The Gaming Den

Eikre wrote:So my question is, is there anything particularly validating to the personhood of that sorceress?

Dragon's Crown protagonists are silent. None of them get any significant characterization. But beyond that: that is a really terrible bar to be setting. The thing that makes a piece of work sexist is promoting sexism, not failing to condemn sexism. It is completely okay for a work to simply not touch on the topic.

Eikre wrote:Yeah, sure, you and I observe a character like the sorceress and comprehend: There is nothing about bouncing tits and flat tummies that contradicts our enlightened values. Meanwhile, the wannabe date rapists out there will continue to summarize her as a bitch, that being the default term for creatures with vaginas.

Do you honestly think Asshole McFuckFace only hates women when he can see their boobs? Have you considered the possibility that Asshole McFuckFace hates women all the time, and separately likes seeing their boobs?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Your entire line of criticism is founded on the notion that objectification follows sexualization. Misogynists hate women, not women in bikinis. Not exposing yourself will not protect you from having your opinion and personhood dismissed by them - just ask Anita Sarkeesian, who does not do her videos in bikinis and manages to be a target of misogyny just fine.

The only thing I'll say about the Sorceress controversy is that I think it's really weird that people flip their shit about a female character with exaggerated maternal traits but they don't flip their shit about a female character with exaggerated childlike traits.

There are in fact lots of ways for a woman to be beautiful, and popular culture should celebrate all of them. The reality is that there are not enough female characters whose bodytype strays from the range of waif-like to athletic with breasts ranging from washboard to double-D. When people flip out about how She Hulk, Power Girl, or Sorceress are sexist because of their appearance, that strikes me as deeply insane. There should be more characters like Big Barda and She-Hulk, just as there should be more characters like Power Girl and Sorceress.

I mean yes, there should also be female characters who aren't beautiful, just as there are male characters who aren't handsome. But anyone arguing for narrower lists of bodytypes has clearly not gotten the memo. This isn't even a thing where we can laugh it off and agree to disagree, there are lives on the line. There are tens of millions of people with eating disorders, and eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all forms of mental illness. One of the leading causes of eating disorders in the West is a unified portrayal in the media of the feminine ideal as being extremely thin.

This is not a long chain of inferences here. It's like two fucking steps. People who try to push portrayals of large breasted women out of games and comic books are literally killing teenage girls. By the tens of thousands.

-Username17

That is easily the greatest thing I have read all week.

In Dragon's Crown eating restores hitpoints. Characters automatically eat when idling. Thus Dragon's Crown encourages a positive view of munching on meats, pastries, fruits, and other foods, potentially saving lives.

http://media.giphy.com/media/vOZU7mnraSgik/giphy.gif

Dragon's Crown also encourages friendship between dwarves and elves, thus fighting racism that has plagued tabletok RPG's since misinterpretations of Tolkien


[/ morality]

As for women of diverse body shapes, what games let you play as them? I remember Tobal no.1 had a gigantic wrestling mother.

What games let you play as men of diverse body shapes for that matter?

Just about any make-a-character game. Dark Souls lets you make 'em however you want.

Trying to remember what other games that aren't RPGs.

Personally, I think a better indicator is how many sympathetic characters have diverse bodytypes. X-Men legends had a cool moment for the Blob and pointed out that even though he's fat, he's still a powerful fighter.

Portrayal matters. Dune rubbed me weird because Baron Harkonnen has every trait that could be perceived as negative that Frank Herbert could think of--being a hideous, disease-ridden, physically-weak, morbidly-obese, nouveau-rich homosexual pedophile descended from a coward. On the other end, you get Sergeant Jackrum from Monstrous Regiment. Fat and badass.

Also, for Dragon's Crown. I remember there's some in-game art, so hey, I went looking. They do a mix of bodytypes in there. Sorta. http://www.creativeuncut.com/art_dragons-crown_a.html

fectin wrote:What games let you play as men of diverse body shapes for that matter?

Street Fighter 2.

-Username17

Most pro wrestling games let you play fat dudes as well.

Muramasa's 4th DLC lets you play as an oni that has a kid, teenager, and musclehulk form


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xmfHl78--k

fectin wrote:What games let you play as men of diverse body shapes for that matter?

King of Fighters, Tekken, Street Fighter, most fighting game series really.

The mystery dungeon Torneko spinoff of Dragon Quest lets you play as a portly middle aged merchant family man.



Muramasa DLC also lets you play as a dirt farmer on his way to the capital to complain to the feudal lord that taxes are too high.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlJc7co3kC4

Dynasty Warriors also has a pretty high diversity of male bodytypes. Most games with a large cast of playable characters are going to see a wide variety of bodytypes amongst the males, but usually the females, in addition to being outnumbered by at 2:1 at least, are all waifs.

Also, the thin swimmer build and the bulky lifter build both see lots of representation in games. If you have a game with a single protagonist, odds are excellent he's white, male, and for some reason will always have brown hair, but there is actually some variation in whether they're skinny or muscley.

Most games with a decent number of male characters have a large number of body types. Ones with large numbers of females...still don't do that shit most of the time.

I always trot out League in examples, but there are literally no HUMAN (one of them is a bird and one of them is a human child) women in League that aren't conventionally beautiful (and also young). The men get a bunch of different body types to play with, and they range from attractive to ugly as sin.

Let's compare some League men and League women! And remember, we aren't counting characters that are not at least mostly human. So we can call Elise human because she is just a sexy woman who also turns into a spider, but we aren't including Anivia because she is a bird that turns into an egg.

League men: Wrinkly old wizard, Fat drunk who throws booze, Buff guy with sword (but which one!), thin (but fit) guy with sword, fat guy who was grafted together with robot spider legs, dude made of fire, Spartan. While there are a ton of buff and conventionally attractive men, there are at least 3 human males that aren't attractive in the least barring some very specific fetishes.

Let's look at the women of League: Sexy spider lady, Sexy fox lady, Sexy assassin lady (they changed a skin of hers because people complained about her literally pole dancing for her dance), Sexy wind lady, Sexy pirate lady, Sexy archer, Sexy steampunk witch hunter, Sexy mage (take your pick) ... it goes on. Hilariously, most of the female Halloween skins follow the "sexy version of something else" whereas the dudes get skins ranging from "actual ghost thing with a sheet on it" to "robot wearing a fake 'stache".

The closest you get to a non-conventionally beautiful woman is probably Quinn, and that's because she dresses like somebody who's going to battle. She's still young, pretty, and thin.

tl;dr: There are no women who aren't conventionally attractive in the most popular PC game in the world. There are plenty of men who aren't, though. That seems weird, right?

Suikoden, courtesy of 108 being a fucking lot of characters, generally has some diversity of female body types. I can't recall any who are actually fat, but it does have giant piles of muscle.

name_here wrote:Suikoden, courtesy of 108 being a fucking lot of characters, generally has some diversity of female body types. I can't recall any who are actually fat, but it does have giant piles of muscle.

Actually Suikoden 4 had Pecola

And in other News:
Apple releases iPhone 6 Plus.
Samsung Users laugh and laugh.

As a Samsung user, can you tell me why I need to laugh about this? Is it just "Hahaha, those idiots fork out every single time." or is the device particularly fucked?

Mind you, it helps stimulate the economy every time they do that, as Krugman explained in one article. Though he did point out that spending that amount of money on anything at all would do the same, so it's not the intrinsic magic of Apple, it's just a positive side-effect of having a bunch of suckers.

Probably laughing because Samsung smartphone screens have dwarfed the Iphone for a while, or something.

There's some giant stupid patent fight between Samsung and Apple related to smartphones. Apparently something happened in it recently-ish.

I wonder how the apple faboys will spin it that all of a sudden 5,5" is not way too big but just right now that apple is doing it but it was the devils work when done by samsung.
furthermore, they were oh so proud of the whole retina display and now the iphone has less dpi than most of it's older competition . . and the big one even goes over to the 16:9 screen format . . and it will cost an arm and a leg while doing nothing particularly better either.
The whole fapingate is just salt into the wound now, so meh.

I've played with Samsung phones and while they're mostly the same as iPhones I just did not care for the differences in UI. For doing tons of web-browsing a bigger screen makes sense, even if it isn't uber resolution (goes for either phone). Samsung got that right before Apple much because Steve Jobs thought that you didn't want it to be so big you can't hold it like a phone... missing out on that they really were selling handheld internet, rather than phones that were smart. I was no better visionary in retrospect since I thought there was no way to use an ipad without looking like a douchebag when they first came out. I guess my perception has shifted.

Last December I had the option to get an iphone 5c vs two Samsung S3's (either was $0 +contract) and while I considered Samsung for the backup/wifi-toy for kids, I instead opted for the iphone. My only regret is that I'd rather have paid a bit for more memory on the iphone.

This came up on reddit. As a Windows Phone user, I have no idea how much of it is or isn't true.

Well I don't know what NFC payments are, but for a lot of that, yeah, my Samsung has a bunch of those things and I just assumed they were standard things any phone could have.

The S4 for example has the IR Blaster,so you CAN use your phone as a remote control for most anything . . i do that quite often.
Wireless Charging is something HTC is doing i think. Not something i would want but eh.
Multi User Support is in the newest Android i think. no idea what selectable default app is suposed to mean. if it is just that a certain app can be selected for doing a certain task when there are more than one apps installed to handle that task . . yeah, pretty much since the beginning of android.
split screen apps: yes, also since android 4 or so i think, at least on my S4 it works in theory, i just don't use it because i have no need for that.
app install from browser:
yes, works, also basically since the beginning of android.
virtual buttons . . this is a stupid thing to say, because, really, what else is anything on a touch screen?

NFC is near field communication.
A kind of even worse blutooth that works with the RFID idiocy. And now you can make payments on certain cash registers in certain shops/situations with that. Yes, that works in android since quite some time and now in the iPhone as well. No idea why i would ever use that . .

Wireless charging is the tits and is on devices from several manufacturers..

Oh right, the thing for instant payments, and the "BE FRIGHTENED OF TEENAGERS, YOUNG ADULTS, TECHNOLOGY AND YOUR NEIGHBOURS" show did a thing about how easy it is for ANYONE to steal your money and identity with it.