Gamergate makes me very, VERY happy. After the Quinn thing I was legitimately thinking of dropping the games industry professionally and moving on to more standard work - GG got a lot of really solid people have come out of the woodwork to call the whole SJW/jorunalism scene in games out on its bull*****. And there's at least one big new news site that will be going up that avoids the incestuous dumb that is games journalism. I'm really looking forward to where the legit gamergate people will take this going forward - we have a REAL chance of breaking out of the bull***** in the near future.
People like Zoe Quinn and the entire Kotaku editorial staff can burn, and the sooner the better for the gaming community.
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Gamergate makes me very, VERY happy. After the Quinn thing I was legitimately thinking of dropping the games industry professionally and moving on to more standard work - GG got a lot of really solid people have come out of the woodwork to call the whole SJW/jorunalism scene in games out on its bull*****. And there's at least one big new news site that will be going up that avoids the incestuous dumb that is games journalism. I'm really looking forward to where the legit gamergate people will take this going forward - we have a REAL chance of breaking out of the bull***** in the near future.
People like Zoe Quinn and the entire Kotaku editorial staff can burn, and the sooner the better for the gaming community.
Could you explain in more detail what you consider to be the 'SJW scene in games'? I'm all in favour of the 'Big publisher games mysteriously get good reviews from journalists when the games are average at best' thing ending. I used to enjoy reading the PC Format (UK) reviews in the early 90s; they really tore into bad games. I'm not sure what the link between Zoe Quinn and corruption in the game journalism industry is though, particularly if the GameOverGate stuff I've seen this morning is accurate.
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Quote from MD »
I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
People are being driven out of the home and forced to give up there work, online harassment does do tangible harm.
I agree completely. Which is why I wrote the words, "Without in any way excusing a completely inexcusable online harassment campaign..." It is not necessary for harassment to be harmless to make my point. It is not even necessary for harassment to be any less harmful than arson to make my point (although it is). My point in fact rests on drawing an equivalence between harassment and arson for the specific purpose of illustrating a fallacy.
Also this is a pretty terrible analogy, I mean is a journalist maybe having given some favourable press to someone he slept with anything like the killing of a young black man in questionable circumstances by the police?
They are alike in that both are alleged acts of wrongdoing, and in both cases some people are dismissing the allegations by pointing at other acts of wrongdoing committed in reaction to them. It is this similarity upon which my analogy rests. I'm not saying that they're alike in every particular. I'm saying, "Don't let the bad behavior of bad people distract you from the original issue."
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Wait...There are video game Journalists? I thought those went the way of Nintendo Power; once everyone realized they were just shills for whichever Publisher gave them the most money that week.
Ok maybe I am being to subtle, have you considered that if you run into this problem everywhere that really the problem is you not the people you are talking too. Getting all worked up and calling people white knights does not endear you to anyone, even if you might have a point under there you are putting it in such a way that it is very hard to take you seriously. Being perfectly honest hearing someone say the problem with video game journalism is all the white knighting, makes me think you are some angry twelve year old of xbox live. I am not saying this is the case but it is how you come across. Also even if gaming sites where committing the crime of being too nice to women is that really a problem? Even more so is it a problem you should be getting this worked up about.
Look, this is not something I get called often. Yes, I have considered I am part of the problem. No, I don't call people white knights to ther faces. And yes, I was angry this morning. Not really about this debate, but that sort of stuff tends to Carry over.
And please stop with the straw men. I never said the industry's problem is that they're being nice to women and you know that.
Or maybe some introspection is needed, I mean really it is very hard to take you seriously why you say things like white knights. Really saying that or social justic warrior makes your point sound ridiculous. I mean look at this http://imgur.com/NFGgOEU I don't see how any adult can look at that image and not cringe.
They're easy buzzwords, similar to how I've seen misogynist and sexist thrown around on all sorts of news sites. And they make your point sound just as ridiculous, I agree.
If that pic makes you cringe already, what does the article do? At least the pic might have been made by an actual teenager, that article was written by an adult journalist. It's overgeneralizing, stigmatizing ***** like this that actually makes people so virulently pissed off at the whole 'SJW' thing.
That's actually an accurate description of events. That it makes gamers sound pathetic is, uh, not the fault of the writer. I mean, we've got evidence of nerds conspiring to ruin Quinn's life and explicitly trying to manipulate people like you. What makes men so angry at people who want to make a space safe for women as well is that they're losing the privileges they've historically enjoyed. Just being a man who went to college is no longer the guarantee for success it was decades ago due to the economic system no longer being able to support it. The alienation inherent to capitalism is now affecting ever more white men and they're freaking out over it and blaming it all on the feminist and anti-racist movements.
Oh hello there. Could you face that white wall over there? Me and a few friends werk watching a film on my tv, but since you're projecting so heavily, you might As well make yourself useful.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
These are not equivalent events and it is almost insulting to try and make it seem like that they are.
I have never claimed that they are equivalent events, only that they have one thing in common: they are both wrong. Not that they are equally wrong - that they both have the basic quality of wrongness. Do you wish to deny that one or the other is wrong?
And even if I had claimed equivalency, to call this claim "almost insulting" would not refute it. A statement can be almost insulting - or actually insulting - and still be true; hell, it's the true insults that are the truly painful ones. Furthermore, using broad expressions of indignation in place of clear analysis and argument is precisely my definition of SJW-dom. So... thank you for providing a pithy illustration of that problem, I guess?
Look, this is not something I get called often. Yes, I have considered I am part of the problem. No, I don't call people white knights to ther faces. And yes, I was angry this morning. Not really about this debate, but that sort of stuff tends to Carry over.
And please stop with the straw men. I never said the industry's problem is that they're being nice to women and you know that.
I don't know what your problem is and that is the issue here. It is not integrity of game journalism and it is not people being too nice too women so what is it? You got angry and yelled about white knights but that is it. Really I don't get what you want or expect too see, if you don't care about people being too nice to women what does "white knighting" even mean? I am totally lost as to what sort of point you are making.
I'm frustrated by the double standard in the gaming journalism. Death threats against Sarkeesian are news, while those same things against the CEO of stardock are not. Calling Zoe Quinn names is a banworthy offense on many sites, while those same sites did not even hand out warnings for calling wizardchanners "subhuman scum"and worse.
I'm baffled by the idea that people have to have the same melanin levels and the same sets of chromosomes As the character they're playing to be able to empathize with them. We've played as a hispanic skeleton who functions as a travel agent for the recently deceased, as an investigative journalist who runs an orphanage in a lighthouse together with a pig, as a creature whose hands, feet and head floated inches from his torso and who helicopters his ears so fast het can float. Why do they insist that playing a black guy or a woman is somehow a issue?
And what I'm most confused about is the why. We all know that despite the numbers saying fifty percent of gamers are female ti's still very much a dangler's club. I don't understNd why they seem so hellbent on alienating people with this false narrative.
Just what monolithic group is he actually referring to in his entire piece and how does he support all the psychological (and ethical) claims he makes about them? What makes you think this is about people hating women? Why would it be about people projecting their own frustrations onto others online? What makes you say that they never cared about these ethical standards before?
There's that. There's also that any time someone writes about the necessity of gender equality they receive threats for it, especially if they're women. This is widely documented. Anyone who has had any contact at all with anyone who is involved with feminism or anti-racism will know that there is a bunch of very angry white men who hide online and build communities around harassing people. If you've played online games you've come into contact with homophobia, sexism and racism.
You're wondering what makes anyone think there's a problem with gamers and the answer to that is simply "women's lived experiences in those communities".
Yes, we all know that there are really bad apples in the community. How does that prove that all people involved in #gamergate are scared of the cooties?
Also: go through the chatlogs of the five guys irc channel and you'll see that there are a few people constantst bringing up blackhatting which are being ignored or chatbanned. It's not the hive of scum Quinn says it is at all (much like wizardchan). Escapist has a decent article on this on the front page.
Combo player-Your arguments really drive home for me what a bigoted bunch of BS "social justice" is. White males are tired of social justice for the same reason black people got tired of having to sit at the back of the bus or drink out of seperate fountains (and NO the extent/scope of these injustices is NOT relevent to the comparison). Privilege theory is just the reframing of things a group has accomplished/earned as something unearned/undeserved and that alone should be a giant red flag that it's bigoted BS. Modern day white males do not owe any other demographic anything for what happened in the past.
People are also angry at SJW's because of the awe inspiring amoung of hypocrisy inherent to your ideology. You declare some groups "oppressed" and then argue that justifies them acting like A-holes and degrading others for the exact things you would never tolerate from the groups you have labeled "privileged" that is not creating equality THAT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF EQUALITY!
Zoe Quinn is clearly a corrupt individual and that is a story (and no it doesn't have to be as big a story as another story to matter).
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As humans, we have a tendency to cling to ideologies. Any positive set of beliefs can quickly turn malevolent once treated as ideology and not an honest intellectual or experiential pursuit of greater truth. Ideology does in entire economic systems and countries, causes religions to massacre thousands, turns human rights movements into authoritarian sects and makes fools out of humanity’s most brilliant minds. Einstein famously wasted the second half of his career trying to calculate a cosmological constant that didn’t exist because “God doesn’t play dice.”
So.... new evidence suggests that the IGF and Polygon actually racketeered the Awards, went out of protocol twice to get Fez to win the money, Twice, and some other nasties.
Warning, long:
We have some interesting facts to disseminate for the public interest. In 2009 Philippe Poisson received investment money for Polytron Corporation in the form of a loan from several influential people.
Ron Carmel of 2D Boy
Nathan Vella of Capybara Studios
Aaron Isaksen of AppAbove
Kellee Santiago of OUYA, formerly of thatgamecompany, and IndieCade
Jonathan Blow of EGW
Kyle Gabler of 2D Boy
Matthew Wegner of Flashbang Studios
These 7 people later went on to form Indie Fund, the “funding source for independent developers” who were “looking to encourage the next wave of game developers.” You can consider FEZ to have received the “Beta” Indie Fund.
Each of these individuals contributed a different amount of money to the FEZ creator and, in return, received a guarantee of a percentage of Gross Profits from Polytron.
While this isn't necessarily the de-facto standard method of investing in a company, it is a valid method of fund raising and isn't suspicious in its own right.
What is suspicious are the events that followed the initial investment of Polytron.
In 2011, the Independent Games Festival (or IGF) had 5 members of Indie Fund on the finalists panel, and 3 members of Polytron's staff. That's 8 out of 10 judges. Mere days before IGF was to accept submissions, FEZ creator Philippe Poisson had to announce the delay of FEZ. Had Polytron finished FEZ on time, the game would have been a shoe-in to win the grand prize at IGF that year as they had a controlling interest.
In 2012, FEZ gets through nominations and wins big. Of note here is the IGF anonymous nomination panel: all of the finalist judges are invited back to nominate games the following year. So the Indie Fund judges from 2011 would anonymously judge entrants for 2012.
The nomination process is simple: a majority of people who vote on your game is all that is needed to push you through to the selection process. While judges are explicitly told that they can only vote on the games they are given, this is not the case, and any judge can vote on any game; for example, eight people who are members of a small clique can give one game a huge starting bias.
In this instance FEZ would have started off with a bias of +8, and since it only takes a majority of people who voted to push a game through it would take at least 8 other judges to vote no, plus the number of judges that legitimately vote yes for FEZ.
Even more interesting is that judges are not even required to play the game to submit a ruling on them. So, no time need be wasted by the submitting judges: they merely must say yes or no to continue the process.
We know all of this thanks to leaked conversations of anonymous judges from past IGFs. We'd like to thank these judges for coming forward.
Interestingly enough, and we think this is not a coincidence, the software used by IGF for the anonymous judges was created by Flashbang Studios – the same studio run by Matthew Wegner who had a financial interest in Polytron Corporation.
FEZ was allowed through the IGF process twice – once in 2008 as a demo, which was strictly against IGF standards, and again in 2012 as a complete game – which created a fire-storm in the indie gaming community.
FEZ was a pre-Indie Fund game. Antichamber was also an Indie Fund game, and it too was pushed through the IGF twice: once as Antichamber, and the year prior as Hazard.
We do not suspect illegitimate practices on the part of the IGF; however, we do find it suspect that Brandon Boyer is close friends with Philippe Poisson, as he has stated on his twitter account multiple times, and is also friends with members of Indie Fund.
We would encourage the IGF to investigate these possible abuses of the anonymous nomination process as well as have an outside third party firm audit the code of their anonymous jury nomination software.
With that being said, I would now turn your attention to IndieCade, which labels itself as supporting the independent game development community. We intend to show that the only thing IndieCade supports is their own wallets.
Kellee Santiago, in 2009, invested money in Polytron which gave her voting rights in the company and a percentage stake in FEZ's Gross Profits. In 2011 she became Chair of the Awards Jury of IndieCade. Coincidentally, 2011 was the year that FEZ won two major awards at IndieCade:
Disciplinary Excellence in Story/World Design
General Excellence by Grand Jury (or, their grand prize)
IndieCade works with “hundreds” of jurors to select a winner, where the Chair of the Awards Jury “works closely” with each juror to help them select the right game. We find it suspicious that the Chair of the Awards Jury works closely with the anonymous jurors (some of which may or may not be members of Indie Fund) and has a vested financial interest in one of the games submitted to IndieCade which, interestingly, won their grand prize.
If this is true, then IndieCade is guilty of siphoning funds through ticket sales and sponsorship money as a prize for FEZ, which is then recycled directly back into the pockets of those investors. Philippe Poisson gets a payday from his buddy investors, and the investors, including Kellee Santiago, get a payday thanks to their loan agreement.
Coincidentally, after its big awards win at IGF, FEZ was released less than a month later. This helped bolster the property and contribute to its hot sales. We question just how much of a hand Indie Fund had in procuring those IGF awards.
We suspect that Indie Fund has manipulated events to guarantee that their “beta” product – FEZ – would be a success and give the investors at Indie Fund a good name, at the cost of damaging the entire reputation of the indie gaming community.
This racketeering allowed FEZ to receive top marketing in the gaming media through its win at IndieCade, and helped line the wallets of its investors thanks to its win and Indie Fund's suspicious involvement with IGF.
If FEZ received such preferential treatment thanks to Indie Fund, what other games also received this treatment? Did Monaco, Antichamber, Dear Esther, and Framed, which are all Indie Fund games, also received special treatment because the investors at Indie Fund have their hands in the cookie jar? What other companies does Kellee Santiago have a vested financial interest in? What financial interests do these anonymous jurors for IGF and IndieCade have? Why aren't any of these interests disclosed to the public, or even the developers that apply to these expensive events? Of the journalists that covered this, how many of them were “incentivized” by Indie Fund or their members to cover these games positively?
We may never know the answer to these questions. We do know that these different festivals are extremely important to marketing departments, as Edmond McMillen stated on a podcast where he recounts a conversation he had with a Microsoft marketing director.
Until we get full transparency of the judges and judging processes behind IGF and IndieCade we cannot trust their results.
The following parties were reached out to without success before we aired this piece:
Brandon Boyer
Philippe Poisson
Ron Carmel
Nathan Vella
Aaron Isaksen
Kellee Santiago
Jonathan Blow
Kyle Gabler
Matthew Wegner
IndieCade
Independent Games Festival
We would encourage these people who have any comments on this story to reach out to us at lordkat@lordkat.com if they wish to clarify, dispute, or affirm any statements made herein.
For further analysis on this situation I would refer you to CameraLady's Video, which you can find on Short Fat Otaku's YouTube channel.
Special thanks to:
Camera Lady
Peter No One
Temet – an unfortunate victim to house slipper abuse
RogueStar
Anon
Our anonymous leakers, developers, and judges
and the 1971 Supreme Court case: New York Times Co. v United States.
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Oath of the Gatewatch; the set that caused the competitive community to freak out over Basic Lands.
Could you explain in more detail what you consider to be the 'SJW scene in games'? I'm all in favour of the 'Big publisher games mysteriously get good reviews from journalists when the games are average at best' thing ending. I used to enjoy reading the PC Format (UK) reviews in the early 90s; they really tore into bad games. I'm not sure what the link between Zoe Quinn and corruption in the game journalism industry is though, particularly if the GameOverGate stuff I've seen this morning is accurate.
IF you've followed games journalism over the past decade or so, there has been a HUGE shift from actual game news, to opinion editorials under the guise of news or informational posts. The biggest problem with this is that the games journalism community is way, wayyy too tightly knit - so a few people get in and wield their influence, and the rest are screwed. The Zoe incident exposed both devs pulling favors from journalists for coverage, as well as journalists pushing their own agendas. One of the most noticable of these agendas has been the tumblr-style, sensationalist SJW news that has attacked great games and devs like skullgirls, dragons crown, and the CaH guys. That ***** needs to go, the game journalism frat party needs to be demolished, and the huge conflicts of interest need to either be disclosed or (preferrably) eliminated. Hope that helps
Also, that Fez thing. These are corrupt ****s.
Disclosure: I've worked with the legal side of the games industry for years, and I know a ton of indie devs personally. I've met a decent chunk of writers on kotaku, RPS, polygon, and a few others, and I've met Zoe twice. My opinion of the games industry is pretty much all from observation, well before this whole thing happened.
IF you've followed games journalism over the past decade or so, there has been a HUGE shift from actual game news, to opinion editorials under the guise of news or informational posts.
Welcome to the new and terrifying world of being considered a legitimate art form for some reason. People have a variety of views, and art criticism is like 90% people arguing about the intent and effects of a particular piece (disclosure: I am a geologist, not an art critic).
Quote from DokuDokuH »
One of the most noticable of these agendas has been the tumblr-style, sensationalist SJW news that has attacked great games and devs like skullgirls, dragons crown, and the CaH guys.
Feminist art criticism is a thing, and while I'm certain it can go overboard, refer to reply part one. Also: no-one is going to stop you laughing at Kotaku.
Disclosure: I like Skullgirls. It's got wonderful character design (more ideas in a single character than most have in a roster), amazing music, fun gameplay, that DARK DECO ARTSTYLE ect. I've personally weighed the stuff I like/want to support against the stuff I don't and Skullgirls comes up very positive.
Quote from DokuDokuH »
the game journalism frat party needs to be demolished and the huge conflicts of interest need to either be disclosed or (preferrably) eliminated.
Good luck killing E3/timelocked reviews/day one dlc/the Xbone!
Quote from joandeMRA »
Modern day white males do not owe any other demographic anything for what happened in the past.
Modern day white males are statistically better off than pretty much everyone, particularly in tech/games. There are people who don't appreciate that, and they're going to keep complaining. Unequal systems don't spontaneously get more equal.
White males are tired of social justice for the same reason black people got tired of having to sit at the back of the bus or drink out of seperate fountains
I don't even have a response to this bit, I just started laughing.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
In much the same way that the Ferguson protests were hooligans wanting an excuse to loot and vandalize. That's happening, and we need to come down on it like a ton of bricks, but it's not the only thing that's happening.
I'm going back to this to say that you got a point, there's legit complaints about journalism to be made and it's not only people being chumps. I was making bad comparisons or whatever. (that said, I still think Hamburger Hepler and #fiveguys share much of the same DNA).
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“Tell me who you walk with, and I'll tell you who you are.” Esmeralda Santiago Art is life itself.
Combo player-Your arguments really drive home for me what a bigoted bunch of BS "social justice" is. White males are tired of social justice for the same reason black people got tired of having to sit at the back of the bus or drink out of seperate fountains (and NO the extent/scope of these injustices is NOT relevent to the comparison). Privilege theory is just the reframing of things a group has accomplished/earned as something unearned/undeserved and that alone should be a giant red flag that it's bigoted BS. Modern day white males do not owe any other demographic anything for what happened in the past.
People are also angry at SJW's because of the awe inspiring amoung of hypocrisy inherent to your ideology. You declare some groups "oppressed" and then argue that justifies them acting like A-holes and degrading others for the exact things you would never tolerate from the groups you have labeled "privileged" that is not creating equality THAT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF EQUALITY!
Zoe Quinn is clearly a corrupt individual and that is a story (and no it doesn't have to be as big a story as another story to matter).
This is why I have given up on gamergate. Good points are being ignored because of non-sequitors and MRA bull**** like this.
Warning reversed; it's not the user's fault that the censor's not working properly. —Rax
(that said, I still think Hamburger Hepler and #fiveguys share much of the same DNA).
I missed the memo on #fiveguys. Can someone explain what my favorite burger joint has to do with all this?
In Quin's ex's blogpost, he mentioned that he couldn't stop thinking about the logo 'five guys, burger and fries' when writing that post, due to the 'five guys' Zoe Quinn cheated with. It became a codephrase on /v/ for the few days the janitors tried to prune threads about the subject.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
I've been following this almost since the beginning. I just want to say that while I'm not really taking a side here, there has been a LOT of disinformation spreading about the entire issue. Few things I'd like to note:
This whole debacle might have started with Zoe Quinn, but it has gone way beyond her at this point. Notably, the main faces of the current movement against games journalism are #gamergate and #notyourshield. #gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin, and #notyourshield was started by indie developer Polar Roller, who is a black man by his own admission. Essentially, the legitimacy of both stand on their own merits, regardless of distantly tangential association or doctored screenshots by Quinn attempting to discredit them.
Anita Sarkeesian has all but retweeted deplorable and exploitive material (I won't say what it was as it makes me sick to my soul just thinking about it), while Thomas Kincannon has been trying to attach himself to #gamergate. I doubt either one is truely clueless about what they're doing despite their claims, which leads me to believe there are many opportunists on both sides of the debate relating to the corruption in games journalism.
There have also been irresponsible attacks by both sides. Social Justice Warriors constantly villified videogame reviewer and enthusiast Jonathan Jafari for being "white" despite the fact that he is a Persian man, while Gamers essentially scared off comic book artist Gail Simone during a discussion with heated rhetoric. It's unfortunate but it has colored many parts of this debate.
To be fair, Dragon's Crown is pretty awful. Even setting aside the complaints on feminist grounds, those characters just look stupid.
Really? Because they make perfect sense to me.
For instance, let's take the Sorceress, who has been one of the most unfairly targeted designs. The automatic assumption by most is that her breasts are huge, and this leads to automatic calls of her being called a sexist design. Setting aside the fact that it's kind of presumptuous to assume anyone with large breasts is purely sexist, and therefore prejudiced against women of such shapes, this makes the equally prejudiced assumption that artist George Kamitani had nothing intelligible in mind when he designed her.
The Sorceress's features are actually quite clever. The figure of women has been used as symbolism to uphold their importance and power, with representations of fertility goddesses dating back to 22000 BCE with the Venus of Willendorf. Admittedly, the Sorceress is a more idealized figure, but nonetheless, I argue that she is merely an extension of this old lineage. She is the only healer of the party, doing so by conjuring edible foodstuffs. She is the only one with a protective spell, shielding both herself and her charges at once. She also gives raises the dead, which I think is the most important detail; probably the most classical form of the necromancer is that of decrepit old men, their age and appearance emphasizing the aspect of death alone. The Soceress, on the other hand, has a design such that she's mostly emphasizing the fact that she is renewing that which has ended. One of her promo arts has her gently holding the underside of a summoned skeleton's head, as one would cradle a child in one's grasp, which I think is a further assertion of Kamitani's intent with the character.
This is the same man who did the design for Grand Knights History, GrimGrimoire, Odin Sphere, and Muramasa. All of them are plethoras of visual imagery with laudably rich and wonderful art, doing justice to all forms of fantasy both Western and Eastern alike. To single out Dragon's Crown for being a bit more sexually charged is to do Kamitani's pedigree no justice.
... and I typed far more on that subject than I realized. Apologies.
He is only one of the people who've fallen for it, not one of the originators of the claims. His belief that this is really about corruption in games journalism may be sincere but it's mistaken. He's better off starting something new and since the whole games industry is as much of a cesspool as anything else is I'll wish him luck with that. Deserves no less, for sure.
Do you see how you made a sweeping accusation that implicitly condemned an actual specific person here, and then had to back off when challenged on it?
The Sorceress's features are actually quite clever. The figure of women has been used as symbolism to uphold their importance and power, with representations of fertility goddesses dating back to 22000 BCE with the Venus of Willendorf. Admittedly, the Sorceress is a more idealized figure, but nonetheless, I argue that she is merely an extension of this old lineage. She is the only healer of the party, doing so by conjuring edible foodstuffs. She is the only one with a protective spell, shielding both herself and her charges at once. She also gives raises the dead, which I think is the most important detail; probably the most classical form of the necromancer is that of decrepit old men, their age and appearance emphasizing the aspect of death alone. The Soceress, on the other hand, has a design such that she's mostly emphasizing the fact that she is renewing that which has ended. One of her promo arts has her gently holding the underside of a summoned skeleton's head, as one would cradle a child in one's grasp, which I think is a further assertion of Kamitani's intent with the character.
One can have all this and more in mind... and still draw a ridiculous-looking character.
By invoking maternal symbolism you're not really helping your case on the charge of female stereotyping, either.
This is the same man who did the design for Grand Knights History, GrimGrimoire, Odin Sphere, and Muramasa. All of them are plethoras of visual imagery with laudably rich and wonderful art, doing justice to all forms of fantasy both Western and Eastern alike. To single out Dragon's Crown for being a bit more sexually charged is to do Kamitani's pedigree no justice.
The same man directed Blade Runner and Prometheus. Having produced good work in the past does not automatically make an artist's current work good. It's no injustice to acknowledge that an oeuvre can vary in quality, and no justice to let an artist slide based on his "pedigree".
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
One can have all this and more in mind... and still draw a ridiculous-looking character.
By invoking maternal symbolism you're not really helping your case on the charge of female stereotyping, either.
I hope the implication of a character design being ridiculous isn't also an implication that art itself cannot or should not be ridiculous. It does disservice to the breadth of what art can or cannot be, I think.
That aside, as I said, the Sorceress goes against the grain. The Sorceress being a character with maternal qualities taking on a role in fantasy that individuals of a completely different stereotype do is actually an overturning of traditional stereotyping. When people think necromancy, they expect Lim-Dul; they don't expect someone like the Sorceress taking the art of necromancy and making it her own. And to me, that's cool, not "ridiculous."
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
The same man directed Blade Runner and Prometheus. Having produced good work in the past does not automatically make an artist's current work good. It's no injustice to acknowledge that an oeuvre can vary in quality, and no justice to let an artist slide based on his "pedigree".
I never said to let it slide. Setting aside that it's not fair to lay that out as my argument for me, all I'm saying is that any artist should be given a fair shake, and if there's one good reason to do it, it's prior work. Furthermore, Blade Runner is a lot less recent compared to Prometheus as opposed to Muramasa and Odin Sphere compared to Dragon's Crown, so it's easier to consider this as him being rusty on scifi, if one were to make an excuse for him.
It goes against Social Justice to operate solely on first impression (not that I'm accusing you or anyone else of this directly); one needs to dig deeper, look at all the details, look at the history and context of things.
Which brings us back to #gamergate.
Again, both sides are at fault here.
Too many SJWs on Twitter are unwilling to look past the fact that a certain anonymous internet enclave are tangentially associated with what is otherwise fairly legitimate criticisms of videogame journalism, nevermind the fact that their anonymity means they are always changing and should not be identified as a coherent entity to begin with. It has gone to the point that what should have been discourse has become unrelenting vitriol, with no restrictions on who is targeted.
Too many people associated with #gamergate, directly or otherwise, shouldn't be condemning all of indie game development. Philippe Poisson may have acted suspiciously in the past five years, and his recent public admission to wanting to sell Polytron may reinforce that suspicion. It doesn't mean he is representative of all indie gaming, and I think some people are forgetting that with their harsh commentary.
Could you explain in more detail what you consider to be the 'SJW scene in games'? I'm all in favour of the 'Big publisher games mysteriously get good reviews from journalists when the games are average at best' thing ending. I used to enjoy reading the PC Format (UK) reviews in the early 90s; they really tore into bad games. I'm not sure what the link between Zoe Quinn and corruption in the game journalism industry is though, particularly if the GameOverGate stuff I've seen this morning is accurate.
IF you've followed games journalism over the past decade or so, there has been a HUGE shift from actual game news, to opinion editorials under the guise of news or informational posts. The biggest problem with this is that the games journalism community is way, wayyy too tightly knit - so a few people get in and wield their influence, and the rest are screwed. The Zoe incident exposed both devs pulling favors from journalists for coverage, as well as journalists pushing their own agendas. One of the most noticable of these agendas has been the tumblr-style, sensationalist SJW news that has attacked great games and devs like skullgirls, dragons crown, and the CaH guys. That ***** needs to go, the game journalism frat party needs to be demolished, and the huge conflicts of interest need to either be disclosed or (preferrably) eliminated. Hope that helps
Also, that Fez thing. These are corrupt ****s.
Disclosure: I've worked with the legal side of the games industry for years, and I know a ton of indie devs personally. I've met a decent chunk of writers on kotaku, RPS, polygon, and a few others, and I've met Zoe twice. My opinion of the games industry is pretty much all from observation, well before this whole thing happened.
All I know about the games you've mentioned is from a quick google now. Result: I can see why people might comment on the sexualised characters in Skullgirls. I would be surprised if people DIDN'T comment on Dragon's Crown. I can see why Cards against Humanity (that was CaH, right?) might make people uncomfortable. I don't know how bad the attacks got, but I think criticism would certainly be justified.
To be fair, Dragon's Crown is pretty awful. Even setting aside the complaints on feminist grounds, those characters just look stupid.
Really? Because they make perfect sense to me.
For instance, let's take the Sorceress, who has been one of the most unfairly targeted designs. The automatic assumption by most is that her breasts are huge, and this leads to automatic calls of her being called a sexist design. Setting aside the fact that it's kind of presumptuous to assume anyone with large breasts is purely sexist, and therefore prejudiced against women of such shapes, this makes the equally prejudiced assumption that artist George Kamitani had nothing intelligible in mind when he designed her.
The Sorceress's features are actually quite clever. The figure of women has been used as symbolism to uphold their importance and power, with representations of fertility goddesses dating back to 22000 BCE with the Venus of Willendorf. Admittedly, the Sorceress is a more idealized figure, but nonetheless, I argue that she is merely an extension of this old lineage. She is the only healer of the party, doing so by conjuring edible foodstuffs. She is the only one with a protective spell, shielding both herself and her charges at once. She also gives raises the dead, which I think is the most important detail; probably the most classical form of the necromancer is that of decrepit old men, their age and appearance emphasizing the aspect of death alone. The Soceress, on the other hand, has a design such that she's mostly emphasizing the fact that she is renewing that which has ended. One of her promo arts has her gently holding the underside of a summoned skeleton's head, as one would cradle a child in one's grasp, which I think is a further assertion of Kamitani's intent with the character.
This is the same man who did the design for Grand Knights History, GrimGrimoire, Odin Sphere, and Muramasa. All of them are plethoras of visual imagery with laudably rich and wonderful art, doing justice to all forms of fantasy both Western and Eastern alike. To single out Dragon's Crown for being a bit more sexually charged is to do Kamitani's pedigree no justice.
... and I typed far more on that subject than I realized. Apologies.
Presumably the barmaid, the mermaid and the Amazon are also avatars of fertility. Or have similar justifications for enormous bosomry. There comes a point where 'artistic direction requires the women in my game to have enormous breasts' makes me think of the old RPG canard, 'I was just playing my character'.
Yes a woman with huge breasts really goes against the grain of video game design. I am glad someone was brave enough to stand up and say its ok for woman with breasts large enough to break their back can also be a necromancer. I mean sure there are elements of this art direction in older games like odin sphere but dragon's crown takes it too such an extreme it is hard to concentrate on the game its self. Just look I don't want to play a game that throws that in my face, it is dumb and distracts from the game its self.
Also where you blaming Anita Sarkeesian for someone tweeting child porn at her? As if so that is a very odd stance to take.
I'm sorry you were unable to look past the obvious surface qualities of character design and instead at how it's comprised as a whole, or past what I'm perceiving as prejudice against large-breasted women. As far as the picture you posted, I was paying more attention to the giant dog head that's still partially alive, still chewing on that poor woman's leg. She's obviously trying to take a posture that keeps that hellish thing away from chewing the rest of her body.
And no, I am not blaming Anita for that vile thing that was sent to her. However, I am blaming her for telling Twitter about it, calling attention to the act and basically foisting it on other people in a borderline exploitive manner rather than quietly reporting it to Twitter and letting the FBI handle an incredibly heinous crime. Before anyone says it, she has been on Twitter for years, and for her to not understand the Report feature by this point when she has been harassed prior does disservice to her intelligence, which led me to my conclusion.
Yes a woman with huge breasts really goes against the grain of video game design. I am glad someone was brave enough to stand up and say its ok for woman with breasts large enough to break their back can also be a necromancer. I mean sure there are elements of this art direction in older games like odin sphere but dragon's crown takes it too such an extreme it is hard to concentrate on the game its self. Just look I don't want to play a game that throws that in my face, it is dumb and distracts from the game its self.
Also where you blaming Anita Sarkeesian for someone tweeting child porn at her? As if so that is a very odd stance to take.
I'm sorry you were unable to look past the obvious surface qualities of character design and instead at how it's comprised as a whole, or past what I'm perceiving as prejudice against large-breasted women. As far as the picture you posted, I was paying more attention to the giant dog head that's still partially alive, still chewing on that poor woman's leg. She's obviously trying to take a posture that keeps that hellish thing away from chewing the rest of her body.
And no, I am not blaming Anita for that vile thing that was sent to her. However, I am blaming her for telling Twitter about it, calling attention to the act and basically foisting it on other people in a borderline exploitive manner rather than quietly reporting it to Twitter and letting the FBI handle an incredibly heinous crime. Before anyone says it, she has been on Twitter for years, and for her to not understand the Report feature by this point when she has been harassed prior does disservice to her intelligence, which led me to my conclusion.
I didn't actually say what you quoted. Nevertheless, I will point out that the video game industry, to the best of my knowledge, could not be described as exhibiting prejudice against large-breasted women. Additionally, women can be large-breasted and yet not sexualised.
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I am willing to bet my collection that Frozen and Solid are not on the same card. For example, Frozen Tomb and Solid Wall.
If Frozen Solid is not reprinted, you are aware that I'm quoting you in my sig for eternity?
Nevertheless, I will point out that the video game industry, to the best of my knowledge, could not be described as exhibiting prejudice against large-breasted women. Additionally, women can be large-breasted and yet not sexualised.
I don't know if I like the implication that something sexualized is intrinsically bad. I'll go into why later, must go. Was nice speaking with you.
I hope the implication of a character design being ridiculous isn't also an implication that art itself cannot or should not be ridiculous. It does disservice to the breadth of what art can or cannot be, I think.
Art can certainly be ridiculous. However, looking at the context, it does not seem to me like Dragon's Crown is intended to be a comedic farce where ridiculous character design might be effective.
That aside, as I said, the Sorceress goes against the grain. The Sorceress being a character with maternal qualities taking on a role in fantasy that individuals of a completely different stereotype do is actually an overturning of traditional stereotyping. When people think necromancy, they expect Lim-Dul; they don't expect someone like the Sorceress taking the art of necromancy and making it her own. And to me, that's cool, not "ridiculous."
It goes against Social Justice to operate solely on first impression (not that I'm accusing you or anyone else of this directly); one needs to dig deeper, look at all the details, look at the history and context of things.
I'm going to disagree here. Art lives and dies by the first impression. If you have to do background research in order to "get" art, it's bad art. Now, immediate context is hugely important (note how I determined that Dragon's Crown is not a comedy above), precisely because the environment in which we encounter art has such a huge effect on our first impression of it.
The vast majority of contemporary gamers have never heard of the Venus of Willendorf, and do not associate planet-sized breasts with mother figures but rather with porn stars. If, as you allege, it is maternal symbolism that Kamitani intended when designing the sorceress, then he designed her poorly for this purpose. It is not the audience's fault for not getting it; it is the artist's fault for not getting the audience. It is not as if there is any shortage of other tropes and cultural cues he could have used to evoke the mother figure. There are tons of effective mother figures in art; they just don't look like that.
Yes, we all know that there are really bad apples in the community. How does that prove that all people involved in #gamergate are scared of the cooties?
A few bad apples spoil the bunch, huh?
I'll get back to you on this.
The whole point of "gamergate" is to desperately salvage what started as simple harassment of a woman and that attitude is seeping through every crack. Games journalism is thoroughly corrupt but Quinn is the least of any problem here. What power does she have? Haha. Claims that this is about integrity or conflicts of interest aren't remotely sincere.
You keep making these claims, but I haven't seen you back any of them up.
How do you expect me to take that seriously? It makes some really stupid remarks similar to those of yours, and again: without backing them up with any sources. But more importantly: this bit:
Welcome to the word of open-invite politics, where anyone who lays claim to a movement is technically part of that movement. See also: the Tea Party. You live and die by your worst members,
This is clearly false. The non-GamerGate site also has some people harassing the other side. But I don't say that side is solely consisting of subhuman scum. The feminist has some horrible people in it, but apart from a few outliers, I don't see anyone equating each feminist to the "I want to cut of your balls and see you bleed to death" kind. There was a thread a while back talking about the social justice movement and someone equated all of the movement with the people on Tumblr and he was laughed out of the room.
He is only one of the people who've fallen for it, not one of the originators of the claims. His belief that this is really about corruption in games journalism may be sincere but it's mistaken. He's better off starting something new and since the whole games industry is as much of a cesspool as anything else is I'll wish him luck with that. Deserves no less, for sure.
Ah, thanks for having so much respect for my intellectual ability that you think decisions I've made are whispered in by people on the internet. Now kindly go and be annoying to someone else.
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We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors.
Ok don't play dumb look at this thing in motion, that dog head is not the centre of attention and those are not cries of pain. I don't really care if you are into this sort of thing but don't be surprised when other people find it tacky and off putting. Big breasted women are not a minority in gaming, they are the norm so no I am not prejudiced against them, it just is not a brave decision to use a big breasted woman in a maternal role.
No, they're really not the norm. It's closer to an even split; for every Chun-Li, there is a Makoto. For every RE5 Jill Valentine, there has been a TLoU Ellie. One cannot take all the big-breasted women in gaming, isolate all cases of non-big-breasted women, and then assert one's case in that manner. That's myside bias, and I see it too often; not saying you're doing it, or anyone else here is doing it, it's just that when people say "oh that's the norm" it's often bias or anecdote in that form.
I did play Dragon's Crown and those did not strike me as cries of anything other than pain then, and they don't strike me as anything but cries of pain now. I don't know what to tell you dude, that nun is seriously in trouble and I'm glad my Elf was around to help her.
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He tweet claim twitter doesn't have a procedure for child porn and having never been in the position where I need to find out I will take her word for it. What is known to get big companies to react quickly is when people with large numbers of followers tweet about some thing, so that could very well have been the fastest way to reply. She also did not force you to go look at it, just pointed out one of the many disturbing things people have sent her in order to keep video games pure or some other nonsense. The only person to blame is the person who thinks sending child porn to scare someone is what you do.
The central victim of this is the child. Whatever action Sarkeesian wanted done is secondary to ensuring that nobody has to view that exploitive, disgusting tweet. Furthermore, the existing Twitter report is fairly open-ended, and she could have easily worked within the bounds of it and taken other, private countermeasures rather than irresponsibly call attention to the horrible things that child went through.
Though she doesn't bear the responsibility of having posted it, Sarkeesian bears responsibility because she spread it, unwittingly or not.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
Art can certainly be ridiculous. However, looking at the context, it does not seem to me like Dragon's Crown is intended to be a comedic farce where ridiculous character design might be effective.
It is a love-letter to the exaggerations of the Frazetta style of fantasy art, as through the lens of a Japanese artist. Where you see farce I simply see the accentuation of each character's roles. Fighter being a Huge Mcbeefsteak dude? That means he's the tankiest man there. Amazon having muscles, muscles everywhere? The strongest for sure. I don't consider it farcical in the least that each design communicates the essence of their character class, though you are entitled to your own opinion.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
Google "female necromancer".
The problem with this is, most of those images emphasize the death aspect of necromancy. It feels like little more than women retreading the concepts of necromancy as their predecessors did before; I think the Sorceress explores a different aspect entirely. Hence, making it her own.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
I'm going to disagree here. Art lives and dies by the first impression. If you have to do background research in order to "get" art, it's bad art. Now, immediate context is hugely important (note how I determined that Dragon's Crown is not a comedy above), precisely because the environment in which we encounter art has such a huge effect on our first impression of it.
The vast majority of contemporary gamers have never heard of the Venus of Willendorf, and do not associate planet-sized breasts with mother figures but rather with porn stars. If, as you allege, it is maternal symbolism that Kamitani intended when designing the sorceress, then he designed her poorly for this purpose. It is not the audience's fault for not getting it; it is the artist's fault for not getting the audience. It is not as if there is any shortage of other tropes and cultural cues he could have used to evoke the mother figure. There are tons of effective mother figures in art; they just don't look like that.
This is predicated on the idea that gamers lack culture. Not every person who plays videogames is a casual, or a dudebro, who would fail to grasp the potential meaning of things in videogames. Dragon's Crown was a niche game from start to finish, and that means a niche audience that can seize upon the foundation of the Sorceress' design as I've pointed them out. Of course art is up to interpretation, but that art can be interpreted in this manner lends credence to the idea that Kamitani actually cares more about his source material than you might think. He didn't need to make a carbon copy of the Venus of Willendorf, just reimagine it for himself. This isn't altogether dissimilar to occurrences like Tolkien reimagining Elvish lore.
Let's make the assumption that gamers of today don't understand all of these references, these potential meanings. So they miss the Conan the Barbarian expy, Roland. The Killer Rabbit, one of the hardest and most memorable bosses of the game, being a throwback to the Rabbit of Caerbannog completely goes over their heads. No one gets that Princess Vivian's trinkets include a visual imitation of Britain's Sovereign's Orb, reinforcing her regal. Then I ask; are these examples, too, suddenly "bad" art because the average person didn't catch on it?
Does every piece of art have to be linked to the hip relevancy of today's culture in order to be considered "good" art?
Does every piece of art have to be locked to one interpretation, as you seem to imply in the way you demean how I'm viewing that scene of that warrior nun who narrowly survived a harrowing attack by demons?
And, oh, whoops. Sorry Grant. My apologies. I'll make the edit.
People like Zoe Quinn and the entire Kotaku editorial staff can burn, and the sooner the better for the gaming community.
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Could you explain in more detail what you consider to be the 'SJW scene in games'? I'm all in favour of the 'Big publisher games mysteriously get good reviews from journalists when the games are average at best' thing ending. I used to enjoy reading the PC Format (UK) reviews in the early 90s; they really tore into bad games. I'm not sure what the link between Zoe Quinn and corruption in the game journalism industry is though, particularly if the GameOverGate stuff I've seen this morning is accurate.
They are alike in that both are alleged acts of wrongdoing, and in both cases some people are dismissing the allegations by pointing at other acts of wrongdoing committed in reaction to them. It is this similarity upon which my analogy rests. I'm not saying that they're alike in every particular. I'm saying, "Don't let the bad behavior of bad people distract you from the original issue."
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Look, this is not something I get called often. Yes, I have considered I am part of the problem. No, I don't call people white knights to ther faces. And yes, I was angry this morning. Not really about this debate, but that sort of stuff tends to Carry over.
And please stop with the straw men. I never said the industry's problem is that they're being nice to women and you know that.
Oh hello there. Could you face that white wall over there? Me and a few friends werk watching a film on my tv, but since you're projecting so heavily, you might As well make yourself useful.
I have never claimed that they are equivalent events, only that they have one thing in common: they are both wrong. Not that they are equally wrong - that they both have the basic quality of wrongness. Do you wish to deny that one or the other is wrong?
And even if I had claimed equivalency, to call this claim "almost insulting" would not refute it. A statement can be almost insulting - or actually insulting - and still be true; hell, it's the true insults that are the truly painful ones. Furthermore, using broad expressions of indignation in place of clear analysis and argument is precisely my definition of SJW-dom. So... thank you for providing a pithy illustration of that problem, I guess?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'm frustrated by the double standard in the gaming journalism. Death threats against Sarkeesian are news, while those same things against the CEO of stardock are not. Calling Zoe Quinn names is a banworthy offense on many sites, while those same sites did not even hand out warnings for calling wizardchanners "subhuman scum"and worse.
I'm baffled by the idea that people have to have the same melanin levels and the same sets of chromosomes As the character they're playing to be able to empathize with them. We've played as a hispanic skeleton who functions as a travel agent for the recently deceased, as an investigative journalist who runs an orphanage in a lighthouse together with a pig, as a creature whose hands, feet and head floated inches from his torso and who helicopters his ears so fast het can float. Why do they insist that playing a black guy or a woman is somehow a issue?
And what I'm most confused about is the why. We all know that despite the numbers saying fifty percent of gamers are female ti's still very much a dangler's club. I don't understNd why they seem so hellbent on alienating people with this false narrative.
Yes, we all know that there are really bad apples in the community. How does that prove that all people involved in #gamergate are scared of the cooties?
Also: go through the chatlogs of the five guys irc channel and you'll see that there are a few people constantst bringing up blackhatting which are being ignored or chatbanned. It's not the hive of scum Quinn says it is at all (much like wizardchan). Escapist has a decent article on this on the front page.
People are also angry at SJW's because of the awe inspiring amoung of hypocrisy inherent to your ideology. You declare some groups "oppressed" and then argue that justifies them acting like A-holes and degrading others for the exact things you would never tolerate from the groups you have labeled "privileged" that is not creating equality THAT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE OF EQUALITY!
Zoe Quinn is clearly a corrupt individual and that is a story (and no it doesn't have to be as big a story as another story to matter).
Warning, long:
IF you've followed games journalism over the past decade or so, there has been a HUGE shift from actual game news, to opinion editorials under the guise of news or informational posts. The biggest problem with this is that the games journalism community is way, wayyy too tightly knit - so a few people get in and wield their influence, and the rest are screwed. The Zoe incident exposed both devs pulling favors from journalists for coverage, as well as journalists pushing their own agendas. One of the most noticable of these agendas has been the tumblr-style, sensationalist SJW news that has attacked great games and devs like skullgirls, dragons crown, and the CaH guys. That ***** needs to go, the game journalism frat party needs to be demolished, and the huge conflicts of interest need to either be disclosed or (preferrably) eliminated. Hope that helps
Also, that Fez thing. These are corrupt ****s.
Disclosure: I've worked with the legal side of the games industry for years, and I know a ton of indie devs personally. I've met a decent chunk of writers on kotaku, RPS, polygon, and a few others, and I've met Zoe twice. My opinion of the games industry is pretty much all from observation, well before this whole thing happened.
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Feminist art criticism is a thing, and while I'm certain it can go overboard, refer to reply part one. Also: no-one is going to stop you laughing at Kotaku.
Disclosure: I like Skullgirls. It's got wonderful character design (more ideas in a single character than most have in a roster), amazing music, fun gameplay, that DARK DECO ARTSTYLE ect. I've personally weighed the stuff I like/want to support against the stuff I don't and Skullgirls comes up very positive.
Good luck killing E3/timelocked reviews/day one dlc/the Xbone!
Modern day white males are statistically better off than pretty much everyone, particularly in tech/games. There are people who don't appreciate that, and they're going to keep complaining. Unequal systems don't spontaneously get more equal.
"What if I told you about a revolutionary new product..."
I don't even have a response to this bit, I just started laughing.
I'm going back to this to say that you got a point, there's legit complaints about journalism to be made and it's not only people being chumps. I was making bad comparisons or whatever. (that said, I still think Hamburger Hepler and #fiveguys share much of the same DNA).
Art is life itself.
This is why I have given up on gamergate. Good points are being ignored because of non-sequitors and MRA bull**** like this.
Warning reversed; it's not the user's fault that the censor's not working properly. —Rax
Oh good God can it go overboard.
I missed the memo on #fiveguys. Can someone explain what my favorite burger joint has to do with all this?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
In Quin's ex's blogpost, he mentioned that he couldn't stop thinking about the logo 'five guys, burger and fries' when writing that post, due to the 'five guys' Zoe Quinn cheated with. It became a codephrase on /v/ for the few days the janitors tried to prune threads about the subject.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This whole debacle might have started with Zoe Quinn, but it has gone way beyond her at this point. Notably, the main faces of the current movement against games journalism are #gamergate and #notyourshield. #gamergate was started by Adam Baldwin, and #notyourshield was started by indie developer Polar Roller, who is a black man by his own admission. Essentially, the legitimacy of both stand on their own merits, regardless of distantly tangential association or doctored screenshots by Quinn attempting to discredit them.
Anita Sarkeesian has all but retweeted deplorable and exploitive material (I won't say what it was as it makes me sick to my soul just thinking about it), while Thomas Kincannon has been trying to attach himself to #gamergate. I doubt either one is truely clueless about what they're doing despite their claims, which leads me to believe there are many opportunists on both sides of the debate relating to the corruption in games journalism.
There have also been irresponsible attacks by both sides. Social Justice Warriors constantly villified videogame reviewer and enthusiast Jonathan Jafari for being "white" despite the fact that he is a Persian man, while Gamers essentially scared off comic book artist Gail Simone during a discussion with heated rhetoric. It's unfortunate but it has colored many parts of this debate.
Really? Because they make perfect sense to me.
For instance, let's take the Sorceress, who has been one of the most unfairly targeted designs. The automatic assumption by most is that her breasts are huge, and this leads to automatic calls of her being called a sexist design. Setting aside the fact that it's kind of presumptuous to assume anyone with large breasts is purely sexist, and therefore prejudiced against women of such shapes, this makes the equally prejudiced assumption that artist George Kamitani had nothing intelligible in mind when he designed her.
The Sorceress's features are actually quite clever. The figure of women has been used as symbolism to uphold their importance and power, with representations of fertility goddesses dating back to 22000 BCE with the Venus of Willendorf. Admittedly, the Sorceress is a more idealized figure, but nonetheless, I argue that she is merely an extension of this old lineage. She is the only healer of the party, doing so by conjuring edible foodstuffs. She is the only one with a protective spell, shielding both herself and her charges at once. She also gives raises the dead, which I think is the most important detail; probably the most classical form of the necromancer is that of decrepit old men, their age and appearance emphasizing the aspect of death alone. The Soceress, on the other hand, has a design such that she's mostly emphasizing the fact that she is renewing that which has ended. One of her promo arts has her gently holding the underside of a summoned skeleton's head, as one would cradle a child in one's grasp, which I think is a further assertion of Kamitani's intent with the character.
This is the same man who did the design for Grand Knights History, GrimGrimoire, Odin Sphere, and Muramasa. All of them are plethoras of visual imagery with laudably rich and wonderful art, doing justice to all forms of fantasy both Western and Eastern alike. To single out Dragon's Crown for being a bit more sexually charged is to do Kamitani's pedigree no justice.
... and I typed far more on that subject than I realized. Apologies.
Hidetsugu - Combo Damage
Ezuri - Elfball
Theorycrafting:
Selvala - "A hunter must hunt."
Selvala - Budget
Yeah. Stop doing that.
One can have all this and more in mind... and still draw a ridiculous-looking character.
By invoking maternal symbolism you're not really helping your case on the charge of female stereotyping, either.
The same man directed Blade Runner and Prometheus. Having produced good work in the past does not automatically make an artist's current work good. It's no injustice to acknowledge that an oeuvre can vary in quality, and no justice to let an artist slide based on his "pedigree".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I hope the implication of a character design being ridiculous isn't also an implication that art itself cannot or should not be ridiculous. It does disservice to the breadth of what art can or cannot be, I think.
That aside, as I said, the Sorceress goes against the grain. The Sorceress being a character with maternal qualities taking on a role in fantasy that individuals of a completely different stereotype do is actually an overturning of traditional stereotyping. When people think necromancy, they expect Lim-Dul; they don't expect someone like the Sorceress taking the art of necromancy and making it her own. And to me, that's cool, not "ridiculous."
I never said to let it slide. Setting aside that it's not fair to lay that out as my argument for me, all I'm saying is that any artist should be given a fair shake, and if there's one good reason to do it, it's prior work. Furthermore, Blade Runner is a lot less recent compared to Prometheus as opposed to Muramasa and Odin Sphere compared to Dragon's Crown, so it's easier to consider this as him being rusty on scifi, if one were to make an excuse for him.
It goes against Social Justice to operate solely on first impression (not that I'm accusing you or anyone else of this directly); one needs to dig deeper, look at all the details, look at the history and context of things.
Which brings us back to #gamergate.
Again, both sides are at fault here.
Too many SJWs on Twitter are unwilling to look past the fact that a certain anonymous internet enclave are tangentially associated with what is otherwise fairly legitimate criticisms of videogame journalism, nevermind the fact that their anonymity means they are always changing and should not be identified as a coherent entity to begin with. It has gone to the point that what should have been discourse has become unrelenting vitriol, with no restrictions on who is targeted.
Too many people associated with #gamergate, directly or otherwise, shouldn't be condemning all of indie game development. Philippe Poisson may have acted suspiciously in the past five years, and his recent public admission to wanting to sell Polytron may reinforce that suspicion. It doesn't mean he is representative of all indie gaming, and I think some people are forgetting that with their harsh commentary.
Hidetsugu - Combo Damage
Ezuri - Elfball
Theorycrafting:
Selvala - "A hunter must hunt."
Selvala - Budget
All I know about the games you've mentioned is from a quick google now. Result: I can see why people might comment on the sexualised characters in Skullgirls. I would be surprised if people DIDN'T comment on Dragon's Crown. I can see why Cards against Humanity (that was CaH, right?) might make people uncomfortable. I don't know how bad the attacks got, but I think criticism would certainly be justified.
Presumably the barmaid, the mermaid and the Amazon are also avatars of fertility. Or have similar justifications for enormous bosomry. There comes a point where 'artistic direction requires the women in my game to have enormous breasts' makes me think of the old RPG canard, 'I was just playing my character'.
I'm sorry you were unable to look past the obvious surface qualities of character design and instead at how it's comprised as a whole, or past what I'm perceiving as prejudice against large-breasted women. As far as the picture you posted, I was paying more attention to the giant dog head that's still partially alive, still chewing on that poor woman's leg. She's obviously trying to take a posture that keeps that hellish thing away from chewing the rest of her body.
And no, I am not blaming Anita for that vile thing that was sent to her. However, I am blaming her for telling Twitter about it, calling attention to the act and basically foisting it on other people in a borderline exploitive manner rather than quietly reporting it to Twitter and letting the FBI handle an incredibly heinous crime. Before anyone says it, she has been on Twitter for years, and for her to not understand the Report feature by this point when she has been harassed prior does disservice to her intelligence, which led me to my conclusion.
Hidetsugu - Combo Damage
Ezuri - Elfball
Theorycrafting:
Selvala - "A hunter must hunt."
Selvala - Budget
I didn't actually say what you quoted. Nevertheless, I will point out that the video game industry, to the best of my knowledge, could not be described as exhibiting prejudice against large-breasted women. Additionally, women can be large-breasted and yet not sexualised.
EDIT: Sorry, Grant!
I don't know if I like the implication that something sexualized is intrinsically bad. I'll go into why later, must go. Was nice speaking with you.
Hidetsugu - Combo Damage
Ezuri - Elfball
Theorycrafting:
Selvala - "A hunter must hunt."
Selvala - Budget
Google "female necromancer".
I'm going to disagree here. Art lives and dies by the first impression. If you have to do background research in order to "get" art, it's bad art. Now, immediate context is hugely important (note how I determined that Dragon's Crown is not a comedy above), precisely because the environment in which we encounter art has such a huge effect on our first impression of it.
The vast majority of contemporary gamers have never heard of the Venus of Willendorf, and do not associate planet-sized breasts with mother figures but rather with porn stars. If, as you allege, it is maternal symbolism that Kamitani intended when designing the sorceress, then he designed her poorly for this purpose. It is not the audience's fault for not getting it; it is the artist's fault for not getting the audience. It is not as if there is any shortage of other tropes and cultural cues he could have used to evoke the mother figure. There are tons of effective mother figures in art; they just don't look like that.
And if you believe that, there's a bridge I'd like to sell you in Brooklyn.
No, he literally did not say what you quoted. You stuck his name onto the words of A Guy Who Might Post.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I'll get back to you on this.
You keep making these claims, but I haven't seen you back any of them up.
How do you expect me to take that seriously? It makes some really stupid remarks similar to those of yours, and again: without backing them up with any sources. But more importantly: this bit:
This is clearly false. The non-GamerGate site also has some people harassing the other side. But I don't say that side is solely consisting of subhuman scum. The feminist has some horrible people in it, but apart from a few outliers, I don't see anyone equating each feminist to the "I want to cut of your balls and see you bleed to death" kind. There was a thread a while back talking about the social justice movement and someone equated all of the movement with the people on Tumblr and he was laughed out of the room.
Dunno. Forums are usually rife with threads not connected to games news, and they post enough non-games news themselves.
I don't know. I've seen some decent explanations of why it could be quite a headache.
Yeah, but since when is that the issue here?
Ah, thanks for having so much respect for my intellectual ability that you think decisions I've made are whispered in by people on the internet. Now kindly go and be annoying to someone else.
No, they're really not the norm. It's closer to an even split; for every Chun-Li, there is a Makoto. For every RE5 Jill Valentine, there has been a TLoU Ellie. One cannot take all the big-breasted women in gaming, isolate all cases of non-big-breasted women, and then assert one's case in that manner. That's myside bias, and I see it too often; not saying you're doing it, or anyone else here is doing it, it's just that when people say "oh that's the norm" it's often bias or anecdote in that form.
I did play Dragon's Crown and those did not strike me as cries of anything other than pain then, and they don't strike me as anything but cries of pain now. I don't know what to tell you dude, that nun is seriously in trouble and I'm glad my Elf was around to help her.
The central victim of this is the child. Whatever action Sarkeesian wanted done is secondary to ensuring that nobody has to view that exploitive, disgusting tweet. Furthermore, the existing Twitter report is fairly open-ended, and she could have easily worked within the bounds of it and taken other, private countermeasures rather than irresponsibly call attention to the horrible things that child went through.
Though she doesn't bear the responsibility of having posted it, Sarkeesian bears responsibility because she spread it, unwittingly or not.
It is a love-letter to the exaggerations of the Frazetta style of fantasy art, as through the lens of a Japanese artist. Where you see farce I simply see the accentuation of each character's roles. Fighter being a Huge Mcbeefsteak dude? That means he's the tankiest man there. Amazon having muscles, muscles everywhere? The strongest for sure. I don't consider it farcical in the least that each design communicates the essence of their character class, though you are entitled to your own opinion.
The problem with this is, most of those images emphasize the death aspect of necromancy. It feels like little more than women retreading the concepts of necromancy as their predecessors did before; I think the Sorceress explores a different aspect entirely. Hence, making it her own.
This is predicated on the idea that gamers lack culture. Not every person who plays videogames is a casual, or a dudebro, who would fail to grasp the potential meaning of things in videogames. Dragon's Crown was a niche game from start to finish, and that means a niche audience that can seize upon the foundation of the Sorceress' design as I've pointed them out. Of course art is up to interpretation, but that art can be interpreted in this manner lends credence to the idea that Kamitani actually cares more about his source material than you might think. He didn't need to make a carbon copy of the Venus of Willendorf, just reimagine it for himself. This isn't altogether dissimilar to occurrences like Tolkien reimagining Elvish lore.
Let's make the assumption that gamers of today don't understand all of these references, these potential meanings. So they miss the Conan the Barbarian expy, Roland. The Killer Rabbit, one of the hardest and most memorable bosses of the game, being a throwback to the Rabbit of Caerbannog completely goes over their heads. No one gets that Princess Vivian's trinkets include a visual imitation of Britain's Sovereign's Orb, reinforcing her regal. Then I ask; are these examples, too, suddenly "bad" art because the average person didn't catch on it?
Does every piece of art have to be linked to the hip relevancy of today's culture in order to be considered "good" art?
Does every piece of art have to be locked to one interpretation, as you seem to imply in the way you demean how I'm viewing that scene of that warrior nun who narrowly survived a harrowing attack by demons?
And, oh, whoops. Sorry Grant. My apologies. I'll make the edit.
Hidetsugu - Combo Damage
Ezuri - Elfball
Theorycrafting:
Selvala - "A hunter must hunt."
Selvala - Budget