Argobot

This collection occupies such a weird space for me. It's labeled as a collection of short story fiction, but I think it could just as easily be considered a book with one cohesive narrative that is just structured in a disjointed way (kind of like Visit from the Goon Squad or Brief Interviews with Hideous Men). It is also the longest I have taken to read a 150 page book. Every 5 or 10 pages (the average length of one of the stories), I have to put the book down and just marvel at how someone can write something that is so beautiful and yet so simple. This really is a perfect 'I read this book because someone I have a crush on told me too.' Is anyone able to read it in Italian? I'm really curious to know how the original differs from the translation (I imagine that the Italian probably sounds more lyrical than it does in English, but that's just based on my very, very scant knowledge of the language).

Ullman is actually a programmer, in addition to being a writer. She wrote about her career as a programmer in http://www.amazon.com/Close-Machine-Technophilia-Its-Discontents/dp/1250002486 Based on a lot the reviews I read of By Blood, most people seem to prefer Ullman's non-fiction to her fiction.

We only know what Isaac feels because it's what the writers tell us he feels. In this case, we're told he feels remorse for a female character (who never actually get to meet) and somehow the player is supposed to take that on face-value and believe the emotional backstory. It's a fast, easy way for the writers to add an emotionally core to their plot, but it comes at the expense of a female character, who the player only cares about because Isaac does. She's objectified in that she's the object used to give the story dramatic weight. It feels especially useless, since Dead Space doesn't even need the 'missing but probably dead' girlfriend story to add drama. It all feels kind of tacked on to the main story.

I can't really speak to the MGS example, having never played the game, but I do have something to say about Dead Space. Your girlfriend starts the game off missing, presumably dead. You learn mostly about her through flashbacks or weird hallucinations, and she is the driving motivation for Isaac to start off the whole game. That fits perfectly into the Damsel trope: she's an object the hero must find and rescue, and that goal is what defines the entire arc of his story. Just because she has a backstory where she is described as competent, doesn't make her any less of an object that needs saving. In fact, I think Dead Space represents another overused trope (one that I'm sure Sarkeesian will mention at some point). It's called 'women in refrigerators ' With that trope, a woman (usually the main character's wife or girlfriend) is murdered at the beginning of the story. Her murder is then used as motivation for the main character (usually male) to go on a revenge-fueled mission. It's a lazy, overused way to get the plot started, and it sets the women up to look like sacrifices to the overall male heroic story. I definitely think that Dead Space fits into this trope, especially the first game. This supposedly competent woman is essentially killed offscreen as an excuse for Isaac to take action and have an emotion. It just feels kind of lazy.

Maybe my brain has been warped by the way DC is planned with straight gridlines, because it never even occurred to me to design roundabouts.

While listening to this podcast, I was absolutely dumbfounded by the fact that this book is almost 400 pages long. I read it on a Kindle, so I had no idea how many actual pages I was reading. If I had to guess, I'd have said the book was no more than 250 pages, which probably feeds into the criticism that it should have been written as a novella. (Sorry that page length is my major takeaway from this great discussion; the book casts just keep getting better and I'm struggling to come up with something to add to everyone's really great points about the book.) My only complaint is that I wish you had talked a little bit more about the book's many explicit references to sex; I think Ullman was very deliberate in including those scenes, and in choosing to make the object of the main character's obsession a (presumably) beautiful lesbian. I never bought that the narrator was giving us a word for word recounting of the therapist sessions (which is why I never had a problem with his ability to recall everything in stunning detail); I always assumed he was retelling them to fit his own fantasies, which was most apparent when he describes this very gratuitous sex scene between two women. That was my reading of that scene at least. But again, really great stuff. I am so pumped for Wolf Hall.

Humor is a really hard topic to discuss because it's obviously subjective and difficult to argue. Plus, not all sexist jokes are created equal (for instance, I generally enjoy Louis CK's stuff and never really have a problem when he uses gender to make a joke, but kind of an unfair comparison because CK is leagues beyond anything DDN could come up with, so anyway). So no, I'm not calling for a ban on all Duke Nukem games or anyone who dares to use gender as a punchline, that would be dumb. I'm just asking that people pay more attention to what the intent of jokes like that are (is the comedian/creator trying to make an actual point, or are they just using the joke as a cover for something stupid), and not get immediately defensive when someone else says they find the joke problematic or offensive. (But in this very specific case of DDN punching a woman in the stomach and then carting her off lack a sack of potatoes, I'm having a really hard problem seeing what the joke is and why anyone would really want to defend it.)

I guess? My problem with this kind of meta-sexism, or whatever you want to call, is that it's a very terrible 'have their cake and eat it too' situation, where creators are still able to use regressive, worn out gender ideas, while having a built in buffer against criticism. Anyone who criticizes it 'just doesn't get the joke,' and then stupid stuff like the DDN intro is allowed to continue. I mean, isn't it a little weird that we live in a society where seeing a woman get punched in the stomach and then carted away with her panties showing can be seen as an ironic joke? Does that automatically make anyone who laughs at that joke sexist? Maybe not, but that still doesn't excuse the fact that DDN and other examples like it are so common and unquestioned in society.

The only thing I remember about playing the first Tomb Raider game as a kid is constantly being murdered by wolves. I know feel obligated to buy this game and be murdered by wolves so I can relive my childhood.

I can't speak for Jake here or anyone else, just myself, but the reason I find this thread so incredibly frustrating and therefore kind of terrible is the fact that virtually no one has denied that female representation in games is a problem--I think we all agree on that--but a lot of people seem to have a hard time accepting the objective facts in this video (leaving off the 'regressive crap' comment, I think the video factually demonstrates that there are a lot of women who are written as damsels in video games) for kind of nitpick-y reasons like 'well x character in y game wasn't a damsel this one time, etc...' If you're honest about wanting to understand the issue, then you should try and just listen and not come up with excuses for why something doesn't count or how this one example invalidates the entire argument. Ignoring any of the analysis, comments, or opinions that Sarkeesian expressed in the video, I hope we all at least agree with her statement that there are clearly a lot of female characters written as damsels and that it is part of a larger problem of how women are represented in media.

Probably most? I've read so many articles about the effects porn have had on the way young people date or understand each other sexually and it's both fascinating and depressing. Especially since so much porn (and let's be honest, most other media...like video games!) is targeted at straight men, it's reinforcing a very narrow-minded, male-centric idea of what sex is and how to do it, which, is also extremely depressing and problematic. So yes, everything is messed up and sad and dumb, but at least more and more people are becoming aware of how our media and culture influences gender norms and are trying to work against it, so, positive?

Completely agree, and I think it's worth pointing out.

Confirmed: Demolition Man is the most 90s movie ever. Good to know that in the future, all women will have haircuts just like my mom did circa 1994. Also, the Arrested Development bonus stuff on Netflix continues to be the best.

I don't even think you need to go as far and say that sexism in games is a direct corollary with sexism in real life, but sexism in games certainly feeds into and normalizes this kind of attitude towards women. It might not be a direct 1 to 1 correlation but it's still incredibly harmful. I completely understand that most people can probably look at this isolated issue with DDN and not immediately go out and assault a woman. But this game doesn't exist in a vacuum and it is just one in a list of many examples (as highlighted in Sarkeesian's video!) that show we are generally used to seeing women treated this way in games to the point where it doesn't really shock us, or we can look at is as 'humorous' in a wink, wink kind of way. It definitely is a part of a broader problem with society, but breaking that problem down to its discrete parts is how we can show and explain exactly what that problem is and hopefully work to fix it.

Meta-awareness of something being sexist, doesn't somehow make it not sexist. You can try to excuse Double Dragon Neon for reusing that intro by saying that they know it's stupid, but that doesn't make it OK; in fact, I think it actually makes it worse, since they knew that the intro is stupid and sexist, but they still used it anyway. Maybe this kind of 'wink, wink we know sexism is bad, we're just using it ironically/humorlessly' attitude wouldn't be so problematic, if unironic sexism wasn't still a very real issue. But since it is, this retro, jokey sexism comes off as exceedingly tone-deaf and juvenile.

Ah ok. I guess I just haven't gotten far enough to really figure out how to actually make money. Good to know that I don't have to rely only on taxes for the rest of the game.

You're right about paying for industry with taxes, but as far as I'm aware, you don't ever make a profit off of those same industries. So, you're paying for them with tax income and maintaining them with tax income, but you're not able to profit off them. If I'm ever able to get the intra-city, intra-region trading working, maybe then I'll see some actual revenue coming from my commercial/industrial sectors, but for right now it seems like I'm dealing with all of the negatives of nationalization with none of the positives.

I assume it's a mixture of income/property, and when your city reaches a certain size, you're able to manage taxes along three-tiers of high, medium, and low density zones. One thing I've noticed regarding taxes: Anytime I increase them for the residential zones, the income I receive from the industrial/commercial zones automatically decreases, because residents have less spendable income to use in those zones. Which, of course, makes complete sense, but I was so pleased that the game took actual economic systems (however basic) into account in its design.

Yeah, it's entirely a tax-driven revenue system, which is a huge shame. I'd love to have the ability to nationalize some industry in this game. Which leads to something else that I've never considered before: This game essentially has nationalized healthcare, right? There's no indication that healthcare is tied to employment like it often is in America, so the only other explanation is that Sim's provides universal coverage.

Agree completely. Especially when you realize how soul-crushingly sad it is for little girls who like video games to realize that their gender precludes them from ever being the hero in their own story. I remember being very upset as a kid when I discovered that the character I was playing in a Zelda game wasn't actually the titular princess, but some guy named Link (seriously, it was very confusing to my child brain. I could not understand why I wasn't playing as the girl, when it's her name that's on the box of the game.) That kind of stuff has an effect on the way people deal with the world and their societal expectations. It certainly taught me, at least while I was growing up, that if I wanted to be the hero, I would always have to be a guy.

Ugggh, that's awesome. Why is Netflix tormenting me by raising my expectations about the quality of the new Arrested Development episodes?

About 5 years ago, when this thread was on its 20th page, I think I mentioned that if you disliked this video for whatever reason that doesn't mean that I will then see you as an awful, sexist person. Maybe that sentiment got lost along the way, but I think it warrants repeating. If Twig or anyone else thinks that I was upset that they did not 100% absolutely love this video, I sincerely apologize, because that was not my intention. I did get upset when some posters on this thread--who ostensibly claimed to support what this video was trying to do--started to nitpick it to a staggering degree. There were some people who were probably trying to offer constructive criticism, but their voices kind of got lost along the way, which is a shame, because I would have loved to have had a an actual discussion about this video. If you legitimately found this video boring, but are actually interested in the issues it brings up (in this case, sexism in video games), then there are a lot of other websites with written content you can seek out instead. I'd recommend starting with http://borderhouseblog.com/ (it deals solely with feminist or queer issues in gaming, and after Chris mentioned her and her game on a recent podcast, I noticed that Mattie Brice is one of the more frequent writers.) Now that Sarkeesian has jumped that first video hump, the videos will hopefully start going up in quality, so even if you weren't absolutely blown away by this one, I hope you keep an open mind and at least try and watch later videos.

As far as I can tell, plopping a new structure on a residential zone has no effect on public opinion. Not sure what happens if you just bulldoze an occupied house, but I know that bulldozing an abandoned one will actually increase everyone's opinion of you.

For me, it's really sounding like she's expected to ride this incredibly fine line between being completely objective but also engaging and conversational. This whole issue is over literally two words she said in a 23 minute video, and I really find it hard to believe that two words can completely dismantle her entire argument.

I think it's painfully obvious that she's trying to keep as neutral a tone as possible throughout the video, to avoid any of the 'overly emotional' criticisms that are too often leveled at women. I'll admit that the attempts at maintaining neutrality are a detriment to the video, but you can't blame her for doing it. I guess I wasn't bothered by her expressing an actual opinion, because it's virtually impossible for someone to remain completely neutral on a subject, especially something they're passionate about. Even the most season academics slip up and express an emotion every now and then.