Saturday 12 December 2015

The Censorious Nature of Outrage Culture

So, considering the current hostile climate in gaming culture brought forth by outrage warriors, I already knew years ago that talking about Dead or Alive wasn't so much a possibility as an inevitability. While these days I mostly shy away from doing responses in favor of talking positively about female characters and promoting games with them, I have been irked by the recent announcement that Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 won't be making its way into Western territories by, get this, the hostile environment surrounding female game characters created by hyper-criticism and outrage culture. According to rumor it's become so ridiculously absurd that Japanese developers now believe Western gamers hate female protagonists.

(Dead or Alive-related Images mostly from Dead or Alive 5: Last Round, as I have no easy way of screencapping Dead Or Alive Xtreme 2)


The Censorious Nature of Outrage Culture
The Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Controversy
'There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.'
- Ray Bradbury

1. Introduction


Recently it was announced Dead or Alive Xtreme 3, the beach-sports spin-off to the Dead or Alive fighting series, won't be localized to Western countries. A Koei Tecmo representative on their Facebook page clarified (in rather broken English) this was the result of the sort of hyper-criticism female characters get by virtue of being female characters, with Dead or Alive often being seen as the worst offender because of the inclusion of skimpy outfits and jiggle physics. Later Koei Tecmo tried to distance themselves from this explanation while at the same time confirming that it is true (what else do you think 'respecting and strategizing to support the different global audiences' means?). A bit later it was revealed Idea Factory is taking a similar approach in no longer localizing games which might have to be censored for the West's delicate sensibilities. Street Fighter V's producer also came forward admitting this sort of thing is what caused the removal of R. Mika's buttslap. As if confirming that the West is unable to handle sexy content, YouTube helpfully closed the account of Senran Kagura's publisher and Playboy of all people called R. Mika's outfit 'objectively objectifying' (which, unless it turns her into a statue, is an absurd statement). There's also Nintendo censoring their Western releases (Fatal Frame 5, Xenoblade X), but they've sadly been doing that since forever. Outside of gaming we also recently had people concerned over Star Wars' princess Leia in her slave outfit.

This is a bad development. Not an unforeseen one, mind you. I myself have spoken out multiple times that the extreme criticism any female character gets these days, rather than being a catalyst for more positive representations, is instead going to end up making artists and developers so nervous that it'll have a detrimental effect on representation and diversity instead. Keep in mind that just weeks before this current issue, the very same people who for years have been demanding Nintendo made a female alternative for Link, were criticizing the announcement of exactly them getting what they asked for as a bad thing and right now they are criticizing Laura Bailey for voicing a character in Uncharted 4 of a different ethnicity than her.
That's because to these people the battle is more important than their stated goals. Whether it's for the personal satisfaction of fulfilling a misguided hero complex or merely monetary gain by appealing to the former, to them there is no true goal because the actual goal of this stupid war is the war itself and groupthink will make sure all on board are slowly radicalized into taking offense at bloody everything. As such they will never be pleased as they continue arguing for how everything under the sun is unacceptable and we'll all be worse off because of it (it's not a conspiracy theory when it's quantifiable and happening).

Note on the title: censorious comes from the word censure and means "overly harsh criticism" or "strong disapproval" rather than the commonly understood definition of censor. However as they do share an etymology it works out rather nicely as "being censorious" is often the prelude to censorship.

Dead or Alive 5: Last Round

2. A Look At: Dead or Alive Xtreme 2


If your only experience with the Dead or Alive Xtreme series has been YouTube videos mentioning it or talking about it, there's a high likelihood you've never even seen a moment of gameplay from the entire series and you're only aware the game is about volleyball because the first game in the series was explicitly named "Xtreme Beach Volleyball". My theory on that is the "sexy cutscenes" are more popularly watched online than in-game on one hand, and outragers show those scenes specifically because they're maximally problematic on the other hand. What this means though is that barely anyone has any idea what the game is even about except for it having the Dead or Alive girls in bathing suits. As a fan of the Dead or Alive series, I did go "what the hell" over a priced-down copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (2006) for the Xbox 360 and I did play and enjoy it (to a point, you'll see why in a second) so I'll explain a bit what it is about.

So the game is set up like a vacation on a tropical island. You pick the girl you want to play as, you are assigned a random volleyball partner and you get 14 days to do a set of activities (or just relax). Each day is cut up in 4 parts, 3 for morning, noon and evening when you get to do stuff around the island, and one at night when you can organize the stuff you collected, send some gifts you couldn't hand out in person during the day, or go to the casino to lose all the money you didn't make enough of during the day.
The main events to engage in during the day are Jet Ski races and the aforementioned volleyball (winning at volleyball pays out more than Jet Ski races but there's a higher risk factor). Lesser activities are randomized mini-games or short scenes of the girl relaxing (which function as a way to skip to the next time period). As the vacation progresses, these activities get progressively harder. While a Jet Ski race the first day is just a few laps in open water, it's a tour around the island, through small rivers and houses on poles the last day. Engage in all of that and you've got yourself a relaxing though challenging beach-sports game.

Still Dead or Alive 5: Last Round


Now for the part that legitimately makes me think of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 as one of the hardest video games I've ever played. You see those sexy bathing suits people go on about? Well, the way in which the game "progresses" (in as much as that's possible) is by you collecting the items and bathing suits available in the game. How do you do that? Well by buying them from the store with the money you get from the activities. But wait, you can only buy the set of bathing suits from the girl who you are playing as (which in itself is time consuming). To get the sets from the other girls you need to play as that other girl and gift that suit back to your own character. But wait, you can't just be sending them bathing suits as gifts because the other girls won't just accept them. No, first you need to become friends. How do you become friends? Well by giving them other gifts from the Zack of all Trades gift shop. But they won't just accept any gifts. No, in order for them to accept this gift, you have to know which items specifically are of interest to this particular girl, you need to wrap it in wrapping paper of her favorite color and know at which time of day she's in the mood to socialize (Ayane for example isn't a morning person. Christie is a NEVER person). Also if that girl's inventory is full, she will accept (maybe) the item but it will disappear, meaning you have to switch characters often anyway to make sure all your inventories are put safely in storage.
Now, if you've done all that, you can attempt to gift a bathing suit. Sadly you'll soon learn that accepting the gift is still based on a roll of the dice, just with better odds if she likes you. If she doesn't like the suit you just gave her, your friendship stats will decrease. You also need to repeat this entire process for every suit you intend to give and your friendship status is erased at the end of the vacation. There's 294 suits total and 9 girls. Good luck! This is why the IGN walkthrough for this game is literally a series of spreadsheets.

Oh, but that's not all. Remember that pole dancing scene that so often gets shown when talking about this game? Here's how you get that one: you have to go to Christie's slot machine (the game never tells you this and there's 9 slot machines) and hit nine jackpots. Yeah, those clips are popular on the Internet because they are very well hidden and very difficult to get in the game itself. Anyone trying to represent the game with that scene simply hasn't played it or is misrepresenting it.

Seriously, if you play Dead or Alive Xtreme like a relaxing beach sports/vacation game, it's bliss. If you actually want to engage in all this fanservice stuff the game gets lambasted over, good luck because you'll be needing it. The fact that the "dating" aspect is so difficult is what I think is an interesting point though. While this game certainly doesn't shy away from fanservice, it does expect you to get to know the specific nuanced personalities of the different girls. Heck, even your assigned partner will leave you if you don't take care of your friendship with her (which locks you out of the volleyball segments, which pays out the best money with which you could buy gifts to befriend a new partner, meaning you are likely screwed for that 14-day rotation). That's the difference between sexualization and sexual objectification. They are the ones in charge and you'll get nowhere unless they want to.



3. Diversity versus Large Target Audiences


For some people it's easy to justify why Dead or Alive Xtreme isn't such a bad thing to lose (and thus being okay with censorship when it's things they don't like). For a moment setting aside that it is in fact mainly a sports game and not uniquely comprised of cutscenes with women in skimpy bathing suits or almost-impossible to get pole-dancing scenes. In a culture where admitting to liking sexual stuff is to be ashamed of, especially if it's cartoons, even people who might like games showing a lot of virtual skin probably aren't jumping to admit that they like it, maybe they don't even want to buy out of fear of peer pressure.
But a game with a specific target audience in mind is why it's a problem to not have it, isn't it? Dead or Alive Xtreme is a niche game catering to niche interests. Removing games of niche interests decreases diversity. Imagine if future Gone Home's disappear because of pressure from religious groups against portrayals of homosexual relationships. You don't open up gaming to a larger audience by removing things that might be seen as undesirable, that's promoting homogeneity over diversity and makes the entire thing stale. This should really go without saying but 'diversity' is larger than 'what you personally approve of' and isn't achieved by merely sprinkling different ethnicities around.

Personally, I'm not sure if I'll be importing Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 myself yet. I don't own a PlayStation 4 or a Vita so the combined cost might be a bit too much for just this one game. Instead I bought the skimpiest costume pack I could find for Dead or Alive 5 Last Round.
I also bought Senran Kagura a while back when that controversy flared up and it turned out to be a pretty solid game with stories on the difficulties of navigating high school as a girl in her late teens, it just so happens the teenage girls are also ninjas and the combat mechanics have clothing damage. It seems these days controversy is a more reliable method of discerning good games than reviews are. You know, when outrage warriors were raging over Quiet not wearing a heck of a lot, the rest of us were being educated on phantom limbs and their real-world prosthetic replacement options while building a truly diverse Mother Base. It even opened up discussions about the possibility of every man on Mother Base being in an early stage of transitioning.

Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (2015) features
a discussion about bacteria-induced gender change.

4. Censorship


'It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God.'
- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1953)

4.1 It's not censorship

Some argued that the explanation from the Koei Tecmo representative why Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 wasn't coming to the West, and Play-Asia's subsequent rewording, was uncalled for since nobody asked for a boycott (in fact they didn't ask for a boycott so hard that they ended up boycotting Play-Asia), which misses the point entirely because the problem is that pseudo-activists have created such a toxic environment with their hyper-criticism that they've produced a measurable degree of negative influence on female characters, despite their claims of wanting positive change.
Every time a female character comes up these days in any capacity, we have the press and outrage warriors bending over backwards to reduce them to a pair of breasts while ignoring everything the character actually does or stands for. What the hell did you think you were doing? You can't use Dead or Alive Xtreme as the number one of countless "Top 10 most misogynistic games", lump completely benign games like the Tomb Raider series or Okami in the mix to fill up the rest of your clickbait article, for a decade and then turn around claiming you never intended to have any sort of effect. That's just eating your cake and having it too and betrays rampant immaturity on the part of these critics, humorously as they themselves often demand everyone else to grow up so the industry can itself "grow up".
However that desire for an industry to be seen as "grown up" was what resulted in the self-censorship of the animation industry (as part of the Motion Picture Production Code, aka the Hays Code) and the comic book industry (the Comics Code Authority, the formation of which was largely inspired by Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a Tropes vs. Women avant la lettre). 60 years later comics and animation are still considered to be mainly childish things in the eyes of the general public. Clearly booting out the undesirable media hasn't done those any good, why should it be different for video games? Movies don't get seen as childish because of its massive porn industry (which gaming largely lacks anyway). Gaming is one of the largest entertainment industries on the planet, it's time we stopped apologizing for it.

People with this viewpoint often also hold the viewpoint that self-censorship is not censorship, as it is done to oneself. Well it obviously is censorship otherwise it wouldn't be called "self-censorship". The "self" is a qualifier, not a negation. The issue then is how much of a problem the self-censorship is. If the self-censorship is an issue of not believing in there being a market for the game, that's hard to call a problem. However since the last big release in the series, DOAX2 (Paradise being mainly a PSP port), saw almost tripple the sales in the West than in Japan, that's a pretty hard claim to substantiate as the data disagrees with that.
A second possibility is that Koei Tecmo doesn't believe in the market through the aforementioned blatant hate campaigns against DOAX2 by a loud minority of critics misrepresenting the consumer-base as having changed attitudes over the last 9 years since release. Or you know, the existing outrage culture that sprung up heavily criticizing practically all female characters (what's the counter for good examples at? A grand total of 4?), while from their perspective meant to improve these characters, might actually give the impression to an outsider that the market hates female characters. In which case, it is most definitely a problem since a minority is functioning as de facto gatekeepers through media pressure.


That's a nice game you have there. You wouldn't want to have it labelled sexist, would you?

Dead or Alive Dimensions was banned in Sweden, Norway and Denmark
after forum complaints.

4.2 It is Censorship

Now, before I start I'd like to emphasize that this next bit is about freedom of choice. I do not care that you personally dislike the Dead or Alive series, the Dead or Alive Xtreme series or have a personal distaste for sexualization in certain media (although as the above demonstrates, I do have a low opinion of those who use their personal preferences to bully others). However when you start speculating on the negative effects of what such things have on grown adults and why as such censorship is preferable even though scientific research disagrees with you, my tolerance grows very thin.

Now whenever someone somewhere is having fun, you can be sure Jonathan McIntosh (producer and co-writer for Feminist Frequency's Tropes vs Women series) thinks it's problematic. Of course the guy who practically demanded reviewers mark down Bayonetta 2 for progressive points, hates fun and can't stop complaining about violence in everything ever (often while looking forward to it), is going to have a problem with Dead or Alive. Yes, of course he does.
He isn't especially relevant to the DOAX3 situation in particular, but he (and by extension Feminist Frequency) has been one of the primary voices in the outrage movement for the last few years, so this is as good a time as any to shed some light on his talking points, because it all seems so terribly familiar.

In a 1908 article from The Nineteenth Century and After, Vol. LXVI by Bram Stoker (secondary link), most famous as the author of Dracula but lesser known as a liberal pro-censorship advocate (it's the combination of the two I want you to take notice of, I'm not implying 'liberal' by itself is a problem), argued in favor of self-censorship, and government-enforced censorship should the reticence of the true artist prove insufficient.

Stoker recognizes that fiction is the most powerful teaching method available as even Jesus Christ himself used it to educate his followers, as such Stoker argues fiction can also be used for evil. McIntosh agrees and staves this by bringing up Narrative Transportation Theory (Wikipedia link). Now by itself this isn't wrong, fiction does indeed allow us to absorb ideas better by virtue of us being engrossed by a narrative. The problem is that McIntosh fills in the gaps of the research with his own unsubstantiated ideas on how that makes fiction dangerous propaganda. There's a difference between people better accepting false information by being engrossed in media, and being indoctrinated into hateful world-views by them. In fact studies have shown that reading widely increases empathy so the reverse is true (which makes sense as that is the whole point of putting a viewpoint into a narrative).
Stoker argues the literature of 'moral misdoings' are written to profit off of humanity's base desires, as does McIntosh, which is code for "it's bad if people like it, especially if those people are not me". Make no mistake, the only reason McIntosh calls what he argues for "not censorship" is because of the negative connotations of that specific word, not because the definition is wrong. The guy argues in favor of instating actual censorship committees instead of an open market, for Christ's sake.



But should it come as any surprise Jonathan McIntosh espouses almost exactly the same position as a 100-year old explicitly pro-censorship advocate shy of calling for brutal police intervention? The only significant difference is that, where Stoker brings forth his religious convictions as the basis for his moral superiority and the prevention of evil, McIntosh merely has his baseless assertions and a small number of decades-old scientific studies which he parades as "scientific consensus", long buried beneath more voluminous contemporary research showing no consensus or reaching opposing results consistent with dropping crime data in the relevant areas, showing that the position he argues for might in fact be endangering women (and people generally). The only part that's (generally) agreed upon is a short-term increase in aggression in a handful of situations (we might as well ban traffic, as that increases aggression even more significantly. Although to be fair we don't allow children to engage in traffic either). Hardly worth taking your real-life pacifism (which is noble) into a crusade against violence in media for (which is a concept so old, even Homer's Iliad suffered from it).

But the fun part still has to begin. Now pay special attention to the following phrase from Stoker's article:

"The word man here stands for woman as well as man ; indeed, women are the worst offenders in this form of breach of moral law."
-
Bram Stoker

Indeed, Bram Stoker does not beat around the bush and makes clear he considers women to be especially guilty of sexual immorality. That is not a surprise considering historically women were considered to be easily corruptible (Adam and Eve comes to mind) as well as more lustful than men (one needs only to refer to the Malleus Maleficarum, or "The Hammer of Witches",  used for the prosecution of witchcraft).

If I were McIntosh himself, I would have already accused his cultural criticism of having been deeply rooted in misogyny based on this alone. However there's the nuance that he's not chastising real women (well, based on his Twitter blocklist he is if they disagree with him or are inconvenient to his viewpoints) but virtual ones. Ignoring that women often have a hand in designing these characters, voice them and enjoy playing as them, we are left with the uncomfortable possibility that the harsh criticism these characters face are still rooted in misogyny, just transposed to a by-proxy representation of women. It's still the age-old argument of women corrupting men even if words like "toxic masculinity" are occasionally thrown in the mix to mask the stench.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (2010)

I remember before when Tomb Raider's Lara Croft was one of the only prominent female protagonists in video gaming and she got all the same stuff on how incredibly sexist she was. The series Jonathan McIntosh is a writer for still explicitly calls Lara Croft a "fighting fucktoy". Why? Because she's attractive? The games don't show her getting into any sexual encounters and it's absurd to call her submissive, so what else can we call this than a misogynistic attack on a woman for the high crime of being attractive?
His entire shtick (and by extension, Feminist Frequency's) is that the way we interact with media is what shapes our views of the world. Personally I would also say that how we view & interact with media is a reflection of how we view the world. You see, it is perfectly possible to be sexually attracted to a person and still appreciate them as a person, but what does it say about McIntosh that whenever he sees a sexually attractive woman, he reduces (and thus objectifies) her entirely down to a pair of breasts? Is he exempt from his own rules?

These people hide behind pseudo-scientific language to justify the fact that they're bullying people and their misguided belief that humanity will be better for it if everyone would just follow their way of thinking allows them to still feel good about it. That's all there is to it. "If everyone applied my personal standards to themselves" is not how you create Utopia, but it is how you start a dictatorship.


5. The limiting role of censorship


5.1 Sexualization vs Sexual Objectification

Currently there's a very poor understanding when it comes to the difference between sexualization and sexual objectification. Sexualization and sexual objectification are not synonyms, if they were, your very conception would have been the result of your parents not thinking of each other as people. Or, to borrow how Liana K words it:

'Sexualization is just putting something in a sexual situation. Sexual objectification is removing someone's personhood through sexualization.'

To conflate sexualization with sexual objectification is simply to vilify sex and sexual attraction itself, but to then make the argument that eroticism is in itself demeaning to women, well that says more about the mindset of the person making the argument than it does about those who can appreciate the eroticism.



Make no mistake, sexuality-based censorship hurts and limits women. Do not let the veneer of it being done to protect or help women fool you, that's the same justification for why in some countries it is forbidden for women to operate vehicles. Studies and crime numbers have shown that the widespread availability of pornographic material thanks to the Internet has only resulted in a decrease of sexual crime due to it actually being a safe alternative than the more violent means. Surprisingly humans do not lose their sex drives when sexually explicit material disappears and installing more safe outlets for potentially dangerous urges (when it goes out of hand, of course) is a good thing, who could have possibly guessed? As if the absence of a few video games could possibly undo several millions of years of evolution.

As I mentioned earlier: women design, act out, voice and enjoy these characters. Heck, some of them look like them so criticizing the characters for the way they look has an effect on real people. It's not like attractive people are less insecure just because they're attractive. The only, the ONLY, arguments you have against these characters is "some don't like them" and "eeeew, ugh" and the only sort of censorship you can substantiate with that is the kind that shouldn't leave your house. Nobody forces you to buy games you don't like and if someone does the problem isn't with the games.


5.2 A historic example: Betty Boop

In animation the Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code) had one major victim: a female character known as Betty Boop. She was sexually empowered, flirtatious (but not "asking for it") and people taking advantage of her against her will are portrayed as being in the wrong, if they aren't portrayed as full-out mountain-dwelling creep rapists terrorizing the villagers (also kids, if you run away from home, Cab Calloway will haunt you in the form of a singing ghost walrus).

Betty Boop (1930-1939)

Under the Code her flirtatious, sexually empowered personality simply wasn't done anymore, which meant she was redesigned with a more wholesome, traditional look. Audiences found the restrictions placed on Betty boring and soon lost interest, killing animation's most prominent and pioneering female character simply because moral guardians have a tendency to strike down on women first. Thank God Walt Disney wasn't far behind and managed to revive the female protagonist in animation by giving us Snow White. Otherwise we would only have been left with female protagonists as girlfriends to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Mickey Mouse and Popeye (who had his start as an animated character in a Betty Boop cartoon himself).

5.3 An Attack on Memory

A rather unexpected area in which prudish attacks have historically wreaked havoc is non other than education itself; more specifically in the art of remembering. In Moonwalking With Einstein (2011), Joshua Foer describes how the art of memory has often been attacked by prudes and Puritans (he specifically names William Perkins of Cambridge (1558-1602)) after it had come to their attention practitioners of the memory palace technique in particular (which essentially allows you to map difficult to remember information to a location you are familiar with by placing images and objects in them) often used lewd imagery in their mental encoding since those stick out more vividly in the mind. That's right, a method of study itself was considered heresy by the Puritans.
Effective as the memory palace technique is, these days it's only popularly used in the competitive memory circuit. Actual students who it can benefit are still mostly relegated to a much less refined brute force approach of studying by pure repetition. That's not entirely the fault of the Puritans of course, modern conveniences like the printing press and more recently the Internet have made the arts of memory go largely out of style, but it's still worth noting that pure prudishness helped in the decline of effective study techniques.

(Incidentally, Feminist Frequency made a reference to BBC's TV series Sherlock's mind palace and claimed McIntosh used it to remember My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic names. You can now amuse yourself with the thought of Jonathan McIntosh spending a discernible amount of time mentally walking through his house encoding ponies on the off chance he'd ever need their names because otherwise that's not how bloody mind palaces work.)


6. Conclusion


The primary way in which gaming culture needs to grow up is in the respect we have for each other's preferences. You do not show maturity by calling Dead or Alive (or Dragon Crown) fans "12-year old" and you do not create an inclusive gaming environment by manufacturing new controversies every week, resulting in developers and publishers being afraid of backlash. This stuff is just sad.

So, at the risk of screaming in the void, I will leave you with this: if you are genuinely interested in making gaming a better place, get off the faux-outrage bandwagon that's been choking the life out of gaming for the last 3 years and which has been putting us on the fast-track to actual censorship. There's no excuse for this tribalistic nonsense from people claiming to be pro-diversity. Gaming is not so small that we need to push "undesirables" out, but we do need to learn how to get along with each other. Gaming is supposed to be fun for all, not a battle for bloody territory. Argue in favor of your preferences as much as you want, but stop tearing down those of others and stop arguing in favor of censorship even when you claim you aren't.

Am I being alarmist? Perhaps, but I know the history of moral guardian-based (attempted) censorship too well to not stand for the reversal of its obvious early effects. This stuff is well documented. Learn from history before it repeats itself. Self-censorship cripples industries. No way should we find this an acceptable course for gaming.

'If there's one American belief I hold above all others, it's that those who would set themselves up in judgment on matters of what is "right" and what is "best" should be given no rest; that they should have to defend their behavior most stringently. ... As a nation, we've been through too many fights to preserve our rights of free thought to let them go just because some prude with a highlighter doesn't approve of them.'
- Stephen King (1992)



7. Further Reading





8. Links and References


- Dead or Alive 5 Last Round on Steam
- Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Fortune (PS4) - Play-Asia
Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 Venus (PS Vita) - Play-Asia


And n

Monday 9 November 2015

Metroid: Other M

About two years ago I made a post (Damsel in Distress) in which I highlighted cultural differences between Western and Japanese audiences. I mentioned Metroid: Other M as an example of a game that was made by a Japanese studio in an attempt to appeal to Japanese audiences, while the Metroid Prime series was developed by a Western studio for a primarily Western audience, which resulted in a pretty heavy culture clash that caused a heavy backlash against Other M. However because I mentioned that I personally didn't hate the game, I occasionally get a couple people who over-zealously insist that my opinion (which I barely elaborated upon anyway) must be wrong*.

So let's get into my actual opinion, shall we?


Metroid: Other M
An Action Heroine After The Movie's End


I got Metroid: Other M on release date (September 3, 2010) on a Friday, put it in my Wii and played (with breaks to sleep and eat, of course) until I had finished it the next day. My initial thoughts were that it certainly wasn't as good as Zero Mission or Super Metroid, but I still had more fun with it than the Metroid Prime games (I think the Prime games are better, but they just never really grabbed me as much as the 2D games ever did). A few months later when the backlash against the game flared up (again), I put the game back in my Wii to have another go, with the backlash in mind, and lost another weekend because I still had just as much fun with it.

That's not to say it's flawless. Far from it. I just have an appreciation for what it tried to do, even if at certain points it became a bit of a mess because of it.

Basically the reasons why I like the game are also the reasons why other people hate it. I appreciate the story as a depressing character study of a completely broken woman in a sci-fi setting where the people act closer to real fallible people who do stupid things rather than characters conforming to our conditioned story expectations and preconceptions. Yes, Samus is acting out-of-character. The events of Super Metroid were clearly the last straw that broke her mental health and by this point she should ideally be in therapy, but instead she continues doing the only thing she knows how to do and by this point she's so much of a legend that nobody even questions whether she's actually still fit to do it. Sure she's badass enough that kicking the crap out of everything that comes her way is intuitive and comes naturally to her, but everything that requires actual cognitive reasoning is way more than she can deal with at this point in time.

In light of that, yeah, I can appreciate what Other M was attempting to portray. Samus' voice acting is detached because that's where her mental state is. The abusive relationship between Samus and Adam Malkovich becomes the result of Malkovich no longer trusting his former apprentice, and Samus being suicidal enough to try to prove her loyalty even when logically it makes no sense. Her not activating the the Varia Suit until already midway into a lava section can thus be read as both of them testing the other to see who breaks first (which ends up being Malkovich).



In her weakened state, the resurrection of her nemesis Ridley momentarily proves to be too much for her to deal with. Yes, he reappeared before but those were during times when Samus was healthy enough to handle it. Revenge on this thing is Samus' entire driving goal, but it just never sticks, and this time that realization hit Samus harder than ever before. Super Metroid left him as dead as he could possibly be, yet even the planet he was on blowing up wasn't enough to permanently end him. So yes, I understand why Samus would momentarily lose it when her personal tormentor shows up again while she's already experiencing a massive mental breakdown (People also tend to forget that the mere seconds of Samus locking up are followed with her trouncing the Ridley clone so badly that it flees in absolute terror).

Even some of the plot threads being inadequately resolved and Samus having little impact on them anyway is rather clever in this regard.  She has trouble figuring out the identity of the Deleter because her mental faculties aren't as sharp as they usually are. It highlights how much Samus just shouldn't be there in the first place. The entire Bottle Ship mission is Samus going through the motions, suicidally trying to cling to a sense of normalcy, even though any reasonable neutral observer would quickly determine she should be in therapy following the events of Super Metroid.


The PTSD Argument

The problem I've seen with many people poking holes in the game's story is that most of them try to analyse the events from a narrative perspective where everything has to make perfect logical sense in relation to the story, as they've been conditioned to do through a lifetime of consuming media (Tvtropes calls this "Reality Is Unrealistic"), whereas Other M takes the uncharacteristic approach of showing failing mental health in a more realistic (and thus unpredictable) fashion with plot-consistency as subservient to that. In reality, PTSD triggers aren't constant and predictable. People do act irrationally under stress (stress sometimes not even required). Subplots like The Deleter in reality would probably play out anticlimactically and confusing as it did in the game. As such you aren't going to convince someone making the PTSD-argument by repeating arguments like "but she fought Ridley several times before" because both parties view those events through a different lens. It's a pointless back-and-forth.

In short, the way I see it, the series goes from Metroid (Zero Mission) to Super Metroid (Fusion taking place when she pulled herself back together). Metroid: Other M takes place after the series proper, deconstructs the formula and shows the damage of what their events inflicted on Samus' psyche and the result is not pretty.

Or if you want me to put it another way, I view Metroid: Other M as if they made a Fight Club featuring Samus Aran.



Conclusion

And that's why I don't mind Metroid: Other M as much as most people do. It's not entirely executed well and it plays rather loose with continuity, but I understand what they were going for. I also simply don't think of Other M as Samus' definitive characterization. It's the tragedy of Samus Aran at her absolute lowest point continuing what she feels she's supposed to do even though it's borderline suicidal and endangering others. That doesn't ruin her character for me. In fact it improves her character because rather than the emotionless robot she's usually portrayed as in the Metroid games, I now appreciate how much pure willpower was really driving her and keeping her together all this time.
Personally I think a worse issue than the story is how linear the gameplay ended up being compared to Zero Mission (which I played about 10 times in a single week when I first got it just to try to improve on my time) whereas so far I only completed Other M thrice in the 5 years since release. It's just not as much fun to try to speedrun.


*Seriously guys, it's been 5 bloody years. Get over it.

Images From

Wednesday 28 October 2015

The Sassette Principle

A long time ago I posted this image on my blog and Twitter as a response to what I feel is the rampant misuse of the Smurfette Principle:

The Sassette Principle: In media criticism, characters or events inconvenient to the argument will be mysteriously ignored to artificially inflate the gravity of the argument, even when they don't necessarily refute the argument.

It has come up a few times again in the past few days so for the sake of clarity I should probably expand on it by explaining properly what I mean with it.


The Sassette Principle
An Addendum to the Smurfette Principle


Katha Pollitt, a feminist poet, essayist and critic who apparently fell asleep during a showing of The Little Mermaid(1), coined the term Smurfette Principle in 1991 in an essay for the New York Times. She defines it as follows:

"Contemporary shows are either essentially all-male, like "Garfield", or are organized on what I call the Smurfette principle: a group of male buddies will be accented by a lone female, stereotypically defined." (2)

Further, here is how Tvtropes.org defines the Smurfette Principle.

"For any series not aimed solely at females, odds are high that only one female will be in the regular cast." (3)

There is certainly validity to the observation that shows not typically for female audiences tend to include very few female characters to contrast with the male ones. That by itself is not in question, thus the Smurfette Principle isn't necessarily an incorrect observation.
My issue however is that far too often this observation is used to generate outrage over an often false description of the particular setting or circumstances we are applying it to. In the context of the Smurfette Principle, its namesake Smurfette is naturally regularly brought up because "she's the only female in a town of 100 smurfs". The obvious inference people are supposed to take away is that the writer(s) of the Smurfs went through the trouble of defining 100 characters with only 1 of the little blue creatures being female and with her primary characteristic being the girl. Sounds pretty bad, right?

Well, the problems with that statement are the following:
  1. There aren't actually 100 Smurf characters despite over 50 years worth of stories, comics, cartoons and movies.
  2. Smurfette is often elevated to being the second-in-command after Papa Smurf rather than just being "the girl". Her importance is greater than that of most other smurfs.
  3. There are more female characters who are not smurfs.
  4. There are more female smurfs introduced other than just Smurfette, such as Grandma Smurf, Clockwork Smurfette and Sassette (and most recently in The Smurfs 2 movie, Vexy Smurf).

None of these things refute the premise that in Smurf media there are a minority of female characters to a majority of male characters. What it does show however is that the severity of this disparity is often unrealistically overstated to make the problem seem much more severe than it in actuality is. Going by male and female character lists on the Smurfs wikia (male) (female), for the moment not taking into consideration the creators and voice actors on said lists (making this a bit sloppy), the ratio becomes closer to 1 female for every 3-4 males instead of the extremely hyperbolic 1 female for every 100 males.

So it all boils down to how honest the piece is represented. Is the person commenting on this phenomenon actually representing the media as it is, or are they sweeping characters or events under the carpet to artificially inflate how dire the supposed problem with representation is?

This doesn't apply solely to the Smurfette Principle either, for example you could easily alter it to fit complaints about damsels in distress: is the critic actually representing a particular character the way she is presented, or are they reducing her entire role down to that moment she served as a damsel in distress and are they representing her accurately during that time?

I feel this is an issue in media criticism that is important to bring up.  It is so rare to actually be presented counterpoints or data that doesn't fit the speaker's specific narrative within the context of their criticism. A lot of critics arguing for better representation in media like to present their problems as if we essentially need to start from nothing, because the current media landscape is so outrageously offensive it would be a mercy to just tear the whole thing down.


Here's an example you won't see when media critics
complain how female characters are always big-breasted
and scantily clad. This character in question is
technically fully naked.

That is not a reasonable position to get behind when we have come to a conclusion based on a multitude of fallacies, one-sided arguments and false representations. This ignores a lot of awesome characters we already have (heck, sometimes even people when the achievements of women in game dev are being ignored). We have a ways to go in a lot of areas, but the goal should be inclusivety for all, not getting rid of everything someone personally doesn't like. That's not being inclusive or progressive at all, that's just kicking out the established hierarchy and redecorating the throne room for a different team (which of course sounds like an awesome deal for the people taking over).

In short: the Sassette Principle is not a refutation of the Smurfette Principle, we are unfortunately still in a situation where writers could stand to insert more female characters in their art (or other minority characters for that matter). However the Sassette Principle is a comment on overstating the problem when presenting things like the Smurfette Principle (which unfortunately started in the very article that coined it).

Or, the Smurfette Principle, wrongly applied, ignores the existence of Sassettes. 


The Burden of Default

As a further comment on the arguments of Hers; The Smurfette Principle, I would also like to add nuance to the following idea:

"Boys are the norm, girls the variation; boys are central, girls peripheral; boys are individuals, girls types. Boys define the group, its story and its code of values. Girls exist only in relation to boys." (2)

There is another side to the coin here that goes unexplored in the article, namely that in a situation in which a pure Smurfette Principle is in play, a girl doesn't have to be anything other than a girl whereas a male character does need a defining trait to matter at all. The downside of being default is that you need other characteristics that lift you out of that state of defaultness. So the male characters in the Smurfs really need to be individuals to be at all noteworthy. After all, why would anyone care about you if you are just default? You aren't valuable since they already have plenty of you!
I would not dare state strongly what effect this has (if any at all) without studies to back it up, but if we're to assume the messages it instills I'd like to present the idea that a straight-up Smurfette Principle could also leave young girls with a sense of entitlement simply for being girls and young boys with feeling lesser valued for just being boys (If this statement is offensive to you, consider that it still makes the case that we need more female representation).


The Smurfs - The Smurflings (2013 reprint)

Notes & Sources

1) Somehow the author of the article notes that Ursula's words, despite villainous, are proven correct, even though I have no clue where she gets this idea as the reverse of the situation plays out since Prince Eric is obviously looking for a girl with a voice (which could metaphorically be considered as him valuing a woman for her thoughts rather than her looks). I go further into this in Out of the Sea. 
3) Tvtropes.org, The Smurfette Principle
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSmurfettePrinciple

Images from:
- Peyo's The Smurfs: The Smurflings (2013 reprint)
- The Lord of the Rings: War in the North (2011)

Saturday 5 September 2015

Guide: Metal Gear Solid V - Female Staff

Just like in Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker (2010), Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom pain allows the player to tackle mission using characters that make up your army other than Snake. Also like Peace Walker, since there are no female enemy combatants (other than special characters like Quiet or the parasite unit), the female soldiers you can recruit are hard to come by if you don't know where to look.


Metal Gear Solid V
The Phantom Pain

Female Mother Base Staff


How to play as Female Staff

In order to play as characters beside Snake, they have to be assigned to the Combat Unit first and then selected during mission deployment. Completing missions as combat staff increases their proficiency.

Amber Fox before & after several missions


Quiet

To unlock Quiet as a buddy who you can take with you on missions, you first have to defeat her non-lethally in a boss battle and bring her with you to Mother Base. The mission where you get to fight her gets triggered when you enter the Aabe Shifap Ruins in Afghanistan during Side Ops or Free Roam mode. After you've done this, you'll still have to wait for the Side Op where Ocelot gives you his report on Quiet.

Likely you'll only have your tranquilizer pistol with you as a non-lethal weapon so expect to call in multiple supply boxes to replenish your ammo.

... Or cut out the middle man as demonstrated by Oliver Campbell.

Getting Quiet back

Right, so technically the fact that you at one point permanently lose Quiet is a spoiler, however considering this is something most people would probably like to be aware of, I'm not treating it as such. Quiet will leave permanently after Mission 41 when you have maxed out the bond with her (resulting in a story mission which serves as her final chapter in the story). You can prevent this from happening (but then you won't be able to complete all missions) by adding a Butterfly into the Front design of your Emblem. The Butterfly in turn is unlocked by completing three missions in a row during which Quiet neutralizes the majority of enemies.

Ready to get Quiet back

However since update 1.06 it is possible to get her back by replaying Mission 11: Cloaked in Silence a minimum of 7 times. Usually the mission will have a [Replay] tag, this will turn into [Reunion] the final time. Exactly what is acceptable to trigger her return deviates a bit between sources, but here's what worked for me:
  • I defeated her non-lethally with Supply Drops
  • Breaking the tedium by playing another mission made me have to restart. It had to be 7 times in a row.
  • The last time before [Reunion], I was playing as Snake.
It's also useful to bring as little equipment as possible, otherwise the GMP cost will start to accumulate after 7 times. Technically you only need your binoculars to call in Supply Drops anyway.

After this process is completed, Quiet will be available as a buddy again as if the heartbreaking finally never happened.

Volunteers

Female staff will occasionally show up as volunteers. Increasing your heroism and sending out your troops with Combat Deployment will hopefully bring them in. Some were awarded by pre-purchasing the game.



Prisoners

Some Missions and Side Ops have objectives that include rescuing prisoners. The gender of the prisoner stays the same so you can repeat the mission to acquire multiple female units.

Mission 9 - Backup, Back Down


1. Northeast of Lamar Khaate Palace
The prisoner will be wandering (from north to south) in the hills northeast of Lamar Khaate Palace until collapsing in the desert. Use of Night Vision Goggles makes locating her a lot easier.



2. Wakh Sind Barracks
The prisoner is held captive in a cell in the Wakh Sind Barracks bunker. Be careful, the compound is heavily guarded.



Mission 14 - Lingua Franca

The prisoner is held captive in a cage in Kiziba Camp.



Mission 23 - The White Mamba

The prisoner is held captive in a building in Masa Village (Bwala ya Masa) near the outskirts. Saving her is an optional task for the mission.



Mission 24 - Close Contact

She's one of the two engineers you have to rescue to complete the mission parameters so you can't miss her. She's being held in a heavily guarded tent at Ngumba Industrial Zone, SW Guard Post.



Side Op 28 - Prisoner Extraction 02

Afghanistan, Shago Village (Da Shago Kallai). The prisoner is the target of the mission.




Side Op 29 - Prisoner Extraction 03

Afghanistan Central Base Camp. The prisoner is the target of the mission.



Side Op 32 - Prisoner Extraction 06

Afrika, Kiziba Camp, South Guard Post. The prisoner is the target of the mission.



Side Op 35 - Prisoner Extraction 09

Afghanistan, Aabe Shifap Ruins. The prisoner is the target of the mission. Beware of snipers.



Side Op 37 - Prisoner Extraction 11

Afrika, East of Bwala ya Masa. The prisoner is the target of the mission. She's on the roof of a hut beside the road.



Side Op 39 - Prisoner Extraction 13

Afrika, Ditadi Abandoned Village, NE Guard Post. The prisoner is the target of the mission. She's hiding next to some rocks.





Side Op 44 - Prisoner Extraction 18

Afghanistan, Sakhra Ee Village (Quarya Sakhra Ee). The prisoner is the target of the mission.




Side Op 46 - Prisoner Extraction 20


Afrika, Munoko ya Nioka Station. The prisoner is the target of the mission. Beware of the enemy gunship flying above the camp.




Links & References

Saturday 22 August 2015

The Eighth Sphere: DMC4 - Lady

Thus did the circulated melody
Seal itself up; and all the other lights
Were making to resound the name of Mary.
- Paradiso, Dante Alighieri


The Eighth Sphere
Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition - Lady


Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition struck me as somewhat weird. The main story of the game revolves around Vergil attempting to open a portal to the demon world with Dante having to stop him. Meanwhile Lady is hunting down her demon-obsessed father (and accomplice to Vergil) who killed his wife for power. With how the game's story progresses I would argue that Lady is to DMC3 what Nero is to DMC4. So when they added a new playable character for the special edition besides Dante it was obvious who was going to be the secondary playable character.

Vergil.

No seriously, they picked Vergil. Here we have Lady, who in the story progresses alongside Dante, has even more of a character arc than Dante, shows exceptional skill at vanquishing demons and even lands in the killing blow on the game's villain, but instead of having her as a playable character, we got color-swapped Dante (That's a simplification since Vergil does have a different moveset and ended up with a sizable fanbase, but still). In short, I was more than a bit disappointed that I didn't get to play as Lady back when I picked the game up in 2007.

Fast forward about 8 years and imagine how hyped I was with the announcement of Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, which not only brought the main Devil May Cry series back from reboot hell, but also promised Lady and Trish as playable characters. You bet I was excited.



Unlike all the other melee-focused characters, Lady's main method of disposing demons is long-ranged and gun based. She does a tremendous amount of damage with the downsides being that she needs time to charge her guns and she's a bit slower. Story-wise her focus on guns is a result of her being the only human in the cast. That in itself is a big reason why she's so awesome: she can hold her own despite not being a super-powered (half-)demon. That's also why her devil trigger is just her tossing grenades around and why, unlike all these guys with healing factors, she has acquired quite a few noticeable scars (unfortunately they used the same texture for both her legs so somehow her scars are symmetrical).

She doesn't really have a story this time around though. It's just the same levels as Nero & Dante from the main story, with Lady & Trish taking their respective places as playable character. As such character development is basically out the window entirely. However we do get an insight in how Lady has progressed as a character since her introduction in Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening. That game had her seeking revenge against her father (and thus closure) for the murder of her mother. We saw her relentlessly chasing a goal her life had revolved around (a Personal Legend in a kind of messed up way, if you will) and as such the events were a bigger deal for her then they were for Dante, who matured a little but all in all was just there to have fun.
Back then she was emotionally vulnerable and broken as a result of the terrible experience her father had put her through. So when we catch up with her again years later in Devil May Cry 4, it's heartwarming to see that she turned out fine, is bursting with self-confidence and now enjoys her job as a demon hunter about as much as Dante does.



So yes, the special edition of Devil May Cry 4 doesn't add a lot of new content, it does add someone I've been wanting to play as for about 8 years now. That alone made it worth my money. All in all, thanks to this and Bayonetta 2, it's been a pretty damn good couple of months for spectacle fighters. Now I just need to get good enough to actually make decent progress in Bloody Palace.

They also added in Vergil, again.

Links & References


Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition on Steam

Screens from:
Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition
Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition

Devil May Cry 5 hinted?