@nietzschecookie said:
@theht:
Insightful as always!
I think we're just applying different meanings to the word agency here. Part of games being a new media is there being a severely limited vocabulary for how we talk about these issues. And clearly we agree that there's a whole host of things that can be critiqued beyond a lack of story context. If you prefer to call it a 'dehumanizing element' or a 'gameplay/narrative disconnect over character use', that's fine with me.
The idea of trusting user experience of media and requiring a litmus test for engaging with a work sort of misses the purpose of art. The thing is, problematic or not problematic isn't actually a binary issue. All work is problematic by degrees, existing on spectrum because the truth is, Society is problematic. Its a chaotically constructed mess of norms, beliefs and customs. Art can't transcend that, it can only try. The thing that makes Nier:Automata great is that it fundamentally understands this about social construction and engages with it. Its a rare thing, and its done really well for the most part. Which is why its also a work that invites 'The Conversation'.
Part of the point of art as a human endeavour is to explore the human experience and hold a mirror up to the world. In this sense art can never go too far in how problematic it is, because its just the Artist's vision, but at the same time its up to all of us to engage with all art and fulfil that art's destiny in saying something by responding to what is says, and indeed the ways it displays our society in a new light and shapes future ones. Art in a vacuum is worthless.
Discussions of censorship and whether a specific work objectively crosses a line into causing societal harm is a completely false narrative.
All works are on the spectrum and some create more discussion. If we don't engage with fiction, then its just raw entertainment and we may as well watch the Mark Wahlberg Transformers films forever.
To act as such a critic is never a slippery slope because there's just no reason to ever run to the extremes of classifying things. Its also vital in that our discussion of art is itself a discussion of society. The relevance to real people doesn't just come from limiting disbelief and substituting real people with fictional ones, it comes from the ways our idea of what a person is, as imaginative creators, originates in our experiences with real people. The Conversation is always larger than just this one work, the work is just the centre piece to talk about ourselves and our civilization.
Again, its not objectifying that's the issue, its the idea that objectification can always be compatible with all scenarios, situations and contexts. The poster example falls onto that spectrum somewhere. There is no test and we don't need to run to extremes to save objectification from being synonymous with dehumanization. We can rather rely on the subjective experiences of people to discuss an art work in its context and how it uses objectification. We can also rely on people to subjectively not be concerned or inspired by anything they experience and not show up to the discussion. To put it another way, displaying an otherwise ordinary sexy pin-up poster of snake that, does nothing else but titillate, at an art gallery would of course encourage criticism.
A difference in meanings might be the case. I define agency as the quality of being able to enact self-control and self-determination. In a video game this is squarely within the purview of the narrative when it comes to pre-defined characters, as any time the player is with agency, the character is not, though the player can certainly role-play (whether deliberately or because the game has lulled them in, emotionally). In these sorts of video games the player is an invisible ghost that inhabits a character during gameplay--technically apart from the narrative, wherein a character's agency in granted to exist. Things like Max Payne might blur that barrier on occasion, or something like BioShock might play with that relationship, but despite these explorations, gameplay in these kinds of games is still separate from the narrative, with agency of the player relevant to the former, and agency of the character relevant to the latter.
So when the two spheres clash rather than align or play off of each other, the experience can feel disrupted. But I source that disruption with the clashing of the spheres, rather than what I view as an illogical exaggeration and overemphasis of a pre-defined character's agency's role in a video game. If I went in for the latter I'd have fundamental issues with the medium itself, as all elements of gameplay (saucy costumes or otherwise) would be an indignity with respect to that character's agency, as opposed to more passive media like books and film (unless I then went on to apply that logic to creators as well, instead of just users, in which case I'd find books and film problematic in that very same sense). If it's the very act of clashing between the gameplay and narrative that you're referring to, rather than an idea that concerns over the character's agency should extend to and supercede arbitrarily isolated gameplay elements (in this case referring to costumes and camera control), then I think we're on the same page there.
I definitely don't want any kind of litmus test required for engaging with any of these mediums, and I hope I didn't somehow give off the impression that I did. Art is for everyone, though the desires and tastes of everyone may not be instantiated in every individual work. Whether someone wants to engage with a work on a deeper analytical level is up to them, and you certainly cannot force an unwilling participant to engage in or with analysis (let alone the game itself), nor should we explicitly or passively implore their abstention in conversations around art. Art shouldn't have gatekeepers, and neither should The Conversation™ around it.
And it's not that every work in-and-of-itself is either problematic or not, as a whole. Works are complicated as fuck, quite like you describe, given that they're testaments to worlds unto themselves. Not just fictionally, but in the sense that they're reflections of reality as filtered through an individual's (or team of individuals') existence. However, relative between people can an aspect of a work be problematic ornot. Person R might think 2B's booty is problematic, and Person S might think it's perfectly fine (and also not problematic; sorry, I really like puns). Both are valid. But every opinion is "valid," and every work is filtered through the world of the individual who's using it. An interpretation of art in a vacuum literally cannot exist, or at least I cannot imagine how it would. And yet, the scope of which an individual understands and chooses to interpret a work may differ from others, and that's for them to decide. Discussion is how we weed out which opinions and which interpretive ranges are better, if there's even a qualitative disparity to be observed at all. That's case-by-case of course.
To that end, the question of a social regression is, to my eye, vitally important. If we're to eventually fall into misogyny, misandry, or a kind of interpersonal nihilism (and not the wispy cutesy kind of nihilism) via the enjoyment of a fictional character's physicality, we should investigate the veracity of the insinuation.
As I've laid out, I'm not an absolute moral relativist. I do adhere to there being a right and a wrong (to be consistently further sussed out by thoughtful life), including when it comes to determining what's best for society and for individuals. If someone is concerned about normalizing the minimization of a fictional person's role in their objectification (which either is or isn't a dehumanizing process), I think it's fair to assume (unless otherwise informed) that they think such a thing could be bad. The "why" and the "how" and the "what if" are the next steps in determining whether that concern is justified or much ado, and what measures, if any, ought be taken either way.
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