Jake

Idle Thumbs 160: Die Übiverse

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I don't think I'd characterize Wario or Waluigi as evil per se, they're just kind of assholes. They aren't really villainous the way bowser is. I think Wowzer would just be a different flavor of evil, like maybe he'd have a crazy mustache and a tophat.

How is bowser evil? Or mario good? Bowser kills noone in any game, mario kills uncountable amounts of persons.

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If they don't want to play it, then don't go into it. Would you tune into a film podcast where the hosts talk about the films that they haven't seen and don't intend to, or a book podcast where the hosts talk about the books they've not read and don't intend to?  

 

And yet game makers routinely make games, or include mechanics or elements, about which they know very little.  But I never see people who break out the "you have to play it before you can say anything" argument also argue that game makers need to experience the elements that they've included in their games.  Should the lead writer/designer behind Watch Dogs have personally experienced what it was like to live as a transgender person before including that in the game?  Or spent a minimum of X hours researching what the life of a transgender person in a major US city is like?  Or speak to a single transgender person?  Nothing I've seen out of the team behind WD indicates that any of that happened. 

 

It seems an odd expectation that people can author things about which they are ignorant, but that others cannot comment on that ignorance without having fully experienced it.

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It seems an odd expectation that people can author things about which they are ignorant, but that others cannot comment on that ignorance without having fully experienced it.

 

Well the basic seed of the idea makes sense, that the context of experiencing something in game as it's intended changes how it comes across. On this basis, making judgements on external impressions can be inaccurate. But too often people default to "You don't get it if you haven't played the game." which seems particularly silly given that you can't know how someone played a game. You could go through the whole game and not happen to find an opportunity to out someone as transgender even if the game contains that somewhere in it.

 

I also think that, given the money put into marketing Watch_Dogs before it even existed as a finished product, you're perfectly allowed to criticise based on the information you've heard. They worked a lot on sending out masses of information in the build up and the on release players were posting their thoughts all over the internet, so it's not like the Thumbs were responding to scant details and drawing too much out of it. There was a wealth of information to ruminate on and discuss.

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Huh, so the writer for Watch Dogs who had the Twitter exchange about transgender people is actually a Kansas native.  That was unexpected.  You can read his bio if you're interested.  Actually sounds like a similar background to me in some ways.

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Shame he doesn't live there now, you could wear a baseball cap and walk past him conspicuously pointing your phone at him.

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Well the basic seed of the idea makes sense, that the context of experiencing something in game as it's intended changes how it comes across. On this basis, making judgements on external impressions can be inaccurate. But too often people default to "You don't get it if you haven't played the game." which seems particularly silly given that you can't know how someone played a game. You could go through the whole game and not happen to find an opportunity to out someone as transgender even if the game contains that somewhere in it.

 

There's nothing to get. Outing as an act implies intent. There's no active investigation option with regard to a persons sexuality of gender persuasion in the game, or any option to exploit such information. It's merely one snippet of personal data that might appear when you scan a person. Same as you might find out that they were declined credit, or were polyamourous by nature. 

 

The accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny of the system in action. 

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There's nothing to get. Outing as an act implies intent. There's no active investigation option with regard to a persons sexuality of gender persuasion in the game, or any option to exploit such information. It's merely one snippet of personal data that might appear when you scan a person. Same as you might find out that they were declined credit, or were polyamourous by nature. 

 

The accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny of the system in action. 

 

Well it doesn't need to be specific intent to be problematic, it can be about the idea that outing someone fits under an umbrella of blackmail and that can still be a harmful portrayal.

 

But if I am reading your post right, the information that someone is transexual is just an element of flavour text and there is no mechanical use for it. (ie. You can't blackmail or somehow reveal it to people). Which means there must have been crossed wires somewhere, someone mistakenly connecting the information system to the bank account draining one I guess. In general it's best to clarify things and discuss them rather than taking an adversarial stance, both sides learn more from that kind of conversation and you actually get to exchange information.

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There's nothing to get. Outing as an act implies intent. There's no active investigation option with regard to a persons sexuality of gender persuasion in the game, or any option to exploit such information. It's merely one snippet of personal data that might appear when you scan a person. Same as you might find out that they were declined credit, or were polyamourous by nature. 

 

The accusation doesn't hold up to scrutiny of the system in action. 

 

The argument is that treating the fact that someone is trans as just another piece of information to discover is irresponsible and a bit heartless, in light of many situations like the article I posted on the second page about a reporter driving a trans woman to suicide through his investigations, When people suffer and die every day because of something, I'd really hope its inclusion as flavor in a game would actually be thought about, as opposed to just being thrown in by a developer who thinks of it as a non-issue.

 

Also, I'm beginning to dislike the implication in Watch_Dogs that all secrets are created equal. Isn't it an incredibly shitty thing to put "declined credit" on the same level as "transsexual" in terms of "random information that pops up when I look at people", especially since there is no follow-up for either?

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But if I am reading your post right, the information that someone is transexual is just an element of flavour text and there is no mechanical use for it. (ie. You can't blackmail or somehow reveal it to people). Which means there must have been crossed wires somewhere, someone mistakenly connecting the information system to the bank account draining one I guess. In general it's best to clarify things and discuss them rather than taking an adversarial stance, both sides learn more from that kind of conversation and you actually get to exchange information.

 

Yes it's flavour text. There is no mechanical use to it. That you're able to chance upon such facts about people essentially ties into the premise of the game of where in the CTOS system that you're piggybacking off of is effectively recording every aspect of every citizens lives without them knowing. It ties into the whole idea of the surveillance state. It's very 'person of interest' when all is said and done, if you're familiar with the premise of that particular TV show. 

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But there is a mechanic where certain guards will have a "distract opportunity" where your character sends them text messages capitalizing on their secrets as a way of getting them to stop paying attention to guarding so you can get by. I don't know whether their sexuality is one of the possible pieces of information that gets used in that mechanic, but it's inaccurate to say that none of those facts are ever used as anything more than flavor text.

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But there is a mechanic where certain guards will have a "distract opportunity" where your character sends them text messages capitalizing on their secrets as a way of getting them to stop paying attention to guarding so you can get by. I don't know whether their sexuality is one of the possible pieces of information that gets used in that mechanic, but it's inaccurate to say that none of those facts are ever used as anything more than flavor text.

 

I haven't yet witnessed a distract option that did capitalise on such a thing. Feel free to post a screen of any that do so in your investigations though.  I'm interested in the actuality versus the potential. 

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There's nothing to get. Outing as an act implies intent.

This is incorrect; the problem with outing has nothing to do with the act itself, but in how that information spreads and gets used in a culture that, in part, sees people crossing gender categories as sick deviants. For transgender people, their privacy can be literally a matter of life and death. Watch Dogs is feigning progressivism by having transgender people in their game, and then uniquely make them victims of the protagonist just by existing in the game; the fact that your argument is, essentially, that it's meaningless suggests their either you really didn't follow Watch Dogs' examination of privacy or (the more likely option) that there's nothing there to follow.

 

THAT SAID

 

I've changed my mind on the value of dismissal, because there's been a pretty big example recently of someone ignorantly dismissing an entire category of work with a lot of value. This Slate article argues that adults should be embarrassed for reading young adult fiction because it's clearly terrible, and is being justifiably reamed for being full of shit. On my Twitter feed, the only person who presented this article uncritically was Chris. I'm not accusing Chris or anyone on the podcast of being closed-minded snobs, of course, nor am I saying that Chris actually endorsed the article, but I think it's easy to fall into wilful ignorance when you think you're being discerning, and I think wilful ignorance is a very dangerous thing to feed.

 

It puts the SRIV discussion into a new and slightly worrying light, which took the form of guests telling the Thumbs how interesting it is and how much they think the Thumbs would enjoy it, and the Thumbs, Chris especially, being skeptical because they didn't think it'd work and the last one had a dildo bat. And then it turns out that they didn't think it worked, just like they said. I wouldn't enjoy the Thumbs becoming old farts in their 30s, railing against strawmen. There is a very big difference between dismissing something because you've seen enough to know it's bad, or can infer that it's bad by the arguments of its supporters, and dismissing something that you've heard is bad from people whose job it is to have easily digestible opinions.

 

(To make the subtext here text: I'd feel worse about saying that Watch Dogs didn't work, given that I haven't played it and haven't seen enough of it to come to an independently informed opinion, if the guy defending it in this thread wasn't doing such a good job of making his opinion untrustworthy. I might be wrong but I'm not going to be the most wrong.)

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Unfortunately inflammatory headline aside, that Slate article wasn't claiming that there is no value in fiction geared towards young people. It was just making the case that fiction aimed at teens isn't relevant to the lived experience of being an adult and maybe adults should be more conscious of potentially stunting themselves by only reading YA fiction. I thought the actual content of that article was very well argued and I wish that more people would have approached it without expecting to find a condemnation of an entire genre (because that's not what it was).

 

Knowing what your tastes are and forming opinions based off of them is not a bad thing. That's not really a strawman, that's just being aware of what you like.

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It puts the SRIV discussion into a new and slightly worrying light, which took the form of guests telling the Thumbs how interesting it is and how much they think the Thumbs would enjoy it, and the Thumbs, Chris especially, being skeptical because they didn't think it'd work and the last one had a dildo bat. And then it turns out that they didn't think it worked, just like they said. I wouldn't enjoy the Thumbs becoming old farts in their 30s, railing against strawmen. There is a very big difference between dismissing something because you've seen enough to know it's bad, or can infer that it's bad by the arguments of its supporters, and dismissing something that you've heard is bad from people whose job it is to have easily digestible opinions.

 

(To make the subtext here text: I'd feel worse about saying that Watch Dogs didn't work, given that I haven't played it and haven't seen enough of it to come to an independently informed opinion, if the guy defending it in this thread wasn't doing such a good job of making his opinion untrustworthy. I might be wrong but I'm not going to be the most wrong.)

 

I dunno, there's only so much time in the day. You have to filter things somehow, and off-putting artistic choices seem like as good a criterion as any. With SR4, Chris and Nick were initially dismissive, were told it was more interesting than the marketing would have you believe, and then tried it a bit and found they didn't like it.

 

With Watch Dogs, I don't think there's been much evidence that it's anything more than a sort of fun open world game. If people push back against an initial impression, and you still bash something and demonstrate no willingness to engage with the other point of view, that's shitty. But I don't really think that's what's going on here, nor can I remember that happening much at all in the podcast's run.

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Merus, on 07 Jun 2014 - 03:18, said:

This is incorrect; the problem with outing has nothing to do with the act itself, but in how that information spreads and gets used in a culture that, in part, sees people crossing gender categories as sick deviants. For transgender people, their privacy can be literally a matter of life and death. Watch Dogs is feigning progressivism by having transgender people in their game, and then uniquely make them victims of the protagonist just by existing in the game; the fact that 

your argument is, essentially, that it's meaningless suggests their either you really didn't follow Watch Dogs' examination of privacy or (the more likely option) that there's nothing there to follow.

 

But again in the game you're not utilizing that information in any way. Outing as an act implies broader public exposure. Lets say you learnt that a friend was transgender or a closet homosexual for instance, you knowing that information is not outing. You'd be outing them only if you broadcast that information to other people. It's not simply about knowing the information. 

 

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/outing

 

 

I dunno, there's only so much time in the day. You have to filter things somehow, and off-putting artistic choices seems like as good a criterion as any. With SR4, Chris and Nick were initially dismissive, were told it was more interesting than the marketing would have you believe, and then tried it a bit and found they didn't like it.

 

With Watch Dogs, I don't think there's been much evidence that it's anything more than a sort of fun open world game. If people push back against an initial impression, and you still bash something and demonstrate no willingness to engage with the other point of view, that's shitty. But I don't really think that's what's going on here, nor can I remember that happening much at all in the podcast's run.

 

I think to appreciate SR4 you kind of need to play SRIII beforehand at the very least (and maybe SRII for good measure) . There's a lot of back referencing in IV that would largely be lost on most people unfamiliar with the previous games. Without that carry though and an appreciation of events beforehand I can understand how the game might not add up. 

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It was just making the case that fiction aimed at teens isn't relevant to the lived experience of being an adult

 

I don't think that case is really any better than the headline, and I think the responses I linked to do a reasonable job of arguing against it. But it's an illustrative example of a blanket dismissal, so it's a bit off-topic, and I'm happy to take that conversation elsewhere.

 

Knowing what your tastes are and forming opinions based off of them is not a bad thing. That's not really a strawman, that's just being aware of what you like.

 

Like I said, there's a difference between knowing something's not for you, and assuming something's not for you. Wouldn't want to imply that having standards is bad!

 

I dunno, there's only so much time in the day. You have to filter things somehow, and off-putting artistic choices seems like as good a criterion as any. With SR4, Chris and Nick were initially dismissive, were told it was more interesting than the marketing would have you believe, and then tried it a bit and found they didn't like it.

 

With Watch Dogs, I don't think there's been much evidence that it's anything more than a sort of fun open world game. If people push back against an initial impression, and you still bash something and demonstrate no willingness to engage with the other point of view, that's shitty. But I don't really think that's what's going on here, nor can I remember that happening much at all in the podcast's run.

 

I think this is fair, and it's true that Watch Dogs is a particularly poor hill to be having this fight on because it's nothing special, but I feel like the issue with worth discussing even if it's brought up by a game that doesn't deserve it.

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But again in the game you're not utilizing that information in any way. Outing as an act implies broader public exposure. Lets say you learnt that a friend was transgender or a closet homosexual for instance, you knowing that information is not outing. You'd be outing them only if you broadcast that information to other people. It's not simply about knowing the information. 

 

Outing isn't the only issue though.  There is a mechanic by which you can use people's personal information against them.  We don't know if gender identity or sexual orientation are in that pool, but it's clear that mechanic is what led people to the assumption that something jenky was up.   In journalism, there's a phrase that goes, "The impression of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself."  Because you allow yourself to get into a situation where someone can question your ethics, or methodology, or whatever, and cause as much harm to your reputation as an actual impropriety.  Including what appears to be not terribly thoughtful flavor text about gender identity (particularly based on the tweets of one of the writers), in a medium that is well known for how shitty it is to any group that isn't made of white males, and then including a mechanic by which personal information can be used as a kind of blackmail creates the impression of impropriety, the ability for people to easily misunderstand how that information can be used.  I'd say it's completely reasonable to suspect that they overlap, given that the permutations you might have to go through playing to see it.  And honestly, I don't see attacking someone with personal information like that anymore of a commentary on privacy intrusion than do I see shooting someone in the game a commentary on gun control.  A big reason for that is that you never have to see or deal with the repercussions of your actions. 

 

In your original post that started all this, you denied that any such system existed at all, while claiming the high ground in the argument because you had experience with the game while others did not.  And yet even with your experience, you hadn't put together the combination of the "distraction" option with some of the troublesome flavor options that appear.   Which, to me, somewhat drives a stake through the heart of your argument that someone needs to play a game in order to have something worthwhile to say about it.  You as someone who played it missed something, while people who hadn't played it had identified a potential problem (the intersection of a blackmail-type mechanic and personal information hacking system).  This entire conversation essentially disproves what you were originally arguing. 

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Bjorn, on 07 Jun 2014 - 20:20, said:

Outing isn't the only issue though. There is a mechanic by which you can use people's personal information against them. We don't know if gender identity or sexual orientation are in that pool, but it's clear that mechanic is what led people to the assumption that something jenky was up. In journalism, there's a phrase that goes, "The impression of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself." Because you allow yourself to get into a situation where someone can question your ethics, or methodology, or whatever, and cause as much harm to your reputation as an actual impropriety. Including what appears to be not terribly thoughtful flavor text about gender identity (particularly based on the tweets of one of the writers), in a medium that is well known for how shitty it is to any group that isn't made of white males, and then including a mechanic by which personal information can be used as a kind of blackmail creates the impression of impropriety, the ability for people to easily misunderstand how that information can be used. I'd say it's completely reasonable to suspect that they overlap, given that the permutations you might have to go through playing to see it. And honestly, I don't see attacking someone with personal information like that anymore of a commentary on privacy intrusion than do I see shooting someone in the game a commentary on gun control. A big reason for that is that you never have to see or deal with the repercussions of your actions.

Outing was the subject under discussion.

Quote

In your original post that started all this, you denied that any such system existed at all, while claiming the high ground in the argument because you had experience with the game while others did not. And yet even with your experience, you hadn't put together the combination of the "distraction" option with some of the troublesome flavor options that appear. Which, to me, somewhat drives a stake through the heart of your argument that someone needs to play a game in order to have something worthwhile to say about it. You as someone who played it missed something, while people who hadn't played it had identified a potential problem (the intersection of a blackmail-type mechanic and personal information hacking system). This entire conversation essentially disproves what you were originally arguing.

Again there is no system to 'out' anyone. I haven't yet encountered a sexually orientated distraction whilst playing, and none of the distractions have any larger impact that occupying the attention of a guard in order that you can either sneak by them or sneak up on them. They get a text message it grabs their attention for a short while and breaks their usual patrol routine. That is the extent of the mechanic. The mechanic is only available in certain situations. It's not something that you can deploy ad hoc whilst driving around amongst the general citizenry of the game.

As regards the 'The impression of impropriety is as bad as impropriety itself ' given we live in a global digital age where in pretty much anyone can throw shade at all manner of things with little regard to the facts of how they play or operate through twitter or speculative articles I'm not sure how developers are supposed to mitigate against off kilter accusations at the end of the day. There will always be someone who is offended. Also I question whether a phrase that has more to do with whether it's right for say a person to judge a contest that they have a relative participating in (and thus whose inner thoughts of assessment cannot be known) is that applicable to a game which can be judged through the experience of play at the end of the day.

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I skimmed the Slate article:

 

Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly satisfying, whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands, looking to the future.

 

Is this actually true in YA fiction?  The only one I've read recently is the Hunger Games.  I didn't particularly like the series but I wouldn't characterize the ending in that way -- it was a pretty damn hollow victory.  The protoganist executes the leader of the 'rebels' and the world is hardly improved over the old guard.

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Is this actually true in YA fiction?  The only one I've read recently is the Hunger Games.  I didn't particularly like the series but I wouldn't characterize the ending in that way -- it was a pretty damn hollow victory.  The protoganist executes the leader of the 'rebels' and the world is hardly improved over the old guard.

 

The epilogue of ur-trendsetter Harry Potter reads like fanfiction of itself. Everything is so grotesquely hunky-dory that it made me all the more retroactively skeptical of the whole thing.

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The epilogue of ur-trendsetter Harry Potter reads like fanfiction of itself. Everything is so grotesquely hunky-dory that it made me all the more retroactively skeptical of the whole thing.

It would have been a much, much better ending without that goddamn epilogue. Some authors are their own worst enemies.

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I think that the HP epilogue is in line with the general tone and structure of those books. That doesn't make it good or bad, it's just not out of place. What it does do, I assume unintentionally, is show how bad the Chosen One trope is. The disconnect between being a wizard Jesus and being just a normal dad is so bizarre.

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I think that the HP epilogue is in line with the general tone and structure of those books. That doesn't make it good or bad, it's just not out of place. What it does do, I assume unintentionally, is show how bad the Chosen One trope is. The disconnect between being a wizard Jesus and being just a normal dad is so bizarre.

 

Aaand it's a perfect time to link a lovely article by a former classmate of mine on Harry Potter and epilogues: http://the-toast.net/2014/02/10/harry-potter-and-books-after-they-end/

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