Mass Effect - Beyond Gender Choice @ GameCritics

Prime Junta said:

So did I, but I snipped them. There's only one point in them that needed making, which is this:

I'm totally opposed to censorship, as you should know by now. I believe very strongly in the right to offend, and the right to be offended. That means that I would adamantly oppose any attempt to get sexist, racist, or jingoist games off the market by coercive means.

However, I also believe very strongly that if games are sexist, racist, or jingoist — as in the case of Mass Effect — then that point needs to be argued somewhere. People should be free to make their own choices when it comes to entertainment — but there's no harm in hoping that those tastes might develop into slightly less nasty directions.

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I'm in total agreement except for that nasty bit. You had to shove that literally 'nasty' comment in there didn't you? Always with the last barb at the end of a conversation.

I wrote another 5 paragraphs about this, but you know what it's not worth it. You think that my tastes are nasty, well fine. That's just freaking peachy.

skavenhorde said:

I'm in total agreement except for that nasty bit. You had to shove that literally 'nasty' comment in there didn't you? Always with the last barb at the end of a conversation.

I wrote another 5 paragraphs about this, but you know what it's not worth it. You think that my tastes are nasty, well fine. That's just freaking peachy.

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Poor choice of words, there. I apologize.

Prime Junta said:

Do you think that "brainless escapist entertainment" and "real life" are the only two possible options?

What do you make of Battlestar Galactica (the remake?)

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No, not at all. However, if the topic is already so far from reality as SciFi is, I think it is unfair to demand that the persons in a totally unfamiliar environment and circumstances should act as if it was happening next door.

It is funny you should mention Battlestar Galactica because I just ordered season 1 yesterday. After havning heard a lot of good stuff about the series here at the Watch I finally decided I should find out what all the buzz was about now that the final season is about to be released on DVD. I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks

Prime Junta said:

Are you of the opinion that science fiction does not, cannot, and should not, ever have anything to do with the real world?

Specifically, are you of the opinion that the characters, species, ideas, roles, and thoughts expressed in Mass Effect do not, cannot, and should not, ever have anything to do with the real world?

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Not necessarily, but it is not up to neither me nor Alex to decide that. It is up to the authors, in this case Bioware, to decide how real/unreal THEIR story is going to be.

Prime Junta said:

Again, there ain't no such thing as "pure" entertainment — entertainment says a great deal more about us than most of us care to admit.

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Perhaps there isn't but there is a matter of how much one reads into the material at hand. When I watch a Arnold or Sylvester flick I don't expect shakespearean dialog and consequently I'm not upset or disappointed when it turns out that there aren't any. Complaining about a game like Mass Effect not trying to take on the stereotypical image of women in our society and changing it in to a more gender respecting view is just overkill … in my opinion. But to each their own. If you want to put a political correct spin on your story that's just peachy as long as it doesn't interfere with the telling of the story. The story comes first everything else is optional.

fatBastard() said:

No, not at all. However, if the topic is already so far from reality as SciFi is, I think it is unfair to demand that the persons in a totally unfamiliar environment and circumstances should act as if it was happening next door.

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But there's the rub -- Mass Effect *does* act as if it was happening next door. The stereotypes are as stereotypical as stereotypical can be; they're anything but totally unfamiliar.

It is funny you should mention Battlestar Galactica because I just ordered season 1 yesterday. After havning heard a lot of good stuff about the series here at the Watch I finally decided I should find out what all the buzz was about now that the final season is about to be released on DVD. I'll get back to you in a couple of weeks

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Cool. I only watched Season 1 (from DVD), and I liked it a lot. Perhaps I'll watch the rest one day, too.

Not necessarily, but it is not up to neither me nor Alex to decide that. It is up to the authors, in this case Bioware, to decide how real/unreal THEIR story is going to be.

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Do you feel that only the author of a story is entitled to describe or comment on it?

Perhaps there isn't but there is a matter of how much one reads into the material at hand. When I watch a Arnold or Sylvester flick I don't expect shakespearean dialog and consequently I'm not upset or disappointed when it turns out that there aren't any. Complaining about a game like Mass Effect not trying to take on the stereotypical image of women in our society and changing it in to a more gender respecting view is just overkill … in my opinion. But to each their own. If you want to put a political correct spin on your story that's just peachy as long as it doesn't interfere with the telling of the story. The story comes first everything else is optional.

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But some Arnold and Sylvester flicks *do* deal with genuinely interesting stuff, and put unusual spins on things. Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Copland, to name three.

Battlestar Galactica should be mandatory viewing for anyone remotely interested in Sci Fi.

What I hate about these games is that they can't just come out and say "We made this game for horny kids that like to feel adequate by blowing shit up and making cheesy eXtreme dialogue in video games."

No, of course not, they have to throw buzz words around and hype the shit out of everything and reveal every possibly interesting secret in the game via trailers. I'm looking at you DA!

I miss Duke Nukem. At least it was honest about it.

I liked shrinking people and stepping on them.

Thoth said:

I miss Duke Nukem. At least it was honest.

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"I'm gonna put the smack dab on your ass!"

Prime Junta said:

Poor choice of words, there. I apologize.

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I was thinking about it and it's no big deal. As usual I overreacted. You have every right to think that this game is nasty and by that thinking, the people who play it.

One thing keeps bugging me about this. You said games tells a lot about the person, but here is the thing. It doesn't tell that much. If Mass Effect is sexist then by your thinking the people playing and liking it should be sexist as well. However, if you knew me that would be funny in the extreme. My girlfriend, Sarah, basically wears the pants in the family and that's ok by me. I like it that way. A strong woman meshes well with my personality. That's in real life.

In fantasy, I want to be the one who is the hero or the strong character. I'll never have that opportunity in real life, so these games let's you be that. Hell, that is why I play Role Playing Games. To take on a 'role' that I see my character as. Now computer games don't do as good a job as P&P RPG, but the same principal is applied. You're taking on a role of being either more or less than what you really are. Some want to be an evil, cunning character and other want to be the goody two-shoe charater. While others just want to play themselves. It's fantasy afterall. The choice is yours to be who you want to be.

By over analyzing this game the author is forgetting the part where this is just fantasy. If you've ever been to a shrink then you would know that fantasy's, in general, are a good thing.

It's the basic human condition to be attracted to beauty and so there is beauty in almost all aspects of our life. Like paintings, sculptures, literature, movies, even advertisments and games have some kind of beauty in them. By saying this is sexist is wrong on so many levels. The author is saying that all humans are wrong to be attracted to beauty.

As for the innocent Liara, yes that is a cliche, but it is not sexist. It's like saying the damsel in distress is sexist or the swashbuckling pirate like Han Solo is sexist. It's not, it's attraction. A lot of us are attracted to that type of person. At least in part in our fantasies or you wouldn't find it so prominant throughout history.

So once again, I think this guy warped the game to the conclusion he wanted. Yes, there are many beautiful characters in the game and some cliche, but he misses the point that it's fantasy and I don't believe for one second that people playing and liking this type of character have nasty tastes(I had to throw that in there somewhere ) and it tells very little about the person playing and liking the game.

Once again, I was going for two paragraphs and ended up with another essay. Oh and Liara is still ugly I don't know why he thinks she isn't.

Thoth said:

I miss Duke Nukem. At least it was honest about it.

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But look where it got him. Its no wonder there was no sequel. Talking about PC:

Thoth said:

What I hate about these games is that they can't just come out and say "We made this game for horny kids that like to feel adequate by blowing shit up and making cheesy eXtreme dialogue in video games."

No, of course not, they have to throw buzz words around and hype the shit out of everything and reveal every possibly interesting secret in the game via trailers. I'm looking at you DA!

I miss Duke Nukem. At least it was honest about it.

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Absolutely. I liked the same thing about The Witcher -- instead of cheesy codependent teenage romance quests eventually fading to black, you had honest-to-god tail-chasing quests, plus a whole bunch of women who knew what they wanted and acted to get it.

It's these games that take themselves all to seriously while being juvenile and stupid about it that irritate me.

skavenhorde said:

I was thinking about it and it's no big deal. As usual I overreacted. You have every right to think that this game is nasty and by that thinking, the people who play it.

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I don't think you're nasty, even if you have a taste for nasty things. Most of us have a nasty side anyway.

One thing keeps bugging me about this. You said games tells a lot about the person, but here is the thing.

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I kinda think that's true too, but it wasn't quite what I meant. I was thinking more of the collective: the entertainment we consume tells a lot about us as a culture. For example, probably the most useful course in Russian studies I took was the one about Soviet entertainment -- Alla Pugacheva and Bulat Okudzhava lyrics, Chapaev, and "Tass is authorized to announce..." taught me more about what life in the USSR was like and how people experienced it than any amount of history about the machinations in the Politburo.

It doesn't tell that much. If Mass Effect is sexist then by your thinking the people playing and liking it should be sexist as well. However, if you knew me that would be funny in the extreme. My girlfriend, Sarah, basically wears the pants in the family and that's ok by me. I like it that way. A strong woman meshes well with my personality. That's in real life.

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Oh, I definitely don't think it's as simple as that. People aren't paper-thin cardboard stereotypes -- hell, that's precisely my beef with Mass Effect.

In fantasy, I want to be the one who is the hero or the strong character. I'll never have that opportunity in real life, so these games let's you be that. Hell, that is why I play Role Playing Games. To take on a 'role' that I see my character as. Now computer games don't do as good a job as P&P RPG, but the same principal is applied. You're taking on a role of being either more or less than what you really are. Some want to be an evil, cunning character and other want to be the goody two-shoe charater. While others just want to play themselves. It's fantasy afterall. The choice is yours to be who you want to be.

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Absolutely. But do you need sexist standard boring juvenile clichéd stereotypes to be a hero?

By over analyzing this game the author is forgetting the part where this is just fantasy. If you've ever been to a shrink then you would know that fantasy's, in general, are a good thing.

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IMO he's not *over* analyzing. He's analyzing. I get the feeling that you believe, for some reason unknown to me, that it's wrong to analyze entertainment at all. Sure, it's just fantasy and just entertainment, but there's a whole substructure of unspoken values and ideas and agendas underneath. Why is it wrong to excavate that?

It's the basic human condition to be attracted to beauty and so there is beauty in almost all aspects of our life. Like paintings, sculptures, literature, movies, even advertisments and games have some kind of beauty in them. By saying this is sexist is wrong on so many levels. The author is saying that all humans are wrong to be attracted to beauty.

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But that's not what he's saying, is he? What he is saying that creating a fantasy race that's exclusively beautiful, exclusively female, able and willing to mate with any creature in the universe, and embodying the three classic virgin-mother-crone female stereotypes is stupid, clichéd, sexist, and juvenile.

As I said, I personally feel that the exclusively beautiful people in computer games have the opposite effect -- by making beauty the new norm, they remove the possibility of expressing *actual* beauty in the game. (As a small personal protest, whenever games allow avatar customization, I try to make mine look like a real person, not a supermodel. My favorite in D&D games is the double-chinned old lady face, with the body proportions set to short and wide.)

As for the innocent Liara, yes that is a cliche, but it is not sexist. It's like saying the damsel in distress is sexist or the swashbuckling pirate like Han Solo is sexist. It's not, it's attraction. A lot of us are attracted to that type of person. At least in part in our fantasies or you wouldn't find it so prominant throughout history.

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Sorry, friend -- but it is a sexist cliché. I think we'll just have to agree to disagree about that.

So once again, I think this guy warped the game to the conclusion he wanted. Yes, there are many beautiful characters in the game and some cliche, but he misses the point that it's fantasy and I don't believe for one second that people playing and liking this type of character have nasty tastes(I had to throw that in there somewhere ) and it tells very little about the person playing and liking the game.

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Again, I disagree on all counts. IMO he did a good job of analyzing the stereotyping underlying the game, and of arguing his point -- and it says a great deal about our culture that such tired old sexist stereotypes still hold so much attraction for so many people.

Alright then, how about this:

Social interaction in real life, especially with the opposite sex, has become so complicated and full of dozens of unwritten laws about what you can or can not do that some people, myself included, have completely given up on it. I simply can't be bothered trying to learn how that lifted eyebrow should be interpreted in the given situation or when it is safe to say what I do for a living (computer geek), so I basically just shun any non work, gaming or family related social events. Consequently it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out why I don't mind simple/stereotypical characters in my games since they are the only kind I can personally relate to.

Escapism is about getting away from whatever it is you're escaping from, not about seeking something that is so close to your everyday life that there is hardly any difference between the two … at least not in my book it isn't. Entertainment today may say a lot about our culture but I also think it says a lot about our daily lives that such "light" entertainment is PREFERRED by so many people, don't you?

fatBastard() said:

Social interaction in real life, especially with the opposite sex, has become so complicated and full of dozens of unwritten laws about what you can or can not do that some people, myself included, have completely given up on it. I simply can't be bothered trying to learn how that lifted eyebrow should be interpreted in the given situation or when it is safe to say what I do for a living (computer geek), so I basically just shun any non work, gaming or family related social events. Consequently it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out why I don't mind simple/stereotypical characters in my games since they are the only kind I can personally relate to.

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Oh, bugger — that sounds awful. I wish I was able to help with that; I can't think of anything, though, so all I can offer is my sympathy. I know that that can't be worth all that much to you, but for whatever little it's worth, you have it — sincerely.

And yeah, it is complicated, and it always *was* complicated. Perhaps it has been getting even more complicated lately, although that's not my experience during my lifetime (although I don't know how it works right now, having been out of circulation for about ten years) — specifically, various forms of online communication have made things a lot simpler in many ways, compared to how stuff worked when I was a teenager, before the Interwebs.

Escapism is about getting away from whatever it is you're escaping from, not about seeking something that is so close to your everyday life that there is hardly any difference between the two … at least not in my book it isn't. Entertainment today may say a lot about our culture but I also think it says a lot about our daily lives that such "light" entertainment is PREFERRED by so many people, don't you?

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First off, I'm not saying that entertainment shouldn't be fun, fantastic, different from real life, or even escapist. Far from it — un-fun entertainment isn't very… entertaining. Neither is the author of the original article, AFAICT. Take Battlestar Galactica — IMO a recent example of good science fiction entertainment. How close is *that* to real life?

And second, yeah, it absolutely does say a lot about our daily lives that so many of us prefer purely escapist entertainment to interacting with real people — or realISTIC people in such entertainment. That, IMO, is rather the point of the whole article; it's not to pick apart a particular game, it's to use it to illustrate a wider point about society.

Social interaction isn't complicated unless you make it so, and that's what human beings tend to do - but you shouldn't ignore the power you can have in that equation.

Basically, by being yourself and doing what you feel is right - you can safely ignore those who don't appreciate what you are. I find that to be a very comfortable position, and I don't see any reason to change who I am if it's SOLELY about making other people like me. That just seems wrong on all levels.

In any case, we're ignoring large parts of reality if we consider games nothing but escapism - because the concept is misleading.

It's true that we have fun, and it's true that many use it to forget their real life obligations and chores. Also, it's basically just a way of passing time.

But you can't really put these concepts into tiny boxes, like stereotypical characters vs. non stereotypical characters - because obviously there are exceptions to that kind of rule. At least, I don't believe for a second that anyone would prefer to have every single character in a given CRPG behave exactly like his/her stereotype.

Also, since it's a game - the awkwardness and insecurity so many people feel in social situations should be pretty non-existant. There are no consequences in games, after all.

Prime Junta said:

Oh, bugger — that sounds awful. I wish I was able to help with that; I can't think of anything, though, so all I can offer is my sympathy. I know that that can't be worth all that much to you, but for whatever little it's worth, you have it — sincerely.

And yeah, it is complicated, and it always *was* complicated. Perhaps it has been getting even more complicated lately, although that's not my experience during my lifetime (although I don't know how it works right now, having been out of circulation for about ten years) — specifically, various forms of online communication have made things a lot simpler in many ways, compared to how stuff worked when I was a teenager, before the Interwebs.

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Thanks, but I have only myself to blame. After a couple of not so successful relationships when I was younger I decided I needed a break to figure out what I really wanted. The break became a habit and now many years later that habit has become a way of life and I can hardly remember what it was like before the break. Along the way my social skills have withered and died off from lack of use and the mere prospect of what's involved in trying to relearn all the facades, the fake personalities, the reading and interpretation of body language/hidden meanings in sentences etc etc makes climbing the Mount Everest seem like a picnic in comparison.

I'm not complaining though. I knew the consequences, good and bad, when I made the decision to fly solo so I'm fully prepared to live with them. I just wanted to present a different kind of view where simple/stereotypical characters isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Prime Junta said:

First off, I'm not saying that entertainment shouldn't be fun, fantastic, different from real life, or even escapist. Far from it — un-fun entertainment isn't very… entertaining. Neither is the author of the original article, AFAICT. Take Battlestar Galactica — IMO a recent example of good science fiction entertainment. How close is *that* to real life?

And second, yeah, it absolutely does say a lot about our daily lives that so many of us prefer purely escapist entertainment to interacting with real people — or realISTIC people in such entertainment. That, IMO, is rather the point of the whole article; it's not to pick apart a particular game, it's to use it to illustrate a wider point about society.

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Oooh, I didn't think of it like that. I guess my knee jerk reaction kept me from taking a step back to see the bigger picture before going off on a rant. That's a pretty good point there that I can't rightly dispute.

*sigh* I never did get a hang of the whole count to 10 before answering thing

skavenhorde said:

I had no problem with Liara. I totally got that Asari lived longer (elves anyone???) and may have been more innocent for longer periods of time.

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I haven't played the game(s), but this theme also appears in an X2 novel : There is a genetically different ... well, group of humans which live, much, much longer than any other human could - and they are only femals having this trait.

These "Long-livers" (crude try to translate their term) are human females, and in the novel "Neopileus" I've read the one in the plot has already had a few "husbands". Or so I understood it.

Today we have a similar thing right here on earth. Of all humans, females tend to live much longer than males.

The reasons why this is so are blurred by the emancipation discussions. Therefore there is no definitive answer (yet), but tendencies seem to be that this is because males work more hard work, in general, than females do, but there also seems to be a genetical disposition for that. Plus the way of living and the food of course as well.

The World Wars also played a role in that. They killed quite a lot of men in the process.

DArtagnan said:

Social interaction isn't complicated unless you make it so, and that's what human beings tend to do - but you shouldn't ignore the power you can have in that equation.

Basically, by being yourself and doing what you feel is right - you can safely ignore those who don't appreciate what you are. I find that to be a very comfortable position, and I don't see any reason to change who I am if it's SOLELY about making other people like me. That just seems wrong on all levels.

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That's good advice, but not always easy to follow. Unless you're George Clooney (or, perhaps, DArtagnan? ), you'll find yourself having to deal with a good deal of rejection, which isn't fun and will chip away at your sense of self-worth. You have to find some way of dealing with that, or it will eventually get you down and make you give up. And that ain't easy.

DArtagnan said:

Social interaction isn't complicated unless you make it so

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I heavily disagree - Aspergers for example have problems with some parts of what is considered "social interaction".

Alrik Fassbauer said:

Today we have a similar thing right here on earth. Of all humans, females tend to live much longer than males.

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Not all that much, actually. In Germany, life expectancy at birth for men is 77 years or so, for women, 82. That's less than 10% difference.

If we look at life expectancy at 60, which will have gotten most purely lifestyle-related deaths out of the system, the difference is even smaller: for males, 80.8 years, for females, 84.6.

(Source: Wolfram Alpha.)