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March 28, 2024, 10:46:13 PM

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It turns out everyone is horrible (tw: possible GamerGate thread)

Started by Barry Admin, August 06, 2018, 11:30:15 AM

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Funcrusher

Quote from: Barry Admin on August 10, 2018, 01:31:58 PM

I dunno, it just seems like people still want to consistently downplay the very notion that ordinary gamers were actively and actually concerned about games journalism.

It does seem that way.

Quote from: Mister Six on August 11, 2018, 11:15:41 AM

But that isn't what Gamergate was actually about. So "downplaying" the geniune concern for some people about video game journos is really more like accurately reflecting what Gamergate was all about - which is socially maladjusted men (and a few useful idiot women) lashing out at "SJWs" (and scary, non-compliant women) they saw as encroaching on their identity.

Mister Six


Funcrusher

Quote from: Mister Six on August 11, 2018, 11:46:41 AM
Those statements are not mutually exclusive.

Barry is saying that there was plenty of conversation on Gamergate podcasts at the time about dodgy journalists, but according to you it was all about misogyny. I guess it's okay to call women idiots when someone on the right side of history does it.

Z

I think a lot of gamers were actually concerned about ethics in games journalism, but certainly not very actively. There were way bigger scandals over the years and it definitely impacted the cachet of the field as people switched to people on youtube in droves, but no sizeable group of people gave enough of a shit to give that solid base to build some PROPER TWITTER OUTRAGE from.

Unfortunately, the first kind of really strong base to form around the premise at best were a bunch of ineloquent morons, and at worse had clear ulterior motives or a massive chip on their shoulder.

Mister Six

Quote from: Funcrusher on August 11, 2018, 11:59:04 AM
Barry is saying that there was plenty of conversation on Gamergate podcasts at the time about dodgy journalists, but according to you it was all about misogyny. I guess it's okay to call women idiots when someone on the right side of history does it.

And I'm saying that Gamergate began as a reaction against women in games, and was from its inception violently misogynistic. If people who were genuinely concerned about shitty games journalism got involved down the line then great - but that's not what Gamergate was actually inspired by or what it was intended for.

I'm sure Hitler's rise to power was backed by many people who were concerned about the dreadful state of the post-WWI German economy, but that doesn't make the National Socialists a party based around economic reform.

Calling individual women idiots because of their self-harming political beliefs is fine; calling all women idiots because of their gender is not. As you well know.

Zetetic

Quote from: Mister Six on August 11, 2018, 11:15:41 AMI certainly am, having grown up with Amiga Power's strident "fuck you, we'll say what we think" philosophy.

Amiga Power would presumably also have been up against the wall, had it still existed, on more fundamental grounds. Reviews appear to have contained both humour and, worse still, ideological input from their authors without clear demarcation and signalling that this was the case - rather than an honest and objective appraisal of the entertainment value of the game and its technological achievements. (Furthermore, their scoring system would be cited an as example of gaming journalists abusing their Metacritic power to penalise games that they didn't like.)

I note that Kieron Gillen went on to found notorious gaming 'journalism' site Rock Paper Shotgun, now undermines comics for living, and was considered as a place to 'start digging' in the highly successful Operational Shills-In-A-Barrel (Status: Ongoing).

Stuart Campbell went from Amiga Power to actually working the games development industry, which I think tells you everything you need to know.

Funcrusher

Quote from: Mister Six on August 11, 2018, 12:14:43 PM
And I'm saying that Gamergate began as a reaction against women in games, and was from its inception violently misogynistic. If people who were genuinely concerned about shitty games journalism got involved down the line then great - but that's not what Gamergate was actually inspired by or what it was intended for.


What is this claim actually based on? Both Barry and I heard plenty of conversation about the journalistic gaming clique and no one calling anyone a whore.

[/quote]
Quote from: Mister Six on August 11, 2018, 12:14:43 PM

Calling individual women idiots because of their self-harming political beliefs is fine; calling all women idiots because of their gender is not. As you well know.

I absolutely agree, but I'm sure that if I called Zoe Quinn an idiot someone would be astride their white charger to call me a misogynist.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: The Boston Crab on August 11, 2018, 10:50:41 AM
Did the OP ask for a potted history of Gamergate or is this your homework

Send it off to forbes.com son

Sorry, too much whiskey last night.



Also good, though I don't really drink spirits any more because I want to live longer than my dad. (Still alive, just it's a running competition.)

Ferris

Catching up on this thread, it's an interesting discussion. It's all about messaging, isn't it?

Here's my example: in 2011's Skyrim you can be whatever ethnicity and gender you like, and marry anyone regardless of that person's ethnicity and gender. And I don't think I heard a single person even mention it. Not to praise it, not to criticize it. Nothing. It was just accepted as so quotidian that it didn't require comment. That was years before all this went down and nobody cared.

Now, if Bethesda has gone out of their way to tout this as some example of how woke they are because their core-consumers are morons so this had to be forced into their ignorant, bigoted consciousness then I bet you would have got a reaction.

The thing that frustrates about these youtube people criticizing video games is their lack of knowledge - of course Princess Peach is a "damsel in distress" trope; that's sort of the point. It's a cartoonish over-exaggeration to set up the story for Mario so we can all get on with the important business of jumping on boxes and collecting coins. It isn't some deep point that you've 'called out' because you are so much more righteous and progressive than me, it's just that I'm able to look at it in context and see it for the nothing-burger it is.

I'm very progressive, but I fucking hate being preached to. I imagine that's the same for a lot of people. From Hillary to Remain to the Ghostbusters reboot - if the messaging was better and less sanctimonious (and didn't try and make joe public out to be a moral failure for not supporting them) I bet the world would be a much better place.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: Funcrusher on August 11, 2018, 10:35:29 AMThis sounds like a bit of a reach.

There was, and still is to a certain extent, a lot of controversy in gaming around casual games in general and narrative-based games in particular. A lot of the time, these things were associated with women.1 2 3 And casual games in particular were really, really successful. Not to mention ideas about Fake Gamer Girls that have been with us for quite a while. All these things made up one part of the ideological background of Gamergate. Admitting that fact doesn't mean every gamergater was a misogynist or that the anti-gamergaters were all perfect saints. But it was there.

You can even see the point where for some people frustration with game reviews morphed into frustrations about casual games and from there into a drama-fuelled crusade against Bad Women. Mundanematt was basically there from the beginning, and you can see this process in his video on how "incestuous" the video game industry is. He starts off on the Kane and Lynch review controversy, then immediately launches into a conspiracy theory about the narrative-heavy, gameplay-light indie game Gone Home. He can't understand how this game got good reviews, so there must be shenanigans afoot. And he applies the same logic to Depression Quest, but the sexual element makes for the more dramatic story, and so he focuses much of his energy talking about that. And in his other video about Quinn's personal life (which Quinn tried unsuccessfully to take down over copyright claims), he begins by talking about feminism. The point is that Gamergate very quickly became about other issues and the journalistic ethics angle got sidelined almost immediately.

Gotta say that Depression Quest is probably the most SJW game title anyone could conceive. It's almost like some really lazy shit satire, but so shit it's dumb funny, so respect for that.

Zetetic

Isn't that just the joke?

Quote from: FerriswheelBueller on August 11, 2018, 03:32:15 PM
Here's my example: in 2011's Skyrim you can be whatever ethnicity and gender you like, and marry anyone regardless of that person's ethnicity and gender. And I don't think I heard a single person even mention it. Not to praise it, not to criticize it.
Other than perhaps an example of how no player choice makes any substantial difference to anything in Skyrim.

QuoteNow, if Bethesda has gone out of their way to tout this as some example of how woke they are ...
Well.


(Renders for BattleSpire, Bethesda, 1997. You could also be any gender and race in that game as well, although the character selection screen only allows you to see tits, not cocks.)

Edit: I feel a bit bad about this - I'm not meaning to stick the knife into Mark Jones (whose site this is from, and who designed these characters). They reflect a particular fantasy tradition that's now been largely abandoned as a bit ridiculous, embarrassing and perhaps offputting to more than a few people. But they're not a bad reflection of it.




Back to the lack of impact thing that Skyrim applied to everything about a player's identity - I think that's not a great solution either, if your story is about discrimination based on people's backgrounds and cultures, and has a setting otherwise involving considerable racial determinism (which I guess is a bit of a problem for a lot of fantasy and sci-fi-with-aliens settings.)

FemShep made sense because why would be a human woman rather than a human man make any difference in the Mass Effect universe (other than getting you a much better voice actor). (Curiously, however, Mass Effect does have some slightly odd views about individual 'genetic' variation of abilities in humans, suggesting that they're much greater than in the various alien species.)

I've thought about Billie Lurk on-and-off over the last few months - a slightly disabled (mostly...) black lesbian being a major character and player-controlled protagonist in a video game. She's one of the more interesting character in the Dishonored series - which might not be saying much, and mostly the plot is either uninteresting or bobbins - and those characteristics I've inventoried aren't ever played towards caricature but they don't feel irrelevant somehow (even though the world she lives in isn't our own).

I'm not sure my thoughts are in order - I think RPGs, even 'action RPGs', have escaped a bit when it comes to 'diversity' in player characters because 1) it's a choice, and 2) it's often rare for that choice to be anything other than aesthetic (which all sorts of positives and negatives), and 3) different audiences.

Zetetic


Ferris

What was acceptable 20 years ago isn't representative now. That just shows Bethesda have largely kept up with society on their own, without the need for bad-faith criticisms from people with their own axe to grind.

Zetetic

And driven by a desire to expand their markets, no doubt.

(Which also ties into the aggressive rejection of anything other than extremely proximal and clearly signposted branching as an expression of player choice - allowing anyone, regardless of their character and previous choices, to experience almost all the lovely content of the game.)

(There are games that continue to cleave to the style of fantasy fiction covers from decades gone by - but clearly these are targeting a particular niche.)

Quotewithout the need for bad-faith criticisms from people with their own axe to grind.
But possibly a little bit out of fear or concern of reasonable criticisms from people (with their own axe to grind, I guess).

Zetetic

Of course sci-fi and fantasy fiction has come under attack for these sort of shifts ("keeping up with society"). Sad Puppies and all that.




Bethesda's games have another layer of protection against being accused of being preachy, in so far as it'll be possible to mod your own massive jugs into a new game within a few weeks if you're feeling under attack.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: The Boston Crab on August 11, 2018, 03:47:52 PM
Gotta say that Depression Quest is probably the most SJW game title anyone could conceive.

Is it? I don't really associate depression with SJW issues, to be honest. It's basically Feels Bad Man: The Game.

BeardFaceMan

With regards to choices about your character being purely aesthetic in these rpgs, what are the negatives of that? Everybody gets treated the same ingame regardless of who they are, isnt that good thing? Whats the other option, to have extra gameplay and dialogue trees based on your gender or race? Doing that would be a lot more problematic.

Zetetic

Plenty of RPGs do that.

It depends on the setting, I think. Fully half of Skyrim's plot is about racism, and the fictional world still in large part clings to fairly strong ideas of racial determinism (which are half-heartedly expressed in some parts of the character creation, but are quickly made meaningless in game play).

Everybody in Skyrim doesn't get treated the same regardless of who they are - some people are forced to live in ghettos, some people are targeted by laws intended to wipe out their culture, some people are suffering the aftermath of a broadly race-linked god-fuckup, some people have been transmogrified into dumb animals, some people aren't capable of magic.

But the player character isn't generally subject to this - they live outside of the world presented (both its biophysical mechanics, dubious as we might consider them, and its social problems). Which is a bit of a cop-out, at best.

Zetetic

Also on Bethesda's decision-making:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESRB_re-rating_of_The_Elder_Scrolls_IV:_Oblivion

Possibly some bad-faith criticisms at work there, (but not from the preaching progressives - the apparent origins of the topless mod are interesting!).

BeardFaceMan

Ah, I dont really play rpgs, do they really write 2 (or more) different games depending on your character choice or are you just talking about different kinds of dialogue being used rather than different plots or gameplay, an NPC refusing to sell you a sword because youre female when you can buy it as a male, for example?

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Zetetic on August 11, 2018, 04:56:46 PM
Everybody in Skyrim doesn't get treated the same regardless of who they are - some people are forced to live in ghettos, some people are targeted by laws intended to wipe out their culture, some people are suffering the aftermath of a broadly race-linked god-fuckup, some people have been transmogrified into dumb animals, some people aren't capable of magic.

But the player character isn't generally subject to this - they live outside of the world presented (both its biophysical mechanics, dubious as we might consider them, and its social problems). Which is a bit of a cop-out, at best.

Well thats what I mean when I say everybody gets treated the same, I mean whatever choices you make when you customize your character you get treated the same by the NPCs, I didnt mean all NPCs get treated the same by each other and every rpg is a utopia.

Zetetic

Which is a weird, baffling depiction of discrimination in a game that's ostensibly in large part about discrimination.




QuoteAh, I dont really play rpgs, do they really write 2 (or more) different games depending on your character choice or are you just talking about different kinds of dialogue being used rather than different plots or gameplay, an NPC refusing to sell you a sword because youre female when you can buy it as a male, for example?

For games concerned with humans, the most common difference is dialogue choices in relevant situations.

Fallout: New Vegas is a game that's looks at what different political systems might be like in the aftermath of our civilization. One of the factions in the game is "Caesar's Legion", which is military dictatorship that treats a lot of people as sub-human - including all women by default. The game doesn't shut-off access to joining them if you're a woman but, certainly early on, it's made fairly clear what most of its soldiers think of you and what they would do to you given the option. It also - a little more crassly perhaps - has situations where, depending on gender (and skills chosen), you have options to influence and seduce different people and solve problems accordingly.

The option is open to depict a world where gender, the colour of your skin, and your background don't matter. But if you do decide to depict a world where these things are important - either as material facts or in the eyes of people in that world - then I generally think you shouldn't exclude the player from them.

BeardFaceMan

But other than different dialogue choices and NPCs treating you differently but ultimately still being the same game play and not changing the story, what can be done? It sounds like what you want is someone to create a game world and then create different stories and quests within that world depending on your customisation choice for your character but I can't ever see devs doing something that in depth, it would add too much work. And how do you decide what is a quest for a female and what is a quest for a male, youre never going to please everyone there. And I thought the whole point of playing rpgs is to play as someone else, why would you want the character and stories to be relevant to your own sex/race/gender/class/whatever?  Doesnt that cancel out the 'role playing' part of things?

Zetetic

QuoteBut other than different dialogue choices and NPCs treating you differently

I don't know what else you think I'm asking for from games that decide to make prejudice or racial differences part of their setting.

Quotecreate different stories and quests within that world depending on your customisation choice for your character but I can't ever see devs doing something that in depth,
But they do! Loads of RPGs have 'romance' options to pick the really obvious example of 'different stories and quests'.

(I'll correct myself on Mass Effect - this is the one place that human gender has some effect because not everyone is into male humans...)

Quotebut ultimately still being the same game play and not changing the story, what can be done?
Does having soldiers indicate that they'd rape you given the chance change the 'story' or not?

(I mean, to be honest, one of the problems that many people seem to have with New Vegas is that's extremely difficult to be sympathetic to the Legion even when they don't consider you personally sub-human.)

QuoteAnd how do you decide what is a quest for a female and what is a quest for a male, youre never going to please everyone there.
What? Why would you do that?

Unless you've chosen, for some reason, to have a misogynist or a misandrist to control access to the quest. In which case, why did you choose to do that in the first place?

(This might be reasonable of course! In Skyrim, one quest-giver has forced one species to live in a ghetto and barred another from the city he controls because he's a racist. His racism is a significant part of one-half of the plot! It should be harder to wander into his palace if you've got the wrong colour skin, wrong shaped ears or a tail!)

Quotewhy would you want the character and stories to be relevant to your own sex/race/gender/class/whatever?
Most RPGs allow you to choose a character that doesn't have to precisely match your own characteristics.

Zetetic

The other option, in case I've not been clear about this, is not to make prejudice and discrimination (on the basis of characteristics that the player can choose for themselves) a major plot point in your game.

BeardFaceMan

Im going to stop now because I dont play rpgs and now have no literal idea what your argument is any more.