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[PATV] Friday, June 8, 2012 - Penny Arcade: The Series Season 3, Ep. 30: Turnaround (4th Panel)
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Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Tastefully straddling the line between documentary and guilty-pleasure voyeurism, Penny Arcade: The Series collects the bizarre continuum of one of the world's strangest companies. In this episode, our heroes create the strip "<a href="http://penny-arcade.com/comic/2012/06/01" target="_blank">Turnaround</a>."
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They were responding to the argument that they started to see in places like Kotaku sensationalizing what this trailer represented for the gaming industry.
But fuck you — no, fuck y'all, that's as blunt as it gets"
- Kendrick Lamar, "The Blacker the Berry"
I didn't get what Mike seemed to get out of it either, but I think, seeing that he wasn't reading it at the time, and Jerry didn't pull it up and read it, he was going off of an impression he got from part of it that he remembered and he didn't recall liking it. Memory works like that sometimes.
Reading the article, it made me think that while I know there ARE games with chainmail bikinis around, I can't really remember the last time I played a game that had really oversexualized female hero characters like that. It seems to me that a lot of games ARE shifting away from that general dynamic, at least in my (limited by time and money) experience.
Your entire point is based around the concept of gaming as a "boy's club" that women shouldn't be invited to, and that's pointlessly exclusionary- you can make great games that both genders like, and you can even have attractive women in it. There's a difference between having a pretty girl in your game, and giving her an outfit a stripper would be uncomfortable wearing.
You don't think that there are games, or at least certain situations, where such things are completely appropriate?
Japanese dating sims?
Alt: Final Fantasy.
1. Neither of them really defends the trailer, beyond Mike saying he thought it was kind of cool if they were going for a grindhouse aesthetic. (Incidentally, I was greatly amused by Jerry refusing to even watch the trailer due to its stupidity but thinking the the game might be great whereas Mike was alright with the trailer but is sure he'll hate the game.)
2. Whereas the thread here focused almost entirely on sexism, the conversation they had was more about games that are and are not suitable for kids.
3. It seems pretty clear now that the central point they were trying to make, which Jerry tried to hit fairly hard in his newspost but which I think got mostly lost in all our talk about sexism, was that games still don't get recognition as a medium the way, for example, film does, and so every individual game is endowed with two great a sense of importance in representing the industry.
"Then let's DO that, Michael, we've been here for a while."
"That was your shot, buddy. You got called up to the big leagues and you blew it."
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Of course there are. The problem with this is that those games and situations are created by men- they don't appear from the aether fully formed, and hurl themselves into someone's head until a game is extruded. Someone creates that character or situation, and it's usually for the express purpose of titillation. And that's fine- but the person I was responding to was making a rousing defense of leering, juvenile objectification in fantasy games as though it was his right, and a biological imperative.
My issue with fantasy games- which he mentioned specifically- is that they are trying to create a new world to inhabit, or at least create an atmosphere where sweeping stories or larger than life characters can exist. Having women in bikini chainmail is such obvious pandering to masculine libido that it makes it so much more difficult to invest in the setting- it's like having a little note on your monitor that says "It's just pretend" you keep looking at every time you see one of them.
The problem is one of perception of the industry as a whole, and the sensationalism of one particular loud and obvious glaring example of the worst gaming can offer. That one example may not destroy much better games, but it becomes the lighthouse that people beyond the industry use to see the industry -- the shining example. And not the one we wanted them to see.
If intelligent and non-trashy games were able to scream just as loudly and reach that external audience, it wouldn't be an issue. But right now, the media latches onto latex battle nuns first, instead of dimension shifting puzzles. Scandal sells more.
Not that the US doesn't seem to have it's share of these problems too, but for whatever reason Australia is way more locked down.
I tend to fall more into this camp, though as people pointed out in the first thread the more troubling issue is that game marketing people think we WANT to see this as a sub-culture, and while the Hitman trailer is not good, it is at least a sort-of established trope or aesthetic that they're playing off of. It doesn't have the whole violation schtick that, say, the Tomb Raider trailer has (and for the record I'm not impugning Tomb Raider as an entire game for its trailer, so let's not go down that road again).
This is a symptom of the problem that people don't recognize games as a medium.
Same problem here and it seems to be related to my origin address.
Using our US proxy everything works fine, so I assume that non-US IP requests are blocked (Germany here).
That trend exists because the vast majority of women in these settings are treated this way. Wouldn't you have a problem if every game was portraying men as beefcakes in sexual poses (sometimes blatantly a la this trailer, but sometimes just as powerless dependent wimps that rely on the main character for help)? After a while, wouldn't you be saying, "hey can we have a couple games where the guys aren't oiled up and wearing assless chaps"?
You can count the number of "strong" and "independent" female characters on one hand for the most part when it comes to AAA games. That's whats wrong with it. Males are not the only audience, and not all of those even want to see T&A. What about the gay guys? What about the ones that want some maturity on the subject? And last but not least, what about the women that want to play games like this?
Why does it have to be about "one piece dragging the entire medium down" and not about "critiquing one piece in a medium indicative of bigger things" the way people do so with movies, music, etc?
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Hitman brutally slaughters a platoon of male assassins out to kill him - A-OK
Hitman brutally slaughters a platoon of male and female assains out to kill him - ?
Hitman brutally slaughters a platoon of all-female assassins out to kill him - Not OK?: Violance Against Women
Hitman brutally slaughters a platoon of scantially clad female assassins out to kill him - Not OK?: Morally Reprehensible Objectifation and Violance Against Women.
I think you're ignoring how the human male operates. If you're such a person that cannot operate without some over-the-top titillation in your games, then you're an addict (either to sex or porn, or a number of other things. Seriously though, if that's you, see a psychiatrist) . If you can't have women in a game without them being hyper-sexualized, then you're sexist in the worst way and you need to fix your shit before you give male gamers a worse name. Men will respond to sexuality in general, there's a lot of studies done that show the effects of sexual imagery on the male mind are different from the female mind, but to say that men have to have titillation in a game or that women have to be objectified in games is ridiculous.
Ultimately though, it's a grindhouse style game that's always been on the "B" side of games as far as story goes, so I'm neither impressed nor shocked by them adding "Battle Nuns". Like they said in the news post and video, the terrible games don't make the good ones worse.
P.S. Real Battle Nuns wear powered armor, use guns the thickness of a mans torso, and go toe to toe with demons and mad psykers.
If you threw in a few female characters on equal level with, and who are treated as equals to, Hitman, then all the above would be A-OK. If there isn't, then the game just portrays women as an over-sexualized, poorly trained, less moral version of Hitman.
Because this isn't that. This is picking one game, the worst example, out of about a dozen from E3 and saying that it is obviously where the market is going without even the benefit of proper release statistics. The "video games are sexist" comments also usually involve picking out two-three worst example games from hundreds released a year, holding them up as the representation of all games released that year, and then drawing a very wavy line between them to say "This is where all games are at and where they are going".
An all female team of assassins in fatigues would probably have raised very few voices in protest.
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It's okay to horrifically brutalize people, so long as they aren't scantially clad women?
It's okay to horrifically brutalize people, so long as they aren't black people dressed as slaves*?
*Important caveat: They are only dressed as slaves because I enjoy seeing black people dressed as slaves, and not because it makes any sense in context.
Snark aside, do you see why bringing social issues into it without appropriate context might complicate what otherwise would not be a problematic depiction?
Just gonna leave this here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/566429325/tropes-vs-women-in-video-games/
I'm saying the reaction to the trailer has been primarily over the objectifying of women and violence purpotrated towards women: the extreme ultra-violence for the sake of ultraviolence otherwise gets a pass for some reason. I just find it weird where some people draw the line.
It's like, you know that bit in the Last of Us demo where the protagonist disarms an attacker, knocks him to the ground, and then shoots him in the face while he pleads for his life? I found that way more disturbing than the shlocky Hitman trailer, yet the prevailing opinion I've seen was that part of the demo was "badass."
I don't think we can say the same about sexism or racism because that is the real world distorting the fantasy. It's the biases and preconceptions of the creators bleeding through. Which maybe wouldn't be as big a deal if it wasn't the exact same bias that some people have to fight with every day in society. Suddenly, it's not just a power trip fantasy about being an international hitman. It's also a reminder that, if you are a woman, your role in society is to be sexy eye candy for guys to ogle. In other games, it's a reminder that, if you are a woman, your role is to be the helpless damsel who can't possibly solve the predicament she has landed in without a big strong man's help, or be the little woman who waits patiently for him to get back from adventures and reward him with sex.