Wait, what? So you're saying that it's perfectly fine to like the song
'Ship Those N*ggers Back Home
http://www.lyricsmania.com/ship_those_niggers_back_lyrics_johnny_rebel.html"
As long as you're only listening to it because you like the tune?

I trust you want to burn DVD copes of Django Unchained at a cult meeting yes? And clap in unison with fellow bees as your many fuhrers proclaim how racist it is?

Django Unchained is one of the finest anti-racism films ever, full stop.
(In a fun, pulpy, Tarantino way - some people have claimed that giving anti-racism a fun tarantino treatment is, itself, inappropriate but I say 'Whatever works', personally)
But what does have to do with anything anyway?
As I say, my level of 'indoctrination' extends no further than procrastinating at work by reading the news articles from The Independent and, I guess, Cracked that keep turning up in my FB news feed and listening to what Vain has to say here and these are STILL my free, independent, thoughts and feelings, sorry but they are!

So art is OK as long as it abides by certain ideological rules?

A good example comes from movies. One can really like Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will for aesthetic and technical reasons while completely disagreeing with its political stance.

Or Birth of a Nation.
Liking something does not mean implicitly endorsing said thing's message. Hell, that was more or less the point of Lolita. Beautiful prose depicting utterly abhorrent behaviors and views.

Why do you guys always jump to racism? What the heck is it with the strawmanning? o_0

Have you never liked a song in a foreign language? Isn't that a much better example to ilustrate what I'm saying? You're UK, not US even, so one would assume you've had some exposure to non-english continental songs... Is my comparison of narrative in games to lyrics in music so good at making my point that instead of talking videogames you just needed to polarize the discussion into politics? Weren't we having a perfectly fine calm and rational dialogue?

Please be clear, because I don't think my opinion about that specific song matters here. Are you actually trying to argue that it's impossible for anyone to enjoy said song musically, despite the lyrics? Is that song somehow a miracle of unanimity and universality in its lack of musical worth? Because if you're not trying to argue that, then of course it's perfectly fine to like that song despite the lyrics. Heck, I don't know the lyrics but maybe they are very poetic even, despite their meaning. There's nothing to debate here, you agree with me and we can just be all happy.

Heck, isn't that what Vaina just said a while ago? You can like something despite XXXist elements? You can't have the cake and eat it at the same time... Either you are permissive about tolerating others' taste, or you insist on casting moral judgement based on aesthetic considerations. You guys constantly harp about us trying to judge aesthetics objectively as if that was a huge sin, but you want to judge aesthetics it morally, which to me is a much worse mistake.

And by the way, if you actually care about that song, please be more precise and objective about what you mean by "tune". The melody? The rhythm? The arrangement? Objective things which can be discussed so much easier than taste... they exist, if you go and actually look for them, even in Art and in games.

Shit... you actually "triggered" me... 0_o
Fuck it, I'm not cleaning it up more than I already have. Make of it what you will...

No, no, look I was just saying that people around here get annoyed when a review points out how an aspect of a game's narrative is problematic and start denying that a review should even be talking about that stuff - that narrative doesn't matter because games aren't about the story anyway

I'm just saying that there's no reason that we can't point out and except that Birth of a Nation, Merchant of Venice and even Ship those N*ggers back home have problematic, racist aspects (an understatement for all but Shakespeare) but, once we've accepted that and seen them for what they are there's no reason we can't go back to analysing them, praising aspects and even enjoying them

It just seems, that when it comes to videogames, there's such fear of the boogieman 'censorship' that people cry and throw their toys out the pram as soon as you criticise and say something negative about anything from a social-political perspective and it's contribution to culture as a whole because no art exists in a vacuum

Personally I've NEVER been pro-censorship but maybe there's people on the 'equality' side who are, I don't agree with them at all and maybe they are doing as much damage as anyone else but I just find all these arguments like 'if you get invested with a character in a videogame you're a weirdo' or 'narrative in videogames is immaterial and shouldn't be mentioned, let alone affect a review score' to be ridiculous and irritating

It becomes a different story when people start claiming objects cause and enforce horrible crimes, that liking them makes you a monster.

imagine you are listening to your favorite random song and suddenly a bunch of people come to you and say "what you listen to that? I guess you must love to mutilate puppies and touch kids then"

and when that song has no racist elements yet people give lengthy monologues telling that it hates blacks.

This is what we've come to these days. You don't have to conclude something is bad, you think of what you will hate about it and then gather arguments as you go. Reviews these days strongly involve how politically correct it is in it's quality.

Quit strawmanning. People here are not complaining just because of claims of "problematic narrative". They are complaining because these reviewers are intentionally misrepresenting the situation. For example, in the last Witcher 3 review from Polygon, where the claim was the game was misogynistic because a wife beater was allowed to tell his "side of the story". The review intentionally left out the rest of the picture, the wife's side, the child's side, Geralt's reactions.

Nope, its misogynistic because of the one small part taken out of context and not viewed as a whole. And why do these "reviewers" keep doing this? They even often say it. They want this content removed from the game, that it doesn't belong. So don't tell me about the cries to censor being "conspiracy theories" or a "boogieman".

Hell how many reviews are calling game "misogynistic" because they don't like what one character is wearing? The Witcher 3 again, because Arthur Gies thinks what Ciri is wearing is inappropriate, you "misogynistic" "sexist".

I have a problem with the made-up outrage of the social justice warrior press. One third of the Witcher 3 review went on and on about fricking misogyny... seriously, that is ridiculous and you should know it.

Well, I just read the review Mr Gies' review
Personally, I don't believe that any reviews of any art forms, out there in the real world, are truly 'objective' or that there is even one, objective truth about the quality of any work of art
I don't believe that the film reviews section of Maxim, The Times (New York or British - take your pick) Arts Supplement and Cosmopolitan are going to agree about everything as all of them will consider their audience and the demographic that their publication is targeted at
I think, more than anything, the harrowing part for a lot of people is that the audience for computer games is differentiating and not all publications are aimed at the same demo anymore - some reviews and the site they appear on may simply not be FOR you anymore!
Mr. Gies makes comparison to Game of Thrones in there and, while I'm not going to dig around right now, I'm sure that there's been plenty of 'high-brow' sites and publications around the world who have pointed out that George R R Martin is presenting a misogynistic world with fan-service titillation while, at the same time, giving generally positive reviews since it was only called 'A Song of Fire and Ice' but here we are, 5 seasons into the TV series and has anything been censored? No! So... Just chill, yeah, the sky isn't falling just yet...

I'd like to know what the problem is with allowing a wife beater to tell "his side of the story," period. Portraying a character as a flawed human being with personal justifications for their actions rather than a moustache-twirling cartoon is just good writing. The hard truth about life is that most people can justify their actions to themselves, no matter how evil, sometimes concerningly well.

The problem is with the emphasis. You seemingly just ignore (or don't get) what we are trying to say.

A reviewer is supposed to be giving the readers an honest and objective discourse on the art. His job is to inform the reader, as best he can, about the game (in this instance). When a reviewer cherry-picks out things to call "misogyny" and tries hard to misportray the game, it becomes obvious to most of us, that he is intentionally being dishonest about the work. And its very likely he's doing this to promote an agenda, be it this crazy SJW change games crap or to gains clicks to the website. Either way, he is not attempting to bring honesty and objectivity to his reviews.

You keep repeating the same tired and frankly disingenuous argument that this might "really" be his opinion. I highly doubt that. Any reasonable person should be able to spot the signs this is not true.

And frankly, why is this so-called misogyny enough to warrant a full 1/3 of the review?

If I were a professional journalist and wrote a review of Gone Home and half my review centered around how the game crashed to desktop losing all my progress right before the end, am I being objective about the game?

Now, I feel that its worth a mention, a significant mention that the game is buggy and makes no attempt to save your progress, but not half the review. And that is the real problem here, that these reviewers are not informing people about the merits of a game, but rather standing on their soapbox to rant about their social causes instead...

That makes them piss poor journalists...

Even it it IS a full 3rd of the review devoted to soapboxing, and that seems like an exaggeration to me, but maybe it just seems like less because the negative stuff was at the end, but whatever, say it IS a 3rd then I think you'll find that those other 2 thirds were actually fairly glowing with praise and explained the game's merits rather well IMO.
There was a lot about the ambition needed for a small company to expand the rather linea Witcher 2 into a fully open-world experience for the 3rd one and how well they managed to pull it off, for example...

That ''review''

1.Has no sense of priority. Very few negative points raised other than the self righteous ones. Since when did soap-boxing and preaching a political view supersede having to write an informative review?

2.The last part, the last 3rd of it is entirely useless for anyone wishing to buy the game.

3.Its gives an disproportional coverage of the game, with other stuff that could've been added in for giving knowledge, and hence better informing the consumer WHO CLICKED ON THIS DAMN THING TO KNOW IF THE GAME IS GOOD OR NOT being omitted.

Here's how it works. When one is reviewing a game, one is engaging in critique. A critic's first responsibility is towards the audience, who are the reason the critic sits in the privileged position today. But this critique did not do a reasonable job critiquing the game. Fair; can be a bad critic. But this also substitutes a part of what should've been a review with political BS that is not even gender neutral.

It is pretty much one third of the review going by paragraph count at least. So that is fairly hard to sweep away. The problem is a lot of the events in the review are taken out of context. Gies is purposely looking to cherry pick tiny bits of the game and make it sound as if the game is nothing but a simulator for misogyny.

First, does this single topic warrant one-third of the review? Could this not have been summed up in a paragraph or two that he personally found parts of the game disturbing due to the treatment of women, and move on from there?

Second, he fails to convey what is actually going on in the game, and a lot of his examples are taken highly out of context. I won't say specifics as not to spoil the game for those who have not played it, but he mentioned a girl having her fingernails ripped out. He fails to mention this is a selfless act by this girl to help Geralt aid another person. He also fails to mention that the game gives ample, and I do mean ample, opportunity to stop any of this from happening. For my playthrough, these events are non-existent.

Third, instead of sitting there damning developers, Gies could have drawn parallels between in-game events and the real world to tackle tough social and political topics. If he is truly interested in educating a reader on such issues, call-out culture tactics are not the way to do it. He only provided a list of what he considers terrible things and added no real commentary or anything meaningful to the discussion.

Fourth, Gies completely seems to negate the fact that the primary female characters in the game are very strong women who are worth looking up to. I have still yet to follow up with one to flesh our her story more, but the other two are selfless people who are constantly seen helping others. They are also badasses that can hold their own in a fight. They are also essential to Geralt's journey, because he runs into dead ends without their assistance. Why is this overlooked? Why does Gies only reduce women down to what they are wearing and see misogyny? Why are these women's actions not be counted and praised?

See the problem with these kind of reviews? The way Gies tackled this review clearly shows there is an agenda that he cares about more than the game itself. Misrepresenting events and characters is the last thing you should be doing in a review.

Sorry for the rant, and I know others have already covered these points somewhat, but there you go. As a side note, it is still annoying that people tend to act like these are the kind of games that drive women away. This is the first game I have played in marathon sessions in a really long time. It is amazing, and I find the main female characters pretty awesome. People need to stop acting like women can't enjoy these games, because surprise, we do!