Merus

The female voice sounds a bit like Rashida Jones to me.

I'm pretty sure Luke's 'new' VA is the one they've been using in Europe since the first game, who can actually do a kid voice instead of the raid siren they use in NA. I'm really curious to find out what people think of this, particularly a friend of mine who ragequit AA5 because you were forced to out a trans girl.

That doesn't actually work, it turns out - people are still shits on Facebook, real name right on top of their posts. There's still no accountability. I think there's a combination here: kids who believe that people like Anita and Zoe are the latest iteration of Jack Thompson and haven't realised that gaming fucking won and this is what it looks like when you don't have to fight any more; and MRAs/associated manosphere jackasses who believe that women being able to choose who they have sex with is coercive, and because of this see feminism as an agent of the status quo attempting to entrench inequality.

Oh goddammit I do this too but didn't realise it. And then I end up making bad decisions anyway because I tried to avoid them earlier.

Usually a diagonal up/down is treated in many games as both an up/down and a left/right. You can imagine how cumbersome it would be to accidentally and frequently push down instead of right. Basically cardinals are much more important than diagonals.

Steeeeeeeeeeeeve

PS2 emulation is good enough to run Persona 4 these days, I think.

You're right, that's unfair. I should have said Penny Arcade, and I'd bet they'd be doing it over the protest of Enforcers. The sole reason I'm going to PAX Aus is because I know an Enforcer. I'd be ambivalent enough about it at this point that I'd probably skip it if I didn't have a personal representative to try and resist the shittier elements that feel entitled to PAX.

You know the thing that I keep coming back to about all this now that my stomach's not turning every time I see what else has happened on Twitter, is that I had this great idea for a cynical take on a game developer sim, and the punchline was going to be that your audience turned out to be your chief antagonists, ruining your chances of survival with their petty, vindictive bullshit. And now basically everyone's come to that conclusion, so it's not going to be that clever.

I feel like the no friends support group should be regularly meeting somewhere.

I've used these two images of artist Hyung-Tae Kim as sources for avatars for going on 8 years now. He's a Korean artist that does concept work for RPGs; it's very exaggerated, but with a lot of detail to it, and that appealed to me. I mean, I could switch 'em back for #reclaimanimeavatars, but honestly? I'm a different person now, and I don't have the same hangups about needing an avatar that is appealing but could never possibly be mistaken for a personal statement. (I have a completely different set of hangups) So I'll light an arrow and send them off down the river, a noble sacrifice on a path of change.

I'm guessing the Twitter handles are an indication of how this list was assembled i.e. they're people who objected on Twitter to the harassment going on. Danielle checked out early. There's been a lot of outside press about this particular attack, and PAX Prime is in a week. I'd think that it'll come to a head there, but PAX's guiding principle has always been making a cozy little gamer enclave and it's clear at this point that goal's incompatible with games being for everyone, which PAX does at least pay lip service to, and I'm pretty confident that when push comes to shove PAX will allow shitheel gamers to take it over rather than have games be for everyone except for people who can't play nice.

My avatar is Tegan approved, so that's fine.

At this point I'd probably hesitate to say I was a fan of gaming, to be honest.

They generally don't go particularly deep; I remember seeing someone from the fighting game community talking about how ignorant games reviewers are because they don't go indepth into the timing of the moves and the balance and how that's much more important to whether the game is any good than the variety of modes and characters. I'm probably mentally substituting your argument for his.

I've got like a dozen friends, it's great.

I firmly believe Letter From A Birmingham Jail is one of the finest pieces of writing in the 20th century. I know a guy, who I strongly suspect is part of the 4chan lynch mob by this point, who has an undiagnosed mental illness and is convinced that everyone else is crazy. We've tried convincing him that he needs help, but he refuses to get it. It's quite sad; we basically had to cut off contact and change the locks on my friend Belinda's doors. So I think there's a limit to the amount of compassion you can extend; some people are beyond help. Recently he accused me creeping on one of my friends in a way that would have been wildly out of character had it happened (the supposed witnesses remember nothing of the sort). Looking back on, I'm secretly pleased my first reaction was to identify and correct my behaviour rather than assume he was making shit up. I don't know if it's worth giving Slate a lot of credit, they're not above trolling for hits.

I strongly considered it! And then I thought about where I was in my life when I started using those avatars, in 2006, and realised that I'm not the same person I was when I started using them. I'm happy to let them go, as part of a different phase of my life. The reason I hate changing avatars is, as I think is pretty evident here, I take avatars way too seriously.

That kinds of feels like analysis, though, and analysis typically gets far fewer hits than the thumbs up/down 'should you buy this?' review.

The trick, I think, is that her videos are grappling with difficult issues that take time and self-reflection to really understand, and so the Dunning-Kruger effect comes into play. The two groups who are most likely to have objections to it are people who are particularly insightful about feminism and knowledgeable about games, and people who don't get it but think they do because they don't even understand that there's something there to get. People in mainstream gaming discourse are probably not going to be in the first camp.

Yeah, I'm done with you. You're basically down to strawmanning and negation, and I have a book to read and a bed that's calling me. Besides, there's someone far more interesting over here. Not at all; Tarantino can't be blamed too much for the racism he didn't have a handle on, I think it's fair to give him points for trying and it's damned hard to make something that's devoid of all racism when it comes from a culture that has unexamined racism in its history. I don't think all racism is created equal, and we could be here all day if we wanted to classify every single instance of unexamined racism in culture and no-one's got that kind of time. I remember being told once that it's racist to think twerking is kinda dumb. So here's the thing that crystallised it for me; this video of a speech by Irish drag queen Panti Bliss: The bit at the end opened my eyes, where she talks about how she, noted gay person and drag queen, is homophobic, as is the audience and everyone, and of course they are because how could they not be? In a society that is still grappling with homophobia, it's unavoidable that at least a little is going to rub off on everyone. It's a great watch, highly recommended. It's the same thing with racism and sexism; we're still grappling with it, and a little is going to rub off on everyone. I think it's possible to misrepresent something by taking it out of context, whether it's sexism or otherwise. I don't think Anita does that, because she's careful to explain why she chose the clips she chose and what larger point she's trying to make. Identifying sexism is tricky because we're not used to seeing it, so part of engaging with the videos is sitting back, assuming it's true, and then seeing where that assumption leads; does it lead to a mess of contradictions, or does it lead to a viewpoint that's mostly internally consistent? Anyway, I'm going to bed, but good talk.

This is worth repeating.

Good thing I'm not making that argument! I think it's a pretty safe assumption that you're not, in principle, a-okay with date-rape. But there's a very big difference between opposition to date rape and actually expressing that opposition in the small window of opportunity you'd have to prevent it, given that there's lots of date rape going on, the people who do it aren't particularly sophisticated, and most people are also opposed to date rape. Yet when it happens no-one in a very crowded room manages to notice a woman falling unconscious and being dragged out by a guy. That seems like a pretty big oversight, don't you think? We know why that is: we know that in the heat of the moment people think, 'oh, this probably isn't a problem' and they ignore it. They don't think to ask, to help, to bring it to other's attention; they stay in their own little bubble and they don't think to challenge their assumptions. Moreover, it's the same initial assumption, the same programming, responsible for both 'Game of Thrones is gritty and realistic, it's probably fine we see lots of boobs and not many dicks' and 'it's probably fine that he's taking her home while she's barely able to walk'. It is an underlying assumption of our culture that leaks out in a thousand ways. The rest of your argument gets into a free-speech argument, which is the one thing I don't argue on the internet with Americans about, so someone else can take that one. I get to make the same jokes over and over and over again and people thank me for it, what's not to like (and they say feminists don't know what a joke is)

Okay: blackface is a vaudeville trope. No-one does blackface any more because what is good about vaudeville doesn't require you to perpetuate vicious stereotypes about black people. Rockstar didn't need to tie a woman to a railroad track or make an anti-semitic shopkeeper, but they chose to perpetuate those tropes in 2012. The context isn't just in-game, but in the environment the work was made and everything it draws from. If you're going to use the same old tropes to say 'hey, the West was nasty', you're also regurgitating the racism and sexism of earlier Westerns. There are people who can get away with it - Django Unchained was explicitly trying to make an old Western without the latent racism - but Rockstar aren't Tarantino no matter how much they wish they were. Yes, but remember that objectification of women is more widespread and more limiting. Men don't get objectified as often, and when they are they tend to be more varied. Yeah! At least it'd better be because I'm writing one, but I'm also keeping in mind that, as the creator, it needs to be done with full awareness of what I'm expressing, and that if I'm not going to challenge this in the work, I should leave it out. This means that if I don't have the time to handle, say, racism, I have to just gloss over it, because otherwise I'm simply reinforcing racism as normal.

BTW to newbies we're usually more accommodating but if you come on the Idle Thumbs forums after a week of just horrifying harassment and say 'you know, those misogynistic shitwaffles have a point' the reception you receive might be a little icy. It looks like I might want to crack out the bingo card, because it looks like this might be a good thread for it. Yeah, all those historically accurate dragons and magic gods and zombies. George R. R. Martin chose to make his fantasy world with sexism and racism. He could have left it out! He made the world up! And then the show basically takes all that but leaves behind a lot of the bits where Martin shows how this systemic bias affects people who don't deserve it, and instead uses it to show how edgy and boundary-pushing the TV show is. There might be a legitimate artistic reason why, four seasons in, they haven't really gotten around to acknowledging the presence of sexism other than to make misogynists more comfortable. Considering most shows never bother to acknowledge it, and Game of Thrones supposedly holds itself to a higher standard of writing, it's understandable why people are getting a little impatient. You're not really helping your case as an informed and aware viewer of media here. You're pretty much saying you kind of mix in your own circles and don't really try and challenge your own opinions, but you still think that your opinions are probably pretty watertight. But here is the thing: your ignorance, and your ignorance of your ignorance, opens the door for people to do actual harm. I mean, this is Game of Thrones, it's problematic but it's got cool battle scenes and it's big budget fantasy but it's small-time in the grander scheme of things. But the same blind spots apply when we're talking about, say, rape. Or domestic violence. Or sex trafficking. There's this whole underbelly of stuff that you'd never be part of, but because you only mix in your own circles and you're quite sure it's not a problem because you've never seen it as a problem, you give the people who do it a blank cheque to do what they want, because the only reason they get away with it is because most people have the same blind spots as you. So we're at the ridiculous situation where it's apparently easier for women to wear special nail polish that changes colour when there's a date-rape drug in their drink than it is for one of the hundreds of people in the bar to shout 'hey, that fucker's drugged that woman!'. So when you say that 'everything has a right to exist' you're also prioritising the freedom of the most awful people to do and say what they want over the freedom of their victims to live safely. And that's fucked up.