TychoCelchuuu

Shadowrun is coming out on iOS and Android too.

They're missing for me just in Idle Banter too.

If you could give some examples of when people use privilege as a pejorative, that would be helpful. Whenever I see it used like that, the idea is that the person saying it is implying that, as someone who is privileged, you aren't understanding the gravity of the situation, and thus by arguing against whatever solution is proposed, what you're really saying "as a privileged person, I don't really think what you're whining about is such a big deal." That's a problem because privilege by definition blinds you from seeing and feeling exactly how big a deal it is. So when people say, for instance, that women shouldn't complain about street harassment because it's actually a compliment for people to hit on them and make comments about their looks, those people are privileged in a way that women aren't - those people don't understand what kind of pressure women are under to constantly think about how they look, what kind of intrusion it is to have people constantly judging you and sexualizing you without your consent, how it feels to be worried about sexual assault, and so on. So privilege as a pejorative would be used in this case as shorthand for "look, you honestly don't understand what women go through, so really you need to learn more about the issue and until you do, shut up." If you think privilege is used as a pejorative in other ways I'm happy to get the examples and try to explain why it might be used like that. I mean it's possible people are just using it as a catchall term for asshole, but I'm sort of doubtful.

Gormongous already said it, but it bears repeating again and again and again: you have given the definition of privilege. Privilege is not having to worry about things that make life hell for other people, simply because you are lucky enough not to have any of it influence your life. I'm glad that nothing bad has ever happened to you because you're gay, but you need to realize that there are parts of the world where homosexuality carries the death sentence, and it's not like you chose to be born in Australia rather than in any of those places. Your ability to be gay without really worrying about is a textbook example of privilege. Had you been born in another country, you'd have to hide in the closet, forever, and if people got suspicious, you'd be up for death.

Eh, that's bullshit. I enjoy games without gameplay already and it's not like people need gameplay to keep them invested in anything. I can watch a movie without any gameplay just fine even when it's on a screen rather than wrapped around my face for a COMPELLING IMMERSIVE EXPERIENCE. The same goes for games. People who don't realize that games where you just exist in a space can already be immersive without forcing you to shoot monsters or whatever are people who haven't played Dear Esther, Proteus, Thirty Flights of Loving, or other things like that. We don't need Oculus Rift to deliver us into the wondrous digital realm of "being there." We're already in that realm but most people have ADHD and can't go 5 minutes in a game without shooting someone or 5 minutes in a movie without someone getting shot. Getting some people to sit through a Tarkovsky film is like trying to bathe an alley cat and the Oculus Rift will probably get them into Dear Esther for another 3 minutes until they get antsy and wish they had a gun and some Nazis or Demons to shoot.

? What about being born with the use of all your limbs? Without any mental disabilities? Being born with the same gender identity as your biological sex? Being born straight into a world that is much more tolerant of straight people? I'm sure that being friendly and opening and caring to everyone instead of rubbing their face in privilege is more helpful - I just don't have the effort for it. I don't like how it's suddenly on me not just to make people aware of the many ways their life goes well without them noticing, when really that ought to be their effort, because the information is out there already.

So unfortunately for someone who sometimes gets into Internet conversations with people who are blissfully unaware of what I take to be the fairly obvious fact that culture can have an influence on how people behave, I don't really walk around with citations for this sort of thing. It's not a field of study that I engage in and I don't know the literature at all. Back during the whole Dead Island disembodied torso statue, thing, I did post in a thread on another forum that talked about a lot of this stuff, so I went and combed through that for a few minutes to find some links to maybe get you started. At other points in my life I've often just thrown up my hands at stuff like "prove to me that sexism is bad" because honestly anyone asking for that kind of proof probably hasn't done enough reading on their own to have any business talking about sexism in the first place, but since I'm slightly less grumpy, here are your links, a few of which are directly helpful but most of which are useful largely because they link to other stuff (I'm not doing to do all the work for you!): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103108001005 http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/06/02/penny-arcade-vs-rape-culture/ http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/06/11/rape-culture-in-gaming/ http://fozmeadows.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/rape-culture-in-gaming-redux/ pdf warning! http://fozmeadows.tumblr.com/post/40949301446/sexism-in-gaming-a-response-to-gabrielle-toledano a video only tangentially relevant but worth watching to get an idea for what kind of people we turn into when we play video games! And that's all I've got for now. edit: "Culture is a one way street" strikes me as a very silly hypothesis. It's clearly untrue when it comes to things like how people dress, talk, eat, fuck, dance, and drive. I don't see why it would be untrue when it comes to how people treat women.

Yes, but the rest of the game is crude and silly and consists pretty much entirely of being up every thug in the world forever... Nobody equates the two in that they are the same thing. Obviously they are different. It's not morally objectionable to do anything to a fictional character because they are fictional. What it is morally objectionable to do is to feed into a culture where certain established tropes about women exist, tropes that lead people to do actual, legitimate real life bad things to women on a daily basis. These games aren't bad because punching a virtual lady is like punching a real lady. These games are full of problematic examples of narratives that lead to tangible bad effects. Nobody is saying that violence in games needs to be outlawed because violence in real life needs to be outlawed or that sexism in games is as bad as real life. We're saying that sexism in games leads to sexism in real life just like sexism in the rest of culture leads to sexism in real life.

Finally got around to watching this. Anyone who disagrees with a single word she said needs to reevaluate their life, basically. The "regressive crap" comment that people seem to be getting up in arms about was a guy sucker punching a scantily clad women so he could abduct her and provide an excuse for the player to beat hundreds of thugs up, and in the latest incarnation this was done in the presence of one of the fellow gang members, a woman dressed like someone's fantasy of a stripper dressed as a cop. If that's not "regressive crap" then nothing in the world is. The video was about as boring and dry as I was expecting (20 minutes of stuff that should be obvious to anyone who's payed any attention to video games gets pretty old when there are barely any jokes) but there's absolutely nothing in it to disagree with unless you think that the system is trying to keep to oppress the poor, defenseless white man. Like Luftmensch seems to think.

That all sounds true to me - I would say that it is my belief that this kind of fidelity is less satisfying than the kind of fidelity you get with something like Sim City 4 - namely, that your cities end up looking like actual cities rather than tiny cities. The best of both worlds is having everything done in discrete chunks in a normal sized city, and some day when we all have supercomputers then we can have that, but until then, it's fuzzy to me why I'd like discrete simulations if those just end up giving me super weird, counterintuitive results. The fun I get from city building games isn't micromanaging things on the level of X discrete units - it's either from building a city with character (Sim City 4) or from getting to know each individual person (Tropico). But in Tropico, I can get to know individual people because they all have jobs, and houses, and I can fire them from the job, and so on. Sim City doesn't get that nitty gritty, but it also doesn't let me get Sim City 4 levels of scale, so... No, I definitely didn't mean to imply that it's wrong for a game to present any worldview. Certainly games can have opinions and advance them. But what opinion does Sim City advance? That American-style cities are desirable? No, it advances the opinion that only American-style cities are viable. It's literally impossible to build a European style 20% tax public transportation city. If you try to move things in that direction, your city falls apart. The message here is that if you try to do something sensible with respect to transportation, you will crash and burn. That's a silly message to send because clearly Europe makes it work. Sim City 4 is an example of something that sends the right message: multiple transportation solutions work, as long as you implement them correctly. (It probably still fucks the taxation up but whatever.) I guess I think the responsibility falls on Maxis because they don't seem to be very clear about how they're just letting you build American cities. The Gamasutra article I linked is a great example. That dude lives in the UK and used Sim City to model his UK city to figure out UK traffic patterns. Neither he nor anyone in the comments at any point said anything like "well, Sim City is a very American-centric game and you can't really use it to draw conclusions about anything other than preternaturally tiny American cities." I think the Anno 1404 comparison isn't really on point - if Anno had had a "Chinese" set of buildings and stuff, I think it would be a totally fair criticism of the game to say that its game mechanics didn't at all support any sensible sort of Chinese history lesson. I think I have a twofold disagreement. The first is that I don't really see Sim City as being just American, but I'll grant for the sake of the argument that it is. Besides that, I think I would argue that the game is misrepresenting the possibilities for American cities because a car-centric design is hardly necessary in America. Just look at New York, for instance, and more importantly look at cities like Washington DC, Chicago, and so on that incorporate mass transit like trains or subways into their planning. If we were building those cities from the ground up today, I don't think anyone would say that a car-centric design is the only option and certainly not everyone would say it's the best option. But as far as I can tell, the newest Sim City, aside from some bus stuff and some park and ride stuff, assumes that all cities must be car-centric. That's patently wrong, in America and in the rest of the world, especially if you are building a new city, because people have tried and succeeded in making cities that aren't just car-centric. But the car issue is just a subset of the larger point - I think games that purport to represent reality in a neutral way have a responsibility to model that reality in a way that at least approximates the actual reality. Sim City, I think, very definitely claims to be at least broadly "right" about how stuff works. But it rules things out of the possibility space that are, in the real world, possible. And in doing so, it is complicit with the efforts of others to rule those options out, and when we rule actual options out at the "reality" stage rather than the "choiceworthy" stage, we're doing it wrong. It's incorrect at best and manipulative and deceptive at worst. But Sim City makes no effort to communicate the fact that its "creative" aspect inheres not just in the obvious creative choices they've made, but in the very reality they're modeling! You have to ask yourself why certain choices make a city thrive in the context of the game and why certain choices make it founder. If those choices make it thrive or founder because they're bad choices in the context of the simulation, I think Sim City wants to claim that, at least vaguely, these are bad choices in life, too. To the extent putting trash next to your residential district or putting polluting industries on the pristine coastline or leaving fire stations out of your city master plan result in issues, I take it Sim City is claiming that this happens not because some designer arbitrarily decided, one day, to make this the case, but because the designer was trying to capture the sort of thing that happens in real life. So when Sim City makes a failure out of a city built to be walkable or public-transitable or heavily taxed or whatever, or even worse, doesn't even let you try, surely this sends the message not that some designer arbitrarily ruled these viable options out for no reason other than unexplainable capriciousness, but rather than the designer ruled them out because they don't work, or they're not even close to optimal. And that is my complaint. The central conceit of Sim City is that you are building a city. Your options are, to some abstract degree, the options that people have when they make cities. And when your options don't fit the actual options, or lead to outcomes divorced entirely from the actual outcome, it seems to me the game is being disingenuous with respect to its central conceit, not that the game is engaged in a perfectly understandable act of fictionalization. You had a conversation about Reciever a few episodes ago on the podcast. You noted how much you liked that it actually made solid the sorts of interactions you have to go through to use a gun - you thought it was gross how many games are about nothing but shooting people but at the same time how those games treat guns completely different from how a gun actually works. As far as I can tell, Sim City is trying to put itself into the Receiver category of games about cities, not the other category (and in fact I can't think of any city games that would go into the "let's just have fun, fuck realism" category of city builders - Age of Empires actually comes pretty close, I think, because I remember having lots of fun building cool looking ancient cities in that without worrying a fig about how it worked in the simulation, because there was no simulation). Sim City is to cities as Reciever is to guns: it goes through a stupendous amount of trouble to model as much as it can to a great degree of fidelity. But now imagine that Receiver made it impossible to operate a gun in some way. Maybe it won't let you pull the slide back or whatever. One response would be to say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Receiver, I guess you can't pull the slide of a gun back." That sounds odd, doesn't it? Why can't you pull the slide back? There's no in-universe justification, and in fact Receiver doesn't have any in-universe justification of any of its gun porn. It just treats guns like actual guns and assumes that you will understand why it does this: it's modeling actual guns! So its failure to model one sort of gun action would be inexplicable. Sim City is like that. Why can't I build a walkable/public transportation city? Why can I buy British DLC or whatever even though my attempts to recreate London are going to crumble and fail? Surely you can't say "well, designers have to make choices, and in the fictional universe of Sim City, I guess cities can't be walkable." That's just crazy! Sim City goes to no effort to explain that it takes place in a magic land where cities can only work like people in 1950's America (incorrectly) thought they had to work.

But feeling bad would imply sympathy/empathy and that would get you the good ending.

I think Demolition Man does not get nearly enough love. It's not exactly the most meaningful thing in the world but I think it's a very well made movie for what it is. Funnily enough for a largely brainless action sci-fi movie, the worst parts of it are the action scenes (the one up there isn't awful but when Phoenix and Rocky fight, it's usually pretty boring) and most of what's good in it are the jokes and the cute little sci-fi future they've imagined for the movie.

The problem isn't that the simulation isn't perfect - the problem is that they've limited cities to tiny sizes and removed a lot of stuff that was in Sim City 4 because their focus seems to be on "everything simulated must actually exist in the world," which is super cool if the actual Sims lead actual lives, but when it turns out the Sims don't act like people at all, then the question is, why bother simulating them with such a high degree of fidelity? Why not cut corners and allow us to build an actual metropolis, like Sim City 4 did? (And I know Maxis tends to make "liberal" games in the sense that The Sims did not pretend homosexuality doesn't exist, and even in the sense that solar/wind/hydroelectric power was a great option in Sim City 2000, but... the new Sim City doesn't have any gay people and it's pretty regressive in a lot of ways, and my issue isn't about whether the games are liberal or conservative: the issue is with how they choose to model reality and what statements they make about how things must be if they are to function. So what if the game isn't heteronormative? It's a city builder, not a relationship builder, and the city builder should get transportation right, like, for example, Sim City 4: Rush Hour partially did...) This applies to the politics, too. I don't care why Maxis made a game that suggests that cities need to be built like it's 1950 and that taxes can never reach 20% without riots. I'm sure it is for a mixture of technological reasons and cultural ignorance about other parts of the world/assumptions that it's America's way or the highway. That doesn't excuse them at all! If I make American-centric assumptions about how cities work, but them I make "Sim City" instead of "Sim American City" and I even sell a deluxe edition that lets people build European-themed cities then I have a duty to model the whole world in my game, not just America. edit: also it is a little unclear to me what your post is responding to. I took it to be mostly responding to my stuff about responsibility in modeling the world. To the extent you were responding to I Saw Dasein's point about the weird lives sims leave or my point about how the game is a simulation of a simulation rather than a simulation of a city, I think the proper response is to point out the fact that whether or why technical considerations result in some game or another does not change at all what the game means, which is a realm where things like aesthetics, implied narrative, and user experience are all that matters.

Weirdly, the new Sim City seems to be doing better as a simulation of a toy/model than as a simulation of a city. It's not The City Simulator. It's The City Simulator Simulator. The tilt-shift aesthetic? Clearly meant to convey the idea that these aren't actual cities, they are just models. The tiny city limits? Not a problem - they're silly if you're building an actual city, but just like model railroad train sets have implausibly small loops that the train goes around forever, model city simulations are tiny microcosmic cities that exist for looking at. The fact that the Sims have some sort of weird dystopian lifestyle where things are simulated just enough to make the city look real but nowhere near enough to convince you that real people live there? Perfectly alright if what is being simulated is just a life-like model rather than life itself! Overall, the fetishization of "nothing in the simulation that's not physically in the game" seems to have been chosen precisely in order to make it the best Simulation Simulation possible rather than the best simulation possible. To actually model a real city, it's completely infeasible to model each and every Sim Citizen to any degree of fidelity. So, of course Sim City isn't a city simulator! It must be a simulation of a simulation, because to model each and ever simulated entity with its own, in-game representation is to give pride of place to the simulation itself. What is important in your game? Surely not actual people - it's the simulations of actual people! And these simulations must be treated with the utmost verisimilitude. You cannot fake the simulations. You must recreate each simulation in exacting detail. The cherry on top? All the social bullshit is perfectly understandable if they are simulating a bunch of simulations, in this case a bunch of simulations that interact socially. You want a high scoring simulation or something? That makes perfect sense, in a way, if you can work out some metric to compete on. So Sim City recreates that feeling by including its always-on social stuff to allow the high scoring functions to work. A high scoring city, though? That's a little preposterous at best and - cities aren't contests, they're where people live. So, Sim City shouldn't be named Sim City. It should be named Sim Sim City. The aesthetic, the design, the social aspects... they all point towards that single conclusion.

I thought saying it three or four times in the thread would be enough but I suppose we've already established that you don't really read this thread, so...

Well, yes, I agree, but I thought you didn't, so I was just granting it. The point is just that tropes that cause damage are bad. If the Nazi thing causes damage, then yes! Nazis shouldn't be generic punching bags! How hard is this? If a trope causes systemic damage in society in the form of legitimately horrific issues that are caused by and reinforced by culture, then we ought to stop instantiating the trope. Whatever the case with Nazis as punching bags, I think this is clearly the case for Damsels in Distress and many other Tropes About Women. Fair enough. I should just watch the video... I'll watch the video at some point and report back. If she really wants to say that Mario is toxic sexist bullshit even in a magical fantasy land where Damsel in Distress isn't a trope and women and men are perfectly equal, I think I'd have to disagree. As far as I can tell, the problem with Mario isn't that Peach is a woman. The problem is that Peach is a stereotypical Damsel in Distress (and she is lots of other stereotypes too, which doesn't help things at all).

Or maybe there is just one very overworked Handyman, and he has to run back and forth through the game, pretending to be different people with his fake mustache that he is constantly applying and removing. And every time you meet him he's trying to talk with a different voice and it's obvious he's the same guy and you call him out on it and he breaks down crying because he's doing the best he can and he used to work with a lot of other amazing Handymen but budget cuts and work-related injuries (being killed by the player) have left him as the last guy, and it's a lot of pressure, and you can press "Z" to feel bad and comfort him and get the good ending and press "C" to execute him and the game becomes easier because you eliminate that enemy class but you get the bad ending.

I haven't bought the game because 1) super expensive and 2) always-on-we'll-rename-your-cities-DRM is dumb, but one thing I've been thinking about is whether as a quasi-representational game that purports to have at least a tangential connection to reality, Sim City has some sort of social responsibility to model things in a certain way. For instance, a while ago I listened to one of the PC Gamer UK podcasts where they talked about Sim City, and they all had a bit of a laugh when one of them mentioned that their Sims were rioting because the taxes, at 20%, were waaaaaaaay too high. They laughed because of course for people living in the UK (or in lots of European countries, for instance), a 20% tax is hardly riot-worthy. They just laughed at it, without commenting at all, but it went into my brain... ...and it stayed there largely undisturbed until I read this tweet which led to this blog post which led to this article, the upshot of which is that Sim City has a very car-centric design, in fact much more so than Sim City 4 as far as I can tell. The game subtly and in a lot of cases blatantly pushes you to make the sorts of cities that are pretty American in character, in that they are car-centric to a ridiculous degree... (This connects to stuff Chris said about European city builders vs. American city builders, in one of the latest Idle Thumbs episodes but also in a much older one when the topic first came up.) ...so eventually I did think about it, and I think I come down on it right where molleindustria comes down on it: this game is propaganda, and evil propaganda, for things like car companies that have for decades systemically stunted and destroyed America's deployment of sustainable public transit in favor of making sure Americans buy personal cars to get around. And of course our American cities are planned for people who drive. And this is pretty clearly bad, for the environment and for people who can't afford cars or can't drive them and for all the people dying in car crashes and for general efficiency, I suppose. It's not just the car companies - the tax example from the PC Gamer UK podcast is just as illustrative of the general principle. The general principle is that Sim City purports to represent reality - of course, it does so in a pared down, stylistic sense, as you can speed up time, turn on tilt shift, etc. - and in doing so it makes statements about how things are and how things must be that you can't really argue with. You can't tell Sim Citizens to stop rioting because their taxes are perfectly reasonable in many parts of the world. You can't tell your Sim Citizens to stop thinking about things in terms of commuting in a car from their curvy road suburbs to the commercial downtown and then back again. You can't break the confines of the simulation to introduce alternative conceptions of reality that might be more conducive to certain political outlooks because the game just doesn't acknowledge that reality. (This is not to say Sim City is one big regressive piece of shit - from what I can tell, and from what was the case in the past games, it still has stuff like education raising property values and so on. The point is a more general one, which is that games like Sim City say things about reality, and I think they have a responsibility to think about what they say and why they say it.) The big takeaway point, I think, is about systemic connections and how the world works. I might be optimistic in saying this, but I suspect the vast majority of deep political disagreement depends on empirical premises. People who are radically opposed in both personalities and policy proposals will fight to the death (sometimes even literally) to get their way, but I think the vast majority of this could be mitigated if everyone were on the same page about, for instance, the actual effects of raising taxes or investing in schools or building public transit instead of investing in wider roads to drive on. I don't think that would solve everything, but in a hypothetical magic world where everyone had access to the same results, I think we'd see a convergence in opinion on what ought to be done. And that is why games like Sim City have a responsibility - because they take place in a magical computerized fairy tale land where we do have a complete convergence of opinion about the empirical fact of the matter. The game decides it for us! Is investing more money in education, or raising taxes to 20%, or building more public transit, the way to make a city thrive? It's not a confusing morass of conflicting studies in Sim City land. It's easy to find out! Just do it, and then load your save game and try the other thing to see the difference. (Maybe the always-on DRM makes this impossible, but still, you get the idea.) So if Sim City decides that public transit is an option but that cities must still be fundamentally car-centric and depend ultimately on the bandwidth of their roads - if Sim City decides that taxes above 15% are unreasonable and bound to cause riots - if Sim City decides that education is or isn't helpful or that police are or aren't useful or something - Sim City is saying that it is like this, in the Sim world and, approximately, in the real world. The game thus has a responsibility to try to actually mirror the real world, where European cities gets by just fine with high taxes and narrow roads in a way that Sim Cities don't. The counterargument would probably be that Sim City is a fantasy, and it's on them to make up whatever parameters they want. If Sim City takes place in an alternate universe where 20% taxes are riot taxes and road bandwidth is the main determining factor of a city's success, then so be it. I'm dubious of this argument. I think the appeal of Sim City would be much lessened if everyone knew that it were just a made up series of systems rather than an abstraction of real world systems. One of the blog posts I linked above links to some articles talking about people using Sim City for urban planning-esque purposes - not actually planning cities, of course, but testing out theories and so on. This Gamasutra article got a lot of press and the entire thing is predicated on the idea that Sim City provides at least a halfway decent representation of how things play out in real life. I think that's the generally accepted take on Sim City, and if it wants to load itself up with (what I take to be) regressive crap about how cars are the future, then I think it's Sim City's duty to say something like "this game is pure fantasy and not representative at all of real life." I don't think Sim City wants to do that, and so I think Sim City needs to maybe not pretend like cars and low taxes are the way that cities must function.

Okay, but that's because nothing much bad happens when almost every depiction of Nazis in society is "bad people who it is okay to kill." There aren't a lot of negative consequences of that trope. Whereas women have been oppressed by society for thousands of years and currently are still oppressed. Horrific things happen to women on a daily basis because, in part, of how they are depicted in media. Really? You think that when presented with hundreds of examples of a trope, we need to examine each and every one and find out which are okay? Here's a hint: it doesn't matter! The point is that when these become omnipresent tropes it's a problem. Each individual one, on its own, might be perfectly fine! It's only when they're grouped together that we have a problem. Because every other game and every other movie says the same thing? You're going about this thing in the entirely wrong way. You seem to be talking about these things in terms of political messages and agendas and stuff. That's not at all how it works. It's completely irrelevant what Mario's agenda is, or even whether it has an agenda (I think it probably doesn't... it's Mario...). The point isn't what the games are setting out to say - the point is what our culture as a whole, and what video game culture specifically, says about women. And the answer is that video game culture says a lot of horrific shit about women. Whether it says it alone or whether it says it because it's aping movies and other culture or whatever is completely irrelevant. Games say what they say, and they don't say much that's good. Who the fuck cares if some games do a good job? I think that's video #2, and it's largely irrelevant to video #1, which is about how most games do a bad job. And I'm really missing your point about Mario which you've been trying to make the entire time without success, as far as I can tell - nobody's going to confuse Mario with a realistic depiction of society? Well no shit Sherlock. Did her video say that? (That's an honest question - I haven't watched it.) I would've assumed the point of choosing Mario is not that it's an accurate depiction of what happens in real life. The point of choosing Mario is that it's an immensely popular and culturally crucial instantiation of the trope in question. There are plenty of realistic games with Damsels in Distress but you hardly have to be a realistic game to say things about gender roles. Okay, because that's the entire point. Tropes in video games are things that are omnipresent and done to death, not weird undercurrents of countercultural contrariness. If Mario were like, one of the few games where the woman is a Damsel in Distress, and if women weren't saddles iwth all sorts of other awful tropes by video game culture, then Sarkeesian wouldn't be making this video series. No, because adding something to the current discourse that simply adds to the trope is itself bad. Just because something is justified in a vacuum doesn't mean it's justified period. If you write a story where the women are all Damsels in Distress, that's not necessarily an awful story in isolation, but it's basically a waste of effort in the current world where you're just going to make things worse. I'm starting to feel basically the same way about violence and male power fantasy video games. I of course have no problem with the existence of something like Hotline Miami or Dishonored in isolation, but games about stomping faces in or stabbing motherfuckers in the neck are the rule rather than the exception, I think it's time to step back and ask ourselves whether 11 out of every 12 games we greenlight have to have body counts that rival most action movies. It's like if every movie coming out of Hollywood were either The Expendables or Django Unchained. But forget violence - because we are at the point where pretty much every game that comes out is sexist. So... that definitely has to change.

Hasn't he always had a face?

But almost nobody gave these games bad reviews because of sexism. Just because a game is bad doesn't mean it isn't also sexist...

Just for clarity's sake, when you say any number of pieces can occupy the same square, does that include pieces from both players? So each player could have all 6 pieces stacked on top of each other?

Traffic in this game seems weird. See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=zHdyzx_ecbQ

eXistenZ is up on Netflix streaming and apparently it doesn't go up very often/gets removed after going up fairly often. So, maybe catch the Cronenberg while you can if you're interested.

Keep this in mind, because I think you have to depart from it almost instantly for any of the rest of your post to make sense. But yes, the existence of video games is important with respect to this topic for the same reason the existence of any entertainment is important. Video games are a reflection of our society's values - they are a mirror, and they are an amplifier, and they are concentrated, refined version of various themes, tropes, and ideas that our society holds explicitly or implicitly. The reason we look at video games is because video games have meaning - what they are and what they say is part of who we are and what we believe. We can have the "is that really true" debate but since you seem willing to grant it at this point in your post, I think we're good to go. So, remember: video games matter. This part is where I got very confused. First, because things are "power fantasies" and "objectified characters play into that so easily," this "doesn't just hit women to be honest." I haven't watched Sarkeesian's video yet, but does she ever claim that any of this only "hits" women? That would be an interesting claim to make, but it's stronger than what almost anyone ever says. Mostly when feminists talk about this stuff, it is in the context of how it fucks over women, because in modern society, women get fucked over by this stuff, but because this stuff is omnipresent and inescapable, of course it "hits" men too. It "hits" everyone. But women get hit hardest. You say video games are power fantasies but really they're male power fantasies, to a large degree. We barely even have a concept of female power fantasies, but the general idea is that male power fantasies focus on what society traditionally considers to be man-like characteristics, like physical strength, leadership, stoic acceptance of the noble burden of saving others from evil, etc. Even a basic glance at the sorts of things society says about strong women in leadership positions and so on should be enough to reveal that they get a lot of shit for instantiating what are traditionally seen as manlike attributes. So when video games reify and reinforce this kind of thinking by, for instance, constantly making their women into Damsels in Distress, video games hurt, or they reflect the hurt. The fact that other things are problematic does not change whether something, in this case the Damsels in Distress trope, is problematic. If I rob you and stab you, and you get mad about the stabbing, it's no help for me to say "all you've pointed out is that the stabbing is problematic in the context of a process where everything is problematic." It's like, yes, but I stabbed you, so... Equally puzzling is your claim that games are meant to be "overstereotypical" and that they don't take themselves seriously (I guess you're talking about Mario specifically here? Or maybe not?). Again, that totally doesn't make it okay, for two reasons. First, we need to ask ourselves what it means for these things to be stereotypical: it means they are so common that it's almost laughable. Is that really better? If stuff like the Damsel in Distress is so omnipresent that you're not sure it's worth talking about? Hardly! It just shows how deeply ingrained these fundamentally unhelpful and offensive tropes. Moreover, failing to take something seriously does not excuse one from criticism. If I don't take my robbery and stabbing of you seriously, that hardly makes a difference to you. Whether Mario really sets out to say "women need to know their place - it's being rescued, not doing the rescuing" or whether Mario says "ohoho, we don't believe any of this of course, women are fully capable, but by the way you always have to rescue them" is completely beside the point because it occurs in the context of a culture where the overall theme is overwhelmingly one of reinforcement of the trope. That's why it's so important that these things are tropes rather than just stuff in a few games. They're only damaging when they're omnipresent ideas in society that girls growing up couldn't escape if they tried, at least not without incurring a lot shit at every turn from the people who think we should all try to fit into whatever boxes society thinks we should. The whole idea of tropes is that any given example is almost never going to look bad. It's like the discussion about Hotline Miami on one of the previous Idle Thumbs podcasts. The Thumbs all said stuff like "I wish this were like, one of the weird hyperviolent games" whereas instead the reality we have is that every video game is Hotline Miami. If whatever Mario is doing that makes its Damsel in Distress is okay to you were something that only Mario did, or that only a few games did, that would be fine. Girls growing up would see womanhood instantiated in all sorts of roles, society would be accepting of women who acted in all sorts of ways, and so on. But, nope, turns out we have some very specific, patently hurtful tropes that women in entertainment are confined to. Except that the new Lara was explicitly designed to be a Damsel in Distress in the sense that she's someone you'll want to protect rather than someone you'll want to empower.