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Video Games: The long wait until Fall games come out


Fez

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No,every culture has this,you are only more aware of it in gaming.

No, they don't. Gaming culture is fucking bad and the worst parts of it are quite large and vocal and rarely called on it.

And just cause of developers cant write fully fleshed out realistic females,dosent automatically make them sexists. Maybe they dont understand woman?

They don't understand women because they don't really bother for a wide variety of reasons related to sexism.

Also, the issues with gamer culture go way beyond just "developers don't write female characters".

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No,every culture has this,you are only more aware of it in gaming.

And just cause of developers cant write fully fleshed out realistic females,dosent automatically make them sexists. Maybe they dont understand woman?

It's more that the fanbase wants to buy games that objectify females and such. This doesn't put the developers in the clear, but it isn't intentionally tp ut down women. Still horrible though

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Playing through Tomb Raider on hard. So far there it seems no different than normal. Don't know how far I'm going to make it though; picking up Saints Row 3 tomorrow.

It's more that the fanbase wants to buy games that objectify females and such. This doesn't put the developers in the clear, but it isn't intentionally tp ut down women. Still horrible though

I can admit to enjoying games like this. It's not essential, nor the only thing I'll base my purchases on. But it definitely gets my attention. And the majority of gamers are male, so...

Game developers/publishers want to sell games. If a scantily clad or even nude ladies will help will help them sell games, then they'll do it. Just as long as she's not the main character. A lot of guys seem to have a problem with that for some reason.

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Well, then. Yeah, a lot of gamers are really fucking horrible. I wonder though if the populations of people who primarily watch TV or movies are really that much better, or if those industries have just been around so much longer that the studios have much better systems in place to deal with issues like this. I'd imagine Damon Lindelof, for examples, gets an awful lot of threats and hateful comments as well.

Yes. Lindelof has said that the comments he received after the Lost finale, the Star Trek movies and Prometheus all convinced him not to pursue a writing role on the new Star Wars movie, even though he was interested in it.

But that is the devs and the writers fault, since they don't really seem to care for making good female characters.

Devs seem to be changing for the better, bringing in female writers like Hepler and Rhianna Pratchett and female devs like Kim Swift (one of the main creators of Portal) and at least trying to put more female characters in games. However, there are vocal minorities on gaming sites who will become enraged at any such changes (see the famous 'Straight Male Gamer' rant on the BioWare forums) and will use sexist and misogynistic language against them.

It's not purely a gender-based issue though: the male founders of BioWare have since admitted that the criticism of their recent games hastened their departure from the company.

Gaming culture is more than misogynistic. It's just downright sociopathic. It's abusive, angry, hateful, bigoted, bullying entitlement. It's pretty horrible.

To be fair, the worst offender by far is X-Box Live and that is partially the fault of Microsoft for tolerating it for so long (though they are moving now in the direction of changing it for XB1). PC gaming culture can be like that, but the moderators of the various forums and games are better at slamming down bans and so on on people who behave like that (though sometimes taking unfortunately long periods of time to do it).

And just cause of developers cant write fully fleshed out realistic females,dosent automatically make them sexists. Maybe they dont understand woman?

This is probably why more female writers are now coming into the business (though they've always been around, they've been a distinct minority, but it does seem to be changing a bit more now).

And the majority of gamers are male

This is a feedback loop, though. Create sexist games and people who enjoy such things flock to them. Devs then assume this is what people want and people make more of them. However, the internet allows companies to see that a lot of women are playing games, particularly things like BioWare and Bethesda RPGs or even Call of Duty, and they can then respond to that. BioWare's radical improvement in writing female characters (and they've never been as bad as a lot of companies) and even Infinity Ward finally bringing in female soldiers to Ghosts are, I think, good signs.

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I'm glad they pick the same Geralt for the Witcher 3 and don't follow the stupid move of Thief 4, but like with Max Payne 3, they keep the original voice-actor for Geralt. Heck, I was already a bit annoyed that they changed Zoltan, Dandelion and Triss for Witcher 2 :D

If you did not already know that we gamers are the worst fucking people on the planet, perhaps you would like to read about the people who threatened the children of Bioware writer Jennifer Hepler.

Some of the arguments and cases are fine and point indeed to a worrying and abhorrent issue. Others are far less well-chosen.

I mean, if you take Fez 2, it was Phil Fish who acted like the biggest douche and a complete prima donna. With always-online for Xbox One, it was the Micrsofot guy, Orth, who was a total prick openly mocking half the USA ("Why would I live there?"). Not to mention them adding George Lucas quitting Star Wars - as if the severe criticism of the prequel trilogy was totally unfounded and wholly without merit.

Without any doubt, the most abusive part of the behaviour is unacceptable - specially when it targets family members. And at times, it's pretty unfair since it doesn't target the real culprits (Dragon Age 2 had problems because EA wanted Bioware to do it on the cheap, for instance, as shown in an article posted earlier by Werthead).

Now, the thing is, big games, big movies, big franchises will be successful, and many people will flock to give them money, even if they're bad. Yet in some cases, people, gamers, fans, movie-goers have genuine grievances and some of these AAA games and blockbusters really deserve to bomb. This won't happen even if the very vocal but tiny minority of angry online commenters decided to boycott. So, even if despicable and repulsive, I tend to consider some of this as a for, of asymmetric warfare - though not a conscious one, in most cases -; basically, even when a lot of online people complain, they usually don't have the economic impact to change things (in some cases, things that really need to be fixed), so criticism heats up and goes into downright abuse, and in a few cases, there are casualties on the other side.

Though, of course, in many cases, I suspect that the ones that suffer and give up aren't the main responsible of the things that pissed off gamers, and this bullying won't have any serious impact.

For instance, George Lucas had been correctly identified as the ultimate cause of many of the SW prequels' issues, and was widel bashed due to it, but on the other hand, I've rarely if ever seen anyone targetting directly Steve Jobs, I haven't heard of people going after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer - who are the ultimate guys in charge when it comes to Xbox-One, not some random spokesperson with no decision power at Microsoft -, I don't see much people openly going after Mark Zuckerberg despite the numerous issues of Facebook (privacy for instance), and to pick an infamous target, Bobby Kotick hasn't resigned in disgust after being twitter-harassed (besides, when it comes to fans pissed off at the lore being butchered, WOW had been pretty high in the list of top offenders, yet despite numerous complaints, people in charge haven't changed); COD among others is widely bashed by a sizable part of the gamers, yet even this kind of broad bashing and abuse doesn't stop them from releasing new games year after year.

So, all in all, not only do I not really agree with the tactics used, but I tend to think that they quite often aren't even able to pick the correct targets when they have grievances and want to vent against someone.

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Those devs and such are part of gaming culture. They grew up in it. They are an expression of it. The whole thing is a feedback loop.

This is a very good way to put it. Video games are not (by and large) producing content for strong, well balanced female characters because the culture does not attract and nurture people who would be capable of doing so. It's gotten so bad that even basic introspection and application of fairly benign feminist readings to popular franchises dredges up some seriously nasty shit in terms of blowback.

Not to mention them adding George Lucas quitting Star Wars - as if the severe criticism of the prequel trilogy was totally unfounded and wholly without merit.

Yeah throwing Lucas into the mix definitely seems like a stretch, given it's film. Especially since the straw that broke the camel's back with him was Red Tails, and that whole debacle was panned by film execs, critics, and the box office. To try and pin that one on the awfulness of the internet seems to be reaching.

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There is also the issue that the internet in general, gaming culture in particular and twitter especially has a horrible attitude when it comes to dissenting opinions. Read an article that you disagree with? DDOS that website, threaten the author on twitter, and do everything you can to discredit the writer. Because Nobody should have an opinion (of a video game, or of issues like gender bias, or a political ideology) that differs from your own.

Case in point the recent controversy around polygon's review of dragon's crown. The author gave it a 6.5, citing an uncomfortable portrayal of women and repetitive gameplay , and the internet lost it's shit. (though that really is 2 issues combined: portrayal of women in games; and score systems being interpreted as <7/10 = horrible game, rather than what it is: above average.

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Infinity Ward confirms that the PC version of CODGOATS will have better graphics than even the XB1/PS4 versions of the game.

Interesting. IW and Activision seem to be actively courting PC gamers after EA spent some time earlier this year telling everyone that the PC was 'inferior' to the new consoles which is why their new FIFA engine won't be ported to it, which they were roundly criticised for.

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Infinity Ward confirms that the PC version of CODGOATS will have better graphics than even the XB1/PS4 versions of the game.

Interesting. IW and Activision seem to be actively courting PC gamers after EA spent some time earlier this year telling everyone that the PC was 'inferior' to the new consoles which is why their new FIFA engine won't be ported to it, which they were roundly criticised for.

If the game looked anywhere near "next gen" I might be interested, it looks like dogshit. I'm pretty skeptical.

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Just quickly on this "video game culture" nonsense: the video games industry is one of the largest entertainment industries in the world, larger than the music industry and close to the film industry (in terms of revenue). That's a lot of fucking people, a lot of people play video games and a lot of people are assholes. Stop bitching.

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Just quickly on this "video game culture" nonsense: the video games industry is one of the largest entertainment industries in the world, larger than the music industry and close to the film industry (in terms of revenue). That's a lot of fucking people, a lot of people play video games and a lot of people are assholes. Stop bitching.

There's alot of people in other industries too and yet you don't see the same kind of shit going on.

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Have you visited this thing called the Internet?

Gamers seem especially entitled and sensitive compared to fans of other media.

Comic fans are probably bad but seem less likely to send death threats to someone over their part making a video game.

I mean, how does that even compute? I sure [some] of it is people unable to move past being bullied themselves or having frustrations in their real lives, but that [threatening to kill someone] still seems beyond the pale.

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Have you visited this thing called the Internet?

Yes. It's part of the reason the difference with gamer culture is so damn obvious.

I read the #1reasonwhy stories. I've seen the products the industry puts out and the way it's fans act.

And more then anything, I've seen the backlash from the gaming community at every suggestion they might have a problem. Like the one your exhibit right here.

The gaming community is worse in large part because it's utterly incapable of making the first step and even admitting it has a problem.

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Yes. It's part of the reason the difference with gamer culture is so damn obvious.

I read the #1reasonwhy stories. I've seen the products the industry puts out and the way it's fans act.

And more then anything, I've seen the backlash from the gaming community at every suggestion they might have a problem. Like the one your exhibit right here.

The gaming community is worse in large part because it's utterly incapable of making the first step and even admitting it has a problem.

It's basically a huge problem at every level. The demographics that represent gaming culture tend not to be very emphatic, and I don't think it's a coincidence that a lot of popular gaming 'personalities', especially in criticism or analysis, are conditioned around fairly unnattractive emotional states (AngryJoe, Annoyed Gamer, the Angry Video Game Nerd, Jimquisition). Combine this with the general grossness of the internet being the springboard for gaming culture in a way that it wasn't for film, literature or music, and you have an issue. Gamers, by and large, just seem angry.

There also seems to be an element of detachment. Inevitably when you criticise gaming content, you're liable to get a bunch of technical justifications or the "gaming is supposed to be entertaining" defence, which rings rather hollow because the exact same argument could be made for any other entertainment medium, and they don't seem to have the same problem to nearly the same extent.

Part of me though thinks it's not completely the fault of gamers. There's been a decades long stigma attached to gamers and gaming which means any criticism, even constructive, is automatically taken as more noise, no matter how justified or well meaning that criticism might be. It's vastly more socially acceptable to call yourself a film buff, for example, than it is a gamer, so I think that's responsible for helping turn these people jaded and detached.

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Got Saints Row 3 today. Only been able to put in about 3 hours, but so far I love this game. It's like GTA, but with more character, better controls, and it's actually fun. After finishing the first 2 mission and getting dropped off in the city, I've mostly run around doing assassination missions. Earning money, gaining respect levels, bought a few upgrades and some new clothes.

It also has a free download of SR2 which was a nice surprise.

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