Hello and welcome to Critical Distance, where representation of all races, creeds, and genders is always in the budget and never a post-production afterthought! And now, it is our pleasure to present you with a veritable feast of critical thinkers who aren’t afraid to do the same in This Week In Video Game Blogging!
You Can’t Get Away with Ignoring Half Your Audience Anymore
In case you somehow missed it, this past week hosted the annual E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo) trade fair.
One of the biggest media storms of the expo, however, began when Ubisoft Creative Director Alex Amanico said in an interview with Polygon that the addition of playable female characters in Assassins Creed: Unity had proved too costly to include. Promptly and deservedly, the Internet called BS on Amanico. For instance:
Sara Clemens argues that Ubisoft had the opportunity to reach a compromise that would appease both pro-women gamers and “he-man-woman-hating types,” but ultimately failed to do so because women continue to be seen by industry higher-ups as superfluous and unimportant add-ons.
In a parody of what it must be like to sit in on Ubisoft’s pre-production creative meetings, Brenna Hillier concludes that, from Ubisoft’s perspective, “all players play as the same character” is seemingly less ridiculous “than the concept of women existing and having a nice time blowing shit up.”
Fed up with such false logic and poor excuses, Rhea Monique looks backs on a time in the not-so-distant past (the late 1990s and early 2000s) when the inclusion of women was more status quo.
Elsewhere, Daniel Golding reflects on the historical irony that while the most famous assassin from the French Revolution, Charlotte Corday, was a woman, Ubisoft elected not to include a playable female character in their assassin game set during the French Revolution.
Without any muss or fuss about the matter, Sande Chen gives us the cold hard truth:
Ultimately, the decision to include female playable characters really boils down to whether or not a video game company makes it a priority.
Offering a glimmer of hope, however, Elisa Melendez recounts her day at E3 spent entirely playing women characters.
Finally, if the above isn’t enough, Go Make Me a Sandwich has curated a list of articles on the issue as well.
But Remember, There’s More to Representation than Making Women Playable
This week, prompted by the trailer for the new Tomb Raider game in which Lara Croft undergoes a therapy session, Leigh Alexander notes the double standard in games whereby:
When you want to make a woman into a hero, you hurt her first. When you want to make a man into a hero, you hurt… also a woman first.
While Alexander is careful not to dismiss the importance of examining mental health or trauma in games or the importance of allowing female playable characters to show their emotional depth by being more than “strong,” she laments that games are “still largely populated by men who feel unsure about how to write and build nuanced women.” On the other hand, Rhea Monique, argues that we should embrace, rather than bristle at Croft’s weakness because she takes the player along with her, through every part of her journey, including her pain and her healing.
Not So Fast, E3, We Aren’t Finished With You Yet
Zack Kotzer reminds us that “Blockbuster Video Games Still Suck at Handling Racism” as well.
Alternatively, rather than calling out games for what they lack, Martin calls out the journalists who are too busy rolling their eyes at the AAA industry to provide equal coverage to independent titles and exposition spaces such as indiE3.
In a similar move, Nick Hanford at Higher Level Gamer cautions game consumers and those practicing game criticism to be wary of the rhetoric we use and reuse, especially the rhetoric perpetuated by marketers and PR gurus.
Developer vs. Player
Moving away from E3 specific coverage, this week also brings us several pieces that investigate the differences in perspective between developer and player and what happens when we interrogate issues across those spaces.
In “Walkthrough Vs. Speedrun,” Nathan examines the differences and similarities between a developer’s slow and cautious walkthrough of a game that intentionally avoid glitches against a speedrunner’s exploitation of glitches to promote speed. He concludes that while neither is the “common player,” both have intimate knowledge of the game’s systems.
Elsewhere, Zach Alexander compares Flappy Bird and Threes and the opportunities their developers were provided to talk about their games and how those games were received and critiqued by players. Alexander argues that perspective is paramount in how we talk about and villainize game clones, and states:
The label of “clone” is subject to things other than passionless examinations of precise details. It is influenced by the surrounding culture. The next time we are tempted to call a game a clone, we should think long and hard about what we’re targeting and why.
Examining the issue that the majority of programming languages have English origins, Robert Yang considers how non-English developers must sometimes prioritize, as the Noserudake2 developer did, to connect with English-speaking audiences over polishing the look and feel of the game itself.
Code Breaking
While elsewhere people are concerned with how to make future games better, Darby McDevitt stresses the importance of preserving the technological present and past, as our obsession with technological advance makes all digital media subject to increasing temporality and code rot.
In a great long-form read, Christian Donlan looks at the intersection between coding and code cracking by telling the story of Elonka Dunin and her attempts to crack Kryptos.
In yet another take on the issues of code, co-authors Paul Ralph and Kafui Monu provides a new way to code our language and theory about games in order to:
…help game designers and academics speak a common language, to legitimize the study of game design among other social sciences and to educate the next generation of game designers.
Building Better Worlds
Bill Coberly worries that Dragon Age: Inquisition will fix all the wrong problems by conflating Dragon Age 2‘s liberal reuse of environments (bad) with its deliberate choice to reduce the game’s scope (good).
Alternately, Peter Christiansen takes a look at how Crusader Kings expanded its scope to include theories of social construction of technology.
Looking through the lenses of experience and nostalgia, Eric Swain examines why, upon return to Myst, the world seems so much smaller than it did 20 years ago.
Speaking of nostalgia, by playing Bioshock Infinite in the “1999” difficulty mode, Steven Margolin realizes that perhaps Irrational Games is nostalgically holding onto what is now an outdated game design — as if it really were still 1999.
Marx
Jed Pressgrove’s argument in “Actual Marxism: Labor and Marx in Actual Sunlight” contains spoilers for Actual Sunlight, and so I will simply state that events in the game can be understood as “not necessarily intended” if understood from a Marxist perspective.
Beyond Easy Grouping
No less worthy of your attention despite my inability to group them nicely are the following:
Jesper Juul, ludologist extraordinaire, investigates impostor syndrome in games and how when our subjective expectations for a game are not met, we are more incentivized to seek flaws in the game itself.
Despite being “complete hogwash” historically, Robert Rath explains why the myth of Nazi advanced science continues to be perpetuated in popular media.
While E3 was full of advertisements and trailers showing us the violence we could experience in-game, VGJUNK takes a look back at game advertisements from the 16 and 32 bit era to find that, back then, advertisements focused on the violence games would enact on the player.
In “Reaction to a Woman’s Friend Request in an FPS Game” a group of scholars conduct a field experiment in which:
We found support for the hypothesis that, in general, women would gain more compliance with friend requests than men. We also found support for the hypothesis that women making positive utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than women making negative utterances, whereas men making negative utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than men making positive utterances.
Cha Holland takes us on a pensive and critical journey through what may or may nor be genital anatomy in Luxuria Superbia.
Before You Go
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That’s it for this week, Critically Distanced friends! Please go forth, enjoy your Sunday and remember to be excellent to each other.