Oh geez... please fuck right off.
Lol, but the only thing most of them have a problem with is her stance on capitalism.
Crossing Eden dislikes Japanese games in general. Its not exclusive to Kojima
There's a lot of focus and discussion about all these toxic and hateful personalities in gaming media, so I thought we might as flip the issue and actually talk about all the many amazing people in gaming media and culture who do critical and inspirational work that helps illuminate what video games are, what they can be, and how they can become better. Writers, bloggers, Youtubers, streamers, conference organizers, activists, etc. Feel free to post your suggestions.
Here are some of my random picks and don't forget to support if you like their work:
[URL='https://archive.is/o/ZTH3O/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWTNi7SPnNA']Latoya Peterson's 5-part series on Girl Gamers for Fusion Magazine - a range of voices across the culture, industry, and academia are represented with some great tidbits and differing perspectives across players, developers, representation, history of women in games, etc. A must watch.
Kim Justice - makes some amazing in-depth historical perspectives on classic games, developers, and hardware.
Gita Jackson - writes for Kotaku with an emphasis on fashion in games, player-creativity, and a wide swath of interesting topics related to games.
Shareef Jackson - Gaming Looks Good. A close-textual analysis of diversity across gender and race in popular games. A great, well-paced, and warm style of presentation.
Heather Alexandra - writes for Kotaku - I'll just let Critical Distance describe her work when she was granted the CD award for 2017: "She has expressed her informed views on games in a wide variety of media forms, from blog posts to feature articles to videos and podcasts. Heather’s skill, insight, and voice have contributed immensely to the field, and it’s a delight to be able to honor her work here." (see also John Kowalski's post)
I Need Diverse Games & Fresh out of Tokens (podcast) - organization that signalboosts progressive developers, writers, voices, etc. and who do conference talks and consultancy. Headed by Tanya DePass who also has written some great articles on race, fantasy, history, and Blackness.
SpawnOnMe (podcast) - podcast with Cicero Holmes, Shareef Jackson, and Kahlief Adams doing weekly discussion of games and special guests from the industry to talk about games, development, personal interests. Great dynamic, entertaining and refreshing to listen to, and they also do charity streams here and there.
Not Your Mama's Gamer (and their podcast) - A collaborative of women across various professions who use their spare time to write weekly if not daily thoughts on an incredible wide range of topics within gaming with an emphasis on academic analysis. They also do a weekly podcast where they joke, chat, and analyze various phenomena within gaming. You might not get a more highly educated and academic group of people talking about games in mainstream form than this.
Justin Clark - writer & reviewer for Slant and formerly Gamespot and Paste Magazine. Clark usually does reviews and I personally am a big fan of his style of writing.
Waypoint - speaks for itself and it's well-known enough here on GAF. Austin Walker & co. doing fun and interesting things.
Simply Undrea - Great, positive, and entertaining Twitch and Youtube streamer. Advocate for AnyKeyOrg.
Errant Signal / Chris Franklin / Campster - Video long form analysis of recent games and the occassional topic throughout many years now. Great thoughts and reflections and food for thought.
Evan Narcisse from ios9 formerly of Kotaku fame - Mostly focuses on comics and TV shows these days with some stuff on games, but his writing and perspective is nevertheless absolutely essential.
Robert Yang - academic, design teacher, and developer of homo-erotic games. Entertaining to listen to in presentations, writes technical and design-focused articles on his blog. All of his games are banned on Twitch and Steam
Paolo Perdecini - activist game designer for MolleIndustria. Interesting smaller games addressing the many contemporary political issues we are facing.
Unconsoleable (podcast) - nice little podcast that deals with mobile games and the various topics surrounding them.
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That's just from the first page.
Brown is very diverse.Okay so I love Gerudo Town. I love everything about it, from the aesthetic, to the many hidden secrets, to the characters and their fictional culture.
They took the concept of a desert Amazon tribe of only women and put a surprising amount of thought and attention to detail in how such a society might work. You talk to merchants who lament that their jobs in the city keep them from their husbands who are not allowed within. You can discover the classroom where Gerudo learn about the outside world and how to interact (and what to beware of) with men. I could go on and on about the daily lives of these people.
The leader Riju is also an especially memorable character. The concept a child ruler forced into a position of leadership at a time of calamity is approached with the seriousness (and sadness) it deserves. She has a strange sort of regal dignity blended with childish naivete that's best encapsulated in the opening pages of her diary:
Buliara told me today that Mother has passed on and gone to a better place... She said that my mother's death means I am now the chief of the Gerudo people. I wish she'd stayed here, though. I don't see how it can be a better place with us apart.
It is incredibly gratifying to witness Riju step up into her role when she helps you take down Vah Naboris. Afterwards, when it was clear that she'd won the respect and admiration of her worried people, I felt really happy for her.
One thing that struck me in particular is that the young Riju is only one example of a remarkable diversity in age and body types among the all female Gerudo. A insular tribe of Amazons would seem like a natural excuse for homogeneity, but Nintendo went out of their way to show that the average Gerudo on the street is not the statuesque muscle bound warrior woman you find among the guards.
There is also diversity in skin color. Some of the Gerudo are lighter than most, and some (like this child) are darker.
All of this of course contributes to the verisimilitude of the city, making it feel lively and lived in and cosmopolitan. This is something they very easily could have gotten wrong, especially in a colorful fantasy setting. I think it's worth noting here that they did it right, and why the game is better for it.
My favorite area and town in Zelda bar none. I think the developers know they nailed it too.
Yes.
Two bonuses here. The OP for the second thread immediately chimed in on the first saying his "girl"friend loved it. His first quote comes from Josh Dale.
Neogaf approved racism below.This is a topic I touched on in my Final Fantasy XV analysis/retrospective thing, and the Mass Effect downgrade thread stirred it up in my mind again, so I figured maybe I'd put my thoughts down on the subject as a whole and we could talk about it. I'll write it up into a more formal essay type thing at some point but for now I just wanted to share thoughts and gather ideas.
The tl;dr version is that prominent female characters in video games are not allowed to be ugly, because they're designed with the gaze of the presumed straight male player in mind.
This is far from being inherent only to gaming. We see it in Hollywood and the music industries, where female celebrities often feel the need to try to maintain their looks through extensive plastic surgery (Madonna, Megan Fox, off the top of my head) because they're painfully aware that their looks are a tradeable commodity on the showbiz stage. Once a female actress gets old, unless she's a revered dame like Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, etc., chances are she's going to fall into obscurity. Because she's old, and old women can't be ugly, and what value does a woman have without her looks? Meanwhile, ageing actors like George Clooney and Harrison Ford still have successful careers, because they are not viewed with the male gaze - the presumed default audience - and thus do not have the same pressure to be attractive.
We see it very much in video games too. I pointed out that in FFXV, the male characters are very varied in their designs, in terms of facial features - big noses, scars, pores, wrinkles, greasy skin, chapped lips. Meanwhile, all the female characters are flawless mannequins, with flawless groomed hair and perfectly applied makeup.
An old picture, but it makes the point pretty well. While the main characters are fairly realistic, if anime-ised, Luna and Gentiana have perfect porcelain-doll features, almost to the point of uncanny valley.
Now, like I said, the ME: Andromeda downgrade thread reminded me of this. People were complaining about Fem!Ryder's derpface, and some claimed that the complainers' real problem was that Ryder wasn't a flawless model created for the male gaze. (By the way, it's both.)
So I went looking at the character pages for the original Mass Effect trilogy, wondering if there would be a noticeable difference in the designs of male and female characters. And hoo boy were there.
We can have female aliens, but only if they're hot blue bisexual female aliens! No weird lizard ladies for us.
Then I looked at The Witcher 3:
https://sneed-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/49/81/fc/4981fcdfe844ad60620a46a1acedf8a8.jpg
Definitely seeing a pattern....
Yup.
It isn't just these. Most games you can think of, this will be the case, whether Japanese or Western. Because in Japan, and in the US and UK and Europe and everywhere else games are made - we live in patriarchal societies where women are objectified, literally turned into "things", for the sexual titillation of men. This trend is endemic in most media, be it TV, film, games, and so on. It commodifies the female body, assigns a woman a perceived worth based on how attractive she is to men. And (this is probably my favourite phrase by now) media reflects and reinforces the norms of society. In only allowing "attractive" women into games, in order to satisfy the presumed straight male player, not only do devs continue to exclude the 48% of gamers who are women, but they also reinforce the toxic notion that a woman's sole value and worth lies in her desirability to men.
The thing with this trend is - not only is it offensive to women, a reinforcement of those unattainable beauty standards we're constantly measured against, that "ordinary" women are somehow lesser, but it's also offensive to men; it implies that men only perceive female characters as fap material, and wouldn't be able to handle the presence of an "ordinary" female character. But then, on the flipside of the coin, we have men who complain when a female character doesn't measure up to their standards of attractiveness, thus seemingly proving the devs' point and putting female representation back even further.
(credit to wee for the amazing thread title idea <3)
So after I saw the mass effect character customization and we are still in 2017. You can see the video below:
It's just plain ignorant that hair representation is not equally distributed among people of color like whites in games. I mean they have 20 different types of hair for white, Asian, Hispanic, and etc but when it comes to black ladies hair textures and styles, their are only the dreaded cornrows or Bernie mac style afros. I mean do these developers not see what's in style with other cultures or is everyone just in there own bubble.
Right now everyone is up for more women roles and equality but that still only represents white women. Even with that it's still just white people are the among the prominent main characters with the most choices and customizations. I mean I wanted some strong black female customizations in games too. I mean look at theses examples.
Zazie beetz actress in Atlanta show:
Or the new Iron Woman
I mean how cool would it be to rock that puffy hairstyle for a protag.
And I as a black male would like a character to look like me
I mean it's 2017 and we still have to bring topics like these up, I know some developers don't want to make Game Center around a black main protag or set in Africa, because let's be honest, salewise wont be too good, because the general public would come with some excuse that they can't relate to the characters......yea like I had to relate to Luke Skywalker, or Indiana Jones as my heroes growing up. So I would at least want them to provide the tools to fully customize my character to look like me in my story play through when given the options. Is that hard to ask ?
This is late as fuck, but it bears repeating that this forum is run by a man who sexually assaulted a woman and actually went on to justify it ("Evil" refers to NeoGAF owner Tyler Malka).
NeoGAF is complaining about how Mass Effect Andromesa has poorly handled the LGBT representation
http://archive.is/s1DPm
Because the game needs more gay representations and ME:A still isn't enough for the LGBT community.
Gay men don't even play video games, anyway. They spend their time shopping for ass-less chaps and amyl nitrate.
http://archive.is/0F4UR
