It’s rare that they come out and say it this explicitly, but here’s Heartiste, arguing that unless society treats women badly they won’t give him a boner. In a brief post about “Dread Game” — his term for manipulatively gaslighting women to prey on their insecurities — he offers up this bit of shitbag philosophy:
Dread game on a societal scale keeps women in line, always working hard to please men lest they be cast to the icy wastelands with the rest of the anti-feminine rejects. The opposite of Dread Game — Coddle Game — relaxes selective pressures on women to stay feminine and thin and agreeable. And so what you see now in the decadent, coddling West is what we get: Ballbusting fat feminist cunts and careerist androgynes.
So brave, Heartiste, so brave.
Everything not only has to be “game”, but they have to rig the rules so they get to play on the Easy setting, while women have to play on the Advanced/Calvinball setting.
Here’s an amazing fact for Heartiste: women do not behave monolithically! They can sometimes act in more than one way towards different people! Creeps and asshats rarely see the best side of people. Women become tense, hostile, and defensive in their presence for some strange reason. I don’t know why he’s surprised that everywhere he goes, women suddenly become “disagreeable”.
His personality is an anti-aphrodisiac. Everywhere he goes, women spontaneously sprout pantsuits and padlock their labia shut. It’s like trees that give off alarm scents to warn other trees when attacked by a predator. If women aren’t being sweet and compliant in his presence, it’s simply a natural defense mechanism.
Oh well. Heartiste isn’t the first person to end up broke and alone from overestimating the stupidity of women.
Ohhhh, Civilization. I haven’t forgiven that series for that time I was *one turn* away from winning the space race in Civ4, but my AI ally decided to suddenly turn against me, generating a diplomatic victory for one of the other bots, with no discernible gain to themselves.
I don’t ragequit games often. But I kinda ragequit.
I’ve stuck to Age of Empires instead–it has roughly the same sort of strategy as Civ, but isn’t turn based. At one level, I miss being able to take a turn to mull over what I want to do next, rather than having to react to things in real time. But overall, in Age of Empires, I feel so much more in control over whether or not I do well. If I do lose, I can usually easily see what I did wrong. In some ways, I feel about Civ the same way I feel about the board game Risk–you can develop really good strategies and do everything “right” (so it’s not pure luck, i.e. good players will win a lot, and bad players will lose a lot), but if fate decides to ruin your day, there’s just not much to do to recover from it.
…Or maybe that means I just never quite got the hang of Civ. It’s been a while.
“There are not enough words in the English language to express how very happy I am that there is no way in hell that I will EVER be able to attract a “man” like Heartiste.
Talk about dodging a bullet! May every woman on this green Earth NEVER “measure up” to this drelb and his compatriots”
I could’nt agree more. Merely the thought of ending up in a relationship with a psychopath, sorry, “alpa male” like Fartiste gives me creeps. The way he and other manospherians think about their Fellow human beings is disturbing.
If only all Red pill men would pair up with Red pill women or sexbots and leeve the rest of us alone, the World would be a much better place.
@lordpabu
Dishonored is an interesting game, but the violence is pretty stark and even a no-kill run means that you’re going around destroying your victim’s lifes, forcing them out of society and robbing them off their freedom for whatever span of time they have left on this earth.
And none of the endings really dealt with what happens to your lover’s soul. For all we know, she might still be stuck to her pickled heart the Leviathan handed you. They really did forget about her after she was turned into an actual plot device.
She probably still is. And was she ever an actual plot device? I quite liked the Heart, and I loved the short descriptions of various people that came out because they were all just so remarkably well written and evocative (I felt).
It also felt really unconnected to anything else.
I think it’s a bit harsh to lump everything together like that, though. The stuff in Dishonored is measurably different than the stuff in Hitman for instance. In Dishonored, you’re infiltrating a brothel during the day because you’re an assassin trying to get to the older brothers of someone you work with. And they’re in the brothel because they are, in a phrase, total assholes on a money spending binge. I actually quite liked how Dishonored managed that, because you are technically this mystically blessed agent who can walk through the frontdoor brandishing guns, rapier and explosive nail grenades and just absolutely destroy everything in the place (and every one) but you don’t have to. There are no cutscenes that force you to do anything to any one in that place, there is no overt controlling elements of you being forced to do anything to these people and they’re all just going about their lives.
I thought it was oddly humane, because it seemed like they were just… people. Going about a job. A job that just so happened to be high end prostitution at a apparently famous brothel. Any interaction with them is something the player chooses to do, where any sort of the usual mutilation, destruction and so on is just the tools the game give you to do whatever. They didn’t even do the usual “Oh, my, you’re so handsome” thing woman always have to do in first person games.
( They run and scream because you’re wearing a mask and the mask is the only thing drawn on wanted posters all over the city )
Granted, I spent most of that level as a fish happily swimming around, so off-key perspective perhaps.
I don’t remember specifically thinking “Ah yes, this is the exotic brothel level because obviously, in a game about infiltration, you have to have one of those. Now I’m going to go around this corner and there we have it, naked giggling slave girls. Sigh”, because the entire thing was set up more like… well, the kind of place a pair of high strung industrialists would go in their off time to blow of some steam.
In Assassin’s Creed, that’s exactly what I thought the first time you interacted with the courtesans guild. Because why wouldn’t you. Of course. Oh? And now there’s a killer running away and you have to be The Only Good Man and stop him? Aha. I bet at some point someone’s going to kill a woman just to prove a point too yeeees there it is.
Now you can spy on someone in a bath-tub in the resistance HQ in Dishonored and frankly the non-lethal take-down at the Ball gave me shivers thinking about it still, so it’s not like the game doesn’t have some fucking problems, but at least it’s not that bad.
But it’s an odd feeling I can’t quite substantiate. The easiest sum up is just that sometimes you feel as if you are reading a story or participating in something like that, and the background is random nude women because it wants there to be nude women and there they are. And that’s a fucking problem, because… See the Anita video, page back. In Dishonored, you were hunting people, and they were at this place, so that’s where you had to go. It felt more… real, I guess.
Which is miles and a country and a continent away from fucking Hitman, which is a game series that just seems to have an endless problem with murdering, destroying, killing, hurting or otherwise crippling women just for the sake of it. If you feel like just laughing at the absurdity of some modern games, go google the Hitman Absolution E3 trailer.
Just… argh. And I saw one of those beautifully executed posters somewhere, once, and I can still kind of see it when I close my eyes and it’s just so… wrong. Like, it’s the most wrong thing I can easily conceive of in relation to marketing. It’s not even funny or witty or clever or anything.
Dragon Age Origins is kind of the same thing as Dishonored. That one scene, with that noble and his “Grab a whore” is the introduction to a city elf campaign. It’s entirely meant to establish that being a city elf in Ferelden is The Shittiest Deal. You’ll also find some economic exploitation and some merchants grossly underselling some elves and thugs and stuff. Giving Bioware some credit, everyone in that scene is actually someone you talk to, get to know and have a kind of relationship with, so no one is interchangable filler solely there to be killed. The noble is set up as a complete bastard, and you ultimately end the thing by killing him, and that’s where someone else swoops in and saves you from execution by declaring you a conscript for the Grey Wardens.
It’s still establishing that scene on the back of “rape n’ whores!” which is shitty writing, and that trend carries through a lot of the game (I lost track of how many times someone, in some form, used the phrase “whore” or “bitch”).
But the difference is writing something that seems fairly believable and exists in the world with a general purpose, and just writing fucking gore smut. You have a conversation with another elf before that bit in Origins, where he talks about how he can’t afford food for his family because the human merchants are charging him more, because he’s an elf. So with that, another human noble coming down to bust up a wedding seems in keeping with the entire “it all sucks” theme.
Hitman has you beating up latex clad assassin killer nuns just fucking because, stop asking about it.
I’m not saying Anita’s analysis isn’t true, but I am saying that there are nuances in the way stories are structured and told. Sometimes, stuff happens in a brothel because it happens in a brothel and that’s just that.
What’d love to never, ever see again, though, is stuff happening in a brothel because that’s a cheap excuse to include boobies!
GOD, Metro Last Light is such a beautiful game. And it’s actually really good. And the story is interesting. And the world (Based on the books) is good. And then… you go this town… at this point… and there’s just this three minute lapdance sequence. For no reason. Someone grabs you, pulls you into a room, and BOOM, lapdancing. No way to avoid it that I could find. Nothing.
One second you’re sitting and watching this completely superflous post apocalyptic circus act with a ring manager who is ecstastic about having found this one surviving guy who knows how to play the harmonika, and how this means their metro station is the wonderful new entertainment wonderland of the underground, and how some light and joy is brought back into an otherwise fairly cruel world, and it’s just really, really good stuff… and you walk out the door and down the corridor and BOOM, surprise nudity.
Sigh.
It occurs to me I may just have posted what ultimately amounts to “But I like it, so it can’t be that wrong”.
I apologize. Using the broken backs of women to somehow make your dark and edgy fantasy darker and edgier and so cool, u gaiz, is atrociously bad writing and seriously messed up sexual politics too, and no more, no less.
It also puts the lie on male disposability in video games. It’s funny, because the same people who complain about the all-male squads of mooks are the ones who would never hire women as THEIR mooks in the first place.
Where are the male victims of sexual violence, then?
…
By the way: a society as unstable AND oppressive as Game of Thrones wouldn’t last long before the peasant revolts started to pop all over the place. Medieval society was a lot more stable than that.
Once again, I read something by an MRA and wonder how he and I can possibly exist in the same reality. Heartiste especially seems to be sociopathic, with nobody mattering at all unless he finds some personal utility in the person. If not, then said person is simply a zero. And of course to him, “mattering” means “I can fuck you.” What a sad, limited, barren world to inhabit. Yet I don’t feel sorry for him because.
“So’s your face.”
Is a good response to pretty much any sentence uttered in english.
Thanks David and old comic book author!
I knew about the unremarkable middle-aged guy part (I’ve seen his photos, and he is utterly unprepossessing), but…LIVES OFF HIS SISTER??? Oh myyyyy. Now I want to know more! Ha, ha.
Ah, Civilization, one of my mostest favoritest games of all time (though I actually keep going back to an early version, 4 maybe? the disk is in an old laptop that is the only one I use for it because if I didn’t strictly control my access to the game I would never get anything else done ever).
My strategy has always been to maximize growth quickly and explore as much territory as possible while maintaining a compact, tight and highly developed industrial conglomeration with lots of mid-level military units. Then, when I reach a critical mass of military units, I move across the landscape in waves, mowing down all in my path and slowly eradicating or incorporating my neighbors. I’m also fond of establishing alliances that allow me to get a jump on military preparedness only to break my treaties and attack when the conditions are right.
Good times.
I don’t play as much as I used to, partially because I started running seriously thin on time due to other commitments and partially because I don’t find that many games that really click with my interests these days. My ideal game would be some combination of Civilization, SimCity and StarCraft, for me it’s not about winning, according to the rules and schedule set by the game designer but about the process of conquering and urbanizing the game world.
Actually, I really miss StarCraft; it was well constructed and written. While I was finishing my thesis I would play for a while in the evening, right before bed, and then write fiction based in that world in the spare moments of my day, around work and classes. It kept me from focusing on how miserable the process was making me by giving me another world to escape to!
Brittersweet: Thank you so much for that video, it’s fantastic. 😀
StarCraft did have a very interesting world, but concerning game mechanics it was always too much of a clickfest for my likes. I preferred the Age of Empires series for RTS.
And yes, Civ-kind of games are all about cultivating my civ/faction for me, too. Which makes it a bit frustrating when eventually the AI fall behind. Especially if they fall behind and still attack you, and you get drawn into a boring war that’s only about pushing your units around the map…
Speaking of, you lot might actually enjoy Alpha Centauri.
It’s like Civ, only not, and in the future, with telepathic alien planets, transhumanist robots and nerve stapling (That’s a crime! Don’t do it! The drones won’t like it!)
I played the hell of that game. It does have so many nice game features the Civ series proper doesn’t have (social engineering, modular units, etc.), and a really nice, well, “atmosphere” and world, too. Alas, it being developed between Civ 2 and Civ 3 means the AI is *really, really* stupid. Especially concerning land use. It almost physically pains me how the AI in Civ 2 and SMAC is leaving perfectly good and valuable land unsettled.
Really, I think there was a major AI boost between SMAC and Civ 3.
Oh, and speaking of drones, I always eventually deleted that annoying “Please don’t go. The drones need you. They look up to you” soundfile :p
*puts Alpha Centauri on list to look into*
I get the point (and agree) about the gameplay of StarCraft; but I did appreciate the world, and I loved a lot of the easter eggs. The writers embedded so many pop culture reference points into the soundfiles that I often got clobbered because I was so busy clicking on some unit to get to it to sing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ while going into battle against a Zerg rush…
“By the way: a society as unstable AND oppressive as Game of Thrones wouldn’t last long before the peasant revolts started to pop all over the place. Medieval society was a lot more stable than that.”
I thought the plot was that the depicted society WAS going downhill (Littlefinger’s plan was basically trying to destabilise the realm for his own reasons).
“Dread Game” sounds like a tabletop RPG played by cosmic horrors and eldritch abominations, rather than an RPG about them.
I wouldn’t rule out a peasant revolt on GoT at some point. There were hints that one could develop with some of the things that happened in A Feast for Crows.
@katz
Detailed Civ 4 tactics I could go on about for hours. Civ 5 I don’t have experience with. Sorry.
I may have gotten distracted by pokemon and been playing that instead of new computer games. 😛
@Gillyrosebee
Woooooo!!! Team civ 4! 😀
Vaiyt,
That’s a really good point. I’m disappointed that I didn’t spot that.
Matthew,
Dread IS a tabletop RPG played with a Jenga tower. When you knock the tower down your characters dies or their will breaks.
Actually, to be strictly accurate there is ONE male victim. Pip the watchman, who took the black to avoid being raped by some noble. The one guy doesn’t refute your critique, obviously.
Vaiyt: By the way: a society as unstable AND oppressive as Game of Thrones wouldn’t last long before the peasant revolts started to pop all over the place.
This would be the Game of Thrones which features a riot of peasants that starts off with someone throwing a turd at King Joffrey (protip: Joffrey is the one wearing the robes; the piece of turd is the thing being thrown) and ends up with Sansa nearly being raped and murdered, that features a gang of peasants getting payback against the Lannisters by ambushing soldiers in the Riverlands, and has a peasant-led religious movement inspired by the chaos of war humiliating Cersai?
@gillyrosebee: *puts Alpha Centauri on list to look into*
Before you do – see here http://store.steampowered.com/app/65980/.