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Patriarchy pissing in the punchbowl for hundreds of years continues to make things crappy, even in the land of video games.
I’m not sure how much longer I can hold on to my introverts card as the membership committee takes a dim view of many of the activities I quite deeply enjoy doing. One of the renegade activities I partake in is running a role playing campaign in a fantasy world that involves a talking animals, hordes of zombies and a mysterious blue toxin that grants super powers when ingested.
On top of the horde and the blue toxin throw in chickens that talk with Russian accents, possums with ninja like abilities and wolverines that tend to end up without underwear and often on fire.
Oh, the motley crew that inhabits the world I’ve constructed.
If you’re wondering, the protagonists of this tale are mutated animals, just like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, only with much less pizza and much more profanity. Our group gathers every Sunday evening at my house, they come bearing paper, pencils, dice and munchies. The living room is colonized and the flat surfaces are fought over for the prime dice rolling/note taking places(not mentioning places with access to TIO’s heavenly veggie/chip dip). We start the game once everyone settles down, this can take anywhere from fifteen minuets to an hour as our group has a couple of extroverts that like to well, be extroverted.
I hate to admit it, as it goes against much of the fiber of my being, but I usually don’t plan the stories that unfold over the course of the evening. I mean, I did at one time make copious notes with tables and charts and what not; a carefully crafted plot line for my players to follow and discover. But what I often found happening is that my damn players often would do the most amazingly stupid creative things and take directions\actions I had not even remotely planned on them doing.
For instance, when battling an augmented human that had the ability to change into a fire form our intrepid Wolverine decided the best course of action would be to engage in close quarters combat – imagine giving a bonfire a loving hug – in the midst of performing a ‘stealthy reconnoiter’ of an auto mechanics shop. Another character, the ninja possum mentioned earlier, decided the best course of action would be to hotwire a car near this melee and promptly gun it in reverse through the bay door and down a embankment. You see, said possum had an electronics skill, but not a driving skill, thus hilarity ensued.
You really can’t plan for shit like this. It is like this most nights, our group wildly careens across (and often through) the story arcs I set before them haphazardly fighting, problem solving and running amok/away. The little preparation I do undertake mostly involves thinking about the broadest of themes, and where I would like them to end up, by hook or by crook, by the end of the evening. It was a bit of a learning curve in the beginning for me as I would offer choice A, B, or C and they as a group, would consistently choose “Q”.
Leaving much of the planning behind seemed like the best option and I haven’t looked back. I worry about consistency sometimes as our intrepid animal heroes have crossed into several different worlds/timelines as our story has unfolded. Keeping track of who is which side and for what reason is difficult and times and I get confused – but I buy myself sometime to get things straight by having some straight up combat for my players to tackle while I refocus my story telling chops. It usually works out fairly well, and everyone has fun as a result.
Being a story teller is definitely not on the top ten list of activities introverts are supposed to enjoy, but in some weird way it works for me, and I am happy to be the weaver of a narrative that allows my group to have as much fun as they do.
Maintaining the drive and energy of a campaign is difficult sometimes, and one of the best ways to avoid storytelling burn out is to hand off the reigns to someone else every second week and let them run a different story. My character in the second campaign we run isa dragon hatchling, ostensibly named “Pookie”, and let me assure you Pookie has a great deal of fun cavorting and generally causing higgildy-piggildty in his travels across the story arcs that someone else has to manufacture and maintain. :)
Anyone else from my fair readership that indulges in the deeply introvert-transgressive practice of role playing or story telling?
Growf?
“Assassin’s Creed 4 marks the first step into next gen for the franchise. Learn how AC4 utilizes next gen technology to create realistic oceans, dynamic weather systems, ambient lighting, and seamless ship boarding.” – Ubisoft Team
Thanks Ubisoft for making a nice looking ocean and flora that bends with the rainfall. You know what would actually be revolutionary? A female as the lead role in the game. That my besotted dudelly programming/marketing types would be fucking revolutionary.
Yerp! Efforts to maintain historical accuracy prevent Ubisoft from having a female protagonist. Concomitantly, it enables them to continue to act like complete bags of douche!
You know what isn’t revolutionary but more of the standard 365, 24/7, misogyny hailstorm women deal with *since forever*, are interviews like this:
Ubisoft steered clear of making the Assassin’s Creed III protagonist a female character because the game’s setting is not a strong match, according to creative director Alex Hutchinson. Speaking to Kotaku, Hutchinson said the American Revolution time period is all about men. “It’s always up in the air,” Hutchinson said. “I think lots of people want it, [but] in this period it’s been a bit of a pain. The history of the American Revolution is the history of men.”
Oh! Because you are making a historically accurate document and are entering Assassin’s Creed 3 into the Library of Congress NON-fiction. Jebus-dancing-christ-on-a-pogostick. It’s a historically inaccurate run around stab festival with historical trappings, nothing more.
“There are a few people, like John Adams’ wife, [Abigail]–they tried very hard in the [HBO series John Adams] to not make it look like a bunch of dudes, but it really is a bunch of dudes,” he added.
Are you fucking kidding me? You’re saying because of an HBO special you can’t possibly put a woman as lead character? This sort of vapid prolix is industry standard when it comes to worshipping the all mighty ‘peen. It is based on nothing but ignorance and misogyny. If you bothered to look you would see women play just as important role in the revolution as men did (time to google women’s role in the AR? 5 seconds), but as with much of history we favour the male based narrative.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has bent the books of history before, but Hutchinson admitted that doing so in Assassin’s Creed III could be problematic.
“It felt like, if you had all these men in every scene and you’re secretly, stealthily in crowds of dudes [as a female assassin], it starts to feel kind of wrong,” he said. “People would stop believing it.”
Ah yes because jumping off of 3 to 7 story buildings into conveniently placed bales of hay is stone fucking cold reality. See below about the suddenly all important believably factor…
No Hutchinson dude, I’m calling shenanigans on this polished crown of turds you’re calling an explanation. You are talking out of your ass trying to avoid the issue: that is the money that greases your skids won’t pay for a female protagonist.
And admitting that you are too fucking in love with $$ to truly make a revolutionary game doesn’t look good in the press. So lets see where was that quote….
“Assassin’s Creed 4 marks the first step into next gen for the franchise. Learn how AC4 utilizes next gen technology to create realistic oceans, dynamic weather systems, ambient lighting, and seamless ship boarding.” – Ubisoft Team
Take your oceans, your pretty lights and and whatever other techno-wank you’re peddling and kindly frak-off.
Come back when you have something that actually qualifies as “revolutionary“.
Back with more insightful analysis is Anita Sarkeesian. The idea of but what about the male in distress plot point is dicusses as well as framing the issues within the bounds of our society.
I’m still waiting for Drakken to be redone and released, not only does it start a female protagonist, but it also has Dragons! And I lourve dragons to bits!
Guess which heroes you start out with – and guess which ones cost 20 Dollars to play.
Having some more free time on my hands, I decided to try out the new free to play Action-RPG Marvel Heroes. My impression is that the game suffers from exactly what happened to The Old Republic MMO (TOR): the curse of More of the Same. TOR took the same mechanics of the genre defining game World of Warcraft, put it into the Star Wars universe, added a neat story arc for each character class and called it a day. TOR was supposed to be the last of the Triple A monthly subscription MMO’s, unfortunately when gamers realized that it was just WOW in space, they left in droves dooming TOR to a rickety F2P structure that other small-fry MMO’s meekly follow while firmly in WOW’s shadow.
Marvel Heroes (MH) dev team made the same decision to not change the basic formula of the genre defining game (Diablo 3 – D3) and instead, slapped some sniny new intellectual property characters onto what is essentially Diablo 2 or 3, thus they too have taken their spot in the shadow of Diablo 3. It begs the question then, why play MH then if you can find a better experience in the game that defines the genre? We’ll return to that question at the end :)
MH is, out of the box, a free to play(F2P) game and thus is the unhappy subject to one of the most crippling monetizing systems I’ve seen in a F2P game. What differentiates MH from D3 is that you can play as a superhero from Marvel’s universe – as in “Wow! I could be Iron Man and fight the evil Hydra that would be cool!”, type of fun. Unfortunately if you are looking to be your favorite hero (the big draw of the game) be prepared to spend the 20 US dollars to unlock him and another 20 dollars if you want to choose his outfit. Errr…Ouch.
Just look at all the awesome Heroes you’ll almost never get to play.
Okay, so I don’t want to spend the $$ on a F2P game, you have to start with something right? Starting MH you get a choice of 5 second/third tier shlubs (Storm, Dare Devil, Thing, Scarlet Witch, Hawkeye) and all perform their assigned roles adequately, you can be the ranged zappy zappy of storm or the armoured tankyness of Thing. But really, unless you’re a obscurantist comic fan with a big chubby for bland characters, the characters/power sets will quickly become boring, especially when you see the characters you want to play doing the cool stuff right beside you leaving you pining for their experience.
Oh sure it is a F2P game, but when the main distinguishing feature (the heroes) of your Action-RPG is behind a steep pay wall why would the average gamer bother? You can find a better, far more polished experience, in Diablo 3 or Torchlight 2 with Torchlight 2 being the better and less expensive of the two (D3 has always on DRM and micro-transaction that break the game). Oh certainly, you can grind in game and hope that you get lucky and get a “hero-drop” so you can get taste of the fabled land of milk and honey, but then when you have to use the word “grind” in context of a playing a game…
Action RPG’s in general are about having fun killing the monsters and reviling in the “magic pants” that they drop for your character – but if you don’t like your character there will be problems. (see the attached video for more on pants),
Edit: Oh hey, Total Biscuit also agrees with me, Meh! for the win.
Ms.Sarkeesian continues her video series about the misogyny prevalent in video games.
Trigger warning for Language, Homophobia and Racism and violence in general.
This is by no means a scientific finding. This isn’t even a good sample, but lets background that for bit and look at what is going on in the video. How many times do you hear the word “Bitch” or “Fag” or even more inappropriate terms? These are examples of people at their worst, but what I find of sociological value is the idea that when we are at our most angry the blinders of everyday “polite” behaviour quickly fall to the wayside. What is left is the unvarnished raw core of feeling and emotion that can give some insight into the some of the uglier systemic features of our society.
U Mad?
The idea that being a “fag” or homosexual apparently is one of the worst insults you can direct at another male – why? Because being homosexual equates to un-masculine thus powerless, helpless; a second class citizen in our society (where men are the ideal) you know, like being a woman (the horror). The prevalence of the word “bitch” completes the circle because being a bitch is to be female and subservient; inferior in every way. (There is more to be said, but consider this a start.)
There are tonnes of vulgarity in the video, but unsurprisingly, most of it is gender or race based. One could hypothesize that video-games bring out the worst in us, but I’d rather look at the idea that video games, as a cultural artifact of our patriarchal culture, show exactly how far we still need to go to make our society a safe egalitarian place for everyone, and not just the menz.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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