Worth Reading: 01/17/2014

That article is fucking hysterical.

When Cox talks about wanting to take risks and arguments with the marketing team, it's clear that the scene was constructed with the intention of evoking sexual assault. It's ostensibly there to show that Dracula is evil; but really, the imagery was chosen for its ability to provoke a strong emotional reaction. That it's being used almost exclusively for shock value serves to trivialize a very real horror that women must deal with every day.

Yep, the everyday threat of a centuries-old creature of the night running up to your family, immediately murdering your husband, then draining your life force with a bite to the neck. Thank god feminism is helping us alter our preconceived notions on this all-too-common event.

Yes, yes, neck biting is a stand-in for sex, but even then, HOW OFTEN DO RAPES HAPPEN LIKE THAT, with the whole family present? The whole scenario is so fantastical and absurd. And why can't it be there both to show that Dracula is evil and provoke a strong reaction? Nope, apparently it has to be just shock value. Bailey acknowledges upfront that the rapiness has always been that way:

Sexualized imagery is nothing new in vampire fiction, but this scene is kind of stunning for how blatant it is with its allusions to rape.

Why did you write the rest of the article then? Because fucking Bram Stoker's Dracula is sexual and creepy as fuck in a few ways, and most vampire stories follow in a similar path. Unless Dracula in Lords of Shadow 2 is literally dry humping her while sucking her blood, I don't see how it could be any more rapey than every other scene where a vampire bites the neck of a pretty lady and she says "oh god please don't". So yeah, you're playing as a pretty bad dude in Lords of Shadow 2. Deal with it. The player character in every action game (other than Spec Ops: The Line or The Last of Us) is basically a callous monster of a human being who kills hundreds of people without giving a shit. Then later Bailey just starts making stuff up:

Second, you're not meant to sympathize with the victim -- a young woman who doesn't even rate a name or a personality. You are meant to sympathize with Dracula. In the moment that the camera shifts from third-person to first-person, you are Dracula. You might feel horror at what he's done, but that doesn't change the fact that it's from the point of view of the attacker.

Are you? Are you REALLY? I haven't seen the scene in question, but Bailey establishes that Dracula is "withered" and he "stumbled" forward, so if it's a "he's so super weak and needs to feed on anyone for sustenance", then maybe she's right, that you are meant to sympathize with him. In which case it isn't "he assaults someone because he's an awful sexual predator, please sympathize with him", it's more of a situation where he is starving to death and you're shown the awful things he must do to survive. They aren't tricking players into sympathizing with a rapist, they're getting players to sympathize with a starving man who can only eat other living people. Being a vampire is kind of a raw deal for anyone who has a conscience. I don't see how this magically removes your ability to sympathize for the victim. It's a crappy deal for all parties involved.

If you're a rape victim, then yeah, I'm sure that cutscene is probably bad news for you, but guess what, you should probably avoid vampire fiction at this point because the odds are decent that it could upset you. However, I really doubt this is having a negative impact on the attitudes of teenage boys and 20-something guys who are most likely to play this game. Unless their high school English teacher is there in the room, I doubt many of them are likely to make the sexual assault connection that Bailey did. It's a vampire, doing fucked up vampire murders. End of thought process, for 99% of players.

At least it was just a first-person cutscene where Dracula murders a whole family. They could've made it "Press X to family-murder", if they wanted to be really crass.

By comparison, I completely understand why Cara Ellison had problems with that Hotline Miami 2 scene, because it is literally making itself to look like sexual assault. That is bound to be uncomfortable to quite a few people. But this Kat Bailey article is reaching SO MUCH HARDER. And then she has the audacity to put this paragraph near the end:

So while I applaud Cox and his team for their desire to take on challenging material, I really hope they cut the Family Scene before Lords of Shadow 2 launches next month. In the end, it's a scene that serves to trivialize sexual assault while failing to accomplish its attended goal -- making us feel like Dracula is awful and evil. We may feel that way in the moment, but ultimately, this scene and others like it are just a few drops in a sea of video game action set pieces. When it comes to characterization, one most certainly outweighs the other.

OK, crazy person, whatever you say. They got money from a publisher to make an action game. So yeah, that means they couldn't devote the majority of the game to a treatise on how Dracula is awful and evil; the reality is that most of the game will be you doing awesome action shit to golems and skeletons, or angels or some shit. Until someone makes the Gone Home of vampire games, where you mope about a castle and miss having a soul and having human friends, most games with a vampire as the player character are going to be combat-based. Most developers wouldn't even have the cajones to show that player character do anything truly appalling, and would instead focus on showing the vampire sucking blood from like, enemy soldiers or something. At least this developer is trying to show that vampires are assholes and not just badass suave supermen.

@bisonhero: Apparently other people have played the scene and described it differently than her, and every one of them, including this person, played the exact same scene as it already is included in the game. I feel this is one journalist forming their own opinion, not based on what is actually being presented, to serve whatever purpose, and a lot of other journalists siding with her without any proof other than her word.

It's a shame that other supposed game journalists either retweet it or include it in a link list without comment or any research of their own.

That Wii U story is bunk. It talks about a developer working on a system as it is being formed - guess what, hardware iterations and documentation fluctuate profusely during that period - and being flabbergasted that Nintendo want to do something that isn't aping its competitors for their online presence. It's an outdated story at best and outright irrelevant at worst.

I'm a Wii U developer. The situation described by the author no longer exists.

Is it weird that my first reaction to the 'slight of hand' argument in that Bobservo tweet is to become suspicious where I wasn't before?

The real problem with the Kat article (besides namedropping Rapeplay which was never going to be a good idea for anyone) is that she just doesn't build a very good case, she states most things without evidence, makes wild connections that leave the reader scratching their head, and then the things she does back up people are reporting they saw differently.

She's certainly entitled to her opinion, but I suspect that opinion isn't going to be very useful to others. Considering no other reviewer even considered similar things I think the article says more about Kat then it does about Lords of Shadow (that's not a pejorative, just an observation since things on the internet must be spelled out)

Frankly, chances are good much like the Tomb Raider scene, the game's going to come out, the scene will hit youtube, everyone will watch it and say "Oh, that's it?" and likely feel dismissive of other articles of this nature, and in some cases the gaming feminism movement as a whole.

Net result is Kat will have delt a blow to the credibility of people calling out things in games that made them uncomfortable. and ironically (knowing Patrick's perspective) here Patrick is magnifying the effect willingly. The world is a very strange place.

Holy sht Baily, keep on fighting the good fight.

And thank you Patrick, for yet again, linking us such thought provoking, worthwhile reads. Between the Vampire rape, and the delve into transsexual character writing, I am starting to really identify with these people!

Hopefully next installment, you can open our eyes to more big issues in gaming, like "Is Super Mario really racist?" and "Metroid....an affront to LGBTQ?"

And here I thought video games were just about playing video games, silly me. Good thing the industry has journalists

It's easy to say "social justice isn't important" when you're not in a group being affected by it. And sadly, sometimes people who aren't affected by it don't care, because they're interested in things that benefit them directly.

I appreciate social justice critique in gaming, because I like the idea of people who may have wanted to get into gaming for awhile feeling welcome, feeling included, feeling comfortable. And because critique itself is healthy, as long as it's civil. If a game makes a mistake, whatever mistake that may be, fans should point it out.

Excellent job, Patrick, keep up the good work.