Diversity fallacies are not your strength...

As we enter the new year, I find myself reflecting on this blog and writings past, and I've spent an obscene amount of years enjoying the digital medium of video games, and in that time I've seen things....

things you wouldn't believe..

Attack ships on fire at the shoulder of Orion, I've seen C-Beams.. 

okay okay. Seriously, though In my 35 years of gaming – from the Atari Jurassic period, to the 8-bit cretaceous period and beyond in both my own memories, and reflecting on media from decades past, I have discovered that there were things that were part of the gaming community that were both unspoken and yet understood. Case-in-point;

This strange business of diversity or the non-versation surrounding it...

Understand, dear reader that in my day, diversity wasn't used as a cudgel to bash across the head of people until they folded to the demands of the zealot shouting into the ether, it was actually something that really never needed discussion, because for those of us who have grown up in the 70s and 80's, we knew that the truth of the matter was that everyone gamed.

Now this is a story all about how Nintendo turned my life up-side-down...

Full Stop.


From groups of children hanging out with journalist turned Libertarian pundit, John Stossel in the 20/20 segment “Nuts for Nintendo”. To the old footage of arcade pans that featured boys and girls dazzled by shimmering electric bliss and the bleeps and bloops of old machines to the sophisticated ladies of the early 80's who would break away from their busy lives to pop a quarter in the old Pac-Man machine and munch away at some ghosts..

Of course, unlike other blogs that would try to make the elementary argument that Pac-Man was interesting to women because it didn't mimic the violence of war games like Missile command, I would tend to argue that it's interest truly lies in the analytical nature of navigating a maze and outsmarting four different types of pre-programmed A.I. all while collecting items for points and enduring long enough to gain power ups that reverse the prey predator roles of the game.

It is, after all, an interesting theory considering female players do gravitate to analytical and puzzle-based games, as previously stated, but of course, I am just a lowly blogger, so what do I know?



Since we are on the subject of gamers of the female persuasion, keep in mind that just because women and girls play video games doesn't mean that the numbers were equal to or more than the number of males who play, and that's not particularly a bad thing; As in the previously aforementioned videos, it has been stated that small numbers of females gaming means that there are a larger number of females doing other things, and having other interests, because of course not everyone has the same interests, nor do they even like video games.

It's intellectually lazy to think that females have never played video games before 2014

But, of course, even this is viewed and usually misconstrued as something incredibly negative, in current year (Current year +5 for those keeping track). So misconstrued, in fact that people will go into incredible bouts of mental gymnastics to justify their often “out of touch” thought processes in order to push an agenda while practically sabotaging media in the process.

The following article from VG247 seems to follow this example to the letter.

I've took the liberty of archiving it, but I'll post portions of the article here to ridicule and actually debunk the points featured in this bizarre excuse for an informative thought piece. So without further ado....

Let's get it on.

Video games are crafted from so many parts, it’s difficult to pin down exactly where the ‘game’ exists.

The easiest answer to this is exactly the part where you hit the start button and start playing the game.

Also, can we do away with hipster fluff introductions where people try to make video games as this strange magical thing that no one could possibly understand? Saying “Games are crafted from so many parts” as if everyone and their mother who would be reading this article hasn't at least looked into the behind-the-scenes nature of video games just sounds incredibly lazy, or dare I say it, you lack the information needed to understand on a base level how video games work, and quite possibly seem like a person who is likely to believe that meat when left out for extended periods of time auto-magically becomes maggots.


Next....

Interactive entertainment is getting increasingly complex and the goals of their creators are more varied than ever. Simply being ‘fun’ often isn’t enough. Multicultural teams work together to create virtual places that elicit various emotions as we explore their strange universes and inhabit personalities different from our own.

What exactly is so complex about interactive entertainment, really? Other than some developers are so wrapped up in either themselves or trying to emulate popular gaming trends that they completely miss the point of why a game series was popular from the start, or why making something (or two somethings) that is a direct copy of a more popular game will not always get them the praise and sales they so desperately crave

Hi, Cliffy

Oh, and apparently now, according to this statement, simply being “Fun” isn't enough to carry a game forward. An idea that apparently Nintendo didn't get the memo on. If fun doesn't carry games, then at least the other side of that coin is that everyone else who make boring games apparently don't print money, either, so at least there's that.

Additionally, the statement itself sounds just bizarre, and It really makes you wonder why that person even bothered creating games in the first place. Is it even for the sake of making games, or are you just in this for the opportunity to be one of the tastemakers of the gaming industry? I guess what I'm really asking, here is why are you here? And what is your motivation for creating games?

If it's just for social climbing and an opportunity to gain fame and fortune, then perhaps you should consider doing something else entirely!

Your efforts will only end in failure.

While we sometimes play games for the pure joy of interacting with something on a screen, we also want to be transported to another place. We want to visit new worlds, and we want to step into the shoes of someone we can never be. To wear a different mask, even for a little while. There’s no limit to where video games can take us.


Despite this hunger for more diversity within our stories and experiences, there are still people who push back, pining for the days when ‘gameplay’ was king. But what even does that word mean? For me, ‘gameplay’ means all the interactive parts: the running, jumping, driving, and shooting. It means the verbs.

We have officially went from having a severely limited understanding of how video games work, to now assuming that gamers are Pavlovian conditioned animals just happy to hit a button for food.

Gadzooks!

Also, wasn't this statement established in the first part about how “diverse teams work to create strange new worlds and new ideas”? Did you run out of steam that quickly?

The second paragraph tries to shelve the notion of gameplay being king, relegating it to just a few actions compared to grand narrative. Let me explain to you, dear reader, why this is the biggest mistake you could ever make if you plan on taking up game development;

One – While, yes people do want to travel to distant worlds and immerse themselves in stories and step into the shoes of someone else for a little while, This is not limited to video games. It's clear that you can do this in both film and books, and yet Video games do offer something new to the mix.

Those “verbs” as you call them seem to matter more when comparing video games to print or film, due to the latter being more passive forms of entertainment that are still entertaining in their own right. Meanwhile video games transcend passive medium and place a more active role in the sequence of events that play out. The user is placed into the role of the hero or heroine of the story and is directly influencing the outcome.

Two – Remember that in the current state of the industry, AAA titles are priced at $60 from launch and eventually depreciate in price over time. If the writer of this article is fully invested in the mindset of treating gameplay as just a means to an end over the grand narrative, then it doesn't matter if the narrative of his game is the video game equivalent of The Godfather, If the controls are unbearably clunky, no one will play it.
Well perhaps masochists would play it, still or Games Journalists who sip flatulence from wine glasses and pretend that they are the ones who truly partake in “games as high art”. I'll let you decide that one, dear reader.

Recently, Battlefield 5 came under criticism from some circles for its inclusion of female soldiers. While people are fine with gameplay mechanics that contradict its historical setting – respawning, killing helmet-clad soldiers with a single headbutt – there’s been criticism of the inclusion of women. Why? Because, for some, there’s no tangible gameplay benefit.

And there it is...

Oversimplifying the issue of Battlefield 5 to one specific point is the best you can possibly do at this point, because it's not that the game didn't have it's fair share of problems, it's just that framing the outrage on just women being in the game is the most convenient method of disregarding the things going on in lieu of that.

This actually is interesting because it is incredibly reminiscent of the previous year's Battlefront II debacle, which surprise, is from the same company and developer. In fact, much like this situation the original controversy was pinned on a similar argument. I guess the actual problems with locking away the game's “hero characters” behind a paywall, while offering slow building in-game currency to provide the illusion of choice, atrocious amounts of microtransctions and mobile game based trickery into your massively multiplayer game was a bit too glaring for journalists, so it's easier to hide behind “muh skrong female representation” arguments.

Recently, Battlefield V was reviled in it's initial trailer, for it's Sci-Fantasy premise, and instead of taking such criticisms to heart and maybe attempting to hear the more astute arguments out, EA and DICE doubled down, with the icing on the cake being this statement from EA CEO, Patrick Söderlund....

"These are people who are uneducated—they don't understand that this is a plausible scenario, and listen: this is a game," he added. "And today gaming is gender-diverse, like it hasn't been before. There are a lot of female people who want to play, and male players who want to play as a badass [woman]."

"And we don't take any flak. We stand up for the cause, because I think those people who don't understand it, well, you have two choices: either accept it or don't buy the game. I'm fine with either or. It's just not ok."

The result of course was clear as day.

With an abysmal launch, an even more dismal black Friday and a 50% price drop compared to the previous release of Battlefield 1, This game was dead on arrival. But of course that didn't really hit home until Söderlund,himself wound up leaving the company, soon after.

 But please, tell me more about how this has to do with just that one aspect of the entire debacle.

According to those people, the women break the illusion more than an enemy magically spawning on a squadmate. To them, women are a pointless addition and spawning on a squadmate just increases the tempo of combat and is there to support the gameplay. The thing is, if something exists in a game, it exists for the players.

Interestingly enough, Call of Duty: Finest Hour featured a female Russian sniper, Tanya Pavlovna . Aiding the player in harassment campaigns of the German army that leads into what will eventually be known as Operation Little Saturn, a critical operation that occurred during the battle of Stalingrad. At that time there were no issues with this, and Sales of the game hit 1.2 million with revenues eventually hitting 45 million... think about that, for a second.

What if there were a game that featured you playing as one of those Female Russian snipers, and additionally had you travel through other parts of the European theater? After all Russia and Germany were both involved in the invasion of Poland, and after Germany turned on Russia those battles got quite heated, did they not? Why is it that instead of something with a bit more substance and interest, did EA's level editor decide to just throw together the game that we actually got instead of something both pleasing the WWII aficionados who enjoy the shooters for the historical aspect and the people who want to be entertained by a new shooter?

Instead of that, you got a Cockney amputee with a cricket bat.... Which the longer I think about it, seems more plausible as a means of inciting controversy to deflect the eventual criticism from your otherwise incomplete game.

Women want to feel represented in their hobby. It gives them more enjoyment than playing as a man. For a lot of men, playing as a woman gives them a break from the norm, in which we’ve come to accept a white man as our default protagonist.

I think women are more than capable of finding the games that they may be interested in as well as characters that they can enjoy playing as without you stepping in on their behalf. One would imagine that this mindset and behavior that you're pushing is as frustrating to most as it is insulting to their intelligence.

Out of curiosity, I'm also wondering if the writer of this piece has any idea how many games that have been out since gaming's inception, actually feature female protagonists? In addition to that, does he know that if male players have no problems playing as female characters in games, then perhaps representation isn't really as big a deal as we are lead to believe?

Just to be fair here is a link to a Quora article that features multiple opinions on the subject from women who play different games, and feel that aside from blank slate character who can be changed to whatever they want to be, they don't really care that much about the sex of the character they play as. Some even going so far as to say the quality of the game matters more....

It’s not just women, either. You can count on one hand how many games feature an Arabic protagonist or a disabled hero. Developers are starting to recognise that the audience wants more diverse experiences and they are reacting to this demand. If it improves the game for some and doesn’t affect others – because it shouldn’t bother you – then it is a quality of life addition in the same way gameplay mechanics and accessibility options are.

On the contrary - If a character is being created merely to pander to a particular group, ethnicity or what-have-you, it can often come off as comically insulting and weak. Mirror's Edge: Catalyst comes to mind, here. Faith was a strong character with an interesting personalty. This had been something people enjoyed from the first game, only to have EA and DICE take what was already established and made her a bland unlikable mess of a character, thus killing any interest people once had in her. Add bland story and clunky gameplay into the mix and you might as well not even tried.

Meanwhile, a series that was considered an underrated classic that had potential is now dead on its second game...

Anyone else noticing a pattern?

One argument is that story and gameplay are two separate entities. Interestingly, having women soldiers in Battlefield 5 is viewed by some as a story choice. In other words, they see it as inessential to the multiplayer gameplay, making it a good candidate for stripping out.

To be absolutely frank, Story and gameplay are separate. One is narrative which may help out as motivation for a character getting from point A to point B, and the other is the act of getting the character from point A to point B. You can make a game without narrative and still have it be interesting for the player, but in order to have, at least a decent game, you have to have good gameplay.
This is as simple as it can be put. 

Let’s humour that viewpoint for a second and have a little thought experiment.Here I’ll list some of the things that aren’t essential to Battlefield 5:

• Textures
• Different weapons in the same class
• Different models of vehicle
• Voice actors
• Music

The core of Battlefield would remain the same with these things removed. The game would still be a booming shooter where battles rage across grand maps, two teams fighting over objectives using weapons and vehicles. But the arenas would be greyboxed and there would be less variety, leaving behind only the things that are vital to the core experience. Nobody wants this, of course, because it would lose its heart.


You see, a video game is more than a collection of systems. You don’t need more than one type of tank in Battlefield 5, but choice is a good thing. You don’t need to have flashy visual effects such as dust particles and debris with each explosion, but they help craft an illusion. Choice and flavour are as integral to a game as the verbs.

"what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul "

The core of the game is what people were clamoring for. That in itself was never the argument, instead we have a game with half of its content missing on launch, A set of DLC stories which came out late last year, which despite are based on actual real events that took place during WWII such as Operation Gunnerslide, ( which could have had the potential to be it's own game in itself,) was deemed by DICE to be not interesting enough and then altered for the sake of a virtue signal to feature a mother and daughter overpowering hordes of German soldiers. Need I also mention this campaign features a frail teenage girl, slowly succumbing to hypothermia, who manages to overpower multiple enemies twice her size?

So, let me get this straight;

You took a real story of heroism, and exciting content and decided that wasn't compelling enough on it's own, and likely because some suit decided "we have to get more women to play this, let's subject this to heavy alteration in order to make it seem enticing to those women" , yet in the process completely alienate your original fanbase, AKA: the people most eager to buy the product?

This hasn't worked for this game, which by all accounts is considered a financial failure for the company, It didn't work for Mass Effect Andromeda, which is not only a massive failure, but killed Bioware's Montreal studio and shelved the franchise indefinitely, it didn't work for Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, which failed to grasp the acclaim the previous iteration did, It didn't work for Star Wars or Marvel , An interesting tidbit that Disney disclosed in their 2018 financial report , it hasn't worked for Dr Who, which is free-falling in ratings and yet because of incredibly bad arguments like the ones featured in this article, here we are again, still trying to make excuses and play a rousing game of “Real diversity hasn't even been tried yet!”

It's enough to make your face tired....

When is the AAA industry going to wake up from it's coma and realize that the only way they're going to tread water, is to actually do it's job in providing entertaining content? Diversity is not going to save you, neither is making a game that's all flash and no substance, or mimicking Hollywood, which is also taking huge blows from this drought of creativity masquerading as “Diversity”. Good content and even better gameplay will bring you the success you crave, but that only comes at the cost of actually catering to your core audience instead of fictional audiences some hoop earring wearing talking head fabricated in a diversity meeting.

Ignore this advice at your own peril.

What would Dishonored be without Dunwall, its hyper-real visual style, and the little stories dotted around?

Thief.

It would be Thief.

What would The Last of Us be without its characters?

Probably a better game.

I stopped caring after being mobbed by people trying to force me to play it. I am curious if everyone else stopped caring after the sequel was revealed two E3s ago, and realized it's just Ellie and her girlfriend sucking face for most of it.

Things I could give two shakes of a wet rabbit about

Nailllll stop making out with your boyfriend. I can hear it from here... it sounds like (audible sucking noises)

These snippets of flavour are what makes games more than a toy. Story, character, environments, music, visuals, choice, mechanics – strip out any part of it and it becomes a lesser experience.

Games have existed for decades and the earliest iteration of games had no music, story or background animations. Missile Command. Tennis for Two. the hundreds of variations of Pong

Even without all the frills that modern AAA games have, they are still games, and are still experiences in their own right. Disregarding these games and comparing them to just toys, seems like a poorly executed “No true Scotsman” fallacy, which is laughable considering if we follow this thought process to it's natural conclusion, you would be saying the exact same thing about this game in five years time, when it's poorly aged graphics will be compared to the next big thing. Of course that's the nature of technology.

Even in games you would usually associate with pure mechanical joy can be elevated by flavour. Over Christmas I played Tetris Effect because everyone at Eurogamer kept writing op-eds about it. I was sceptical since, you know, it’s Tetris, but it’s a perfect example of classic game that’s been modernised by adding heart. 

The soundtrack and visual effects aren’t essential to the core, but they work in harmony with it. It creates an all-encompassing experience that pulls you into the zone, every movement you make registered by the audio, every line clear rewarded with visual spectacle. It transports you to another place – a world where the controller in your hand, the soundtrack in your ear, and the fireworks on the screen connect you to each tetromino.

So what exactly is “heart” in this instance? The game has been graphically updated , and made with VR in mind, so it is aesthetically different, but at it's core it's still Tetris. Since this iteration is created by the same people who made both Lumines, A game that I'm currently obsessing over, and Rez, it's Tetris with those aesthetics included, which indeed “modernizes” the game, yes, but at the core of the game, Tetris is as timeless now as it was back when Alexy Pajitnov debuted the game with help from Dmitry Pavlovsky and Vadim Gerasimov in 1984.

No matter what iteration of Tetris, the core gameplay stayed the same...

Because you surely lost track of your own argument, You can add or take away elements from Tetris, and it will still always be Tetris.

I can play the original Gameboy Tetris, Tetris Worlds for Gamecube, Tetris for DS and Puyo Puyo Tetris for the Switch and still get the same experience, because the core gameplay will always remain intact. The latter game introduces a story mode and characters that help the game along in it's multiple acts, but even without that I can still get a solid Tetris experience.

Funny how that works out.

Even Nintendo – which was famously obsessed with making sure its worlds were fun to traverse, even in an empty room – knows the importance of flavour. It is why you can tweak and pull Mario’s face on the loading screen of Mario 64.

Choice, options, surprise, cosmetic, audio – it’s all there to craft a unique feeling.

What exactly does this have to do with women in WWII shooters, again?

Your “flavour” is what I would call “quirkiness” and Mario's face doesn't particularly add to or take away from Super Mario 64's revolutionary camera system and interesting new take on platforming. If anything it's just a fun introduction screen that takes advantage of the new technology of the 64.


Where Nintendo is concerned, that's nothing new either, as many of Mario's outings have doubled as tech demos to show off Nintendo's new hardware, but of course, any other enthusiast would understand that.

One other thing.

It's Funny that you use Nintendo as a reference considering it's track record with female led games. Nintendo has gained notoriety for games such as Metroid where the main character. Samus Aran was revealed to be a female during the game's ending, or The Legend of Zelda series which despite having a male lead, has an incredibly large number of prominent female secondary characters who all had notable spotlights in the 2014 game Hyrule Warriors. Female main characters also graced popular Nintendo games such as Balloon Fight, Sin and Punishment, It's sequel Star Successor, Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, Fire Emblem: Raidant Dawn, Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones, The recently exclusive Bayonetta 2, and Dixie Kong in Donkey Kong Country 3. Of which this is clearly just scratching the surface, but I'm sure I made my point crystal clear.

Also none of these female characters were presented in a manner that was pandering to a particular audience.

A truly historically-accurate WW2 experience wouldn’t make a ‘fun’ video game. That game would give you one life, delete itself after you died, and you would be forced to play it. It’s a period of history that’s impossible to respectfully recreate without any caveats. If that was where the real issue was, people would be up in arms about any game that tried to create a virtual rendition of the conflict, not just the one where you can play as a woman.

 This hypothetical statement is a crude way of trying to prove your argument right, though It's a shame that the glut of WWII FPS games that predate this release are still in circulation and disprove this outright.

Fun Fact: During the development of Call of Duty 3 Special edition, Treyarch brought in actual World War II veterans to ensure that their stories were done justice. The Allied veterans provided input, as well as participated in interviews discussing the material used for the game's scenario.

The reason why I know this is because I own and have played the game.

So what you're saying is.... I done goofed?

For someone who identifies as a Journalist, it almost seems as if you've clearly pulled this argument out of your ass, and you have no idea what you're talking about?

Surprise Surprise.

Modern video games are more than just a series of actions. Think back to the most recent games you’ve played – the ones that have stuck with you – and I bet many of them linger because they triggered some kind of emotional response 

Imagine you weren’t you, and see how that emotional response could vary if you were transported into someone else’s life – surely God of War has more pull if you’re playing from the perspective of a parent. You might be the only agent of change in many games, but you are not the protagonist of reality.

Now, more than ever, we need games to let us be someone we’re not. We need to spend a while in someone else’s skin. Let’s start 2019 with a little more empathy.

The only current game that has given me anything resembling an emotional response has been Marvel's Spider-Man; a game with a character who doesn't look like me nor do I want him to.

I can actually relate to Peter Parker's personality and views through his circumstances and how he deals with them, not through his appearance.


After all, I am capable of empathy.

Minus the Miles and MJ missions, the game was damn good!

This ending statement is weaker than the argument that, over the course of this article, seemed to completely evaporate mid-thought. People may not be the protagonist of reality, but they are living their own lives and in them sometimes, based on perspective, they can be the protagonist or the antagonist. Life is interesting that way.

Games aren't stopping you from being someone you're not, either, so why is it exactly that you have to make this statement as if there is an active push from others stopping you from immersing yourself in stories?

Perhaps this isn't really an issue of immersion or representation at all.

How on earth are you making these weak arguments, and lack the fundamental knowledge about the subject matter you're writing an article on? This would leave one to believe that perhaps you're not really much interested in the topics you're writing about, and are in fact only using this situation as a soap box to stand on to push forward someone else's ideology.

Let me reiterate. 

There is no barrier of entry for people who wish to play video games. Everyone who wants to can play, and when ideology is pushed in games it does more damage to those it supposedly is there to pander to and entice than actually solving the supposed problems of society. However, I feel that this is something that I'm going to have to continually reiterate on as people in this current time period are incredibly hard-headed.


- I'll See you next Bossfight!