The Male Gaze

[DavidCaruso]

first of all, idk where you're getting the idea that a theme is aesthetic. a theme will resonate through the entire game, in the aesthetics, the plot, and, in a well constructed game, in the gameplay. its a far more important aspect of the game than you are making it out to be. in duke nukem forever, the misogynistic themes resound through the game, in the aesthetics, the story, and even in the gameplay. this makes it VERY hard to ignore and far more prevalent than the gameplay flaws, however egregious they may be.

The "misogynistic" themes in DNF (lowest-common-denominator pointless sexypandering and outright hatred of women are different things -- both are bad of course but in this case it's technically not misogyny) are mainly aesthetic (story, graphics, and audio all fall under the general "aesthetics" category), and can be fixed without impacting how the game plays very much, if at all. Here's a basic example of how I'd do it:

1. remove the cutscenes with the twins, including that one with the alien pregnancy (they're Half-Life style in that you can look around and whatnot, but the player still can't impact anything that goes on in them meaningfully e.g. saving the girls, and they're generally irrelevant to the plot and just there for fanservice, so their removal doesn't affect the game's overall design much if at all)
   
2. change the wall boobs in the Hive level to glowing Ego Increase rocks/panels or something, and remove the gratuitous breasts on the alien boss
   
3. put more clothes on all of the women and make it so they say more than just exhilarated screaming or damsel-in-distress-ing whenever they see Duke
   
4. make it so those creepy-ass vagina doors in the Hive level are just regular doors
   
5. change the "babe" in the multiplayer mode to a flag

I have no clue how to handle the strip club dream level at all though (the dumb condom/popcorn fetch quest could probably be replaced by an equivalent one with different items but idk), but all of the other changes are basically separate from how the game plays, or its mechanics and level design. It's not very intertwined in this case (again, with the probable exception of the strip club level).

if you think that awful themes in videogames should "just dock the games a few points" there's no hope in getting you to understand the problems inherent with accepting women being treated as weak and unable to function without a male behind her/women being treated as cheesecake and fanservice with or without the flimsy excuse of "but she's a strong woman who's in control of her sexuality"

I never said that this wasn't a problem. All I'm saying is that there can still be great games in spite of bad themes, and if and when this happens it should at least be recognized as such instead of the entire or major focus of criticism being on the themes. Same with movies. More justification and support for that below.

comparing this to outrageous things like child porn/lynching is a non sequitur, because as it stand these things are reviled in our society, while sexism is highly prevalent and accepted

Only reason I mentioned those things was because others brought those up to me and I was responding to them. Isn't the Rapelay example the same way anyway (rape is reviled in our current society)?

seriously the gameplay and mechanics of a game do not matter one fucking bit if the content is going to openly display out-and-out discrimination and marginalisation of any group, not just women

Hm, would you also say the same applies to movies, that their narratives and visuals don't matter if they display discrimination of any group? If so, have you heard of The Birth of a Nation? It's an incredibly racist movie, with scenes where black people are depicted as unintelligent and aggressive; at the same time, it's also a landmark film and widely regarded as one of the best and most influential ever made, it was selected for preservation for the Library of Congress, it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it's on Roger Ebert's Great Movies list, etc. It also came out at a time when racism in the United States was considered okay, "highly prevalent and accepted" even. So why is such an openly discriminatory movie regarded so highly? Well, read Ebert's review; he spends time criticizing the racism, but at the same time he also spends time admiring and complimenting the craft of the film: its powerful narrative, its revolutionary new camera and editing techniques, its visual beauty, and the many unprecedented things it did in general. He says "it is a great film that argues for evil, [and] to understand how it does so is to learn a great deal about film, and even something about evil," and his review reaffirms and justifies the film's status as one of his selected Great Movies.

Now, is there any good reason that a similar type of criticism can't or shouldn't be done for a similarly offensive videogame, especially one which manages to have great mechanics and design (the equivalent of plot and cinematography in movies, in terms of importance) in spite of any ugly themes? There aren't many great videogames with ugly themes (closest I can think of is Bayonetta, at least in the context Tachikoma puts it in) right now, but as videogames get closer to a fully immersive and free virtual reality more taboos are going to be broken, and this issue is only going to grow in importance.

grow up and get out of your fantasy world of "a game is good if its gameplay is good and nothing else matters". rapelay could have been the pinnacle of pc gaming with fantastic gameplay and beautiful graphics, but at the end of the day it's still a video game about raping women (which is, as i hope you know but at this point i am not completely sure, a Bad Thing).

I never said that gameplay is all that matters ever. If you read my post again, I said that there are cases where a game can be ruined for me if the aesthetics and/or themes are bad enough, and that the examples others gave (games about child porn, lynching, etc.), as well as this one, fall squarely in that category. At the same time, I'd hope that in this hypothetical case, critics and experts talking seriously about the game would not dismiss it entirely as soon as they saw it, and mention that it's a "pinnacle of PC gaming" in spite of the disgusting theme (just like the Birth of a Nation example I mentioned above is a landmark movie in spite of its racism). That is what "growing up" entails =P

It's a good twist to reveal her to be female (I never knew I was playing as a woman with Samus on Smash Bros 64, but I thought he/she was a cyborg badass), but I felt let down when I realized she was a sexualised blonde woman.

Other M never happened. Please don't remind me, I refuse to accept it as canon



EDIT: ok, to clarify:

[2: 22: 35 AM] radkojjiro: carusos point is that sexism is cool as long as hes entertained
[2: 22: 35 AM] radkojjiro: That's Sort Of Not Admissable
[2: 22: 36 AM] radkojjiro: ever

do people actually think this is what i've been saying? wtf.


EDIT II @ Tachikoma's below post (because making a new one seems like a waste):

[2: 58: 39 PM] Sengir: i have the mental image of a naked guy in a battlefield bending over and blasting massive shits

(and yeah, we do =P)