See, I never much cared about Anita Sarkeesian. She was a talking head in what had at that point already been a sea of talking heads, that's only grown since. I do think that there is something very funny about her actually setting up a kickstarter for a series of video essays, even more so now that there's a never ending army of skinny neckbeards of all genders, races and walks of life, each individually producing dozens of hours of video footage talking about games from all different angles, simply for the love of their own voice. But people went and paid for it, so it's not like she didn't have the right idea.Xed51 wrote: ↑Sat Aug 27, 2022 9:31 amIt was slightly more complicated than that. Yes that was the (retarded) inciting incident, but it happened in conjunction with a bunch of low effort games being pushed by the press like "Gone Home". At the same time, you had a handful of feminists (mostly just Anita "CUTE" Sarkeezian) applying what they defined as "feminist critique" to videogames, a few of them being hired by westoid companies to write their games (you probably remember that picture of the purple haired obese fujoshi doing writing for Mass Effect).AngelheadedHipster wrote: ↑Fri Aug 26, 2022 5:28 pm It was a simpler time. It started with the accusation that some random critic no one's ever heard of gave a good review to a game from an indie developer no one's ever heard of because they had an affair, and when it turned out he didn't everyone just kind of went on arguing about it for, like, 6 more months out of boredom.
The previously mentioned goblinoid mutts saw it as ZOG, as in they blamed the entirety of any problems in the gaming industry on journalists being corrupted by pussy.
I had huge problems with this. (Outside of the fact that both sides were filled with ugly mutants.)
Mainly that gamergate attacked the principle instead of the individuals. Gone Home may very well be dogshit, but the entire conversation revolved around "this is not a real videogame!" because they couldn't compulsively grind for horse armor in it. The whole "consumer revolt" aspect entirely revolved around "stopping bad feminists from turning all games into walking simulators" which of course is retarded. Gone Home (I'm just using this as an example because it was very prominent at the time, but there's many games like that) is just a bad example of something in the same genre as The Silver Case or Flower, Sun, and Rain where everything you do is walk around environments and interact with characters to experience a story.
TSC is endlessly more inspired for a million reasons: for once the whole presentation was inspired by Godard of all things in how text and images and sounds overlap to condense different types of separate information in one screen, secondly the writing and setting are a lot better obviously, the art is better, the soundtrack is fantastic, so on and so forth. But by framing the conversation around "non-games being passed off as games", anything that doesn't fall into the very narrow OCD-based definition of what a "game" is, is "retarded" and "doesn't make sense".
Which is why we end up with shit like what me and Cat discussed in this thread.
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Why does Silent Hill have tank controls, combat mechanics and armies of goblins? Because Resident Evil did, and "that's how survival horror plays".
(Without you reading the whole thread. No we don't hate Silent Hill. We just happened to agree that the games fall into several pitfalls of "normalcy" which hinder the very inspired art design.)
I'm not trying to single out Silent Hill either. This is just an extremely pervasive attitude where games employ repetition without any thought, which is just retardation. You still smash barrels in videogames just because Donkey Kong threw barrels at Jumpman in 1981. The usage of barrels in that arcade game was inspired because it bridged the gap between basic videogame abstraction (think atari games, or space invaders, where stuff just looked like pixels) by turning the obstacle in a real thing that the player would initially recognize, and the association with jumping came from the comedy of Buster Keaton.
We then had barrels for videogames for 40 subsequent years just because they were in Donkey Kong. No thought, no inspiration, just iterating on what had been done before by artists to turn it into a product. Silent Hill has similar issues (though again, I like it a lot overall, it just unfortunately happens to be a good example of this philosophy in action.)
Resident Evil was meant to simulate a military operation in desperate situations. Therefore combat was employed to force the player into resource and menu management, and tank controls were meant to simulate encumberment and tactical movement.
Silent Hill tries to evoke a completely different type of experience, with a random civilian being stuck in a nightmarish world where the town itself is a manifestation of inner spiritual pain. Implementing Resident Evil combat mechanics haphazardly is not conductive to the game at all, but it's "done that way". Which ends up dragging the whole series down, despite having some incredibly high highs.
The reality that gamers (and producers) don't want to face is that even the games that are praised for their gameplay alone were made by weirdo artiste types. They were just copied thoughtlessly for so long that they became a "standard".
Super Mario Bros is not thoughtless. It's one of the weirdest things ever created. Italian plumber jumps from left to right on top of turtles and monster mushrooms in order to save the white sovereign of more mushroom-shaped people from a tortoise dragon man who may or may not want to rape her.
The original inspiration for Donkey Kong, which was the original appearance of Mario when he wasn't even called Mario, was 1950s american pop art in the vein of pop-eye.
Jumpman ended up being called Mario just because the italian referent for Nintendo was called Mario Segali and Miyamoto thought he resembled the pixellated character. Either way, when it was decided to put Mario into a globe throttling adventure, the framing device became the old chivalristic tale of a knight saving a princess from a dragon. Which is why Mario and Peach look like completely different species. Everything in the Mario series comes from personal inspirations, the boos are based on the enemy designer's wife being an aggressive woman who suddenly became shy when confronted. The music was composed specifically to be conductive to the jumping sound effect; I could go on for ages but I don't want to derail the discussion too much.
My point is that even the most "standard" of genres in the 80s, side-scrolling platforming, came from a variety of inspirations, mythology, pop-culture, real world.
The AIDS-infested OCD-riddled mongoloid gamer mind would have you believe that games are like a math equation that you solve for the exclusive purpose of wasting your free time trying to avoid experiencing a piece of art that might possibly activate your brain.
In reality, all the greatest innovators of videogames were weirdo artists. Shigeru Miyamoto, Gunpei Yokoi, Eiji Aonuma, Hideki Kamiya, Shinji Mikami, Motohide Eshiro (gotcha you don't know who the fuck that is), Tomonobu Itagaki, the list goes on. We lived off of "standardized" videogames for so long only because people like that built such an esoteric and complex yet intuitive framework that imitators could thrive off of it for ages. (For example, I did not list Itsuno in there because I mostly consider his work to be iterative or derivative. His games are good though, I liked all of them. I haven't listed Yoko Taro either because despite liking his games a lot as well, they also fall into the trapping of just "adopting" pre-existing gameplay styles.)
Standardization became a much bigger issue during the sixth generation because HD development became so expensive that working on proprietary engines became too expensive, which led to mass adoption of things like Unreal Engine. Creating a game from a pre-made engine is similar to painting on a canvas where the colors, the frame and the shapes have already been chosen for you: Yes a great artist can still make something from it, but the creative process starts in the middle of development rather than at the very beginning. Which is why something like killer7 could not realistically exist anymore.
At the same time though, with stuff like Xbox live arcade, game development became way more accessible to the average guy leading to a resurgence in indie gaming. In the sense that people who had never approached game development in any way and may not even have been fans of videogames were now able to construct completely new systems. And yes, a bunch of those people were academic style feminists.
What I'm getting at, is that feminists getting into gaming was ultimately a good thing because it was part of a larger conversation around the stagnation of gaming itself. For every Gone Homo, we got a Hotline Miami. For every Depression Quest, we got a Gods Will be Watching. I'm not even a fan of Undertale but I would still call it very creative. Jonathan Blow might be up his own ass but his games are great, and so are the two games made by Lucas Pope.
I would much rather have a hectic artistic context in which we get masterpieces and dogshit being pumped out simultaneously than a stagnant world of mediocrity, which is what we have now. Gamergate was a consumer revolt comprised of Game of War obsessed OCD-riddled mutts that posited the superiority of AAA goyslop just because having an indie game industry where anyone from nazis to hardcore feminists could express their own artistic opinion meant they might possibly be exposed to things they dislike.
In other words, it's just the democratic statist voter mind being afraid of freedom and choosing slavery as it was programmed to be. "Yes sir, I would rather consume the next entry of Uncharted, rather than possibly risk hearing something I disagree with." Considering I never bought or played Gone Homo and I can barely name any other dogshit indie game made by mutants, but that same context allowed me to become a lifelong fan of Hotline Miami and Papers Please, I much preferred that system to what we have now.
The current state of indie games, where it's gatekept by an army of crossdressing estrogen fiends, is a direct result of Gamergate scaring away any creative voice for fear of being blacklisted. There is no separation between the two; indie-trannies employ the same exact tactics as gamergaters did (because they are the same people) by making anyone whose opinion they dislike loose their jobs and sponsors through coordinated smear-jobs.
The old adage of "you must protect the opinions of others, because censorship will eventually come for you" proved to be true, because as soon as the biodemocrats were done getting rid of "radical feminists", they started getting rid of "far right extremists". Once they were done with that, they applied the "far right extremist" label to anyone who believed sex was biological, and so on, so forth.
As a result, the creative wave in indie gaming is completely gone and we are now living in a world where videogames may as well not exist, because major publishers all pump out the same shit they have since 2008 and indie games are all earthbound-inspired allegories for taking estrogen to cure depression. This is a direct result of Mr. Metokur not dying from cancer soon enough and I do directly blame him and his homosexual butt buddies.
Another huge issue I had even at the time is that Gamergate brought nothing to the table. Anita's feminist critique was at times retarded, like Melon's earlier example about Bayonetta. That showed that Anita's scriptwriters (I want to make babies with her) had no artistic literacy whatsoever when it comes to imagery because Bayonetta herself is meant to be a feminist icon; she is coded as a sexual dominatrix who is confident in her own body not for the appeasement of men (she does nothing but toy with them in the game and in the second one she's so obviously in lesbian with Jeane that they might as well be married) but because that was her own way of taking control of her own self after being bound by rules her entire childhood & teenage years (Which is why there's a butterfly motif in her design. She came out of her cocoon to finally be able to fly.)
The ultimate result of this is her becoming her own mother through Cereza. Bayonetta, as the ultimate feminist icon, finds all the strenght that she needs to finally let her own childhood trauma go, within herself, by nurturing and protecting her own childhood self. The villain of the game being her own fucking father.
You might even make an argument that Anita's position is the chauvinistic one, because when looking at Bayonetta, all she sees is an ass (and she is therefore "objectifying her" and demeaning the work of her character artist). HOWEVER by having that retarded opinion in the aether, it at least sparked a conversation that allowed me to have a better understanding of Bayonetta by disagreeing with it.
The only opinion brought to the table by gamergate was "LoL! I don't care. Imagine caring. I just want to slay six hundred identical dragons with my +10 Sword of Thunderous Rage which I crafted from Kobold skin." Complete mindrot for mongoloids. I would go as far as to say that Anita also had some good points, for example when she brought up Double Dragon 1 as an example of a game using sexist tropes because you go rescue your girlfriend. I wouldn't agree that said trope is "sexist", but I would definitely call it "retarded" considering it was only applied because they were imitating Mario and Zelda without any thought to it (as I previously explained, Mario and Zelda purposefully harkened back to chivalristic/arthurian conventions which were then coated with a billion different things making them ultimately original products, much like George Lucas did with Star Wars), due to their popularity. Streets of Rage has a much more interesting setting specifically because they applied thought to what exactly would be conductive to beat 'em up gameplay than the original Double Dragon did.
I'm not saying that Double Dragon was bad for it. What I'm getting at is that allowing a true diversity of viewpoints is conductive to conversation, which in turn is necessary to make art. 2001 a space odyssey, Solaris and Dark Star were three different responses in a film industry that couldn't be any more diverse, all three take a completely different stance on the same issue and I would argue all three of them are good.
Art as a form of conversation is now impossible in the west as a whole, both in the gaming industry and in the movie industry (where everything is now some form of capeshit. There's no substantial difference between Iron Man 3 and Bladerunner 2049. They are the same movie, much like God of War 4 and the lust of ass 2 are the same game.) because only one opinion is allowed. Gamergate mutts argued in favor of "games as math problems", only being able to be built around very specific templates, and got exactly the world they wanted, which is why the fearmongering about it is so absurd to me.
There were no sides to begin with. Everyone just wanted to suck goblin feet and hated art, so art is gone from pop media entirely.
See, this might be due to me being literally autistic, but for about two months I was actually really on the side of GamerGate, not on the virtue of having any strong opinions about feminism as relating to video games, but because I foolishly assumed it was actually about gaming criticism. In other words, here I thought it might mean that people will finally stand up against paid reviews from big publishers. But as it so happened, both major publisher, and major gaming outlets like IGN or Gamespot were hardly even brought up, instead everyone got hung up on indie games and glorified blogs like Kotaku. Which, probably later then I reasonably should have, made me realize that it's not, in fact, about the impartiality of gaming criticism. Took me until all those shady political ideologues like Milo Yiannopolous and Sargon of Akkad showed up, that about a year later would all resurface as Trump cheerleaders.
I absolutely agree that the rise of indie game is the best thing that happened to the industry. Most games I'm right now even cautiously looking forward to are indie games. I absolutely believe that everyone should be able to make and release whatever the hell they want. I haven't played Gone Home and I don't think I'd enjoy it much but I get what it is and why people like it. Stripping a game down, mechanically, until all that's left is environmental storytelling is as valid an approach to make something as any. It's the sort of thing that I don't think brings much to the table as a game, but as an experiment in honing in on one single aspect of a game I don't see why it shouldn't exist. Hell, it was Depression Quest that caused the entire outrage. People thought that the rumor of a critic from a random magazine recommending a small text adventure that was released for free on the internet was somehow an issue worth getting worked up about, moreso than major magazines featuring advertisments of games they are supposed to critique. And then the rumor wasn't even true. Who the hell cares?
I guess, when it comes down to it, the shift in attitude back then was people proposing that games should have the same respect, but also the same scrutiny as any other medium. Which they more or less do now. GamerGate showed pretty well how many people would prefer to look at games as purely mechanical constructions, which I don't get. Though, for what it's worth, there's a subset of people who treat movies the same way. I'm sure you've come across MauLer, who makes those 5+ hour videos trying to formulate objective arguments for how a movie is overall bad or good. The punchline being, of course, that all the talks about, and presumably watches, are artless cookie cutter action blockbusters. And there is something kinda sad, but also kinda funny about it, in the way movies made according to purely mathematical, statistical values with minimal human creativity attached to any aspect of the production feeds into the critique of a person who only watches them to break them down according to a rigid formula. I guess it's kinda kafkaesque, both sides of the equation could be replaced with algorithms and it wouldn't make a difference. Large film studios and large game studios are all chasing that pie in the sky of the mathematically perfect production, and both have navigated themselves into different dead ends. There are a lot of rubbish indie games, there are a few good ones, but there'll never be the day when I won't prefer them over the next annual iteration some person shooting a gun or swinging a sword in a forest, this time with slightly more detailed foliage.
