Dragon Age: Origins
Let me start off by saying that I never go out of my way to actively break a game. I do things the game tells me to do, and more often than not, I actually can get to the ending. It is thus surprising that for a game touted as the next best RPG since Oblivion, Dragon Age: Origins seem to be plagued with a great number of technical issues.
I’m fairly certain the people with decked out monstrosities for desktops would run this game fine, but my 1 and a half year old laptop handled Assassin’s Creed 2 fairly decently, and I assumed it wouldn’t be a problem for Dragon Age. Orzammar was a non-interactive environment that at any given loading point was probably 1/40th of the size of Venice in AC2 – it wasn’t that hard to make that logical jump that a decent laptop could probably run something that only came out months after the biggest sandbox game ever.
I met with freezing cutscenes, quests that wouldn’t complete (the NPC disappeared; even reloading the game had no effect), quests that completed but still had the quest tracker over the NPC’s heads and lagging spells that would only activate 5 seconds after it was cast.
Other smaller glitches included my party members speaking to me with their helmets on (which resulted in a fairly amusing encounter with my main character attempting to kiss through Alistair’s helmet. It looked like his head was going to snap from THE INTENSITY OF THE ROMANCE), dialogue that claimed one thing when I made sure that I did not get that outcome and receiving no attribute points after leveling.
The most frustrating point was when I was forced to skip through most of the dialogue during the Landsmeet (the dialogue climax of the game) because it kept freezing midway. The forums suggested a variety of fixes, which only amplified the multitude of coding problems that were present in the game.
A few solutions were to run the game on one core (a memory leak issue), disable the sound (a sound coding issue), or to reload the game (game processing issue). I’d probably need Kali’s 10 arms to count the number of times I did all three, and in the end I had to skip the dialogue as quickly as possible, hoping that I might squeeze through and make it to the end of the autosave once the cutscene ended.
Which is an enormous shame, because the world of Dragon Age immerses you. While it is still essentially an “Alliance versus Horde and dragons figure in the mix somewhere”, they manage to bring a classic with a few twists to the head. The dwarves are American, not Scottish, the city elves are slaves to the humans and the Dalish elves are Italian, and the humans are… well, still medieval armor wearing, territorial seeking assholes. The story behind the dwarves and Branka’s determination, I must admit, scared me in a morbid and fascinating way. It’s the type of horrific disaster that you can’t wait to hear the next part, and it’s quite empowering to actually have a say in Branka’s decision in the end. It all boils down to one point: immersion.
(At which point immersion is completely thrown out the window when one encounters the multitude of processing problems that plague this game.)
I played an elf mage first and a human rogue on my second playthrough, and I have to say: class balance probably didn’t figure much in creating these classes. Warriors and Rogues have about 8 abilites each, but they just threw everything in when it came to the mage. The number of spells are staggering; to the point where every spell can’t possibly fit on your bar, especially if you wind up specializing in 2 trees. Warriors and rogues are essentially DPSers, and warriors turn into tanks through passive abilities + shield, but mages are crowd controllers, healers, debilitators and AoE and single target DPSers all at once.
You wonder why there are only 2 mages and 7 melee damage dealers in the entire party that you could potentially accrue.
The allocation for attributes were also rather skewed. Essentially, as a mage, you could just dump all your points in two main attributes – willpower and magic – but distributing it for tanking warriors was a slow and agonizing process, because they require 4 of the 6 attributes to be a proper tank (strength to wear massive armor, dexterity to miss attacks, constitution for physical resistance, and willpower to have enough stamina to use your abilities). It wasn’t all the surprising to see the threat generation poorly done, where my overpowered mage would slice an enemy’s health bar in half because the melee did tick damage, and the enemy would zoom straight for her.
It was also fairly annoying to realize that the ending that I wanted on my elf mage (Alistair as king and my character as queen) wasn’t going to be possible with the double whammy of not being a human nor a warrior/rogue. Which led me to create another character, and to be honest, being a rogue is ridiculously boring. I stopped playing after the first major quest was done on the second playthrough; I don’t know if I’ll pick it back up.
The romance options were cute in the beginning, and turned into disappointment when I couldn’t lesbo Morrigan. The only same-sex relationship was with an overzealous religious woman whose character I honestly couldn’t like at all. The other male-female relationship was with an elf who tried to kill you and whose loyalties were doubtful the moment you recruited him. Yeah, no. So romancing the future king it is then!
I would have enjoyed Dragon Age a lot more had I not run into so many bugs in the game, as much as I was disappointed in not being able to get the outcome I wanted on my main character. In short, great story with a few unique twists, but playing the story itself just bogs it all down.
Lair: First Impressions
Save for the fact that my cousins got me this game, everything else about it is crap, at least for the first 5 missions, because that was where I stopped. Lair is set in a fantasy-medieval era, where the Uruk-hai, sorry, Mokai are at war with the Asylians because of some volcano that blew up both their homelands and they decided to blame each other for it. You control Rohn, an elite member of the Asylian Sky Guard, which basically means that you sit on a dragon and let your pet do the fighting for you.
Factor 5 attempted to shoehorn the SixAxis’s motion sensor function by making the entire game control that way. In order to navigate your dragon around, the controller has to physically tilt left/right or up/down. It feels like they were rejected for developing the game for the Wii and they decided to project it onto the PS3 instead, with disastrous results. The controls are extremely sensitive, yet horrendously inaccurate. A brief tilt downwards would send my dragon diving to the bottom, and at one point, when I tilted my controller left, the dragon wound up going right. Maybe the up/down function messed with the left/right controls or something, so I suppose my controller was pointing UP while I was tilting LEFT, which probably made the dragon very confused, and decided to go RIGHT instead.
The whole ‘wrist-flick’ maneuvers were horrendous as well. Apparently if you want to make a 180 degree turn, you have to flick the controller… upwards? Not that the odd directional positioning mattered, at any rate. I was never able to flick my controller fast enough, and sometimes the dragon would make a speed dash instead, which put me even further away from where I was supposed to be.
I won’t gripe about the believability of the wide turns, but in essence, it’s a horrendous thing to navigate with when you’re in battle. There’s a dragon on your right! Okay, tuuuuurn… take your time, whatever. By that time you’ve actually lined that enemy up in your sight, he’s firebombed you and disappeared. The wide turns got even more annoying at the end of the last mission I played, which was killing off enemies on a straight, tiny bridge. Doing turns on that bridge was a nightmare.
It was incredibly hard to do accurate navigation, as a result. On one occasion I had to navigate my way through an arch, and apparently I didn’t dip low enough or a wing wasn’t in range of the hole or whatever, so I wound up bouncing off the damned architecture and had to circle my way around it instead. I was subsequently accosted by the wide turn problem again, where I had to fly off into the distance in order to properly position myself and come back facing the right direction.
After I had firebombed the dragon quota, they sent in a bunch of ‘Tauros’ on the bridge, and I was supposed to wipe them out. This was where the fault of the lock-on system came into play. I could not get a proper lock on any of the tiny Tauros on the bridge. The computer did the locking-on for me, and half the time I would swoop near a Tauros only to realize the computer had targeted a nearby catapult instead, and I would be faced with a big brick wall while the camera tried to get back into place. Other times had me attempting to target the Dark dragons, and having hit the ‘dive’ button, I would suddenly swoop 50 miles away from the bridge to target some shitty ice dragon. I then had to do the laborious wide turn and then fly all the way back, while my allies were shouting at what a moron I was for leaving the battleground.
The bugs in this game are of mention, seeing as bugs don’t bother me most of the time (I had freezing issues like everyone else on Assassin’s Creed, but unlike the other anal fanbois, I just reset the game and tried again) and I don’t actively try to break the game. These bugs were bad. I had some incredible screen tearing on the fourth mission that I couldn’t see where I was going (not like I knew where I was anyway), and the clincher came in the fifth mission.
I was flying under said archway when this dragon decided to attack me from behind. Apparently the game wasn’t prepared for that, because all of a sudden, I was stuck under the arch. After giving my controller a good shake my dragon broke free, but the camera wasn’t. I was still looking through the archway while my dragon flew off and merged with a bunch of other equally similar looking dragons in the distance. Whenever I tilted the controller left or right the camera would do the same, and I found myself staring at castle walls, or the camera would bypass the wall entirely and I’d be looking at the interior of the castle, which was a black screen. Soon after, for some inexplicable reason, I was reunited with Rohn and co. again. As usual, I was 50 miles off to sea after this shenanigan and everyone was yelling at me for being an idiot. The game then abruptly ended because I didn’t maul enough dragons on time or something (yeah, being stuck under a fucking archway would do that).
Speaking of which, there should have been some counter to note how many targets are left before you advance to the next level. I couldn’t see the Tauros at all, and I had to make a couple of passes on the bridge (coupled with horrendous navigation, wide turns, squinting and getting motion sickness) before I actually nailed every last one. The game congratulated me by having the enemy drop Rhinos on the bridge. They were dispatched in exactly the same way as the Tauros, except now you had to shake your controller up and down like you were having a seizure before the dragon finally picked him up and threw him into the sea.
Since this game was touted Blu-ray and supposedly plays fantastic on 1080i resolution, that automatically meant it would look like crap on my 14 inch TV screen. Everything is supposedly rendered in ‘gorgeous detail’, but the little soldiers on the ground just looked like shimmering dots on my screen. I had to adjust the damn screen size, and even the options menu seemed to insult me for it – they titled it ‘adjust frame size’, which I felt was a completely moronic choice of words. I scrolled up and down the options menu looking desperately for ’screen’, ‘resolution’ or ‘widescreen?’ and by luck I decided to try this frame size thing out. I didn’t have any display problems with Assassin’s Creed (save for the tiny font), so I’m just going to chalk it up to Lair being stupid.
I suppose my ‘first impressions’ has gotten way out of hand, so I’ll just stop here. Overall, I don’t like Lair. Nothing is good about it; not even the aesthetic side of it. The voice actors all sound gruff in varying degrees of deepness, the soundtrack sounds like Troy’s (complete with Incoherent Female Wailer), and the story is pretty much ‘we’re at war, go beat the bad guys’. I suppose if you like playing with a retarded version of the Wii you just might enjoy Lair.
Kingdom Hearts I
I bought Kingdom Hearts a couple of months ago, simply because it was Final Fantasy and Disney all rolled into one. It couldn’t be anymore perfect.
It sucks.
I’m not sure how Squaresoft managed to achieve this level of game design, because the whole place looks so cheap and thrown together after a couple of hours in Maya or something and then they decided to pass it off as a level. Everything is Square, Block, Square, more Blocks and Big Ass Blocks. The spacecraft shooting levels seem to be just another way to waste more of your time, and the spacecraft itself looks like something out of a game you would’ve played in 1995.
The controls are shoddily designed, where instead of using the right analog stick to rotate the camera around, you use the L2 and R2 buttons instead. There’s no option to look up or down, unless you want to move into first person camera (which is still a piece of shit; you can’t move around in first person). The camera itself never fucking points where you want it to. Everytime you get thrown into an obligatory platform puzzle, you can be sure that you’ll fall a minimum of 6 times before you finally make it all the way to Point B. You have to manually rotate the camera around whenever Sora jumps from one place to another, and God forbid if you don’t rotate the camera in time, or you’ll see Sora land straight to the ground and you’ll start pulling out your hair in frustration. Sometimes the platforms you’re supposed to land on are so ridiculously small you’ll instantly lose your balance when Goofy or Donald decide to become clever and think that there’s enough room for all three of you on that tiny motherfucking mushroom.
The music is incredibly annoying. The background music that plays whenever you enter a world simply blasts into your ears on repeat. The loop was so short that I could traverse one single area (not level, AREA) and hear it on replay at least 3 times. You’ll hear the same melody over and over again anytime you enter any world, and it’ll drive you insane. I wouldn’t have minded if the music was softer, or to give some sort of ambiance, but the music seems to want to be a very annoying third character in the game, and the melodies sound exactly alike, only differing in the instrumentation.
Another thing, really, is the lack of a objective marker. I put down Kingdom Hearts a few weeks ago to take up FFXII, and I had completely forgotten what I was supposed to do when I picked it back up again. I had to fight wave after wave of bad guys before realizing I was supposed to be delivering a package to some shitface in the cellar. And you know what? I reminded myself. The game gave no inkling of what I was supposed to do, and I had to remember it. Another occasion had me platforming the blocky rooftops of Agrabah with no destination in mind, except that I knew I had to get to the Sultan’s Palace. I had probably traversed the whole of Agrabah about 7 goddamn times with no idea how to reach the palace before going ‘fuck this shit’ and quitting the game.
Not to mention that everyone is rendered the same, except for the three main human characters, Sora, Riku and whatsherface. If you’ve watched Disney animation as much as I have, you’ll notice the style of drawing differs from movie to movie. Mulan has the more ‘chinese-brushstroke’ kind of art, where everything is sharp and in smooth strokes, while Aladdin has more rounded edges, giving a more comical effect. In Kingdom Hearts, everyone looks the same. Put Jane in Jasmine’s clothing, dye her hair black and you’ll get Jasmine. I don’t think this is a major gripe, since I understand that they are all rendered by the same 1995 graphics engine that Squaresoft pulled out of their closet to develop, and honestly, if they did look different, I’d probably still be complaining anyway.
I suppose the bigger plotline is pretty much motivation enough for me to slave through the game (plus, I haven’t met Belle yet), but the individual worlds that you visit just feels like the game is obligingly giving you as many Disney characters as it can. Also, the game contradicts canon wherever it goes, and it makes the Disney fan in me a little disappointed.
The combat system also sucks a great big load of crap. I suppose this game was the predecessor to FFXII’s combat system, and you can see it’s not as finely tuned. Firstly, you can’t enter the menu whenever you’re in battle, so when you realize Goofy’s out of potions, you can’t go back to the menu to restock. You wind up sitting there getting killed by the big boss because you have 50 potions in stock but the game won’t let you use it.
Secondly, combat is fast. I honestly don’t know why magic is a necessity in this game, because you have to move your cursor to the menu, click on whatever magic you want to cast, and then cast it at your target, all the while having enemies raining crap on your ass. Before you know it, you’ve lost half your health just searching for the damn Gravity spell. Sure, there are shortcuts, but what the hell, three shortcuts? What if the boss is immune to elemental damage or something, and all I have are elemental magics in the shortcuts? I can’t go to the menu BECAUSE THE GAME WON’T LET ME, and I wind up having to refer to GameFAQs to prepare myself.
Thirdly, whenever there are enormous waves of bad guys for me to maim, I’m never able to see what I’m hitting. My screen is blocked with silhouettes of Heartless, and especially so when those big fat round guys show up. Most of the time I just hit the lock-on button and mash X blindly. This really all calls back to the camera issues, because I can’t really have a bird’s eye view of what I’m fighting against, since the camera just likes to stay at Sora’s height, who probably is about a meter tall.
I suppose Kingdom Hearts II might make up for it; hopefully by then they’d have worked out what worked and what didn’t. Of course, that’s assuming I’d even get through KH1 in the first place.
FPS Games
I don’t like First Person Shooters. There, I said it. I’m sure I’ve pretty much alienated 3/4 of the American gaming industry with those words, but I just don’t like them.
I remember playing my FPS game, which was Thief: The Dark Project. My first question was “why the hell am I holding my blackjack so close to my field of vision?” If you actually noticed when you hold anything, it’s never up to your line of sight. It’s down below, part of your peripheral vision and blurred. If you actually held things consistently to your line of sight, your biceps will hurt like there’s no tomorrow. This effect was always jarring to me, and even more so when I wound up venturing beyond my Thief trilogy and fingered my way into the Darkness demo.
Firstly, the field of vision where your guns were placed were annoying, as usual. Secondly, the guns are held like they’re being pointed at each other. I’m sure it’s supposed to facilitate the illusion that you’re pointing two guns at a single enemy (hence, the cross-eyed type effect) but all I saw was your wrists in a rather painful position. Thirdly, why the hell are those weird black things up in the corner? If they truly emerged from my shoulders/spine, they’d be either above my head or beside it, not jamming itself in front of my eyes and blocking up the screen. I think game industries have attempted to remove the clutter by removing the inventory screen and health bar, but all they’re doing is still mucking stuff up by adding BIG SPESHUL THINGS to oogle at for the next 10 hours while you play the game.
A few other dumb reasons shall be listed here under what can only be described as ‘human realism’. I can’t see my feet, I don’t walk naturally (either my gun hand moves, giving some semblance of weight shifting, or I just drift through straight on), and for some reason, I always feel shorter than everyone else. Everytime I look at the floor it seems to be just 10 centimeters away from me, and especially so when I’m walking up a hill. My jumps are crap, partially because I can’t see my fucking feet, and the character jumps like a wuss anyway. It feels kinda odd to see your character constantly get gun upgrades and is able to shoot bosses 10 times his size, but he still can’t get himself over a rooftop.
Despite all these things that subvert the effect of realism, I feel unnaturally attached to the character whenever I play any FPS game. I feel like I am the character, right in the middle of the setting, wherever it is. This, unfortunately, plays up the tendency for me to conserve my ammo whenever possible. It’s a habit I’ve consistently had. Open up any FF saved game of mine and you’ll see my inventory maxed out, and I never use them. Same goes for Tomb Raider. All the nifty guns are saved for the ‘rainy day’ that never comes.
I remember stepping into Halo 2 for a while, and whenever I shot someone, it would always be in single, individual shots. My friends were always yelling at me to keep shooting.
Them: Why the hell are you always shooting in short spurts?
Me: I want to conserve my ammo!
Them: Enemies drop guns! You can take them!
Me: I know, but what if they drop those stupid guns like that plasma pistol or whatever? I’ll be out of ammo and armed with a lousy gun!
Them: -___-”
So I wound up shooting everything in sight, as per their instructions. Predictably, I ran out of ammo and died. Yeah, thanks.
X2’s slut factor
This comment pretty much encompasses the reasons why FFX-2 has been perceived as a ’slutty game’. Yuna wears shorts so short that they reveal part of her rear, Rikku’s in constant bikini form, and Paine’s probably the most decent looking of the bunch. The credits sequence in the beginning of the game also juxtaposes the girls’ breasts with their respective preferred weapons.
There are also some pretty disturbing sequences, like the whole ‘Jack Leblanc’s satisfaction up!’ through massaging, and she gives some very, very disturbing noises. I was Not A Fan of the wording (‘Jack her up?’ Christ, the sexual overtones can’t get any more obvious than that). Not to mention that Yuna teases Brother that he has to pay to see her dance, which pretty much screams ‘I WANT TO BE A LAP DANCER’.
(For the record, I’ve seen even more disturbing sequences than this. God of War II had such a hilariously bad scene and I was just dragging my jaw around for the rest of the day).
But the sexual overtones end there. Yuna, Rikku or Paine do not actually sell themselves out in any way. Sure, one can say the revealing dresses panders to the ‘my penis likes to talk’ demographic, but what about the story? In FFX, I lumped Yuna together with the ‘helpless girls who get kidnapped and need to be saved because they are special’ heroines (see: Garnet, Rinoa and Aeris) and couldn’t tell from the four of them. X-2 gave her a character makeover, and I’m glad for the fact that she actually gets angry and frustrated at people who aren’t villains. Paine, as indicative of any ‘badass’ stereotype, projects nothing that can be seen as sexual. Rikku’s probably the more passive of the three, and her reaction towards Gippal’s joke that they used to be together made me roll my eyes and mute the TV.
There was some debate that asked if revealing dresses subverted the characterization of females in games. You have Lara, who scales the skyscrapers of Tokyo barefoot and in a skimpy black dress. You have Ivy, who clearly needs a good ol’ bra. You have Mai Shiranui, whose bouncing bosom has been a subject of debate even within SNK itself. All these girls are strong – fighter strong, even, but has the sexualization of these women actually subverted their strength?
I think this is a very different issue than the whole Jade Raymond incident. The problem here is that the women are already sexualized, and there has never been some sort of survey done that actually measured what people felt. Jade, in contrast, was a woman working in a professional capacity, and became a sexual object. Perhaps this goes to show that gaming culture truly does affect our perceptions. There are psychological studies to show that violence in gaming is correlated to the amount of violence exhibited in real life (Anderson & Dill, 2000), despite gamers’ protests. Perhaps this correlation of violence can also be carried over into perceptions of women, and since violence is essentially a physical activity, it can be possible that the ‘nonphysical’ can be manifested more readily. Since physical aggression harms people, and everyone knows it, stereotyping and discrimination becomes a more acceptable form of aggressive behaviour.
It’ll be a very interesting study to partake: gauging the type of attitudes men have about women, and the correlation between video games that presumably sexualize females.
Back to FFX-2. No, I don’t think the game actually made them whores. Character development on any of the three girls don’t show that, and while the style of dress is objectionable, it’s not extremist. The other dresspheres looked pretty decent and appropriate – the dark knight and warrior dresspheres are but two examples, and hey! NO CLEAVAGE. I suppose in that sense, it pretty much caters to both the male and female demographics – the males can jack themselves off looking at the outfits that are revealing, and the girls can squeal at the massive amount of clothing they can change into.
Anyway, it’s not how sexual the game was that killed it. It was the motherfucking minigames.
My misogyny has nothing to do with me; it’s your fault I’m showing it!
Having followed Assassin’s Creed for a while before it was released, I already caught a glimpse of the sexism that pervades the male-dominated gaming community. Jade Raymond is the producer of Assassin’s Creed, and she had given interviews promoting the game. Any preview video of Assassin’s Creed with Jade in it has always been met with comments of ‘OMG she is sooo hawt’ and ‘I wanna fuck her’. I had originally brushed it aside as another case of the ‘my penis iz talking, let me show you it’ syndrome, but then it got so out of control I can’t help but express rage at this point.
Recently there were rumors she was about to appear in Maxim magazine (which she flatly denied) and SomethingAwful.com linked a comic of her giving blowjobs to men to persuade them to buy Assassin’s Creed. The webmaster of Something Awful was given a C&D from Ubisoft. Comments of ’she’s a touchy bitch’ and blame the victim are abound.
Being steeped into this event, I’d like to offer a few observations on the general arguments made by (misogynist) men who think it isn’t that big a deal.
The most common argument made was Ubisoft was using Jade to sell their game, hence, ’sex sells’. No one has seen a producer get this much coverage, compared to other producers of other games. It’s Ubisoft’s fault to send a woman to promote a game publicly, and the comic (and comments) were just backlash ‘in response’. Dave, the very man who created said offensive comic, gives his extensive tl;dr thoughts of this argument, and so does Crawford, and Ken. It’s also interesting to note that the amount of misogynist comments made on any news post about Jade have been brushed aside by the arguers, and heap blame on Ubisoft. It’s not new to find people looking only for evidence to confirm their own biases and dismiss disconfirming evidence, but when something as obvious as sexist comments are ignored in favour of a company conspiracy, I can’t help but wonder if everyone’s missing the forest for the trees.
In short: The blame lies wholly on Ubisoft for exposing a woman to the public to sell their game. Because she’s hot and popular, the misogynist comments are therefore justified.
This argument is fundamentally wrong on two accounts:
1. It was the press coverage (i.e: Kotaku) that focused on how pretty Jade was than the game; not Ubisoft. Anything that was possibly sanctioned by Ubisoft never portrayed Jade in a sexual light. The few photos of her show her in a completely professional capacity. The Developer Diaries that promoted Assassin’s Creed never portrayed her in such a way. It was the press response that molded a spokesperson into a sex symbol. It was not Ubisoft’s fault; it’s the misogyny that pervades the journalistic (gaming) culture, and the subsequent comments that spawned from these newsposts.
2. Explicit misogyny is never justified. No more needs to be said.
With that out of the way, more inferences can be had about this argument. Firstly, this operates on the basic assumption that pretty women are forced to be exposed publicly, with or without their consent. The feedback the pretty woman receives is therefore justified, because ogling at beautiful women seems to be a norm for men. This then leads to the conclusion that since one does not like the feedback men find okay to dish out, one must stop being exposed to the public. This is where the blame for Ubisoft may come in – by stopping exposure, you stop the feedback.
The problem with this logic is that it begs back to the gender-role stereotype that women are not to be seen, especially beautiful women. The belief that it’s okay to say ‘God damn, I’d rape her in a second’ has become so internalized that misogynist men find there’s nothing wrong with their psychological make-up, instead, one has to blame other sources for implanting misogynist thoughts.
The second argument was that there was nothing offensive about the comic; in fact, it’s a political and well-thought out message about the sexual perversion that UBISOFT WHORED HER OUT TO OMG. Also, ‘people need to learn how to take a joke’ can also fall into this category of ‘not getting it’. Dave, as mentioned, loves his tl;dr, and Brad, in his infinite wisdom, doesn’t mind being called stupid, and neither does he mind photoshopped pictures of himself giving blowjobs to other men (but then refused to give his picture).
I doubt I can find anything of value to actually counter this argument, simply because it seems their our values greatly differ. It doesn’t take a Psychology major to know that personal values cannot be changed (unless you’re shown to have explicitly experienced some form of cognitive dissonance, which is not the case for the arguments made here; all of them think objectifying women is okay).
From a personal standpoint, I found nothing satirical about a comic that portrayed a professional woman in a demeaning way. There was nothing ironical nor mocking; it was explicitly sexist, which Dave readily admits to (and how it falls under his belief it is still ’satire’ is something beyond my grasp). I found nothing laughable about a comic whose only message was a sexist view of women.
The final most observed argument was ‘it’s the internet, stop getting your knickers in a twist and focus on something more productive’.
Apparently, the word cyber rape has been either ignored or not learned. Sexually demeaning photos is a form of cyber rape. If a woman didn’t ask for it, then don’t give it. The fact that it’s virtual is not any less important than the physical assault itself. Sadly, ‘violence’ has become a metaphor for ‘rape’ over these years (see the statistics on the amount of judicial punishment meted out to rapists who inflicted bodily harm to their victims against those who did not), and it is assumed that if there is no physical harm done to the female, it’s relatively acceptable. It is not. Whether it be severe psychological trauma or just minor annoyance, the fact remains that harm was done.
It’s not shocking to see the same old arguments made by both misogynists and feminists alike. I can’t say that I’m well versed in the area of misogyny myself, but all I am able to observe so far are extreme examples of it, with no ‘moderate ground’. This is also perhaps based on my feminist nature, since I have observed varying degrees of feminism (the oft-proclaimed question of ’should a man hold open the door for a woman?’ is often met with a variety of responses from feminists) and none yet from misogynists. Perhaps it is because all their arguments can be countered, and every single comment is inherently sexist in nature.
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ETA: Before I forget, my entire point was this: the attempt to justify the objectification of women (in this case, Jade) is misogynist. The arguments that I’ve seen from these very people seem to have ignored this very issue, instead focusing more on who is to blame for this fallout (not the misogynists). It seems that they indirectly admit the fallout is sexist in nature, but have attempted to justify their misogyny by shifting the blame to someone else, hence the title of this post.
ETA 2: I’ve seen a greater and greater amount of posts that have completely sidestepped the issue of misogyny and has now focused on the ‘freedom of speech’, or ‘the First Amendment’, and that any form of censorship is oppression. Any person who has actually read the First Amendment would know that the amendment is not an umbrella that protects every single piece of bullshit that is spouted (see also: libel, defamation, obscenity). The fact remains that the response (which encompasses fanboy reactions, the comic, and the photoshopped photos) was sexist in nature, and is possibly defamatory. I will not speculate on whether Ubisoft actually has grounds to win should they choose to sue (given that I’m no lawyer, but hey, it still doesn’t stop wannabe-lawyers from espousing misconceptions of the First Amendment and then predicting the result of the lawsuit based on that).
More gloriously related posts:
Character Assassin’s Creed… More Misogyny in Gaming. (Roy is full of awesome, by the way. He put things into words more eloquently than I ever could).
The Trouble with Jade @ Feministe.
Jade Raymond is for Real @ GameGirlAdvance
Shrub.com.
Clearly, We Do Not Deserve Nice Things And/Or People.
A Brief Word About the Whole Jade Raymond Situation.
