WTF: The unavoidable life implosion edition

wundergeek Miscellany, wtf

Hi, folks. This is the only post you’ll get this week. I’m pursuing a completely awesome opportunity that requires sacrificing pretty much every waking hour this week. Which means no time for blogging. I’ll be reading the comments irregularly to make sure you aren’t setting each other on fire in the comment sections, but don’t expect direct answers from me. It’s not because I don’t love you. I promise.

I’ll be back next week, honest. In the mean time, please enjoy this link about how Duke Nukem Forever inspired something even more sexist.

I realize that’s a pretty lackluster offering, so if any of you have come across anything particularly wtf, I invite you to post links in the comments.

See you all next week.

25 thoughts on “WTF: The unavoidable life implosion edition”

  1. OK Incendiary ammo, gasoline and a molotov? Left 4 dead, check. Flare gun and flash-bangs? Alan Wake, check. A demented grease monkey with high-tech weapons? Dead space, check. A horde of junkies armed with biological agents? Bioshock, check. Alright we have a week to get at each others throats, pick your weapons. I have mine 😉 .

    Now on topic: on one of my previous post I ranted about being unable to find a decent porn game online, it is a bit paradoxical for most people, but seriously even if getting women naked should be easier in a porn game then in real life, why should such women be two-dimensional and unrealistic?

    Now about this sexist in honor of Duke Nukem game: it is nothing new, the shooter where you shoot the clothes of a girl who just stands there and waits for it is something that has been around for a year or two or three now.

    So here is to recycling intellectual thrash as a mental stimuli for young males looking for life experience on the internet 😦 .

    • “on one of my previous post I ranted about being unable to find a decent porn game online, it is a bit paradoxical for most people”

      A lot of people don’t get this because a lot of people are Genophobic and thus view masturbation as something akin to the Insite; they don’t even think quality is possible, except in a negative sense. The rest of us who are not afflicted as such realize that some porn can actually be better than other porn, and not just “less evil,” and so is just as subject to critique as any other genre of film or game or comic or whatever. Alan Moore, for example, got so fed up with bad porn that he wrote his own, Lost Girls, to show everyone how to do it right. People are still trying to call it ‘erotica’ to get around admitting that porn can be high quality, even after he specifically stated it was porn, much like how the literati tried to call Dune a “philosophy novel” instead of SF.

      To be specific, it’s not that there’s no such thing as erotica, it’s just that erotica is something that uses sex as a critical tool to enhance the point of the narrative, whereas sex and/or the fetish are the goals of porn and the other narrative elements are tools to enhance the quality of them. For example: The Witchblade anime is erotica because the entire story is a statement about motherhood. (essentially, it was this point. And yes, I’m sorry for that terrible pun.) The sex stuff dials down when it would distract from that instead of emphasizing it. In contrast, no matter which neopagan Jim Balent gets to endorse Taro as esoteric wisdom in any particular issue, that comic is still porn. Very, very, bad porn, but still the same genre as Lost Girls.

      “the shooter where you shoot the clothes of a girl who just stands there”

      Kotaku mentions that it’s possible for you to lose your clothes by playing worse than the AI, which means that this is theoretically reciprocal, depending on how hard the game is, of course. Strip target shooting, essentially.

      Which is the most libertarian thing I’ve ever heard of.

      • OK I never read Lost Girls or Taro so excuse me if I won’t talk about your example, but in principle you are right in any genre there should be certain standards when writing and/or drawing.

        And also thank you for explaining the difference between porn and erotica. Always wondered about that.

        Now a bit of sarcasm: thank you so very much for getting me to try out the strip-shooter duke nukem. Now if you do not mind I’m going to go and blow my brains out so I can get that piece of trash out of my head. Here ends the sarcasm. Seriously that game is crap, you might be right about the idea of it but you never see the male strip when he looses and without that it just a commercial tool for roping in adolescent males.

        • […]you never see the male strip when he looses and without that it just a commercial tool for roping in adolescent males.

          If Soul Calibur is anything to go by, it’s a commercial tool for roping in adolescent males whether the guys lose their clothes or not. >_>

          • The thing is that SC has (had?) a fairly large group of slashficcers that were totally into Rapael, Mitsurugi, Sigfried, and Rock. Then Namco decided to blow it all on pandering to men, because people with giant swords hacking into each other wasn’t enough, apparently.

            It brings to mind that one time when SyFy had a Dresden Files series and canceled it because there were too many 40+ aged women watching it and they were “outside our demographic,” possibly the most spectacular failure of understanding basic capitalism ever seen. (The sad thing is that that is one of the least stupid things SyFy has done, comparatively. The name change is one of the highest)

            • It brings to mind that one time when SyFy had a Dresden Files series and canceled it because there were too many 40+ aged women watching it and they were “outside our demographic,” possibly the most spectacular failure of understanding basic capitalism ever seen.

              My understanding is that increasing viewership raises the cost of advertisement, but if that increase isn’t in the target demographic, it doesn’t increase the value to advertisers? …which still makes no sense, because the network should be able to set the price of the advertisements, but it somewhat explains the mindset of people who can’t figure out how to harness a bigger but more diverse audience. (Though, seriously… the overlap in the preferences of 40 year old women watching Dresden Files and their target audience is probably larger than they think — I imagine that in a significant number of cases, media preference has a much higher correlation with purchase decisions than age and gender do)

              • This is a really old example, but the same thing happened to the show ‘Murder She Wrote’. It was an incredibly popular show, but only in the ‘older woman’ demographic, so they canned it.

            • To be fair though the tv show of Dresden sucked balls compared to the Books*, you were never going to get him riding a fucking zombie T-rex through downtown Chicago in it and thus it was not good 😛

              *This still puts it better than about %85 of the normal tv crap though 🙂

        • “OK I never read Lost Girls or Taro so excuse me if I won’t talk about your example, but in principle you are right in any genre there should be certain standards when writing and/or drawing.”

          Well, you said you wanted quality porn. Lost Girls is a gold standard there.

          As to Tarot, it’s notable for being roughly 10 Rocky Horros on the “so bad it’s good” scale. [A HREF=”http://www.the-isb.com/?cat=56″]Start here and enjoy the ride.[/A]

          “And also thank you for explaining the difference between porn and erotica. Always wondered about that.”

          Just be sure to keep in mind that certain group of people don’t actually think there is a categorical difference and use the words as rhetorical tools. To them “porn” is a pejorative, while “erotica” is an exaltation; they are used as “sex I hate” and “sex I like,” respectively. Hence that old “I know it when I see it” bit of idiocy.

          “Seriously that game is crap, you might be right about the idea of it but you never see the male strip when he looses and without that it just a commercial tool for roping in adolescent males.”

          Calm down, man. I didn’t actually play that game, I just went by the Kotaku article said.

          On second thought, I trusted a Kotaku article. Carry on.

            • OK I understand, but I have to ask then: why did you point us in the direction of the duke nukem official porn website?

              • Because it’s a game in which female nudity is used as a gameplay reward for the presumed male player. Porn and H-games fall within the purview of this site, even if I mostly avoid them. (They’re icky.) Discussions of porn in general do not.

    • “Alright we have a week to get at each others throats, pick your weapons. I have mine 😉 .”

      Swarm of space zombies? Dead Space 1 and 2, check. Massive hordes of magical creatures? Oblivion, check (Note: Have to try combining those…). Massive, armored vehicles that can go through any terrain except oceans*? KOTOR, etc., check. Large group of superpowered people with really nasty high-tech weapons? KOTOR, etc., check.

      That should hold for a week.

      *Sandcrawlers.

  2. OK people wundergeek is off this week because of an opportunity in real life that will gobble all of her time this week, I wish her the best of luck in her endeavor and so should the rest of you. So lets all pitch in this week and make a discussion on topic for this blog.

    So to start things off here is a target for discussion that comes to us from the official site of league of legends and was done by one of the gamers and then shown by the official website: http://eu.leagueoflegends.com/news/summoner-showcase-issue-29-%E2%80%93-painters-tape-and-dubstep ,this is the part of the official website that posted the link you just click on the ,,ace in the hole” paragraph title and you get here: http://blog.naver.com/doinjang888/30107326912 . And this is their picture of said character: http://eu.leagueoflegends.com/champions/51/caitlyn_the_sheriff_of_piltover , so you can compare and comment on both.

    Now: I am not wundergeek and this is not an attempt to highjack this blog, I am nowhere near as good as her in making a valid point on the topic of this blog. I have merely found her blog as a good way to vent my frustrations about sexual prejudices against both males and females of our species in today’s media.

    So wundergeek sorry if this post is off-topic, but I really do find the discussions on your blog help me vent at least some of my anger about the stupidity that can be found out here in the world.

    • I’m not sure what we’re supposed to be comparing about those two image, but I’ll shoot with the commentary.

      The character design itself is basically absurd. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to take that woman seriously as a sheriff when she’s wearing a strapless minidress and belts on her bare legs (seriously, even as a Tetsuya Nomura fan, those belts make my brain go in circles), even in a superheroesque world. I wouldn’t describe her as particularly egregious, but I’m not really a fan.

      That fanart, on the other hand, is on a whole different level. She has one eye closed like she’s supposed to be aiming down the gun, except that her gun is pointed away from the viewer/shooter, and her lips are so pouty that she looks like she’s blowing the camera a kiss. She’s portrayed as helpless when confronted by the viewer, instead of a respectable opponent (and the title of the piece, “Ace in the Hole” reflects that). It’s almost entirely degrading to the character. =/

      • Um, you are right about the fanart, but the name: Ace in the Hole, it is worse then what you think about it because that is the name of her sniper attack which in-game is a nightmare for opponents ,last time I played against Caitlyn she killed me with that move 8 times (next to my teams tower most of the times), and instead of getting a picture of Caitlyn taking aim for that dreaded master kill shot most players can not escape we get the above mentioned picture.

            • In the hands of an experienced player who has a style of game play that fits Caitlyn’s abilities it is, for the rest of people who find themselves playing with Caitlyn it is a method to take a little of the top of your opponents health bar in a fight.

              And that is why I corrected the type-o, the skill and experience of the player make the difference, but yes it is a skill-kill shot.

  4. well, i’m glad someone is finally talking about issues of sexism in games. only took several decades.

    hopefully it won’t take a few more decades before we address the 800 pound gorilla that is the absolutely astonishing racism in games. i mean, if it takes this long for straight white women (the second most privledged group of people on earth, after straight white men) to get some recognition, it’s not looking good.

    • I would recommend checking out The Border House as a blog that discusses wider issues of discrimination in game, including racism, homophobia, transphobia, and fat-shaming. I try to keep this blog very focused since this is a very part-time endeavor for me, but it’s undeniable that gaming is probably the most racist segment of an already incredibly racist entertainment industry.

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