Watch Dogs, I assume. As mentioned, if you step in too fast, the perp just grumbles off and you don’t have any cause to “bring him to justice” since he hasn’t done anything yet. But, as you also mentioned, the game mechanics are identical whether you’re stopping an abusive boyfriend, a drug deal gone wrong, a gang hit or a mentally disturbed arsonist. There’s no special spotlight shown on stopping abusive boyfriends, it’s just one scenario out of many that can lead to a violent confrontation you need to stop.
And, of course, a stabbed girlfriend victim is treated the exact same way as a stabbed drug deal victim, a stabbed insane meth-head victim, an stabbed gambling debt victim, etc. Demanding special circumstances for the “domestic violence” scenario is absurd. That said, I’m sure a vigilante game where you have coffee with the victims for two hours and listen to their life stories before referring them to professional mental health and wellness counselors would be a great hit
Seems to me that what’s troubling her is that first of all that there are women who serve as sex objects, and she sees it as exponentially worse if it’s possible to commit acts of violence on them. I myself draw a sharper line between games in which you could kill a hooker and games in which you are given a mission to kill a hooker.
That these games are interactive and immersive does make it different from the power we used to have to mutilate a magazine picture of a pretty girl with scissors. But whether or not you are actually encouraged to do so matters at least as much in these games as it whether the magazine itself suggested doing so.
There are games in which men are presented as sexual objects, and I do think she has a point that this tends to be a kind of joke, like when your local chapter of Alpha Smegma puts on a male beauty pageant – it’s a joke more than anything else – a joke about how ludicrous it would be if men were treated like women. Long ago someone made the sharp observation that one thing (besides, of course, pathological self-repression) that drives homophobia is the disgust at the idea that a man might be looked at the way he himself looks at women. On that score, there is no equivalence possible swapping roles. Still, though, I am not left with the impression that she thinks there could possibly be any violence against women that is not sexualized in nature, if she thinks just attacking a casino waitress counts.
I’d say there’s a good case to be made that there are too many hookers in computer games, period–especially too many high-priced hookers. Sure, it’s a fantasy, but the number of games that involve prostitutes is a bit much. And the fact that prostitutes appear so often as objects of gory violence is worth discussing–it’s a subcategory of women in refrigerators.
But if a game is equal-opportunity in its victims–if, say, the brothel shows both johns and prostitutes killed–I’m not sure it’s fair to criticize the game for violence against women. And that, for me, is where her analysis overreached.
She would presumably argue, and I’m sympathetic, that there is no such thing as balance. A male prostitute doesn’t play into female fantasies of sexual domination the way a female prostitute does for men. Nor is there a female equivalent of the kind of rescue fantasies played out in video games.
On the other hand, like her I also roll my eyes whenever somebody starts complaining about ‘realism’ in games, when the gaminess is itself so silly – hit points, eating food to recover health, etc. That we accept, but a world without hookers would feel unreal? Well, in some sense, yeah. Kind of. But if they’d never bothered to show any hookers at all in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
So, as Miller alluded to upthread, what’s the bottom line? If there is no such thing as balance, does that mean that games should allow violence against all characters except women? As in, if I point my gun at a male NPC, he runs screaming and if I shoot him, he falls, bleeds and dies. But if I point my gun at a female NPC and/or shoot her, the same thing doesn’t happen? Should female characters get the same treatment as children in Fallout/Elders Scrolls games or little sisters in Bioshock? Or just the women dressed sexy, if those should be in games at all?
But the fact that the opinion is “silly” absolutely insane is proof that it’s incorrect. People can think it, but those people are morons. Or, more gently, they have no concept of video game history before 2006.
The per capita of machine-gun toting gang soldiers seems a bit skewed from the real world as well. Prostitutes are mainly just shorthand for “crime” – you see hookers on the streets and you know it’s supposed to be a seedy area, you see call girls at a penthouse party and you know the penthouse owners are supposed to be high level crime bosses.
You can argue that using prostitutes as shorthand is lazy but that doesn’t make it morally wrong or destructive. Games use all sorts of shorthand just because they’re just trying to make a setting for you to interact in. There’s no in-game value to finding some innovative new way to immediately get across “These guys must be bad guys and have lots of money”.
Probably. Men and women do frequently have different play and talking styles. I have a fairly macho play style - frequently I will get into a raid situation and someone will hear me speaking on teamspeak and be flabbergasted because they did not realize that I was female. <shrug> I only play female toons, don’t swear much and don’t grief. I just have a very go-to-hell style of game play - I am not tentative, I know what I need to do to survive in a fight and I do it. I rarely get killed and regularly tank multiple mobs at a higher level than I am. It takes knowing how to play your class to be successful and I know how to play my classes.
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LOL I lived and flew in null space. I was one of the coordinators for a corp that made caps and super caps, I introduced spreadsheets and dropbox - better living through accountancy! When you have an accountant running construction logistics, really large things get made. At one point I had 15 toons feeding me 0 level planetary construction goods to keep my set of factory planets running. I built one of the first Orcas in game, and built my own rorqual.
On the other hand, I would argue that ‘crime-ridden area’ also suggests hookers so strongly that you don’t really need to have them standing there. Someone should mod one of these games so there’s a guy saying, “Man, you should have been here like five minutes ago. There were hookers up to your eyeballs, man! There was like short skirts and stockings and enough mascara to paint the motherfucking Taj Mahal, man, you just missed 'em. All spoke broken English with ethnic accents, man, just a whole herd of 'em. I guess they’re all busy now giving blowjobs or something, like that’s how much hooking goes on right here. Go ahead, wait around. Or run off and do a couple of missions. They’ll prolly be back.”
Not only that, but from what little I saw of the early game (it won’t run on my computer… dirty RAM havers shakefist…), most people in the vigilante’s life think and say that he’s more than a bit creepy with his revenge obsession, and that his “problem solving” tends to make matters worse, not better, for everyone involved. As a result, he’s alienated from his own family*.
Context matters. When the movie or the game or the book shows the main character doing A Thing, that doesn’t mean the movie or the game or the book endorses A Thing, or expects you to. That or I really should have felt dirtier while reading *Lolita *:p. And for some reason, while this is a tacitly understood fact when it comes to movies & books, it goes right out the window when handy to criticize games. I don’t quite get it.
I don’t believe you’re expected to idolize Aiden - even though I also realize he’s the arch-Anonymous power fantasy, the hacker who’s not content with doxxing Bad Guys, he also bludgeons them personally for good measure. But I don’t think it’s stated (directly or subtextually) that his shtick is a good way to do things.
Aiden is a vigilante. Of course he’s a short-sighted idiot. That’s what vigilantism is. So no, he won’t call an ambo for the stabbed girlfriend - his jollies have been thoroughly gotten by beating the shit out of her assailant, and for him that’s all that matters. Batman doesn’t call the ambos, either. Same deal. The Justice is in the righteous punching (in their eyes of course).
It’s up to the player to think about that.
And if they don’t, well, shrug. Plenty of people never quite reach the vicinity of the notion that Batman and Dirty Harry are narcissistic fucking psychopaths, either.
which has its own, separate creepiness factor. See, the game’s script and plot were written with the hero caring for, protecting (and obsessing over) his ex-girlfriend and her kids. Sometime over the course of the development, the ex-GF got turned into a sister. But they changed nothing else in the script. So… yeah. It gets WTF-y at times.
Sure, but they’re trying to depict “crime ridden” without needing to put text on the screen: Now In Crime-Town! Hookers are an easy way of doing it. There’s other ways as well of course but I don’t see a harm in using the hooker motif as well.
You’re definitely not supposed to idolize Aiden. I didn’t get any creepy vibes from the sister story (I’ll accept your history of the story as fact) but, yeah, he’s increasingly alienated from everyone because he’s obviously a bit loose in the head. Even his supposed allies in the game often say/act that Aiden isn’t acting like a sane person.
Hookers are really easy, because they don’t have to really do anything but stand on the curb and show some leg. I think if you had to find a substitute, the only really good one is a drug dealer, because they can stand there and peddle drugs. Of course, since the rating system is fucked up, that would probably get all sorts of shit from the press.
With other crimes – carjacking, robbery, whatever, there’s a lot you have to do to make it work. Animations you have to program, AI routines you have to write so people react to it, and so on. With a hooker or drug dealer they can just stand in one spot being conspicuous.
Don’t tell the player “This is a crime-ridden area” and let him infer that there are prostitutes. Doing this would be as clumsy as having a character/narrator say “This is a haunted house” in a haunted house movie.
Show the player prostitutes and other entities associated with crime-ridden areas to let the player infer that it’s a crime-ridden area and be immersed in the ambiance of a crime-ridden area.
Jragon makes a good point about why prostitutes are quite commonly used instead of drug dealers or other forms of crime. That and sex is good at grabbing attention.
Note that graffitis, badly lit alleyways and trash are used plenty because they’re even more economical than prostitutes at hammering the same nail.
*In video games, this might be amended to: “Interact, rarely show, almost never tell” which really means: Start by trying to make the player interact. If you can’t make the player interact, show. If you can’t show, well then I guess tell but that’s the very last resort.
Books typically run about 100 000 words and only have words to work with. They can and to some extent must go into greater depth than other media. Video games pretty much have to use shortcuts for ancillary aspects because the pace of a video game is nearly always several times faster than a book’s. Clichés help with that.
As long as they’re virtual hookers, I’m ok with it. Way back in the 70s, the hysteria used to be about porn theaters then snuff films then porn again and now it’s video games.
I think we should point and laugh. And perhaps have a mission in a video game where the villain is a serial killer named Bonita Snarkeesian who targets hookers.
That’s a big part of it and where I think some of these arguments fall apart, or at least fail to give a good alternative.
Many game plots are just thin hangers for the game mechanics. You’re playing a game where you shoot dudes in the face and so the game says “Holy Cats! These dudes kidnapped your wife! Dick move, right? Go shoot 'em in the face” and off you go. It’s a quick (and in video game logic, plausible) reason to go shooting dudes. People say “Oh, but if we got away from these tropes we’ve have such richer games” but all an elaborate back story does here is waste my time by weaving a rich and innovative reason to shoot dudes. All I want to do is shoot dudes in the face though. An “innovative” plot doesn’t really enrich what I’m setting out to do.
That’s what many of these tropes do: Give a “good enough” reason to commit mass homicide for recreation but fall somewhere on the better side of “psychopathic maniac”. That’s all people are looking for them to do. Hitman: Absolution wouldn’t have been a better game without me saving some girl because the plot was just an “entertaining enough” reason to go sneaking around and garroting people. Watchdogs’ hacking and vigilante justice wouldn’t have been improved with some other drive for justice (if anything, having his sister tell Aiden how fucked up he was was probably strongest coming from family). Neither game was strong in narrative but that’s not why people were playing them. Likewise for cliches like “prostitutes in slums” or “call girls at bad guy parties” or “sexy bad ass fighter woman” – quick, easy and you’re not going to actually help the game by “improving the narrative” through avoiding them.
Certainly there ARE games where plot and narrative play a greater role, even games where people say “The mechanics are kind of bland but the story is good”. But many of the games that get cited aren’t in this category and people want them to change without even offering an alternative that gets the job done as quickly and easily. Which I think is a major weakness of this movement: developers aren’t going to make life harder on themselves with no real benefit to them or to the players. Nor are players going to demand a rich and fulfilling reason for shooting dudes in the face.
It’s trivially easy to come up with flimsy rationales for shooting bad guys. (I should know, as the designer of Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon, I did it a lot.) There are dozens of ways to quickly set up that someone is evil without resorting to violence against women. Hell, all DOOM had to do was say “Evil aliens killed your buddies!” and players were off and gunning.
Well, speaking for myself, I kinda do, akshully.
Which is why, despite loving the shit out of Total War, I never could get into the multiplayer - if I’m not fighting over a specific territory for the sake of a grand strategic vision using veteran soldiers/survivors from some other ill-thought-out foreign adventure and whatnot, what’s the fucking point ?
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Hell, all DOOM had to do was say “Evil aliens killed your buddies!” and players were off and gunning.
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DOOM *said *something ? Well hell, I must have missed it back in the day. All it ever said to me was “You have a chainsaw”, and I sort of took it from there.
