Yes, and I'd disagree. To build on what I said earlier, I think there's a problem inherent to the relationship aspect of games where at best you are using good writing to cover up the general failure of game mechanics to adequately address this question. It may be a fundamental problem that games simply can't do as a true interactive/skill/simulation/whatever type experience and simply must staple in things that books and movies could do just as well. The dialog tree, when competently executed, provides a you a bridge to actually substantive game mechanics that integrate the experience with what the player is actually doing, but the tree itself is no more substantive than choosing between labeled doors. That isn't normally a problem, since we like what we actually play inside of those doors, but when the outcomes are relationship-oriented you risk a thinner and thinner veil between an experience that feels authentic and one that feels like crass Mary Sueing the more you push into sex and romantic territory. Coupled with the fact that writing good romance is probably much harder and prone to taste fragmentation regardless of genre, and you end up with a lot of things are just going to be geared at lowest common denominator audiences. No, because the mechanics of good games versus bad ones successfully "gamify" their core conceits, whether by using standardized processes that are familiar or by creatively making new ways for your skill or attention to detail or any of a number of other key criteria solve problems. It's unclear that relationships and romances particularly benefit from what games have to offer in that capacity beyond the "choose your own adventure" aspect that transitions you to an interactive movie or book. To connect back to the thread, albeit distantly, I think what he was getting at is that because of historical biases in the genre of entertainment, you end up with a lot of "click to get sexy with x variant of low grade male wish fulfillment" which isn't wrong in and of itself, but it's problematic as an overwhelmingly pervasive end state.
An alternative take on how to successfully "gamify" romantic relationships is the dating sim genre. Generally these present relationships from the female POV, the end-goal is a fulfilling happy relationship rather than sexytime, and it's a long involved process to get there. The male wish fulfillment fantasy inverts that into a game of buying sex with hotties with money and a few clicks, and as such it seems especially odd (using SW:TOR again as an example) when they frame a female PC's romantic gameplay in those exact same terms. It's still "romance" from the perspective of male wish fulfillment, except your character's model just happens to be female. Maybe that's progress, but it's not exactly having arrived.
I really don't know enough about the dating sim genre to say (and the whole question of what people who aren't adolescent men actually want is a murky one in and of itself, I'm sure). More specifically, though, I'm not convinced they've addressed the question of having the mechanics reflect actually "playing" a game (ie using skill or some other key variable) at anything approaching the level that violence and puzzle abstractions have been achieved, or whether that's even possible with the level of AI and emergent behaviors currently available in games. Or whether it's even something we want truly game-ified, regardless of what all of the hordes of diligent gift-givers and [persuade] sexytimes button pushers suggest about how marketable it is.
That's not quite what i was getting at; the game will always require some sort of interface with the player -- currently that's going to be either mouse clicks and/or pressing buttons. Thus, you can always simplify anything happening in the game to 'press buttons/click options to get (impressive) results', but it's dismissive on the level of say, reducing entire LotR to a fetch quest that makes the backbone of it. In that sense it's also not something you can realistically expect the games to "move past", either.
Hmm not sure if i'm reading what you get at here right, but it seems like you deem the 'relationships in games' fundamentally lacking because they don't involve significantly more than some sort of 'interactive book- or movie-like romance'? The thing is, if that's the case then i don't share this view -- and hence, i guess, our disagreement. Well written books and movies do pretty adequate job at portraying relationships imo, and so an interactive version of that feels like sufficient/satisfactory approximation in a game, especially one that doesn't attempt to be some sort of Falcon 4.0 of relationship simulators. Perhaps this difference of views (game implementation living up to expectations or not) is also why you mind more being able to see through the mechanics curtain, and are quicker to mock them? It'd be interesting in any case to read some ideas on how the relationships should be handled in games, from those who find the current implementations lacking. I don't really see then how that makes it a "no" then, as whether the 'gamification' is succesful will depend on individual views/preferences of the player. I.e. what you view as 'click options to get rewards' someone else may see as decent gamification of their core concept of relationships, while what's in your view succesful gamification of melee combat to them may be 'pressing buttons for gratification' that comes nowhere near the real thing?
OK i'm going for a reply hat-trick here, but take the Tokimeki game series for example, which --while having some differences when it comes to wearing pants or fighting monsters-- use the same approach to relationship building regardless of the PC's gender, the one you associate with the female POV. It also started with a game aimed at boys if i remember right. As such i don't think the "girl games make it about feels while evil male eye makes it about buying sex" is all that accurate, or fair way to put it.
That's true, but I don't think there's any question that the relationship aspect of Western RPGs (to take an example I'm familiar with) is nowhere near as mechanically detailed as the combat. I'm struggling to imagine what RPG combat would look like were at as simple as dialogue trees, and I'm coming up blank. The Bard's Tale, maybe? Maybe Dark Messiah if one limits oneself to the Chickian KICK EVERYTHING approach. TOR is a weird example for a couple reasons. For one, you only need to "buy sex with hotties with money and a few clicks" if you're not using your romantic interest as a companion. And while yes, it is problematic, this is also how the non-romatic relationships work as well; the game gives you enough opportunities to increase maybe two companions affection via dialogue, but keeping more than one companion's gear up to date via questing is iffy. So you're looking at buying gifts for three of your five companions, and gear for three or four of your five companions. What I'm getting at is that to the extent that your summary is accurate, it's accurate because the devs decided to introduce MMO grind to the Bioware companion system. Additionally, the end-state for every romance in the game is marriage, not sex. As Ingmar said earlier, that's problematic, but not for the reasons you're pointing at, and it's not the brand of male wish fulfillment you describe.
That's a fair point. The dialogue based gameplay seems to be limited in that way in general (you have occasional games like Fallout or Planescape which tie available options to character's skills, but it's still pretty limited) A different approach i can think of was abstracting the dialogue into card-based duel game done by whatsitsname MMO which used it for the "diplomacy sphere" they had as another area for player's activity.. but that also wasn't any sort of relationship simulation.
You're confusing being critical in a question of degree to being an absolutist. The degree to which the button pushing or whatever successfully integrates skill or meaningful choices (in a game sense) is how much the design has successfully "gamified" that aspect. So games are very successful in gamifying violence, for instance, and to a certain extent literal, physical aspects of character development. In contrast, the relationships are not much more than choose your own adventure books, and not successfully gamified. We rank them based on the quality of writing, largely, not in how they deliver a mechanically interesting game conceit. That's not necessarily bad or good, but it is different. However, it starts to be a problem in terms of the effect on the game as a whole with romance relationships in AAA and near AAA games (versus niche titles) that they are built around adolescent male wish fulfillment; since there is no real "game" component to it, there isn't even a skill gate to the Mary Suing and indeed we are back at the Dragon's Lair level of gamification. Except here instead of "press a to be a hero" it's the far less savoury "press enter to enter your already ludicrously objectified comrades". I like both books and movies, possibly more than I like games. I think doing relationships in both fields is a really difficult task, one of the hardest, and doubly so with romantic ones. But it's something that artists in both fields have actively engaged for a long time, and they've come up with a lot of interesting answers to what that can look like according to the strengths and limitations of their line of work.What we have in games is that what amounts to a place-holder from early game design of how you design human interaction has become the standard, under the assumption that the violence simulation or the power development simulation or the graphics or whatever is thought of as primarily marketable will continue to let you think of it as a game versus an interactive novel or movie. From what I've seen of dating games and the like, it seems like many of them do much more interesting things with the writing and goals of the experience than most AAA adolescent male fantasies, but mechanically they have not added much (It's entirely possible I'm missing something here, but in any case this is more of a side point to an argument geared around the big stages of game design). I'm describing a limitation as I see it, and I think the specific implementation of adolescent male wish fulfillment at the basest level is worth of derision, but it's not a generalized sneer. What I'm arguing is that it's not being worked on in the same way as other aspects of the game. Look how long the humble cutscene (or literally, the movie stapled into your game) has endured as a primary means of storytelling. Look how suddenly QTEs brought us back a decade or two in game design but by slapping a new label on them and shiny graphics amid the broader context of more interesting violence simulations or what have you we're suddenly onboard with the project as far as narrative creation. And, of course, the dialog tree that never really left and actually became more limited as a result of the constraints of voice acting. Here's where I think the lengthier pedigree of boardgames can come in handy, but it might not be as useful or accessible a history as it is to me so ignore it as you see fit. My point is that regardless of whether you like the experiences they offer, games have successfully turned violence and other things into gamified experiences that involve skill or tactical/strategic decisionmaking. I'm not sure that games have done anything to gamify relationships to a meaningful degree that creates a difference between them and books/movies the same way you would never confuse a war game experience for a war book or movie experience even though they may freely borrow from each other. It may be that it's a fundamental limitation, because when designers do try to gamify them you end up with ridiculous conceits (give gifts you earn from quests to get love! trade quest for love! level up your relationship by enduring more dialog! and so on) it still survives entirely on the quality of writing and the way that choice is layered so it feels consequential (ie Alpha Protocol) even if it's not really gaming. Hopefully I provided my view on this above: taste is relevant to a degree, but the degree of difference between how violence, tactical/strategic combat, etc are gamified as compared to relationships generally and romances most especially seems pretty clear-cut once you the criteria for the comparison are made clear. Again, I'm not saying it's impossible to enjoy them, but merely that I don't think game designers are coming up with good game answers to the question yet and it may be one that no one can answer. Why? Because while some relationships like those articulated in the boardgame Diplomacy can be modeled, it requires another human *and* still has potential for extraordinarily embittering experiences. And I can only imagine how creepy that model would be with sexytimes. So it might well be that "push x to win/get laid" is a better cost-benefit for designers, but I will continue to opt out of relationship play relative to the quality of the writing rather than considering them holistically as I do with other aspects of the experience.
This is slightly off-topic but interesting. According to this research done with Second Life, women avatars tend to wear more revealing clothes: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0051921 Of course, we have no hard data on the gender of those players, but: "Previous work demonstrated that less than 25% of users of online virtual worlds, including Second Life, take on the opposite sex for their avatars [19]. After finding a significant difference in skin exposure between the entire sample of male and female avatars, we conducted a subsequent analysis that excluded the top 25% of female avatars that exposed most skin (excluded n = 53, leaving n = 159) and the bottom 25% of male avatars that exposed least skin (removed n = 48, leaving n = 144). This approach provides a conservative assessment of whether sex swapping on its own was responsible for the differences we observed between male and female avatars."
I'm not sure that research tells us anything we didn't already know; I would guess that "revealing clothes" metric would work as well in a nightclub or at a party. I guess the population is larger? But population size is not as relevant as sample size, and we're talking about 100% sample sizes already. I suppose it severely reduces any counter-arguments along the lines of the girls having their clothes selected for them by other people, but I don't think that's a very credible (or at the least, it's a very simplistic) argument, missing out on many key points about peer feedback and social structures. I was going to add "a beach" to my examples but then realized that it depends on what you mean by "revealing".
Something to keep in mind; cultural norms in SL aren't that different from real life, meaning female avatar with say, bare midriff will raise way less eyebrows than male avatar dressing the same. On top of that (and to a degree as a result of it i suppose) clothing selection available for women in SL offers way more variety in the level of skin exposition, compared to what is offered for males. These factors are going to affect even the areas like the Star Wars cosplay/rp they've studied.
Is Second Life data relevant to gaming? I understand that superficially there are a lot of connections, but that seems to me much more in the province of social networking and the like.
Mount & Blade Warband. It's a medieval RPG and if you play as a female every character in the game reacts to you accordingly, from laughing at you for being a woman knight, to ridiculing how awful you must fight for the same. You can conquer the kingdom, but you can't rule it because you're a woman. However, if you acquire a husband he can rule it in your stead. That might sound horrible, but I rather liked that they implemented it that way. It is a game which does attempt to adhere to the historic record and I felt it was appropriate. They also made it far more interesting because in most games the choices doesn't matter. In this game, it effectively puts the game on ultra-hard mode. And to stay on topic #1reasonwhy ....because I've been a gamer for over 20 years and an online gamer for half that and this is the first forum post I've made as myself.
There are a number of ways that this could go wrong. Is their 25% males-as-female-avatars actually accurate? I wasn't willing to chase the paper they cited for that result, but given my distrust about similar papers, I have my doubts. (The last last time I looked at one of these sorts of things closely, it didn't really hold up: a study that reportedly showed there were disproportionate numbers of female bisexuals in MMORPGs had methods and conclusions that seemed suspect to me.) Then there is the fact that SL is a haven of cybersex in a way that MMORPGs aren't that makes this result not very relevant to videogaming/gamers even if true. (They attempt to address this by examining a case where 'cultural norms' demand more coverage, but it's too weak to be trustworthy; a single test case -- people role-playing in the Star Wars universe.) Worse yet for the relevance of this research to this thread or anything at all, the authors of the paper seem to believe they're not even talking about MMORPGs or social networking and the like; they write as if they believe this has let them discover what people prefer "deep down" -- if only in the real world they didn't have issues like excessive cold, ugliness, or cultural norms affecting how much skin people showed. Which I find highly doubtful.
I'm not exactly sure what you are arguing for or against, or why. It is a study that I felt was somewhat relevant (see the discussion 4 pages ago about women clothing in video games). If you disagree with the study, surely the responsibility is on you to point out the flaws in a more structured way instead of going with "mistrust based on experience". I'd like to think we're beyond truthiness (as in, "I don't like it" or "it just feels wrong"). Personally I feel like the subject is complex and it is hard to get a simple answer regarding aesthetical preferences. Having said that, I absolutely feel like women aesthetics are often treated in a ridiculous way in the entertainment and sports industry (take cheerleaders for example). It's just not video games. As an example, I was recently looking after my relatives kids and the show they were watching wasn't far from what was going on in Everquest (http://www.nick.com/shows/winx-club/). I think it is fair to look at the bigger picture, since all culture and entertainment at the end of the day feed off from each other.
nothings is raising doubts about some of the assumptions he percieves in the study. For example he questions the 25% figure of alternate gender selection. I raised an eyebrow too, because I'd heard a much higher figure for male-playing-female than female-playing-male, but they justify it as you quote: "Previous work demonstrated that less than 25% of users of online virtual worlds, including Second Life, take on the opposite sex for their avatars" and give a reference so you can check that metric too. Which I'm tempted to do; I should probably read all this stuff. The other issue is how relevant this population is as a sample of a larger population. They have a measure, it is claimed, on the average clothing coverage percentage in female-selected avatars to contrast with the same measure for male-selected avatars. Still not making any claims about why, but there is ( nothings suggests) a claim that this measurement can be generalised as a sample of a larger population: firstly to all MMO players and secondly to all people on the planet. Unsurprisingly, he's skeptical about the validity of this generalization. I suppose he's asking on what basis is that generalization claimed to be appropriate? The burden of proof of these details (the 25% figure, the representative sample problem) is on the paper's authors firstly, but I get the impression they have already put justifications in their paper and nothings already admits to not chasing the references. I guess he wanted to know if you, mixuk, or indeed anyone, wanted to copy over the reasoning to this thread for him, and vouch for it?
Gotcha: "Although further work is required to tease apart the contribution of these variables, the wide variety of clothing available on the Second Life market combined with our large random sample of avatars suggest that the sizable difference in skin disclosure between male and female avatars more so reflects an emergent behavioral tendency rather than a particular cultural influence." I don't think that is a justifiable conclusion. I suspect cultural influence on couture is far more important.
I'm not, I thought it was clear from the first post. I'm not saying it's false either before I know more. But I don't really understand what I would even be vouching for? Is it necessary for the discussion? To me it's a piece of the puzzle (albeit a shady one) in a larger discussion where we try to understand the current status and perception of women aesthetics in entertainment. Please don't tell me that you see this as a debate between chauvinists and feminists? Then again, it feels weird since the discussion seems to be handled by a bunch of guys.
Me? Good heavens, no, sir! I'm simply being cautious about the extent to which I attribute significance to slices of evidence. It was nothings who was more forthright with his criticism, most notably saying "I wasn't willing to chase the paper they cited for that result" which I assumed you were criticising when you said "surely the responsibility is on you to point out the flaws" which is true if nothings wants to criticise their research but he'd already indicated a disinclination to even consider it. Which prompted me to suggest that if you do want to engage with that line, you might have to put their dependent data on the table, so to speak, by posting it for him. Studies are important because they are accurate measurements of what is, but they tell us nothing about why it is so. Or at least, this study has no power to tell us that. I should add that a significant thing studies can do is to disprove theories by providing evidence to contradict a claim. In this case, you could say the study disproves the postulated postulate (!) that female avatars in online social games are more scantily-clad because they are actually being controlled by men. The study has adequate precision to show that the percentages don't line up.
That being said, it's also worth noting that they don't always tell us what we think they're telling us. cf. that one xkcd comic.
Even I have a limit to my precision, or we're in "Three alleged ladies went to a so-called dinner party" territory :)
And here's another example of someone doing a #1reasonwhy-ish-type of complaint about their non-game tech field. In case you needed more evidence that this stuff is sadly endemic to all of tech. (You didn't.)
I'm still slightly amazed by the way the comments go. I know, reading comments on the internet. What do I expect? Well, when people post up amateurish YouTube videos, there are plenty of stupid or incoherent posts, but there's a distinct thread of aggression in the comments on videos about sexism. It's fascinating, and probably tells us something about how deeply-entrenched these gender roles are established, that to question them is, apparently, to question the fundaments of (some?) peoples' positions. As an aside, this sort of sentiment always makes me wince: "I will guarantee you there were women who worked on this the same way women do the art for big-boobed video game characters. To me, that's enough to make it not a gender issue." - from the Voco article's comments, of course. "If those seal cubs didn't enjoy it, they wouldn't take part."
It's not just videos about sexism that get those comments - it's videos made by women in general. Look at the kind of comments someone like Dodger, from PressHeartToContinue, gets just for doing an interview where she talks about being a gamer: Actually, scratch that - in the time since I last saw the video, earlier today, either someone has been shamed into deleting a whole truckload of misogynistic comments, or a staff member has thankfully deleted them. It was pretty fucking rancid, but perfectly exemplar of the kind of hatred and bile that gets directed at women who express opinions on the internet, particularly if it's about a geek topic. Comics, games, computing, doesn't matter, there will be oceans of bile, calling them too ugly to sleep with, and therefor not worth listening to, or too stupid to listen to, because they're cute, or only in it for the attention, and thus worthy of being insulted and dismissed (unlike all those guys who get up in front of a camera because they're shy, wilting flowers who want no attention at all), etc, etc, etc. There's literally no winning angle with these kind of angry, entitled douchebags. And they're everywhere. Frankly, it's enough to make you despair. In the interests of trying to substantively address it, however, instead of just despairing, let me share this link with you - I feel like it makes a lot of decent points in discussing the massive upwelling of misogyny we're seeing in geek culture, in the past years. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/11/29/fear-of-vulnerability-and-geek-misogyny/
I read this first on Adam Cadre's blog, and it is an excellent line: comments are the bottom half of the internet.
... that Tony Harris piece linked in there wat what the sweet fuck. how can anyone over 40 write like that
Indeed. GirlWritesWhat is the classic example. I was mainly thinking about the artist in question being not so 'conditioned': I can imagine that having a review meeting to analyse your latest character design's breasts would most definitely be a #1reasonwhy. Apropos female artists, I also remember remarking (in the wake of Tomonogu Itagaki stories) that I thought being asked to work on Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball probably constituted sexual harrassment in and of itself.
I'm a little unfair, GirlWritesWhat has a more subtle position based I suspect on unfortunate clashes with people flying a feminist flag. Being polite, I'd say she was arguing a logically coherent sinij line. So only almost completely insane.
I could be wrong, but my take on sinij was always that he was simply pushing buttons based on simplistic logic-puzzle reconstructions of the issue at hand. I don't think I would equate an MRA advocate who provides justifications for pro-domestic abuse manifestos with his brand of troll performance art. If he starts building a life around those stupid arguments, well, then, that's a different story.
My apologies; I didn't mean to suggest that sinij had some kind of internal philosophy, however broken, that he wanted to share with us; I think it's clear he'd just found something on Google to oppose people with and didn't even understand his own position let alone that of anyone else.
So I was thumbing through HL2 graphical update mods because it's been a few years since I've played HL2 (for me it's a like a favorite movie you can revisit every so often and still enjoy) and I'm ramping up for a replay. While searching I came across a mod called "FakeFactory's Cinematic Mod" and one of the thing it does is... uhh... "enhance" Alyx Vance. JESUS FUCKING CHRIST WHY. EVERY SINGLE VERSION THIS DUDE ADDED IS LIKE A 3D SEXDOLL. WHY WHY WHY WHY. THIS SCREENSHOT'S LIPS ARE LIKE BATTLESHIPS FIGHTING OVER HER TEETH.
Leaving aside the "why", that remake's face is based off Adriana Lima's picture, with proportions left pretty much intact.
