Over on Return of Kings, one brave gamer dares to ask the question of our age: What will the world look like after the inevitable triumph of GamerGate?
I know, I know, just humor him for a few minutes. Because he has a rather, well, revealing notion of what triumph will look like, and it’s not one that’s compatible with the #NotYourShield propaganda that GamerGaters use to disguise its retrograde goals. Greendestiny, a veteran of TheRedPill and KotakuInAction on Reddit, sees in the video game “war” a new opportunity for gamebros to become Game Men:
It is my personal belief that, after GamerGate, video games will evolve to become a tool for raising a new generation of men. Our current education system fails horribly at providing real information on how the world works, what motivates people, and how to get laid.
Our education system is a disaster! Can you believe that not one college in the United States offers a major in Getlaidology?
More importantly, it pussifies men and turns them into starry-eyed believers in the Disney variety of life and love.
Huh. You know, there’s a cultural critic who’s made some interesting videos challenging the sexist tropes you can find in Disney movies and elsewhere in popular culture. Her name is Anita Sarkee… oh wait. Never mind.
The entire concept of sitting quietly and reading is meant for girls. Boys need the fight, the challenge, competition, and a test of their strength.
So why exactly are you trying to convince guys of this in a post you expect them to sit down and read? Shouldn’t your blog post be a video game or an arm-wrestling contest or something?
Games were always learning tools. Now they can become a tool for learning greater masculinity.
If by masculinity you mean “the proper sequence of buttons to push that will enable you to pull off an awesome combo.”
To become real men, boys must overcome challenges and find the true strength in themselves. Whether this is done in a virtual or real arena is irrelevant. By creating games that are consciously aimed at presenting a proper challenge, we can collectively make the world a better place for the next generation of men. And possibly help them get laid more.
“Hey, babe, I bet you didn’t know you were sitting next to a Level 90 Fire Mage.”
But seriously for a second: Yes, video games do teach gamers certain skills, and even something about the value of persistence. But why are the skills involved in, say, shooting dudes with maximum efficiency in Call of Duty any more intrinsically valuable, or “masculine,” than the skills involved in doing this?
@Kitteh – Oh, yeah, the snap-out-of-it brigade. Grrr. Not to mention, how many of these guys had to deal with untreated chemical imbalances or other mental illnesses? And the STRESS!! Oh, my goodness, the stress! Any girl who dreams of marrying a prince has absolutely NO idea of the stressful reality that royals face.
Anne of Cleves was great! Most women would have wanted to get married again, but she just said, “NOPE! I’ve got my own property, and freedom to live as I choose. The only reason for me to get married would be to pop out babies, and I’m not gonna do that.” She lived on her own terms. She didn’t allow herself to be shipped back to her brother, just because she didn’t please the king. And she used her personality to become friends and earn herself a really good position at court, that lasted until her (natural) death. With all the corruption running rampant at that court, she either avoided it all, or else rose above it. At any rate, she came out unscathed.
As to whether or not she lived a sex-less, loveless life? Who knows. She never got caught, that’s for sure. Doesn’t mean she lived like a nun. It just means that either she was chaste, or she was clever. Either way, she remained one of the very few upper-class women in the country at that time to be able to maintain any real control over her own life.
The immortal question of “How on earth do classes manage to make history boring when it’s inherently interesting?”
@katz – They teach it to children, and demand that all sex and violence be removed to protect their youthful innocence.
Now, perhaps if history were reserved for college-level courses, and taught at a PG-13 (minimum) level…
::grinds teeth:: I had a feeling that was coming.
And this guy’s a therapist?
::waves hand:: I know who should be in any film set in Egypt, or the whole region really – Oded Fehr. As long as he looks like he did in The Mummy, that is. 🙂
SO true. Imagine dealing with a situation where your immediate family are either sent abroad, so you’re likely to never see them again, or become your political enemies rather than supporters, or both! Imagine being in the situation of the princesses sent off to marry when their countries were hostile; loyalty to their homeland could slide into treason against their adopted country (something Anne of Austria, Louis’s wife, came this close to), and loyalty to their husband and adopted country meant their homeland became the enemy (Louis’s eldest and favourite sister Elisabeth was queen of Spain, married to Anne of Austria’s brother Philip IV, and she effectively killed herself through overwork and strain for the war effort when Spain and France were at war from 1635).
Louis knew what he was talking about when he referred to kings as “those unhappy beings” – he could have extended it to queens as well, of course.
Oh I hope they don’t. Or if they do, I hope they remember a few things NOT to do from Yoda’s fight in that episode-we-shall-not-speak-of.
I mean, I don’t mind that he was a younger, spryer Yoda. I don’t mind that he pulled some physical shenanigans. But to see him start hobbling into the room as the wizened, cane-toting Yoda we know and love, and then instantly switch into caffeinated-ninja-gremlin mode — yeah. I had to fight laughing out loud in the theater. I do understand how you could explain that, because The Force, but it still looked unbelievably funny to me.
Now maybe I’m speaking way out of turn, because I have almost no knowledge of the Star Wars extended universe, but it seems to me that older Jedi should have a “Fight smarter, not harder” mentality. Like they’d grow out of the need to showboat by flinging themselves all over the room, instead doing more with strategic hand-waving and anticipating the other person’s move. (Like the bit where Yoda and Dooku started throwing pieces of the room around? That was kinda cool.)
I’m hoping for something more akin to Gandalf and Saruman’s fight in Lord of the Rings, which was still plenty physical, but relied more on non-contact magic, and was calculated and deliberate, rather than a flurry of arms and legs and staves. Even when Gandalf was later fending off orcs with a sword, he behaved in a way that pretty much matched his physical frame — a strong and competent physical frame, to be sure, but one that does not belong to an overenergetic young showoff. I see no reason why an older Jedi should not adopt the same basic stance.
(This concludes the nerd rant from someone who probably does not know enough about Star Wars to justify a nerd rant about it.)
If my therapist vomited ignorant blather about Jane Austen, without actually seriously reading her work or having any real grasp of the history of the English novel, we would have words. Lots and lots of words, many of them quite harsh.
I’m not sure there’s anything constructive or convincing that you can say to someone whose attitude is “a woman did it, it’s mostly about women, and the target audience was women again, therefore obviously it’s crap”.
Seraph:
Round here they say it takes 4 cm of ice to carry a man, or 2 cm to carry a fisherman.
I’m too young to either remember Cold War or witness climate change. Scary history, scary future.
(In fact, I’m 32 just today :))
Happy Birthday!
Oded Fehr! In Mummy! Oh yeah!!
@Kootiepatra
I hated the fight between Gandalf and Saruman because it was far too physical. Throwing someone around with magic makes no sense when you could use far less power directly on their heart for eg. Admittedly, how I imagine a real wizard battle would look wouldn’t work so well for a movie.
http://33.media.tumblr.com/18bbc815e4c641246df8a28c9633d392/tumblr_mm5bjfDbG61qdlh1io1_400.gif
Climate change? You’re only 32.
You ain’t seen nuttin’ yet.
I am in a gap agewise.
I mean my parents were alive during WWII, so think of that as current events, not history.
But I am only 43 so I missed a lot of events between then and now.
Climate change makes me kind of glad to be over 40, to be honest. I can already see the big wave approaching the shore, but I’ll probably be dead by the time it really hits. If I had kids I’d be scared for them.
Should have said, I’m a bit grumpy on the climate change issue just now.
SBS is showing Years of Living Dangerously. For those of you who’ve managed to steer clear of the online climate wars (unlike me, these denier folks really need to be told where to get off) this is a pretty good overview of where we’ve got to and where we’re headed. It’s just so bloody irritating to see people trying to drum this really simple message into some bloody thick skulls.
Though it was, in a sour way, quite amusing to see Harrison Ford almost get himself deported from Indonesia after not showing enough “respect” to the Minister for Forests. He was frothing with fury during that interview, a bit more restrained when he interviewed the President the following day. But he’d spent some time in the orangutan protection refuges. What more can you say when a dear little baby orangutan’s been tugging on the peak of your cap?
Michelle:
I’m no historian but I strongly suspect there’s been constant low-level population mixing both upwards to the Nile valley and downwards to the Mediterranean. This would mean ancient people looked about the same as present ones, and there was no dramatic difference between neighboring regions. Also, there must have been individual variation within same region, so it doesn’t so much matter what individuals looked like, the outlook of general population is more relevant for realism.
Ancient Egypt had such a (relatively) huge population that any invading peoples wouldn’t have had much genetic effect without a really massive native genocide, of which there is no evidence AFAIK.
Nobody knows when exactly the Exodus is supposed to have happened, as it apparently wasn’t important for people who wrote the Biblical book, and there’s no any remotely contemporary account or evidence (therefore historians usually treat the story as fictional). One popular guess is the time of Ramesses II in the 13th century BC. Incidentally, we have his mummy as a reference for facial features (if you want to go ultra-realistic), but the original skin hue has darkened beyond recognition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pharaohs_in_the_Bible#Pharaohs_in_the_book_of_Exodus
More historical info
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus
in 1989 i was -2 … so I really don’t have anything to say about the cold war. it’s so interesting to read about your experiences because this is all “just” history for me, something we were taught about in school a little bit. but it was never a priority in history class either.
regarding climate change, in the region I grew up there is just no denying possible. I remember skiing a lot when I was a kid but now you would have to drive a long way to the next skiing area. there ist just no snow left around our village and all the small skiing areas disappear because it’s just not profitable any more.
NO general luv-in about Oded Fehr ? Boo 😛
Re: Older Jedi and fighting smarter not harder…
What I really want to know is why no Jedi ever did something really, really simple. Like, say, using your sneaky telekinesis to just turn off the other person’s weapon mid-parry.
Or, you know, loosening up some bolts in their navigation system, so they get lost somewhere in hyperspace.
Or maybe just nudging over a convenient slippery thing right under their feet.
Or just dangling them upside down instead of tossing them across the room. It’s hard to concentrate when you’re upside down.
Or knock the crystals in their lightsaber out of alignment and wait for the boom.
There’s so many ways you could use the force smarter not harder…
@Contrapangloss:
Given the samurai-esque nature of Jedi, my completely unsubstantiated guess is that the force is more of an aura than telekinesis. You can only directly affect a person, or things close by the person, if your connection with the force is much stronger. It’s why Vader, despite being able to choke an officer, was only able to throw random garbage at Luke in Empire Strikes Back.
I’d imagine a lot of the pauses in action in the older movies has the two combatants clashing auras, since successfully doing so would be as much of a win as sword slice.
This would sort of make sense given what the force is described as; a connection between things that pervades the universe rather than something originating from one’s self. The observation that “the force is strong with this one” is an observation about the strength of one’s aura, possibly with a greater effect radius, rather than one’s demonstrated abilities.
That second paragraph sounds like something that would be both dramatic and make people stop complaining that Jedi don’t just pull peoples’ hearts out(not a knock at you, @contrapangloss, just some stupid friends I have) so we can get to the next…whatever it is they want faster.
With the right sound design and acting you could give the sense that another, mental battle is going on, parallel to the physical, with the combatants struggling to overpower each other’s grip on the Force. Like a swordfight crossed with a psychic arm-wrestling match.
And the reason Darth Vader spent all that time flinging stuff at Luke was to wear him down physically and mentally, disorienting him and making him more vulnerable to the revelation. The guy was not even kind of a match for him at that point.
Funny enough, my completely uneducated guess might not have been too far off. A read on the dark side at wookiepedia reveals that mental stamina is a huge thing when talking about succumbing to the dark side. There were some cases of sith with such powerful connections to the dark side that they’d convert jedi around them to dark side users simply with their presence.
I like this theory!
I will join that luv-in! (But, the correct answer is still Adam Beach)
Happy Birthday, Arctic Ape!!!
That’s actually hugely important, much more so than I would have thought. The dark side is about temptation, mental turmoil, and submission. The more Luke was worn down, the more likely it’d be that he’d fall to the temptation of the dark side and his anger would take over.
Suddenly that scene has much more meaning; Luke does practically fall prey to his own emotions, possibly even almost turning to the dark side, but instead he jumps. He gains a much darker aesthetic after that confrontation, as if he had tasted the dark side for the first time and it left a permanent mark on him.
Then, in Return of the Jedi, he actually does use dark side power to overpower Vader (who, interestingly enough, needs to constantly use dark side energy to keep his lungs functioning. Perhaps once his aura is overpowered, he can’t even breathe). The triumph of Luke is not defeating the enemy, but in stepping over the boundary of the dark side and returning.
Damn, I’ve missing so much cool stuff about the Star Wars universe by just watching the movies.