Video games and stereotypes
“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night
A discussion has evolved in this thread about the degree to which entertainment of various sorts affects us, and I thought the quote apropos.
It was interesting to read up a bit on the controversy surrounding Cooper Lawrence, her statements about Mass Effect, her later retraction (NYT, reg probably required), and of course, the concerns of the original study that was done at U Maryland.
And frankly, the whole thing is full of silliness. Consider this statement:
Killen is studying how young moviegoers tell right from wrong at a time when the traditional demarcation between good and evil in the movies themselves seems to be breaking down.
Oops, sorry, I misquoted — that should read “gamers” and “games.”
Of course, there’s Cooper Lawrence’s boldness in offering critiques on national television based on, well, secondhand rumor:
“Before the show I had asked somebody about what they had heard, and they had said it’s like pornography,” she added. “But it’s not like pornography. I’ve seen episodes of ‘Lost’ that are more sexually explicit.”
The double-standard grows tiresome, folks.
Then again, we also get gamers fooling themselves, perhaps out of defensiveness:
Killen’s research found that most subjects understood that the two over-the-top games depicted negative themes and harmful stereotypes. But they failed to see how that content could harm them.
Many subjects reasoned that there could be no negative consequence from playing the games unless the player then proceeded to go out and shoot people in the head or attack them with a golf club.
Which brings me to the Vonnegut quote. It’s true whether you’re a gamer or a wanna-be muckraker.
45 Responses to “Video games and stereotypes”
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Having played Mass Effect (and loved it), I was obviously outraged at the misinformation and double standards from these “news reports”. I told as much to my girlfriend (who considers herself a gamer, but mostly because of me), and she agreed that it was ridiculous that they didn’t fact check the information.
However, she asked me a question that I really couldn’t figure out how to answer confidently. She asked, “Why even have that kind of content in the game? Isn’t that what you’re always complaining about when people stereotype gamers as horny young guys?”
She also went on to include my newfound loathing of the tv network G4. They have slowly turned the network from being similar to TechTV to be more and more about sex (girls specifically). They even send and report on the Adult Entertainment Expo about as much as CES.
To summarize the question, “Why have blue butt?”
Is it for the story’s sake? It didn’t add much. Is it to show the love between two characters? That’s kind of a lazy way to show it for the storytellers. Sex can be a deep experience, but only for the two involved. Observers just see two people doing it.
What is the reason? Is it really the same as what G4 is doing? Trying to attract horny gamers?
Say it isn’t so.
titilation?
penny arcade had the best take 🙂
Pretty simple, the audience who plays RPG games for the most part feels that a story is incomplete without a love interest.
Considering that modern culture has likened romance with sex, this is probably what led to the addition of the scene rather than a blackened screen and a few sounds.
You can analyze this to death but the thing is it didn’t hurt the story and offers the opportunity for those who want their lead character to have a romantic liason the opportunity to do so. You as the player have the choice to either participate or not.
One thing you might tell your girlfriend is that it isn’t required to complete the game it is only 1 aspect of the story that you don’t have to participate in. The game is about choice, and you have that choice, maybe she should get on your case for making that choice 😛
Also ask her the last time she read a Sci-fi/fantasy/fiction book without a romantic sub-plot to it?
Go4broke wrote:
What you just wrote is what’s called a (baseless) stereotype, and I say that as a veteran RPG gamer.
Go4broke wrote:
Hah, funny you should mention that. We’re both really big fans of a Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. For those who have read it, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.
Ah, good old Song of Ice and Fire…
Anyway, to the topic. I can cover the sex stuff and all, but that’ll be done enough. What stands out to me beyond that is this:
I mean… What? Yeah, Raph, that was rather apt because there are plenty of movies where there are moral ambiguities. But, seriously. To begin with, in Mass Effect you are the good guy, paragon or renegade. The choices you make can be hard though, yes, but only in very few cases would I really say anything starts to hit towards ‘evil’. But, that isn’t what bothers me. What bothers me, is why is it that entertainment where you can make a choice between good and evil (or less good, or renegade, whatever) some sort of damaging thing? Does that mean any time you have a chance to do something wrong in real life also damages your psyche and in future incidents you cannot tell the difference from good and evil?
This doesn’t indicate that they are studying people who do wrong in games, just that the option is there. Heck, that option presents itself an awful lot in daily life. It seems that the reactions to the mind would be similar – if not more powerful.
Granted, of course, doing evil in a game is easier. Even still…
Raph, I think it’s kinda hard to draw the conclusion that just because you’re playing a game about shooting people, you’re actually *pretending* that you’re shooting people on any scale that makes sense. In most cases I would argue that the game logic is too bare to be considered real. In terms of narrative and emotional connection, they’re too basic, too obvious about what they do, and too bare to have any meaningful context. The player isn’t involved on any deep level, so they’re not *pretending* as much as they’re simply playing… watching the screen move from objective to objective… it’s more about checking off the boxes to get to the next goal than it is about actually wanting to *be* the character. The game isn’t about being a character, or about behaving a certain way… it’s about beating a puzzle. No matter how you dress up the puzzle, it’s still obviously a puzzle.
Granted, I’m sure there are plenty of people who *are* prentending to be those characters… but I’m not sure I’d even put them in the majority. And yes, people who actually identify with the characters they’re playing in those over the top games probably aren’t all that well grounded. But it doesn’t speak for those who only see them as a vehicle for entertainment or a way to move a narrative forward.
Eolirin, I have actually made that same argument at great length. And it’s a valid argument — to a point.
At the same time, I know full well that media do have an impact on people. Media full of stereotypes — be they games or not — do have an impact on people. And so on.
This has less to do with the medium of gaming and more to do with the medium of headline grabbing manufactured ‘news’. A number of journalists (not making a sweeping generalization here) out there, if they were to post these same stories on a forum site, would be called trolls simply because they aren’t doing anything more than stirring the pot. I really don’t see much difference between them and daytime talk shows that hook you in with emotionally charged dramatics.
In fact, I’d say the divisive nature of the way they draw dichotomies and put people into simplistic groupings and pit them against each other does more damage to our society as a whole than any poorly thought out abstractions that get used in games (now that is baseless conjecture :9). There’s half the reason I started listening to BBC World Service and have tried my best to avoid domestic news outlets. Heaven forbid I should actually here half a dozen perspectives on an issue without the anchor coloring the issue a certain way as directed by the executives (I’m sure there’s plenty of such examples in gaming). If I had my own blog, I could spend 3 months hammering out 5 posts a day on that topic alone, so I’ll let it rest at that.
When it comes to moral dilemnas, I don’t object to them outright; its just that I often find them to be so cartoonish in presentation. The Deadwood and Firefly television shows captured some really incredible internal character conflicts in my opinion. I think that might be an issue of nuance, depth, and fidelity. When I feel obligated to make choices based on extrinsic rewards rather than potential consequences, I’m quite dissapointed that whoever envisioned this completely failed to interest me enough to see past the mechanical framework.
If two competing radio stations played ping-pong with their promotions from week to week and the listener base kept jumping back and forth, doesn’t that say something about their content quality (then again, maybe it says something about the listeners, too)?
The question isn’t “Do video games teach about right and wrong?” but “What do gamers learn about right and wrong from video games.”
Maybe the dangerous thing games teach gamers is that once you get stuck you might as well start exploiting or cheating to go on. Maybe its the authorities around the world that needs to learn how to design themselves so their users dont get stuck. The “real world” or what we should call things such as school, sports or economy is based on the notion that those who fail will try harder to succeed, a questionable method for controlling behavior.
I’m also not very sure games develop stereotypes, you can’t spot a “gamer” in a random crowd. You can however spot all kinds of music related stereotypes by merely looking at their clothes. I also believe that you can predict the behaviour of a person by studying their music taste over their gaming habits.
I strongly disagree with this statement. While love interests have enhanced works of fiction throughout the history of storytelling, it is not necessary to include one to create an engaging story. I have seen plenty of movies where love interests were shoehorned into them. If you include a love interest for the sake of having one, it cheapens the plot. I would hate to see this problem permeate into videogames.
We are most definitely a product of our environment. The degree varies among people, but it’s still there. This has been known for centuries. But gamers want to exclude their gaming environment, despite the numbers of hours they put into it. This is certainly a defensive reflex.
Also, what’s interesting here is that few people even allude to the fact that this isn’t just a love scene. It’s a lesbian love scene….in a game that mostly boys buy and play. Go figure. But it’s noticeable that the fact isn’t being, uh, noticed. Or I should say that this context isn’t being noticed, except by Trenton’s girl friend and probably a few others, mostly those who aren’t gamers of the male persuasion.
The only people who seem to be ‘remarking’ about it are those who make good money putting spotlights on controversial topics. Out of curiosity, I went to youtube and looked over the cut-scenes. I think I can muster out one giant /yawn.
We’re going into battle soon, lets do it!
Seriously, all the euphemism just about made me sick. Even the entire idea of suggesting these are ‘romantic’ themes. Please, this is about as romantic as something on a soap opera or action film.
Exec Producer in screening room scribbles on notepad: violence? (check), sex? (check), result? (pulls out ‘approved’ stamp). That is about what I’ve come to expect from these incredible ‘visionaries’; more cookie-cutter, me-too crap.
completely unremarkable, the only thing notable here is that as a society we’ve gotten a lot closer to the point where a lesbian scene can be considered no more ‘threatening’ than a heterosexual one. Although in the next breath I have to concede that there’s still quite a lot of resistance to visuals of homosexual men doing the same.
You wouldn’t be suggesting that someone would inject cheap thrills into a medium to turn more dollars, would you?
Now that I’ll object to, I don’t care what the context is.
The problem is investors think that investing makes them artistic consultants. If you don’t like the artistic direction the company you invested in is going…..sell your damn shares and invest in one that does! Stop trying to tell 100% of the businesses to cater to 30% of the customers. If you’re all fighting over the same market slice, quite a few of you will fail and meanwhile the other 70% of the potential customers are wondering how the industry got so stupid and blind!
Disclaimer: I haven’t played Mass Effect (except for the first 5-10 minutes or so, which hardly counts as “having played”). However, I want to address a couple things:
Sex can be a deep experience, but only for the two involved. Observers just see two people doing it.
There are a lot of stories that use sex to great advantage in this regard, both in a graphical medium and in a textual medium. But it’s a requirement to prefix the scene with character development and, more importantly, relationship development (which is like character development, but much less talked about). I don’t know whether or not Mass Effect succeeded in that, but from the outrage and lack of defense of its story elements, I’d imagine not.
No pun intended, but sex is most appropriately used as a climax.
Maybe the dangerous thing games teach gamers is that once you get stuck you might as well start exploiting or cheating to go on.
In the real world, “cheating” and “exploiting” is called “innovation” and “thinking outside the box”. I’m not a Trekkie (unfortunately), but I have been acquainted with the Kobayashi Maru scenario through its Wikipedia page. Notice how it evolves.
This has been known for centuries. But gamers want to exclude their gaming environment, despite the numbers of hours they put into it.
Gamers are no more intelligent than the rest of the populace, no matter what Steven Johnson says. People want to exclude parts of their environments all the time. “Separate work from home,” my ass.
And Raph, it’s not that I disagree about media having an impact on people, especially in a negative way… I think it does. And I think that negative stereotypes aren’t a good thing, or really an excusable thing… I just happen to think that because games are primarily goal oriented, it’s actually *harder* to make it matter there than somewhere else. Because I am currently of the belief that games are extremely bad about talking about context rather than process… and stereotypes are very much rooted in context. It’s thus much easier to propagate a stereotype in a single 10 minute biased or uninformed newscast than it is in 20 hours playing over the top video games… not because the setting (the context) that the video game has is inherently better, but because it’s actually secondary to the experience by a very large degree.
This isn’t a cry to ignore responsibility in making games, merely to understand that games really are a very weak form of media in terms of actually getting a point across. Granted, I really hope they don’t stay that way, but until the medium and the tools we have for crafting meaningful experiences in it mature… it’s not a very large issue all things considered. It will increasingly become one, should we manage to actaully get moving along that path instead of cashing in with rehashes, so it deserves thought… I just tend to get wound up over the “GAMES ARE THE DEVIL” crowd a bit too much and overcompensate, even when I shouldn’t be, especially when looking at what we have right *now*, instead of what we’ll hopefully have going forward.
Good questions. Here are some of mine. How does the media itself determine wrong from right? How are young people affected by living under a regime of brutal, greedy, lying torturers?
It’s funny that Cooper Lawrence was making these comments about Mass Effect, when The Witcher, released at about the same time, includes a LOT more entirely gratuitous sex. I’m curious how much of The Witcher’s popularity is due to the sex – I know a bunch of the people over on f13 were special ordering the uncensored European editions of the game; I think the censorship is rather silly, but digital boobs aren’t really that exciting either.
Kinda funny how someone claimed my statement was a baseless stereotype. IF its so baseless (which I completely disagree with) why is it that nearly every book published in the sci/fi – fantasy genre has a love interest? No, not all books do(including some major works) but the vast majority of them do.(Including Tolkein, notice I said love interest, not sex) Let’s face it, tawdry as it may be to you, sex sells and if companies can make more money by adding it to a RPG, they will.
So, I wouldn’t call that a baseless stereo type. Also, if you follow anything that George Lucas says about a Star Wars story, a love interest is a requirement. (not that he’s the greatest story teller but I’d say he’s a good judge of what sells)
I’d like to point out that there are 2 places where the sex act is portrayed in the game. One is early on, with a “Consort” the game tries to cover up by saying she’s respectable but essentially we all know what she is. You also have to push the dialogue to the point where the act occurs. (btw nowhere is it necessarily a lesbian act, that is only 1 of many possibilities in the game)
The 2nd scene occurs much later in the game and is only possible by the player actively pursuing the character in the game. So this is a development that occurs over the course of the game and many encounters with the NPC involved. (Maybe we should object to the fact that doing this is a achievement on Xbox live)
It’s not as simple as God of war or the hot coffee incident both of which I’d call much more immature, tasteless and even tactless. To jump all over a game that has put some effort into character development here is a bit of a tragedy. Too bad that its SE”BOX” that grabbed the headlines and is creating all kinds of negative attention. What I don’t understand is why isn’t The Witcher coming under this type of scrutiny where sex is reduced to a collection of pokemon cards?
What I will say about this is I like the opportunity to choose what happens in Mass Effect(and games like Mass Effect) and not be forced into it. I think that if the choice was denied to me it would be a lessening of the possibilities in story telling.
Rob, while I agree with you that love interests aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be shoehorned into plots and stories. That doesn’t mean they don’t have their place in the context of some stories. For good and bad, the video game industry will most likely follow in many of Hollywood’s steps.
Go4broke wrote:
We’re talking about games, not books. I’ve played at least 100 C/RPGs that had no love interests. Granted, I don’t remember most of their names, but you weren’t arguing that “sex sells.” You were arguing that gamers feel RPGs without sex are “incomplete.” Even your recent argument falters when set against one word, one game: Diablo. Games don’t need to build in love interests because players often create what they need, either through in-game tools or simply with their imagination. That’s one of the great benefits of interactivity.
Doubtful. Hollywood is going into reflective mode, looking at and discussing everything they’re doing wrong. That was a big theme at CES this year, too. Plus, games are more like music than movies. Hollywood is actually finding itself following the other spheres of entertainment media.
That brings up an interesting question. Is there a difference when in a game a player is actually “doing” something towards the sex or violence, as opposed to watching it in a movie or reading about people in a book?
I think so, in the gaming aspect “they” are doing the whatever, where in the movie they are watching someone else do it, or “do it”, or what have you.
It’s their own decisions in a game as opposed to someone else’s decisions in other media. That strikes me as huge when we’re talking about environmental, even habitual, influence.
@Go4broke: I concur. I just dislike when love interests (or any plot device, for that matter) gets wedged into a story because someone believes it will make the larger work appeal to a larger audience.
With regard to the game industry following the path of other mainstream industries, I think this will result in niche markets where you have blockbuster games and indy games appealing in the same way their film or book counterparts do.
Interestingly enough, I have a hard time identifying with my character in a video game, where I’m dictating my character’s actions. However, in well-written movies and books, I can immediately identify with the main characters…even though I have no control over their actions.
I think this may have something to do with the actions and situations in the various media. A good writer or director can give us moments that excite us, make us sad or angry, etc. But as gamers, we don’t typically put ourselves into those moments. We’re just out to win the game. The opportunities are in there, to be sure, but we’d have to go out of the way in order to experience them. For example, the waterfall in WoW’s Feralas. The gameplay dictates that you run past it, but you could stop, zoom the camera out, and take a moment to appreciate the setting.
We see sex and violence in video games partly because the designers are trying to put more of that stuff in there, more reason to get us excited or sad or angry or whatever. But yeah, I just see people doin’ it, too. 🙂
The answer is in your question: Publishers
There’s a nasty, self-reinforcing cycle here. Publishers push ‘love interests’ into the content, people buy the product (most could probably care less about the love interest, some may be incensed by it, very few chose specifically for it), publishers conclude that audience must like ‘love interests’ and continue insisting it is a necessary part of the formula. Then they pat themselves on the back as incredible visionary businessmen. Truly, without them reminding authors to put love interests in stories the whole genre would collapse, right?
I can tell you on a handful of occasions I’ve walked out of a sound check when the talent manager starts telling me how to do the mix down. Here’s a guy that doesn’t know jack about sound, acoustics, or the physiology of how music affects people running his mouth to feel important. I studied up on the band, their style, their image and whatnot, but he can’t take the time to learn my side of the trade, a few of them clearly didn’t even know the typical preferences of the genre’s audience.
Has it cost me opportunities? Absolutely it has.
But they aren’t opportunities I’d probably want anyways.
The industry is reinforcing its own negative stereotypes, whether its pushy publishers or juvenile journalism (Assassin’s Creed), they are their own worst enemies in this regard.
Really, just about every media has a layer of entrenched, self-important talking heads that tank quality in the name of a quicker (but less lasting) return that separate artists from audiences, and then walk away with a big chunk of the money for their ‘services’.
Kerri, I don’t buy that for a second. There’s no real indication of heavy pushing by publishers to include romantic sub-plots into sci-fi/fantasy novels… To be honest… there really aren’t *that* many novels in those genres that use romantic themes very much, and the ones that do tend to come from the same authors. I think there’s a much stronger cause for saying that certain writers tend to focus more on romantic or sexual sub-plots rather than to say that there’s a high level push from publishers to include them. You might be able to make a stronger case for video game rpgs, but definitely not for books. And in the case of RPGs… there’s *definite* fan support for romantic interests for the main character, so it’s not senseless there. Course, that’s partially demographics. If most of your target audience is 18-25 year old males, then yeah, sex *does* sell.
Not that it was really a valid question to begin with, since by including Tolkien we’ve opened the definition of “love interest” up so much that it refers to any reference that someone loves someone else without regards for the importance of that theme to the actual novel… At which point it becomes impossible to write anything with even remotely human seeming characters if we want to make sure there aren’t any love interests. Humans fall in love. It’s hard to talk about humans in any meaningful sense without talking about what they care about, and that tends to fall back to other people after a certain point. It’s the use of it gratuituously, or the use of rampant sexuality, that can fall into that stereotype… but honestly, most of the sci-fi/fantasy novels I’ve read *don’t* do that. A sizable number of them, especially from certain authors, do, but that tends to be the fault of the writer, not the genre.
I’ve got two writers I can think of in my personal circle who get pressured in their self-publishing attempts to put certain content in their works. In this case the publisher isn’t even risking any big promotional spending, they get paid to print and bind however many copies you want. You get an edit/revision process and they’ll check for any potential licensing infringements. Other than that, its up to you to sell them. They still want to get their fingers in it.
I also ought to apologize to publishers, though. As not to stereotype them, I should qualify myself to say some publishers. The challenge for me is managing to see past the ones blasting their messages so loud you can’t hear the genuine stuff. They take up a disproportionate space for the total depth and scope of their actual offerings.
Alright, I’m wondering when 18-25 year old males became the sci-fi/fantasy target? I haven’t done the research on that, but just thinking about it for a few seconds, it doesn’t make much sense.
Then again, I’d only loosely call a largely tactical/strategic based game that happens to have some branching selections and cut-scenes an RPG.
Slightly off topic, we’re hitting another vocabulary problem. English does a horrible job of defining ‘love’. There’s often up to a dozen words translated from it to other languages. Tolkien did an amazing job of expressing different variations of this. Eros (erotic) is just one kind, but gets used to convey a message one of the others would probably be better at. Philleo, brotherly, how many times did Frodo and Sam show that for each other? Agape, absolute self-sacrificing love, again was shown all over the series. Subtlety isn’t lost on the reader/listener/viewer, believe me. Even though they aren’t trained to know it is there, its going to invoke the right response. We need to train some of the folks who make editorial decisions (whether authors or publishers) to know that the obvious choice isn’t really the best choice. Sadly, fools and their money are quickly parted, and there is certainly a segment of the content providers who have the revenues to dominate certain fields with it.
It doesn’t sound right to anyone who likes Sci-Fi and isn’t a 18-25 male. 🙂 On the other hand, when I was a 21-year-old male, I was spending more on comic books than I was on rent. I make more now but spend less percentage-wise and dollars-wise. On the other hand, I’m more likely to buy the deluxe version of something now, the $80 version with the slip cover instead of 20 used trade paperbacks for $5 each.
Rik wrote:
The claim doesn’t sound right to anyone who thinks critically, period. Fans age, too, people.
Eolirin, I included Tolkein for a reason. I was hoping someone would make the connection between what was the standard for love stories when Tolkien was written vs. now. The popular culture has changed and what was acceptable on a widescale in the Mid 1930’s (the hobbit) and the mid 1950’s (Lord of the Rings) has changed.
For whatever reason love scenes portrayed in todays pop culture frequently amount to hopping into bed at some point(the exception being children’s books). Whereas books from the mid 30’s to the mid 50’s frequently allude to the act but don’t openly state it or give graphical descriptions of the act (lots of exceptions though). I think the mid 60’s is when I notice a major change in how this is portrayed.
Regardless, what I’m gettting at is that I think pop culture has changed the expectation of a love interest to one that includes the sex act.
Eorilin Said;
That there pretty much was my point in the first place that people feel that without a love interest a story is incomplete. Sure its general but then aren’t RPG’s trying to create a human experience? I think the sophistication of this medium is only now starting to be explored and the future is going to shock people with some incredibly engaging stories.
Kerri Knight said;
Funny you should mention this, I’ve been having discussions with a friend of mine who is getting her first book published. We’ve had a number of conversations on the topic of the sci/fi-fantasy genre and she mentioned that the market of sci/fi-fantasy books is 75% female and 25% male. Further she was stating that the majority of readers is something like 80% female and 20% male. She got those facts from some publishers who are scrambling to find more female authors because what they discovered was that people weren’t buying books for the boyfriends/husbands but for themselves. (something about market research making assumptions about why poeple where buying the books) I find this quite humorous when people state that sci/fi-fantasy is marketed at 18-25 year old males. (now not having confirmed her statement through research I can’t claim it to be valid, but my anecdotal experiences do match what she is claiming)
Kerri – your also correct in that English is a very poor language when it comes to defining relationships. It’s almost laughable how poor it is. (makes you wonder if the language has any great effect on the divorce rate doesn’t it?) Further your correct in how the brotherly love is also a factor in the Tolkien books.
Slyfield says he can’t identify with a computer character. However, not everyone has that issue. Heavy RPG MMO’s I think show that there is a good market for people identifying with computer avatars.(2nd life anyone?) I also think we’re only scratching the surface of the medium so I fully expect to see some very immature themes played out in the near future of these stories as the medium matures. I also expect sex to continue to be a major theme in a majority of these games if only because the adult industry takes in billions of dollars every year. (in the privacy of your own home and all that stuff)
To me, computer RPG’s have become the natural evolution of the “choose your own adventure” books of the 1980’s. I can remember 1 or 2 of them being incredibly popular. I do however expect that within 20-30 years we are going to see a computer RPG reach the same stature of fame(and critical acclaim) as Gone with the Wind or Tolkien. Of course it may not be by strict definition a computer RPG (Bioshock anyone?).
Personally I can’t wait for the next RPG, as I think 2 RPG’s this year are changing the landscape. Mass Effect for the incredible cinematic quality and The Witcher for introducing moral ambiguity in a way that I’ve never seen before.
Lastly, I’m hoping that major authors for example, R.A. Salvatore, William Gibson, will sign on to write the RPG’s in the future. Something I think we can all hope and look forward to.
When writing for effect (interactive effect being differentiated from passive effect), one uses the idiom to evoke the selected emotions, not to portray them. Sex isn’t used simply to evoke love. Depending on the idiom, it evokes power as well. It is the combinatorics with other idioms that determines the evocative behaviors.
If portrayals of human behaviors as signals of emotions are sampled for accuracy, love is high amplitude but low frequency. A high frequency portrayal example is greed. Pair that with power and violence is a high probability follow on. See “Death Wish” and its sequels, or “Rambo” and so on. How often since Jane Austen has “love” been the dominant theme of literature?
As far as the 20th century goes, the changes begin with WWII. It isn’t immediate. The fifties were repressed but dark (disciplines of war and secrets of all kinds combined with monetary success); the Sixties were brilliantly lit but pathologically violent (the magic of science and infinite potential combined with the terror of the unknown and unknowable). The 70s were colorful but unfocused (a sort of a menagerie of anything affordable and comfortable narcolepsy). The 80s saw the return of greed and sex (awakened to danger and wanting Mom and Dad back). The 90s belonged to Buffy and BubbaVamps (the urge to merge with death over boredom with confidence in action and self-exploration over seeing other in self-knowledge). This decade is the evocation of those urges with virtual worlds and games becoming the unique literature of the period expressed mainly by youngish teams and rewarded handsomely even as their peers signed up for the desert.
I see no signs of learning. Just training. Change is constant but it is not evolution, merely a crabwalk across an undulating but dismally same sandy bottom populated by excess and paranoia. The Holloway case in Aruba is iconic.
I hope you’re going past that in your meaning. Because ‘choose your own adventure’ style branching selections are exactly what I’m getting tired of. Its still pre-scripted and what I learn is largely useless unless I replay that branch again.
Another music analogy: Guitar player is in a given cord. I could give them a selection of 3 cords to transition to….or I could let them play around with any cord they want. Chances are after 20 minutes of pick’n around, they’ll come back saying ‘one of these 3 sound really nice’. Even better is when they come back saying ‘I found this really cool sound’ that I didn’t even list in my choices. Do we really only get to pick between like 3 different kinds of common time to put this song in? I’ve heard some great stuff in 17 or 11, who wants to miss out on that?
Do you really want a community of people who constantly need to be told what the ‘right’ choices are?
@Len: Being even more jaded than I am has to be unhealthy, stop it! :9
@Keri:
The question is, why is it so much fun to write to the dark side?
Hey, I can stereotype whenever I can get both hands to hit the keys together! 😉
BTW: The key of the piece is one part of the variation. The extensions offer the richer colors plus more potential modulations. Blues is not a common practice harmonization. Jazz isn’t moreso. But Debussy knew all of that without playing either so even style or genre don’t determine the color space. Pay attention to the adjectives and adverbs.
There are no absolute rules. The combinations limit the outcomes and even these are limited by time in their ultimate effects. Nothing is written but everything is predictable if you don’t mind making mistakes. The most critical question we ask as composers and performers is which ears are the most important, those of the audience or our own? You may be surprised how that changes given circumstance, if fact, surprise IS the prize.
Exploration.
I don’t have a problem with dark topics at all. I’m in the middle of reading Push by Sapphire for my Writing and Rhetoric class, I’m challenged to keep myself to only reading the chapter relevant for class discussion each week. Incestuous abuse among a number of other ‘abrasive’ topics are central in the book. I have a problem with poor writing, not specific topics.
A well known character on my SWG server ran a guild of worshippers around his character, they had sex slaves, they had coercion of all kinds, they had bad boy trouble makers, etc. The character himself was the usual ‘its good to be bad’ thing going. When I would talk to him out of character to let him know that the citizens of my city were getting a little tired of the over-the-top drama he and his group would bring with them on our big social event nights, his usual defense was ‘It would be boring if everyone were good’. Ok, I agree in principle. The problem was this server’s RP guilds were about 60%+ criminal organizations. The Imperial guilds were understandably….Imperial (racist, brutally authoratitive, etc), the rebel guilds were either criminally themed as well or had close ties to criminal guilds.
My problem isn’t criminal guilds or criminal themes or even the mind rape RP, mysoginist characters, or any of that. It was the almost complete lack of purpose or substance to it. It was the fact that even in OOC talks it was insisted he had the right to come and portray all that despite our desire not to see it and that it was driving away everyone else. We were called emo crybabies and a bunch of other names and the abuse continued, even worsened into almost outright griefing until they’d driven our town into the ground (a rather short list of names on that server were responsible for killing quite a few RP social hubs). That, despite all the great memories, really leaves a bad taste in my mouth when I look back on that era.
To dive into a specific area, I’ll pick slavery. I don’t have an issue with potrayals of slavery. In Star Wars lore, slaves are part of the reality of the galactic social fabric. My problem was with the uses of it. Twi’lek slaves were very popular. The problem was they didn’t jive with the lore. Twi’lek slaves were symbols of power, wealth, and influence. The Twi even had a standing agreement with the Hutts and others to sell their firstborn daughters into slavery to maintain control of their homeworld. Great opportunity for political intrigue and deeply engaging character conflicts (internal or external)!
Sadly, most slavery was just Gorrean sex slave cults. Most slaves were abused, made to sit on the floor beneath their master, treated like dirt, etc. In Star Wars lore these women would be paraded about in high fashion on their owner’s arm or in the case of one Twi senator, aides in his political office (massive opportunity for influence of socio-economic issues, moreso than the average ‘free’ person). Add onto that how often I’d hear tales of people being surrounded by some group, told they are being abducted, and threatened with being ‘blacklisted by the RP community’ for ‘powergaming’ their way out of the situation. Trying to tell them its not fair to put someone in that situation when they don’t have to face the risk of being hunted down and prosecuted by authorities (or angry Hutts who feel their trade is being infringed on) usually fell on deaf ears.
Basically I’m just tired of crappy, sappy drama dominated with cartoonishly over-the-top cariacatures. I’m tired of injecting content more for the attention its going to get, the ‘splash’ that can be made than what it adds to the story and how it synergizes with other elements. I tire of companies using their marketing wings to tell consumers the exact opposite of what is true about them, hoping to part me from my money with no concern if they’ve even reached their intended audience. All that in the same way that I’m tired of turning on the radio and finding more crap that ignores the power of the musical medium to make a quick buck on ‘image’ and a ‘phat beat’.
Probably, I just need to get to work digging through all the sounds, images, and ideas that get blasted and try to find the quality stuff. On the other hand, I’ve so frequently discovered something that gets yanked from production that keeping up the willpower is a struggle of its own (Firefly/Deadwood/SWG). Appologies to Raph for how far off-topic this may be now. :9
Something I’ve said elsewhere, Kerri, that is maybe a little sad but so: walled gardens are not just a way of life, they are often preferred. One has to choose love or greed. They are not compatible.
Consider the pure warrior and the natural wizard: one lives in fearful legend, the other in magical works, but only the wizard lives long enough to become wise. The works of others may be purposeless or be filled with terrible purpose. I think we only get to choose our own purpose and make of it what we will and can.
Live short and leave a beautiful corpse?
Live long and leave a beautiful body of work?
So its not that the stereotypes about video games/gamers aren’t true, it just that they’re no more true than any other media?
Being critical of myself in the depiction of events above, I was trying to put walls around my city in some ways. The real point of frustration for me is that I did choose my purpose only to have it subverted and ultimately crushed. Even more maddeningly frustrating was that we were a hugely popular spot on the server during our two weekly events before the trouble-makers drove everyone out. So there’s this affirmation that what you’ve built is good in the minds of many people, but it fails anyways.
This is why I get on a soapbox about being given some level of control over what I don’t want to see. Months or years of work went into building our community, planning the city layout, and promoting our style and culture. That level of commitment is not going to continue if the rewards are bitterness, frustration, and loss. Its a struggle between ‘I am what I am’ and ‘I’m not going to build castles for others to kick over’. Admittedly, that is probably just a tiny taste of what some very passionate game designers feel :9.
It’s that stereotypes are never true in the sense of setting rules over some instance. They are statistically true if enough instances are used to derive the stereotype. Instances have a locale in time, a zeitgeist. The stereotype derived from some sample set taken at some time may or may not be precisely true in the next set. As in any answer given by pattern matching, the answer is only statistically reliable. You never get out of the Markov squeeze.
As to control: who do you love? It is said that American Indians were never enslaved because anytime they were captured and forced into slavery, they would sit down and starve themselves to death. I don’t know if it is true but it exemplifies the cost of freedom, essentially, of self-control. I said I value freedom of movement and expression over fame, wealth or any sense of belonging to a mob. You build a community and like anything else you want to control (self and other), you give up some freedoms for that control or that assurance. It is a Chinese finger puzzle. There is no solution except to quit pulling.
Bob Sutor asked what the primary challenges facing social networks are. I told him the biggest challenge is the ability of the community or individual to control the actions of others. I think Raph is exactly righ to say “My Tiny Life” is required reading. As soon as there are two players in any game, negotiations ensue. If there are not negotiations, someone departs or there is war.
We talked about different kinds of games. Games I am familiar with require players to solve puzzles, do tasks, earn ratings/badges (whatever) to obtain powers to get to the next levels. Eventually some elite player cult emerges (trained humans ARE the emergent controls). Somehow your game enabled thuggery to emerge as the dominant control paradigm. Are there games that can prevent that by design? If becoming a physicist is a game, why is that game different from becoming a thug or a sex slave? Is it the problems to be solved or who has to be pleased to enable you or anyone else to belong to the game?
Thuggery was role-play style of a number of those involved (avoiding stereotypes :9), Thuggery was expressed as an RP style by many not involved, as well. The issue is really complex, and includes a very paradoxical social contract in use among the majority of the RP community on the server. Naturally people accepted emoted commands and the /say and /yell channels to be ‘in character, etc. But there was no cohesive effort to maintain standards. Yes, vampires in Star Wars was apparently perfectly acceptable to the overall community (different example from above…though, again some of those names are on the ‘short list’). Oh, to dare suggest otherwise, why you’d be labeled an ‘elitist’ or ‘narrow-minded’. Never mind after they assaulted some dancers at a jam one night, some (criminal :9) friends of the city (see, I told you I don’t mind) caught up with and surrounded the ring leader, he logged out. Nothing ever really came of that. Thuggery was not the paradigm, griefing was the the paradigm.
I haven’t studied the field enough. However, the average phpbb site has more tools for shaping community and protecting from potential spam/griefing than towns in SWG had. That is not a knock on its designers, bulletin boards have those systems now because they went through the same phase. Could probably go on a whole tangent there about whether the game should be ‘yahoo news forums’ or ‘titanic modelers society’ :9. I’m not trying to cut content I disagree with, I’m trying to cut content that a majority of my citizens/forum-goers have specifically said they don’t want to see. Upon opening up a dialogue with said party, they reject any intention to alter their behavior, unleash juvenile insults, and step their activities up even more. This is followed across a number of instances and soon there is a (very small, but very) loud, foul-mouthed minority being abusive to me in public chat channels. When I speak up to defend myself from their unwarranted tirades, I get half a dozen tells within 30 seconds, “omg stop arguing with them”. I either have to go to the ‘final solution’ and put them on /ignore or concede the ability to communicate on the channel meant for rp’ers to communicate. Who’s dictating behavior to who, now? Even ignoring doesn’t solve the problems, as you can generally tell the shape of the conversation you can’t see going on from secondary reactions around it. The point is whatever you were trying to communicate is now getting hit with all kinds of interference.
I’m not arguing about who belongs in the game or not, I’m talking about reasonable levels of buffering between groups that are, for whatever reason, hostile to each other and incompatible. Whether mutually disagreeable or one-sided abuse, it is bad for the enjoyment of more than just those directly involved (as the half a dozen whispers seems to indicate).
I’m not asking more of anyone than the same courtesy you show when you walk into someone’s house and they ask you to please take off your shoes!
You like wearing your shoes around the house?
Have a great time doing so at your house, but while you’re here, please keep them parked right over there,
yeah…to your left on the mat (actually I’m more of a ‘just throw them anywhere, person :9),
perfect.
There’s a third possibility:
That through whatever series of complex circumstances and motivations, one endures under the dominance of the others.
There’s a wide depth to ‘dominance’, so don’t attach too much emotion to it. The rules of social etiquette and property rights granting a host the ‘right’ to request certain guidelines of their guests, for example (within reason, yada yada, see: anything written about ToS/ToU/EULA in the last 10 years). This is very subjective along too many axes to even bother listing. Greek culture put a lot of responsibilities on hosts that would seem mind-blowing today (though with that comes the distinction of your quality as a host for adopting a number of them). It can also include the enforced dominance thats taking place across a disturbing amount of the world’s landmass. Usually the extreme forms can be identified when they are coupled with a systematic removal of the realistic possibility of the two options you listed. Surrounded and massively outgunned. Yes, when I get to that point, I think I’ve demonstrated (at the not-quite-such-high-stakes level) that I’ll sit down and starve to death (/cancel subscription).
Yep, that’s pretty much the same kind of abusive behavior being observed on community systems (eg, lists, bulletin boards, games) since the dawn of the Internet. Wired just ran some articles on two AI gurus who perished in their interactions. Notably, jorn barger (once referred to on the kate bush list as ‘he who’s name may not be mentioned’ even before the Harry Potter series used that phrase), came up. Barger had been using those same tactics on lists for years. The Web rewarded him for it by making him famous. The KB list extinguished him by refusing to acknowledge his posts. He persists but over time, many a list refuses him because with fame came infamy.
IMO, extinguishment is the single best tactic to get rid of lightly armed griefers, but it works just as effectively on those who are behaving and encouraging others to behave sensibly. That is a culture that is cowardly or has become ill (vampiric). When some cultures becomes sick, it is self-reinforcing because the need to belong is stronger in some than the need to be self-respecting. Sad but so. There is plenty of literature showing how some lists die or their creators burn them to the ground to stop such self-reinforcing spawn.
That is why I asked about the reward structures. I think it possible to create games where such behavior would be self-extinguishing because once identified, rewards become scarcer. Think of it at the level of the individual players (loss of powers/badges), loss of group cohesion (strip them of their cult identifiers), and loss of world (system shuts down to them). I’m not a gamer so I don’t know what has been tried and how it worked out. Given the title of this thread, that is an interesting question. Are gamers and game devs actually working to systemically change the stereotypes, are they ignoring them, or are they reveling in them?
As your reply exemplifies, you can create a walled garden (your house), leave or bifurcate (think about what churches do when members can’t come to agreement about the practices; they split the congregations and or shun).
That option can split. You can become prey and be food. Whenever you speak, they shout you down cruelly. You can become a Slayer and go looking for the fight. The problem is you can become “Faith” instead of “Buffy” or “Kendra”. You can be oblivious, meaning you ignore and endure but then what is the value of being there?
There is another option. You become the catalyst, aka, the Chameleon. The Chameleon is the combination of the wizard and warrior. They are the shape shifter who can take on a role in any environment except the Hero. They never play zero-sum games because survival is their first goal. They never gamble with the resources of others unasked because then they can become known and lifelong targets. They are wise analysts who play the long game making very subtle changes where those changes are one play or one step away from a cascading event. They understand the dynamism of their environment and the plasticity of human emotions. They prize their anonymity because it ensures their freedom to act. They do not want the spotlight to shine on them but they do want to occasionally pick the place where the light shines. They are farmers first, engineers on occasion, warriors only if by fighting they save what they value, their friends, and never start a fight they cannot win.
When looking for examples of that stereotype, consider the role played by Claude Rains in “Lawrence of Arabia”. While some disparage the role of the diplomat, it was he who ensured the right players were in the right places at the right time. He did not like the goals, but he understood all of the means, where to find them, how to guide them, and when to run. A different version is Gandalf. He lived simply, used his powers as much for entertainment as attainment, prized his friends above all, and did not pick the fight until the time came to fight. A fierce and cunning warrior, he did not love the conflict.
Some games are better, IMO, if the new player cannot pick their roles. They must become them by the acts they perform and by the nature of the trades they make.
I draw a subtle distinction between ignoring and enduring. Ignoring is a solution to a problem that can be ignored. Enduring is a solution when it can’t be. Either option is an expression of defiance, to be aimed at a person/group, behavior, or policy. The latter gets used for such things as refusing to be exterminated, absorbed, coerced, or silenced. Numerous cultures have utilized it throughout human history, to differing degrees of success.
/thread :9
Total agreement here on that one. Basically what I was trying to say about having your activities in game read like a Bartle test result (more nuanced, mind you) a few blogs back. I think something similar to this got covered last year in all the web 2.0 stuff discussing user profiles and the like on ecommerce sites. Anonymity may be useful to some degree, but it works against the feeling of community, responsiveness, and personal responsibility for one’s actions. I know that we’re talking games here, and they don’t have to be so life-like and realistic that all the fun gets sucked out, but there’s dangers on both extremes (like always).
btw, this is fascinating stuff!
We are drifting toward the topic of character design, Kerri. Not being a game designer, I can’t comment too cogently. Being a writer in different media, character design is fundamental for storytelling, so understanding enough about archetypes to apply one to meet linear expectations should be a fundamental of the craft. Non-linear systems such as games are significantly more challenging but architecturally straightforward. Without getting into topics such as the HumanML design, let’s say that routed events in a topic/character vector model can do the job but determining the presets (innate characteristics) is the artful bit.
In the 1960s, there was a TV series that ran exactly one summer with 17 episodes. It was called “The Prisoner”. It was a very forward looking piece of work historically. It would make an excellent source for comparing a linear series to a non-linear series for games. The question is, can one design that character with his inherent qualities and still enable a *free-thinking* player to use it in play? Number Six was a very mono-driven individual in a world of conformity enforced by both the environment (The Village) and a series of Number Two characters with individual approaches to extracting “information” whilst enforcing conformity with absolute power. I should think it would be a challenge to design Number Six as a ‘bot and have the player attempt to be Number Two. There is a very fertile set of ideas to be explored and some eerie and perhaps horrific comparisons to the “Web” as “The Village”.
There is an RPG (pen and paper) sourcebook for the prisoner. As a “gameworld” it has interesting problems but lots of control for the game master. We quickly found that players distrusted anything new, so it was easy to create targets for them to destroy but difficult to build allies. But that’s a topic for another day. Really I just wanted to say that if you enjoy Lost you owe it to yourself to see a show where they do weird things and then finish the story.
The Prisoner is considered by some to be the prototype for series like Lost, the X-Files, anything with a continuing paranoid individual against the world theme. I did find the RPG and at least one other mentioned, but a real virtual world modeling the Village and the various protagonist/antagonist combos would be a fascinating thing to play. Note that in Checkmate, Number Six also discovers the problems of making allies when his own authoritative air makes them think he is one of the blacks. The Free for All episode is a pretty good description of the current US presidential primary right down to the positions taken in some speeches.
Scares the willikers out of me just how dead on the series is about things that have come to pass or are coming to pass. Finish? You call that a finish? 🙂 Technically, yes, but thematically, it left a lot of open questions and that was the point, IMO. McGoohan seemed to think so too.
Of course, a voluntary game isn’t quite the same as what happens to John Drake. (yeah, controversial but I’ll take Markstein’s cut on that). I wonder what would happen if someone built the Village in Second Life and began to abduct SL citizens.
Someone is leaving money on the table.
BTW: it wasn’t summer, but the fall season when it ran originally. My bad.