man babies tantrumed themselves straight into nazism
G*mers were so pissed off at Ebert for saying that, I remember them so badly wanting games to be treated as an art form they pushed for it for a long time. Then they got what they wanted and totally backpedaled because it was uncomfortable. Now there's a huge backlash among G*mers to make games not art, not "political" etc. etc. Biggest whiny babies on the planet.
Yeah, like "games as an art" led to Oscar bait games like the latest God of War, The last of us 1 and 2, Uncharted 4, Witcher 3, etc. Whatever you think of those games, I know some people hate them and they definitely have lots of flaws, it's definitely more mature than "let us zoom in on the bum of a female character climbing a ladder", which was an actual scene in Uncharted 2.
I'm honestly fine with the change, while the "prestige" theme definitely has problems, it's a lot better than what came before it in terms of storytelling in mainstream games.
“let us zoom in on the bum of a female character climbing a ladder”
As much as I love him, this is Kojima and all his female characters lol. But yeah like I said there's huge backlash no against games telling mature stories, especially if it's about subjects that make cishet white men uncomfortable like TLOU 2. They want games to go backwards, back to fighting fuck dolls and high scores.
I would kill Joel again if I could, he damned the human race so he could feel better about himself.
I remember some very old :frothingfash: moments that happened on :reddit-logo: the moment that Epic Daddy Figure With Manpain was criticized for being a selfish gaslighting murderous asshole.
Meanwhile Brad Armstrong from Lisa: The Painful RPG goes through similar story beats, fucks up even worse and is punished for it even worse, but avoided most of this backlash because it wasn't happening in a AAA game advertised on cable TV.
I mean apparently death stranding was better, aside from the blatant monster energy adverts lol.
But yeah honestly looking back weirds me out a bit. Like I still love the older need for speed games, but booting them up and seeing half naked women on the loading screens and starting the races for no reason feels really cheesy and cheap.
I think that's why weird nerds are so obsessed with pedophile like games from Japan that have underage girl fanservice, it's their last like refuge they can take in toxic masculinity.
last like refuge
If only that were true. The Andrew Tate plague, not to mention :up-yours-woke-moralists: shows that the tide is still rising for that.
Death Stranding still has creepy perv camera angles except they're all focused on Norman Reedus
IDK, Sony's serious first party sad dad games just don't appeal to me at all :shrug-outta-hecks: I might get the Spiderman game now that it's on PC though.
Is Witcher really that similar? Haven't played 3 but 2 had more of a juvenile preoccupation in reveling in sex, grime and violence as opposed to serious drama
The Witcher games all do that to some extent, but 2 is better about it than 1 and 3 is better about it than 2. I didn't really like 3 though, it felt like a worse in almost every way version of a Bioware game.
Playing Witcher 2 I appreciated the fact that my choices felt like they actually carried some weight when compared to your average Bioware game.
Is Witcher really that similar?
The Witcher 3's big selling point is just the ridiculous amount of fully fleshed out and detailed content in it. All the dialogue was fully voiced and animated (which was still pretty novel at the time) and there was a ridiculous amount of it (to the point that it still hasn't been matched since AFAIK; Cyberpunk may have beaten it in sheer volume but I'm unsure, it didn't feel like it did), with even random sidequests in places you had no reason to ever be storywise having these fleshed out scenes telling stories that have literally nothing to do with the main plot, and often they'd narratively tie into other side stories in unexpected ways and things done in one sidequest would impact others. And there's just so much of that, well over a hundred hours of it.
The gameplay itself is mediocre, though still better than pretty much any other comparable big open world game especially from that era, but the writing's decent and the game as a whole is a very impressive body of interconnected stories that's unmatched in its scope. IIRC you can just not do the majority of the :bonk: content too, probably all of it. Some characters relentlessly flirt with Geralt, but you can just brush them off.
They wanted the prestige of being called art with all the associated accolades, without any analysis
I remember thinking Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes Vs Women series was bad because it was an extremely intro-level version of feminism with no nuance or depth, and surely there's nobody who actually needed this.
Lol @ me.
I haven't actually watched her videos in an age but I remember finding it an overly simplistic takedown of some very basic tropes, but I ended up disagreeing with a number of examples she brought up.
Like it's really obvious that Peach or Zelda don't need to always be the damsel but they pretty much always are. I've heard so many people talk about a reversed Zelda game where Zelda is the playable character going to save a damsel Link and it sounds so much more interesting.
Honestly it's fucking wild just how deranged a number of people got over her applying super simplistic analysis to the point you had entire personalities rise up, like the guy that was super racist with the skull on his bookshelf, or that other guy that was super racist that looked like he crawled out of an 80s basement, or that other guy that was super racist that screamed racial slurs online, or that other really racist guy that also wanted to be a filmmaker. Most of Hbomberguy's early works highlight the absolute peak of derangement over this stuff, who the fuck makes a documentary about a woman making a light critique of some games? Like I said before, a reversed Zelda would be interesting to see, it would reverse some tropes and be an interesting spin on a very tired formula.
like the guy that was super racist with the skull on his bookshelf, or that other guy that was super racist that looked like he crawled out of an 80s basement, or that other guy that was super racist that screamed racial slurs online, or that other really racist guy that also wanted to be a filmmaker.
I know each of these people without being named. :agony-4horsemen:
Meanwhile I'm over here like :jesse-wtf:
Perhaps ignorance is bliss.
I don't know why you'd go so far as to have Zelda rescuing Link, though. They're different people every game, you can just have today's Link be a girl and today's Zelda be a prince. It's 100% canon-compliant and preserves the branding of the hero with the iconic green nightcap.
The point is not that girl hero rescuing boy damsel is more interesting, it's that this would be an interesting subversion of the prophesy core to the Zelda mythology. If Link fails early and it is Zelda who has to step up and be the proactive hero, that's a subversion not just of out-of-game tropes, but in-universe tropes as well. Zelda would have to face someone else's destiny, and challenges which require someone else's skills. The bad guy could even have underestimated and ignored her specifically because historically (or mythologically, it's hard to tell which in this universe) it was the other hero who was directly responsible for the prevention of evil.
Fundamentally, it's interesting to see someone thrust into a situation they aren't prepared for, to build skills and face challenges which are unusual to them. In Breath of the Wild, Link is an experienced knight, a personal bodyguard to the heir of his nation's monarchy. There is no one in the world more fundamentally prepared to pick up a sword and slay goblins and traverse dungeons to save Zelda. It's been done. It would be interesting to see someone who is the least prepared to play that role (because they've been preparing for a different role) take a shot at it.
Like it’s really obvious that Peach or Zelda don’t need to always be the damsel but they pretty much always are
One of the most glaring examples of the Thermian Argument in practice is when some Zelda fans insist that because of a fictional "prophecy" in a 90s Nintendo 64 game, Zelda must always and forever be stuck doing the same story beats as the damsel in distress.
So boring. Why wouldn’t you want to explore Zelda and Link breaking that cycle and killing the gods who cursed them? So muchhhh more fun
Fiction put that "prophecy" in place. More fiction could just as easily change it in less hyperbolic ways, if there was a will to do so.
Not really. That's what JRPGs are for. The point of Zelda games is that it's a very simple good versus evil story with fun puzzles, beautiful environments, nice music, and cool little characters. If you want something more complex, just play something else.
if they're really committed to doin le epic Archetypal Hero's Journey thing where it's variations on the same story over and over -- and I don't really have a problem with that choice in itself -- i think what would be really neat was just having a Girl Link and Boy Zelda (or shit, make them lesbyans, but I know Nintendo is too bitchmade to do that). Like they already made Linkle, maybe as a way to test the waters for such a concept,
I'm not opposed to archetypes or even tropes as much as I'm annoyed when it seems like a Zelda game may be trying something different but then recursively returns to the tired old beats the moment Tetra is "Oops! All Damsels" exposed as Zelda.
I’ve heard so many people talk about a reversed Zelda game where Zelda is the playable character going to save a damsel Link and it sounds so much more interesting.
One of the infamous Zelda CD-I games did exactly that IIRC
It wasn't bad because of that. There was also a nearly-identical Link game called Faces of Evil for the same system.
I just think it's amusing that among all the Zelda games, it was the dollar store knock-off looking non-Nintendo ones with the :morshupls: MS Paint cutscenes that swung for those particular fences
It's a damn shame, because the apparent takeaway message for that disaster was "never have Zelda do anything but be a damsel in distress again."
Even one of my favorites, Wind Waker, takes an interesting and fun and seemingly new pirate character and then the moment she's revealed to be Zelda all the tiresome old beats kick in. :debord-tired:
Nintendo makes Zelda the protagonist in a game...
spoiler
but it's another Other M situation
:very-intelligent: “Zelda, you can’t use the mastersword until I tell you to”
:anarchista-chad: “what the fuck why”
:very-intelligent: “Because I have a dom/sub humiliation fetish and compulsively write it into everything I create”
I still have no idea why nintendo let the sex doll volleyball simulator devs make a metroid game
To be fair, Team Ninja also made the sixth and seventh generation Ninja Gaiden games (OH SHIT THEY'RE ON STEAM NOW :xi-pog:). Also, correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that it wasn't Team Ninja who were responsible for Other M's story and characterisation but rather the Metroid head honcho himself
Zelda's cool in spirit tracks. Unfortunately, spirit tracks isn't cool
She kept saying, over and over again, that it was possible to enjoy something while criticizing it and/or accepting criticism of it.
But to the most toxic of fans, the treats must be seen as perfect or else eternal rage toward the critic. I still remember when Sterling got the G*mergate treatment (doxxing, stalking and other chuddery) for giving Zelda Breath of the Wild a 7/10. :heated-gamer-moment:
Same lmao.
After all the "new atheists" like thunderfoot at the time moaned about it. I decided to watch one of the videos. I was in high school back then I think? And it was just really basic feminist stuff from Anita.
Apparently that was too much for the capital G G*mers
I think it was just novel bc no one had really attempted to apply even basic stuff to video games yet. I liked them for what they are but They’re also pretty basic in their presentation but that was more of a thing before the over produced breadtube style we have now.
Sooooo many dudes. Props for doing the work to educate though, I found this site because someone linked me the “feminism for babies” post you wrote :heart-sickle:
It makes perfect sense when you consider that to a lot of people, reactionaries in particular, that art means "realistic replication of real world". Triple aaaaaaaayyy games with "realistic" graphics (as in loaded with shaders that makes every surface looks wet) is art, while snobby sjw indie game with too much dialogue :lt-dbyf-dubois: are not.
We really should lol. Also Stephanie is non-binary and uses they them now, just a heads up
Fuuuuuuck. Force of habit since I've been watching them since 2015.
Pretty much, yeah. I do know plenty of left-leaning gamers, a trans woman too, who are still incensed about the apparent actions of the Depression Quest dev and the reviewers and shit. I really don't doubt any of them, none are Nazis or anything and all were fine with Sarkesian, it's just not 100% clear where someone will end up on those two """issues""".
As always though, it only really matters who ends up with power. No matter how valid some platform or argument is according to some logic, it just matters if you're able to obtain and wield power with it to affect things the way you want to. So if Nazis can capitalize on a niche issue like this to grow their coalition and actually achieve things, well, that's what makes a political position legitimate. That's the number one lesson for leftists from the Gamer-to-Nazi paradigm. Power = legitimacy and never forget it, do anything and everything to get power and use it. Some stuff is a long term project with planting seeds and waiting for conditions outside your control to change, and going too far can have backlash obviously, but if it's not getting you closer to power it's a waste of time.
ehh I see what you mean about being effective, but there are plenty of activities that are worth it even if they don’t give you power. fighting for the rights of the marginalized, feeding the hungry, housing the unhoused, etc
the lesson from gamergate to me is that even anticonsumerist subcultures can be easily converted into reactionaries if there is no political theory behind them
Say the line Sankara :sankara-salute: seriously though, you're totally right. The lack of theory and thr massive surplus of propaganda makes it so easy for groups to become reactionary whatever their starting off point of trigger
I only heard about her because of GamerGate, like nost people. Watched her videos to see what the fuss was. It's pretty standard feminist critique, but i really enjoyed seeeing it applied to video games
Imagine getting upset at the opinion "it's bad that so many games use the 'damsel in distress' trope." Now imagine getting so mad about it you make dozens of hours of youtube videos about it, and keep going several years after anyone stopped watching them. That's Thunderf00t.
Anita Sarkeesian's slogan for her milquetoast feminist critique series was something about how it's possible to enjoy things while also criticizing and accepting criticism of those very same things.
G*mergate's lasting legacy, in part, was ongoing tribalistic rage against that idea. The treats must be perfect, and the naysayers must be deranged and/or evil. :agony-minion:
And now criticism of any media boils down to either "I dedicate my soul to this thing" or "I will hunt down the creator of this thing with a spear". Now all rating charts either looks like a letter C or a valley.
I've noticed that too. It wasn't enough to like the Elderingerinos more than Horizon Forbidden West. The latter had to be punished to further exalt the former, especially because the latter's crime of political fine hairs on human skin being an affront to G*mer spank banks. :freeze-gamer:
But also eldenringerinos is bad because they politically removed gender from a non political game about killing non political kings and queens and non politically becoming a non political lord
I mean even though horizon somehow managed to make robot dinosaurs boring, I'd still take a game like that over Elden ring or most fromsoft games any day. As would most "normies" I guess.
honestly can you really say you love a work if you don't feel both of those things?
Are we revisiting GamerGate as a topic? Because I’m down. The .win-iverse has a gamergate site iirc
If gamergate has ever ended /r/gamingcirclejerk would not be non stop politics every single day.
I met someone who's a woman of color and would talk about being pro-gamergate and used that "not your shield" phrase. They whined to me how they got called a race/gender traitor for wanting videogame journalists to get harassed (they did admit eventually that they thought people should be harassed over videogames after a good few minutes of denying GG was about harassment) and I kind of wanted to say "well if the boot fits" but in the moment it felt weird for me, a white dude, telling a latina woman that. I still don't know what makes a person like that tick.
credit to @Thomas_Dankara for linking this in another thread. It was too :chefs-kiss: not to repost
Here's the thing its both, most video games with online focus are Disposable art. Games in general turned into a disposable art with little replay value after they are played. Shelving the culture war shit games even if the chuds could get out under the group think of big tit thic boy shit. Are funimentaly taking a turn for the worse as the market is addicted to skinner box monthly pass shit, in lieu of creating a game thats fun to play.
I don't understand why a lack of replay value means it's not art? Like I see your point about skinner box shit, but that seems like a weird thing to focus in on
So its still art, but the issue is when all electronic media is disposable game pass shit, you don't get new experiences that move the needle in game design, a simple example would be any online shooter game today, in 10-20 years the effort and time put into that game is not repayable due to its format being an online multi-player game but because its all slow unlock designed to milk your time its not gonna push the edge of design since the design is to rob you of your time, so the art doesn't have to say anything memorable.
What I'm trying to underline is the video game is art but no one is trying to make masterpieces or even experiment inside company's with budgets to be able to take a loss on a new idea. This is why you see indy devs pushing the forefront of game design only to become bigger and lose what made them unique to begin with, example Bethesda. The fact you have to make games appeal to everyone is what constrains design in a way that isn't condusive to deeply interesting design choices as you have to sacrifice that so its not too niche. Idk if that makes sense. Emotionally its tragic because imagine if painting got invented 30 years ago but can't reach a high potentially due to market forces.
What was Gamergate even about? I was there and I’m still not sure.
People started noticing video games had sexist content , and petitioned rectification in future products. Also, a perception that women started to share this hobby led to protoincel freak outs.
An indie game developer and writer Zoe Quinn dated a guy named Eron Gjoni. They had a messy dysfunctional relationship and broke up. When they broke up, Eron Gjoni decided the most reasonable course of action was to write an 8 page dossier defaming Zoe Quinn and accusing them of sleeping with people in the game news industry for press coverage of their indie game project Depression Quest. Eron then went to a shitload of internet forums and posted the dossier everywhere, actively looking to incite a harassment campaign against them.
Eventually it took root in certain chan spaces and they happily made organized efforts to doxx, spy on and harass Zoe Quinn and anyone professionally connected with them.
Zoe Quinn had some friends in the gaming industry and gaming news industry and when they heard that this was ongoing, they spoke out against the harassment campaign and against Eron, and in turn were immediately targeted themselves, with the chan crews creating accusations of the gaming news media being a cabal of evil gamer hating SJWs wanting to destroy hard core games forever.
This rapidly snowballed into what's now known as Gamergate.
