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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. :/
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.
This is a post based on a personal experience. The general topic of the sexist nature of video game culture can be found here.
As of late, I’ve been on a bit of League of Legends binge; a fact the Intransignet One can well attest. The problem with League of Legends (LoL) is that the competitive aspects of the game makes it very rewarding to win and thus, difficult to not to play. It is a strategic game based on skillful play and teamwork – it rewards the teams that communicate and work together. Thus, voice over IP in the competitive stream, provides a definite leg up on those who do not use voice communication.
Ah the glories of voice communication… it exposes one to other gamers with different backgrounds and social experiences and therein lies the problem. What do you do when one of your teammates, as a part of their regular vocabulary, uses the word ‘rape’ to describe what is happening in game?
As in: “We are raping hard right now!” as a descriptor of our team doing very well or, “we’re getting raped” when we happen to be losing.
Here is where I pause because I’m stuck and I know I should not be. Rape is traumatic, horrible crime that should not be normalized in gamer talk. Yet, when I was confronted with it, I sat passively by and said nothing (tacit acceptance, if you’re keeping score). There were five people chatting and they noted that those darned Canadians were a quiet polite lot. Little did they know the social struggle going on within me.
The pressure to accept the normalized use of the word rape was stifling as it would mean, on my behalf, requesting that said individuals please refrain from using that terminology in chat. I was part of a social group and we were all having fun playing a game – and it would mean harshing that particular mellow.
In hindsight I can see that all the social baggage that prevented me from speaking up was/is utter bullshit. There is no excuse for not calling out rape culture when it is staring you right in the face, yet I declined to act, thus propagating and encouraging the rape culture that I vigourously campaign against in other facets of my life.
This is a personal failure of integrity and will. It leaves me feeling disappointed in myself and my culture.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
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