"Ethics and Journalistic Integrity"

[Brodie]

Just a reminder that this thread exists.

 

In case anyone needed to be reminded that it's not all shitty and terrible

[thefncrow]

Ok so it is primarily about the prevalence-realness of the crime in question. So in theory, in a nicer world where rape drops off to similar point as say, genocide, then it would be much less of an issue to use it as plot device, as lazy as they may be.

Rape is often used because people regard it as shorthand for a dark, gritty, "realistic" tone. In a world where rape was insanely rare, that shorthand disappears as well.

[Gaizokubanou]

Edit: If rape was less prevalent, I doubt it'd be in video games at all, actually. I think the reason it turns up in video games is related to why it's so prevalent in society, but that's me.

 

Edit2: here, here's just my blog post about it: http://www.applecidermage.com/2015/01/16/a-brutal-landscape-sexual-assault-in-gaming-narratives/

It certainly wouldn't exist in the form it does now, which is a lazy shorthand for shock value/'grittiness' because idea would be that it would have lost those since it would be too distant from most people in the way that genocide is to most of us.

 

Nicely put blog BTW, just finished reading it.

 

 

Rape is often used because people regard it as shorthand for a dark, gritty, "realistic" tone. In a world where rape was insanely rare, that shorthand disappears as well.

 

Right.

 

My apologies Brodie, hope you feel better.

[Vainamoinen]

I may still gather my thoughts about the Nightwatch segment and put it into a more coherent critque about why this whole thing was in no way helpful and why I think Sarkeesian and Schafer were misrepresented in a rather extreme way.

For now, the news of the day certainly is that Crash Override was unveiled. And naturally, the verge has an article up immediately, calling gamergate a "contemptible online gang".

[Twig]

Meanwhile PC Gamer wrote up an apology for lack of unimportant-disclaimer re: some relationship and the comments are filled with, "See, if other websites just did this, there wouldn't be a GamerGate" and I'm once again left wondering why gaming websites should even exist if all they're going to do is cater to the bullshit.

[Gormongous]

Meanwhile PC Gamer wrote up an apology for lack of unimportant-disclaimer re: some relationship and the comments are filled with, "See, if other websites just did this, there wouldn't be a GamerGate" and I'm once again left wondering why gaming websites should even exist if all they're going to do is cater to the bullshit.

 

It drives me crazy, because it's manifestly untrue, but I know several websites that must be convinced this is their audience and they might as well cater to them. Like I said a long time ago in this very thread, Erik Kain seems to have made that bed for himself, and he's got some talent outside of his opinions of #GamerGate, so I can imagine a lot of other journalists, especially those with established followings among the manchild crowd, feeling (or fearing) the same thing deep down.

[Twig]

Yeah I absolutely understand why they would feel they need to do these things.

 

But it sucks every time I see it actually happen. It's basically prioritizing money over morals. I mean... that's capitalism, I know. Welp.

[Apple Cider]

I am probably going to put myself up for volunteering at Crash Override because I would really like to help other harassment victims. 

[GraysonEvans]

So Kim Correa who wrote that article about the Dayz rape is a friend of my mine, she is super sweet and a lovely person.

 

We played a lot of Dayz together and would always show up with a posse of players (mostly men and mostly very nice). 

 

 

I dunno where I was going with this but Dayz is crazy

[Problem Machine]

Well, half-crazy.

[Merus]

It bothers me that they make these games where you have to Survive! and there's no effort to model mental health. Killing things should be costly. Killing people should be worse.

[Ninety-Three]

It bothers me that they make these games where you have to Survive! and there's no effort to model mental health. Killing things should be costly. Killing people should be worse.

 

I'm glad that they don't do that. Videogаmes, as systems of rules maintained by computers, can do some things really well, and some things poorly. The industry standard for modeling human conversation is dialogue trees, the same level of fidelity as a choose-your-own adventure book. As a way of interacting with characters, it works, but it sure isn't anything like actual humans. If a game attempted to model what goes on inside a person's head, I can't imagine it would be anything but a horrendous representation that did a disservice to its serious subject matter.

 

Either that or it would be a blue bar to put under your red health bar. "Ended a human life, -10 sanity!" "Found Zoloft, +25 sanity!"

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, it'd be reductive, though that's sort of how Call of C'thulu does it except you never regain sanity. I'd love to see a game that maybe at least dealt with that subject matter though. I know quite a few games feature a character that prominently deals with something like depression (The Cat Lady is a great example of this) but nothing much else beyond that. 

 

See: asylum games as how to not handle mental illness or mental health.

[Bjorn]

Don't Starve does use a reductive sanity meter, but it's also still one of the better explorations of the mental and emotional stress of surviving.  As your sanity dwindles, the world around you grows increasingly ominous, including shadow hallucinations that play at the edge of the screen.  As you crouch around your fire at night, fearful of the things in the dark that will devour your, shadowy hands reach in as your fire dwindles, threatening to steal your light and plunge you into darkness even faster.  The reason it works is the amount of stress that it puts on the player.  It's really unnerving during your initial playthroughs. The lady got stressed enough a couple of times she just had to quit and walk away from the game for a bit. 

 

Of course, you play enough, and this just becomes another resource you need to manage and any impact it has on you is eliminated.  That's another reason that I doubt we see explorations of this too often, as the impact on the player rapidly fades with more exposure to similar systems. 

[Ninety-Three]

I found Don't Starve's sanity meter to be a very poor representation/exploration of mental health (as a resource management system, thumbs up, but that's not the topic). Before my sanity dipped low enough to start seeing any effects, I had figured out that low light, pitch darkness, and spiders lowered my sanity, and everything else was fine. When the first tier of hallucinations showed up, I immediately ran over to poke them, and figured out that they were incorporeal, and purely aesthetic. When the shadow hands showed up and stole from my campfire, my reaction wasn't fear but "Hey! My fire's lower! You jerk, now I'll have to throw another of my 20 logs on it!" That was before I figured out they could be driven off too, I was thinking of them as simply a firewood tax. Once I learned how to 'kill' them, it was just "Oh, better go drive off the shadow hand."

 

To talk a little more about killing people in games, what always bothers me is that the protagonists are fine not with just killing, but with killing hundreds of people. Your average videogаme character has personally killed more human beings than perhaps any real person that ever lived, and not only does this not affect them, they don't even notice. No videogаme character ever goes "Jesus Christ, you killed three hundred people. One at a time." When I realize how absurd a character's kill-count has gotten, it always makes me wonder how I'm supposed to see the game. Is the character meant to be a sociopath? Or is it like the way Civilization games get hazy with distance and time scales, and all the murder on screen hazily represents a substantially different amount of murder meant to be taking place?

[Merus]

I wonder why it feels reductive to reduce sanity to a meter, but not for health.

[Bjorn]

I still think that feels super reductive, its just something that's so normalized and established people rarely give it thought, whereas sanity meters are still somewhat novel.

[Ninety-Three]

They're both reductive, but brains are more complicated than bodies, so a sanity meter is much more reductive. More than that though, sanity meters are reductive in a way that loses a lot of the detail of the systems they seek to model, whereas health bars do a decent job of conveying the core principle of "bullets make people die" (at least before the days of unarmoured protagonists with regenerating health). Sure they gloss over the idea of bleeding to death, and being injured doesn't impair you in any way... as I type that I realize that perhaps it's not about the model, but the outcome. 

 

Everyone understands what dying is, that it will happen to you if too many bullets go into you, and health bars are a system that makes you die after getting shot too much. Sanity bars, on the other hand, are usually a system that causes you to start seeing a very specific set of hallucinations after excessive exposure to another very specific set of sanity draining things. The point of every kind of bar in videogаmes is that something bad will happen to you when it runs out: You get shot, your health bar empties, you die. You run around, your stamina bar empties, you can't run any more. But with sanity bars, you look at a monster, your sanity bar empties, you start hallucinating. While the other bars simplify complex systems, their inputs and outputs still make sense. Sanity bars though, they're just silly.

[Merus]

Isn't that just a function of attempting to model Lovecraft-style insanity, though? It makes sense that very tropey insanity would be pretty goofy when modelled because mental health doesn't work like that.

[Ninety-Three]

Almost every sanity bar I can think of is Lovecraft-style (not that Lovecraft really did hallucinations), but that's sort of a limit of the medium. How else would you systematize the effects of a sanity bar running out? It's not like you can reach into the player's brain and change the way they think, so you're limited to either changing what the game shows them (hallucinations), or changing the way the player can interact with the world. The only example of the latter I can think of is Depression Quest, where the severity of your depression dictates which options you're allowed to pick in the choose-your-own-adventure gameplay.

 

EDIT: I realized the above may sound critical of Depression Quest, I didn't mean to be. My point was that Depression Quest is a game wholly about depression, as in not about anything else, whereas all this sanity bar talk seems to be concerning games that have a core mechanic, and also the sanity bar.

 

I think it runs into some of the fundamental limits of videogаmes. We are never going to have a conversation system that's anything like human conversation (well, not until the year 21XX when we start putting sentient AIs into games), and similarly we just can't model mental stress well, because it's a thing that doesn't lend itself to being a described by a small collection of rigid rules.

[Merus]

The Depression Quest model is a really interesting one for just that reason, and it's why I get particularly stroppy when dipsticks accuse it of not being a real game. It is a game about a mental illness that has a model to make it relevant to gameplay! It's not only a game, it has an innovative mechanic you dropkicks

 

I'm really pleased that we managed to get back on topic here

[SuperBiasedMan]

To talk a little more about killing people in games, what always bothers me is that the protagonists are fine not with just killing, but with killing hundreds of people. Your average videogаme character has personally killed more human beings than perhaps any real person that ever lived, and not only does this not affect them, they don't even notice. No videogаme character ever goes "Jesus Christ, you killed three hundred people. One at a time." When I realize how absurd a character's kill-count has gotten, it always makes me wonder how I'm supposed to see the game. Is the character meant to be a sociopath? Or is it like the way Civilization games get hazy with distance and time scales, and all the murder on screen hazily represents a substantially different amount of murder meant to be taking place?

 

This is reminding me of an idea I had for a game that was about alien parasites (ie. Futurama's brainslugs) that were landing on earth and taking over the world. You would play as one of the brainslug's, taking control of your human host and forcing them to do your bidding (you wanted the invasion to stop or something, who cares?). Except even though the host usually doesn't have control, they are aware of all the actions their body enacts, so the more you go around killing humans the more distraught they would be and might break your control or have physical reactions to their ordeal and you have to wrestle them back in control and try to keep them largely healthy.

 

...but then when you analyse that properly it's clearly another resource system to manage, just with different justification and window dressing. Which I'm sure is what happens whenever people try to do this. At least with my idea the dehumanising aspect is probably consistent with the fiction (since I'm assuming the aliens don't care much about humans).

[Vainamoinen]

The Depression Quest model is a really interesting one for just that reason, and it's why I get particularly stroppy when dipsticks accuse it of not being a real game. It is a game about a mental illness that has a model to make it relevant to gameplay! It's not only a game, it has an innovative mechanic you dropkicks

 

I'm really pleased that we managed to get back on topic here

 

No, it's not an innovative mechanic. It's your everyday "choose your own adventure" or "fighting fantasy" single player roleplaying mechanic found in hundreds of 80's and 90's books. It still is an important game that has deeply moved me. Digging up older game mechanics like that is about as valid as relying on the same mechanics for dozens of years (like about every game genre in existence).

 

And of course Depression Quest "is a game". The argument "It's not a game", in any discussion, universally means "I am dissatisfied with the game mechanics, but do not have the patience or rhetoric skill necessary to explain what exactly constitutes my dissatisfaction".

 

All this is, I think, very much on topic. All tendencies in gaming that run counter to gamergaters' preset notion about what games are supposed to be about are, by their definition, the infusion of political ideology, an invalid way of making games.

[Bjorn]

No, it's not an innovative mechanic. It's your everyday "choose your own adventure" or "fighting fantasy" single player roleplaying mechanic found in hundreds of 80's and 90's books. It still is an important game that has deeply moved me. Digging up older game mechanics like that is about as valid as relying on the same mechanics for dozens of years (like about every game genre in existence).

 

The innovation (to me, Merus may think something else) was in how various choices are able to be recognized but not pursued based on how well you were doing with depression at various stages. It's a simple change, but one that mechanically conveys so much.  I'm not deeply familiar with these types of games, but I had never encountered it before.  In other games where your choices may change, the ones whose criteria you don't meet simply don't appear. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

All this is, I think, very much on topic. All tendencies in gaming that run counter to gamergaters' preset notion about what games are supposed to be about are, by their definition, the infusion of political ideology, an invalid way of making games.

I agree 100%. For an extensive discussion of the topic that occurred before #GamerGate was even a thing, check out this thread. As you might notice glancing through that thread, I took a ton of shit from people for (among lots of other things...) claiming that a lot of the reason behind the whole "this is not a game" sentiment is typically just veiled sexism.

Fast forward to #GamerGate blowing up, and some people thought back to that original thread and said that #GamerGate had finally convinced them that I was right and that this was and is all about sexism as opposed to what games actually are or journalistic integrity or whatever stupid label the sexist shitheads have come up with lately. It was super gratifying. Unfortunately I never bookmarked the public posts where people said this, but I do still have a PM someone on that forum sent me, which reads in part "I used to think you were extreme and maybe even a little wacky on your views about sexism in games. I don't think so any more. I wish I had supported you in this sooner, but I just didn't want to look into this ugly corner of playing and caring about games and stuff."

I have a reputation on those forums for being one of the people who won't fucking shut up about sexism all the time, and one of the few silver linings on this #GamerGate cloud is that they're so obviously evil and sexist and stupid that, finally, they're pushing some gamers to realize how fucked up our hobby is, even though #1reasonwhy and the backlash against Feminist Frequency and so on and so forth didn't manage to do it.