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Roderick

Feminism

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The commentary about the RPS article is all too familiar and depressing. Also, apparently having comic books as your inspiration for an art style should be regarded as sufficient justification for hyper-sexualized female characters. Telltale take note!

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Has anyone else seen this Battle of the Sexes game?  I keep seeing ads for it and every time I do I get angry because this game looks horrible in so many ways.  It's basically a trivia/knowledge board game, except the teams are men vs women where each team has to answer questions about the opposite sex.  Men get asked stuff about clothing, makeup, cooking, shoes, poetry, etc.  Women get questions about cars, tools, sports, more sports, machinery, etc.  It is the worst thing.

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Has anyone else seen this Battle of the Sexes game?  I keep seeing ads for it and every time I do I get angry because this game looks horrible in so many ways.  It's basically a trivia/knowledge board game, except the teams are men vs women where each team has to answer questions about the opposite sex.  Men get asked stuff about clothing, makeup, cooking, shoes, poetry, etc.  Women get questions about cars, tools, sports, more sports, machinery, etc.  It is the worst thing.

Sounds like something I'd see on the thrift-store shelf.

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The original is pretty old I think. Like clyde I believe I've seen some similar games in thrift shops.

The fact that they are making new versions creep me out a bit though. 

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Ugh, and now Tom Chick posts a tin-eared satire of Nathan Grayson's second piece on Blizzard's faux pas. You know what millions of gamers need to be told? That things really aren't that bad, that games are better and more mature than comics, at least.

 

Anyone who reads this, I've got an easy test to see if something is sexist. Just replace women and their stereotypes with people of color and their stereotypes, then see if you're still comfortable. If not, it's at least a little sexist. For instance, if Blizzard responded to questions about why all their black characters dressed like gangstas and talked about drugs by saying that they were "just making characters who look cool" and that they were "not running for President"? Yeah, that's racist, so having all your girls look like blow-up dolls with stripper heels is probably sexist too. Just FYI.

 

Great blog post from one of the Vlambeer guys. Pre-empts a lot of the stalking head nonversation.

 

That's a really great post. I especially liked the Ramadan thing, I'd never thought about that.

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Ehh, I'm in two minds about the Tom Chick piece. I think his tone is a bit weird, his satire is all over the place, and many of the examples he cites are by no means the best examples of well written female characters. On the other hand, it's not the worst thing in the world to have a sense of optimism for how far we've come, or at least how far we're coming. I just question whether railing against the very people fighting to further that change is going to send the right message to anyone on either side of the fence. Judging by the comments, the people getting the biggest kick out of it are the "I'm so sick of those lefties and their phony controversies!" types.

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Ehh, I'm in two minds about the Tom Chick piece. I think his tone is a bit weird, his satire is all over the place, and many of the examples he cites are by no means the best examples of well written female characters. On the other hand, it's not the worst thing in the world to have a sense of optimism for how far we've come, or at least how far we're coming. I just question whether railing against the very people fighting to further that change is going to send the right message to anyone on either side of the fence. Judging by the comments, the people getting the biggest kick out of it are the "I'm so sick of those lefties and their phony controversies!" types.

 

Wow, yeah. Those are all my thoughts, too! I can totally get behind an argument of "We should celebrate the good parts of the industry as much as bemoan the bad" (even though most of his examples are extremely debatable, it's probably a debate that should still happen). But that's not really the argument he's making, whatever his intentions. By parodying the RPS article so slavishly, his piece ends up coming out more against the so-called "armchair activism" of journalists like Grayson than the latter did against the often-unintentional sexist tendencies of developers like Blizzard, so it's really just arguing for a different kind of jadedness and cynicism, the kind where you cover your ears and let history take its time.

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Between this and the Metacritic stuff, I've got this niggling feeling that Tom Chick's falling into the trap of mistaking having occasionally controversial opinions for being an iconoclast. 'Having something to say' can either mean that you've got detailed thoughts on a topic, or that it's geed up your emotions and you've got unexamined biases.

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Tom Chick often says very dumb things.

 

But they're usually interesting or provoking, even if dumb. Here, I can just feel his frustration that people are talking about the newest sexism-in-games kerfluffle instead of about Elizabeth or the new Lara Croft as Strong Female Characters, but he's lashing out in a way that rebukes only one side of the issue, the side more in the right. It's very strange and a little upsetting.

 

I get the feeling he might have an inkling that he fucked up, though. In the comments, someone pointed out that he's just given misogynists more ammunition and he was like, "Yeah, I think I did. Oh well, it needed to be said anyway. I can't waste time thinking about how my audience will react." And then, when asked by someone else why he wrote a piece targeting the "weeping Graysons" of the world rather than the Anita Sarkeesian trolls, he said that no one listens to the latter anyway, so he didn't bother writing anything on that. Still, there's a lot of "argument to moderation" fallacy going on there, which I think does smack of just being contrary.

 

Actually, this is the second piece he's posted with such a myopic and reactionary view of sexism in games, so I'm beginning to wonder if I should just be reading his reviews, which I find really great, and nothing else.

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I love Tom Chick's writings and I've always been (probably unnecessarily) defensive of his stuff when people complain about, for example, his dumb yearly Top Tens. But... I'll admit this article did make me a little uncomfortable. Which then made me sad. So there's that.

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The riddle in Ismail's piece is just too good.

A father and his son are in dad’s car, driving through the night. They pass a railroad crossing and are caught off-guard when a train hits the car, flipping the car over several times before the wreck comes to a stop. The father dies immediately, but the son is rescued and rushed to the hospital, lifted onto a surgery table and prepared for surgery. The surgeon runs in, slamming the door and looks at the bloody body on the table. The surgeon looks at the other doctors in the room and exclaims “I can’t perform surgery on this child, for this child is my son”. How is this possible?

queer parents!?

Oh wait, women can be surgeons

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Tom Chick also criticized the Hotline Miami devs when they decided to edit the rape scene that was to appear in the sequel after Cara Ellison described her discomfort with that depiction on the odd grounds that the devs listening to feedback of their game contaminates it's artistic purity (I guess real artists don't consider how their work affects their audience, or something), and that rape scenes in video games make the medium more mature, sophisticated, and artistic (because if Bergman hadn't made the Virgin Spring his oeuvre would have been considered a mere crass, adolescent plaything... basically trash). I like Tom's no-nonsense reviews, but if you want to find some well considered opinions on issues that affect women in video games, I'd search elsewhere.

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That riddle thing... I remember when I encountered it first. I suppose this is bragging, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what makes it a riddle. I suppose that's what growing up in a Nordic Socialist utopia does to you.

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That riddle thing... I remember when I encountered it first. I suppose this is bragging, but for the life of me, I couldn't figure out what makes it a riddle. I suppose that's what growing up in a Nordic Socialist utopia does to you.

No joke, that's probably the reason.

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No joke, that's probably the reason.

 

Nah. Plenty of people in my high school were completely unable to get it right.

I think only 1 out of like 10 people we asked were able to get it.

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Anyone else read through the RPS article on Barbie Dreamhouse Party?  It's kind of amazing.  A malevalent AI is awakened by a clueless girl who doesn't understand how to run a computer.  The AI then takes the girls hostage in Barbie's mansion, and forces them to learn how to be proper women through minigames that teach them how to put on make up and comb horses. 

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Feminism doesn't have to be serious business all the time. Sometimes, we can just look at something and shake our heads together.

 

Oh Crytek. Never, uh... something.

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Every time she puts her foot down, a system of tiny ropes and weights pull her nipples down in defiance of gravity and physics. It's quite brilliant, if you think about it.

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All I can imagine is that as reference the animator watched a lot of women jumping up and down in slow motion and then forgot to speed things back up...

... and also, uh, have the woman jump up and down.

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I'm pretty sure it wasn't an animator who decided the boobs should move like that. Looks basically like simple physics simulation to me. Similar to cloth physics. So I'm guessing they were just too lazy to make the flesh move with the same fidelity/detail as it does when you're chopping someone's head off in that game.

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Pretty much what an animator said here too. Also:

 

 "I think it was a bad decision to have her in those clothes," says Clubb finally. "This is supposed to be a moment of emotional gravity. Just dress the character."

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Well, yeah, but someone still made the call that "Sure, that looks about right, put it in". I'm actually not sure whose job it is to tweak physics settings like that. It should be an animator, but games being games it probably just as often isn't.

 

Oh a new post --

"The methodology is actually very similar to simulating the look of body fat," says Stewart Jones, an experienced animator who has worked in both film and games.

Um. Shouldn't it be?

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