But she has no nuance. She pretends to as a deflection but there’s nothing to indicate that she actually sees it. When she takes a half dozen games from different genres and lumps them all together as sinners against her theme of the week, what nuance is there? Because she hand-waves off a “Well, I’m not saying it’s always bad…”? Really? Because I’m struggling to find a difference between those games and the ones you didn’t mention to differentiate why one is bad and why the others might not be.
“Nuance” is a weak word without examples. The “nuance” of me being against theft might be as slight as being okay with eating some apples off the neighbor’s tree, the “nuance” against killing might be some typical self-defense scenario while the “nuance” of me being against rape might be “what if a supervillain was going to blow up the universe unless you…” To vaguely say “Well, it’s not always wrong” and leave it at that is worthless. Would it really take such an extreme scenario for it to be “okay” to rescue a woman in a game or have a villain act cruelly towards a female that she couldn’t name one and we should just accept that “she’s openminded enough to accept that there might BE an example”?
Yes, I would in fact prefer it if she were honest rather than giving weak illusions of “nuance” to cover herself. And, given that her videos are intended to sway people’s opinions, the insincere posturing and lack of examples is very much her problem because her videos are a failure (in my opinion) without them.
Actually, it was you I thought lacked nuance, and you’re sortof proving me right.
Indeed, you are pretty much making my point for me: You are asserting that you would rather she was a frothing loony than that she admit the possibility that she might be wrong? Again, I don’t see why she has to come up with examples. It’s on YOU, if you disagree with her, to come up with counterpoints. She is just allowing that they might exist, which seems to be more than most people involved in this debate are willing to do.
Actually, no, there’s all sorts of reasons people play Gor. Some don’t want to do sexual RP at all … including, mindbogglingly enough, some slavegirl players … some want to play panther girls and have lesbian RP while fighting evil men, some want to play scribes and other unheroic types. My character isn’t a warrior, he’s a slimy tavern owner who pimps out his paga sluts, steals money from customers if he can get away with it, and generally behaves in ways that are not all that honorable. He’s not a very good fighter but brags about his prowess and steals credit for others’ success where he can. He calls defeats “near victories.” He is, in short, a parody of the idealized Gorean Master, and it is SO much fun to play him.
She admits no such thing, she just gives meaningless lip service to it to silence critics.
Not at all. She wants change, she fails to make a convincing argument for it, the status quo remains. I don’t have to do a thing. Personally, I’d say the “counterpoint” is the status quo – people should use “rescue the princess” or “bad guy hits girls” or whatever trope they wants, as often as they want and without excusing it to anyone because it’s their story. If you want someone to feel like they should need to justify their use of it, you need to make a real argument why, not lamely say it’s the other guy’s job to make the counterpoints.
Maybe in some marketing board room. Gamers talk about games and companies being somewhere on a continuum of casual or hardcore all the time. Nintendo is and has been considered casual for many years. Since the SNES era, probably.
Mario is widely considered an easy casual series that’s marketed to everyone. Gamers often look down their noses on anyone who plays mostly these sorts of games. Have you never seen this opinion? I find that hard to believe. Gamers are pretty elitist this way.
Whenever the discussion of L4D2 vs. Killing Floor came up most would agree that L4D2 is way more casual. You can say the entire casual/hardcore dichotomy is fucked and not all that useful. I’d tend to agree since you can get super hardcore with Mario speed running or L4D2 versus/realism expert, both of which involve higher skill ceilings than normal gameplay. I’m guessing you can get hardcore with Peggle or Candy Crush or whatever mobile super casual game everyone says will destroy gaming too. But this is how people use these terms.
I’m trying to think of a more casual FPS I’ve played…single player FEAR, maybe. Infinite recharging Matrix-mode for da lawls.
It can also depend on where you stand. A hardcore Starcraft 1 player might consider SC2 a casual POS. But SC2 isn’t exactly casual compared to the entire market.
Back to the topic, FWIW, I never saw any girls in KF. I dunno if it was because it required more skill and time investment compared to L4D or just because, ya know, it’s not as good or well known in general and L4D has the Valve aura.
I never got into fighting games. I’m to understand girls aren’t attracted to that genre, which makes sense because it focuses on mechanics, rote memorization, competition, and high learning curves. Except for Smash Bros. Everyone and their mom played that. But I’ve seen a lot of people call Smash…casual.
What you’re missing is that the Call of Duty gamers call Nintendo fans kiddy casuals, and the Nintendo fans call Call of Duty gamers dudebro casuals. There’s a lot of elitist animosity between different fandoms and part of that is nonsensically calling fans of <genre/company/series x> casual. Generally the more popular or accessible something is, the more likely it is to be labelled “casual”.
I mean, I would question whether anyone calling Super Mario 3D World “casual” has ever actually attempted to beat the level Champion’s Road.
I think the reason people call L4D casual is because campaigns are pretty short. It’s not a game with much progression, nothing you have to devote time into to become good. As far as a sane definition of “casual” goes that’s actually a pretty good one, but it’s not how the industry as a whole uses it. As far as industry jargon is concerned, it generally refers to the Wii Fit/Cookie Clicker/Farmville/Candy Crush type games.
No… just no. Do you know anything at all about video game history? This is not an opinion held by any game historian/critic and you’re making yourself look silly by continuing to fight for this position.
I’ve heard this and created female toons with the purpose of mocking such idiots. Sadly, no-one ever took the bait. Maybe they could tell I was a male player. lol
I think the confusion there hinges on a faulty equivalence between two adjectives : casual gamer and casual game. While the adjective’s the same word, its meaning is very different.
A “casual gamer” is one who either does not play very many games or does not play for extended lengths of time. E.g. a casual *WoW *player would be one who’d log on for half an hour or and hour to unwind after work, then log out to cook dinner, watch TV, read a book, whatever. As opposed to the really hardcore *WoW *player, who logs on a 5pm sharp upon coming back from class and delogs around 3 in the morning. And poopsocks while on raid :). There’s also an implied notion that the casual player, who does not get to practice as much, will display less skill at the game than the hardcore.
With apologies to Georges Carlin : “anybody who games less than I do is a casual n00b. Anybody who games more than I do is a no-life try-hard. I’m hardcore”. Applies to the way many gamers, and most teenaged idiots, think. The same can be applied to gameplay itself : a game I find too easy is for casual n00bs, a game I can’t wrap my head around or kicks my ass is some neckbeardy piece of crap for basement dwellers. Whereas I play good games.
OTOH, a “casual game”, per industry standards, is a game that is designed from the ground up to be played casually, which is to say in bite-sized chunks and w/ simple mechanics, & not much investment on the player’s part. A *Sudoku *puzzle lasts 5 minutes if you’re really slow. Your *Farmville *“gameplay” is a couple of clicks (at repeated, separate intervals because it’s designed for Evil). And so on.
That’s not to say casual games are always or have to be easy games - trying to get all stars in Angry Birds is a recipe for iPad-flinging RAAAAEG!!!1. But it’s still a casual game.
I’d also add that many people seem to confuse the issue further by applying and equating the casual/hardcore paradigm to the *tone *of a game rather than its gameplay or design. Which is why **marshmallow **is correct in saying that Nintendo has been considered casual for a while - but in large part because they make bright coloured, soft edged games and have an adamantium-laced policy to remain strictly PG-13. Nothing in Mario feels threatening - you can fall into fricking lava, but it’s bright orange lava with cute bubbles popping up. There’s no alcohol, sex, gore or blood in Zelda, and even though Link will spend 80% of his gameplay hacking away at stuff, destroying property and committing grand theft ruby ; a majority of parents would take one look at it and find it good, family-friendly fun. It’s not edgy in the least, and doesn’t try to be.
Contrast with, say, Assassin’s Creed, which isconsidered more hardcore than Zelda even though it’s basically just open world Prince of Persia. And really fucking easy.
I agree with all of this except for one thing, marshmallow is not correct in any way shape or form. Tone does not dictate the type of game a game is. That’s what ESRB ratings are for. In fact, there’s a recent quote floating around from Shigeru Miyamoto where he talks about how Nintendo does not make “casual games” because they have no interest in that market.
L4D is mechanically fairly simple and the missions are short but the community (when I played) was filled with insanely serious people who’d flip out if you didn’t have every map memorized and know exactly what to do at every moment. Casual game for hardcore people
I watched about 20 minutes of the video about women as objects of violence, and I had a mixed reaction to it. The Hitman ads, in which murder victims were portrayed either with dignity (male) or with sex appeal (female), were strikingly gross.
But when she criticized Bioshock2 for the brothel spear victims, I thought she was off-base. Yes, the female victims in the brothel were dressed in a more alluring fashion than the male victims. How else do you depict a massacre in a brothel? It’s just one location among many in the game; unless she wants to ban brothels from games, I’m not sure how else it could be depicted.
There was another game, whose name I forget, in which girlfriend-killers are one of many perps you can chase down and kill. The game apparently allows you to step in before the murder happens, but she was pissed that you had to wait until the violence was incipient, you couldn’t be super-preventative. And if you waited until after the violence was committed, there was no option to call an ambulance for the victim or otherwise tender aid; you could only go after the perp for vengeance.
I wasn’t convinced by her case against that game, either. It’s not as though the mechanics for girlfriend-killers were any different from the mechanics for muggings or other violent crimes. While acknowledging the unique aspects of domestic violence, I don’t think singling them out in this game made sense: if there’s a criticism of the game, it should be that all the crime victims are just anonymous set-pieces, not that women specifically are anonymous set-pieces. And yes, few if any of the violent criminals were women; unless you start examining child abuse (which this game doesn’t, thank God), that’s how the world is.
I thought about half her examples were good, thought-provoking examples, but the other half were kind of weak.
Considered by who? Were any of these people born before the 21st century?
Again, considered by who? That’s certainly not an opinion you’re going to find among people who make videogames, or write about them professionally. I suspect it’s something you only hear from the dedicated console-war enthusiasts, who are operating from the default assumption that, “Not on my platform” = “Sucks.”
That is, indeed, an excellent collection of people who shouldn’t be taken seriously.
I’m trying to think of a way to make the phrase “casual FPS” make any sense in the first place, and I’m coming up blank.
A few of them were deceptive to the point of dishonesty. For example, she shows clips from the game Deus Ex, where your character is chasing a woman with a gun while she flees in terror from you, and another where a woman is huddled on the ground while you have a pistol pointed at her head, both as examples of violence against women in video games. Except that’s how all of the non-combat NPCs in the game react to you when you start firing guns in public - it’s the exact same animations, male or female.
Almost all her examples of player-directed violence towards women comes from sand-box style games where it’s possible to kill almost every NPC in the game, and I’m not clear what her solution to the issue would be, short of just not making sand-box games at all. Either you just not have women in those games at all, or you make it so that the female NPCs specifically cannot be killed - both of which seem even more sexist to me.
It’s a shame, because she does touch on some good points, and the issue of sexism in gaming is a huge problem, but she hurts her argument by using such manipulative and de-contextualized examples.
Yes, but that’s not what he said. He said “Nintendo has been considered casual for a while” - which is true. Plenty of people *do *think and say that Nintendo games are “for casuals” and people who play Nintendo games or even Nintendo consoles are all casual players ; simply because Nintendo land tends towards the happy saccharine.
The fact that this opinion is silly (or at least based on a misunderstanding/mixing-up of concepts) does not change the width of its spread ! Which was what I meant.
To me personally though, saying something like “Zelda is a casual game” is borderline insane. You have to spend like 30 hours to finish Ocarina of Time (barring speed runs), and IIRC loading a save either plops you at the tree or at the entrance of dungeons regardless of where you saved, which means you can’t pop in for 10 minutes then go do something else - you have to set aside a solid chunk of time to play Zelda, or at least to get anywhere in the game.
Both of which being the antithesis of what a “casual game” strives for. Whether it’s “for casual players”, well, it’s up to the individual and where his or her autocentric referential lands on the issue :).
