Sean

Idle Thumbs 146: Osama's Dog

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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. 

 

I think that's silly.  When someone's writing about a game, it's fair to mention anything they like or don't like.  If a reviewer doesn't like the blocky graphics in Minecraft, it's fair to mention that even if the game isn't trying to look like Skyrim or whatever.   If a reviewer doesn't like unskippable cutscenes, it's fair to complain about them even if the game designer thinks the cutscenes are essential to their creative vision.  If a reviewer doesn't like the way gender is handled in Donkey Kong, it's fair to mention that even if the game isn't trying to take its characters seriously.

 

The reader can decide whether they agree or care about blocky graphics or unskippable cutscenes or gender stereotypes, and if a reviewer consistently complains about stuff that doesn't matter to you, then read somebody else who better shares your values.  But it's dumb to say a reviewer shouldn't mention things they didn't like about a game.  Why read reviews at all if you don't want to hear what the reviewer actually thought?

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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. 

 

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?

 

Granted I totally understand the idea of Donkey Kong not needing the deepest of scrutiny, but it exists within, and is emblematic of a larger culture and context. Enough so that when in 2014 they let you pick both genders it garnered a small note.

 

Also, to the episode in general, Danielle was a hoot. I like when guests have an enthusiasm for games that the thumbs would probably never touch. 

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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. 

 

 

You're gonna hate the news that enrollment in clown colleges in the U.S. has been greatly affected by global political and economic forces.

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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?

 

I was looking to see if anyone had brought this up.  Yes, we all just want some escapism sometimes, but it's so much easier to ignore a problematic element of a game when it doesn't directly affect you.  That is one of the benefits of having a privilege, it's much easier to just ignore things that might make you uncomfortable.  And that privilege is reinforced when someone suggests that it would be better for everyone involved if we just didn't bother to talk about it so much. 

 

One thing I've been trying to do more lately is to notice when a game handles gender or race in a positive way, to paint good examples of how to do it right.  We spend a lot of time criticizing games that do it poorly, and we ought to spend some time raving about the games that try to do it better, to serve up as an example of how to improve.   Two that might be easy to miss are:

 

Thomas was Alone:  Through most of the game, you have 7 characters, 4 male and 3 female.  Not equal, but a better than typical balance.  None of them feel like they lean too heavily on a stereotype, and 2 of the females go against typical gender norms.  Later in the game, there are 5 additional characters introduced, of which 3 are male, 1 is female, and 1 is non-gendered(!).  These things are just bloody blocks, and yet they do a better job with gender than virtually any AAA game.  It also touches on both ableism and ageism.  And yet it would be really easy to not notice any of this stuff, because the game is fun and well written.  It's a great example that having diversity doesn't make a game less fun (something that I have seen people claim). 

 

The Banner Saga: Major bonus points for having a conversation about the role of gender in a society in the middle of a video game.  They could have done better, but I think it's clear they approached gender in a thoughtful way, made interesting characters first, and at one point give the player an option to empower/disempower women in the camp to appease the men who would rather risk death than empower women.  Which when you think about this conversation in terms of video games, is a holy-shit-meta kind of thing.  Also, there are some major spoilers that actually show that gender plays an even bigger role in the game than is obvious if you haven't played the whole thing. 

The Giants are male only, and dying out because of it. The Dredge may be female only, or at least are a matriarchy or truly egalitarian, which creates an interesting narrative where the heroic armies of the past were maybe just crushing a female dominated species and putting women back in their place.

 

I like that we are starting to get more games that we can point to and say, "Look, look at these games and how good they are and how well they deal with gender.  There's no reason that a majority of games can't be like this."

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I'm pretty early into Thomas and Banner Saga still, but both have a really good ensamble of well-written characters.

Still in early access, but Particulars (despite being a game without any characters on screen) has some pretty nice character writing.

I really want to try and tackle Cart Life again - playing that game as a non-American is actually pretty hard (I don't think the coins have numbers on them?) but also I guess realistic if you're the guy with the cat...

 

It's weird that outside of adventure games I'm struggling to think of many other shining examples that are about the writing more than being just a really good game with female characters. Perhaps games where you have a cast of playable characters (or generated / make-your-own characters) seem to fall into sterotypes less (I'm sure there's examples for and against this) because you need to have all characters feel like "valid" choices? I mean - gender doesn't matter in games like xcom or rogue legacy, but it's still there.

I think Donkey Kong is a good example; you replace that basic motivation (rescue Pauline) with another basic motivation that's more participatory.

That's actually a bloody starting point. Really you could replace the motivation in a lot of games without changing the mechanics at all.

(Bravely Default is hella sexist though, and they don't get a cookie for having a couple of good female characters)

Not really a spoiler, but I was honestly quite disappointed in the Hartschild area in Bravely Default because it didn't skewer men and machismo in the same way it did with women and beauty / competitiveness in Florem.

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Yeah but as Miyamoto says you can't make a good Mario story without kidnapping Princess Peach!

 

Okay those weren't his exact words, but I do recall some totally suspect answer to the idea of ceasing the damsel trope which was basically: "This is how we've always done it, and we don't want to change. Goodbye!"

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It's weird that outside of adventure games I'm struggling to think of many other shining examples that are about the writing more than being just a really good game with female characters. 

 

I don't think it's that weird, really; often sexism (and other forms of punching down at the marginalised) is more to do with bad writing than the writer being a bigot. The writer thoughtlessly regurgitates stereotypes instead of working to capture something more true, and many of those stereotypes are rooted in marginalisation. Games generally don't attract good writers because the money's not that great and it's not fundamental to the process. A game can get by without a writer, but it can't really get by without a programmer, and if you don't have an artist that severely constrains what you can do.

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 It's weird that outside of adventure games I'm struggling to think of many other shining examples that are about the writing more than being just a really good game with female characters.

 

When you put it like that, it makes me think the problem is really how loose we are with the label adventure game. Sure, Broken Age and The Longest Journey are adventure games. But what about The Longest Journey's sequel, Dreamfall? It's not point-and-click, but it's still based mostly on having conversations and solving simple puzzles, and I think most people would call it an adventure game. How about Telltale's The Walking Dead: Season 2? Mechanically similar to Dreamfall, and quite possibly an adventure game. What about Anchorhead? We might call it "interactive fiction", but we might as easily say "text-based adventure". Is Gone Home an adventure game? Well, it's certainly more adventure game than it is FPS. Arguably it's more adventure game than it is RPG, given that "RPG" is strongly associated with "fighting and leveling up". What about Device 6? It hardly conforms to any of the traditional genres, but it definitely has a character and a plot and motivations and all that, and I wouldn't be surprised if it, too, were tossed under the umbrella of adventure game.

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Not really a spoiler, but I was honestly quite disappointed in the Hartschild area in Bravely Default because it didn't skewer men and machismo in the same way it did with women and beauty / competitiveness in Florem.

Is it weird that this makes me want to play the game? Not that I approve, but I want to see for myself.

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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.

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If you truly believe that middle class proles like you or I are privileged

Of course I do because I know people who aren't. Privilege is relative.

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Someone on the Bombcast put forward the theory/possibility that Take 2 was just going to shut the whole thing down and Levine managed to save 15 jobs rather than firing 200. I don't know how plausible that is, but it's something I hadn't really considered prior to that.

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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."

Typically what "privilege" means in this context is not "your life is the best thing in the entire world, hooray for you, nothing is wrong," but rather "the person with privilege is able to ignore certain things that other people have to deal with." In this case, you have the privilege to ignore the politics of games that you just want to play for fun because pretty much any game you want to have fun with, you can sit down, play, and have fun with, without being reminded that much of the games industry doesn't give a shit about women or minorities or whatever.

What you choose to do with that privilege is up to you: in your case, you've come onto a video game forum about a podcast and posted that you'd rather other people not call out this privilege, because you'd rather just have fun without being reminded that certain things about video games make other people feel excluded or sad or oppressed. This to me seems like a pretty odd reaction. Surely whatever bad stuff happened to you as a result of hearing Danielle speak about sexism for literally four seconds on a podcast can't be nearly as bad as the effect of the sexism on her and all the other players who aren't immune to this stuff because they aren't in a privileged position where they can just ignore it. If you think it's bad to hear Danielle say "the game has some sexist stuff," imagine how much it must suck to play video games for a living and be constantly confronted with stuff that seems sexist to you!

Privilege, in this case, is not having to deal with that. You can ignore messages that games send (like "creeping on women is funny" or "women should be scantily clad at all times") because those don't speak to you. One area in which you're not privileged is in terms of what you have to put up with when you listen to, for instance, Idle Thumbs. Sometimes this podcast calls out sexist stuff. You'd prefer not to hear it, but that's not something that you can get. So, do you have a legitimate complaint? You tell me! Is your desire to not hear about sexism, because you'd rather video games be about fun, the same as Danielle's desire not to experience sexism when playing video games? Or is there a difference between these two desires (which might perhaps lie in whether sexism is objectionable and whether calling out sexism is objectionable)?

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Specifically when we talk about privilege in contexts like these it refers to the numerous perks and advantages, that I, for example, enjoy because I am variously white, male and straight. The key thing about the way privilege works is that it is almost entirely invisible to the privileged, because that's just how things are and how they have always been. It's normal. Important: being privileged is not an indication of bad character at all. It just is. I was born this way. What matters, all that matters, is how I behave once I discover the ways in which I have benefited from my status in ways that others cannot.

 

Two key things about the way discussions centered around privilege inevitably go, noting that almost all discussions about discrimination center around it in some form:

 

1. People get uncomfortable fast. Really fast. It's why these sorts of discussions are so difficult. Common results include defensiveness, denial, hostility, and forum threads exploding to ten pages in a day. People will go to great lengths before they'll admit to being advantaged. Learning to deal with your own privilege is painful and takes time. It shouldn't have to be this way, but apparently our brains are just wired like that.

 

2. Those with privilege underestimate its impact on those without. Women should be fine with representation in gaming because you have Samus and Lara Croft and April Ryan and lots of characters, right? People being systematically harassed on the Internet should just grow a thicker skin, because it's the Internet. Women sick of catcalling should learn to take it as a compliment. These are real things that are visibly deeply hurtful to a lot of people, not to mention symptomatic of very broad and serious cultural issue, yet large numbers of men sprout out of the woodwork to post in discussions about how it isn't that big a deal, and there's a big fuss being made out of nothing. 

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Might've been mentioned before but does anyone know the Irrational podcast episode with Chris' faint "...moon?"

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Might've been mentioned before but does anyone know the Irrational podcast episode with Chris' faint "...moon?"

 

I'm scanning through and I can't immediately find it, but I'm pretty sure this is the podcast that Sean was referring to, since it's Ken Levine, Chris, and Kieron Gillen. I'll let you know if I can find it. 

 

Edit: I couldn't find it! But I was half paying attention. Hopefully someone else can do better.

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Speaking of Home Alone, I always thought he was exaggerating when he used the aftershave,

until I switched from an electric razor to a straight razor last October and tried it for myself.

 

Q: Who do you guys think would win in a fight between the snow shovel man from Home Alone 1 and the bird lady from Home Alone 2 (aka "the last Home Alone movie")?

 

Edit: Ok, I guess there was a third home alone movie.

 

It was that interview Macaulay Culkin did with Barbara Walters where he told her that, literally, he was hoping to disappear off the face of the earth.

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There was a fourth Home Alone movie.

 

It features the same characters from the first 2 films, all played by different actors. Nobody knows why it was made.

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t was that interview Macaulay Culkin did with Barbara Walters where he told her that, literally, he was hoping to disappear off the face of the earth.

 

Literally? He hopes to go to space or underground?

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There was a fourth Home Alone movie.

 

It features the same characters from the first 2 films, all played by different actors. Nobody knows why it was made.

 

There's actually a 5th movie as well.  It stars Malcolm McDowell and Ed Asner.  How the mighty have fallen.

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