We greatly appreciate your faith, but we fear it is misplaced.
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Random!
- Beat Deus Ex: Human Revolution a few days ago; the more formal review will be forthcoming. Short version is: game was goo… *crash to desktop*
- Steam holiday sales annoy me to an extent. You see, what is the point of having entire catalogs on sale from 33-50% off, when they routinely turn around and toss up seemingly random selections from those same catalogs for 75% off? The only purpose I can ascertain is to piss people off.
- For example, Space Marine was 33% off for the pass week, now is 50%. Torchlight was 50% off for the past week, now is 75%. I learned my lesson when I was burned in this way a year ago, but it still boggles my mind they pull the same shit year after year. All it encourages me to do is to wait until the very last moment to buy anything lest it go on sale a day later, and thereby potentially miss the deadline entirely and not buy anything.
- I generally avoid the stupid Steam contests that involve you having to (re-)download multiple 10 gb games you already purchased but haven’t played yet in order to unlock achievements that result in lumps of coal. I did however do so on a whim with the Orcs Must Die! one. I have been playing the game every since.
- Sometimes I hate buying shit off the internet. There are two monitors on Amazon, both Viewsonic 24″ widescreen LEDs: the VX2450WM (originally $368, now $179.99) and the VX2453MH (originally $270, now $189.99). For the life of me, I can’t seem to understand the difference. The latter has 30 million: 1 contrast as opposed to 20 million:1, is “ultra thin,” can be turned into a picture-frame looking thing for god knows what reason, and weighs 0.9 lbs less. The former can be mounted on a stand or something, and has roughly three times as many reviews (both are 4.5/5 stars).
- My first instinct, I shit you not, was the former simply because “You Save: $188.01 (51%)” vs “You Save: $80.24 (30%).” With logic like that, I’m surprised I haven’t already ruined the Monster cables hooked up to my Alienware by spilling Grey Poupon all over them. Good thing I’m still covered under my Black Tie GeekSquad 5-year Best Buy warranty, ya?
- Grey Poupon. Poupon. Poupon.
- You now have an angry French guy in your head. You’re welcome.
Have a happy whatever you celebrate or not celebrate, as the case may be.
Chilton and Audiences
From a NYTimes article:
“What we’re trying to do now is figure out what our current audience wants,” Tom Chilton, World of Warcraft’s game director, told me by phone last week. “It became clear that it wasn’t realistic to try to get the audience back to being more hard core, as it had been in the past.”
As someone returning to World of Warcraft after a long absence, I find the current direction of the game eminently engaging. As Mr. Chilton said, “We hear from a lot people who used to play a lot that they’re just not at that point in their life anymore, and they want to play, and they want to see the content. But they can’t make the same time commitment they used to.”
What is interesting to me is how they felt that it was realistic in the first place. And the use of “current” audience, with the implication that a prior audience existed but no longer does today. The debate over whether the “more hardcore prior audience” hollowing out was due to lack of attention or was inevitable seems almost academic at this point.
The same MMO with a new community is a different MMO, period.
Sexism: Point Taken
This should be my last post on the sexism topic for a while, as the items below essentially obsoleted a 1500-word post on the subject I had scheduled to go up.
Item 1: The Comic
False Equivalence from Shortpacked.com:
Although I would still argue the finer points of what physical features are power fantasies to whom… well, point taken.
Item 2: The Paradigm-Shifting Article
Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women. An excerpt from the thesis bit:
I think the major problem here is that women were clamoring for “strong female characters,” and male writers misunderstood. They thought the feminists meant [Strong Female] Characters. The feminists meant [Strong Characters], Female.
So the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.” They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.” Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.” “Weak” meaning “flawed.”
Good characters, male or female, have goals, and they have flaws. Any character without flaws will be a cardboard cutout. Perhaps a sexy cardboard cutout, but two-dimensional nonetheless. And no, “Always goes for douchebags instead of the Nice Guy” (the flaw of Megan Fox’s character in Transformers) is not a real flaw. Men think women have that flaw, but most women avoid “Nice Guys” because they just aren’t that nice. So that doesn’t count.
This article, much like the two videos I posted previously, came from such an unexpected direction that it shifted the entire way I looked at the issue itself. Even the nagging objection I had in the back of my mind – “Is attractiveness in these female characters harmful, then?” – is addressed towards the latter end of the article.
Item 3: The Pithy Video
Why Men and Women Can’t be Friends.
While the previous two items changed the scope of the debate for me, this video summarizes the problems I have with the article Nerds and Male Privilege, the one that made me /facepalm so hard I developed an epidural hematoma and set me to writing a 1500-word post. At one point in the aforementioned article, “Dr. Nerdlove” writes: “Y’see, nobody’s saying that women don’t receive different treatment from guys… I’m saying that being treated differently is the problem.” While the examples of sexism he goes on to use are legitimately bad (assuming a woman is a quota hire or got to where she is by sexual favors, etc), there is an implicit underpinning to the article that if nerds just treated women equally, all this would go away.
Except… it can’t. The harassment and stereotypes can and should be diminished, absolutely. But as the video succinctly demonstrates, there will always be a difference, even under gender equality.
A Few Unresolved Issues
First, there is the question of whether characters like Samus, Chell, FemShep, etc, are actually strong female characters if they could be replaced by male characters without a loss in narrative integrity. The Rule 63 Dilemma, if you will. I’m inclined to say that any non-fanservice female is a win by default, but I can acknowledge how that may amount to the soft bigotry of low expectations.
Second, I am beginning to question whether a call should go out for more weak male characters (see Item 2). While some would point to, say, Batman as an example of a flawed male character with depth, my point is that male protagonists inevitably succeed at “being a man.” Chiseled men kicking ass may be a male power fantasy (see Item 1), but I consider it just as pernicious a fantasy as Objectified female sex objects. When I was out of work for 14 months, I felt a crippling sense of shame for not “being a man,” because men provide, men aren’t weak, men aren’t emotional, and so on. While there is obviously a power difference between being conditioned to be aggressive versus demure/passive/accommodating, it is still harmful conditioning.
Third, while the debate on Syl’s blog has wound down, one of the main issues we have “agreed to disagree” on was why Tifa/Sylvanas were drawn sexy. Syl asked “Why?” I asked “Why not?” They both are written as strong characters, so it should not matter in the scheme of things to also dial up the visually appealing meter while we’re there. Syl asked: “what’s the message there exactly and why will their male equivalents not come with equal, sexual innuendo?” My counter-question would be, if I were still permitted to post there, “What would you like to see, innuendo-wise, from males?” From my (limited) understanding on the subject, what women find visually appealing or sexual varies wildly from woman to woman. In contrast, pretty much all men are visually attracted to boobs and butts. If the Batman from Item 1 is only appealing to 20% of the female audience, is that a win or a loss considering the traditional Batman model is 100% appealing to men for power fantasy purposes (and presumably X% of women)?
I understand that it’s more fair if the audience breakdown for games is 50/50 to draw as visually appealing characters as possible without alienating one side (i.e. women) with panty shots or barely-there clothing. I suppose the question is: what’s the impact when one gender is more predisposed to visuals than the other? Is equal still fair? Or can we agree with the article in Item 2 insofar that the problem isn’t the sexiness of female characters at all, but rather when the whole depth of their character concept is visual sexiness?
In closing, I want to mention again the importance of tailoring one’s argument away from Goal-oriented methods towards more Results-oriented ones. The articles and arguments that shifted my attitude on this subject were NOT the confrontational ones that attempted to guilt me into accepting their conclusions wholesale. Even though the comic in Item 1 began that way, the unique perspective of what a woman actually found attractive in comparison to the standard fantasy male was intriguing; not to mention the idea that Batman’s chiseled abs were drawn for men. That, along with the notion that sexy poses were actually demeaning and patronizing to men too, were game-changers. How could you argue against that? There is no defense. Appealing to self-interest may not be as noble, but at some point the question arises as to whether you’d rather be noble, or actually accomplish what you set out to change.
Strong Female Characters
I was not going to write a follow-up to yesterday’s post, but I came across another Kotaku post today titled “It’s Time for a Lady Hero in Grand Theft Auto.” I agree with the article, in that such a thing would be awesome, assuming they find a way to make it work. And by “work” I mean actually make the main character being a woman matter, as opposed to merely swapping gender models in a story written for a man (or gender neutral, which so often defaults to man anyway).
But then I got to thinking… is that not what typically occurs anyway, even with strong female characters?
In the comment section of that article, the following was posted:
Oh shit a female character? How am I supposed to relate to that?
BRB PLAYING METROID AND PORTAL.
The comment is obviously sarcastic, referring to the strong female characters of Samus Aran in Metroid and Chell in the Portal series. And yet, at what point does it matter in any meaningful sense that the protagonists are women? Don’t get me wrong, I love that they are. As I mentioned in the comments on Syl’s post:
I love strong women. I love the rich, dramatic narrative possibilities of balancing strength with femininity; “being a man” is almost always one-dimensional (i.e. strength == man) in contrast. It is why I almost always roll female toons in MMOs.
A woman slaughtering a bandit camp or slaying a dragon is automatically more interesting to me than a man doing the same. But if I am honest, it’s that way because I’m imagining more complex inner struggles into those events from the female side. I expect a man to slaughter a bandit camp or slay a dragon, because that is the cliche. To not do so would be a renunciation of “being a man.” Which, incidentally, is something I consider far more pernicious than any Objectification that goes on with scantily-clad women, but I may be biased. But when a woman slaughters a bandit camp, I envision a struggle against conformity, against despair, against a nature inclined to nurture, and so on. The Bene Gesserit of Dune and Aes Sedai of The Wheel of Time are more interesting groups of people because they are women; a mystical cabal of controlling men is almost too cliche to commit to paper.
Going back to the Metroid and Portal examples though, did it really matter in a narrative sense that they were female? I would say no. Samus and Chell could have been dudes and the game would have played out in the same way. If strong female characters can be replaced with males with zero narrative loss, are they really strong female characters? As I mentioned, them being dudes would have certainly diminished something from my play experience, but I’m struggling with the intellectual notion that the gender of the character model really makes that big a difference to me. Or is the fact that they could be replaced by men without a loss of narrative integrity actually a win? Gender equality and all that.
Perhaps silent protagonists are not the best examples. Final Fantasy 7 is my second favorite game of all time, and I consider Tifa one of the deepest characters in any RPG I have ever played, despite (and perhaps in spite of) some of her more obvious fanservice qualities. Tifa is strong, capable, independent and yet distinctly feminine at the same time. That being said, outside of taking care of Cloud during the whole Mako poisoning bit, and the pseudo love triangle thing, I could not really give examples of what I mean by “distinctly feminine” that does not have something to do with the way she looks or otherwise read like a laundry list of cliches. Maybe that’s okay, and those prior distinctions are enough?
So, good luck Rockstar. I cannot wait to see what they would do with a female lead in GTA.
P.S. While “researching” this post, I came across two excellent examples of What To Do when talking sexism in games, both in video format. The first is The Big Picture: Gender Games, and the second is Game Overthinker: Bayonetta. The former is rather brilliant with it’s “pose” argument, which is both intuitive and unassailable. The latter doesn’t focus on sexism explicitly, which makes its implicit argument all the more compelling when you realize what just happened by the end, i.e. you agreed with everything.
If you want to affect real change, you do it that way.
Internet Sexism, Global Warming, and the War on Terror
Through a confluence of events – namely Syl’s war on panties and a Kotaku article that points towards an abysmally counter-productive blog post – I want to talk about internet sexism for a moment. Namely, how not to do it. For example, taken from aforementioned counter-productive blog post:
So first up, is this a problem at all? Yes. Yes, this is a problem. The gaming community contains an incredible number of idiots. Go here and read this article about Saint’s Row 3 by Emma Boyes. It’s a good article, well reasoned and the complete opposite of anything aggressive or hectoring or provocative. It defends a game that has been attacked for sexism. It’s a great piece.Then read the comments and it’s just a roll-call of complete fucking bullshit. Angry, shouty, stupid, illogical, emotional, insecure ranting, brought forth from the depths of the internet’s prick cabinet. If that exact same article had been written by a man, not a single one of those comments would have been written. That’s because they have absolutely nothing to do with anything that’s said in the article and, more importantly, because men don’t get handed this shit.
This is not how you should approach the problem of sexism over the internet. To be honest, even approaching the problem of sexism over the internet is probably dumb. Not because sexism is a cause unworthy of one’s concern, but because it is an unnecessarily Sisyphean struggle based on how you are outlining the issue.
The United States is currently “at war” with Terror, even after Drugs won the Drug War. If you set your objective as eliminating the Platonic Form that is Terror – and exclude the Terror you inflict on other nations – you set yourself up for failure. All terrorists have to do is succeed once; you must succeed 100% of the time, forever. Similarly, eliminating internet sexism can never succeed considering that the closer you reach the endpoint, the more effective a sexist troll becomes.
Is such thinking defeatist? No. To be defeatist is to set oneself up for defeat, i.e. unrealistic goals. Your goals should be informed by what you want to accomplish, not the other way around.
When Nils wrote about Global Warming, I knew how the comments would unfold before I even read the post. Why? Because the way the Green movement approaches the subject is dumb. We should not be talking about the earth warming, sea levels rising, and so on. It is entirely possible (no matter how unlikely) that mankind has nothing to do with the earth warming; every minute you spend trying to convince someone the Green movement isn’t an anti-business communist conspiracy is a minute farther away from what you want to accomplish. Instead, Green should be focusing on the power plants very obviously spewing toxic material in the air. Green should focus on more fuel-efficient cars for energy independence and because, hey, efficiency. And in the process of focusing on concrete, unassailable accomplishments, Green also achieves their Global Warming goals.
Incidentally, the above is why this nonsense:
@olly – If you believe what you just said and act accordingly then you are enabling those assholes. These people will always exist but it is still your personal job to tell them they are being assholes when they are being assholes.
We don’t stop trying to catch murderers just because there will always be murderers.
You are making excuses. Stop it.
…is worse than doing nothing, it’s counter-productive. Calling trolls assholes is exactly what they want. The more white knights that show up on internet message boards, the more embarrassing their (otherwise noble) behavior appears to everyone else, and the less likely anyone actually does stick up for women (etc) when it counts. And by the way, if you tell someone who gives to charity that they don’t give enough, you are liable to make them stop giving at all.
If you want to combat internet sexism, demand these companies moderate their own goddamn comment sections. Do you see? A well-moderated forum is just as free from (trolling) sexism as an utopian gender-equal society. Moreover, the actual issue was never sexism per se, but trolling itself. “Solving” sexism and racism and other -isms is fairly meaningless if everyone ends up trolling about how fat, stupid, or ugly someone is instead.
Sexism in the real world is a lot more difficult to solve, of course. But just like with everything above, the key is to leave ideology at the door, fix the plumbing, and then the owner will invite ideology in on their own. And even if they don’t, well, at least the plumbing got fixed.
When In Doubt, Update Drivers
As I mentioned in the last post, I was extremely nervous about my computer “investment” considering the choppy performance in Deus Ex: Human Revolution thus far. When I re-downloaded Fraps, I finally saw the full scope of the depravity: ~15 fps standing still in the outdoor environments, single digits walking around. Keep in mind, that was with the lowest texture settings, AA set to one notch above “none,” and a 1440×900 resolution. As is often the case in these things, Google was fairly useless other than letting me know that people with lesser machines were miraculously getting better performance.
Then, in my darkest… half-hour, I fell back on my most basic of training: when in doubt, update drivers.
The Nvidia driver update did not actually solve anything. But in the process of updating it, I noticed a Virtu Control Panel button in the System Tray. Screwing around with the settings there did nothing. That was when I chose the “check for updates button,” navigating to their website for the latest driver. Which said:
New games added
- Battlefield 3
- Shogun2
- Crysis 2
- DiRT3
- Deus EX Human Revolution
From what I gather, the Virtu program basically creates a virtual GPU that combines the power of your processors + your normal graphics card. Or, in my case, prevent my computer from using the goddamn graphics card. No, seriously. Once the driver was updated, I loaded up Deus Ex and had a maximum settings, 105 fps orgasm. We’re talking Perpetual Motion Machine lubricant smooth. This feels like an entirely different game than I was playing for the last 15 hours. I almost feel like starting the game over entirely.
So, when in doubt, update drivers. Including the drivers for shit you didn’t even know was installed on the machine.
Deus Ex: Cardboard Box Revolution
Been playing DE: HR for about 11 hours now, and I have come to some early conclusions.
- Many of the design incentives are all screwed up.
It is one thing for your reward scheme to be rote enough that a player can earn XP for knocking out a guard, and then earn even more XP for killing the unconscious guard. Or that there are obviously invisible XP triggers in the duct-work, that encourage players to actually wander around up there long after there was a need to. Those are fine, whatever.
Where I begin to draw the line is the differences between hacking a computer and using the known passcode for the same computer. It is not just the XP that you get for doing the former: the hacking bit is actually fun and rewards its own loot. Not getting the hacking loot might be considered an acceptable “cost” for someone who never bothers to upgrade those skills, sure. But the game design in regards to hackers doesn’t make sense on two levels. 1) Using the passcode prevents you from playing the fun minigame, and 2) it makes no goddamn sense that you couldn’t unlock those secret files with full administrative access to the computer. If I can find secret files while hacking, why can’t I find secret files when I enter the password?
Of course, many people have commented on the above inconsistencies months ago. While I haven’t gone around killing the guards I knock unconscious or running around in the duct-work unnecessarily for the XP, I find the hacking bit to be especially jarring. That could be a sign of my atrophied “simulation is important” organ lurching back to life, but I prefer to think of it as the principal of the thing. If I’m a hacker-type and get your password, I should automatically get all the goodies on your computer. It’s only fair.
- I’m getting nervous about my computer investment.
Perhaps its unrealistic expectations, but I honestly thought I’d boot up the game and play on the highest settings at 60+ FPS. That… is not the case. I turned some settings down, usually the ones with the acronyms that they don’t bother explaining, and am at a point where everything still looks good and plays smoothly. Considering Kotaku pointed out a deal today on a laptop with a i5-2430M, GeForce GT 555M for $695.20… I’m concerned I may not have got $500 more oomph for my money. Ultimately, it will come down to how BF3 plays, since that was my primary impetus for the purchase.
- Did this game begin as a cardboard box simulator?
Seriously, you cannot walk 15 feet in-game without half a dozen cardboard boxes being highlighted in helpful yellow. At first I was confused about all this seemingly pointless interactivity. But that was before I got to the basement of the police station…
Nothing out of the ordinary here, Mr. Camera.
Directly behind me was a keycard reader I was hacking; behind the boxes is an oscillating video camera with its helpful green beams. In a break from FPS tradition (Bioshock, et tal), hacking in DE:HR forces you to stand up and do so in real time. After some close calls with attempting to disable the camera with my stun gun and hack my way through the door while getting all the goodies, I came upon the more… practical solution.
In An Age 
Boxed In
Dec 14
Posted by Azuriel
I have been having more fun with boxes than strictly necessary in DE: HR.
Two birds, one industrial crate.
Things Not to Say to A Guy Randomly Carrying Around a Vending Machine #467
With that kind of setup, I was surprised by the lack of an achievement.
What has been less fun are the frequent Crash-To-Desktop (C2D). By “frequent,” I mean between every 5 to 50 minutes with a trend towards the former. It boggles my mind that legitimate pieces of software are able to be released in this sort of broken state. Googling results in the same, unhelpful article posted a hundred different places. The Steam forums basically tells you to turn off DirectX11 (it’s off), and then tells you that it’s not really a Steam issue anyway. The Edios website tells you to, no joke, create a non-administrative user account in Windows, then play the game from there (tried it, didn’t work). Oh, and by the way, technically it’s not an Edios problem, but a Square-Enix problem. And there is no useful support forum for Square-Enix.
Finally, there was always the “turn everything down” proposed solution. I have yet to try this “solution,” mainly because A) I didn’t purchase a goddamn $1200 computer to play games on settings my laptop could have done, and B) the C2Ds, while supremely annoying, do not make the game unplayable.
I would like to believe that, ultimately, reviews should reflect the game as it should be, or is for the majority of players, reflected through the prism of of the reviewer’s worldview. For example, it would be asinine to complain about DE: HR’s graphics looking terrible in 640×480 resolution with the lowest settings. Similarlly, should a game be “punished” if it launched with bugs that later players never experience?
On the other hand, this situation frustrates me so much precisely because I love everything else going on. If it was a terrible game, like say Frozen Synapse, I would have dropped it like a rock (something I typically do not do). I want to be able to say that I’m never buying another game from Edios/Square-Enix based on their shitty QA process, but just like with Bethesda, I can’t say that either. If they released another Deus Ex, I’d be on that like
white on ricemicrofiber weave carbon nanotubes on a super-conducting ceramic polymer.Posted in Commentary
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Tags: Crash-To-Desktop, Deus Ex: Human Revolution