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“This episode examines the general lack of female representation among standard enemies as well as in the cooperative and competitive multiplayer options of many games, and the ways in which, when female enemies do exist, they are often sexualized and set apart by their gender from the male enemies who are presented as the norm. We then highlight a few examples of games that present female enemies as standard enemies who exist on more-or-less equal footing with their male counterparts.”
The part that got me was the argument that it was unrealistic to portray women as combatants in video games; the very same games that allow you to refill your health bar by eating a hot-dog.
This game has a long title, it is called Warhammer:Endtimes – Vermintide. Vermintide is a four player cooperative survival game, set in the Warhammer fantasy universe. People familiar with Valve’s Left4Dead series will be familiar with the play-style and challenges to be encountered in Vermintide.
The plot of the game resolves around the actions of the five playable heroes as they travel around the besieged city of Ubersreik. As this is a first person melee combat game all missions will revolve around you introducing the sharp end of your sword into the assorted Skaven rat beasts that serve as the enemies in Vermintide. Certainly, there is variation in theme, as there a missions where supplies are gathered or objectives are required to be destroyed, but make no mistake of where the focus lies in this game.
The focus of Vermintide is melee and the developer, FatShark, has done an excellent job of making rat smashing an exciting and challenging experience. Each character has a range of melee weapons that require different strategies adding a fair bit of depth to the game – for instance, choosing a two handed hammer versus a sword and shield combination will effect how the the player interacts with the levels.
The interaction with enemies is modelled very much on the Valve’s Left4Dead series with the Skaven hordes standing in for the zombie hordes that swarm the players. Being swarmed in game encourages the players to stick together and use the environment to their advantage to minimize the damage hordes can do. Facing down hordes would become stale quite quickly though, fortunately special classes of Skaven exist to only to wreck havoc and break apart tight knit groups of player characters.
- Skaven Gutter-Runners are agile, teleporting assassins that leap onto a player from medium distance. Assassins knock down their targets and require another player remove them.
- Skaven Globadiers or Gas-Rats throw area of effect poison clouds that break up the group.
- Skaven Ratling Gunners bring a mini-gun to the party and focus fire one of the members of the party.
- Skaven Packmasters bring are armed with a medieval man-catcher and will drag their victim away from the party.
- Skaven Rat Ogres – Huge, Durable, Uber-Rats that will punch or pound the players into submission.
The special Skaven force players to make quick tactical decisions as these specials are all high priority targets and always seem to show up with the party knee deep in regular Skaven.
Knee deep in regular Skaven and constant besieged by specials – this formula keeps the pressure high through most maps. The difficulty level in Vermintide is quite challenging. This is one of those games where skipping the ‘easy’ and ‘normal’ levels is not a good idea. Without a firm grasp of Vermintide’s blocking and dodging mechanics novice players quickly succumb to the ravages of the Skaven horde.
Vermintide can be a grind, as better weapons are awarded only at the end of a completed map. Wiping halfway through a map grants only a small pittance of raw materials, and this barrier to progression can be frustrating at times.
Optimization issues still plague Vermintide as this game will put a heavy load on your CPU and GPU. Scaling down the graphics helps, but much work still remains for Fatshark when it comes to streamlining their code.
I’ve had a great deal of fun with Vermintide and if you have a beefy CPU and some friends who like cooperative action I would heartily recommend this game.
So many rats…
I have no interest in playing the new Mad Max game, Jim Sterling summarizes the hollow shell that is this game:
“Mad Max feels like the embodiment of everything Ubisoft has been building with its own dire stable of open world games – a pure saturation of nebulous “content” that offers nothing of substance but simply litters a massive map with repetitive busywork so it may display a facsimile of “value” to its audience.
It’s just stuff. Exhausting, tiring stuff. The very opposite of a game like Wander or Submerged. While those games present a massive vacuum of things to do, Mad Max drowns its player in endless scarecrows to tear down, snipers to kill, encampments to dismantle, and scavenging posts to loot. None of it compelling in the least.”
Yeah… So… Why write about a shitty game Arbourist?
Glad you asked faithful reader because I think that Mad Max the video game shows exactly how ubiquitous the deference to the status-quo is in the triple A gaming market.
The makers of this video game overlooked one unique aspect of the movie that made the movie so awesome.
Oh you mean the protagonist in Fury Road that got shit done? What was her name again… Imperator Furiosa?
The game is centered around Max – the boring protagonist of the movie, while Furiosa the character with motivations, emotions, and speaking lines is relegated to the background in the game.
This would seem to be a bad decision at the very root of this particular game. The choice to go with Blandy McBlanderson in an attempt to court the supposed appropriate demographic (youngish white dudes) resulted in a lack lustre, been there done that game, whose mechanics have been done with more polish and better execution in a game released last year – Shadow of Mordor (even in SoM you have the option to play as a female character).
What would have garnered my attention rather than another sandbox fetch quest grind, featuring Blandy? Maybe a story where you get to play as the female bad-ass of the movie, where we could learn more about her and her backstory. A game that featured Furiosa would almost write itself as you might get to see her move up in the ranks, how she lost her arm, why she makes the choices that she does. All interesting shit.
But nope. Let’s go with ‘safe’ and staid Blandy and let the chips fall where they may.
The chips have fallen, and yet another cookie-cutter grindfest is the result. Way to go Triple A publishers. :/
We can lump this video in with the others that attempt to shed light on issues in society that matter while discreetly hawking their wares in the background. The best form of advertising? I’m not sure, but the commercial makes space for some thinking about how generational experiences are becoming increasingly stratified and foreign to one another.
Are today’s youth doomed to be nothing but cloistered vid-heads who only know nature through what they have seen on the screens of their tablets? Possibly but I’m thinking that much of the fuss we see about losing out youth to technology is a direct result of our societies ruthless quest for economic productivity, seemingly at all costs.
Productivity has ever increased, but at what social cost? Remember when only one bread-winner was required to live a reasonable life and raise children? Successive generations have had to work harder for less money, just to stay in place. Community life has taken a back seat to the lifestyle focused the individual and consumption – social technology directly feeds into our atomization and separation from others.
The leaders of our society have learned the lessons of the past. All that New Deal/Civil Rights/ Second Wave Feminist scared them shitless and having witnessed what an organized community of like minded people can accomplish are doing their best to ensure that it (social change benefiting the masses) does not happen again. People with common interests, common community and commitment to bettering their own interests change society. Isolated lone-wolves mired in consumptive practices do not. Hence witness the trajectory of our society in which the ‘tailored-experience’ is all the rage; the idea that making choices (ones that are carefully circumscribed mind you) is empowering; and sadly the idea that social power resides in competition and being ‘unique’. These are all hallmarks of society geared toward preserving a status-quo that benefits a particular segment of society.
The video is playing up the same fears every generation has about the next. Are some of the concerns valid? I think so, but nothing that cannot be overcome with realization that social media friends are not the same as having friends in real life. Sharing (not the facebook variety) your life with others is a necessary part of healthily existing in society and cannot be replaced by social media. Can social media/technology be used to enhance and facilitate our social interactions? Of course, but it is not a replacement for the attachment and community humans need to be healthy and happy.
Societal analysis aside,I for one am glad that video games have come as far as they have. Video games are an immersive experience for me that allow me to spend some time outside of the real-world. At the same time I do realize that video gaming is just one aspect of life and must be balanced with other pursuits/activities/interests.
Admittedly, one must be careful in allocating time to video gaming as hours seem to disappear, especially when playing with your friends . It is very easy to lose yourself in the experience and come out bleary-eyed on the other-side wondering why the hell it is 2am and why you’re not sleeping. :)
Women in video games, destroying men’s lives everywhere!!!
Spending your time harassing people just doesn’t seem like productive or pro-social behavioural choices. According to a study recently undertaken it seems there is a positive correlation between unskilled players and the amount of abuse they heap on other players, especially females.
“Some male players, however — the ones who were less-skilled at the game, and performing worse relative their peers — made frequent, nasty comments to the female gamers. In other words, sexist dudes are literally losers.
In today’s online environment, alas, this is not an idle observation. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 40 per cent of Internet users have personally experienced harassment. While both genders are frequent victims of this abuse, women tend to get the worst of it: They are “particularly vulnerable to sexual harassment and stalking,” Pew said.“
Well that is an interesting conclusion. Speaking from personal experience being harassed never helps one’s game. Heaping abuse on a member of your team won’t help their performance, in most cases it will worsen the situation. So, really we can add self-immolating to the list of qualities for loser harasser dudes.
““As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status,” Kasumovic writes, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank.”
Like your mother always said, bullies just feel bad about themselves.”
Well, it seems like an almost tailor made explanation for sad phenomena known as GamerGate. Low status dudes threatened by women kicking their asses in video games, perhaps getting better and competing with women might be the answer? Of course not! And thus the most obvious(?) answer(?) and logical(?) recourse is embarking on a epic whingefestival – made most memorable because of its harassment of women – because their male fee fees are being bruised all to shit.
It bears repeating here as this article and Gamergate illustrate beautifully the first rule of misogyny – ” is that women are responsible for what men do.”
Hat Tip: @bleatmop for bringing this article to my attention.
I swear, there is a helpful graph for everything on the internet.
Where do you fit in? :) I’m pretty sure I firmly inhabit the rectangle of snooze…*sigh*.
For those of us who like lists –
The list describes the basic ethos of killing in a fantasy setting according to each alignment type. ( nuanced version here)
I’ll kill you because…
Lawful Good: you look evil, you stinkin’ orc!.
Chaotic Good: you are evil.
Neutral Good: you did something evil.
Lawful Neutral: you broke the law.
Neutral: you just tried to kill me.
Chaotic Neutral: its Tuesday.
Neutral Evil: I want that nice sword you have.
Chaotic Evil: I’ll get this tingly sensation in the back of my spine, OOooooo.
Lawful Evil: your interfering with my conquest of the world.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…