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Roderick

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Here is an explanation by Laura Shigihara, one of the designers of Indie Custom Cube (a Magic the Gathering parody that features indie-game development inside jokes), about how it is not racist or sexist or dismissive.

http://shigi.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/my-response-to-the-indie-cube-comments/

Here is Jenn Frank's attempt to use Laura's explanation as a teaching moment.

http://jennfrank.tumblr.com/post/65029638316/blog-comment-to-laura

I enjoy this interaction because it displays how confusing these issues can be. Often people think that because they have anti-racist, anti-sexist intent (in general); none of their individual actions will promote white-supremacy, patriarchal power, or any other institutional-exclusionary tendency.

Jenn Frank puts on the baby-gloves real good. She's a hero for reaching out like this IMO. As I was reading her response, I wanted to be like "triangle" after her first point and then be like "square" on her next. Then when she finished I was like "hexagon".

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That's an interesting discussion. Being a former MTG player, mechanics driven gamer, and white male, I tend to agree with Laura Shigihara. It makes sense given the basic mechanics of MTG to call out the smaller group with a specific label, but not the bigger group. For instance a certain subgroup of developers might be labeled as "Creative" but you wouldn't then label the rest of the developers as "non-creative" (keep in mind that I haven't actually seen the card set so, if my example is an actual card type, forgive me.) Otherwise, you'd end up with card types that are 20 words long describing all the things that the card isn't.

 

However, (and I'm assuming the content of the set once again) you wouldn't want to have a subset of cards that are black developers right? Most people would find that distasteful (or risky, depending on their stance on the issue) enough to not include it, even though there could be similar mechanics created that a famous minority developer could be an inspiration to others of his/her same race.

 

It's a sticky issue for sure.

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I thought it was especially thought-provoking when Jenn Frank talks about how using things like cultural identities or life-experiences as symbols for game-mechanics reduces and belittles them; while using game-mechanics to demonstrate some of the complexity of life-experience or cultural identity can be communicative.

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Any time you try to boil down a living, breathing human being into a set of game mechanics you're doing something inherently offensive. Even if they're a dead, presumably no-longer-breathing human being it can be a huge issue. As Jenn pointed out, it doesn't seem bad to them because they're just picking out a couple of traits from people they consider friends and compatriots to make little jokes about: However, the moment they put it out there for general consumption, it becomes A Problem.

 

Aside from that blanket problem, I still think "fan girl" is a tremendously problematic card. IIRC, it was 1 white 1 colorless for a 1/1 with a tap ability which tapped any non-female creature. Just... making a creature who has no purpose other than what is strongly implied to be sex, and identifying her as generically as "fan girl", i.e. presumably any fan who is a girl, rather than "game groupie" or "developer fuckmachine 1000 model F".... How did that fucking happen?

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That's an interesting discussion. Being a former MTG player, mechanics driven gamer, and white male, I tend to agree with Laura Shigihara. It makes sense given the basic mechanics of MTG to call out the smaller group with a specific label, but not the bigger group. For instance a certain subgroup of developers might be labeled as "Creative" but you wouldn't then label the rest of the developers as "non-creative" (keep in mind that I haven't actually seen the card set so, if my example is an actual card type, forgive me.) Otherwise, you'd end up with card types that are 20 words long describing all the things that the card isn't.

 

However, (and I'm assuming the content of the set once again) you wouldn't want to have a subset of cards that are black developers right? Most people would find that distasteful (or risky, depending on their stance on the issue) enough to not include it, even though there could be similar mechanics created that a famous minority developer could be an inspiration to others of his/her same race.

 

It's a sticky issue for sure.

It's true that the mechanics of MTG lead to the fact that it "makes sense" to separate out things by subgroups. There are two issues, though.

First, just because something makes sense in terms of game mechanics doesn't mean this isn't also sexist. For instance, I'm sure I could design a game where it "makes sense" for all the black people to be criminals (for whatever reason). That doesn't make it okay, though - it just means that the game mechanics have forced me to be racist. "The game mechanics made me do it" isn't even an excuse, it's just an explanation for why your game is sexist or whatever.

Second, even if we disagree with my first point and say that it's fine if game mechanics force you to act in a sexist/racist/whatever way, this still isn't a justification because it's simply not true that the decisions made in accordance with game mechanics are neutral. To pick out a certain group as the "other" is never just a rational, statistics based process, because you could always alter the set from which you're selecting people so that the "other" group is the default group. For instance, this game made "female" a special characteristic because "male" isn't particularly special for game designers, but this is only because it's a game about all game designers, rather than a game about all human beings (where "female" is slightly more common than "male") or all female game designers plus a few token males, or whatever. There's no such thing as a neutral setting if you're going to use it not to just depict how things are but to also label things in such a way so as to color your depiction. Less obscurely, if you're going to say "being a female game designer is bizarre" it's only because you've chosen to carve game designers into categories based on gender in the first place, which isn't inherently bad but which certainly comes with issues once you start assigning gender a role in your game or making female the exception or things like this.

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Gamereactor is a Scandinavian game magazine that's given away for free in game stores, ad supported. It's kinda like Game Informer, but with WAY less cred.

 

For the October issue, they decided to celebrate breast cancer awareness month by ranking "The game worlds' most braggable cans". Not an exaggeration.

screen_shot+2013-11-01+kl.+08.49.18.jpg

 

Swedish game journalists points out on Twitter that maybe this is profoundly stupid and doesn't help anyone. A newspaper about media picks this up, and the editor of the magazine lists the usual cliches, including "it's light-hearted fun! In order to highlight a serious issue", and "A woman thought of it, so it can't be sexist." Google translated. They only interview him defending himself in the article.

In the end of the article, there's an addendum from the sole female journalist that was on staff at the time, that got "blamed" for this, saying "I have no idea what he's talking about, I had left at this point, I have never heard of this before". The deputy editor then says on Twitter that it was his girlfriend that thought of it.

 

 

When I first started writing this post, I searched all over twitter for the image above. Then I realized I couldn't find it among everyone who retweeted it, because the woman who originally posted it has now locked her Twitter account. I wonder if it was because she got too much overwhelming support?

 

 

 

 

This happened right before a convention, so Svampriket (kind of a Swedish Giant Bomb), decided to make a video reply, "Sexiest knobs".

 

The text says this:

 

Svampriket loves knobs, but hates prostate cancer.
…and sexism.

Obs: The person that came up with this video also has a penis, so it's okay.

Criticism of this is automatically exaggerated.

 

The video is in a spoiler because you might get weird looks at work, unless you work in a really cool place.

 

The best part is that they asked a bunch of random game journalists in the press room to film their crotches, and they were like "ok!".

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I wonder if it was because she got too much overwhelming support?

I think this is definitely what happened.

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Yeah, Gamereactor...

This magazine/website has always had a very "boyish" (Not quite sure if this is the right word) attitude and their community follows suit.

Which is kind of depressing for me since I was a part of that community for a couple of years and really liked several people there. Seeing the same people still on that website around 7-8 years later is kind of saddening when you notice that some of them still act like teenagers.

 

The Editor in Chief caused another discussion earlier this year when he had edited out Ellie from The Last of Us from the cover of their magazine, leaving only Joel. 

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The editor made an apology blog now, in proper Gabe from PA fashion; "we still think the article has merit, but sorry if you got offended".

 

 

 

The comments below are... a frustrating read.

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Yeah, Gamereactor...

This magazine/website has always had a very "boyish" (Not quite sure if this is the right word) attitude and their community follows suit.

 

I think probably "laddish"? "Lad" used to mean boy but now pretty much exclusively refers to immature badly-behaving young men. UK bikini mags are called "lad's mags" these days.

 

Probably because of the rhyme, to be honest.

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Ah, that is incredibly interesting! I think the most modern way to look at sexual desire is to regard every person, man or woman, as having innate desires ranging from non-existent (asexual) to sex-obsessed and everything in between. Of course, our media landscape and popular culture certainly don't consider it so, and lavish themselves on stereotypes that impose the need to conform. Bah!

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The RPS stuff was fun too though.

 

I live in fear of your sense of "fun." The number of commenters coming out of the woodwork to scold RPS for "bullying" the richest developer of all time with a single question (well okay, one question asked three times) about their love of tits 'n' ass defied all reasonable expectations.

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defied all reasonable expectations.

Dunno about that. When I finished the interview, I totally expected most of the comments to call RPS out for their unprofessionalism or whatever.

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Dunno about that. When I finished the interview, I totally expected most of the comments to call RPS out for their unprofessionalism or whatever.

 

Haha, you caught me! I went for hyperbole, for no real reason. People should probably call me on that more. You're right, when I read the question, I thought to myself, "The comment section for this article is going to make my stomach hurt." And I was right, even though I tried to stay away!

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Yea I tend to use fun to describe horrible things.  However I found the response by blizzard interesting.  I expected the comments to be what they were, as they tend to be that whenever RPS or any other site dares bring up gender stereotype/equality in any context whatsoever.

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