Shivoa

Ye, I get this exact thing whenever I encounter media with white cis straight characters in it. It's just so unrealistic and then you look at how many things have that exact issue and how all the media with this bad content in it has been elevated by critics who are unaware of what nonsense a world filled with white cis straight characters is. How am I meant to enjoy my escapism when I'm thrust into this totally unrealistic world filled with these fake ass Kinsey-scale-0 cissies?

Really we need to have a more organised campaign to ensure that no media is released with these unrealistic, immersion breaking flaws in it. Writers need to go and have a long hard think about why they need straight cishet men in their stories at all. Haven't those stories all been told by now? And it's so immersion breaking when they keep dumping so many of them into stories.

[Which is to say I really enjoyed this week's Beastcast - keep up the good work guys. Making time to have the conversation and put that out there is important. Really glad to hear everyone weigh in and discuss it.]

We're people, not "contested" ideas. We've always been here. We will continue to be here. Get used to it.

About an hour in when they spend a while thinking about how to get the trajectory just right to land in the ocean and then time moves forward and the planet rotates. *Mwah* Pwerrfect! This is why I can't turn away from this series. So good!

So about an hour in where they are about to land and suddenly realise, after theorising about landing sites "oh, the planet rotates; of course it does!" was perfect.

@yoshara: I think the focus (it seems to be the thing always raised, presumably because the radio loops so literally everyone has likely heard it and can reference it) on that one radio message (that walks back Right fears with a play to the Left) does a disservice to just how much is here to push back on both Left and Right fears (because clearly doing both is playing to both fears but also exposing each group to the exact fears of "the opposite" and so will challenge both groups to draw an equivalence that either side are unwilling to draw [and your personal politics will determine how you resolve that with justification for why it's a false equivalence]). As noted in the critical response to this game (and even the pre-release critical reaction to setting a fictional terrorist attack in NY), it's not as if this has saved the game from being given specific political readings (it is a Tom Clancy game, even if some critics dislike that branding on this story beyond dislike for what that brand is tied to) and the rejection of other readings as not supported by the text (which I'd say is a very contentious position to take).

It's certainly afraid of saying something definitive and therefore says a lot of things and expects the reader to pick and choose or find a way to resolve that conflict (I've said my piece above about how I unify the text above). But it constantly does it. You give your precious consumables to those scanned as "in need civilian"s and they thank you. Not always in American English or even English at all. Of course it's a cosmopolitan area (and the US has a diversity of languages) and so we should expect this. It's a very little touch, but they did bother to get some barks in there to reflect that rather than paint the entire city in a single brush by only getting the "standard" VAs (or just fill it with Canadians local to a dev studio) to fill the bark archive.

The idea that the Division plays it safely by not taking a strong stance or pushing hard on things seems contradicted by the critical and enthusiast response. The safe play is to make everyone straight, because not doing so generates homophobic responses like this. Again, the game backgrounds this because it is totally normal - there is no need to focus on it and so the game doesn't, but it does not remove it from the fictional reality crafted here (as many games/fictional spaces do) to play it safe.

I'd also be interested in a sequel that did more outside of shooting and a few copy-pasted template side-quest formats (which ultimately involve shooting or pressing buttons - often a combo of both). But I have to wonder if this is the Ubi process: think AC1 to AC2. A technologically ambitious project that is creating a new IP (under the TC name here but still not a SC or GR title), a huge asset cost, and a lengthy experience that feels at times barebones. They got one element down (here shooting, in AC then traversal) and pushed more interactions to a future project. If the Division 2 arrives and doesn't make progress in building out the actual protagonists interactions, I think that's when we call this a design decision to not explore that (and the pre-release interview definitely sounds like the original plan was to develop gameplay mechanics in that area before getting cut to hit a ship date). The sales seem to indicate we'll be getting that sequel at some point presumably in the not too distant future.

Yep, agreed. I always consider it weird that this happens (it's not like we all haven't grown up with SciFi being pretty explicit about themes, black and white faces on Star Trek TOS to pick one popular example outside of novels) but it does seem that the setting here has acted as a lightening rod for commentary and avoiding that would likely have created a game with identical themes that was talked about far less for the ethics it promotes. I think that's a pretty sad state of affairs and hopefully something that corrects over time as academia becomes more interested in dissecting games with the same depth as other mediums.

See, I really appreciate the landscape here. The city post-apocalypse but not of the zombie kind (because let's be honest here, the Last of Us had vibes of this but swapped out a lot of humans for former-people who are now fungus and gave the cities much longer to be "reclaimed") has a really haunted deserted tone.

This is, in areas, a place to dread when no one is even there. This is the fog of a Silent Hill made of night snowstorms and the potential for anything to be out there but actually the horror is the body bags peeking out of the snow as you walk past. This is a virtual space in great need of a camera mode.

Some of that is because it's a decent virtual NY. In a detail we don't normally get in the abstracted worlds of GTA or other open worlds. This is (while not making most areas actually walkable inside) a space that feels real when I'm walking it alone. There's also a combat game and an RPG progression there (plus some fear of others in the DZ) but sometimes I'm just there for the place. That setting of real world but post-apocalypse is a sparseness we don't often see done like this. At times the scenery is draining and all you've got for company is a recording of someone in their last moments to share it with. That is why I think there is great storytelling inside this game, even if the game as a whole has many clear failings (including the story, and the comparisons to Assassin's Creed 1 are worth making for where it could go).

And sometimes that horror does map well to the combat and what it says about a person with a badge and the right to kill anyone they see. A bit of that is thanks to the setting (which is also somewhat refreshing for an RPG as it's not fantasy/faux history humans or scifi - those seem to be the two genres you can set your RPG in to get a crowded setting off the bat) but it also wouldn't go away with a palette swap.

Just mapping this to SciFi? There is no genre that is typically more loaded with metaphor than SciFi. We may not immediately feel the same discomfort if this was given a SciFi sheen but it's not as if the commentary it makes would have gone anywhere if they'd done that. Halo is still about marines taking on a diverse religious group, even if those marines are "United Nations Space Command" not USMC. The phrase "alien enemies entirely devoid of humanity and undeserving of sympathy" isn't restricted to SciFi, it's in half of Trump's speeches.

@halexandra64: I am 100% happy if the analysis of media is more exciting (as media itself) than the media it is built on top of. As long as it's built on top of the text and not purely fabricated or (key for me, where I dislike that EG GTA V criticism I linked) directly contradicted by the text then I love it when criticism uses something as a launchpad. I don't raise this to try and elevate the Division, to justify what can be easily read as nothing but military fetishism. But I think the text does support an analysis that digs deeply into the areas touched upon (at some point I'll hopefully find the time to go through every collectible, surround myself in the virtual space, give the mainline story another pass, and then I'll think about an essay - although I doubt there is a Brendan Keogh's style book in this game).

TBH, the opposition to this (doing a close reading of a game) seems to come more from the "but they're just games" crowd. I'll laugh along to the joke about skulls next to toilets (and at any dev who gets a bit too wrangled by that joke) but also I'm really into someone doing a piece all about the craft of putting skulls near toilets and the development of that particular narrative tick. I don't think there is nothing to be gained by looking at these massive endeavours and picking them apart for what is contained within the masses of text (or diving into the minutiae of something repeated in many games that can seem trivial).

And here is where I respectfully disagree, I think that the text itself overflows with scenes that can be read in that light (even if not authorial intent) - maybe not the majority of them but in a 60 hour RPG there is a lot of text. But then I consider this a common thing in "Ooh Rah" fantasies: there is a straight reading of them as the dystopia of military might that the main reading may (with the most direct reading be interpreted to) elevate. And it's far from buried, so much as to be a completely straight, purely textual reading of the work.

I realise that there may be some cultural differences in how texts are typically read as subverting their own premise without clearly showing their hand. The at least partially apocryphal classic (of not exactly subtle satire) being Starship Troopers opening to European movie audiences and critics lapping up the extreme cartoon nature of the subverting of the original book's message but some US critics reading it straight and simply as a bad movie. Even the most obvious of hands, literally getting the character to explain to the viewer the satire during a car ride can be missed by those not looking for it "the writers' true motivation will remain shrouded in mystery"!?

A more subtle hand is easier to miss (and open to debate about if it even exists in the text) but by no means is it entirely absent just because it does not hit everyone over the head. This is not to say the only reading of the Division is as dark satire about current military intervention, civilians as pawns, and pro-military reporting of events (which it heightens into the conflict that has caused such a visceral reaction in many US critics to seeing "our troops" [aka foreign troops for any non-USians] killing "our" civilians). But I don't think that reading is entirely absent here - I think that reading can be defended by the text.

So many of these works grin and say, "isn't it good that we needed to kill all these bad guys - this was clearly the right way and we didn't even need to think about any other potential resolutions to this conflict" and that is self-subverting as a message. It's the grin, you can't help but feel the work is straining to hold it, because that brutal message is exactly the fake smile of mainstream militarism that most people only go along with because they avoid really thinking about what that means about complicity in murder.

With the Division it repeatedly pushes the dual messages of a clear good/evil while also subverting it with scenes that point to moral gray and survival coming before morality. It can be read as garbled, several different writers who didn't read each other's scripts. I take it as a unified whole, the protagonist is never directly questioned (your actions are always "necessary" and you are always in the right to deploy your might) but everything about being a division agent ends up being touched by those conflicting messages and fragments of how other division agents act (in the found narratives)... and then it becomes the self, the other side of a message saying you're losing connection to the eye in the sky central command, as you enter the DZ. The player could always pretend they were right and ignore the echoes of what's really going on, as long as they keep shooting and ignoring the things they find, until they meet more current division agents (away from prying eyes of command) and then it's all up for friend or foe - the narrative and mechanics make this explicit.

@halexandra64: That's certainly true but also... that criticism is of every AAA game. Bioshock was a benefit/cost analysis for Little Sisters (turns out it wasn't altruistic to save them, that netted the most Adam).

At least in this game you are reducing your consumables stash (medkits are in home base so cheap to restock even if being down on them isn't great, other consumables are things you've looted but can be reasonably rare to replace) for access to what is usually a cosmetic item (so mechanically something of no value in the core combat system). So it's not a false altruism, you are actually giving up something (the xp may make it a net worth but only to the level cap and the xp for missions is generous enough to make it far from something you need to do for xp). The side missions, yes, those are more about getting the points to upgrade the base (and a reasonable boost of xp).

But as I open with, games in general have an issue with always rewarding player actions. Always. And this is an RPG (the source of much of the mechanics of player reward that have seeped into every genre today). I agree this is a poor game if its sole aim was to be about actually helping people, but also I think that reading it as a game about someone who is military and thinks that what they're doing here is helping (often via might) is the straight reading of the events here.

You, the character, are definitely the good guys and so is everyone you work with, against everyone else, who is clearly bad. Except in the DZ where everyone could be either. And that's where I think the game makes an explicit nod to where you, the player, should not be accepting of the fiction the character believes about this. The radio and other audio-log type narratives you walk into have notes in that back that up (as is the story of who the LMB are and why they are who they are now - as I noted above) as textual.

@halexandra64: Except that, as an agent, you will be constantly running round with less medkits (for use by yourself) than you could carry because of the mechanic of trading supplies for clothes with civilians in need. It's not well developed, but you do go round the overworld handing out supplies as a mechanic. You also rescue captured civilians as that's one of the core side-mission types (Hell, half the other types are saving JTF people who seem to be barely non-civilian at times and a pooled from civilian suport professions).

Not to say this is complex or in the story of the protagonist a significant event but this combined with the side-stories told via classic game language of collectibles with narrative attached talking about the other actions of division agents before you and so on, the game and mechanics both paint a picture of agents who are there to save when they can while dealing with imminent and longer-term threats.

As a post-apocalyptic world, it also has the coldness of something like the Last of Us in a lot of it (only this is taking on the darker chapters of Joel post-intro and well before that story took place - the collapse and survival). You will walk down streets literally stepping over body bag after body bag peeking out from the snow. The setting includes strong isolation and cheap-life notes (again, part of the Libertarian/survivalist fetishism that the game and all that have similar settings builds on).