Jake

Idle Thumbs 185: Beppo's Hole

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I guess I AM the only person in the world who's seen Asian gangster types dress like that before.

 

Poster feelthedarkness cited some good examples on the 3rd page of the thread. The Ichi the Killer connection sprung to my mind as well just because I watched a ton of Miike movies in college.

 

I still think that even if they went off into some kinda odd tangents, the overall point about the weirdness of how Ubisoft markets the Far Cry games is correct. I suspect that's because post-Clint Hocking it doesn't seem like there has been any coherent vision for what the games are about.

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Oh okay cool then. I guess everyone else is just crazy, and not me. Phew.

 

 I suspect that's because post-Clint Hocking it doesn't seem like there has been any coherent vision for what the games are about.

I uh don't agree with this at all. Their vision is pretty straightforward. Do crazy badass things and give the player lots of dumb sidequests in a big open world FPS.

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If you say so. I don't think a vision has to be deep to be coherent. They clearly know what they want to do with the series, and they're doing it well, even if it's not something you like.

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I guess I AM the only person in the world who's seen Asian gangster types dress like that before.

 

Nope, I'm right there with you.

 

I STILL feel this is all rooted in the very first screenshots being released and people seeing him as a white guy rather than him actually being one. I heard about it first and was caught in the same wave of being upset, and then when I saw the high res screenshots he's obviously an Asian dude. I 100% believe this discussion would not have happened then and would not be happening now if they had released any of dozens of other PR screenshots of him looking obviously East Asian, and not "whitened up" by white dudes in Montreal.

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I guess it depends on how the character was created. If they made a flamboyant white character dominating all the local populace, then realized it might cause PR problems and decided to change up some art and make him Asian so it's OK, that's definitely suspect. If they came up with the character holistically (which it seems like they did,) always intended him to be Asian, and integrated his homeland into the story, then it's just unfortunate advertising.

Same thing with Dumbledore really. What made the whole thing feel disingenuous was not that he is a gay character, but more like he was a straight character through most of the books then the author suddenly tacked on "he's gay" to try to appeal to a certain group of fans.

 

I don't think it's reasonable to describe Dumbledore as a "straight character" that was suddenly altered to be gay. There's no real discussion of Dumbledore's love life or sexuality at all in the series proper that I can recall. I can understand feeling Rowling's revelation that he was gay is tacked on, but it's not a contradiction of any previous characterization, it's just...not really present in the story as written.

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I can understand feeling Rowling's revelation that he was gay is tacked on, but it's not a contradiction of any previous characterization, it's just...not really present in the story as written.

 

I guess that's why I brought it up in comparison to Pagan Min's Asianness, despite other people rightly pointing out the many ways in which it doesn't apply. There doesn't seem to be any in-game reason for Pagan Min to be Asian. He's still a foreign king ruling and oppressing people of color, while also stealing their culture. In all of the marketing materials and the several twenty-minute videos I've watched of Far Cry 4's story, being Asian doesn't seem to inform his character in any way that is qualitatively different from a white person. He's voiced by Troy Baker (aka Booker DeWitt and Joel) from Dallas, TX of all places. As far as I can tell (and I'm very willing to be proven otherwise because I find it depressing) it seems like Pagan Min is Asian because a white person can't look and act like the writers want Pagan Min to look and act without being called out as problematic. I have not been able to find a plot or character justification for why Pagan Min has to be Asian, besides it just being another way to make (and justify making) the game more exotic without sacrificing any actual storytelling liberties, and that's why I'm having trouble giving Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt.

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I guess that's why I brought it up in comparison to Pagan Min's Asianness, despite other people rightly pointing out the many ways in which it doesn't apply. There doesn't seem to be any in-game reason for Pagan Min to be Asian. He's still a foreign king ruling and oppressing people of color, while also stealing their culture. In all of the marketing materials and the several twenty-minute videos I've watched of Far Cry 4's story, being Asian doesn't seem to inform his character in any way that is qualitatively different from a white person. He's voiced by Troy Baker (aka Booker DeWitt and Joel) from Dallas, TX of all places. As far as I can tell (and I'm very willing to be proven otherwise because I find it depressing) it seems like Pagan Min is Asian because a white person can't look and act like the writers want Pagan Min to look and act without being called out as problematic. I have not been able to find a plot or character justification for why Pagan Min has to be Asian, besides it just being another way to make (and justify making) the game more exotic without sacrificing any actual storytelling liberties, and that's why I'm having trouble giving Ubisoft the benefit of the doubt.

 

Isn't one of the problems with diversity in games is needing to justify non-white characters though? That if a character is black, or Asian, or Middle Eastern, there has to be a reason? Not just because, fuck it, let's make him something other than a white dude.

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Isn't one of the problems with diversity in games is needing to justify non-white characters though? That if a character is black, or Asian, or Middle Eastern, there has to be a reason? Not just because, fuck it, let's make him something other than a white dude.

 

I don't know, I think that tokenism is just as big a problem in games right now. It's seems like they have a limit of one person of color per game, always like Coletrane from Gears of War. The protagonist and antagonist are going to be white, if there's no good reason to make them another color, and I don't think making the antagonist Asian, still without a good reason, actually addresses the whitewashing of games. Moreover, and this is not connected to anything, but I think one needs to be thinking a lot harder about what race one makes one's flamboyant and transgressive video game villain in an exotic foreign setting. The blind spots in the marketing of Pagan Min make me wonder what the full story of his genesis is.

 

Also, I didn't make this very clear, but it's not just external justification. Lee from The Walking Dead doesn't have to be black, in terms of the broad motions of the plot, but his blackness is still present throughout his character, both in how he behaves towards others and how others behave towards them. His blackness is essential to his character, if not the story as a whole. In the many cutscenes that Ubisoft has released, I haven't seen anything like that for Pagan Min. Maybe it's all in the third act, I don't know.

 

I'm sorry if I sound tired. We argued this to death in the Far Cry 4 thread months ago. The release of the game itself has not really answered my ultimate issues with the marketing for it, which is that the villain is a Westernized and somewhat whitewashed Asian, surrounded by racist and imperialist imagery, who might as well be white with regards to how he functions in the story and with other characters, making me feel like his character was an arbitrary decision by the writers. Don't get me wrong, it's still better than having an actual white dude, but I don't see the game as much of a victory for better representation of people of color in digital media. That's on me, and I don't blame anyone else for being thrilled that both the protagonist and antagonist of a game are non-white.

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That might just betray how terribly generic a lot of video game characters are, more than anything.  With Gears of War, I think you could give Marcus any race or ethnicity and not change the character at all, and it would probably still work.  I think that's probably true of a bunch of characters. 

 

I do see what you're saying though.  It would be disappointing if Min ends up being so generic that he could have been anything and nothing about the character would change.  There's clearly opportunity there, which may or may not be actually explored. 

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I haven't played Far Cry 4, so I can't comment on how he's portrayed in the story, but I will say that I immediately recognized him as asian. It wasn't until people started complaining that I realized he might be mistaken as white. Obviously that doesn't necessarily mean much, but it's made these discussions a little bit harder for me to follow.

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Tegan, I have a curious:

 

What do you think of Pokemon Omicron / Zeta ? (For those who don't exactly know what I'm talking about, they're pretty massive standalone fan-made Pokemon games [well, in the same way that Red and Blue are "different" games], created using RPG Maker XP. Click Here for more info, and you can get to where you can grab the games from there. The Reddit is [bizarrly, IMO] more up-to-date than their official website).

 

I don't own any Nintendo products (haven't since the N64), much less a Nintendo handheld (handhelds just don't fit into my life: I walk half a mile to work, and drive 40 minutes to school...honestly, I barely even ever use my smartphone at all...), so I haven't had a chance to play any Pokemon game since...well, the GBC games, with the one exception of when I borrowed a friend's 3DS to play X for a day (side-note: really REALLY did NOT like the 3D art of X. When did they change away from sprites? :[ ) ANYways, point being that I picked up Zeta and am enjoying it a lot, and reading through the first half of this thread, you seem like a person who knows themselves some Poket Monsters, and am curious of your thoughts.

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There have been a lot of fanmade Pokémon games, and they're all pretty over-ambitious and kind of crummy, in my opinion. I'm not familiar with those ones in particular, but they usually sacrifice some of the deeper mechanics and a lot of the games' charm in favour of just making the map bigger and adding more Pokémon.

 

The last games to use sprites were the fifth gen games (Black/White and their sequels), incidentally. Maybe try those?

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If you say so. I don't think a vision has to be deep to be coherent. They clearly know what they want to do with the series, and they're doing it well, even if it's not something you like.

 

I didn't say it needs to be deep. I disagree that they know what they want to do with the series though, and the marketing demonstrates it. The marketing places so much emphasis on this weird villain despite your description of Far Cry as a game where you "Do crazy badass things and give the player lots of dumb sidequests in a big open world FPS." That isn't communicated in those bus ads at all. I mean, what you describe is basically the vision for all Ubisoft games at this point. That description doesn't give Far Cry any unique identity which is why I say there is no vision for the game. It might be a fun game, and successful for Ubisoft, but they are definitely running on autopilot creatively. 

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I think "dumb story where you take down a psychopath" totally enables "do[ing] crazy badass things and giv[ing] the player lots of dumb sidequests in a big open world FPS".

 

A vision ALSO doesn't have to be unique to be coherent.

 

I mean I don't know what to tell you. It really just seems like you don't like the way they present the game and so you assume they don't know what they're doing. Meanwhile, Far Cry 4 follows nearly the exact same pattern that Far Cry 3 followed which to me indicates that they know exactly what they're doing. It's not an on-the-surface exciting concept for people who want More out of their games (e.g., the typical Thumb), but it is a video-game-ass video game, and they're doing it pretty solidly, by all reports.

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I have no problem with how they present the game, I just think it makes no sense, i.e. it is incoherent. I agree that a vision doesn't have to be unique, but it does need some sort of expressive intent, and I just don't see that.

 

It feels way more like it's just following the whims of the Ubisoft board of executives' Ouiji board then anything else. One common thread of all the reviews of the game, which have been very positive, is how thread-bare the plot is. That's fine, but it just means Ubisoft is very good at making digital playgrounds, not that there is some sort of idea they are trying to execute on other than on iterating on what worked last time.

 

Doing the same thing as Far Cry 3 but with an Asian villain, and non-frat dude protagonist doesn't strike me as a strong idea of what their game should be. Like I said, it seems like they are just kind of going on auto-pilot. I didn't say there was anything wrong with that. Bu the idea that Ubisoft has a strong concept of where the game should go is about as compelling an argument as saying they have a strong idea of where the Assassin's Creed games should go. They clearly don't. What they do have is a huge work force that has been optimized to churn these games out. It's successful, but I think successful business production is not the same thing as a coherent artistic vision.

 

EDIT: All that being said, it does look like we basically just have a semantic disagreement so I'm going to stop here.

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