Sometimes I think people forget reality

[edmonddantes]

So, some reviewers I watch (not naming names) did some coverage of certain older games in which in a cutscene, the male protagonist makes a comment akin to "Not bad... for a girl."

He went on to lecture against this (and actually got some backlash), which... okay, he personally found it unpleasant, which I can sympathize with, but he also said that making the character sexist meant players wouldn't identify with him and could lose potential sales.

Now, this is a guy I usually like, but here I had to wonder about how well the guy remembered the past, not just in broad strokes but in his own life.

Like, his argument might be true for a game made today, but this was a game made and released in the 1990s.

At the time, gaming was still seen as A) predominantly for little kids--and "not bad for a girl" is precisely the kind of comment a pre-teen boy might make and see nothing wrong with, because that's how kids work.  The game wasn't being sexist, it was just trying to identify with the way a little kid would think and react and have the character behave identically (a similar case would be the movie Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, where Krys is the same way though eventually learns to respect Rainbow).  The reviewer himself probably made similar statements when he was a kid, before he knew any better.

B) This was a period where gaming (along with comic books and some cartoons) were "edgy" and "macho."  I can still remember magazine ads for Contra: Hard Corps which depicted a meat grinder and said "this is what our game is like," and just looking thru some PC Gamer issues I have, yeah... most games then were the same way.

C) The game in question was released only a year or two before Duke Nukem 3D.  The argument that having a sexist main character would negatively impact sales kinda doesn't fly when you realize how big a deal Duke remained for several years.  Heck, I've never heard anyone hate Duke Nukem Forever for being "sexist," all the problems I've ever heard revolved around it just not living up to the decades of hype.

So it's mind-boggling to me that someone could not only completely misunderstand the "sexism" of a 1990s game but also think it would hurt sales.

.....

Now, this isn't the only case of "ignorant of reality" I've seen.

Years ago on another forum, I was talking with people who were on about sexism in video games (Please tell me this isn't gonna become one of THOSE topics), and in particular these people were on about the sexist undercurrents in Japanese products (predominantly anime but also some video games).

Their argument was about how certain female "types" are always presented as ideal--the hero's love interest is always the meek and submissive one or some such.

Right off the bat, I was like "you mean like in Lufia I and II, where Maxim turns down the meek and submissive one in favor of outright marrying the warrior babe?"

Now, his comeback was "video games are usually designed with an international audience in mind, so they chose the stronger woman to better appeal to westerners."

At this point I called B.S., pointing out to him that both the Lufia games were made in the early 1990s, a period where the RPG genre was famously not popular outside of Japan (only like 10% of all JRPGs got an English translation) and thus, they would have no reason to "cater" the games to westerners because they had no realistic expectation the game would come out in the west at all.

Also, speaking as someone who has done amateur writing... it doesn't work that way.  The idea of a story being written to pander to a specific audience is the kind of thinking you could only have if you've never written anything yourself, similar to how people who don't know computers think that navigating MS-DOS is voodoo magic.

....

Both stories have one thing in common (besides the sexism thing):  Both failed to account for the passage of time, and thus thought "things are Way X now, so they must've been the same way 10-20 years ago."  But they weren't the same 10-20 years ago.  Modern phenomenon are called modern phenomenon for a reason.

I seriously can't see how people forget that, or fail to take it into account.  I mean, its like seeing someone unironically think that the Three Musketeers all had Volkswagon BMWs (I won't be surprised if I run into such a person some day).  Michael Crichton once commented that in the 1900s if you told people the roads were gonna get wider, their thought would be about how they were gonna get rid of all the horse droppings.   But people forget that this works in reverse as well:  You can't think that just because Call of Duty is a well-known franchise now, that realistic military FPSes were always money makers--there was a time when everything was new, after all.

I'm not sure if there's a name for this phenomenon of applying the modern world to the past.  Anyone know the proper term for it?

Anyway, that's my ramble.

[Snake]

Aug 11, 2018 10:20:00 GMT -5 edmonddantes said:

Also, speaking as someone who has done amateur writing... it doesn't work that way.  The idea of a story being written to pander to a specific audience is the kind of thinking you could only have if you've never written anything yourself, similar to how people who don't know computers think that navigating MS-DOS is voodoo magic.

I don't know if there's a term for it per se.  To me, it just makes me think of a generational and cultural gap.  And I agree, that when people write, they are mainly writing for themselves.  Hollywood may employ a think-tank of professional writers.  Yet for video games, especially older games, a lot of developers are just guys that got hired and stayed with the company.  They write what they like. No more, no less.  

Even it if it is unhealthy to keep writing about some meek, geek of a guy that becomes the hero and has a harem of girls that jock him, writers of a certain age seem to gravitate towards that fantasy.  Like how some female writers keep writing about hunky, powerful masculine-yet-tamed vampires, werewolves, and billionaires.  

[Allie]

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but here I go...

I kind of get the feeling that a lot of times when people want to apply later societal expectations to much, MUCH earlier works, it's almost a form of saying "We're such superior people to everybody who lived back then, look how unenlightened and awful they were!"

Not much more than cultural narcissism.

[GamerL]

Aug 11, 2018 17:11:36 GMT -5 Allie said:

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but here I go...

I kind of get the feeling that a lot of times when people want to apply later societal expectations to much, MUCH earlier works, it's almost a form of saying "We're such superior people to everybody who lived back then, look how unenlightened and awful they were!"

Not much more than cultural narcissism.

I think you're right, not to mention the absurdity of applying this to video games, ya know, the majority of which that people play came out over just the last 35 years, I don't think you're going to find anything that dated, no equivalent of Al Jolson singing in blackface, let's get some perspective here.

People used to like cheesecake in their games, beyond females characters with pronounced bosoms or behinds I don't think you'd find a whole lot genuinely offensive unless you're one of the many easily offended and if you can't just shrug it off because ya know, it's an old game, why would you even expect it to fit modern cultural standards? That says more about you than it does the game you're getting offended over.

There are exceptions though, some games that really were sexist trash, but those are almost always trash games in general no one wants to play anyway, like BMX XXX or The Guy Game.

[lurker]

It mostly depends on context and execution.

[Allie]

Aug 11, 2018 17:38:58 GMT -5 GamerL said:

Aug 11, 2018 17:11:36 GMT -5 Allie said:

I probably shouldn't wade into these waters, but here I go...

I kind of get the feeling that a lot of times when people want to apply later societal expectations to much, MUCH earlier works, it's almost a form of saying "We're such superior people to everybody who lived back then, look how unenlightened and awful they were!"

Not much more than cultural narcissism.

I think you're right, not to mention the absurdity of applying this to video games, ya know, the majority of which that people play came out over just the last 35 years, I don't think you're going to find anything that dated, no equivalent of Al Jolson singing in blackface, let's get some perspective here.

People used to like cheesecake in their games, beyond females characters with pronounced bosoms or behinds I don't think you'd find a whole lot genuinely offensive unless you're one of the many easily offended and if you can't just shrug it off because ya know, it's an old game, why would you even expect it to fit modern cultural standards? That says more about you than it does the game you're getting offended over.

There are exceptions though, some games that really were sexist trash, but those are almost always trash games in general no one wants to play anyway, like BMX XXX or The Guy Game.

On the other hand, BMX XXX is ultra-low-hanging fruit, because the Dave Mirra engine wasn't all that great to begin with, even with all the sleazy stuff taken out.

Though maybe that's what you were getting at to begin with...

[GamerL]

Aug 11, 2018 20:08:14 GMT -5 Allie said:

Aug 11, 2018 17:38:58 GMT -5 GamerL said:

I think you're right, not to mention the absurdity of applying this to video games, ya know, the majority of which that people play came out over just the last 35 years, I don't think you're going to find anything that dated, no equivalent of Al Jolson singing in blackface, let's get some perspective here.

People used to like cheesecake in their games, beyond females characters with pronounced bosoms or behinds I don't think you'd find a whole lot genuinely offensive unless you're one of the many easily offended and if you can't just shrug it off because ya know, it's an old game, why would you even expect it to fit modern cultural standards? That says more about you than it does the game you're getting offended over.

There are exceptions though, some games that really were sexist trash, but those are almost always trash games in general no one wants to play anyway, like BMX XXX or The Guy Game.

On the other hand, BMX XXX is ultra-low-hanging fruit, because the Dave Mirra engine wasn't all that great to begin with, even with all the sleazy stuff taken out.

Though maybe that's what you were getting at to begin with...

That is what I was getting at, the truly sexist stuff back then was more often than not just plain garbage that even gamers at the time didn't want to have anything to do with.

Other games might have content that is dated, sure, but if you can't just laugh it off that's on you.

[Allie]

Aug 11, 2018 21:48:51 GMT -5 GamerL said:

Aug 11, 2018 20:08:14 GMT -5 Allie said:

On the other hand, BMX XXX is ultra-low-hanging fruit, because the Dave Mirra engine wasn't all that great to begin with, even with all the sleazy stuff taken out.

Though maybe that's what you were getting at to begin with...

That is what I was getting at, the truly sexist stuff back then was more often than not just plain garbage that even gamers at the time didn't want to have anything to do with.

Other games might have content that is dated, sure, but if you can't just laugh it off that's on you.

For what it's worth, I still recognize value in Cobra Mission.

[edmonddantes]

Aug 11, 2018 14:56:02 GMT -5 Snake said:

I don't know if there's a term for it per se.  To me, it just makes me think of a generational and cultural gap.

That's what seems odd to me tho... with regards to video games some of the people I talk to who make these kind of snafus are from the same generation I am. I could understand some 13-year-old not getting it but how do you grow up with a SNES or a DOS PC and not remember what the culture was like?

[toei]

One thing I do strongly agree with - I hate this idea that you absolutely have to be able to identify with the lead character. This has never been true, and it's the reason why so many protagonists are so boring compared to the secondary characters. You can have a great story where none of the characters are people you'd want to be friends with in real life. This idea that they just have to be blandly nice people is ridiculous.

[Ace Whatever]

Isn't it the other way around? I thought people identified with character quirks and weaknesses, or are you talking about the Link/Adol class of mute POV lead characters?

[toei]

Aug 13, 2018 1:44:38 GMT -5 Ace Whatever said:

Isn't it the other way around? I thought people identified with character quirks and weaknesses, or are you talking about the Link/Adol class of mute POV lead characters?

It's a thing I frequently hear in conversations or read on the Internet, not specifically related to video games but to fiction in general. The idea that the protagonist absolutely has to be an audience-identification figure in order for them to like the story. In general I find that secondary characters tend to be more interesting than the protagonists, in part because creators seem afraid to give the lead too much personality in case it puts some people off, so they go with a safely bland character. This doesn't always happen, but it's a common occurence.

[edmonddantes]

Yeah, the idea of a character the player/viewer/audience is supposed to identify with seems like one of those things borne of Executive thinking rather than Writer thinking or any sort of reality, as like Toei said most people find "identification" characters either boring or, worse, outright annoying.

Executives typically have no grasp on reality but I find it weird that critics and reviewers also take it as gospel, again, in spite of their own memories and experiences. What's even weirder is I sometimes see such people basically say the same thing Toei said and even cite famous audience identification characters that they hated but then they still turn around and act like its a requirement.