@pedoveijo You sir need to read Valaris’s warning. If you’re talking about feminism. It has to relate to gaming. Talking about the ideoligy of feminism itself is a no no. That shit will not derail the thread again.
Well in relating feminism to gaming, I think the only thing that needs to be said is that it’s fine if certain content creators want to incorporate feminist themes into their game but it shouldn’t be mandatory.
Wow Sennin wasn’t expecting such a fair and logical view point on that from you. I agree. If devs want to make more relatable, believable female characters, and put them in lead roles. great. If devs want to make more over the top, sexualised female characters. Or somewhere in between, that’s fine too. As long as devs are free to design games how they want without pressure from any special intrest groups. Not just SJWs/Feminist.
People should be allowed to create whatever the hell they want.
If Brian Wu wants to make some shit game then let him and guys shouldn’t hate him for it and if some dude makes a game for dudes then feminists need to sit down and mind their own business as well.
In actual games, it’s fine if people want to inject any kind of politics into the theme of the game. Hell, Hideo Kojima has been doing that in MGS since forever, themes of anti-war, PMCs, cybernetic mind control and augmentation, and artificially produced human soldiers. If it’s done well, it can make for a good story and a good statement. It would be impossible to make actual games objective and force people to not write about aspects of life they’re biased to.
In coverage of games? No. Reviewing story content is one thing and going over the themes and whether or not the reviewer thinks they’re presented well (objective) but then injecting their own politics into it becomes a problem. Once they start writing blogs that aren’t about games but targeted to ad hominem attacks against anyone for their views, we have a problem. Once they go further than that, and start writing about how particular themes in games that don’t fit their outlook in life and mandating alternative themes fitting their agenda as a requirement, we have an extreme problem. This is actually the point we’re at now. We’re at a point when the game bloggers are trying to mandate, and that isn’t cool. It’s wrong and needs to be dealt with.
What also wouldn’t be ok, would be content creators making statements as representatives of a business attacking other aspects of life. Not everyone thinks like you, so let them be. If you want to make a statement with your game, fine. They’ll probably let you be, too, and also make their own statement by not buying your game. That’s perfectly fine, because that’s business and a target audience.
Says the dude who conpletly ignores posts and responds with shit like.
“People like you living in your mom’s basement”
Stay free to your own hypocrisy. At this point you have no ethical platform to stand and critiaize gg as “harrasers”, when you go around, purposefully ignore well thought out posts with the exact same type of harrasment, and even have the guile to straight out tell people you don’t want to talk about that.
This is why people don’t take you, your stance, and your points seriously. Telling somebody he’s a basement virgin isn’t exposing others to a narrative where there’s supposedly only one narrow minded view point.
You didn’t even bother refuting the the issue of men being automatically typecasted as MRA rape enablers h cause they don’t necessarily acknowledge your viewpoints. Something you accused somebody off within the last two pages.
It’s like these bloggers forgot what target audiences are.
@Moonchilde I never said for devs not use political themes in their games. I said as long as devs are free to create whatever without pressure from special intrest groups. I.E a dev re-designing a character or re-writting parts of the story not because an idea poped up in their head, but because they felt pressured to by a group.
I"m talking about the use of feminist or other “-ism” themes in the “psuedo-intellectual” analysis of video games and it’s then assigned “grade” based on that criteria. And how they should present themselves
The use of these ideas should be explicit, and the scrutiny of these ideas shouldn’t be an excuse to react the way these content creators did. If I remember correctly, this gamergate became an “issue” when these content creators started trying to suppress criticism through shame and ridicule. The whole “feminism” thing became an issue when the content creators started pushing the narrative towards some no name female indie developrs and started using words like “misogony” to describe how the “masses” where treating 4 women.
What I’m implying is that if you truly want “ethics” in journalism content creators are going to have to explicitly label themselves as such to use whatever “-ism” they use in the analysis and then eventual criticism of somebody else vision when they politicize something as simple as video games. Especially when their “criticism” impacts the livelyhood of others, and it shapes the thought process of people subconsciously. The general public needs to be aware what the authors beliefs are so that they can for themselves choose to supportIf things like “images” on a magazine shape how women and men think of themselves and their ambition, what makes you think it isn’t going to shape somebodies viewpoint who has a passion for the hobby and invests a lot of time in alternative video game media.
it should be important that these “journalists” start labeling themselves as such. tHatt way these things don’t happen as often. Who takes seriously the idiot that goes on a CNN thread crying about how CNN is biased. Who takes seriously the FOX equivalent, etc. If you want to use you “-ism” and politicize a neutral thing, so be it, but state your stance so people know if they want to support you or not.
@pedoviejo Thanks for clarifying. We don’t want to slide down that slippery slope again, lol.
@BB_Hoody I never wrote you did 
I was kind of responding to Sennin as you had posted. You know, trying to avoid going back down the path focusing on feminism, lol. I think political themes in gaming can be interesting if well done and simply wanted to touch on that. Perhaps giving the player another perspective in life or something to think about. It’s a problem though if idiot bloggers can’t understand there is someone out there with different thoughts than them who don’t associate with the same ideals as they do. Actually, what’s really funny is that all the cries of misogyny in gaming and how sexism is rampant and shit, they’ve completely ignored the one game that actually is quite misogynistic, purposefully themed so. Silent Hill 2. James hating the nurses because they’re attractive and he’s dealing with sexual frustration while his wife is sick in a hospital bed. Nearly all the monsters in the game have feminine qualities. The masculine monster is a sadistic rapist. Gosh, where is the out cry? Oh, but the game is adored by the blogging press! The themes are so deep and emotional, and there is symbolism! Symbolism, I tell you! But no, Bayonetta is fucking misogynistic? You kidding me? SH2 took an amazing theme like that and made it interesting. Bayonetta has an empowered female, proud of her attractiveness and flaunts it because, fuck you that’s why. One’s a problem, one isn’t. One’s misogynistic to a large degree, one isn’t. But one gets called misogynistic, while the other isn’t. Fucking unbelievable.
Well it’s always been my position that artistic expression shouldn’t have boundaries. As a big comic book fan who mostly collects indy books these days, I’ve been exposed to a lot of feminist leaning "hipster"comics that I probably wouldn’t pick up again. However just because I’m not a fan of them doesn’t mean I don’t think they shouldn’t exist. Likewise I feel the same way in gaming. If special interest groups don’t want to support games like DOA or personally hate characters like ivy and cammy then fine. As long as my preferences aren’t forced to become their preferences I don’t have a problem with feminism in gaming.
You are ignoring the difference between literary/ideological misogyny and “tumblrina hac-tivist” misogyny. The former is a legitimate theme revolving around the distrust of a gender open to artistic interpretation that can be deconstructed and won’t be taken as the author’s true opinion. The latter, however, is an excellent way to get white 20something SJWs to begin throwing a tantrum for the defense of the oppressed white womens.
You can find the former in Hamlet, Heart of Darkness, and other highly regarded literary works. No one complains because, quite frankly, you won’t get anywhere other than a bread line trying to get a classic banned. The latter appears to pay quite well in SJW/tumblr circles, especially given that the cost of living in SJW Mecca San Francisco is pretty high.
Not ignoring it, just amazed that there is a literal example out there thematically showcasing legitimate misogyny in a game and they aren’t jumping on it. Even with SH:HD collection coming out only a few years ago. I’m sure if they wanted to, they could try to claim the makers of SH2 are misogynistic shit lords forcing people to kill women in games with rape themes dripping all over the place, creating a toxic masculinity in our young, impressionable male gamers. As you pointed out, if they did do that, they’d get absolutely no where because the game is held in such lofty regards, they’d be laughed out of their ad revenue even more.
I wonder how far we could look back, at all the political themed games, and see if there was any press injecting bullshit into reviews because the themes presented to them weren’t in line with their ideals? Imagine if Army of Two came out today. It’d be highly problematic because you’re controlling two sociopathic white shit lord bro-dudes targeted towards bro-gamers to mass murder muslims and under represented people of color, women, and children. I’m surprised ABC or MSNBC never picked up on it and how it glorifies white on brown violence and times of war. Funny, how when this game came out, I recall remarks about homosexuality and how these two dudes were two bro and two comfortable with each other by the game blogging press. Funny, because isn’t that a complete 180 from the narrative now? That gaming is strictly a cis white pig scum thing and everyone who plays games hates LGBT and that any remarks about perceived homosexuality is bad, mmkay?
How times have changed in only a short time span…
They’d have to play SH2 first :kappa:
Speaking of political/social themes in gaming, I playdd Spec Ops the line a few days ago after watching Yahtzee’s review of it. All I can say is wow! Fuck Last of Us that shit there is arguably the most powerful, captivating and thought provoking story in gaming. Like they took the uber badass gun ho feeling you’d have as a COD protagonist and flipped it to show you the real gritty, dark side of being a soldier in which the line between being a hero and being just as bad as your enemy is blurred and you can only tell yourself and others “I’m just following orders” so many times to justify your actions. Like that “White Phosphorus” scene.
Also in the world of SH the majority of prominent characters are women…not to mention SH3 having heather and Claudia would negate any accusations of misogny cause the sexual/violent themes are present there too.
http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/2014-08/29/9/enhanced/webdr09/anigif_enhanced-5871-1409320146-10.gif
In SH3 the violent themes are there, but the sexual ones aren’t nearly as strong, or at least, are drastically different in tone. It may have some unwanted pregnancy themes to it. She has something growing inside her she didn’t want, similar to how women who get pregnant who don’t want children could feel. They want it out, at any cost. She doesn’t want to die for the birth of a god, or to have a monster growing inside her. Some women actually do die from childbirth, and some women may consider the child growing inside them a monster depending on how it was conceived. You could draw parallels to abortion, accidental insemination, or even rape. The monster designs aren’t as symbolic in the sense that they represent frustrations like in SH2. Still, I loved SH3, great game, and Heather went from being a normal girl to overcoming fear and seeking revenge for the murder of her adoptive father. She isn’t sexualized, she isn’t “pretty” although I do think she’d be an attractive woman in real life in that real down to earth woman sense, and she comes to grips with her past and empowers herself to see things through to the end. From a feminism standpoint, the game is probably everything a feminist could want, with the exception of the insemination overtones. Still, any criticism in that manner could be countered with her taking charge and expelling it from her body, right down to it being in the form of an abortion pill.
There is little political injection you could put into it, at least from the more liberal perspective. However, there is oodles of religious political criticisms you could levy at it. Anti-abortion would probably be one and slaying god/god is dead/atheism would be another. Some of the monsters seem deadly sin themed such as the gluttonous looking cancers. The cult aspects would probably be criticized as anti-church and anti-religion. The fact one of the main priests isn’t strong in his faith, and rather use the power of the town for his own gain would also fall under anti-religion. It’s probably something the likes of Fox News would run with.
That’s probably looking into it a bit much, but the SH team is known for symbolic imagery left and right in their games.
That sounds pretty good, actually. I might check it out.
From my understanding of the SH games by some interviews with team silent, the role of violence and sexuality are integral in conveying a feeling of discomfort and disturbing imagery. In SH3 the only sexual images I’m aware of are the bondage monsters, the theme of childbirth and pregnancy and I think anything else is mostly interpretive/subjective.
I disagree I think she is pretty and interestingly enough did you know she wears skirts because the female staff on team silent wanted her to be more feminine and stylish. Also she is sexualized on the official OST cover as well as with certain alternate outfits in the game. Althoufh I don’t think the game ever goes out of its way to make you notice that she’s attractive so yeah I can agree on that level that isn’t sexualized.
The problem is that feminist theory is often times so contradictory that the “ideal"feminist game is almost impossible to achieve. The fact that heather has to resolve her issues violently could be argued to be nothing more then"replicating patriarchal norms.” The fact that she’s thin and wears a skirt could also be argued to be playing up her image for the male gaze. Even her father being the main driving point behind her revenge could probably be seen as some evidence of sexism against women. As much as I’d like to say I’m exaggerating, we literally have a Jezebel article calling Cassie cage’s ballbusting move"rapey"all because it was done to a female character. The fact that SH3 even has male characters might be enough to disqualify it as a feminist game.
In saying this though I think the SH series is a perfect example of integrating "progressive"themes in a game. SH2 did a vastly better job at dealing with depression then depression quest did.
Part 3 of Allistair Pinsof interview with TechRaptor. This part he discusses his opinion on Gamergate and the circumstances that got him fired from Dtoid