Open Thread for Non-Personal Stuff: January 2016 Party Girls Edition

re: “Baby got Backstory”, in specific , Quiet.

Ugh. I have a friend who was trying to get me to play the game when it came out, raved about how good it was. So I looked into it and saw, this Quiet character (And the ridiculous cut scenes, and the double horrible figurine with the squishboobs).

I told him how offensive it was and he came back with exactly that – she can’t wear clothes cause she breathes through her skin you see! And she photosynthesizes so she doesn’t have to eat or do any of that gross pooping. She never talks either! And she can disappear so you can’t see her! And, in the game, you basically don’t see her at all except for in cut scenes! Where she’s inevitably rolling around on the ground under a shower in orgasmic glee! She’s like the perfect woman, apparently.

I tried to explain how gross this is, but he just couldn’t get it. He eventually admitted “I guess you might not want to look at that.” but to this day steadfastly refuses to see how horrible it is.

Ugh. Humans.

@Scildfreja

Sometimes I notice a lot of guys, especially when they like a game, will try to insist that it’s totes not misogynistic or sexist in any way, because then they can’t consider it a good video game. And that’s just terrible!

If you wanna get through to this guy, you could try something along the lines of:

“it may have excellent gameplay and a well-crafted world, but that doesn’t excuse the blatant sexualization of the only relevant female character in the whole game*”

Full disclosure, I use to believe that ‘plot justification’ made blatant sexualization ok (and it was Pandapool here on this blog who gave me the explanation so I’ll paraphrase them for this context)

“Even if it does technically count as a justification, the obvious goal here is to show of a woman in a state of undress for the (male) viewer. The paper-thin ‘explanation’ doesn’t suddenly make that ok”

Or point out that Quiet is treated on the same level as your Dog or your Horse, you can customize her just like you would choose which upgrades to put on your horse. Just like DDog, Quiet will ‘like’ you if you bring her out on missions more.

It seems like Kojima (along with a lot of other developers) decided to solve the symtoms rather than the problem. The biggest criticism of many ‘chainmail bikinis’ or other bullshit fighting attire was “not only is this sexist, but it makes zero logical sense for a warrior to fight wearing that outfit”

And it seems like the response has been “Oh, ok, well now it does technically make sense for her to fight naked. Problem solved!”

Also, Kojima has had many problems with overt sexism in his video games. The never-released-outside-of-Japan adventure game Policenauts allows the player to literally grope women. Apparently it was actually required to do so in order to advance the plot.

*Except for an underaged girl who was last seen piloting a metal gear in her underwear and has an infamous minigame where you get to go in a ‘date’ with her.

@Scildfreja

I’ve debated many Gaters and it’s by far the most common trait. They all take the criticism personally.

For whatever reasons (I believe video games tend to evoke strong emotions, probably because of how much is personally invested), criticizing a video game is taken as a personal offense more so than criticizing, say, a movie.

If that response bounces off, then here’s here’s a hammer:

“It’s possible to like metal gear solid 5 and still consider Quiet to be horrendously sexist, which is exactly the case. Just like it’s possible to consider Super Mario brothers ‘an absolute classic’ and consider it’s plotline to be horrendously sexist”*

“Photosynthesis is a bullshit excuse and if you don’t think that Hideo Kojima pulled that right out of his ass to cover his ass, then you’re giving him waaaaaaaaaay too much credit.”

Any delusion of Hideo Kojima’s grandure can be countered with:

“Her name is ‘Quiet’; yeah, that’s a totally original name for a sniper.”

and a sharp spear:

“It’s a shitty and inconsistent backstory: If she is photosynthetic, why the hell are they keeping her underground and why is she not dying? How does she not suffocate at night? Why do you get a gold and silver version of her as ‘upgrades’?”

“Hideo Kojima has a reputation shoehorning this crap in previous games. The B&B corps (4 women in skintight outfits) in MGS4 have pointlessly sexually exploitative gameplay sequences”. Policenauts ‘groping’, the MGS1 sequence of “identify Meryl by how she moves her ass when she walks”

“Quiet barely qualifies as a character, and there are barely any other female characters in MGS5, so this is especially bad. Imagine if this were genderflipped, and you were playing a game where the only male character was naked all the time, never said anything, and was interchangeable with a pet dog or horse. Would you feel encouraged to play that game?”
“Ok, now what if they said he has to be naked all the time because [insert BS justification], would you then consider it totally acceptable?”

“Even other MGS games, each with their own problematic elements, had better depictions of women, so this is a huge step backwards for the series and makes it very uninviting to women”

Pointing to examples of ‘this being done better’ is a double-edged spear (it can easily open up a whole can of worms) but I’ve found it very effective since these guys simply do not understand what sexism really is, so providing a frame of reference helps a lot. I don’t know your familiarity with the MGS series but these are some of the characters I usually point to, they’ve all got problematic elements but they’re all drastically better than Quiet:

The Boss from MGS3
Olga from MGS2
Meryl from MGS4 (and specifically not her MGS1 incarnation where she’s just a damsel in distress slash love interest with a gameplay sequences of “identify Meryl among masked terrorists because of how her ass moves when she walks”)

*I’ve been imagining an alternative plot for Super Mario Brothers that fixes the problems with the story while changing as little as possible:

-Super Mario finds out that the princess has gone missing, and Bowser has taken over the kingdom and turned everyone into Goombas (I think that’s close to the original?)
-End of each level “sorry mario, the princess is in another castle”
-After defeating the ‘real’ bowser on 8-4, Mario encounters Princess Peach, who’s revealed to have been behind the coup the entire time.
-Final Boss Fight against Peach ensues.

Thoughts?

Someone once wrote, and I can’t remember who, that video games culture in the modern age must be understood as a post-war veteranocracy. Everyone who considers themselves a “gamer” remembers the struggle over the past few decades to avoid video games from being banned altogether or be censored into nothingness; and that struggle was won largely by pushing the alternate position that video games were entirely harmless toys which could not influence anyone towards anything and which contained no messages at all. In a sense it was a struggle between idiocy and nihilism, and nihilism won the day.

When #GGers take the debate personally (and as Moocow points out, they almost always do), then my opinion is that the reason they do it is because they are defending nihilism. They are saying “my hobby does not influence me in any way” and that is a statement which cannot be anything but deeply personal.

It’s wrong, of course, but like many things which are wrong, people take it very personally.

Did anyone watch the new X-Files yet?

Spoilers
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It kind of seemed like it was written by Alex Jones or something. I sure hope there’s some sort of twist coming up that will take it in a different direction. The snarky tone that was taken towards Bill O’Reilly as well as the O’Malley character gives me some hope that they wouldn’t really make the entire story into a paranoid right wing reactionary fantasy. We’ll see.
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Spoilers done

Sorry if this was posted elsewhere. I’m seeing this story in my news feed with an unedited version of the photo which shows the girls’ faces. A bunch of people are saying they’re glad to see a version without the faces blurred because we shouldn’t be protecting racists. I get where that’s coming from, but with the state of things and how vigilante “justice” gets meted out wherever the Internet gets upset with someone for any perceived slight, maybe outing these girls isn’t in everyone’s best interest.

IMHO the deep investment that male gamers make in games comes from the relatively high price of games, both in terms of $$$ you shell out to buy them, and in terms of the time you put into them to play them.

Especially in the case of the old classics like Mario, someone might have played SMB for hundreds or even thousands of hours over the years. That’s an enormous investment. JRPGs commonly require a minimum of dozens of hours of gameplay, up to 100+ for a series like .hack//. You might also pay $60 or $80 for a single game when it’s brand-new, and if you’re at a point in your life where that is a shitload of money, you may not feel like admitting that you spent that money for a game that is deeply problematic.

So you’ve bought a game that is problematic but you don’t want to admit it because you’ve invested a lot of time, money, or both into it. Plus, the problematic content doesn’t really affect you (because “you” are male in this example and the problematic content is sexism). Plus, the problematic content really exists for the purpose of appealing to you (or, at least, some game designer’s idea of what is appealing to you).

It doesn’t come as any surprise to me when male gamers get up in arms over criticism of a game in those circumstances. They have reasons to want to like the game, and not be told that they spent money on something that sucks, and they haven’t yet developed enough human empathy to realize that something is a problem when it is a problem for anyone, and not just when the problem affects them personally. Some never develop that, so they never get over this.

kupo: I wish I could be surprised that two out of the 8 responses took the, “Well, rap-singers use the word, too” tack.

Ugh.

And I agree with your concern–particularly in the case of women, and doubly particularly for young women/teens, the internet mob squad loves to swarm them. They’re immature idiots; let the school admins punish them appropriately, in a way that forces their parents to at least be aware that this shit won’t be tolerated, and move on.

*****

So, I’ve mentioned that I occasionally fill in on the phone desk here at work when the person who usually answers them is on lunch. When I went down today, she told me about how one of her callers had opened up by telling her, “You sound like Jessica Rabbit” and after she’d steered him through an actual professional conversation where she helped him with whatever it was he was calling about, he ‘thanked’ her by saying, “I owe you lunch; hope you like Mexican.”

I ‘eww’ed my sympathies and congratulated her on her professionalism and restraint.

Jessica Rabbit. Seriously.

he ‘thanked’ her by saying, “I owe you lunch; hope you like Mexican.”

Gotta assert dominance – oh, wait, i mean ‘maintain frame’. Or whatever.

My condolences to your friend. And congratulations. That sort of restraint requires real ladyballs. (is that how that word is supposed to work?)

… and if I’d refreshed, I would have seen that this ought to be (if anywhere) over on the other thread. :-s

Yesterday morning, a 22 year old employee was stabbed to death in a shelter for refugee minors, by one of the teenagers in their care. This is a shelter in my own city, where I could be working right now had they not turned me down when I applied for work there last year.

Yet, what’s most upsetting about this story, other than the loss of a life, is the backlash these children will receive. I don’t even want to look at political polls after this. Sigh.

Maybe not the greatest loss in the grand scheme of things, but perhaps you’ll allow me a sniffle.

1948 – 2016 🙁

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/jan/29/last-land-rover-defender-rolls-off-production-line