Completely understandable, and I hate lazy characters too. One thing I was mentioning though is sometimes going into tropes and looking too closely can be a trap. Tropes when there's nothing behind them is boring, but at the same time, there are moments when we look too closely at the tropes and forget to look for what's holding them together.

Sometimes, an art critic can look at a piece of work without going into feelings and brush strokes and just enjoy the art. Sometimes they look too closely and see the building blocks, but not how everything operates together.

That's exacly the effect I as an always neutral and calm appearing person have on people offline, even the ones I like.
I can relate to him way more than to any human character I know of.

Hmm, I can't say what I want without spoilers, so

Planescape: Torment SPOILERS:







It wasn't really that he was neutral. It's hard to explain, but I always assumed my reaction to him was the intended effect. After having discovered his full backstory, he has a completely legitimate reason to utterly HATE the Nameless One, so I thought that the writers intentionally let that bleed through a little bit into his dialogue without explicitly stating it.

I didn't know any spoilers about him going into it, so I thought I was just picking up on some subtle clues that they worked into it without really understanding why I felt that way until I got the full revelation about his past.

Feminism is, in its core, about the equality of men and women in anything besides very basic biology. If a game designer is able to write interesting men, he or she is absolutely able to write interesting women. That's because people of both genders are persons. There is literally no difference in writing the two. A writer who sets up to write a female character and begins with the thought: "Well, now, what makes women different from men?" is leaving the path of wisdom immediately. His fictional men can be anything, anything at all. His fictional women will always be "the women".

I am convinced that "giving good ideas for female characters" is something Sarkeesian might do, but it certainly would not be in the best interest of what those videos are about. She is not a creative writer.

There is some extensive research and there are some novel ideas in these videos, not much doubt about that. Tropes are a shorthand of discussion - a way to not always start at zero when you're discussing media, a way to classify popular stereotypes. Unless these stereotypes are identified as stereotypes, game designers will gladly continue to use them thinking THEY are particularly original. Amongst the things that were new to me personally - although I can not make the claim that they were necessarily voiced by Sarkeesian first - were e.g. the euthanasia trope; the perfectioning of the damsel trope by first having the girl killed, then having the player save her soul; the prevalence of the 'statue' trope; the actual problem with gender signifiers in video games (often misunderstood by fleeting TvW watchers); the Mass Effect advertising bias etc.

Game designers are not the choir, yet game designers have listened (like e.g. Tim Schafer). Feministfrequency is a non profit organisation; the videos are not monetized; yet of course Sarkeesian has quite a lot of resources at the ready from the Kickstarter. Sarkeesian wasn't promoted by the press as an authority figure in the first place; she was thrown into that position as a direct result of the popularity she gained when several thousand people engaged in harrassment on youtube starting with day one of her Kickstarter. I'd certainly rather have a voice that has garnered support step by step over the course of years; I'd certainly rather have a voice that has garnered support because of the worth of her work and not as a clear protest reaction to (indisputably wide spread) inacceptable ways to treat a person; and I'd rather have a voice that more indisputably stems from within the core gamer group. I wish the idea of a feminist critique of video games was wide spread enough to have a multitude of 'authoritative' voices heard, from both women an men. That, however, will obviously not happen. The argumentation scheme we're still facing is "video games are a male dominated industry, so video games can be sexist" (the Sommers argument). Of course advocates of feminist ideas will continue to support Sarkeesian foremost as an already established voice, even though her ideas might not be 100% the same as the ones of her supporters.

The people who think that Sarkeesian is not entirely correct in what she says are not making their own feminist critique video evaluations. They're making "rebuttal" videos.

That at least is a better thing to say than "purposefully misleading" or "lies", but I still have to see examples of where that factually applies. The way Sarkeesian portrayed Hitman, for example, I assumed to be correct. Enter the critics, who seem to be of the opinion that a lower 'score' (a game mechanic on the meta level, actually devoid of immersive features) was 'punishing' players who killed the strippers - ignoring the whole idea of the sandbox principle brought forward in the very same video; arguing reverse sexism where none exists; ignoring how the game gives you points back for dragging the bodies around and putting them in a dumpster... the list goes on.

I'm not saying that there aren't any false claims made in Sarkeesian's videos, but many of the attempts I've seen to 'defend' some games in particular are indeed "shallow or factually wrong". I've seen some interesting attempts at defending Zelda and Peach, for comparison; but their benevolent ruler status of course doesn't change their actual role in the core games that introduced them as characters.

You're right. "Ms. Splosion Man" is about as much "Ms. Male character" as humanly possible. Which proves the point - the NUMBER of female characters in games is totally irrelevant, the PERCENTAGE of female playable characters is irrelevant. Yet when they're up, they'd better count in quality. :(

I agree with your words one hundred percent. I think that elsewhere, I have called that a variant of Stockholm as well.

Valve makes a mockery out of gamergate, and gamergate doesn't give a shit. Heck, there's even a gamergate Curator channel. Jesus, that's like pissing in your own face! But no, let's attack the smallest indies with the most made up transgressions instead of the bona fide monopolists who openly laugh in your face, see no evil, do no evil.

Dak'kon will join you regardless of your stats. He's bound by oath to one of your previous incarnations. You can howewer pump him for information about your past / discuss about his philosophy during the course of the game providing your Wisdom is high enough.
Interesting character anyway.

As someone who also learned a lot from the FF videos, I'm always surprised at how rough people are at dismissing her, young males, indoctrinated adult women and whoever else, especially considering I always thought the clichés were obvious and tired for most people. Whether you like Anita and her thoughts or not, at the end of the day she is suggesting diversity and more originality in character development and identities. How can anyone be against that?

And why would it be a problem at all if they continue using them ? Yes stereotypes and tropes exists and are used in most media... big news... and what?

You can count the number of games with "fully original" plots/characters and/or original characters (regardless of their gender) of those last 20 years on the hand of a single hand, and if you go to other medias (TV, movies, books) its not any better.

There is nothing wrong with using tropes or stereotypes (as long as they don't become insulting or willingly degrading) per see, you can make a very good games with an interesting story while using only tropes and stereotypes and on the other side makes a boring game with bland characters by trying too hard to avoid them.

Indy games are more often than not a good reminder that "originality" or having "new ideas", doesn't necessarily makes good games; having characters/stories that doesn't follow any stereotypes/tropes (from the most obvious to the most far fetched ones) won't necessarily make them any more interesting either.

It wouldn't, and it's ultimately impossible. Tropes are not bad. Tropes are a way for people to categorize patterns they notice in fiction. An artist has the choice of either using tropes already known or the ones that aren't yet. Even if he chooses the latter in every single instance, as long as people follow his lead, the patterns will get notices and formalized into tropes. Even if every artist avoided every trope, assuming that the spectrum of choices isn't infinite - they would run out of options. Even IF the spectrum of choices IS infinite, we already know that an infinite series can have a finite sum, therefore certain things can simply be dragged under the same umbrella-trope. Inversions, subversions of tropes are still tropes.
Originality is overrated. It's this pomo ideal of doing something that has never been done before. Screw that - I'd rather see something only moderately innovative, but fun and entertaining. For instance - Heroes of the Storm is obviously a MOBA game, but it has no items, gives players the ability to modify their skills mid-match, and aggregates the team's experience into a single pool. It's not a venture into the absolute unknown, with byzantine mechanics and unheard of narrative. On the contrary - it takes all the famous Blizzard characters and gives them a chance to beat the crap out of one another... and it's fun as hell.
Just because something can be analyzed, classified, doesn't mean it's bad. You can break down a song into separate instruments or notes, but this will not diminish its beauty as a whole.

I just finished Jazzpunk and Zoe Quinn is credited (along with Jim Sterling) for additionnal voices. They're everywhere, it's just like "They Live"... Where's Roddy Pipper when we need him? :o)

That's what surprised me the most with GG, these people really get around. They are literally professional sycophants.

Because she's spewing hatred for men and couching that under a huge mountain of bile and puss.

She could have made that point in a way that wasn't so offensive and maybe people would have taken her seriously. But, she's outright looking for the best examples of things wrong and purposefully making mountains out of molehills ignoring the fact that a lot of this stuff is driven by the demographics. If women were the main customer for video games in the past, then you'd probably see a lot of princes being saved and characters that catered more to a female demographic than male.

I don't think anybody really thinks that games wouldn't benefit from more diversity, but most of us can make that point without relying upon cheap rhetorical tricks and a crapload of bigotry to prop up the point.

Women being always in need of rescue isn't bigotry, it's just a tired and boring demeaning crutch.

And Anita opened my eyes to that. :p

Also, let's not forget that these female characters are often written by men, for men. It's not really mean or sexist, but it is still appropriation.

So does the same thing apply to male characters written by females, for females? Are we going to attack, say, romance novels in the same way, since men read books too?