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Ah, all the poor male gamers having their pet misogyny project blow up in their faces. Yep, you dudes are for sure are ruining Anita Sarkessian’s career. Keep the hate-train going maybe you can get her into the NYT again, or Le Monde or Time or… really the sky is the limit.
*basking in the sweet sweet schadenfreude*
Good Job Gamer Gaters – You may have to blame Anita for starting GG as well, because she must have started it, just look at all the publicity, fame and money she’s getting…
Anyhow, here is the first paragraph from Rolling Stone…go there and catch the rest of the article. :)
“She started with a YouTube account and wound up on the front page of the New York Times. In between, all that the Canadian-American feminist cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian did, via her video series Feminist Frequency, was calmly, comprehensively collect and explain examples of the shoddy portrayal of women in video games. Titled “Tropes vs. Women,” her series on gaming pointed out that the roles most often available to women — from princesses to be rescued to prostitutes to be murdered — are both sexist and unimaginative. If these roles were rethought, diversified and expanded, Sarkeesian argues, gaming’s creative class and audience would be diversified and expanded in turn, and games would become more fun to boot.”
“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“.
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.
No objectification going on here Ms.Facetitsass. None at all.
Embedding in wordpress sucks.
Thus, I am only able to provide the link to the video I would like you to watch. Jimquisition, featured on the pop culture gaming site The Escapist, puts crass behaviour and bombast squarely in the centre ring. Jim’s style is crude, but in the case of female protagonists in the gaming industry, serves to succinctly make the point about the blatant sexism in the gaming industry (and yet another reflection on the inherent misogyny in the culture).
So go watch the video here. Then come back and talk to me about how right or wrong I am. :) Also, do check out Zero-punctuation while you are there as the author of the game reviews are an inspiration for creatively using the english language.
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