And in fact, if he did talk to someone like that, that person would then have the hard-to-beat advantage of being able to truthfully claim that they attracted Tycho's attention and talked with him, and wouldn't really be starting from zero anyway.
Between Sturgeon's Law and the fact that there is no scarcity on the Web, if you don't have shoulders to stand on, really the only "voice" you have is agreeing or disagreeing with much more famous people. Your chance of getting a bigger audience for your own work than your mom, a friend or two and a few screen scrapers is literally one in a million.
(Notice that I didn't take talent, skill level, or the quality of your work into consideration. Because the Internet doesn't, either. It's pretty much a "does this strike somebody in just the right way" lottery.)
I'd also suggest giving them a t-shirt with the tumblr logo, but that'd just be repugnant. Maybe a Loki shirt?
Man are you joshing?
I write a shitty blog and get a couple hundred hits a day. On like, the least important nonsense. The internet will pay attention for a couple moments to any shiny object you care to put out. It might not pay your bills, but you've got more ability to broadcast an opinion than you'd have at any other point in history.
That's his point. You're not shouting into a void. You can communicate with many people, and the art you make can be seen by many people. Not everyone, but sure as hell not no one. Make some shit, put it some place. Hell, post it on a widely-read forum.
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
What discussion are we trying to have? I don't think anyone denies that there is sexism in games. My argument is against the statement that "All video games are sexist" or "The gaming industry is predominantly sexist"
Yes the Hitman trailer should be condemned, because its stupid on several levels. I'm just saying don't attack ALL video games, because one did something wrong. Its the same as locking up an entire country for the crimes of a few.
Probably because Gabe and Tycho aren't "champions of social justice"?
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Jashinslayer
You have to be a champion of social justice to understand the concept of privilege?
http://troublethinking.wordpress.com (Updated Wed) http://twitter.com/#!/Durandal4532
Is anyone actually doing this?
sexy gun nuns are the latest trend in PMCs
Even outside of bondage porn, "sluts getting what they deserve"--whether it's violent treatment, degradation, whatever--is probably an entire genre of porn these days.
I disagree with certain points of the newspost, but there's no arguing it's astonishingly well-written. On my best days I've approached parts of it. The main critique I have is that he seems to be attempting to shut down criticism of video games as a whole. That's understandable, because criticizing a medium as a whole is generally laughworthy and stupid. Except when it's deserved and accurate.
People make value judgements all the time about "Hollywood movies", or "mainstream porn", or "superhero comics", because those are the most prominent examples of a medium, and they have some serious fucking problems. Even if it is a generalization and the same studio system that produced Battleship also produced The Avengers, a lot more Battleships are produced than The Avengers. There's a lot more of Hitman: Absolution's trailer in the video game industry than there is Quantum Conundrum.
Oh, and "make the movie/game/book you'd want to see", while an admirable sentiment and one I tend to agree with, isn't always possible, because not everyone who can see that there's a problem has spent their life developing the artistic skills and/or network of contacts in the industry necessary to counteract it, and some of the people who have are the troglodytes we're struggling against. And if you don't have said skills or industry clout, you are reduced to upvotes and downvotes, which are far more meaningless than voting in real-world elections.
No, just to care about it.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/Jashinslayer
I don't even understand what your point is.
I've seen this with several games I've played recently. Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is a great example (yea, I'm behind on my vidya games, I know). Probably just a sign of me getting older, but I would definitely like to see games (and developers) move in a more mature direction.
That said, I find the Catwoman example kind of odd. I would expect random_thug_01 to be a misogynist. It fits in with the stereotype of the hardened criminal. In the same way that we are generally ok with movie villains being chauvinistic pricks because it makes sense for their character to be so, this is one of those few areas where I think calling a woman a "bitch" makes any kind of sense in a video game.
That said, I'm still playing through Arkham City, so maybe the issue is frequency? I've only heard Catwoman mentioned by the various gang members a handful of times.
Yeah, if we're at a stage where obvious bad guys aren't allowed to say anything mean of possibly offensive, I don't know what to say.
Although I will point out that while in this case, the people calling a woman a "bitch" are clearly villain who we're supposed to dislike, I don't think merely calling a woman a "bitch" necessarily makes one a misogynist any more than, say, calling a man a "dick" makes one a misandrist.
No, but they never really call any of the male characters "dicks" or any other derogatory words really. Of course, I don't think I've ever heard them badmouth Poison Ivy, so maybe they just have a thing against Catwoman and I'm being overly judgmental.