Idle Thumbs 212: DMCA Dad

[Bjorn]

It's because you seem to think every game must hit some kind of percentage. It's just never gonna happen with every game. I don't feel like in Brothers it necessarily means much on how the gender is distributed. Basically what's important is the two boys. You can't expect every game to fit this mold and games have been coming more diverse than years. It's not always a bad thing. As far as I can tell nothing harmful was done except it didn't conform to a checklist. Almost all of the genders could have been anything and the townspeople and such seem mostly arbitrary. Are you mad the reason that the younger brother is afraid of water because someone drowned and it could have been written as a fear of some sort without involving a death or are you mad it's just because it is a woman? If it were the dad would it have been A-OK? The dad is the damsel in distress the whole game and is the motivation for the adventure, not the mother. Should the dad have drowned and the mother played the damsel in distress role? Is that going to patch up the fridge problem (even though that is not the motivation for the adventure but an aspect of the younger brothers characterization) or is the shorthand of a drowning accident just poor writing to you?

 

It could have been a game about sisters, but I think it should be considered that a part of this probably comes from Josef Fares' own close relationship with his older brother, a leading actor in almost all of his movies and had escaped from Lebanon with him, and so that's probably what he would relate to most.

 

It seems like what people want to fix this is to just redistribute the genders, and since they are so interchangeable that says to me it doesn't say much about patriarchy or gender at all. Even the spider girl didn't say really anything about relationships and it could have been another boy they befriended and it wouldn't have made a difference either.

 

I'm not going to agree about all this stuff as per usual I suppose. I will stick up for the gameplay, it was great fun. The rope swinging stuff was a nice touch that felt very smooth to control. As far as the emotional core not always resonating, I did have problems with this mostly because you are dealing with characters who speak gibberish and the mocap was kind of dumb.

 

No, there isn't a checklist, but trying to write female characters who aren't entirely defined by shitty tropes should be a goal of all writers.  If that is too high a bar to cross, maybe it's time for a writer to find a new job.  I don't know how many times I have to say this, as I've now said it multiple times (both in the original thread you participated in and in this thread).  I'll try shouting.  MY MAIN PROBLEM WITH THE GAME IS THAT THERE ARE 3 FEMALE CHARACTERS AND ALL OF THEM ARE WRITTEN IN REALLY SHITTY WAYS, ENTIRELY DEFINED BY SIMPLE AND NARROW TROPES WHICH WAS BOTH DISTRACTING TO ME AND VERY DISAPPOINTING.  Do you seriously think that the game shouldn't be criticized for this? That it should just get a pass, because....well, I guess because.  I still don't understand why you think this game deserves a pass on criticism when other games don't. Because you liked it?  That seems to be the only thing that separates it from any other game being criticized.  Do you feel it is special in some way that separates it from other games?  If so, how?

 

I think the story is mostly junk, and trying to fix it with genderswaps is like trying to put makeup on a pig.  But I do think you could have a young boy afraid of water without having fridged his mother to accomplish it.  You could just genderswap some of the secondary characters to have a more balanced overall cast.  And I'd completely abandon/rewrite the entire spider-lady bit, because a black widow character who is also literally a spider is literally the most boring thing.  As someone said earlier, a game where you're the spider lady eating boring boys is a much better story.

 

Riddle me this, if a story doesn't have a narrative need for a cast that is dominated by one gender, then why shouldn't it be close to gender balanced?  This is a nearly universal problem with the vast majority of American/European media, that there are more male characters than female.   This is a thing we talk about, but we don't actually break out numbers on very often.  In part because when you break it down, it makes a lot of people very uncomfortable to have it presented in cold, hard facts just how male skewed much of their favorite media is.  And that's exactly why we need to do it. 

[Twig]

As someone said earlier, a game where you're the spider lady eating boring boys is a much better story.

this is a game that needs to be made tho

[SuperBiasedMan]

The game's currency is male tears.

[RoutineMachine]

Yeesh, how annoying can a game that's only 2 hours long be.

[sclpls]

Pretty annoying! Although I would love to live in a world where it took things at least 2 hours before they became annoying. We'd all be a lot less irritated.

[syntheticgerbil]

I haven't played the game, and so had to cut my podcast short, but it irritates me that the subtitle is 'A Tale of Two Sons'. That's not a subtitle, that's a lousy rewording of the title. That's like calling the podcast "Idle Thumbs: A Podcast Recorded After Our Thumbs Have Been Engaged".

 

"Polygon: On Media Made Up Of Shapes"

 

"Firewatch: A Tale Of Lookouts In The Forest"

Yeah it is pretty redundant in the way of Metal Gear writing. Not sure if it is maybe an English language barrier or not.

It's also not about every game hitting a percentage, it's about games as a whole consistently being too far one way, and how often games continue that trend rather than undermine it. The problem is less that Brothers doesn't do good female representation so much as yet again a video game does bad female representation.

It's not like I'm not fully on board with that, I just have a problem when Brothers is specifically singled out as having "the same problems with gender representation that a lot of shitty games have." when it doesn't seem to say much of anything about either gender besides it's about two brothers. Sometimes a game is just not going to represent women. Doesn't mean it's Far Cry 3 however.

 

If you guys want a game about a spider woman who eats boys, I don't know what to say. It's not even the same game or premise. Nor would it even contain any of the same functions in terms of simultaneously controlling two boys.

 

If so, how?...

Riddle me this, if a story doesn't have a narrative need for a cast that is dominated by one gender, then why shouldn't it be close to gender balanced?

I already explained myself twice. I don't know what else you want from me. You say in a paragraph before swapping genders is like putting make up on a pig and then you want the genders swapped. This is all just kind of volatile at this point, but I'm glad you feel like I need all caps to understand things.

[RoutineMachine]

Pretty annoying! Although I would love to live in a world where it took things at least 2 hours before they became annoying. We'd all be a lot less irritated.

I would think that a video game hobby would be decent therapy for someone with a low tolerance for frustration.

[Gormongous]

It's not like I'm not fully on board with that, I just have a problem when Brothers is specifically singled out as having "the same problems with gender representation that a lot of shitty games have." when it doesn't seem to say much of anything about either gender besides it's about two brothers. Sometimes a game is just not going to represent women. Doesn't mean it's Far Cry 3 however.

 

I mean, the developers made the conscious choice to have several woman in their game but to represent them poorly. Granted, they're a small proportion of the total cast of characters, but it's not like they meant it to be a story about all dudes (as might have been gathered from a title that employs both the word "brothers" and the word "sons") and some ladies were accidentally included. They deliberately made a game that was almost all dudes and then made the only women in it dead, in danger, or evil, which says a lot about gender, really. Some people might not like that and might feel that it's not a good game because of it. To feel that way and say so on the internet is not "singling it out," it's having the conversation about gender that should happen with every game these days.

[Argobot]

I'm going to preface this by saying that I've never played Brothers and therefore completely invalidate my opinion, oh well.

 

On the one hand I am really sympathetic to increased representation in stories. On the other hand, I don't like this idea of individually critiquing a creator's decision because they "arbitrarily" decided to favor one gender over the other. Usually, if the creator is good, those decisions are not arbitrary. There's a big difference between a game called Brothers and a game called Sisters (or a game called Siblings), and hopefully the developers of Brothers justified their decision to have two male leads in their game. Calling for a direct substitution for women in place of men leads to a lot of the bad Strong Female Character writing, because it favors shallow characteristics over actual depth.

[Twig]

On the whole, I agree with you, but I think most people against Brothers' representation of women are not complaining about the fact that the two leads are male, but rather that all of the [important, plot-relevant] women that do exist are shitty one-dimensional tropes.

 

Which is a fair complaint and not one that I've ever disagreed with, but it didn't ruin the game for me (which, as I've stated before, I thought was fantastic).

[syntheticgerbil]

I mean, the developers made the conscious choice to have several woman in their game but to represent them poorly. Granted, they're a small proportion of the total cast of characters, but it's not like they meant it to be a story about all dudes (as might have been gathered from a title that employs both the word "brothers" and the word "sons") and some ladies were accidentally included.

As I said, Josef Fares most likely made the game exclusively about brothers because his relationship with his brother (and family) greatly influences this. This is probably lost without seeing how important his family configuration is to his previous work as a movie director since I am going to guess no one has seen his movies except me and people in Sweden and the guy who wrote the article on Polygon. Possibly people Lebanon too. Zozo illustrates this biographical element more than anything (great movie by the way). Not convinced switching the father with the mother would make a difference. I'm just not convinced the spider woman really says anything about woman in particular.

 

On the other hand, I don't like this idea of individually critiquing a creator's decision because they "arbitrarily" decided to favor one gender over the other. Usually, if the creator is good, those decisions are not arbitrary.

True, but maybe that will not always apply? I don't think he made anything harmful intentionally at all. I think he maybe made a mistake in the representation without considering that he was perpetuating the status quo and took a more folklore type stance. It's not that deep of a game.  Also Fares most likely was not paying attention to a lot of the criticisms in games at the time since he basically just barged into a studio and wanted them to make his idea with his money and I think did not really give a thought to it.

 

I think it's way off the mark for some of you to say to say Josef Fares is a not a good director or is a bad writer and should be fired. Is it so bad to say the configuration was most likely not conscious and he did not mean anything by it?

 

Also here guys, here's Fares' reply to Anita Sarkeesian on Twitter:

 

Josef Fares ‏@josef_fares 2 Oct 2013

@femfreq sorry about that:( point taken:) i admire what you are doing by the way. Keep up the good work!

I'm sure the next game or movie won't make some of you enraged then.

[Gormongous]

Syn, I love you, but you're taking a lot of what people are saying in the worst way possible. They just don't like a video game (partly) because its treatment of women is weird. Does that mean they're saying that Brothers shouldn't exist or that Fares shouldn't be allowed to make stuff? I don't think so, certainly not in this thread. They just don't like some of the choices he made, whether intentionally or accidentally, as is the case with every creative work ever made in the history of humankind. For a few of them, it makes Brothers a bad game, but not one that should be literally censured or rewritten. Bjorn, especially, was just playing "what if," thinking about what could have been done to answer his own criticisms and not outlining a prescriptive way to make future games.

 

It's cool that Fares' questionable choices did not detract from your enjoyment of the game, but that doesn't really make anyone else's distaste for the game less valid.

[Problem Machine]

I think it's way off the mark for some of you to say to say Josef Fares is a not a good director or is a bad writer and should be fired.

um. wat?

[syntheticgerbil]

Most of this is just a response to Bjorn being especially mad or condescending. He said he was a bad writer. Sorry, nevermind.

[Gormongous]

Most of this is just a response to Bjorn being especially mad or condescending. Sorry, nevermind. He said he was a bad writer.

 

Oh, that's my bad. I didn't see that. I personally don't think Fares is a bad writer, meaning incapable or malicious, but I think the non-central plot elements of Brothers are frequently somewhat lazy. In general, as a sometime writer of speculative fiction, I've found that it's dangerous to try and write fairy tales, a lot of the time, since they exist exclusively to explain why things are the way they are, and that often means that they're capturing a lot of ugly societal trends like flies in amber.

[syntheticgerbil]

Yeah I can definitely see how slippery fairy tales can get. I suppose part of a fairy tale is perpetuating a hostile environment but you wouldn't want to make it too unpalatable. I guess I feel Brothers does a good job avoiding this. Mileage may vary. I still see it as a very important game to play.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Also accidental or not, this stuff is worth critiquing. And for me too it is less about the director/writer and more just criticism of this particular work.

[Bjorn]

Most of this is just a response to Bjorn being especially mad or condescending. He said he was a bad writer. Sorry, nevermind.

 

Part of those last couple of posts was me getting increasingly frustrated with feeling that you were being condescending and twisting my pretty basic criticisms into something they weren't. 

 

I know nothing of his work other than having read the Wikipedia entry on him.  Based on Brothers, I'm not terribly impressed, but it's also a medium he had never worked in before and he wouldn't be the first film person to stumble trying to write a game. 

 

I'm really not angry at Brothers (or Fares), I was so disappointed in that game that it fell down in some incredibly basic ways with its female cast.  Like whatever shitty things are in GTA elicit no emotional response from me, because I do not care about that series at all.  A game like Brothers is a game I wanted to love, and that makes its failing both worse and more worth talking about to me than a game that I don't care about. 

[sclpls]

I would think that a video game hobby would be decent therapy for someone with a low tolerance for frustration.

 

1. I think you're maybe taking my comment out of context. 2. I never said I had a low tolerance for frustration. 3. I don't think it is evident that is true at all.

[RoutineMachine]

1. I think you're maybe taking my comment out of context. 2. I never said I had a low tolerance for frustration. 3. I don't think it is evident that is true at all.

 

1. Yes, I think I was operating in a different context than you, I was primarily thinking about the Brothers discussion, I hadn't read your posts up to that point in the thread.

2. Wasn't aiming the low frustration tolerance comment at you or anyone in particular.

3. Temporary frustration is a part of a lot of games.  My thinking is that someone has video games as a hobby has by necessity bought in to the concept of occasionally being thwarted.  

[namman siggins]

So Tale of Tales is no longer making video games (well, it's a bit more complicated than that):

 

http://taleoftales.tumblr.com/post/122153044077/and-the-sun-sets