Jake

Idle Thumbs 173: Ridonkulous Rift

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This week has been atrociously disheartening, scary, and sad. No "silver lining" really comes close to counterbalancing that. But at least it's been a somewhat effective human decency smoke test.

 

Some sort of... hot wire touched to a petri dish of questionably human blood test.

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It's a lazy "she's not a real gamer!" argument based on the single fact that she at some point in time said she didn't identify as a fan of gaming, or something to that effect.

 

Specifically, it's usually supported by a video of a talk she gave at Santa Monica College in 2010, but it's selectively excerpted. She says she'd love to play [sc. more] video games, but she doesn't like ripping people's heads off. So, she doesn't play a particular type of video game for pleasure, in essence.

 

The funny thing about that, it seems to me, is that the dudebros were trying to undermine her by saying she wasn't a real gamer, and a couple of years on a whole bunch of people are saying "actually, if this is what being a real gamer entails, we don't want to be real gamers".

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On the idea of violence against women in video games, I would say (and Anita does say this) that violence against women (or anyone) can be an effective tool for... well, anything. I would point everyone toward the great Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño's masterpiece 2666 as an example where violence, and in this specific case, violence against women, can be used to achieve a higher artistic goal without succumbing to the temptation to relish in the violence itself. Briefly, 2666 has a roughly 400page section which outlines in clinical, police-report-style language the brutal rape and murder of hundreds of women in a Mexican city over a decade. This section is harrowing and difficult to read, but the most overwhelming part of it is the administrative evil of the murders. The murder of these women become normalised within the mind of the city, and though some people remain vigilant in trying to find the killer/s, most everybody simply adjusts to it as the "new normal" (particularly the police), and once something has become sufficiently ingrained as "part of what the city is", then it becomes virtually impossible to stop it. This evil - and it is unequivocally presented as evil - eventually pervades every aspect of the novel until it feels while reading that one is gazing into an impenetrable, endless abyss inside which is contained the worst and most horrible of man's deeds.

I would say that Bolaño's depiction of woman in his novels, especially when violence came upon them, is something most game developers should look at. He never let it succumb in gritty/darkness nonsense without any substance. He had a understanding of the violence that women, especially Latin women, faced during his time in Chile and various Latin American countries. Bolaño never short-changed them and always explored the ramifications, both personal and societal, of the violence that was put upon them.

I remember this novella I was reading by him in which he took a whole chapter to explore the life this female poet. She was an absolute genius but was in a abusive relationship. Bolaño didn't hold any punches describing how much of an asshole her husband was but he never forgot about the poet. He wrote her with such care and precision and explored the aftermath of being in such a relationship for a long time. Though it's a harrowing and heart wrenching read, you never thought that Bolaño was exploiting her just to make his story darker and gritty, no; he had love for her and explored how such a genius poet could fall in such a situation.

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I agree 2666 is a powerful novel, but part of its power comes from the fact that it's based on real events. That's in contrast to most games that lack that sort of specificity to real events. It's ironic to mention Bolano too. His writing is full of machismo and a lot of his women characters are kind of one dimensional. But compared to most games? No contest he is way better.

In of his earlier novels and short stories, yes. He got better as he went on but there were times where women in his novels were cardboard or background sprinkling. That pissed me off because I knew he was a bit better than that.

As much as machismo is pervasive is in his novels, he also deconstructed it and explored it's ramifications on art, men, women and hiw it shaped Latin American politics.

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You're generalizing a lot here dude. What do you mean by the female talking heads at a video game website? I haven't found them to be "wearing tank tops and flirting with the camera"

 

I don't think I agree with the exact wording used in that sentence, but it's definitely true that a lot of women get the impression that they have to prove themselves to an audience that's going to dismiss them.

 

 

There are two Youtube personalities whose Pokémon videos I sometimes watch: TheJWittz (real name Josh Wittenkeller) and TamashiiHiroka (real name unknown). The two make almost identical content, usually top ten lists, trivia videos, and other such stuff that you're likely to see if you read any gaming websites. Often they'll even cover the exact same ground. Take a look at how each of presents themselves:

 

 

sNW3LGt.png

 

 

 

 

This is actually one of the more ordinary-looking shots I've seen of Tamashii. Usually she's wearing a Pikachu hoodie and the camera is pulled back further to show even more gaming stuff behind her. Tamashii frames her videos in a way to show how much "nerd cred" she has, while Josh doesn't feel obligated to. And it's not because she's any less talented than Josh, it's because she has a large hate community for being both a woman and a feminist. Her channel has been around longer, she seems to have actual programming knowledge and insight into game design that Josh lacks, and in my opinion she brings exactly as much enthusiasm and technical skill to her videos as Josh; but she still has fewer views and a much larger anti-fandom (I can verify this personally from my own experiences on 4chan's Pokémon board, but it's not like it's hard to find creepy comments about her attached to her own videos).

 

Lately she's started using a custom sprite of herself against backgrounds nearly identical to the ones Josh uses as a stand-in for the live footage of herself that she used to use, and I've always wondered if it was because she felt discouraged by this kind of stuff.

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In of his earlier novels and short stories, yes. He got better as he went on but there were times where women in his novels were cardboard or background sprinkling. That pissed me off because I knew he was a bit better than that.

As much as machismo is pervasive is in his novels, he also deconstructed it and explored it's ramifications on art, men, women and hiw it shaped Latin American politics.

 

Yeah, I realized after I wrote that that I should have hedged my claims more carefully. I've read quite a bit of his work, and there are so many different characters that making a blanket characterization like that when he does infuse a tremendous amount of humanity and empathy into a very diverse range of people. Still, it's something you see crop up even in a work as late as the Savage Detectives, so it's worth addressing. But it's absolutely true: style, perception and appearance, identities of characters, these are rarely straightforward things in his writing.

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Totally fair Tegan, I guess I was thinking more along the lines of Leigh Alexander, Danielle, and Cara Ellison, which are the journalists I'm more familiar with. I will admit I'm not very familiar with the YouTube scene and jumped to conclusions I shouldn't have. Reading through this thread kind of just made me angry and I kind of just jumped to my keyboard to be like blahhhh...thanks for pointing that out to me!

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You're generalizing a lot here dude. What do you mean by the female talking heads at a video game website? I haven't found them to be "wearing tank tops and flirting with the camera"

 

Some do.  Others use a lot of self-depreciating or "zany" humor.  Or bend over backwards to establish their gamer cred.  Or some other thing I mentioned in the paragraph you snipped that one phrase out of.  The point is, you won't find many videos of women talking about games who present themselves and talk about their subject like Sarkeesian does. 

 

I personally found her off-putting at first, and I realize now that was for mostly stupid and superficial reasons. And even if there are good reasons for disliking or disagreeing with her, they are far less important than the principle that we shouldn't allow her to be shouted down by the mob.  I admire her quite a lot for continuing to make these videos exactly the way she wants to make them in the face of all this hostility.  Just continuing to put her own face out front-and-center after the gross things people have done to her picture is pretty bad ass.

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huzzah for friday-before-holiday-weekends at work.  was able to catch up on this whole pile from page 1 to now...

 

lots of good discussion, some clear instigation, but all in all reminds me why i like this place and come back every day.  ive other strong feelings, but to type them all out would re-hash the bulk of the (positive) previous 12 pages

 

other note - i love the idea of the ridonkulous rift, but i think by the time it lands retail i'll have other obligations and an outdated dota machine.  That will a tough sell to the wife why i need to budget for a new rig and this cool helmet that would help me ignore her even more than my g35's do now

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I do also constantly conflate the Oculus Rift DK/DK2 with Donkey Kong and I eagerly await the OR ad that features their version of the DK rap

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Important FYI!!! you can play Wii games in the DK2.  You can play DK2 on the DK2.  

 

The VR Wii emulator is actually amazing.  Unlike most VR adaptations it just lets you look around wherever, it's basically reading the in game geometry and separately rendering the world, so you aren't tied to the character's vision.  The game UI is projected onto a transparent plane where you character is facing and you can look away from it.  

 

So you can look 'behind the scenes' at stuff you shouldn't be seeing.  Maybe something is about to happen and the game starts assembling NPCs 'off screen' -- you see them blink into existence.  It's like watching a play where scenery gets rolled off stage and as the audience you can still see it during the other scenes. During a cutscene, look around and see what the artists rendered that wasn't visible.  See how the buildings appear and disappear when your character looks at them to save memory on some older N64 games.  Scrolling text?  More like a 20 story scrolling tower moving slowly downward.  Even a static main menu screen is a bast as you can look around and see all this random stuff that was never meant to be on screen.  

 

Despite that you have that strong sense of physicality to everything in the game that the Rift gives you so all the props moving around... it really does feel like a theater production, that's what I kept thinking when I try stuff.  Standing inside an N64 game is like a Nintendo fever dream.  I think just stared at an NPC for a few solid minutes.

 

Be warned that's it's super performance intensive and framey -- not perfectly smooth even with an overclocked top ofthe line PC -- so those susceptible to motion sickness probably wouldn't fair well.  

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This was my go-to Nintendo Power VHS. I would watch and rewind and rewatch the little techno montage at the end over and over again.

 

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Excellent show and interesting thread.

 

Anita's point is that the violence in these games IS either totally contextless or designer window dressing to get the player to do a thing. Think about that for a second and it's pretty gross.

 

Although she doesn't mention it, one of the clips from the latest Tropes vs Gaming video that stood out to me and is an example of the designers trying to manipulate the player is the mission in Assassin's Creed where a serial killer is slitting the throats of prostitutes in front of you. What makes this mission particularly egregious is that it actually acts like one of the tutorial missions for the gun mechanic in the game. The gun had this weird mechanic where you had to lock on and charge/aim it before you could fire. This mission is designed to teach the player the range of the lock on mechanic. If the player gets too close to the killer or takes too long trying to lock on and charge a shot then they fail the tutorial and are punished by the death of a woman. The killer runs off to find another woman, effectively resetting the tutorial and repeating it at another location. The whole thing is treated with the same banality of most failable tutorials ("You failed. Try again.") but casually dressed up with violence against women.

 

I think this video guide for the mission does a good job of showing how players are expected to react to this mission, readily objectifying the unimportant female NPCs as props that exist solely to demonstrate the game mechanic. Also note that the name of the mission is Damsels in Distress. 

 

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Having light music play behind live-reads is so entertainingly dainty that I hope it keeps happening.

 

Appreciated the entire first section of this podcast, not only for the summary of events but also the cogent arguments presented against it.

 

Beyond that, hearing Jake and Chris' philosophy about being wrong on the internet and in real life struck a chord. I'll say this as a younger thumb fan (still south of drinking age) that's been listening since I was in high school: whereas flaming twitter might be the worst way for a kid to spend time on the internet, being in this community might be the best. It's honestly hilarious how much useful life advice I get from this video game podcast now; being a part of this community has been a strangely formative experience. 

 

P.S. I'm pretty sure I'm also better at articulating thoughts and my vocabulary is bigger (bespoke) just because I listen to this podcast. If you guys offered diplomas for things I could quit school and delete all my other bookmarks.  :fart:

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I'd like to thank you guys for the great and thoughtful cast! 

 

I generally try not to dig too deep into these kinds of stories because I know that just about the only possible outcome is me being angry at the entire human race just because a bunch of assholes can't be arsed to do the bare minimum of acting like actual human beings.

 

I don't mind people disagreeing strongly with, say, Anita Sarkeesian's criticism, and can easily live with the fact that some people simply don't find any validity in her arguments at all, but Jesus Christ who the fuck sends rape and death threats over this sort of stuff? Any stuff really? The distance and relative anonymity of internet/social media must be a big factor, because I find it hard to believe that most of these people would actually threaten Anita or others in person (Yes, I am aware of the stalking and breaking into people's houses branch of this sort of fucked-up internet-born harassment, but the thought is simply too disgusting for me to delve any deeper into). But would they tell their real life friends that they just threatened to kill a popular Youtube personality because he/she disagreed with that personality? Or would they be able to meet their fellow internet rape and death threat writers in real life without suddenly feeling really gross about the direction their life has taken?

 

While I find it almost impossible to relate to this type of behavior, I think I might have seen a glimpse a while back of what makes complete assholes of at least some portion of these people. I have watched one or two of Anita Sarkeesian's Feminist Frequency videos before and found them insightful, well-researched and -presented. Still, I don't follow them actively, mostly because they make me feel a bit depressed about the state of (triple-A) video gaming. Earlier this week I was scrolling through my RSS feeds when a news item about the latest Feminist Frequency episode caught my eye. I would probably have ignored it and kept on scrolling (I have subscribed to way too many feeds, and so simply skimming through them feels like a chore sometimes) if the preview image for the video hadn’t featured the box art for The Witcher 2. I thought “Wait a minute? I really liked The Witcher 2!” and for a millisecond I felt some bizarre defenses – spikes even – going up in my mind. This was a bullshit reaction of course, as my enjoyment of the game had nothing to do with the aspects of the game that she was going to criticize and I was already fully aware that the use and portrayal of women in that game is sketchy at best (Although, Triss Merigold was okay at times in The Witcher 2, if I remember correctly. Then the developers made her pose for Polish Playboy which is more than a bit depressing), and so the feeling quickly faded away. How this could lead to someone opening Anita Sarkeesian’s picture in Photoshop with an aim of creating something truly horrible, or registering a new Twitter account and sending death and/or rape threats to Anita or her supporters, or worse, is anyone’s guess. But perhaps if one was 10 years younger, incredibly and aimlessly angry to begin with, a bit more ignorant, and equipped with some sort of strange malfunctioning internal pre-amp that amplified these sorts of feelings by a factor of a million, perhaps then one could confuse criticizing a game that you love with attacking your loved ones and making a counter argument with sending death threats.

 

But so anyway, I watched her latest video “Women as Background Decoration: Part 2” and found it, again, very insightful and well-researched. (As a side-note, the episode reminded me of a piece of criticism  – which I had spotted just days earlier on the Wikipedia page for Blue Velvet – that Roger Ebert leveled at David Lynch: “She is degraded, slapped around, humiliated and undressed in front of the camera. And when you ask an actress to endure those experiences, you should keep your side of the bargain by putting her in an important film.” As a further side-note, I was glad to find out she had disallowed comments in her Youtube videos. That I’m actually relieved by this is supremely depressing.) It seems that her videos deal with many of the issues that I have with video games, issues that have, from time to time, made me vary or reluctant to actually purchase/support certain titles and developers (e.g. Farcry 3, but I’m not here to talk about that). It is the kind of criticism that I really appreciate because if it leads to anything – which I hope and think it will do, eventually – it means that I will be able to enjoy video games more in the future, or at the very least feel less guilty about enjoying video games as much as I do now. That is to say, I genuinely think that The Witcher 2, a great game in my opinion, would have been much better, not worse, if the developers had consulted someone like Anita Sarkeesian during the writing process. I admire her devotion, both in terms of the time she is willing to sacrifice for her research (I am already exhausted just editing this stupid post) and in terms of the shit she is willing to endure from random Internet people (more about this in a bit). I find it really hard to believe that this level of devotion could stem from anything other than deep caring for video games as a medium. Furthermore, I don’t think the points she has raised in her videos are all that controversial (Disclaimer: I have only seen a few. Maybe the really vile Feminazi stuff is hidden in her other videos). I view them as valid observations that are not part of some evil feminist cabal (granted, I don’t even know what this is supposed to mean) but that can be roughly equated to someone pointing out in a detailed and thoughtful way that, say, free-to-play might have some issues from the customer point of view, or something. Now, I don’t know if someone is running a video series or a web site devoted to the potential issues free-to-play games and micro transactions, but I’m fairly sure that if that person exists, he (I omitted “/she” because I’m not entirely sure if the assumption would have held anymore. Again, depressing.) is not constantly bombarded with vile tweets and death threats.

 

This brings me back to my first statement of cowardly avoiding these types of news and controversies, because they make me feel bad and I don’t need that shit in my life or whatever. I made a similar comment a while back in the awesome if daunting Feminism thread, in connection with the Polygon article about harassment of women in gaming linked by Argobot. Hermie responded to the comment a bit later:

 

Jumping back a bit to grab this quote (about the Polygon article), because I had the very same reaction with it and some of the other articles linked in this thread. I think "Ugh, I can't deal with this right now, I'll be so down." 

 

But that's when it really sunk in how these people have to deal with this every single day. They can't just close the tab and deal with it later, because it's everywhere, all the time, in your face, in your Twitter that is supposed to be for you to talk to your friends, it's where you work. And I felt so bad just for being able to dismiss it, unlike them.

 

(By the time I noticed Hermie’s comment the thread had already gained 5 pages or so, and I decided not to respond at the time. I will do so now, in a way.) This is a good point and something that always makes me feel bad even if I make a deliberate choice not to read and feel bad about something. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like to rake through this kind of shit in your email and Twitter feed, etc. every morning just in case there are still some decent human beings left in the internet. What I know for certain, however, is that I wouldn’t feel passionate enough about video games to keep doing so day after day, month after month. And since I – like many others here, it seems – find it almost impossible to imagine someone enduring this of harassment for (what must be) relatively small amounts of fame and money alone, I suspect that Anita Sarkeesian and others must be passionate about the subject to an extent that I am probably not passionate about anything really. As I already mentioned, I envy this sort of passion and devotion. I am also happy that there are people who are incredibly passionate about things that I am much less but still somewhat passionate about. It makes things easier for me.

 

While I might not be passionate enough about any one subject to choose to endure being harassed day after day for it like some popular Youtube personalities seem to be, there are still things I am passionate enough about to at least make me think twice before committing the equivalent of never talking about video games again and deleting my entire Steam library. Like my work for example (in a broader sense, not the menial things I am doing at the moment). If I suddenly started getting a shitload of unwarranted flak and downright harassment for my work (And this, believe me, is really hard to imagine because the idea is so distant and absurd. That it is not only not distant but practically a norm in certain areas of Internet discourse is, again, monstrously depressing.), I don’t know what I would do. Well, I would probably quit eventually because I couldn’t live with that shit forever, but before that, before I let the stupid ignorant fuckers win, I’d probably just be confused, angry, and lost. I would not revel in the questionable popularity, the unwanted attention, the occasional word of support, and a whole bunch of death threats, that is for sure. I would most likely be in a very dark place hating the entire broken universe with all my heart.

 

 

Ugh, this was a much shorter and more coherent post in my head. What happened?

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Having light music play behind live-reads is so entertainingly dainty that I hope it keeps happening.

 

It also helps delimit what is and isn't paid for ad-reads, which I think is good conduct.

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Great episode.

 

 

I'm reminded of this comic about street harassment when reading comments like the one to which you're responding.

Cool comic; thanks for linking to it.

 

 

The thing that resonated with me the most in the latest episode of Tropes vs Women (but which apparently didn't strike the same chord with a couple of people earlier in this thread) was this:

 

It's not enough to simply present misery as miserable and exploitation as exploitative. Reproduction is not in and of itself a critical commentary.

It's something I've felt for some time now – I've been uneasy about fictional accounts of oppression that are clearly framed as bad, but which nevertheless felt exploitative in their own right – but it was something I had difficulty succinctly expressing. It seems so obvious now that I can hardly believe this ever gave me trouble, but that's how these things often go. At one point I think I babbled about works having to "earn the right" to include such grim subject matter, but I quickly realized that that was crass and didn't effectively convey what I meant.

The above quote really hits the nail on the head. Without critique, it's just colour. It's ambience. It's the wallpaper on the room the story happens in. The author pays lip service to the injustice, but the lack of thought and care put into such a serious topic is kind of insulting.

A lot of the talk pages and pages back was about context. The accusation levelled at Sarkeesian is that she ignores context. Context is important, but context isn't just where something sits in the world of the story; it's also where it sits in the world of the audience, and where it sits in the substance of the story, how the story treats it. To invoke real human horrors just to establish a tone is vulgar. Sarkeesian isn't ignoring context; rather, she's considering a wider context than her critics.

Nothing is off-limits for art, but artists have a responsibility to be mindful of their subjects, and treat sensitive topics with the care they deserve.

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Saying that Anita doesn't consider context is something that really bugs me. Untold centuries of violence against women; That's your fucking context.

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Saying that Anita doesn't consider context is something that really bugs me. Untold centuries of violence against women; That's your fucking context.

I think they mean the context of the video game.

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Yes, but people have already played through the games to get that context. Anita is bringing new context that's relevant to her points.

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