jwoozy

@chaosnovaxz said:

I remember that review of Other M infuriating me. So many people throw (not just in gaming of course) terms like "sexism" and "racism" around where it doesn't apply, just to further victimize themselves, for what end I have no idea.

Samus shouldn't have been taking orders from anyone, but you can't call it sexist just because it was a man giving her orders.

I had an ex-girlfriend that would call "sexism" any time she saw a guy being a jerk to a woman, and I, sadly, had to inform her that said guy was just a jerk, and it happened to be a woman he was being a dick to. Nothing sexist about it. As douchey as it sounds, that's the typical female attention grab we see far too often. If a situation would be just as offensive and insulting between two people of the same gender, then you can't call it sexist just because the situation is happening between people of differing genders.

It could just have easily been a female commanding officer, and that would still have been offensive to fans of Samus as a lone wolf / badass who takes direction from no one, but since it happened to be a man, this reviewer knew she could get away with the "sexist" criticism. Also, if that were sexism, then in past jobs where I had a female boss, I should have run to HR anytime she told me to do something, because it's sexist to boss around the opposite gender, right, Ms. Heppe? -_-

Now, if she had said that the philosophy of the team behind the story creators was sexist because they DID choose to place a man in that role, then perhaps I might side with her.

What the shit is this? You literally believe that the reviewer "wanted to be victimized"? Read that phrase over and over to yourself until you see what the problem is, there.

@AiurFlux: You literally just called someone a "bitch" for having the nerve to be offended by sexism and with the same breath proclaimed to speak for "most people". This would be an excellent time to excuse yourself from the discussion and go talk to yourself in a corner somewhere since, as the voice of gaming, you already know what everyone else is going to say.

@RedRavN said:

I suppose that criticism in a game review requires some type of qualifying statement to really be appropriate. For example, its one thing to say that "uncharted 3 is linear and therefore less of a game than it could have been" and another to say "There are examples in the industry of less scripted games being great and the market is saturated with linear games, so some people might be dissapointed that the experience feels familiar".

Good or bad design is at times subjective, so perhaps a reviewer should be extra careful when doing that comparison.

I also think its funny how people are making all kinds of inferences about ME3 when none of these articles are even about that.

It's really interesting to see how linearity vs. non-linearity has played out in gaming after GTA became the go-to template for a variety of genre games and the rise of the MMO. Skyrim's QUESTS QUESTS QUESTS theory of gameplay looks pretty fucking terrible as a design choice when you write it down on paper and yet somehow it was basically GOTY by default. On the other hand there were times when Uncharted 3 barely even qualified as a "game" but you'll be hard pressed to find a gamer who didn't play at least one of the two in 2011.

@Hailinel said:

@patrickklepek Abbie's review of Other M was, in my mind, grossly inaccurate. I had an opportunity at last year's PAX Prime to voice my disagreement with her in a panel she was a part of, and I think that there's a mutual willingness to agree to disagree to an extent, but suffice it to say, I don't hold her words against her.

What I disagree with is Abbie's highly negative view of Samus's characterization as being sexist, which is a point that she latches onto very strongly in her text. While it is true that the developer's interpretation of Samus was obviously different from what Abbie had built up in her mind, it's not particularly fair to say that the developer should portray Samus as the person she, or any other player, expected or desired.

At the panel, I pointed out to Abbie that, in my mind, Samus's portrayal is not sexist. It is not sexist for Samus to have emotional weaknesses; characters that have issues they struggle with are generally the sign of a more well-rounded characterization, and it's something I prefer over the notion of Samus as a take-no-prisoners death machine. What I will argue is that Other M's script is not well-written; it routinely violates the idea of "show, don't tell" by overusing narration to flesh out character detail that could have otherwise been depicted through other means that would have a greater impact, and allow certain scenes to play out with a greater degree of context. Anyone familiar with Samus's backstory as conceived by Yoshio Sakamoto (Metroid's co-creator) would understand the context of certain events that occur in the game, while for others, the details are left in the dark.

But again, that's a fault of the script, and to an extent the localization as well. That is not indicative of sexism in the game. It's just poor writing.

And like I told Abbie, the notion of sexism swings both ways. Just as I perceive Samus to be a well-constructed (if poorly written) character, I perceive Kratos to be an insult to the male gender. Kratos is nothing more than a ball of petulant rage and adolescent lusts; he is the masculine power fantasy of the worst sort, using violence to solve his problems where none is required and engaging in frequent, pointless sexual trysts for seemingly no other reason than to demonstrate just how much of a man he is to the women he has sex with. His reprehensibility is on par with Duke Nukem, and yet people are fond of this monstrous, chauvinist wretch.

None of what I said to her changed her mind, of course; I didn't expect to. But like I said, we agreed to disagree. I enjoyed the hell out of that game, she didn't.

This reminds me of the hundreds of other gamers who went out of their way to tell Abbie, a woman, that she'd been stricken with an incurable case of feminist rage and had simply hallucinated the deeply problematic trends that have made gaming an insufferable mess for anyone not plugged into the straight white male experience. As long as we have a Bioware dev on the line, let's ask him whether the romance options in ME3 will actually reflect genuine human interaction or if it will be more of what their fans are demanding--a parade of waify, infantile virgins and "exotic" blue sluts who's various "flaws" are miraculously healed by sleeping with the male protagonist.

This shit matters. The "culture" of gaming has gotten to be incredibly toxic and insular precisely because gamers and reviewers have not had the courage to take games to task for catering exclusively to the deeply problematic tastes of misogynist basement dwellers and falling back on the same tired cliches about the role of women and people of color in fantasy and sci-fi settings. Bioware in particular has received not insignificant pushback from it's terrible, terrible fanbase for daring to include romance options with same-sex and minority characters, and yet at the same time it's clear that they're largely incapable of writing these interactions in an authentic way to the players who would know best what those sorts of romances are supposed to look like. This is a real problem that has had real consequences for an industry that is notorious for being unable to reach demographics beyond their bred and butter male nerd fanbases who aren't coughing up the same amount of cash that they used to.

Why shouldn't reviewers leverage their own perspectives towards writing about these issues and calling out the bullshit where they see it? It is, after all, deeply unfun to play a game that makes you feel like a cartoon character because of your race, gender, or sexual preference.

@masterpaperlink said:

Reviews are personal opinions masquerading as absolutes, the removal of any sort of ambiguity as to the value of the game creates a lot of problems. To me, a discussion on a podcast is of a much higher value than a written review, it is the natural environment of an opinion (review), it informs while still leaving some uncertainty, it provides an approximate area of value (that i am free to manipulate) rather than a pretty arbitrary "accurate" point. I applaud GB for using a 5 point scale because it moves in the direction i want, i think 100 point scales are completely ridiculous.

Overall i don't like reviews because they colour my opinion on a game, whether i like it or not.

This is why critical reviews are so important, though. Reviewers can't continue to adopt this posture of being in the peanut gallery and making observations and delivering a final score as if they aren't, themselves, part of the dialogue and part of the consensus. Reviewers don't just passively deliver opinions according to their own taste--they shape and develop the opinions of others and frame the discussion around specific games. Whether they like it or not, that position carries a responsibility to be critical and deliver genuine insight about the medium above and beyond "buy or rent" type drivel and tell us something about the title that might not necessarily occur to us just by passively consuming the gameplay ourselves.

It would never occur to us that such a conversation were even necessary if so much of the gaming press' review corps weren't hacky shills who function primarily as another arm of the major publishers' marketing machines. Of course reviewers should be critical. Asking whether a review is the "appropriate" time to be critical is just a weaselly way of asking whether reviewers should do their fucking jobs. Reviewers, despite whatever pretenses they may have about themselves, are not neutral observers who objectively evaluate a games strengths and weaknesses on its own terms. They are players and critics with their own perspectives and their opinions SHOULD piss someone off, strike nerves, and move the conversation forward.

Turning criticism--a practice meant to advance the body of thought surrounding a medium and introduce a sense of progress to our understanding of game design--into a low-rent "buyer's guide" a la Meta-critic leaves us in an intellectual cul de sac that's bad for gamers and bad for the industry, because it only serves to assure the built-in audience that they bought the correct game for their own tastes and never questions whether something can be done better. Jeff, for example, reviewed AC as a perfect 5/5, giving a total pass to the deeply problematic and (elsewhere, at least) controversial misogyny that made playing Catwoman a nauseating sexual assault simulator. In what universe is a review not the most important place to skewer this kind of bullshit?

I'll tell you: a universe where videogames remain an insular and culturally irrelevant void of creativity and humanity enjoyed by the same audience of aging manchildren that never change and never grow up.