Gormongous

I think, for someone who prizes rationality so highly, it might be anathema to admit that the principal things influencing or even dictating your behavior are things that you do not control and are maybe not even aware exist within you.

Yeah, to hear them talk in previous episodes, it seems like the GOTY thing was somewhat prompted by the response from their community. I expected them each to create their own lists and go through them with a quick spiel for each game and commentary from the rest of the hosts. Instead, they decided to make it a battle royale and I repeatedly heard all the hosts (but especially Maddy and Steve) say, "This is my personal GOTY for this category, but the rest of you haven't played it, so it has no chance of winning. Let's just take it off the table." That's so heartbreaking! I couldn't give a shit what the "consensus" GOTYs from Isometric are, especially if that means we don't get to hear everyone's personal picks and their reasons for them.

I agree that it's a specific reading insofar as it confines itself to the specific details contained within the comic itself. If you ignore those details and replace the sealion with a real-life category of person, it seems inevitable that it could be made to represent oppression of that category of person. Like I said before, I agree that that does make it a less-than-perfect metaphor, because there exists the possibility of misinterpretation, but I do not find it a damning criticism of the comic, because it requires ignoring some details, writing off others as farcical, and taking the rest as played dead straight. Again, in the last panel, the male character says, "Told you, dude. Sea lions." That refers directly back to the first panel and the female character's statement of dislike, as well as the second panel and the male character's statement of "Now you've done it." To my eyes, that makes it abundantly clear that the two non-sealion characters dislike sealions specifically for their reputation of relentless and invasive harassment in response to being discussed in a negative light, a reputation that is borne out through the comic. This does not resemble Nina White's characterization of the comic as confronting bigots with fearful politeness at all. Maybe it's the way she wishes she could confront them, which I guess is fine, but it's not the lived experience of me or of anyone I've ever known. Harassment is overwhelmingly a tool of the oppressor, not the oppressed, because the opportunity and ability to harass are mostly products of privilege. If we can't criticize actual harassment of the oppressed because it could also be made to apply to hypothetical harassment of the oppressors... I don't know, I can't finish that sentence. As a personal reaction to the comic, White's reaction is unassailably valid, but I find it really perplexing that she sees herself in the passive-aggressive harassment of the comic, rather than the frustration and exhaustion of its targets.

I really don't have the energy in me to watch the video, but it sounds like Georgina Young is using the age-old anti-feminist argument that women have agency even in traditionally passive roles because they have still made the choice not to act. Even if that argument were valid, which some aspects of it are in third-wave feminism, it doesn't change the fact that Peach and Zelda are most often kidnapped in Nintendo's games, by definition an act that removes agency from its victim, and their "choice" is to not reclaim their agency after it has been taken from them, hardly a choice at all.

Yeah, there's that, too. Like ProblemMachine said, it's a comic where the woman is in the wrong if it were to stop at the third panel, but it's a six-panel comic with the last three panels being the sealion invading the woman's home, interrupting her meals, and watching her sleep. If that accurately represents an oppressed person being "polite in its insistence" while "finally standing up for itself," then I am extremely confused and a little uncomfortable, particularly but not just about how oppressed they actually are.

I love Brianna Wu and what she does, but listening to her on Isometric's game of the year podcast is going to drive me insane. Her two watchwords are "innovation" and "fun," both of which she applies so stubbornly that it's impossible for the games she likes not to make her sound inconsistent. Some games get faulted on lack of mechanical innovation (like Super Smash Bros. for the WiiU and Pokemon Alpha Sapphire/Omega Ruby) and some for lack of graphical innovation (like Desert Golfing and Fantasy Life), but most for both. Brianna's own GOTY, the visual novel Danganronpa, doesn't get criticism for either despite being an excellent example from an entirely ossified genre. Even then, Brianna discounting This War of Mine from indie GOTY because it's not fun to play and GOTYs have to be fun to qualify really wouldn't be a problem, except that she's louder, more charismatic, and more opinionated than the other three hosts. What makes her hilarious and charming during a regular episode of the podcast becomes painful when she's trying to reach a consensus with other people. Listening to her walk all over Steve Lubitz when he tried to explain why Desert Golfing is his mobile GOTY left me feeling some serious secondhand embarrassment, and hearing her dismiss Monument Valley for nothing more than an overly muted color palette did, too. Listen to Isometric! It's my favorite podcast after the Thumbs. Just don't start with their 2014 GOTY podcast, maybe.

I think it takes a lot of rhetorical work to make either real sealions or sealions in the comic resemble persons with disabilities more than superficially. Even in the context of the comic, being a sealion is not a disability, not even in the hypothetical, except insofar as certain people don't like them and are unwilling to elaborate on the dislike. To me, it is furthermore apparent that sealions are disliked because they harass people relentlessly for speaking negatively of them, even in private conversations, as if the two aren't connected. Certainly, it takes no less rhetorical work to conflate that with people with disabilities, with whom I have never in thirty years had an interaction like in the comic, than to do the same between Sarkeesian and Sauron. I'm not condemning Nina White's interpretation outright, because I assume it's her genuine reaction and that's important, but I don't think it's totalizing or definitive for either the comic or the language that has come from it. EDIT: After a shower, I think I've got my objection conceptualized a bit better. In the real world, people with disabilities and people of color and women and LGBTQ* are hated because of a racist, sexist, ableist, transphobic, and homophobic society that co-opts its members into perpetrating systemic oppression without accountability or responsibility. In the comic, sealions are hated because they harass people for speaking poorly of them, full stop. Support for this is overwhelmingly implied by the comments of the male character ("Now you've done it" and "Told you, dude"). Sometimes oppressed people in real life have good reasons to use violent tactics like harassment for self-defense and self-expression, but that does not mean all people who use violent tactics have good reasons, let alone that all people who use violent tactics are oppressed. Therefore, with no further context than the comic, identifying sealions as people with disabilities (or any other kind of oppressed people) on the sole basis of them using harassment and being disliked for it is something I find extremely problematic.

That's fair. If so, it should probably be something that's not bizarre or confusing to say in public, which I have already found "sealion" to be.

I'm sympathetic to her arguments, but I don't think I agree, mostly because of her interpretation of the comic? The joke isn't that the sealion won't leave them alone and that's funny, the joke is that by relentlessly harassing two people through the veneer of civility and reason, the sealion is proving the woman right in her dislike of it, even though it apparently thinks the opposite. I am all for conceding oppressed people whatever tools they need to withstand and fight oppression, but I am slightly discomfited that harassment needs to be defended as one of them, even just in the abstract. I've never known any oppressed person to use harassment to fight oppression, anyway, as it mostly seems the tool of the privileged. I'm also just really cautious of being shown how problematic certain statements are by substituting the central characters within them. Almost any statement can be rendered problematic that way. "The justice system ought to focus on punishing violent criminals" becomes problematic if we replace "violent criminals" with "people of color." "Sauron intends to enslave all peoples and cover all the land in darkness" becomes problematic if we replace "Sauron" with "Anita Sarkeesian." I thought the point of using a sealion instead of anything more mundane was to highlight the behavior as harassment when removed from context, but if we replace it with a real-world analogue, of course there are situations where the harassment is potentially justified. All that said, I'm not crazy about using "sealion" as a verb for harassment. Just call a spade a spade.

Man, the obvious and right answer is to smile a goofy smile and say, "Me, of course!" Even I know that.

Not that I feel I have much interesting to contribute to this discussion, but I really think it's impossible to keep the human brain from seeing patterns everywhere and shaping its behavior accordingly. Even if one could somehow break the habit of making arbitrary and fallacious connections between things, I'm not sure it'd result in better mental health or a happier life, not unless perfect secular rationality is what really gets one's motor going. I was also going to write something about the old "harmful/disruptive/dysfunctional" definition of mental disorders applying to my perception and treatment of other people's religious and spiritual beliefs, but I'm not terribly in love with what I wrote and not really sure I believe it all that much, anyway.

In a way, it's good to see you arriving at a point that it took me until age 26 or 27 to reach, where I finally learned to recognize the shounen foundations for so many "great" shows after almost a decade of watching anime and started to resent them from it. Like I think I've said elsewhere in this thread, it was probably watching all of Rurouni Kenshin, even the stuff after the Kyoto arc that is universally considered execrable, that forced me to advance my tastes a bit more aggressively. It's weird, because my junior year of college I watched the entire hundred-episode run of the first Naruto filler arc and managed to derive some kind of enjoyment out of it, but no more. Basically, you have two choices once you begin to sour on shounen-type anime, which has the greatest penetration and visibility in American media culture due to its (often superficial) resemblances to traditional Western cartoons: you either build out your knowledge of anime so you can seek out stuff that doesn't have any shounen influences, or you can learn to appreciate shounen anime in spite of what a pile of shit it often is deep down. If you're interested in the former, I'd recommend looking into more shoujo- or josei-type stuff, it's worth your time. I feel like it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy with Princess Jellyfish, because all of the things that were handled the worst in what is overall a fairly good anime were because it was (or felt, at least) obligated to cram the first major plot arc of a fourteen-volume manga, complete with all of its characters, into a twelve-episode half-cour. There was a string of shows getting screwed like that, but Japanese production companies seem to be a bit better now about using a half-cour to test the first half for a full season of a show, rather than just to leave it out to twist.

No, I agree, and even in the best space opera, what works best is when the scope and grandeur of the background is set off by believable and sympathetic characters with something to contribute to the story beyond exposition dumps. That's why I've always praised Iain M. Banks and why I'm starting to praise Ann Leckie. On the more direct topic of the thread, I read Blindsight last year and had a lot of the same reactions. I found Watts a bit too enamored with his own erudition and prone to overly cute character touches, but on the whole, his obsession with psychology lead to a fascinating answer to the Fermi Paradox. That said, I have trouble convincing myself to read the rest of Watts' work and have absolutely no interest in the sequel Echopraxia. ... And now, double-checking Wikipedia about Watts, I learn that he cannot ever enter the US because of an aggravated felony charge with US customs that sounds like total bullshit. What a bummer, no wonder I never hear about him at cons or anything.

Ugh, I love it when Chris goes on tears about sound design. It's just nice hearing someone with a lot of specialized knowledge on a subject that I know nothing about break stuff down like that. I think I agree with Ben, though. Crystal Skull is way too aware of its legacy as an Indiana Jones movie, as filtered through the grandpa brains of Spielberg and Lucas, and it suffers enormously for it compared to even the worst moments of the original three. For instance, Lucas has become adamant that Indiana Jones isn't the kind of hero who kills people, even though he murders between two and three dozen people in each of the first three movies (the number varies depending on what you think of leaving people to die), so we have these absurd scenes to avoid Indiana Jones being involved in direct physical violence. I don't know how it happened, but Crystal Skull is like someone making an Indiana Jones thirdhand with no personal or institutional continuity, even though it involves many of the same people (albeit mostly as old men with children and grandchildren, which is probably where I lay the blame).

I'm sorry, I'm already tired of arguing my position. It must just be a cultural difference for me. It'd be inconceivable for me to say publicly that a given period of time was my peak personal happiness if I had friends and colleagues hurting in the way that #GamerGate hurts people, not least because I'm not going to be at my happiest if my friends and colleagues are hurting. I'm not saying Dan shouldn't be allowed to post the tweet or deserves to be "vilified" for it, I'm saying that I personally find it in bad taste and it contributes to my difficulties appreciating Dan as a member of the video games establishment.

I guess that's where it falls down for me, it's something I could never do and I find it in fairly bad taste. Also, "not having a great time" is the understatement of the year. I think almost anyone else in the industry would give a lot to have Dan's year. Thinking just about his tweet about people not seeming to have a good reason for hating on the TSA and the multiple times he's called Hayao Miyazaki "Japanese Colonel Sanders," I'm skeptical, but okay.

That's not what I said or what I meant. It's someone working in the video games industry, the very industry undergoing a long-term and universally awful civil war, saying that this year was the best ever and that the next is going to be even better. If you changed the name from @DanRyckert to @PlayDangerously or @Nero, it would be painfully obvious that it's about #GamerGate, because how can you ignore #GamerGate, but it's Dan, so I guess he just doesn't know or doesn't care about what's going on? So yeah, I know it's not malicious or offensive, it's just a bit disconcerting and frustrating to see. I just can't imagine what mental space I'd have to be in to post online about how great this year is for me personally when the industry in which I work is falling down around me. And I get that chance every single year, because things aren't exactly great in academia right now, but I don't. Then again, I'm not Dan, so...

The short version is basically this: "You should assume I'm acting in good faith, but even if I'm not acting in good faith, you should pretend anyway, because my fans will ruin your life for saying so." Ethics!

Yeah, that's very "I'm all right, Jack." Unintentionally, of course, but still...

Yeah? I can also say fuck masculinity and fuck white people, neither makes me a hypocrite. Sometimes the things of which we are a part are incredibly shitty and deserve to be called out as such by the people benefiting the most from them.

Thanks, you managed to put your finger on what bothered me about it. As much as I like the intent and so much of the language in the article, I don't really see what good is a brutally honest, albeit ultimately compassionate, deconstruction of nerd privilege if the upshot is basically that nerd privilege is still a positive thing, if properly understood and directed. There is nothing innately good or bad about being a nerd. It's not even an identity that possesses any traits outside of having experienced social trauma as a young adult. Flattering the intelligence of nerds might make criticism a bit more palatable, but it also validates the more toxic version of their worldview, which is one of entitlement and self-righteousness. In my mind, it almost defeats the point of an otherwise good article.

I remember a brief push towards that type of romance system around 2009-2011, among which the first two Dragon Age games and Alpha Protocol figure prominently. I think the one of the reasons that developers (or at least Bioware) have moved away from it is because the tendency for certain types of players to optimize every system can lead to a miserable style of play, as they struggle to do everything exactly like their beloved would want them to do. In short, having an NPC providing obfuscated evaluation and feedback for gameplay choices is not particularly fun, especially if getting the best romantic "feedback" is not rewarded as an overarching goal of the game.

The romance system in general was really barebones in Baldur's Gate 2. It was basically a series of incidental conversations on a set of timers, based variously on length of time spent in party, other members of the party, and length of time spent in different areas. You'd often wait a half-dozen hours between conversations, all the while unsure if you'd said something wrong that had prematurely ended the romance script, which was easier to do than you'd think. Aerie and Viconia were relatively robust, but Jaheria was famously breakable, relying as it did on a bunch of highly situational triggers that weren't always along the natural flow of play. In short, it was a very unpredictable system that happened almost entirely independent of conscious player choice, which made me resent it as a teenager who wanted to fall in love in a video game but makes me like it as an adult that wouldn't mind the romance options in newer Bioware games to be less of a player-driven thing. Of course, there was conversation in this very episode about how games "teaching" players to wait inevitably has mixed results.

It's definitely an extension of the power fantasy, albeit in a different direction that's not often reflected in other video games. This makes me an old man, but I remember in Baldur's Gate 2 that only one of the three romances worked out with a happy ending that kept the couple together. One of the other two was painful, the character involved leaving your party forever in the end, and the other didn't get any sort of resolution until the expansion pack. It's so different from the dynamic in modern Bioware games, which sometimes seems just like selecting your preferred waifu or husbando out of a lineup.

Both those articles are spectacular, thank you. I especially liked the second one, which addresses (although doesn't fully answer) one of the most annoying counterarguments to any sort of progressive thought in games: "Corporations exist to make money, they should be allowed to do whatever they want to get it." Yeah, I didn't know much either, aside from the designer's notes I recently read for the game Dog Eat Dog. I'm going to have to think hard about how I discuss Hawaii with friends and with students in the future. Honestly, the hardest part about that conversation is that they've kept tagging me in their responses long after I unsubscribed from the comment thread. I'm not even going to look, but I definitely feel like I failed a bit.