6 posts tagged “gaming”
Via Official Shrub.com Blog, a game covers meme.
The original challenge, from Yudhishthira’s Dice, was geared towards women gamers:
Ladies, what RPG covers (or interiors) have you seen that involve a woman in the art that make you say, “I want to play that” or, just as good “I want to play her.” Or that make you feel like it is a game you could like, or be included in by a group of guys you’d never met and whose maturity you didn’t neccisarily know?
Meme Rules:
- Copy the text of the original challenge from Yudhishthira’s Dice and give a proper link attribution.
- Copy these rules exactly.
- Find images of game covers (interiors are okay, too) that make you want to play the game. Any kind of game — video game, card game, tabletop RPG, etc — is fine. Post them and include a short (or long) explanation on why the image makes/made you want to play the game.
- The original challenge is about finding out what women think about how game art is marketed and therefore it is targeted at women. I’d like to keep it that way, please.
- You can tag as many or as few people as you want. You do not need to be tagged to participate in the meme.
- When you make your post, please post the link on this thread so we can all see what others have said.
I'm kind of violating rule 4 here by talking about the covers when I wasn't part of the original challenge, but I'll try not to co-opt things.
Wasteland, Neuromancer and Starflight. I'm cheating a bit here, because part of what hooked me on these boxes was the fact that they were Electronic Arts/Interplay "square boxes." But Wasteland had its postapocalyptic Western showdown, Neuromancer its pixellated cyberpunk head, and Starflight its spaceship boldly going forth, back when all of these genres were relatively unexplored in computer gaming.
Archon. I didn't discover Archon through its cover; a friend had a copy. But it's the most emblematic cover I've ever seen with its almost Escheresque symmetry and contrast.
- The games I've picked, from memory, are much older. These days, I don't really go on cover art because I have the Internet to keep me informed on what's out there. At best, I'll spot a game - usually because the art signifies a genre I like, like RPGs - and look it up later.
- I don't much care for representations of people in my cover art. The only face is in AMFV (maybe Neuromancer too) and that's more because of the background images. Contrast this with Tekanji's picks, which tend to feature women that she'd like to play as. I think that, because I'm in the "target" demographic, I don't look for this - very few games are going to directly alienate me. That said, I do get turned off by exploitative art, like the cover of Dragon Wars, or more recently the ubiquitous MMORPG ads featuring half-naked elf women. I want to be able to show games to my friends and not have to apologize for the covers.
- I also don't care for art that attempts to suggest the visual style of the game. In part, I'm always skeptical of it - there's no guarantee that the game will match the art. I make a bit of an exception for games in which the visual style is unique and a key element, like Okami.
Because you're never too old to rejoice in the receiving of gifts. Here's what I picked up (in the realm of media; I also got clothes, shoes, food, etc.) over the last couple of days. Items with an asterisk are actually Keri's, but we tend to pool our resources when it comes to media.
Books
Board/card games
- Lost: the Board Game
- Super Munchkin 2: The Narrow S-Cape
- Bully
- *Dance Dance Revolution: Supernova
- *Justice League Heroes
- Okami
Am I the only gamer who was up until now unaware that Bully featured teh gay make-outs?
I've played for about two hours, and watched Keri play for about two hours (covering the same ground).
Aesthetically, it seems mostly a cross between Final Fantasy IX and Final Fantasy Tactics for the PlayStation.
The sweeping political storyline at this point reminds me of FFIX and a bit of The Phantom Menace. The opening is a lot bleaker than the earlier games I've seen. The story at this point is too big for the characters; one big empire against another with the little kingdom caught in between. I presume at some point someone in one of the empires will go batshit and try to destroy the world. There hasn't been much of a "hook" yet though; I assume that will change once I meet Ashe (I dislike how the manual spoils events in the opening of the game, though Ashe still being alive is rather predictable).
The characters so far seem rehashed from earlier games, with a few subtle differences. Vaan is a cross between Zidane and Tidus. Penelo is a less squeaky Rikku/Selphie type. Ashe could pass for Yuna's sister, possibly crossed with Garnet (I hope she doesn't turn out to be the White Mage Love Interest), and Basch as the older knight seems Auron-esque with a little bit of Steiner thrown in. I haven't seen Fran and Balthier, but they seem like Freya and Cid/Setzer, respectively.
On the other hand, I find the characters a bit more believable so far. The main cast is still teenagers, but they're acting like teenagers in a war-torn country that have had to grow up quickly rather than like transplanted mallrats.
The combat system is interesting, and seems more similar to PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate than console RPGs. Basically, you can pause and give orders, or rely on an AI scripting system. I haven't had the chance to try it out with multiple characters (Keri got Penelo in her party; I'm not there yet). I haven't figured out any strategy beyond "try not to let monsters team up on you", which holds true for every RPG or strategy game with a positioning element. I tried the tactic of running away during the recharge time between attacks, but it didn't seem to do much good. (Does positioning affect combat? That is, if I'm not facing an opponent do I get hit for more damage?)
The License Grid is interesting; the skill progression reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics crossed with the Sphere Grid of FFX. The main drawback at this point is that it seems that to build an effective group, you've got to know ahead of time when characters join or leave your party, and what skills they will bring. I was going to have Vaan focus on daggers and white magic, only to find out that Penelo would join soon and have precisely those abilities. So now I'm back to guessing from the character descriptions what skills they will have (there don't seem to be any dedicated mages this time around).
[This post originally appeared on Official Shrub.com Blog.]
This is disappointing.
I’ve seen Beyond Good & Evil and The Longest Journey cited as exemplars of “feminist video games”, but not much beyond that.
Of course, there’s the larger question of what would make a game good from a feminist perspective. In addition to being good from a gameplay perspective, I’d say such a game would include female characters who are full agents in the game world, and who are treated as subjects rather than objects. I think a variation of the Mo Movie Measure applies as well, in that female characters should interact with other female characters in ways that aren’t centered around men.
So do other games fit the bill? I think a lot of them do to an extent, but have aspects that undo their positive messages. Final Fantasy X, for example, has several active female characters, but their stories each have problems. Lulu isn’t given nearly as much character development as the other characters, and the main element to her backstory is a romantic relationship. Yuna’s got a great story, but it cedes precedence to Tidus’ perception of Yuna. (Incidentally, how much cooler would FFX have been if Yuna rather than Tidus were the primary character we followed?) Rikku doesn’t get the pairing-off treatment, but does get the “fanservice” treatment, most notably during her reintroduction when the camera pans along her body.
It’s been a while since I played Suikoden III, but I remember Chris Lightfellow being a fairly complex and foreground character; the only drawback there was that she was the only female in an otherwise all-male group of knights (albeit the leader of the group). Xenosaga I contains the characters of Shion, a female scientist, and KOS-MOS, a feminine android, which both appeared promising, though I never progressed far enough in the game to find out how the characters were handled.
In other genres, the Metroid series gets cited as a feminist game, since Samus Aran is a hyper-capable woman who avoids (mostly) being objectified. While Metroid doesn’t quite fit the standards I put forth above, I think that speaks to my own bias toward adventure games and RPGs, which may be unfair.
What games do you all think meet the standard for good video games from a feminist perspective?
[This post originally appeared on Original Shrub.com Blog.]
Earlier this month, Collie of Collie’s Bestiary posted about her experiences with Planescape: Torment.
A short while ago I started playing the computer game “Planescape: Torment,” and stumbled across this issue again, with painfully eye-opening results. Keep in mind, this game won numerous awards for its storytelling and quality in 1999, the year it was released — which makes me wonder in appalled horror just how awful the other games were. But to continue: I first noticed the sexual objectification of women with the game’s job/species designations, which float above the head of the graphical character on the screen. There were monsters, and men and women. As I recall, men were classified about 50% as townsmen and 50% thugs. Women were similarly classified as either townswomen… or harlots.
What?! Um, hold on. Why were there no male harlots? Why no female thugs? Is the game trying to teach us that women can only be for sale, and only men are capable of violence? I found myself bewilderedly wondering: are the creators of the game afraid of women or something, that they feel the need to so dehumanize women in the game?
My first reaction was to attempt to excuse these aspects of the game
as “ignorable.” There’s no need to look at the portrait gallery to play
the game, and the “harlots” don’t actually have much in-game purpose
(they can improve Morte’s Curse ability; that’s about it). It seemed a
waste to miss out on a game that had so much else going for it. This,
of course, is precisely the wrong framing - it puts the burden on the
player to put aside her own discomfort. Besides, there are other
uncomfortable aspects to the game which are not so easily ignored, such
as the geek-girl fetish of the Brothel of Cartesian Dualism Slating Intellectual Lusts, or how every girl’s crazy for a gothed-out Hulk.
A better way of approaching these issues is in terms of the costs and
benefits of the design decisions - is it really worth alienating a
sizable portion of your audience for this?
I. Penalizing Women
There’s been a lot of debate over The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s character creation process, which gave different attribute bonuses based on the character’s sex, and did it in such a way that male characters were more optimized, especially for fighting classes. As tikae notes:
It’s that if you want to have a female character, you’re going to be punished if you want to be anything except for a mage - and you’re still not going to be as good at that as male characters of most races are. It’s just how the numbers work. Making it a punishment to choose a certain gender is always going to be bad game design, whether it’s political or not.
First edition AD&D had an even more unbalanced portrayal of sexual dimorphism - the maximum allowable strength for women of any “race” was significantly lower than that for men, with no attempt to balance this penalty. In other words, men were penalized for playing cross-gender characters, and women were penalized for playing same-gender characters - again, especially warrior types.
Arcanum goes even farther than that - many of the species in the game are simply only playable as male. The designers cite the extra work and storage space that would be required to include artwork representing female dwarves, gnomes, etc., and explain it away in-game by referring to Victorian convention. The upshot, though, was that players had significantly fewer options if they wished to play female characters.
II. What Is Real? How Do You Define “Real”?
In addition to simply being glossed over, all of these examples of sexism in RPGs also get defended by portraying critics as valuing “political correctness” over “realism,” a defense that’s especially pernicious because it goes outside the game to make claims about the world in general.
But what do we mean by realism in the context of gaming? I’m not talking about the tired idea that, in any story with magic or supernatural elements, there’s no need for verisimilitude - that’s just a defense of bad writing. When we speak of realism in a game, we usually mean two things: immersion and complexity.
Immersion is the believability of what Roger Giner-Sorolla calls mimesis:
As stated before, I see successful fiction as an imitation or “mimesis” of reality, be it this world’s or an alternate world’s. Well-written fiction leads the reader to temporarily enter and believe in the reality of that world. A crime against mimesis is any aspect of an IF game that breaks the coherence of its fictional world as a representation of reality.
Complexity is the depth of implementation of the game world. Immersion and complexity are often in conflict, as every additional detail is an opportunity for a crime against mimesis to be perpetrated. What we call realism, then, is the combination of the two: a world sufficiently detailed that “rings true” to the player.
Guilded Lilies points out that what breaks mimesis will vary from player to player, citing the requisite detail for any discussion of sexism in gaming, Lara Croft’s breasts:
I feel it is pretty safe to say that women and men have different impressions of male and female game characters in computer games. Exaggerated female body parts may fall into the category of fantasy elements that men are willing to accept, but for women, this might just be the fantasy killer that interrupts her experience of suspended disbelief. A woman knows intuitively that having to haul around an enormous rack would make, for example, Lara Croft’s acrobatics impossible. For a male playing the same game this might never arise as a conflict, and likewise enjoying the presence of such things, he may never be aware that suspension of disbelief is required to maintain his immersion in the story line.
III. Reality is Overrated
The thing is, realism alone - i.e., the combination of mimesis and complexity - is not necessarily entertaining. There are games which are perfectly consistent and coherent in their game worlds, but simply aren’t a lot of fun because those worlds aren’t very interesting to the player (for me, strategy games like Railroad Tycoon and Colonization fell into this category, as did Oregon Trail when I wasn’t trying to make my friends die of dysentery). And there are other games with interesting, believable worlds, but whose complexity bogs down the gameplay until it’s intolerable. Realms of Arkania is the classic example in PC RPG-land; Xenosaga and Star Ocean: the Second Story approached this point for me with their multiple point-advancement systems. What game designers should be asking themselves is not whether a feature will make the game more realistic, but whether it will make the game more fun.
IV. Scope is a Design Decision
The realism that’s being defended in the above examples is selective at best. Some elements get focused on while others are ignored entirely; it’s not so much that these design decisions are expected as it is that they “feel right” to the perceived core audience of male gamers. Gaming, especially fantasy role-playing, has been a “boys’ club” for so long that these little touches of sexism have become cliches that players take for granted. If an area is poor, the reasoning goes, it will have prostitution, and that will invariably take the form of female streetwalkers, no matter what the rest of society looks like. In a multi-species society like Sigil, why would all of the prostitutes be human women?
What the realism defense ignores is that any game - indeed, any narrative or documentary medium - is limited in scope. The game designer makes a conscious choice about what to model in the game world; including sexism under the guise of “realism” makes a statement that sexism is sufficiently important to be included in the world model.
V. A Misguided Attempt at Anti-Censorship
If these aspects of the game could be omitted without notice - since few people complain about the details that aren’t in the game - why does criticism of them always raise such a fuss? Aside from the general backlash against “political correctness,” I think there is a more specific backlash against perceived censorship of games a la the “Nintendo Code,” where adventurers went to cafes to drink soda pop and called each other “spoony bards.” The problem with such a response is that it conflates legitimate design decisions with “fixes” superimposed on the games - the equivalent of renaming the “harlots” to “dancers” or something and blurring the artwork, cosmetic changes that serve to break mimesis by emphasizing what’s omitted.
VI. Boys’ Club Backlash
I also think there’s a subgroup of players who are simply reacting to having their privilege challenged. The following entitlement-laden Usenet post on Planescape: Torment started a sizeable flamewar:
I also appreciate the way the women are dressed, showing much of their breasts and buttocks. To me it is not the main thing of course - who would buy a game just because some of these tiny little figures look a bit sexy, it is just not enough for any real erotic thrill, but it is a small aesthetic delight that adds to the overall thrill of the game. I think a bit of sexiness belongs within a RPG. As I understand it, it is part of the fantasy-world.
The later replies defending this mindset use all the standard arguments - it’s PC, they’re just trying to make games less enjoyable, there aren’t enough women players to matter, etc. I guess when the games are being specifically targeted to you, there’s nowhere to go but down.
Conclusion
Game designers would benefit from asking the following about any design decision, especially those that involve gender:
- Why am I including this feature?
- How will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
- For whom will this decision make the game more enjoyable?
- For whom will this decision make the game less enjoyable? Is there any way to minimize this?
Designers and players alike need to stop using the idea of realism - “that’s the way the world works” - as an excuse for condoning sexism in games when they’re called out on it. It’s simply passing the buck.
