officermeatbeef

Eh, nothing about big breasts makes me uncomfortable. In fact, I'd say they're probably one of the most comforting things I could think of! Nothing wrong with big breasts or women having them, they're great. Real top-shelf stuff, you could say. But honestly, their large prominence in SFV so far is getting to be a bit much already. I'm not uncomfortable with big breasts as a concept, but at this point I AM comfortable in saying it's far more than a handful that are really busting out all over in a way that is just so over-the-top it's starting to get a bit heavy.

Listen, seriously: something like DoA, eh, that's always been their thing, I'm fine with it mostly, barring maybe some of the more fringe Beach Volleyball stuff like the voyeuristic camera mode thing which does come off as kind of creepy and gross. Big Bouncy Breasts With Fighting Anime Ladies Conveniently Attached has pretty much been the series, and they're upfront about it (Age Setting!) so whatever. There's absolutely an audience who loves it, and the devs are into it, and for all its pandering and cheesecakery the female characters have always all come across as general take-minimal-shit highly-competent badasses from what I've seen, and that goes a good way to making it all seem relatively harmless to me.

But if you're going to go that hard into pandering to a certain audience to such an extreme, you have to accept that you're not just going to have a larger part of the potential audience that's not really into it, you're also going to have a chunk just as large as your main audience that's extremely put-off by it. That's not really a problem, except when that pandering kinda becomes the norm rather than the exception.

That's the problem I'm starting to feel with SFV. Street Fighter has always had its sexy ladies (and dudes!) and that's cool, but it's never felt so... DoA to me until now. And again, I'm ok with DoA, but not so much with everything being like DoA. When I saw the new character was named Laura, literally the first thing I was thinking was "oh a new lady fighter, maybe she won't have real giant ti... nope, this is SFV I guess". And I like R.Mika! Always have! She's a damned showy luchadore wrestling vixen, the outfit fits the character and her counterpart Zangief is showing off more skin because she can't have the luxury of not wearing a shirt at all so...

So the characters in IV were obviously pretty exaggeratedly cartoony and everything, and V feels like it's just pushing that even further, and that's ok though I'm personally not sure I'm really into the look but whatever. But like, the thing with this example is... yeah, in a game with about super-strong fighter people where the character design is exaggerated cartoon, of course most of the charactersm especially the men, are going to have giant muscles. They're the world's strongest fighters! The majority of ladies having pretty uncommonly large breasts... not so much. I mean, if anything it seems like the exact opposite of what you'd expect to see; generally I've found that muscly fighty ladies tend to not exactly have the most prominent of breasts naturally. Don't forget that they're mostly fat, after all.

Basically: a character or two having giant boobs, that's fine. Great, even! Variety and all that, and again, I have no problem admitting I enjoy seeing large breasts. But the sheer mass of mammaries in V is starting to feel lazy at best, and immature, kinda gross pandering sexualization at worst. The Street Fighter series is unquestionably the premiere fighting series in the world, maybe it could feel a bit... classier? Instead, it feels like it's actually just regressing, and it's kinda a bummer.

If you hit the Quote button at the top right of whatever post you want to quote, it'll stick it right in the bottom of your post, if that's what you're asking for. It's faaaairly usable, though editing parts can be a pain.

Edit: This took too long to type and people mostly covered my points in the meantime so sorry about that. To be clear, not trying to go at you @oldirtybearon, when I started it this was all I had to reply to!

@bradbrains said:

This kind of apparent cognitive dissonance is really fascinating, bewildering, and frankly frightening to me. You don't generally have to watch more than a segment or two of Last Week to tell that it has a very humanistic, progressive, "liberal" (I dislike the connotations of the term but for the sake of brevity here) take on social issues. Presumably if someone is concerned about their opinion of Oliver "changing", they already have watched enough to have developed a relationship with the show, and agreed with or at least liked pretty much everything he's done in the past, right? Obviously it's fine and inevitable for opinions to diverge on some matters, but surely if something has been consistent with its stance on social issues, and you've always felt it right-thinking or at least empathized with or respected that stance in the past, and suddenly it clashes so hard with your opinion... surely more than anything else, such a jarring disconnect should be enough to make you consider that you might in fact be very wrong on this one?

And if it isn't, I find that deeply troubling and frankly frightening because I can't see what else could at that point; those ideas have essentially become as deeply-rooted and irrational as those of any other hate group. As someone who has happened to be behind everything I've seen on Last Week Tonight in the past, who's always felt it very fair and even-handed, I just don't get how someone else could have seemingly felt the same way and yet be so very turned around in such an aggressive way on this sort of topic. Trying to find a way to reconcile this apparent disconnect rationally is beyond me, but I suppose that inability to find reason in the unreasonable is probably the entire problem, and why this shit is so dangerous and scary.

I mean, I understand how it occurs, but somewhat paradoxically also find it incomprehensible. It's just like when Tim Schafer tweeted something about liking a Sarkeesian video, and dozens of people are suddenly replying with stuff like "noooo, Tim! How could you! I've always loved you!" and the like. Regardless of your opinion on Schafer as a designer or developer or whatever, I've literally never seen a single word or appearance by him where he hasn't come off as just the most affable, charming, nice guy. Honestly can't think of a single unkind word he's ever said about anyone in public. How can you know the guy enough to be a "big fan" and be at all surprised when his response to this stuff is anything but "this lady has some interesting points"? What did you expect from him, "hahaha look at this stupid bitch"? How could you be a fan of Last Week, yet seemingly expect Oliver to just be like "ahhhhh being a total pile of shit to people online isn't a big deal, there's just a bunch of dumb broads on there being loud all the time getting what they deserve"? Sincerely, who are these people?

It's a little bit like (and I mean only a very little bit, this is a bad analogy but I can't think of anything better at the moment) eating at some vegan restaurant all the time and loving it, then they introduce a new menu item that's cooked in some way you don't like or understand, or it contains an ingredient you dislike or have felt you wouldn't enjoy in the past, and suddenly you think the restaurant is garbage. Also, you find out that the new dish doesn't have any meat in it, and in fact the people running the restaurant don't really like to eat meat, and you're just infuriated. What did you think you were getting before? What in the hell did you expect? And how did you enjoy it so much in the past if you apparently don't actually have a like or appreciation for what went into it on the most basic level?

@liquidprince said:

This thing with this argument is that nothing has changed with regards to Steam having more competitors; these alternate stores aren't new in any way, people have been free to buy pretty much any things from wherever they want for years now. Steam cannot be considered a monopoly because Valve quite clearly makes no demands of exclusivity or sole distribution to anyone ever for any product they offer. Yes, probably even their own.

(Since Valve products are even available on at least one other storefront, I would hazard a guess that Uplay or Origin would also be free to carry their stuff as well if they were so inclined. In fact, rather hilariously, up until some time in the recent past the Ubisoft store apparently actually sold Portal 2.)

It's certainly their prerogative to sell (or not sell) their products where they want, but don't fall for the fallacy that says making stuff just not available on Steam somehow makes Uplay or Origin better or more preferable services in any way. In fact, it's actually much closer to just making them the uncompetitive monopoly people complain Steam supposedly is.

If they actually wanted to provide a better option for consumers than Steam rather than just snubbing it, Ubisoft could simply use the fact that they don't have to pay anyone a cut on their own store for their own product to undercut the Steam price and still make more per-unit than they would have on Steam. This would be a step towards the actual competition people claim to want to see so much from these other services.

Yeah, I would not really have any issues with Uplay popping up when I launched a Ubi game on Steam if it was GOOD, or at the very least, didn't often suck. But it too often has, and for no appreciable gain for me as a user besides gaining dumb Uplay points for useless things I don't care about. It can't compare with the complete trash that was GFWL, because hopefully nothing ever will, but me and my friends have had enough similar troubles with regards to Uplay straight-up not updating properly, performing inexplicably slowly, being unavailable for long periods of time, messing with saves due to half-assed cloud implementation, etc. to make us very unhappy & wary when we have to deal with the thing.

Have I occasionally had issues with Steam too? Yes, of course. But as @hassun alluded to up there, I've used Steam probably nearly every day for years, whereas I've only had to use Uplay when I occasionally play a game that requires it. Yet in that much, much smaller usage time, I've had what feels like at least the same amount of trouble, percentage of use wise, as I have had in my entire Steam lifetime use. My personal experience has unquestionably shown Uplay to be a much poorer service for me, statistically, than Steam, while providing no advantages that Steam doesn't provide as well if not better.

One last fun thing to consider: if you are someone who really doesn't like Steam (and I can respect that opinion, even if it doesn't really much sense to me), only buying stuff from other stores and then downloading it on Steam is arguably one of the best ways you have to stick it to Valve. You're literally only costing them money this way. Fight a power!

I think it's important to point out once more that he is the one who made Valve's private email response publicly available. Valve almost certainly would have just pulled the game and that would be that. In fact, that's exactly what they did. He certainly has the right to tell his side of the story, but in doing so he also accepts the risk that he's going to incriminate himself, and that's exactly what this guy has done.

Thought that's not to say I necessarily agree with people bombarding him with shit for it. They're not really any better, no.

It's kinda why I do take a littttle bit of issue with this one part from @patrickklepek's article:

Would this have been quietly dealt with privately in another kind of environment? Possibly. But we don't live in that environment right now.

Again, this guy (the one who committed the offense) is the party who continued to make this public; besides (quietly) pulling the game from the store, Valve has dealt with this matter entirely privately and quietly as far as I can tell.

Now, would any news sites have noticed if dude hadn't continued to blow up? No way to know that of course, but games getting pulled from Steam entirely is rare enough that I think it would have been at least noticed regardless of environment, and the flashpoint of the whole thing was quite obviously inherently public regardless.

Yeah, I'd like to see that but doubt he will. He has a loooong way to go. It's telling that he is the one who provided Valve's "we're done with you" email to journo sites for publication. I'm pretty certain he honestly thought he was in the right and would get generally lauded for... something? Taking a stand against Valve for putting up the wrong (promo) image for a while? I get that they've had difficulty with getting on Steam and all, but wow.

Don't get the sentiment that this was a "single moment of stupidity" some are taking from this either; the death threat was the proverbial straw, but this guy has quite clearly got a fairly long-standing history of being a total ass. There was nothing particularly constructive about calling his business partner "incompetent piece[s] of fucking shit" for a simple wrong promo image, and it's frankly astounding to me that Valve would typically even let that shit slide; they certainly have no need or requirement to do business with someone acting that unprofessional and repugnant.

I feel sorry for this awful person only in the sense that I feel sorry for any human being who somehow ends up being such a mess, but he deserves exactly what he's gotten here. Otherwise, yeah, my only real sympathy is reserved for the other people in his company.

Thank you for making this official statement, guys. Not that I had any doubt it was your stance on the matter, but I'm still glad you made it clear. I think that was important.

I know y'all are in a tough spot on the whole thing. Certainly not the toughest, but up there. Like Jeff was saying, in many ways silence is arguably the best call on a lot of this garbage, rather than in some way "legitimizing" the "movement" by giving it attention. At the same time, being able to choose silence is a luxury the people who are really being hurt by this don't get, and I believe there's a point where making your stance clear and supporting those people receiving all this abuse becomes more important than that. Sadly, I think this whole mess became that within about a week or two.

The only thing in the statement I kinda take a bit of issue with is the "one side attacking the other side"/"us vs. us" bit. I get that it is meant as a more general philosophy, and I agree with the idea. But I think given the situation it might be a bit too reductive because part of the reason this awful shit has continued so long is it quickly wasn't "one side vs. another side". It became "one side vs. another side, with a THIRD side that thought they were supporting the ideals of the other side without realizing the true, terrifying ideals at the rotten core of the beast".

I saw plenty of people on twitter falling for this stuff; decent people with legitimate concerns about gaming journalism (and make no mistake, there are plenty of those to consider) falling in with something with a "snappy" (well, shitty, but at least it was trending or whatever) name that seemed to be getting a lot of traction and attention, selling itself as all about those concerns, really! The only thing scarier than a hate group with some traction is a hate group with traction who's just cunning enough to try and pretend they're something legitimate.

Terrifying stuff all-around. But I think (well, want to believe) most of that is drying up now. Decent people are realizing what GamerGate really is, and I believe much of that is because of statements like this from important voices like y'all. Thank you again.

@demoskinos:

Yes because one side is "fucking gamer culture is the worst" and the other is CONSTANT DEATH AND RAPE THREATS TO REAL, IDENTIFIABLE PEOPLE.

Anyone who has done ANY real research into the true nature of this horseshit "movement" and does subsequently not "follow lock step in condemning" it is garbage. Unequivocal trash.

It does not matter that some parts of the GamerGate thing may have some merit. It is inextricably tainted by this awful shit it started with, and continues to exhibit, already. Something legitimate can replace it, but this monster needs to die.

@scotto said:

Not just that, a real, honest-to-god, 193-year-old respected newspaper posted a disclaimer following their original choice of editing for what was extremely clear to anyone with slightest bit of reading comprehension an op-ed piece, and they were obviously LYING ABOUT IT. A publication with almost 2 centuries of established journalistic credibility is willing to risk throwing that all away just to get some insane heat off a freelancer who was never even in their employ, because... ummmmm.... COLLUSION!?!?

If you think you're part of GamerGate, well, I hope you're looking reaaaaal close here, because there's no better example of what it REALLY represents. It's a "movement" focused on insane conspiracy, provably false mudslinging, and "examining journalistic integrity" by people who don't really understand what journalism OR integrity are, while gleefully ignoring the dozens upon dozens of easily-confirmed, easy to find, and indisputable conflicts of interest that would actually be worthy of severe scrutiny and discussion. Because none of those targets fit their actual agenda of hatred and batshit craziness.

This. Ignorance is one thing, but willfully spreading a false narrative because you haven't taken any time to actually do any critical thinking or research on your part is irresponsible and deserving of nothing but scorn. And if you don't know or understand what an "op-ed" piece is, sorry, your opinions and "critiques" of journalism are useless, because you quite clearly lack a fundamental understanding of the field.

What's more, even if you didn't realize the piece was an op-ed... I can't even find a part of it that anyone could argue as false? Everything Frank mentions is easily verifiable as having happened. I was there on Twitter when it all broke down, I saw it happen. Though again, the point is moot because if you couldn't tell the piece was an op-ed from the way it was written, your clear lack of critical thinking and reading comprehension abilities means any criticism you have of journalism is fundamentally worthless.

Losing Frank as a writer is one of the saddest goddamn things. Even the most cursory examination of her work and career makes it clear she loves games and just wanted to write what she loved, yet every single step of the way has been dogged with this kind of bullshit. It's a testament to how much she actually does love games that she stayed around as long as she did. The same could be said about any of the women involved in this, because who the fuck would want to subject themselves to this kind of horseshit on a daily basis for terrible pay and no job security if they didn't actually love the field?

I mean, I don't even have to deal with this kind of abuse and just seeing it happen makes me want to have nothing to do with games or gamers at all.

I get what you're trying to say here, but you seem to be under-informed as to what the idea of misogyny actually encompasses. Misogyny doesn't just manifest in straight-up vaguely-cartoony moustache-twirling "hatred" for women, the kind where you think they should be barefoot in the kitchen and only speak until spoken to and you should be able to hit them whenever you feel like it. It doesn't have to be something indefensible or incredibly heinous to be misogyny.

Sexual objectification of women (particularly unconsenting) is part of the concept of misogyny. Seeing a female (celebrity or otherwise) as an sexual object whose private photos you have a right to view just because they're available is still misogyny. It's showing a lack of respect for someone because she happens to be a pretty lady you want to see without her clothes on, which you can pretty easily break down to "lack of respect for someone because they're female" because obviously if they weren't female, you wouldn't care about seeing them.

I hope that last extrapolation helps make it pretty clear? After all, how can disrespecting someone precisely because they are female and have something you want NOT be misogyny at some of its very simplest?

It can be a crime (the actual hackers), probably not quite a crime but still shady as shit (having a large hand in distributing the pictures) or even relatively "innocent" ("I still respect her as a person but I reaaaally want to see her boobs and it's not like little old me looking at them is really hurting anyone, really"). It can be any of these things and still also be misogyny.