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Sephyr posted:You know what I'd really like to see? Just once? A game in which the protagonist is moved entirely be ideology. No abducted love interest, no burned down home village, no parents slain by mustache-twirling villain, no being enslaved/kidnapped and out for revenge. Just a person with a strong set of ideas and out to challenge the world with them. Saints Row series. I mean there are sub plots with certain other motivations but as a whole the series' motivation is Become Awesome
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Jul 11, 2015 01:20
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She also criticized The Hunger Games movie because Katniss wasn't affected by Foxface's death the same way she was affected by Rue's, which is an odd opinion to have because Katniss never talked to Foxface and never bothered to learn her name. Anita is a spring of bad opinions.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:22
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Wanderer posted:Grandia II. Maybe Skies of Arcadia. More recently, Sunset Overdrive kind of fills the bill; your character's entire motivation in that is "I'm a superhero now Gah! I've been dying to play Skies of Arcadia since it first came out, but i didn't have the money for a console then. It just seemed like such a fun, colorful adventure. I keep hoping it'll get a Steam version sometime. And yeah, I'm not big on Sarkeesian myself. She seems to either tread ground covered better and earlier by others, or easily indulge in hyperbole and being baited. Her main virtue, I guess, was being able to aggregate most of the themes into online video format.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:25
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Dominic White posted:Yep, that's stretching a bit. I disagree with Sarkeesian on... most things, come to think of it. Broadly speaking, I think she oversimplifies things and takes a very reductionist approach. Which makes attempts above to reduce her points even further to the point of absurdity in order to try and argue against them downright silly. Yeah, she's probably not the best candidate for her position. She's rarely 100% wrong but she wears her agenda on her sleeve. I think her initial plan was to get enough notoriety to turn herself into a studio head. There are dumber plans. Jessica Chabot became a professional games talking head on the basis of being the girl who licked a PSP. Mel Mudkiper posted:What was wrong with her critique if Dying Light? An independent and resourceful female character losing her agency and being used as a tool in the feud between two men is exactly her complaint. She's only half right. When you reach Jade in that level, she's infected and you're offered a sadistic choice by the villain; he gives you enough medicine to save one of you, but not both. Your character immediately tries to inject Jade, but over the course of a hallucinogenic dream sequence, she tells you that you need to take it, because she's decided she's ready to die. Jade then beats the gently caress out of four of the villain's goons by herself before she turns into a zombie. While there's some creepy psycho-sexual bullshit in the run-up to the scene with Jade that didn't have to be there, the actual "damsel in distress" moment is a slight subversion of the trope; you go there to save her and she ends up saving you. More to the point, her argument on Twitter was more of a trope-gatekeeper "you should never do this ever," which isn't a great rhetorical device.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:26
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Germstore posted:She also criticized The Hunger Games movie because Katniss wasn't affected by Foxface's death the same way she was affected by Rue's, which is an odd opinion to have because Katniss never talked to Foxface and never bothered to learn her name. Anita is a spring of bad opinions. For someone that you don't care about the opinions of, you seem to know approximately fifty times more about Sarkeesian's thoughts on things than I do or ever could want to. Don't you think that's weird?
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Jul 11, 2015 01:27
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If this thread gets a long as the Middle East one, gamergate shall end. I have read it in the entrails of a newborn lamb.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:30
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Dean of Swing posted:If this thread gets a long as the Middle East one, gamergate shall end. I have read it in the entrails of a newborn lamb. All I got in the entrails of my newborn lamb was bad Riker/Picard fanfiction.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:31
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Sephyr posted:Gah! I've been dying to play Skies of Arcadia since it first came out, but i didn't have the money for a console then. It just seemed like such a fun, colorful adventure. I keep hoping it'll get a Steam version sometime. Buy a cheap GameCube or Wii and get the Legend port. It adds more content and fixes a couple of things, like the stupidly high encounter rate. Sephyr posted:And yeah, I'm not big on Sarkeesian myself. She seems to either tread ground covered better and earlier by others, or easily indulge in hyperbole and being baited. Her main virtue, I guess, was being able to aggregate most of the themes into online video format. Her virtue was mostly in her timing. People were just starting to discuss games as if they were as artistically valid as films, which opened the door to feminist/queer reading, and she made herself the standard-bearer. Then, almost by accident, she went ahead and triggered an international squad of angry dorks who were willing to break the law to shut her up, thus convincing the mainstream media she actually had something to say. GamerGate: the Wile E. Coyote of feminism.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:31
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Dominic White posted:For someone that you don't care about the opinions of, you seem to know approximately fifty times more about Sarkeesian's thoughts on things than I do or ever could want to. I've watched two of her videos; Beyond Good and Evil, Hunger Games. Both were bad, so I didn't watch more. e: and her "just because you profit from patriarchy does not mean..." keynote.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:33
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Wanderer posted:
I must die for your sake is another trope she has a problem with though, and for good reason. Taking one problematic trope and switching it midstream for another is neither innovation nor subversion
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Jul 11, 2015 01:35
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Germstore posted:I've watched two of her videos; Beyond Good and Evil, Hunger Games. Both were bad, so I didn't watch more. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpDnr2s9yxQ this one is great too.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:40
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You'd think with the current state of online security and surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the terrorist dorks who sent death threats to Anita. I mean how much of a hacker are these guys and how incompetent is the police to not find anything yet
wiregrind fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 01:41
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wiregrind posted:You'd think with the current state of online security and surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the terrorist dorks who sent death threats to anita. I mean how much of a hacker are these guys and how incompetent is the police to not find anything yet The govt absolutely has the capability to track down a vast majority of offenders; they're not allowed to do so because of regulations in place to prevent abuse of the system
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Jul 11, 2015 01:42
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Plus a lot of law enforcement agencies don't take the threats seriously which is part of the point of being vocal about when you are threatened.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:44
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I must die for your sake is another trope she has a problem with though, and for good reason. Taking one problematic trope and switching it midstream for another is neither innovation nor subversion I would argue that it subverts expectations by setting you up to think it'll happen one way (a lot of the subtext at that point is conditioning you to think that Jade will end up as Crane's love interest, and Rais is under the impression she already is), before doing something else entirely, complete with a weird, memorable psychedelic sequence that really exploits the possibilities of the medium. At this point, though, we're simply dealing with a difference of opinion and I'm happy to leave it there. It's also a side point to the main issue, which was that Sarkeesian was arguing that the "damsel in distress" trope shouldn't be used at all ever, which is unnecessarily reductionist and makes her look like the worst version of her own argument. There's always room to play with even the most hoary old trope, and trying to tell people to not use a specific one is unduly limiting other people's toolboxes. Half of Resident Evil: Revelations 2 runs off a "damsel in distress" trope, but it's only there to gently caress with you and turns itself around in the end.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:47
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wiregrind posted:You'd think with the current state of online security and surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the terrorist dorks who sent death threats to anita. I mean how much of a hacker are these guys and how incompetent is the police to not find anything yet A lot of times they could, but it's not seen as being worth the effort. Just to get the name and address of a user on twitter (for example) would take effort, and possibly multiple subpoenas or court orders. If the person behind the account used a proxy, then it gets harder still.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:48
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Wanderer posted:It's also a side point to the main issue, which was that Sarkeesian was arguing that the "damsel in distress" trope shouldn't be used at all ever She had never said this. She has said you cannot use the trope without it being problematic which is something entirely different.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:49
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wiregrind posted:You'd think with the current state of online security and surveillance, it wouldn't be that hard to track down the terrorist dorks who sent death threats to anita. I mean how much of a hacker are these guys and how incompetent is the police to not find anything yet There were a lot of horror stories coming out of the entire thing from Wu, Harper, Jenn Frank, and a few others, that the concept of online harassment is still sufficiently new to the cops that their idea of a sufficient response was to tell them to stay off Twitter. A lot of the go-to tactics of online harassment are not actually illegal yet. John Oliver did a segment on it on "Last Week Tonight" a few weeks ago. (Bonus round: he was specifically talking about the wan legal response to not only this, but other online harassment such as "revenge porn," and used a thirty-second clip of both Sarkeesian and Wu talking about their experiences being harassed. Neither mentioned games, gaming, or GamerGate, nor did Oliver, but because of that thirty-second clip, GamerGate went loving ballistic. The comments section on the "LWT" clip on YouTube is like the stupidity Olympics, even by the standards of YouTube comments.)
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Jul 11, 2015 01:52
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Mel Mudkiper posted:She had never said this. She has said you cannot use the trope without it being problematic which is something entirely different. It was easier to find the tweet than I thought it'd be, and she said that using the trope at all is "embarrassing," then goes off on all the reasons why it should never be used at all. She makes a decent case in that it's somewhat worse if "damseling" happens to a capable character, since it's actively disempowering, but again, I'd rather encourage clever or subversive uses of tropes (the "damsel" rescues you, you get there and she broke out already, you get there and she was never there at all...) than forbid their use entirely.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:57
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Wanderer posted:It was easier to find the tweet than I thought it'd be, and she said that using the trope at all is "embarrassing," then goes off on all the reasons why it should never be used at all. Where are the tweets? I would be interested in seeing which ones you refer to.
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Jul 11, 2015 01:59
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Wanderer posted:There were a lot of horror stories coming out of the entire thing from Wu, Harper, Jenn Frank, and a few others, that the concept of online harassment is still sufficiently new to the cops that their idea of a sufficient response was to tell them to stay off Twitter. A lot of the go-to tactics of online harassment are not actually illegal yet. John Oliver did a segment on it on "Last Week Tonight" a few weeks ago. GG should want these new regulations, unless their actual goal is just to harrass the people they don't like...
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Jul 11, 2015 02:00
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Wanderer posted:It was easier to find the tweet than I thought it'd be, and she said that using the trope at all is "embarrassing," then goes off on all the reasons why it should never be used at all. This is one reason why the word 'trope' and the idea of 'subverting' it annoys me. If you go to rescue her and she broke out already, she's not a damsel in distress. The trope hasn't been followed. I don't think Sarkeesian or anyone else would have a problem with that. To put it another way, the 'subversion 'of a trope is normally the opposite of it, so it's not 'using' it, it's referencing it. I also think the whole trope thing is a bad taxonomy.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:00
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Where are the tweets? I would be interested in seeing which ones you refer to. Google femfreq twitter "dying light" There are thick veins of TotalBiscuit running all through that piece, so if that's something you dislike, be careful. wiregrind posted:If GG doesn't like the harrassers and is actually not about harrassment, they are really dumb for getting angry at this specifically Dumb and self-sabotaging are kind of the GamerGate watchwords, yes. Obdicut posted:This is one reason why the word 'trope' and the idea of 'subverting' it annoys me. If you go to rescue her and she broke out already, she's not a damsel in distress. The trope hasn't been followed. I don't think Sarkeesian or anyone else would have a problem with that. To put it another way, the 'subversion 'of a trope is normally the opposite of it, so it's not 'using' it, it's referencing it. I loving hate using the word "trope," but there are certain conversations where it's really the best word for the job. The general idea is that you set the audience up to expect one thing and they get another, which is the point of a subversion, much like comedy. If you fight through the zombie Nazis' stronghold to rescue your hot British spy colleague, and when you get to her cell there's a hole in the floor and a note that says "ha ha, gently caress you" with a cartoon of the spy flipping the reader the double bird, you were still expecting her to be there and the trope (ugh) still applies. That's just how it works, man. Wanderer fucked around with this message at 02:05 on Jul 11, 2015 |
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Jul 11, 2015 02:02
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Wanderer posted:but again, I'd rather encourage clever or subversive uses of tropes (the "damsel" rescues you, you get there and she broke out already, you get there and she was never there at all...) than forbid their use entirely. Isn't this exactly what she proposes with her game concept? Granted I found that whole part weak but the whole thing was built off subverting the trope like you said.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:02
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computer parts posted:Ideally it would be equally likely for a man rescuing a woman and a woman rescuing a man (and man-man, woman-woman, etc). While I do want more stories with a woman rescuing a man as part of her own arc, sometimes this isn't possible in the context of the story itself. That doesn't excuse lazy writing, though. (Totally want a Witcher add-on where Ciri rescues Geralt). Mel Mudkiper posted:I am not saying the trope should be thrown out, and Sarkeesian is not either. But you cannot escape the context and implicit message it communicates. The idea is not to annihilate the trope, it's to raise awareness of the issues behind it and challenge creators to think more critically about their decision to use it. And if you do the trope right, it isn't a woman that is going to be saved. Its the character that's getting saved. Your audience has come to care about her as a character, through her actions and words and it makes the impact of her rescue all that more profound. The emotion comes from a character the audience cares about, and not just a woman. The trope becomes a cliche when the only emotional investment you have is 'woman' and not 'character'. Like Wanderer said, they may as well be a bag of money because they aren't a real person. The emotional distress of the cliche comes from them solely being a woman, with no personality of their own. The emotional distress of the trope is supposed to come from the character, not their gender. Dominic White posted:No, but it would be nice if the woman got some kind of character arc. When a character is purely a damsel in distress (background until kidnapped, motivation until rescued), that's pretty bad writing all round, and in the VAST majority of cases of such lazy writing, the character/furniture is a woman. True, there's a lot of that. Because it is a cheap, easy move to do get emotion as quickly as possible in a shallow story. Not saying its right or anything, but that's why it is done so much. Wanderer posted:Yeah, in the '80s the princess thing was already a cliche. She might as well have been a bag of money or a sandwich or something. It really is the tradition of crap writing. Its the princess in the tower and such. Its done over and over and it really needs some meat on the drat bones.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:03
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Wanderer posted:It was easier to find the tweet than I thought it'd be, and she said that using the trope at all is "embarrassing," then goes off on all the reasons why it should never be used at all. Weren't those suggestions in her Tropes vs Women video? Or one of them? Did she get all galvanized and polarized since then?
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Jul 11, 2015 02:03
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Wanderer posted:Google femfreq twitter "dying light" I want to make sure we are working with the same quotes. Just link them.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:03
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Obdicut posted:This is one reason why the word 'trope' and the idea of 'subverting' it annoys me. If you go to rescue her and she broke out already, she's not a damsel in distress. The trope hasn't been followed. I don't think Sarkeesian or anyone else would have a problem with that. To put it another way, the 'subversion 'of a trope is normally the opposite of it, so it's not 'using' it, it's referencing it. Trope and cliche are two different things. A lot of people do not understand this. The problem is that this is jargon mostly used by writers and literary people. It is like the word theory in science has a different meaning outside of the discipline which not many people know. Wanderer posted:It was easier to find the tweet than I thought it'd be, and she said that using the trope at all is "embarrassing," then goes off on all the reasons why it should never be used at all. The thing is strong people can get overwhelmed too. You can do it with strong characters, you just keep them strong. You don't make them suddenly lose all their character traits because they were in trouble. (Unless they were just fronting or something). EDIT: Mel Mudkiper posted:I want to make sure we are working with the same quotes. Just link them. https://twitter.com/femfreq/status/561761720834592768 These ones?
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Jul 11, 2015 02:07
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Dapper Dan posted:The thing is strong people can get overwhelmed too. You can do it with strong characters, you just keep them strong. You don't make them suddenly lose all their character traits because they were in trouble. (Unless they were just fronting or something). I can see your point about this. One problem I guess I have is that the narrative is so ubiquitous right now that any attempt to do it "authentically" comes off as part of the noise instead of being genuine. Like, a crime procedural could do something really authentic and respectful with a serial killer of women but the genre is so stuffed with objectified female corpses that it would still be hard for it to come off as separate from the trope.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:10
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I thought so but I don't see why pointing out a trope is played out to the point of being embarrassing as a narrative device is saying it can never be used again.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:12
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Isn't this exactly what she proposes with her game concept? Granted I found that whole part weak but the whole thing was built off subverting the trope like you said. Her game concept, as I remember it, was a fairly blatant genderswap of the original Prince of Persia. It's been a while, though. Admiral Ray posted:Weren't those suggestions in her Tropes vs Women video? Or one of them? Did she get all galvanized and polarized since then? Might've been. I should probably take the time to refresh my memory on her videos if I'm going to be talking about them. I just remember her making the case that the "damseling" thing happens super often and how that was weird. Dapper Dan posted:It really is the tradition of crap writing. Its the princess in the tower and such. Its done over and over and it really needs some meat on the drat bones. Really, my takeaway point from most of Sarkeesian's videos has always been an issue that I knew existed before she made the scene: writing in games, plot and dialogue and characterization, is often treated like a disposable afterthought and shouldn't be. What she ended up highlighting more than anything else was that untrained, inexperienced writers (and a lot of the fifth, sixth, and seventh-generation video game writers were literally just some dude in the office, rather than somebody who actually had any writing experience or education, i.e. Chris Metzen) will tend to go over some really well-worn territory unless you tell them to do something else. It's not that they're actually sexist assholes; it's that they're thoughtless, and a lot of these shopworn concepts have been around for long enough that you can use them without thinking. Anthony Burch had a funny line after E3 last year, where he mentioned that Borderlands 2 was already done and in stores before he realized that he had, completely inadvertently, written a plot in which the black guy dies and the female lead gets kidnapped to force you into action. This poo poo can bushwhack you.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:14
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I thought so but I don't see why pointing out a trope is played out to the point of being embarrassing as a narrative device is saying it can never be used again. Yeah, well, you're a Pokemon. What's to be expected. It's a series of tweets ranting about why it's stupid and why it should never, ever be done. My takeaway from it was Anita Sarkeesian, Trope Guardian. Your mileage apparently varies.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:16
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Wanderer posted:It's not that they're actually sexist assholes; it's that they're thoughtless, and a lot of these shopworn concepts have been around for long enough that you can use them without thinking. This is the literal exact point of her entire series so I do not see why you are so eager to reject what she is saying
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Jul 11, 2015 02:17
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Mel Mudkiper posted:I can see your point about this. One problem I guess I have is that the narrative is so ubiquitous right now that any attempt to do it "authentically" comes off as part of the noise instead of being genuine. A lot of people don't realize that you literally cannot write without tropes. It is functionally impossible. There have been multiple novels in the second person and written solely with words containing the letter 'e', You can't get around them. People think pointing out a trope is like some big 'gotcha!' moment. Its like accusing someone of using a hammer to build a house. The problem is you have to look at each work in its own contexts. Sometimes it is really easy with videogames since their writing tends to be bad, but a lot of times it isn't so clear cut and stories will mean different things to different people. While you can identify the trope, it is much harder to get people to understand that it isn't just about that.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:19
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Mel Mudkiper posted:This is the literal exact point of her entire series so I do not see why you are so eager to reject what she is saying I have said repeatedly that she isn't wrong, except that I thought some of her Tweets are stupid and her arguments are reductionist. Jump off my dick.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:19
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Wanderer posted:Yeah, well, you're a Pokemon. What's to be expected. Are you seriously reducing yourself to attacking my avatar? quote:It's a series of tweets ranting about why it's stupid and why it should never, ever be done. My takeaway from it was Anita Sarkeesian, Trope Guardian. Your mileage apparently varies. Here is what I found. Show me where she says it should never be done. Feminist Frequency @femfreq Jan 31 Dying Light has a Damsel in Distress storyline. Dear game developers, it’s 2015 aren’t you embarrassed by this yet?! Feminist Frequency @femfreq Feb 1 When female characters appear capable before being damsel’d it does not make it better. It makes it worse. It's literally disempowering. Feminist Frequency @femfreq Feb 1 The villain’s dialog in Dying Light about damseling Jade: "The last time we met you took something of mine, now I took something of yours.” minist Frequency @femfreq Feb 1 That Dying Light quote is damning because regardless of her strengths she is still reduced to an object in a competition between men. Feminist Frequency @femfreq Feb 1 Reminder: In the game of patriarchy, women are not the opposing team, they are the ball. and that is all I could find on the subject. No where does she argue to never use the trope again. She points out it is embarrassing and disempowering. Which it is.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:19
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Dapper Dan posted:Trope and cliche are two different things. A lot of people do not understand this. The problem is that this is jargon mostly used by writers and literary people. It is like the word theory in science has a different meaning outside of the discipline which not many people know. I know what it means. I'm still saying it's a bad taxonomy.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:22
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Dapper Dan posted:The problem is you have to look at each work in its own contexts. I don't think this can be done in any medium though. Art doesn't exist within its own self-prescribed context. It will always exist within the larger narratives of the society that produced it. Wanderer posted:I have said repeatedly that she isn't wrong, except that I thought some of her Tweets are stupid and her arguments are reductionist. Jump off my dick. This is not a personal attack on you. You do not have to get upset.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:23
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Mel Mudkiper posted:Are you seriously reducing yourself to attacking my avatar? That's an awfully razor thin distinction.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:27
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Germstore posted:That's an awfully razor thin distinction. How so? Critics point out issues with narratives and themes all the time. It doesn't mean they are demanding the wholesale extinction on their usage. If you want to say someone is calling for banning something you need to show it. Criticism is not censorship. EDIT: For example, Roger Ebert said slasher films were trashy and reductive. That doesn't mean he said slasher films should never be made again.
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Jul 11, 2015 02:29
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