Worth Reading: 07/14/2014

@brendan: For my part, while I liked STNG's socialist utopia pretty well as a kid, when I watch those shows these days they seem ridiculously naive.

To be honest, I preferred this on Fridays. It was nice to come home from work and have a set of articles to delve into in that transition period between work and fun on Friday (waiting for everyone to shower, etc.). with some articles. On Monday, I'm just so tired and eager to sleep that I'll open the articles but let them stagnate in my browser, until finally closing them some days later.

Also, it was cool to see "professional" content and "amateur" content -- Community Spotlight on the forums -- and I enjoyed reading both throughout the weekend. I believe this should be moved back to Friday.

I like the Vox format, the Blezinkski one seems uneccessary but then I took a step back and considered most people are unaware of personalities behind games. This is a good step to being more open to new or less knowledgeable gamers. Thinking back on it, GB content usually assumes the site visitor knows personailities such as Greg Kasavin, John Drake, Phil Fish, Jonathon Blow yet a good deal of gamers would need to Google/Wikipedia them.

Back to my point, I read the linked Vox article and I like the format, more of this please.

For the DOTA2 article I….zzzzzzzzz…zzzzz….fuck DOTA2. Nah I’m glad it exists if only to show companies how free to play can be done well. But yeah feedback on the format, didn’t have an opinion one way or the other. For the content, it makes sense to consider the viewpoint of someone who’s interested in the subject but doesn’t know where to start.

Developer/pirate format. I thought the headline was perfectly fine. You didn’t use the phrase “you wont believe what….did” or some other bullshit. No hyperbole just a simple description of the article content. I can’t speak for the rest of your traffic but I clicked on the link because stories like this are usually humorous or interesting. This story had a moral, a happy ending and pictures, the best kind of story.

Xbox & Grim Fandango stories, you summed it up well. No more to say

The Alien story I liked a lot, particularly bringing in the twitter viewpoints.

Patrick used Excerpt

It's super effective!

Seriously, really diggin that format for the featured articles.

@veektarius: I never thought that deeply about them, to be honest. To me, Mass Effect is just like Star Trek: Much of the social norms in the universe simply reflect a future where things are obviously going in western society now. I honestly don't see how social problems over 100 years before these stories start should be accurately reflected.

I concur

@truthtellah: Yeah, seems you lose either way you go. Maybe Sunday morning, "Meet the Video Game Press" style?

Honestly, I missed Worth Reading over the weekend.

It's so common for there to be less articles everywhere on weekends; so, Worth Reading was convenient as a source for some additional, bigger reads on the weekend. On Monday... it kind of just gets swept up in the cavalcade of new week stories and videos.

Gruber has said in the past that his long-form commentary articles seem to take far longer to write than their word length would seem to indicate, to the point where he might only do one or two a month.

As it turns out, long form is hard. Really hard. Especially if you want it to have an authorial voice, and most especially if you don't want it to lose the plot or say something you didn't intend.

I think it's great you're experimenting. Sometimes things aren't going to come out right, but sometimes they will. And through it all, you're still learning more about your craft. Keep it up.

Not sure if Monday is the best day for this feature.Maybe Saturday is more fitting? But I guess you'll get a lot fewer people checking it out if that were the case.

Wednesday may also be a decent time for it to go up.

Ditto.

I just really want Quadrilateral Cowboy.

@veektarius:

To add another thought to your conversation, there's no need for a story to be wild fantasy in order to allow it to alter the social expectations of their universe. There's no ratio of Pure Realism to Bigotry that can only ease as you get more fantastical.

Take the rebooted Battlestar Galactica universe. Okay... yeah, it's sci-fi, so maybe not the best example. But their twists on "our" gender and orientation expectations weren't only permitted because it was a crazy fantasy world, they simply were able to change things which fit into their shared fictional history.

The BG characters came from twelve colonies most of which accepted a pantheon similar (pretty identical, actually) to that of the ancient Greeks. Apollo, Athena, etc. In those myths, there is a fair share of messed up rape and mistreatment of women, but that subjugation of women was never a dogma as it is in certain other religious texts and there were far more powerful and cunning women than those who were victims only. So women in their modern culture were always seen as equal to men. So the bathrooms/showers are all co-ed, and even a man boxing a woman isn't inherently seen as an unfair fight.

Also, homosexual relationships factored into many Greek myths, so homosexuality just isn't considered any different from hetero relationships. In their culture, there simply isn't a difference.

So, basically, you don't need to explain away bigotry by creating a happy flowery world where everyone is tolerant. In BG, hate and racial bias are core themes. But by tweaking the roots of their collective morality, you have a world where gender and orientation equality is the norm without it being disingenuous to our current world.

Okay, yes. But also...a bland refusal to address a present-day audience's expectations (in particular a straight audience's expectations) for a queer character is also powerful (or can be, assuming the story is interesting, etc). Depicting a queer character whose life is not even remotely touched by prejudice based on their sexuality is powerful.

As I said before, part of the problem with ME and DA is frankly that they didn't follow through enough with this attempt to depict a world without homophobia...so bits of the game were actually unintentionally laced with present-day prejudices.

Anyway...I don't mean to pick on you and I'll stop the lecture now.

I really enjoyed the news coverage last week, I felt there was more to the article than just the headline. It's definitely an experimental thing, but I like the idea of my news being portrayed with personality, that is, after all, why I come to this site.

I'm fairly new to giant bomb, but I like your unique perspectives and the way you conduct your journalism. Don't over criticize your articles too much, I would hate to see some great content lost because of that.

Nope this should be up in Fridays were I can relax from a stressfull week diging into articles and following up with other articles into the wee hours of the night without worrying about responsibilities the next day. And about the Levine article ... what a load of bull I love how conveniently everyone forgets about the miriad of games that has not violence in them like Tetris the sims , harvest moon , sports games so on and so forth ... really it was just the gaming media being whinners with Bioshock Infinite because of "reasons"? Stupid ones like why is this a FPS even if the whole franchise is a FPS??? Sheesh really?

Oh yeah about your articles ... was I supposed to hate them or something? I for one was glad that a lot was done in that department , nor I care much for article titles and what not , really some people just make up ridiculous things to complain about.

This is some good stuff Patrick.

@hrn212: It's possible that there is some queer-friendly setting that could be written in such a way as to challenge our expectations rather than just being a bland failure to address them. I'm willing to accept that.

The thing is, meeting straight white dude's expectations is what's considered 'best practice' when it comes to most AAA games (and pop culture in general). This is part of why, when you've been talking about your personal expectations and breaking immersion, I thought you were applying them more universally. Because, in general, your personal expectations are applied universally.

But also...breaking expectations is part of what makes for good storytelling. If you anticipate every beat of a story, it becomes boring. Discovering that what you thought you knew about a character (or the world) is actually wrong can be really powerful.

Thus, that common argument that I made (about accepting dragons and spaceships but not a gay utopia) applies rather well to both ME and DA, I think. In ME it is not surprising one would expect to see similar prejudices to our current world...but it's also not impossible that we have a world where those prejudices are more-or-less gone in some (even not-so-distant) future. The breaking of that expectation can be quite powerful.

Now, whether ME and DA executed portraying these queer utopias well is another question entirely.

I know this weekend was a one-time thing, but could you keep Worth Reading a Friday/Saturday feature? I have a lot more time and attention to read articles over the weekend than on a Monday evening.

I'm not trying to make universal arguments, I'm only arguing from my personal taste, which I consider to be good and therefore meeting my standards should be considered best practice ;)

Your other point regarding suspension of disbelief in a fantasy world is a common one. Ultimately a stronger case can be made for Dragon Age than for Mass Effect, as despite sharing many of the value systems of our own past, Dragon Age doesn't occur on Earth. However, the premise of Mass Effect is that it takes place in our own future (not-so-distant, either), and thus, our current prejudices are in its history. As such, it's natural for us to expect to see them addressed.

I love all the podcasts and videos, but the site has felt really lite on written content for awhile now. Perhaps because there aren't as many reviews done nowadays? Alex and Jeff are the only ones that seem to write them now, and its infrequent. As entertaining as QLs and the new Unfinished series are, its nice to get more than an initial impression of the first few hours of a game.

Perhaps I'm getting old and that's the new YouTube generation, but I always enjoyed hearing and reading full thought out discussions/opinions on games the crew has finished. I think that's a big reason why people enjoy the Endurance Runs or Spooking/Spelunkin' with Scoops so much because they got to be a part of that full game experience.

Also, I agree with several of the previous posts that a post mortem look at games sounds really appealing. Whether it's a review, interview, essay, or roundtable discussions. The Walking Dead interviews and the Beyond: Two Souls spoilercast are both great examples.

man, patrick. If the internet had your honesty the world would just melt.

Well now you're asking me to prove a negative...but alright, I'll bite. Let me rephrase: It does not harm anyone. She did not perpetuate a stereotype which is used to commit violence against people; she did not personally attack anyone; she did not threaten or insult anyone; she did not name names or call out a specific individual...thus, no harm. - That someone might have read her statement and had their feelings hurt, well yeah...that's possible. As I said, that sentence wasn't particularly nice or polite...but Quinn is human (like the rest of us) and thus isn't always going to be the most polite or the nicest.

As for the second part: those two are mutually exclusive when we're talking about 'Quinn wasn't nice' versus folks sending threats and slurs to Quinn, personally.

Just to clarify...I didn't mean I didn't want you to reply directly...just that I wasn't asking those questions with the expectation that you must answer directly.

Anyway...so...you wrote "I think that the dialogue and the romance itself loses its impact by not being treated in a manner that would resonate with my experience." That's what I was responding to...you said the romance loses impact because it doesn't resonate with your expectation. Now, perhaps I read that incorrectly...but I thought you were making a somewhat universal statement (that it objectively loses impact) because of the way it doesn't meet your personal expectations. Perhaps what you meant is just that it loses impact for you because of the way it doesn't meet your personal expectations? - Which is somewhat different as I thought you were making more universal statements.

As to the second bit...see I disagree with you with regards to whether ME or DA is going for a fairy tale tone. In many ways it is going for a more grounded version of a fantasy, sure...but it's still a fantasy. They've got magic and space magic and hyper-sexual blue alien ladies and giant robot aliens and Morrigan...like, Morrigan is straight out of a fantasy. Adult fairy tales, perhaps, but still fairy tales.

Like, of course not every gay person prefers the way ME handled representation to a more realistic one. The point of diversity is a diverse set of representations. Both the story of overcoming struggle and the fantasy of living without struggle are valuable stories...but considering ME and DA have spaceships and dragons why is it that the notion of a gay guy not having to struggle with discrimination is what throws your 'unrelateable' switch but the blue aliens don't? (Also a somewhat hypothetical question).

I've really enjoyed the more regular text based content. Video is good and all, but sometimes I'd rather read something.

• Pyrella's spin on a Metroid-inspired action game is making darkness a key component.

Go fund this! I know one of the guys working on it, and he is no newcomer to game development. The footage they show already looks great, if not a little lackluster, mainly because it's pre-alpha. In the end, I'm always down for a new metroidvania game with cool mechanics. :)

I admire your dedication to experimentation and constantly trying something new. Someone's gotta keep things moving forward.

@necroneko:

That still ignores the critical point that this is one of the prequels.

Well, I think the entire point of that scene was to show how everyone was flawed, and that despite being 'good' the Jedi often didn't understand their own teachings. And we've already seen that Obi-Wan ignored Yoda's council and teaches Anakin to be a Jedi, just like Qui-Gon did.

So you can never really quote any of the Jedi as being flawless or ideal role-models.

Ah I see it now. Front page made it look otherwise for me at first. Thanks.

As I said before, Caroline's piece doesn't criticise Persona for "including characters who held negative stereotypical views or presenting the oppression that certain groups have and still face", it's simply critical of how it's done. As for the GoT piece, I was referring to games and not television or film. Anyway, you're right that we've gone off-track, so we'll have to agree to disagree. I appreciate the links regardless!

To your points, even though you told me not to reply to them directly

One: I don't think this question makes sense. We aren't discussing straight white males (which I am, spot on) in this conversation. We are discussing the experience of blacks and gays, which is not my experience, but which is an experience that is nearly universally acknowledged to be prejudicial. You're either arguing that as a straight white male I don't get a vote, which is silly, because I represent a larger pool of game consumers than do gays or minorities, or you're arguing that my perspective of reality is biased by my good fortune, which it probably is. However, if I am biased, it's in the direction of seeing things as fairer than they actually are, when we would expect that the perspectives minorities themselves would magnify the challenges and social forces arrayed against them.

Two: You could make the argument that I only value realism because my reality is privileged, I suppose. Nevertheless, fairy tales are perfectly fine - I like Big Fish and I like Up and any number of stories that could be described as having a fairy tale tone. In this case we are discussing games that are not going for that style of storytelling. They are aiming for plausibility, by and large, as evidenced by the extensive codices attached to both Mass Effect and Dragon Age games. And let's not pretend like straight white guys don't face any prejudices - they can still be fat, bald, ugly, short, could have a southern accent, or they could just have trouble getting the job they want because they weren't privileged with good opportunities to make the right professional connections. Everyone deals with some degree of unfairness and prejudice day to day. I'd argue that if you threw a guy with my general attributes into a game and he was a total chick magnet, I might enjoy that, but I would definitely feel like it was being fan-servicey and unrealistic. This is sort of how I feel about Geralt's luck with the ladies in the Witcher series.

At the end of the day, this isn't a question of right or wrong. This is a question of what I personally value in a story. So, it could be that every gay person in the world prefers the way that Mass Effect handled gay relationships to having even one scene where Shepard and Kaidan furtively discuss whether they should come out to the crew. But even if that were the case, it would have no bearing on my own opinion of what makes story relatable.

@conmulligan: Okay, I disagree, but we're getting wildly off topic and discussing these specific points further will just result in us saying the same things ad nauseum.

I posted originally just as a response to you saying how you've never seen an article which criticised including characters who held negative stereotypical views or presenting the oppression that certain groups have and still face, and I provided you with one.

Here's another discussing the other Game of Thrones related perspective that I also brought up which many others have similarly written about.

Game of Thrones doesn’t need to be historically accurate because it’s a fantasy, a fantasy that includes scenarios in which women fall for men who treat them like property and are confronted with the threat of rape at every moment. This is the world that George R.R. Martin chose to build, and this is the way the HBO series chose to portray it.

Here, unlike Petit perhaps, Maris Kreizman is clearly stating that it's not just the way these things are handled in the narrative, but their existence itself which is problematic.

I'm not trying to get in a discussion about the ideas presented, and I agree with some of their sentiments. Just trying to show you that, yes, many people have argued that very point which you've never seen.

@patrickklepek That Polygon article about Dota as a sport is troubling. Here's an article by David "Ultradavid" Graham, a lawyer and prominent FGC guy, on the issue with sportsifying video games: http://dpgatlaw.com/inviting-regulation-the-sportsification-of-video-games/

@joshwent said:

I think the point she was trying to make is that the decision not to challenge Yosuke's homophobia was thematically at odds with the rest of the game. For me, Persona 4 excelled when it explored the different personality traits of the characters, so excluding Yosuke's homophobia from that was at best a missed opportunity, and I can totally see why some would see it as normalising homophobic behaviour.

As for your suggestion that Caroline was implying the creators are homophobic because of Yosuke's characterisation, I would point out that the majority of the piece is focused on criticising the depiction of Kanji and Naoto.

I liked the Microsoftnews post, @PatrickKlepek. I'm all for reminding people that researching everything is better than jumping the gun and looking stupid.

It's really not so much the way it was handled, more that it wasn't explained away in a way she would have liked. Let me quote a bit more from Petit's piece for context:

Yosuke's attitudes about Kanji are problematic, and so is the game's way of handling them. Rather than addressing Yosuke's negative perceptions of homosexuality, perhaps with a character arc in which his prejudices are challenged and he becomes more open-minded over time, Persona 4 lets his view of homosexuality as something to be feared stand unchallenged and unremarked upon, treating it as normal and acceptable.

So yes, she's okay with the game including these real life prejudices, but only if it's treated as a moral lesson and it's concluded with the offending character realizing the error of their ways.

As we strive for better and more serious writing in games, that kind of resolution only serves to potentially dumb down a story and force a character into a two dimensional role. The brilliance of Persona 4 is that its characters are, on the whole, fully realized, meaning... they are imperfect. Yosuke is a clutz, he's awkward, he's trustworthy, he's easily excitable, he's true to his friends, he's very self conscious, and he's homophobic. Not to the extent that he would speak out against homosexuality or work to deny people rights, but in so much as he's unsure about how to act around a friend of his who might be gay. Like many real people are.

Forcing a resolution (in her specific terms) to that by the end of the game, is exactly that... forcing. If it was part of the narrative that the authors had in mind, then great, that can make for a great story too. But if not, claiming that its omission is directly implying that homophobia is acceptable feels like an immature accusation and honestly a bit offensive towards the creators of the game.

During a school camping trip in which the protagonist, Kanji, and Yosuke are gathered in the same tent, Yosuke goes so far as to ask, "Are we gonna be safe alone with you?" suggesting that in Yosuke's mind, if Kanji had been gay, he would also be prone to behave inappropriately. When Kanji tells Yosuke that he has no problem being around girls now, Yosuke asks him to prove it, saying that if he can't, "we're gonna be stuck here all night half scared to death." Yosuke's attitudes about Kanji are problematic, and so is the game's way of handling them. Rather than addressing Yosuke's negative perceptions of homosexuality, perhaps with a character arc in which his prejudices are challenged and he becomes more open-minded over time, Persona 4 lets his view of homosexuality as something to be feared stand unchallenged and unremarked upon, treating it as normal and acceptable.

That reads pretty straightforward to me. Because Persona 4 faithfully portrays Yosuke as an ignorant teenage boy like so many ignorant teenage boys, and there's not explicitly some sort of kumbaya moment with him and the rest of the team talking about how awesome gay people are by the end, that (in her opinion) means the game is normalizing and excusing anti-gay rhetoric. She's criticizing the game for not having an unrealistically feel-good portrayal of that character.

I mean, there are plenty of other issues with that article (Kanji is not gay, for one, and people actually do call Yosuke out on his bullshit, and even if they didn't, that doesn't mean the game supports that rhetoric because "it stands unchallenged" in one scene or another, etc.) and this is veering off-topic, but it's clear that the issue of Atlus including a character that acts like an actual person was mildly controversial to some.

@brodehouse: @joshwent: Caroline Petit's article does not criticise Persona for portraying the difficulties faced by LGBT people, it criticises the way it was handled. That's a pretty big distinction.

Okay, two things, though...

One: Why is it that resonating with your experience should be prioritised? Especially if you're not part of the group of folks who are being represented.

Two: Aren't people of colour and lgbt people and what-not allowed fairy tales, though? I'm assuming you're a straight white dude, here, and if not please forgive me...but straight white dudes got all their fairy tales when they were kids. They saved the world and rescued the princess and blew up the evil villain's lair. So now that you're an adult (or a teenager or whatever) you're like...hey, let's see something more complex and real.

And minority adults also want to see something more complex and real (because we're adults). But we also want to see our power fantasies...our fairy tales...because we didn't really get that as kids. We had to map ourselves onto straight white dude fairy tales...and the queering (so to speak) of hetero texts is fascinating and useful...but still not quite filling that same desire as just having an explicitly queer fairy tale would be.

Three (or 2a, I guess): Isn't it troubling that something which is a bit of a fairy tale regarding minority folks is equality. Whereas a fairy tale (or power fantasy) for a straight white dude is...well...actually having power.

Okay, those aren't exactly questions I'm expecting you to answer directly...

(Okay, now I really am out the door...I'll be back later, though. I do like this conversation...I know I often come across a bit more aggressive online than I mean to be, so, yeah).

It wasn't an article, it's a general line of thought I've heard and even discussed with friends who share it. If I were to pick an article, there's a couple on tumblr that I won't pick because they seem to have gone uncommented on and I know I'll be told they're irrelevant, but Carolyn Petit's piece on Persona 4 criticizes the game for not 'dealing' with Yosuke's homophobia. I don't typically believe in 'microaggressions', most 'microaggressions' tell you more about the victim's narcissism than the abuser's cruelty.... but the way Yosuke's ignorance manifests itself in minor, negative ways would be an excellent example of microaggressions. But all I get is that the writers of Persona 4 are bigots for including what I feel are rather authentic depictions of interactions between teenage boys because they include negative experiences suffered by gay/questioning characters like Kanji. Especially from a character who is not portrayed as an out-and-out villain, if the character doesn't grow and have an after-school special moment of empathy, then the game is contributing to the normalization of anti-gay rhetoric.

I read an article the other day about how Trevor from GTA5 is a negative depiction of gay characters due to his violent narcissism. Frankly, I don't even know what to peg Trevor as due to how severe his mental illnesses are, but his violent narcissism manifests in explosive reactions when he thinks people are negatively judging him; one of those aspects could easily be that he feels negatively judged by homophobes or low-thinkers. He doesn't want to conform and he has violent psychotic moments when he even feels as if he's being judged for not conforming. This is a rather complex and authentic characterization of how extreme narcissism intersects with negative cultural stereotypes or opinions of groups; but everything I've read just says "the writers are bigots" for making the gay(?) character into a violent narcissist.

And then in the rare cases where games present people behaving in a manner not emblematic of our current culture, they're whitewashing negative gay experience.

@hrn212: I don't want to be dismissive, but I get the feeling you're replying to the words "social agenda" and not anything I'm actually saying.

Not to step on Brode's toes, but here is just one article of many which proposed that the unease that some characters had with Kanji's exploration of his sexuality was homophobic:

Yosuke's attitudes about Kanji are problematic, and so is the game's way of handling them.

- Denial of the Self: Queer Characters in Persona 4

I've seen similar arguments tons of times regarding historical fantasy which portrays women as the second class citizens that they tragically were in the medieval era. When Game of Thrones got big, there were articles and prominent blogs condemning the series and even suggesting boycotts for what they saw as a narrative promoting rape and subjugation of women... because rape and subjugation of women were events and themes in the story.

The repeated plea went along the lines of, "You're creating a fictional fantasy world. Why do you insist on raping your characters? Why can't we have a story with women who aren't victims?!". The implication being that even if GRRM was legitimately trying to explore these crimes and their aftermath in an earnest context, their mere presence was stereotyping women by showing them as characters who only exist to be abused.

That whole can of worms is a discussion for another thread, but those arguments, that showing the real oppression that a person might face IRL in a fictional fantasy story is a negative thing and even if it reflects era-appropriate attitudes it's inclusion will only serve to promote those attitudes, is quite wide spread.

On my way out the door but just wanted to say:

@veektarius: One more thing about the question of social agenda versus absorbing narrative. The thing is, all games have a social agenda...even if it's unintentional...even if that agenda is just "treat status quo as neutral" or "treat status quo as normal."

@video_game_king: One more thing to add about Quinn...it's also so frustrating to see this particular "her response is not nice enough" sort of argument levied against her, of all people. I mean, she's sat in a panel with Patrick in which she talks about the difficulty of how to respond to internet jerks. And she's talked about the difficulty in not responding to the hate with immediate anger...so I think any worry one might have at whatever inferences you might have made at her "nothing better to do" comment are unfounded. She clearly isn't attacking anyone, is what I'm saying.

I really like "Worth Reading" I usually don't get to them until Mon anyways.

Keep up the good work Patrick