Kishijugo

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Posts posted by Kishijugo

  1. Posted

    Maybe this speaks more to the privilege of not needing to notice these things? You might feel differently if the near totality of games spoke nothing of your life experience, short of making you a prize to be won?

     

    If you truly believe that middle class proles like you or I are privileged let me introduce you to Aldous Huxley: "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude."

     

    This is convenient way to bring things back around to Ken Levine and his games because they provide us with evil political bosses to lovingly worship.  Huxley: "So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. "  To clarify what I'm saying, I think that the Bioshock games' primary hooks are the characterization of villains and their created worlds.  To be fair, Portal fits into that category just as well.  What's frightening is that Huxley was talking about real tyrants but we are just as satisfied with imaginary ones.  The cake is lie indeed.

  2. Posted

    I don't even fully understand why you're so frustrated by something that has no impact on (what I assume from your posts are) your ideals and opinions on video games.

     

    I'd say my ideals change depending on the type of game and what it seems to be trying to acheive.  Donkey Kong for me is not the stuff of serious political discourse but something like Portal could be. 

  3. Posted

    Sorry; I have to comment on this.

    The narrative that we can somehow extricate politics from anything, especially culture, is ridiculous and often times recounted by folks who are either stoked about that status quo or simply don't see anything wrong with "the way things are." You may not like "politics" commingling with your video games but, unfortunately, that's a lot like saying "I don't like evolution commingling with my science." They are inextricable, for one, and it's kinda shitty to come at someone like Danielle (in any forum) for advocating that the thing she has spent her vocational career promoting be a little bit smarter about not just the things it makes but also the politics of the things themselves. Politikos, literally "of, for, or relating to citizens," is going to be a hard thing to carve out from any community -- especially one that self identifies by posting thoughts, criticisms and dick jokes to forums on the internet.

    "I just like games separated from politics," is a statement that somehow suggests that these things aren't made by people who are making choices. That these choices aren't informed by the lives they lead and the world they exist in. And those lives and that world aren't OUR society -- that we don't live in a society of human beings, organized together for our general well-being, with culture being one of its many many byproducts.

     

    I do completely agree with you that politics cannot be completely removed from the things men create but I do believe there are varying degrees by which those things can become more political or less politcal.  For example, if Miymoto had created Mario dressed in Samurai armor and Bowser with an American flag draped over his shell and an atomic bomb in his claws I think one could have fairly said of that imaginary game, "Wow, this is perhaps too political for saturday fun time hour.  I guess I'll have to play Custer's Revenge for the Atari 2600 again" 

     

    Again though, you're right I had no right to come into your house and insult your guests.  I apologize again.

     

     

    Danielle was making a sarcastic comment towards her relatively unending political position; she is harangued, quite publicly, for criticizing the limited human scope of this culture's "serious" efforts so pointing out "typical gender tropes" in something like DK is, what we call in the biz "a joke." You might groan but that groan seems, and correct me if I'm wrong, directed towards your general dissatisfaction with this dialog inside of the culture of which you are citizen.

     

     

    What makes me groan is this.  The feminst angle gets pressed on so heavily I feel that the forest is missed for the trees.  I think that video games are almost completely bereft of good characters, male or female.  In fact I believe the most well drawn character in all of video games to be the female character GlaDos from Portal.  So to me the issue is not why do game designers exclude women, it's more like why do game designers put human shaped things in their games that they have no desire to inject with human qualities.  I think the example that comes to mind is the characters in the Gears of Wars games.  I can't even look at that stuff and this is the most popular stuff out there and for some reason all I hear in the press is "where are all the female characters?"  Where is any character?  Bioshock Infinite itself is touted as some highpoint in video game art but I can't take the Booker Dewitt character for two seconds.  This is my frustration.

  4. Posted

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm

     

    Also, please don't come in here and be an asshole.

     

     Fair enough.  I'm sorry about that.

     

     

    Joking aside, I like how he points out the overlap between how Levine writes his villains and how Levine presents himself in that recent statement. I think it's a salient point about how Levine seems to perceive leadership and power, albeit overshadowed by knee-jerk misogyny.

     

     

    It is completely within the realm of possibility to both like women and dislike the philosophy of feminism.   I understand that I'm somewhere where that debate may not happen so I'll just leave it alone.  I just like games seperated from politics for the most part and it sort of frustrates me when they are artificially jammed together.  Apologies all around.

     

    Thanks for the compliment.

  5. Posted

    Man, when I heard her say gender equality in reference to a cartoon monkey game I almost couldn't believe anything was real any more.

     

    As far as Ken Levine's message goes, it seems to me that the most well drawn characters in his games are tyrannical villians, who present themselves as visionary heros through the use of grand propaganda campaigns.  He writes what he knows.

  6. Posted

    I had a dream that I was in a Running Man style celebrity deathmatch tournament on my old university campus.  I won by crushing Paul Walker under a brick wall.