Neoriceisgood
Member
#lol
Haven't played, but I'm always open for interesting analysis if there's enough depth to it.
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Anita Sarkeesian reviews Assassin's Creed Syndicate (spoiler: she liked it)
- Thread starter Alex_Mexico
- Start date
#lol
Haven't played, but I'm always open for interesting analysis if there's enough depth to it.
Parappa_the_Fapper
Banned
yeahhh.. I'm pretty sure you're going to get banned just for bringing this up. Not sure if you want to risk that....
Alex_Mexico
Member
We're way past the "15 minutes of fame" only. She's still relevant and the 8 pages in the upteenth thread on GAF about her says I'm right.
And I don't appreciate you questioning the existence of the thread in the first place. You're free to go someplace else.
Well you sure showed us!
In case anyone questions her not being relevant anymore this shows she still is.
Industrialist
Member
Yes.
I don't have to agree with a subject matter in a game to be able to experience it so that I can discuss it from a first hand perspective later on. I don't agree with running around shooting people in the streets, or with stealing cars, but I've played all the GTA games. I don't agree with blowing up folks who have joined oppressive regimes as they have no choice if they want to survive, but I'll play Far Cry 4.
Most exploitative or "super controversial" games I won't play because they're often not good games, but if it was the best game ever made? Sure. Mainly because I'd like the chance to make that determination myself.
Hamster Plugin
Member
lol I thought this was posted ironically, but then it was an actual Sargon of Akkad vid behind the link.
It's that "she's not actually a gamer!!" thing yet again, which is getting tiring.
It isn't herself that's making her "famous", but the overwhelming sexism and misogyny in video games culture and society at large. As long as this oppression exist, the type of comments she and others make should be put in the spotlight. It is comments like yours that just directly proves how important her and many other people's work is. Because the sexism and the maintaining of the oppressive status quo that you seem to champion needs to cease as soon as possible.
Even considering comments like yours, don't you realize all the bullshit she and many others have to go through to even be allowed to say anything? Her privacy? Her security guards? The harassment and terrorism she endures? You really are so heartless as to dislike her when you are aware of all the insane shit she faces every single day because of fucking video games?
Neoriceisgood
Member
I clicked it too, expecting a silly parody video with the hashtags and all that.
But nope.
Parappa_the_Fapper
Banned
Why not just only post her in the review thread. What exactly did she do to deserve her own thread? Let's treat everybody equally - how about that. So maybe just post every youtuber's review about syndicate and not only her video.
N
Noray
Unconfirmed Member
Bye
I enjoyed the review and it's good this stuff is out there. You just wanna hear a boilerplate discussion of the mechanics, there's hundreds of reviews out there for you to read.
Also, I want to say Black Flag actually had a trans woman (edit: whoops, trans man)in it, who was also just treated like a goddamn human being by the protagonist and everyone else. It's really refreshing to see. Based on a real pirate too (Mary Read).
I've seen this clip and you know what ... people change.
If anyone asked me about "running" 3 years ago i would've told them that i hated it and never ran a longer distance than maybe 2 miles, in my life.
a year later, i ran half-marathons.
It's not "debunking" if you just point out that people said different things at different times in their lives. That's how people work. They change.
Alex_Mexico
Member
Not the same thing. The idiots who whined about that were saying RE5 was outright racist. Anita isn't calling AC Syndicate racist for not including colored people. She just wishes there was more diversity but commends Ubisoft for the noticeable progress they did with women.
Apples and oranges.
One thing that bothers me is just one part of the video. There's a criticism of the representation aspects is that its a fictional world so real world reasons don't matter, or a disregard for story contexts supporting it. Representation should be part of the story context, not a token aspect. Representation matters and a story with good representation has to matter, too. Seeing the narrative as "it doesn't matter it's a videogame"...I don't understand that at all. To me that feels like it's undercutting the entire point of branching out games representation in the first place. It needs to matter because people need to care.
Tal Shiar Agent
Banned
Its unfortunate. Most of GAF seems good when it comes to sexism in games, but it's the bad apples that come to these threads to shit them up and eventually get them locked.
Most other games journalists don't set out to expose and tackle the most insidious and pervasive problem in gaming.
Problem is, women still aren't equal. Not in society and especially not in gaming, despite the gains made. People like Anita need their own discussions because it exposes how fucked up the gaming culture still is, especially as evident by some of the reactions to her videos.
Neoriceisgood
Member
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=182647415&postcount=305
Bishop already answered the exact same question earlier. (lol)
Alex_Mexico
Member
This was addressed in the first page of this thread, I found it relevant and thats the end of the story. Obviously the mods didn't mind or they would've closed this hours ago. I'd appreciate you stop questioning the existence of the thread.
N
Noray
Unconfirmed Member
Actually the issue wasn't "this game has black people in it", the issue was that some of the early marketing materials invoked some imagery which was very much rooted in racist propaganda. It was a lot more nuanced than you make it out and calling black people who talk about racist depiction "idiots" is not a good look. http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2008...nt-evil-5-trailer-this-imagery-has-a-history/
Anyway I don't wanna derail the thread. I just don't feel comfortable letting this stand.
Talk about missing the forest from the trees. I still can't believe people are so blind to why RE5 is a clear-cut example of problematic depiction of power relationship between white and black.
If you're still so uncertain about why RE5 was straight up racist, read this:
There's also this that came out last week: http://gamedesign.btk-fh.de/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/HarrerPichlmair-PCG15.pdf
Harkins1721
Banned
Meh. Thought the review was crap.
Alex_Mexico
Member
I take it back. RE5 wasn't racist and some overreacted but I'll be the first to admit the Japanese have a tendency to be out of touch when it comes to topics of race and dropped the ball, hard. But I also don't want to derail this further.
It happened a couple of times that someone made a extra thread for a review. I think this thread is the absolutely very first time that some posters, like you, question that practice.
http://multiplayerblog.mtv.com/2009...board-deems-resident-evil-5-scene-not-racist/
"Sue Clark, Head of Communications at the British Board of Film Classification, to comment. She stated that in her viewing of the scene, it has only one man pulling a blonde women in from the balcony and that the single man was not black."
people suicide their accounts questioning angry joe threads too. I don't get it, if people don't like the reviewer they can just move on lol
Well, I guess that debunks the entire peer-reviewed article and the tons of other academic and journalist work that has pointed out the many ways that symbolic racism is enacted in RE5.
This is off-topic of the thread, if you want to keep "discussing" it, PM me.
N
Noray
Unconfirmed Member
Is this supposed to debunk all the racism complaints? Because a white woman found "no issue of racism"? Well color me shocked!
Intersectional feminism or it is garbage.
I do see this kind of attitude thrown at other youtubers like Angry Joe, actually.
However, I'd say this video deserves its own thread, as it's not really a review of the game's mechanics that a buyer would find informative as much as it's a discussion about the inclusiveness of representation in the game. And that's a very different discussion.
Alex_Mexico
Member
Please don't derail this into Resident Evil 5 talk lest a mod may lock this thread. Ive seen too many that go this way. Keep it on topic, please.
Agreed 300%
She's just being consistent. Every time she mentioned violence against women as a problem in games she also pointed out that it was problematic because the women were treated differently than the men.
This isn't a Dante's Inferno where the woman is naked, groped, and then murdered. This is a scenario where the women are given equal treatment to the men. They're not wearing revealing outfits with lingering camera shots. They're not wearing midriff revealing amazonian outfits while their male counterparts are in business suits. They, like their male counterparts, are dressed appropriately. The camera, during cutscenes, treats them equivalently.
Seems like an improvement from the norm.
kinoki
Illness is the doctor to whom we pay most heed; to kindness, to knowledge, we make promise only; pain we obey.
It's to weed out the worst of us. I'm uncertain if you're one of them.
Scrooge McDuck
Member
I actually did not intend to be condescending so if it come off that way, I apologize.
Oftentimes I encountered people who feels that the elements they happen care the most in a game - or any work for that matter - is the de facto most important thing to judge a game with, and that it must apply to everyone. I was just trying to establish a base premise to start the discussion with. To be honest, I was a bit testy because the way you worded your initial argument make it seems like people who care about female portrayals base their buying habits solely on what's not allowed to further some kind of an agenda, and not because they simply dislike said portrayal. That was a failing on my part and I probably could have worded it better.
I'm fairly sure that the ratings board doesn't consist of just one white woman.
N
Noray
Unconfirmed Member
Look at Lime's post. The statement from the board doesn't engage with it at all, just goes "nah tho".
Roni
Member
Yes, not everyone is so easily offended. Going on a tangent of my own: it should never be debated whether or not a concept or ideal should be portrayed. They all should.
If you consider it good, it should be treated as a depiction of something you aspire to always be.
If it's something bad, it should be treated as a reminder of something you want to actively fight against.
I have movies I hate, but I'll never state those shouldn't exist. I simply won't watch them and that will be the end of it. You start putting things up for censorship and soon you'll see other people do the same with things you like.
Pretty sure Mary Read in the game was a woman who crossdressed so as to not catch shit from other pirates and not FtM transgender.
1. There were a lot of 'colored' people in Victorian London. At most just over 10,000 (it would have been a far smaller city, then). I'm surprised you haven't been banned yet, your activity in the other two AC Syndicate threads was pretty horrible and derogatory about the series, too.
2. I haven't played it, but apparently Jacob isn't a meathead by the end, though he seems to start as a juvenile person.
Oh my god, could we please stop with the whole fucking censorship stuff? It's beyond insane at this point to invoke. It's equivalent to demanding to see Obama's birth certificate.
Haven't seen such a despicable and abhorrently stupid post in a while...
Anyway...
Noone before you talked about censorship. We talk about criticism, about highlighting negative aspects. If you are fine with extremely negative elements in a game, feel free to swallow. But don't attack others for making a educated decision and opt out.
I agree with your posts, but it's worth noting that Elise in AC Unity and Hope in AC Rogue are both excellent characters.
Black Flag also had a decent female character (who we thought was a young man for most of the game).
Lord British
Member
Cheers for the Black Flag spoiler! 
I hadn't got that far for the "reveal", but I had figured it out. Not mad. 
Alex_Mexico
Member
Well I did say female playable character, right? I never said AC was completely devoid of good female characters but it did take 9 years and 9 mainline games to get one female playable character (and she shares the spotlight with a man, not that there's anything wrong but it's worth noting after 8 games with only one male protagonist per game).
Guileless
Temp Banned for Remedial Purposes
Did you miss the whole Charlie Hebdo thing? And then the group of prominent writers boycotting the ceremony where Charlie Hebdo received an award for freedom of expression? And then Charlie Hebdo announcing it would no longer publish depictions of Muhammed?
Lord British
Member
How have we got from Woman Reviewing Game to Charlie Hebdo
Alex_Mexico
Member
Please staph!
You did, sorry - though I was specifically responding to your post's first clause where you said 'female protagonists' rather than 'playable characters'.
I totally agree with you re playable characters and in general, though.
Great post.
What is this? Are you putting not being able to play Civilization: Beyond Earth on equal footing to beheading people? Or what is it what you do? Excuse my confusion but this has gotten way too absurd.
The game still looks like Unity from last year which really killed it for me. And from what little I've heard of the story, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to that either. Not that any of that shit would make any sense to anyone who dropped the series after Revelations and never knew there was an extended universe. I can't say I was ever interested in the time and place this was going to be set in in the first place, but it's a shame that at a glance there doesn't seem to be anything else to it. Aside from Austin Wintory's score which caught my eye from the early videos though, and I'll be happy to listen to that on Spotify at some point.
I don't see how this game is ever going to evolve beyond what it currently is unless people stop giving a shit about Assassin's Creed. And I imagine that won't happen for a very long time.
If this was going to be brough back 20 years from now and the games industry hadn't changed in that time, I would hope them to bring the games back as something really difficult to master, where you as the player would have to work to become good at the game. Where climbing stuff would be as free-form as Grow Home, and the controls for that would be as tight as in a good fighting game. Climbing huge buildings would be as challenging as the fighting Colossi in SoTC instead of holding a button and pressing the stick forward, and executing assasinations and escaping from those scenes would require some amount of planning.
But that'll never happen because the draw of these games is that it's easy to look cool.
I don't see how this game is ever going to evolve beyond what it currently is unless people stop giving a shit about Assassin's Creed. And I imagine that won't happen for a very long time.
If this was going to be brough back 20 years from now and the games industry hadn't changed in that time, I would hope them to bring the games back as something really difficult to master, where you as the player would have to work to become good at the game. Where climbing stuff would be as free-form as Grow Home, and the controls for that would be as tight as in a good fighting game. Climbing huge buildings would be as challenging as the fighting Colossi in SoTC instead of holding a button and pressing the stick forward, and executing assasinations and escaping from those scenes would require some amount of planning.
But that'll never happen because the draw of these games is that it's easy to look cool.
sensui-tomo
Member
Being a guy who isnt for double standards, i'm seeing some people who always "defended"(for a lack of a better term) the angry joe threads but are asking why this is up... Ugh way to hurt that cause from happening again (ah who am i kidding, AJ hasnt made a review in a while)
Flawless Martin
Who (spoilers for the three games)
also die. Elise and Mary also die incredibly pointlessly and their impact on the plot arguably qualifies as fridgings. This largely because it seems that the writers were unable to come up with a way for a more interesting female character to interact with their bland male lead without killing her off.