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Creslin321

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Everything posted by Creslin321

  1. Description - Crash to desktop when using map to exit Neketaka by sea from Periki's Overlook. Crash occured when the character reached the end of the map of Neketaka. Reproducible? No, tried to reproduce but no crash occurred.
  2. Holy crap, congrats dude! I tried Trial of Iron on PotD and got wiped with a full party pretty early on lol .
  3. Some are. Some are awesome. And then there's Rapelay. Hehe I've never played that game, never going to play that game lol. That said, you got me curious on what the actual rape rate was in Japan, because it seems like they have a higher acceptance of rape in their media than we American do. Interestingly enough, the rape rate in Japan is 1 per every 100K people, while in the US, it's 27.3 for every 100K people. So despite having much more rape portrayed in their media, Japan has 27 times less rapes than the US does. Strike one against rape culture theory I guess lol.
  4. My problem with the FF videos (and I'm a woman saying this) is that she has openly admitted that she hasn't played all of the games she reviews. I would agree with you completely if she were doing game reviews. The trope videos, as I understand them, are trying to identify recurring patterns over a large number of games. What makes you think she is upset? She is doing cultural criticism - looking at games to find patterns and pointing them out. If anything, it would be better to hire people who had never seen the games to objectively look for examples of the tropes: 1. Provide a standard to identify the various tropes that a disinterested person could follow to identify examples of the tropes 2. Get a bunch of people to count the tropes in various games and cross check that different annotators give the same answers by having several people do the annotations 3. Update the annotator guidelines if the people don't agree and redo the annotations with new people when necessary 4. Crunch the numbers That would give a clearer signal than somebody who plays the games and is emotionally invested in them. It would make a good kickstarter project for someone wanting to uncover the truth about these tropes whatever that truth turns out to be. Sorry man, but if you wanna critique something like games you have to actually play it or you will end up making mistakes like saying that Hitman series is about murdering women and hiding then in dumpsters, instead of making the least aggressive approach and achieve the murder like a professional Hitman. Other observation is, of the 16 targets only 4 are women. Killing the narrative that the games is violence against women.(Blood Money) Yeah exactly...the problem is that her "research" is backwards. She assumes that her tropes are are a systemic problem in gaming, then she goes and looks at a bunch of Lets Play videos to find clips that support her conclusion. This is NOT proper research. You can't assume the conclusion before you even start lol! If it was honest research, she would have a hypothesis that some trope is prevalent through gaming, then should would do some kind of statistical analysis to see how prevalent it is. For example, a good metric may be something like: "Of all best selling games in 2014, only 10% of them allow you to play a female character." That fact is made up, but you see what I mean. Without statistical analysis, cherry picking scenes to make it "seem" like you are right is worthless.
  5. Gonna be honest, I don't see what's "wrong" about people wanting to protect artists against being bullied into changing things. I don't agree with everything that people on the "anti-SJW" side of the argument say, but I do agree with the general idea that bullying or shaming someone into changing something that you find offensive is messed up.
  6. Yeah sure, but did you read what Obsidian changed the joke to? It basically mocked the person complaining how horrible it was. Personally, I think it was a brilliant move . Cool, I haven't seen it. I think this person is pretty pathetic. If these are the kinds of things that get her outraged in life then she must have a pretty sweet life. Getting mad about a bloody limerick in a fictional game in a fictional universe is really the best thing to get pissed about right? All these Wars and bankers sucking the economy dry are just pathetic in comparison to a LIMERICK. RIGHT? /S Yeah but like, that limerick seriously makes people want to murder trans people. It happened to me, not even kidding. After reading that limerick I bought 10 copies of Rocky Horror Picture Show and burned them all out of rage.
  7. Yeah sure, but did you read what Obsidian changed the joke to? It basically mocked the person complaining how horrible it was. Personally, I think it was a brilliant move .
  8. Makes sense to me! Every time I hear something ludicrous like Apple being based in Ireland, I know there's some shady crap going on there, and you expressed what that crap is pretty well . It seems like it all comes down to the conundrum that the people with the wealth make the rules, and they're not going to make rules that will cost them...which just leads to more wealth inequality. Also, I did some more research into the wage gap, this is a pretty good video on it:
  9. I don't know if the tweet in the OP was real, but if it was, SJW's would not care about it. "Save the children" is a conservative argument, and no one in gaming gives a crap about them . SJWs care about women, marginalized groups, and identity politics. Not violence, you're getting your authoritarians mixed up .
  10. I don't have a huge amount of knowledge on the subject, but I definitely don't disagree with you about the modern day wealth distribution problem. But at least to me, it seems like this kind of thing happens regardless of what government system there is. People will find a way to corrupt it. They will exploit tax loopholes, they will buy off watchdog agencies, etc. etc. Honestly, I don't really know what to do about it, it's a problem that has basically always existed. And every solution I can conceive of seems worse than the problem. IIRC, Communism was supposed to be a potential solution to this problem, but it seems like most communist countries have devolved into dictatorial regimes. Once again, you can't stop human nature. Maybe the problem is just that the change in times has produced new challenges? For example, the government of the US was conceived with the idea that people would try to corrupt it, and I think that the checks and balances system worked for a while, but now it seems to be falling apart. There are so many different things that exist in today's environment than exited in the 18th century, and there is no way that the founders of the US government could have thought of them.
  11. No, Capitalism - by definition - is a system of free market enterprise based on impartial competition. You're thinking of Cronyism. Oh? In that case, capitalism doesn't exist, and never has. Capitalism, much like socialism, communism, or any other governmental system, is subject to corruption. I don't think you can ever implement a governmental system that is not corruptible. The best you can do (IMO) is have a system that provides the most freedom and security for the people, while having the highest resistance to corruption. Personally, I prefer capitalism over socialism because I don't like the idea of all the power being concentrated in the government. At least in capitalism the power is split between the government and the modern day equivalent of merchant princes, so I feel like there can be a bit more resistance to corruption there. However, as 2008 showed, this can still be corrupted .
  12. I have. Their explanations aren't that strong IMO. A relatively small part of the gap can be explained by things like childbirth. The major cause though is that professions where women are in the majority are lower-paid than professions requiring a similar level of skill and/or study where men are in the majority. Construction workers are paid more than nurses, for example, and nursing is every bit as demanding as construction work. Erm, according to Google construction worker average salary is ~$35K, and a nurse's average salary is ~$66K. Regardless though, I get your poin, I mean just look at teachers! I won't argue with you that some professions are underpaid. But hey, that's capitalism. I don't think it's any kind of conscious gender bias. Salaries are controlled by supply and demand, and they definitely aren't "fair" by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, you can get a 4 year BS in IT, and make WAY more than someone with a doctorate in Chemistry.
  13. This wage gap thing is always something that people bring up, but I really think it's a misleading statistic. This article explains why far better than I can. http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/08/gender_pay_gap_the_familiar_line_that_women_make_77_cents_to_every_man_s.html The way I see it, men and women are just different. They have different challenges, and even different inclinations. These differences manifest in certain ways, one of which I feel leads to the wage gap.
  14. Yes, I am, and it was a mistake to propose the thought experiment to start with. This is a complex issue and can't really be illustrated with anecdotal evidence. It needs systemic analysis, and such an analysis would be a pretty big undertaking. And I'm actually a little bummed that Sarkeesian chose not to do that systemic analysis with the resources made available to her, but instead did a quite a lot of cherry-picking when making her case. Her argument would have been much stronger if she had done otherwise. Does it matter if some female NPC's are submissive? Of course not. It does, however, matter if female NPC's are usually or by default cast into a few predefined roles: waifus, woman-in-the-fridge vengeance plot drivers, background decoration, or objects to be rescued. Which is, unfortunately, where most of 'em have ended up, until the past couple of years at least. I could easily list a bunch of standout women characters in games too, but they stand out precisely because they're the exceptions. Perhaps a better thought experiment would have been, of the games you've played which feature men and women as characters, how often are the men portrayed as someone you'd want to be? How often are the women portrayed as something you'd want to possess? I 100% agree with you about Anita, and your view that systemic analysis needs to be done. And if that analysis were (honestly) done, and it did show that there is a very large systemic bias towards "macho" male characters all across gaming, I would acknowledge it. Until then though, I am going to have to go off my personal experience, which says that there is no such bias. Moving on, I think that your next thought experiment really depends upon the one answering. You ever hear the phrase "women want him, men want to be him?" This refers to a desirable male, and the idea is that women want to possess him, but men want to be him. The reasoning for this is simple... Straight women, want men, so they simply want to have the man. Straight men, want women, so they want to be a man who can get women. So if you ask me, a straight man this question, of course I would want to "possess" the female character and want to be the male character. But a gay man, or a straight woman may respond differently. Also, possess in this context doesn't literally mean "own," it more means more "sexually desire."
  15. Funny thing is, the fighting game community is MUCH more diverse than average.In terms of diversity, fighting game tournaments blow sites like Kotaku out of the water. Which is hilarious, given how much whining Kotaku does about diversity in the FGC. Well the fighting game community is largely black guys playing games made in Japan. You should all know that Japan doesn't give a **** and that black guys for the most part don't care as long as you're good. *shrug* Also, judging from the Japanese games I've played, I really think that Japanese people think that black guys are either Mr. T or disco dancing afro dudes .
  16. I don't think either of us are arguing that sexism doesn't exist. I'm just arguing that there is not this huge "diversity problem" in video gaming outside of FPS and action games. I also really think that you're moving the goalposts here onto something that is going to require way to much research to respond to intelligently. I mean, I don't think any of us have the time to analyze the NPCs in every game we've played. But I mean, does this really matter? If the game lets you play a strong female character, is it really that bad if some female NPCs are submissive? I'm sure that you could find some submissive female NPCs in RPG games, I mean they are huge. But just having a submissive NPC isn't an issue. It's only an issue if the entire game is essentially some kind of misogynistic allegory. For example, how Ayn Rand portrayed liberals, or how Elysium portrayed the wealthy. And normally, it's fairly obvious when a piece of media does this.
  17. Oh, this started WAY before the limerick. Check the Caedgun's Boob Plate controversy of 2012...which happened during the kickstarter So you are one of those people who don't think boobplate is stupid. Even if you don't think its stupid is it really hard for you to realise that everyone else does ? A woman in plate armour looks a lot like a man in plate armour. Personally, I think that that boobplate is no less realistic then other things that happen in fantasy games regarding armor. Like plate armor wearers swimming, plate armor being put on without assistance, plate armor never rusting on needing maintenance, plate armor not effecting your speed at all. Point is that fantasy games are fiction and lots of unrealistic stuff happens in them in order to make the gameplay better, please the audience, or fit with the developer's vision. If the dev wants to make a more "gritty" game without silly things like boobplate, that's great. If the dev wants to make a more "pulpy" game with things like boobplate, that's great too. Please note that I didn't say it was unrealistic. I said it was stupid. I am not one of those fools complaining about things not being realistic enough and that breaking my immersion. Boobplate is stupid. It looks stupid. I do have a very strong bias towards armour which looks functional and that means armour which looks like actual armour from real life since people used what worked. Nothing cool or powerful looking in my opinion about armour which looks dysfunctional. I just want my armour to look cool. A bit of artistic license with this is fine imo but not to the point where the armour no longer appears functional. This is of course my own subjective opinion. I really appreciate that the armour and weapons in this game are modeled of what worked. In an anime I am ok with someone wielding a sword that would be impossible to life but in my games I prefer swords which look like they would hurt someone. I don't feel that catering to my viewpoint in this amounts to pleasing some group of people with a social agenda. Then that's totally fine . Everyone has different tastes. Personally, I'm indifferent on boobplate.
  18. Haha it's funny you should mention this, because the last Norwegian I met actually was originally from Sri Lanka. We were sitting on the plane from Aarhus to Copenhagen... Probably not liking in the middle ages . And come on, a Sri Lankan immigrant is not "representative" of the Norse people or culture. Just like how I'm not representative of the American people or heritage, yet I live here .
  19. Some MOBAs are big on sexuality and boob physics (Smite), but some aren't (DOTA2). Even then, I see absolutely no issue with having sexualized men or women in a game. I mean, even Joss Whedon, who is pretty progressive, knows that it's probably a good idea to put the sexy actress in a tight leather jumpsuit because that's what men want to see. I guess my question would be why do you feel that sexualized characters are a problem? Sexuality is a fundamental part of human nature, so I see no issue with catering to it in games or any other media for that matter. As for your second paragraph, I think it's a bit silly to try to give fantasy races a direct analog to "real life" races. I never saw Kana Rua as anything but an Aumana, and I never saw Viconia as anything but Drow. The point is that it's fantasy, I don't think that all fantasy needs to have some kind of real life equivalent for everything, and I think it may be detrimental if devs try to do this. It's definitely fine for fantasy to try to have a message about a real world problem...but acting as if everything in fantasy as a real world analog is silly. Anyway, as to the whole cultural change thing... I think that things are becoming more diverse, and really I think that's a good thing...but I don't think that's going to result in any huge changes. I think that more races will wind up being represented, but I don't really see sexualized characters going away, and I don't see Michael Bay games going away. The drive for sex and violence is far to fundamental of a human desire for devs not to cater to it.
  20. Oh, this started WAY before the limerick. Check the Caedgun's Boob Plate controversy of 2012...which happened during the kickstarter So you are one of those people who don't think boobplate is stupid. Even if you don't think its stupid is it really hard for you to realise that everyone else does ? A woman in plate armour looks a lot like a man in plate armour. Personally, I think that that boobplate is no less realistic then other things that happen in fantasy games regarding armor. Like plate armor wearers swimming, plate armor being put on without assistance, plate armor never rusting on needing maintenance, plate armor not effecting your speed at all. Point is that fantasy games are fiction and lots of unrealistic stuff happens in them in order to make the gameplay better, please the audience, or fit with the developer's vision. If the dev wants to make a more "gritty" game without silly things like boobplate, that's great. If the dev wants to make a more "pulpy" game with things like boobplate, that's great too.
  21. ^ this is all probably true, but the White Male Protagonist cliché is not a gender/racial commentary so much as a confirmed marketing truism. Bethesda, for example, did not plaster the muscle-bound, white Nord warrior all over their Skyrim ads because they were "racist", or " socially non-progressive" or whatever. They did it because...Sales. Because 1) the white male gamer is the biggest gaming demographic; 2) marketing logic dictates that to attract a demographic, a game must send the message that they'll be able to enjoy it vicariously. Skyrim....would not have sold 3 million copies on DAY ONE if its canon protagonist was a lizard woman. The time will eventually come (because the metrics are slowly showing it) where there will be just as many Female gamers as Male gamers. And when this happens, rest assured that we'll start seeing a lot more Female protagonists as default for games. Just a note on your Skyrim statement, I'm pretty sure they put a white male on the cover because it's Skryim (Scandanavia), homeland of the Nords (Norse), who are all white. Having a game called "Norway" and then having a Indian guy on the cover wouldn't make much sense . Regardless though, I get your point that companies are going to market to what they see as their primary demographic, and I don't really see anything wrong with that. It's just business...if my money was on the line, and if I thought I could get more profits with a white guy than a black guy on the cover, I would put a white guy on there.
  22. Somewhat, yes. Definitely some genres are more space-mariney than others, but it is a systemic problem IMO, in that the exceptions tend to stand out. As a thought experiment, why don't you write down a list of, say, 30 games you've enjoyed over the years, and then underline the ones which had a non-white, non-male default protagonist, regardless of genre or whether they even have a protagonist. I just did. My tally: One. A good many had no protagonist at all (simulations, worldbuilding games, strategy games), and some but not all allowed you to pick a gender and race, usually with little to no reactivity to the choice. All except one of the games that had a fixed protagonist or offered a default choice were set to white male. You could do this systematically. Say, take the top 10 most highly-praised games from the past 10 years, put them in a table, and mark which ones have women as protagonists or secondary characters with agency, which ones have them as murder victims to provide plot motivation, prizes to be won, titillation, background decoration, etc. etc., you would get a pretty lopsided table. This is in fact what Sarkeesian has been doing in her videos. You can argue that she's been too lopsided about it (I think she has and it significantly weakens her argument), but I think that the phenomenon is very real, and that you have to be a white straight male or really steeped in patriarchal culture not to notice. So yeah, I do think this is a systemic problem. I also think the fight is already over bar the shouting: everybody from Harebrained Schemes to inXile, Obsidian to Electronic Arts is now paying attention and we are seeing much less oblivious racism and sexism and much more interesting and diverse characters. The GG'ers can howl all they want, but if they want to continue playing games while boycotting the "SJW's" they're going to be very short on games to play pretty soon. And you know what else? In most of these games, you'll still be able to roll a white square-jawed space marine, if that's your fantasy. Which ought to count as a win for everyone, no? Sure, I'll bite. I'm going to really try to be fair with my selection here and not cherry pick. So I think the best way to do that is just to pick the first 29 games (alphabetically) that I have installed in Steam, as well as Bloodborne that I'm playing right now on PS4. So of those games, here is what I found: 21 allow you to either create or select a character of either gender. 3 have no protagonist 3 have a male only protagonist 3 have a female only protagonist Now to be fair, I play mainly RPGs, strategy games, MOBAs, and indie games, so that's kind of what you would expect I suppose. But I hope you can see why I don't see this as a systemic problem. It's only a systemic problem when you look at very specific genres, namely FPS and action adventure games. Granted, those genres are some of the more popular ones. On the other hand, MOBA is the most popular genre in existence and nearly EVERY MOBA allows you to select male or female heroes. All in all, I just think the argument that this is a systemic issue is very poorly stated. It generalize two specific genres of games to "all games" while basically ignoring all other genres of games. Also, all the companies you listed that are now starting to have more diversity in games ALWAYS had diversity, except maybe EA, they are so big it's hard to determine. They are all RPG developers, and RPGs have featured diverse casts of characters since the 80's. Nothing has really changed. I mean look at Final Fantasy 6, a woman was essentially the main character (Terra) and it had another strong female general character. Look at the Ultima series, that series is SUPER old, and it's always had female party members. I feel that the games you see as problematic seem that way because they are the video game equivalent of Michael Bay movies. They aren't supposed to have deeply defined characters. They exist so people can blow crap up. Thankfully, there are other game genres that cater to gamers, like myself, and presumably you as well, who want a deeper experience. And these games will inevitably feature more diversity, because as you yourself said, lantern jawed space marines are boring. Despite my distaste for "Michael Bay" video games, I have no issue with them existing. And I don't really think they dominate the marketplace as much as some believe.
  23. I think it all hinges on whether Obsidian "caved to pressure" or whether they just changed something that Josh Sawyer would have removed anyway if he knew it existed. I'm almost certain that Sawyer didn't look at every backer memorial, there are too many, they probably assigned other employees to do that, so it's feasible he never saw it. And IF he would have removed it if he saw it, then I see no problem, I support the freedom of artists to do whatever they want in their games, regardless of my political opinion. For example, if Anita Sarkeesian were to make a game, I would fully expect it to be full of radical feminist propaganda, and you know what? That's her prerogative. I wouldn't agree with it, but I support her right to create what she wants. So anyway, if we are to guess at whether Obsidian "caved to pressure" or whether they just removed something that they would rather not have in their game...I'm kind of leaning towards them just removing something they would rather not have. The mere fact that Sawyer backed Feminist Frequency tells us a lot about his views, and I think removing this line is probably consistent with those views. I, personally, do not agree with it being removed, but it's 100% Sawyer's and Obsidian's prerogative to edit what is in their game. I think the issue is that it's backer content and not dev content. Of course consulting with the back over what to do with it is a good move and I applaud Obsidian for that. Yeah I see your point that the backer paid to have it in so there should be some respect on his or her wishes. Still though, I'm sure that Obsidian retains the ability to censor backer memorials that it doesn't feel are appropriate. For example, if someone had a memorial with the N word in it, I am like 99% sure that Obsidian would censor it. So I think this falls in the same territory. Ultimately, it's Obsidian's game and they can censor or not censor whatever they want. So long as they aren't bullied or pressured into changing something that they otherwise would not have, I have no issue with it. Once again though, personally I do not feel the joke was offensive, but I can't speak for Obsidian.
  24. I think it all hinges on whether Obsidian "caved to pressure" or whether they just changed something that Josh Sawyer would have removed anyway if he knew it existed. I'm almost certain that Sawyer didn't look at every backer memorial, there are too many, they probably assigned other employees to do that, so it's feasible he never saw it. And IF he would have removed it if he saw it, then I see no problem, I support the freedom of artists to do whatever they want in their games, regardless of my political opinion. For example, if Anita Sarkeesian were to make a game, I would fully expect it to be full of radical feminist propaganda, and you know what? That's her prerogative. I wouldn't agree with it, but I support her right to create what she wants. So anyway, if we are to guess at whether Obsidian "caved to pressure" or whether they just removed something that they would rather not have in their game...I'm kind of leaning towards them just removing something they would rather not have. The mere fact that Sawyer backed Feminist Frequency tells us a lot about his views, and I think removing this line is probably consistent with those views. I, personally, do not agree with it being removed, but it's 100% Sawyer's and Obsidian's prerogative to edit what is in their game.
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