Bjorn

Fox News expert suggests that video game Dark Soul (sic) may be responsible for woman's probably fictional killing spree.

Those death scenes get old me in "serious" games, particularly if I end up struggling through a section and have to see it several times in a few minutes. But I love cheesy and ridiculous death scenes, which are almost like a reward for trying something stupid and dying. Best example would probably be Dragon's Lair. It makes dying a fun little reward in and of itself.

I have a garden zombie statue that apparently fell over during our last snow storm, noticed him thawing out today and thought it looked awesome.

In the discussion you guys had about the day-to-day duties of an independent studio head, that's really applicable to any small business owner (which is what you guys are). Once you own a business, you discover that your days of specialization are over and that you need a crazy wide skillset to be successful. My family is mostly made up of small business owners going back several generations. Retail, ranching, farming, food service, bars, even a video arcade back in the 80s, we're all over the place. I grew up thinking it was normal to have to do a billion different things in a week, and it wasn't until I was out in a wider job market late in college that I realized the average person is a lot more specialized in what they do day to day than anything I had seen as a kid.

Pattern recognition. Humans are, in many ways, incredibly evolved pattern recognition machines. But geared in such a way to identify patterns that stand out from our environmental norm. If you walked into a room and saw a tile floor that was laid out in Tetris blocks, it would immediately grab your attention. But if it was just laid out in a standard grid, you wouldn't notice, even though it's still a pattern. It would be normal. Sadly the environmental norm of our media is one composed of a lot of sexist and racist elements. We're getting better, but it's still the most extreme examples that stand out to us. Even people (like the writers at those outlets) who try to be thoughtful about these issues will simply overlook a lot of them because they blend right into the norm. Sometimes I do just really want to be entertained, and purposefully choose not to think about the game I'm playing in any kind of analytical way. I come out of a journalism and media studies background, and critically analyzing media is one of my favorite things in the world. It's fucking depressing if I do it to everything though. The same is likely true of most other people.

I got 5 coupons and own every DF game. No clue what the criteria is.

Be faster You don't need to shut up if you want to keep talking about it. There's a really big difference between a creation having racist elements, and the creator being a racist. A lot of racism/sexism comes not from hate, but from ignorance, lazily depending on tropes or from just going along with the cultural norm. Even if it wasn't the creator's intent to create something with racism or sexism in it, that doesn't mean that it shouldn't be examined in those terms if they fit. Most of us have some level of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia or something in us. We exist in a complex culture with a million influences. We shouldn't expect our creators, or their creations, to be perfect. But nonetheless, we should examine those creations to see if they cross lines that perpetuate harmful stereotypes. It's one of the ways we get better as a society.

I appreciate where you're coming from, but I think this thread and plenty of other examples disprove what you're saying. If someone is just screaming "SEXIST" in a comment thread, or is raging about privilege, that doesn't communicate anything. But the crowd that hangs out here mostly intelligently discusses things. prettyunsmart opened this discussion expressing discomfort with Loadout, gave multiple examples from the game, and then provided examples historically of how similar artwork was used to dehumanize and vilify a minority. Then showed how that historical example was similar to what was shown in the game, and finally asked for others opinions on those observations. That's expressing concern with thought and analysis. You brushed aside the existence of intelligent discussion in a thread where intelligent discussion and analysis is happening. The same thing happens on blogs and sites all over the Internet. Often when someone criticizes a game for being sexist, they aren't just screaming into the aether, but do break down their concerns much like the OP here did. But that rational analysis of a potential problem is then dismissed as being oversensitive by lumping it in with the trolls and with people complaining with out being able to present an argument for their concern. That's basically what you did with the examples of your acquaintances earlier, who just sound like trolls with their actions.

Thanks, that does help put it in perspective. Barring some jarring revelations, he sounds frustrating to work for, but not a monster like some bosses. High expectations but a poor ability to clearly define what he wants. That story about having the art team trash the original Shanty town is kind of a classic creative genius/maniac type story. But it doesn't necessarily sound like the wrong decision either. A Jamaican, colorful shanty town in the bowels of Columbia would have felt jarringly out of place, though it would have made for a nice change from the sterile beauty of the rest of the city. If I'm surprised at one thing, it's that they didn't decide to try a DoubleFine model of splitting IG into a bunch of small teams to experiment with a variety of small games for awhile. Or maybe the exodus of employees over the last year or so took the best potential creative leads from the company?

Seemed appropriate to drop this here. More details on Sean's twitter. Should make for an interesting story on the podcast this week.

Tim's reply, awesome: Has there ever been any credible account of Ken being terrible to work for? I can see him having an ego, but this is an industry that's been known to air its dirty laundry on a regular basis, and I don't ever remember seeing anything out of Irrational like that.

Great deal for executives and optioned employees. Go public, cash out, retire.

Technically 2K owns IG, and Levine just manages it, right? It's a fully owned studio? 2K would have had major input, if not final decision, on closing the studio rather than turn it over to someone else.

It makes sense. Lots of creators reach a point where they aren't really creating anything anymore because of their success. They are managing a business, overseeing multiple projects, etc. And the expectations for the next thing only get bigger and bigger.

Noticed this in my garden this morning. SPRING IS COMING

Good lord, that stuff is ridiculous now that I've read some of it. Fodera criticized a female author as being a hypocrite for being both anti-sexism and having sexy modeling photos on her personal site. He says that the same author is an unperson, unworthy of even being acknowledged and compares her to a dog. There are misogynists in that thread. Are all of them personally misogynistic, no. But when you ally yourself with misogynists, when you support them, when you make their causes your own...well, what other word should be used.

Okay, that explains a whole lot to me about my Facebook feed recently. There have been some crazy long and clearly passionate discussions of late about feminism and sexim in SF, but I hadn't had a chance to dig in to see what the origin the sudden escalation was.

Are you still in your first game? Until I lost my first full campaign, I didn't realize that when you start a new game after the first time, there are a ton of modifiers you can apply. Some to make the game easier (like an extra merc) and some to make it harder. But some of them seemed like they would just level off the randomness of it some, like guaranteeing that you always have at least one offensive unit.

Sad thing is I just realized I forgot 2 animals in my original count.

I debated on continuing this, as it feels like it's hitting the point of just counterpointing everything and not really going anywhere, but then I ran across this article this afternoon by Cara Ellison about the raw number imbalance between male and female characters in games and movies. What I'm about to write isn't about beating up on this game, or criticizing anyone else's opinion. As stated in my original post, there are things I enjoyed about it and I felt it was worth playing. But since the conversation got rolling about the attitude towards female characters, lets do a little analysis and thought experiment on Brothers. I'm not going to spoiler any of this, as the only spoiler are some character descriptions. But, you've been warned. There are at least 10 male characters that you have to interact with to drive the story forward (some of these are very minor, but still necessary to advance): Father, doctor, son, son, town bully, gate keeper, ogre, cemetery keeper, inventor and cult leader There are only 3 women that you have to interact with, and we've already explored their rolls. There are 7 plot necessary animals that you have to interact with: Dog, dog, sheep, owlcat, owlcat, goat, goat There are more plot relevant animals than there are women. Women are 23 percent of the humanoid characters, and 15 percent of the plot relevant characters if you include animals. So yeah, it does really bad on gender balance, though sadly it's probably better than many other games. Thought experiment time. Arguably you could gender swap 3 of the minor male characters (cemetery keeper, inventor and cult leader would be interesting choices) and you've just improved the gender balance and blunted the effect of using 3 bad female tropes. And all it took was 3 character model swaps. Put a little thought into the female troll, and you could avoid the Damsel in Distress by trapping the older boy in the cage instead, and having the younger boy work with the female troll to save older boy and everyone escape. This would have been good foreshadowing, as it would have shown the younger brother having to work without his brother briefly to achieve something. If the inventor is female, you've avoided the crazy old scientist trope, and you've shown gamers a female engineer. Now make the cult leader female, and have some observable interaction between her and her prisoner. Female to female interaction is crazy rare in video games. Close to nonexistent. The cult leader ultimately avoids all tropes, and gets left as an interesting little mystery given how that scene plays out (which is what happens anyways). To achieve this, a studio has made 3 new character models and re-worked two scenes using existing assets. That's surprisingly minimal work to achieve better gender balance, more interesting characters, maintain the fairy tale setting, eliminate one negative female trope, show a positive female character and show a female to female interaction. It doesn't take a massive reworking or ridiculous changes to a game to be more gender balanced. This shows how little work it is to avoid lazy tropes like the ones present here.

I've just finally got around to starting to watch the Tropes vs Women series, and am quite enjoying them even if I already know most of it. Wondered what Sarkeesian had been up to since no new vids have gone up for awhile. https://twitter.com/femfreq/statuses/433339610131734528 Those sound fascinating, and perhaps more enlightening than the Damsels in Distress series, which covered pretty well tread ground.

The generation of women who worked in war factories and watched their peers play in professional sports leagues set the stage for the next wave of feminism. It's a complex and interesting time in gender relations in the US that was overlooked or minimized for decades. Similarly, look at the Reconstruction period following the US Civil War. For a century it was taught as a failure that was rife with corruption and incompetence as former slaves began voting and holding elected office. The reality is that white racists eventually crushed all the gains that Blacks in the south had made (often through violence), and re-wrote history to justify their actions and reinforce their biases. That period of progress and Black empowerment was functionally erased from history for generations. Something similar, though lesser, occurred with the power that women held in WW2 and shortly thereafter.

Just wanted to point out that this was a game that's got a 90 Metacritic score, was up for several GOTY nominations or in "best of" lists, was developed by a significant European studio and was designed by a well known European film director. That's not small profile. Also, what does a game have to be about in order to have better gender characterization? Are games that are about boy characters going on an adventure automatically excluded from needing fair gender representation, or handling female characters in a thoughtful way? Anyways, glad to see I wasn't the only one bugged by how they handled the female characters in this.

Thank you for answering in a more elegant way than I could have. Sometimes I overthink how to explain why something feels a particular way to me. I would point to Broken Age as a counterargument to the idea that a fairy tale that relies on tropes must fall into the same traps. BA is very much a fairy tale that actively subverts and twists all of the tropes that inspired it.

Played through this in one sitting this afternoon. I pretty much echo Tegan and SyntheticGerbil's thoughts on it. It was worth playing for the novelty of the controls and the incredible art, but ultimately I walked away quite frustrated with it. The longer it went on, the more and more forced everything felt in it. I hadn't seen anyone else mention this, but maybe that's because I'm becoming more sensitive to this in general, but I'm getting damned sick and tired of games that can't manage to field a female character that isn't a tired and shitty cliche. The game has 3 significant female characters. Female #1 Female #2 Female #3 It's not like any of the characters got a deep treatment in game. But none of the male characters got saddled with tired, negative tropes as their defining characteristic either.