No one may ever see this but the Quarians and Geth are kinda Israelis and Palestinians huh? I guess the Quarians are the Palestinians since they lost their homeland to an invasion. There's more to it than that with the sci-fi-ness, but the parallel is interesting.
@lemmox: FemShep having boobs, them being nice, and seeing them sometimes without pearl clutching.
Three months too late, but just to say: I feel like you're conflating the notions of sex positivity and the male gaze. Shep Shep, as Alex has role played her, is a no-nonsense, serious woman with occasional moments of frivolity. The writing and camera in this level, in general, is responsive to that character, her feeling awkward in the dress, expressing that to Kasumi, etc. That's why a shot that cuts off her head and frames only her leather-clad breasts is surprising and mood-breaking. It stands out and doesn't fit the woman helping another woman on a personal heist mission vibe at all. Whether intentional or not, the effect is to take a thoughtful player out of the moment for a second. Commenting on it is a fair reaction.
Also, the phrases you used - puritanical and pearl clutching - imply moral panic. There was none of that. Puritans murdered women for being sexually open, or for any attempt to take power from men. Pearl-clutching white conservative women fighting against lewd art were trying to keep the power structures of race and gender and sexuality stagnant.
Both comparisons don't make sense and irresponsibly conflate the real harms of conservative misogyny with the good of noticing when art objectifies women's bodies in distracting, purposeless ways. Don't do that.
Your analysis touches my English teacher heart and totally fits Nintendo's renewed emphasis on freedom. I like how it's more gender inclusive, too. It's clearly directed at the player even more than Mario. Thank you for writing this!
@kierkegaard: I'm drunk, watching anime and now I'm crying? Thank you, this comment means so much to me, you're an amazing person.
Wow, thank you! So far my lofty goals have mostly resulted in using Hamilton a lot, but I'll keep at it. You keep being you. I teach in the northern Chicago suburbs, but travel into the city a lot. You, Patrick, and Sam make me proud of my association with the city. And I can't wait to find the time to visit your growing art studio space. Thanks again!
@xoxogossipgita This is wonderful writing! As other's have said, your piece acts as what I think the power of video games can be: to help us reflect on self, our world, and the social issues that define it. Racism against black people exists. Institutional and personal. You know that, Gita, any black person knows it, and right now 50% of white Americans admit it when it comes to cops (far fewer with general racism--this poll makes me so angry).
And what sucks is the battle to increase that number--the status quo needs to admit racism is real before doing anything about it. Thankfully, the justice department and President Obama have spent the twilight of his presidency actively fighting racism in the courts and in police, but it's sad that he needed to be politically safe in order to do so.
Your piece is so personal and so sweeping at the same time. It's so hard to do that in writing, to make a single experience connect to the larger social context in a meaningful way.
I'm overjoyed that 6 pages of comments contain around 90% affirming, building responses with the negative, presumptuous, dismissive ones being so uncommon. I also really appreciate your approach to those few comments--you don't ignore them. You respond, set boundaries, and say when boundaries are crossed and conversations are over. That kind of strength in communication is a valuable lesson for all on the internet, and I'm sure a powerful mechanism to keep your own sanity and composure.
As I teach American literature and such, I've become far more blunt about racism. I'm a white, straight, upper-middle class dude, and so I view it as my responsibility as a teacher to fight racism in these kids heads and lives. Racism=bad is not fighting racism. This year I want to integrate a minor research unit into modern hate groups using the Southern Poverty Law Center's list--I want students to see that not only does the subtle and institutional racism still exist, but hate speech and white supremacy are not dead either. I know that some of my students unknowingly or knowingly are racist, so I feel like the least I can do is have them confront the reality of that.
Games, and all media about any art form including the GB staff, are political inherently. Not saying something is just as political as saying something. Adhering to the status quo and ignorance is just as political as speaking out for or against it. What I loved about Inquisition is that it directly integrates the narratives of racism, religious intolerance, and even homophobia into its narrative because these injustices are part of our lives and cannot be ignored in art. And they make the player choose to be anti-racist, anti-religious, or anti-homophobic rather than simply saying these things are bad. They made me choose to tell Dorian his dad is a dick. They made me choose to not call myself a messiah or defend the Qun. They made me choose to be proud of being a Dalish elf but not be a elf-supremacist.
What I want to create in my classroom is struggle--there is no easy answer to the social issues of our time. There is no, "well, I won't be racist then." There's hard learning about what racism is and how it works. And there's hard learning about how to fight back against it. And if teaching that makes me political, then so be it. Fuck neutrality, especially when it propagates extant harm.
Thanks again, Gita. You make the world a better place.
Really good article, Rorie. As an English teacher, it really bums me out to see how intimidated people are by challenging books. Popular culture has made a sport out of portraying the classics as stuffy and impenetrable, not only impossible for most people to read but also not worth reading. There's this sense that all works are basically of equal merit, and that things that take time and effort to read aren't worth it. This creates a vicious feedback cycle that encourages people to never move beyond easy-to-consume pulp, which rarely has any real depth or personal significance, and this in turn reinforces readers' belief that all art is just as shallow, making the prospect of taking up a challenging work even less appealing. If all you've ever bothered to read are John Grisham novels, you've probably got a low ceiling on your sense of what books are capable of, and it doesn't make sense to branch out to harder works since you don't expect them to give you any more enjoyment or enrichment than an airplane novel could.
Some works are difficult for a reason, and their very complexity and difficulty is often an integral part of what makes them work. As an example, Ulysses' extreme complexity is what allows it to so fully capture the subjectivity of its protagonist, and the constantly changing, sometimes obscure or archaic language enables Joyce to draw parallels between the unsexy, everyday subjects of the story and the great epic tales of western society. The novel wouldn't work without its difficult elements, and to try to read an edited version of it means surrendering its greatest accomplishments. Walden, being an essay, may be more amenable to summary, but opting for the easier path is a really, really terrible habit to get in as a reader, and greatly limits your ability to enjoy the beauty of the author's language. Even if you knew nothing about Thoreau, his background, and the things he tends to allude to (Classical myth, for example), you could easily work through Walden in the time it would take to watch a season of a TV show on Netflix. People just need to be open to the possibility of a "great work" actually living up to its reputation (thereby justifying the decision to choose it over a more immediately gratifying work), and they need a sense of confidence that they are capable of reading and understanding it.
Also, as an aside, hearing people use "Shakespeare" as a shorthand for arcane, boring, old literature horrifies me. His plays were the blockbuster smash hits of his time, and they're full of battles, magic, murder, and sex jokes. Everyone, from kings and queens to illiterate laborers loved them. If you think you can't understand them, then you're claiming that you're stupider than an illiterate 16th century peasant, and that isn't terribly likely.
Hello fellow English teacher! We should be friends. No seriously--haven't seen a ton of other teachers on Giant Bomb and would love to talk shop and whether games fit in anywhere.
As for Walden. @rorie You are a great writer with a strong purpose here. I think we read excerpts when I was in high school, and in my class I just teach a part of it in the larger curriculum. It's valuable for students to struggle when there is a purpose to it, to see what florid prose looks like, to see the cavalcade of allusions and wonder about them.
And it's valuable to put things into a modern context and connect student lives to what the prolific writers did or didn't do.
And it's definitely valuable to teach writers as flawed human beings who make mistakes, not perfect geniuses that we should bow down to. Shakespeare was pretty bad with women and played to the lowest common denominator like a Tyler Perry movie. Lee fought racism in mockingbird via a white savior character and some creepy descriptive fascinations on black people's teeth. Fitzgerald wrote some serious anti-semitic hogwash in Gatsby.
But flawed people created some great writing that often aspires to make us think about how we treat ourselves and others, how we interact with society and nature.
And those texts deserve to be taught in their original incarnations. Helpful guides are helpful, but students need to learn that there is value in struggle. The hardest thing about teaching is when students are either afraid or conditioned against truly diving in and trying something hard or new.
It's like a game with a five hour tutorial. Sometimes the player can wander or die or fail for awhile as long as they are able to learn. I find it incredibly difficult to not jump in and save students, but their learning to swim, not drowning.
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