Game News Video Games And Male Gaze

Borderhouse Codex

PC elitist detected.

The actual reason is that most gamers are utter manipulable idiots (sorry, red blooded young males).

Why is this in News & Content and not BTE or /gd/?

Another, more important reason is that sex sells. It always has and it always will. Even to some of the women.

I kind of thought that with easy access to porn on teh netz, sex would not need to be depicted so much elsewhere, but apparently this is false.

I guess i'm getting old

So am I, I wanted to just add "that most gamers are horny utter manipulable idiots".

detected.

Fix'd it for ya.

Wrote like an idiot.

I have no problem with those scenes the same way I dont have problem with a lot hollywood action scenes. Artistic licence to twist the inconvenient facts to serve artistic aims.

The whole problem people got with Hitman trailer is because Christians, on the whole, is a easily butthurtable group. And the game devs, unconciously, always want to troll their attentions.

I mean, if they choose the Buddhism nun outfits, there wont be that much problem for sure.

On the detail, precisely because they are about to assassinate someone they should wear tightest sexiest outfits possible. The honey trap is the oldest trick in the book because it's still quite effective.

The only problem I have with the trailer is those assassins fire a RPG while on high heel. Standing tall on high heel. Recoil is a stone cold bitch and they... then again, it falls under the inconvenient fact category.

Overall idiot game reviewer is idiotic. NOthing news. Move along now.

I... liked the article. It was insightful, objective and fair-minded. Above all, it really makes a number of good points about what is wrong in the industry... and how juvenile we - gamers - are, how unmonocled this entertainment usually is.

He overreacted a little bit with Hitman trailer. I mean, stuff like that is pretty common in e.g. Tarantino movies, which may be an aesthetic they went for, for some reason (I am not entirely sure it fits Hitman, though...). Still the rest of the article is fine.

I hope it'll generate a lot of butthurt.

Hitman went off the rails a while ago. Not very 'untopically' but there was this:


Current nun thing seems much worse though, principally because it's so random, though the game may still surprise with some retarded justification.

He goes a bit overboard with it, though. Girls who play videogames are pretty numerous today, and we are exactly the same as the guys who play videogames: We want to see shirtless hot guys with chocolate abs, nice butts, and well toned arms and legs pulling some ridiculous combat moves that serve no purpose beyond showing off their awesome bod and their awesome attitude.

And I don't really understand the girls who go, like, ohmygosh the horror about it. We sexualize guys just as much as they sexualize girls, big deal: Just go read some of the comments hot guys get on youtube.

Edit: Exhibit A.

/edit

My boyfriend used to play otome videogames he got from me back when we were just friends to know the kind of fantasies and fetishes girls have and use those to score, girls should have the same attitude instead of going bawww about it.

mountain out of molehill

I thought Internet was "up in arms" about that trailer because wtf did it have to do with Hitman franchise.

The video itself was fine, though on the silly side.

Only real assassins are Lithuanians, anyway.

Ok this got me curious, how hit and miss are the fantasies and fetishes in otome videogames?

As to topic, not sure whats the fuss, didnt Saints Row 3 go over the top to, hell add in the playmate DLC.

That's pretty much what the whole internet is about.

All those people who want to get laid by writing drivel like that make me puke.

Why the fuck is this on the Codex?

You're not safe from feminism anywhere

I think that he doesn't try to be overly defensive of the fairer gender - in the sense that: "all sexuality in gaming is evil, we should purge it with fire, because it all threatens female self-image". It's more of an attack at pointless pandering to the crowd with really low-brow fan-service which is quite common in gaming. When more than 10% of characters depth comes from butt-shots and the camera paning over cleavage... that's not quite right way to do it IMO. This is really something we can do away with.

Everyone likes to see/play attractive characters but when all the character has is a chest/boob to flash, and little else it really puts the developer's intentions into question. I mean it's fine if the game aims to be a fairly low-brow entertainment with nothing but pandering about for its niche audience. However, when the devs set themselves a lofty goal or continue a well-established non-pulpy franchise (like Hitman), and stoop downs to tasteless pulp, it may signify that they have nothing interesting to tell and they must resort to cheap tricks to hold their audience's attention. And that's pretty low/ Insert a tonne dirty jokes into any novel or pan camera onto butts, cleavages and chests in a film and see how it's quality drops.

Now if such scenes were given proper context e.g. were meant to be erotic as opposed to pornographic that's another matter altogether.

Yes, ladies can be as foul-mouthed and lascivious as gents. And that's fine, by all means. The thing is:

1) It's not proper everywhere - the booth babes controversy and how some guys treat them pretty much illustrates that.

2) We really don't have to have this kind of pandering in non-niche games - especially AAA titles which are meant to be played by millions of people. I know it pretty much sells most of them, but it speaks a lot about what the developers think of their audience (low-brow entertainment).

We can. We can also do away with most other things in gaming, including gaming itself. The point isn't that we can do away with it but whether or not we should: Guys enjoy it and girls enjoy it, and games are about entertainment and enjoyment. What's the point of doing away with it?

The developer's intentions are not into question, as everyone knows there's no point to the design choice beyond providing fanservice. What's so wrong about fanservice, then?

You mean the non pulpy franchise about a genetically engineered super assassin killing his genetically engineered super assassin brothers and his creator in a secret laboratory under a mental hospital, with a minigun he carries around like it weights barely more than a box of beer?

Last time I did check videogames were not highbrow shit. They were, you know, videogames, and if I go around assploding the population of a small city worth of enemies into little bloody pieces shit's already lowbrow enough for them to throw all in the unnecesary hot girls and hot guys to make our hormones dance at the rythm of our pewpewpew-ing.

I.E: Dante being shirtless more often than not is completely unnecesary, but man, putting a shirt on him is a waste.

What proper context is there for tits and ass? What proper context is there for sweaty naked bishies slaying thousands of demons with their really big swords?

The mere existence of those elements into a game put that game outside the realm of shit were context is important, you are reading way too much into this.

Define "proper." I'm willing to bet most people believe them to be totally proper, and their opinion in the matter, without further argumenting, is as valid as yours.

Games are lowbrow entertainment, yes. We all know it. You are shooting shit into little chunks of meat, dressing up like a mighty viking warrior and screaming dragons to death, contemplating the profound consequences of moving markers around a hex grid, flying a starship around and genociding the population of a small planet in every other battle, etc. Or playing make-believe about being a lone survivor wandering a post apocaliptic wasteland and shooting giant moles while changing the lives of those your wandering touches.

This isn't suposed to be high art, and both hotness and beauty make everything better by themselves.

I do not fully understand hit and miss on the context. Would that mean, like, how popular those fantasies and fetishes are among girls? The entire genre exists for no other reason than exploiting the fantasies and fetishes of girls be those romantic, sexual, or conceptual. That's what they are selling, so they are actually pretty good at their job. Not all products are for all markets, but there are both patterns and constants inside every market and general ones that span all, or most, markets.

You can even notice that the archetypes, body language, etc, that those games exploit are the same ones other forms of pop entertainment directed at exploiting fantasies and fetishes and repressed hormones work. I.E: Idol pop groups, etc.

Sorry I omitted most of your post, but RL is calling and I just replied to what I found was the gist of your reasoning...

Yes, you are right - games are not inherently a high brow entertainment... but once upon a time novels were shunned as works a true gentlemen should despise and movies were pretty much simplistic pastime for masses as games are now. I think that half of the reason of Codex's existance is the deep disillusionment and dissatisfaction with the direction gaming in general took over those years. In order to appeal to the masses games lost their "higher" purpose - the potential to become something more. They are cheap entertainment and nothing beyond that - abundant with tricks like pandering and fan-service. I think most of us hoped that over the course of years gaming would become a little bit more sophisticated - just like novels and cinematography has become.

Generally games now are like sweets - it's good to have some from time to time, but have too much and nothing good will come out of you. Considering that games are rather time-consuming pastime which cannot broaden our horizons (because - as we agreed - they are low-brow) an average gamer eats plenty of those sweets. The question is, what will happen to him in the end?

It's fine when such an individual like yourself - with a interests in a variety of subjects and abundant knowledge ( ) - is aware of the true status of contemporary gaming and can approach them with more of a happy-go-lucky attitude. The problem starts when the people who grow up on nothing but playing games (because it's goddamn time-consuming so there's no time to read a book, go to cinema, see an opera performance etc.) start to extol this and that game as "art" or something along those lines, with - let's face it - nothing to back it up save for their ignorance. And there are more and more individuals like that (Bioware social, for instance).

Mind you that doesn't mean every game should be serious, sombre, about solving complex analytical problems and so on.

I am not saying that games are art or are supposed to be art, but consider this: games - like movies - are comprised of elements that on their own have some artistic merit - we often talk about beautiful art-direction, amazing sound tracks, great animations and so on. To create a game, it requires a lot of effort from the developers and very talented people on the board with a variety of skills. Now for this extremely gifted individuals to pour all their efforts into what is essentially is a pulp with no merit, function or message, but with quite a bloated price-tag, is a terrible waste of talent, time and money - their as developers and mine as a gamer. For all games to be about nothing but pandering to the crowd is just disheartening.

And yes, hotness and beauty make everything better by themselves but on their own they are like glamour - they are very superficial. And if misused they can become as pleasing as grotesque.

I have no problem with girl gamers liking "shirtless hot guys with chocolate abs, nice butts, and well toned arms and legs " Goose and Sauce and all that. Just to clear the board.