The SCUMM Manifesto
holding games to a higher standard
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The post about Pyro sure was interesting. But it bothers me people rarely take into account other genders. Why couldn't Pyro be something else than male or female? A genderqueer? Transgender? Hermaphrodite? I think it's more likely than Pyro being a woman.
Asked by Anonymous
I wonder why this posted without a response.
Trans, genderqueer, and intersexed Pyros are not unusual in fanart and fanfic at all. If you’re asking why your average nerd looks at Pyro in terms of male vs. female, remember that many of them are people who can’t handle having a woman’s voice on their mic chat. Their concepts of gender and sex are incredibly regressive.
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Got any plans to get other writers in? I expect there are quite a number of players who'd like to have a shot at deconstructing their favorite pastime.
Asked by zedoktor
Yes, absolutely. I would like to turn this into a full-fledged gameblog, so I will be looking for writers (or just contributed articles) after I’ve got a few more parts of the TF2 piece up.
I will be looking for writers and writing about games with a good grasp of aesthetics, history, literature, or art. And I’d like to hear from writers within other fandoms, as well. I think, over time, this blog will evolve into whatever it needs to be, but I will always keep the focus on aesthetics, and in particular, the failings of the game industry, so far, to produce anything that could be called art, with a very few notable exceptions.
I love games, and so should any future SCUMM Manifesto writers. But it needs to be a tough love.
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Just a quick update to let everyone know that I appreciate all of the followers I’ve gotten since Part I and II of my TF2 deconstruction went up, and that I’m currently working on Part III. I have also added an About section, in case you wanted to know more about me. I have a few very good questions in my ask box/fanmail that I will get to very shortly, so bear with me. Thanks!
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I was hoping this was going to be asked! For those not in the know, the SCUM (one M) Manifesto is a famous radical feminist document written by Valerie Solanas. As per my Elaine Marley gif, it opens with a call to arms to women, to bring down the government, the patriarchy, etc. It is may be satire, or even a parody of the far far hyperbolic end of patriarchal culture. A few people believe the Manifesto is intended to be serious, a view which is supported by the fact that Solanas was the person who shot Andy Warhol.
Solanas was a friend of (or at least friendly with) Warhol prior to the shooting, and both artists were strongly obfuscatory in their performances—the why of what they did was usually a mystery and sometimes meaningless, so whether or not the SCUM Manifesto is intended to be taken seriously is up for debate. It may be absolutely sincere, it may be farce, or it may be meant as something in between: a ha-ha-only-serious, tongue-in-cheek, hyperbolic-yet-sincere sort of catharsis.
The other half of the pun is SCUMM, that is, Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion, which is a scripting language developed at LucasArts (known at the time as Lucasfilm Games) to ease development of the graphical adventure game Maniac Mansion. It was used for every LucasArts game up until Grim Fandango, when they switched to the GrimE engine. This means the SCUMM engine was the arena for some of the greatest video games of all time (the Secret of Monkey Island, Sam and Max Hit the Road, et al), and was the foundation on which our modern ideas of ‘good games’ were built, and then expanded upon.
The SCUMM games, though primitive by modern standards, showed a unifying aesthetic comprised of all their parts: the music was exquisite, the art was excellent, the moods were meaningful even when the games were goofy. If you played the Secret of Monkey Island near the time that it came out, you likely remember the feeling of subdued excitement during the opening music and eerily beautiful title screen:
That LucasArts was able to wring so much from so little then, is very much like what a few select studios are doing now. They work within the confines of their technology and medium to make things that are greater than the sum of their parts.
So the purpose of this blog is to, as stated in our subtitle, Hold Games to a Higher Standard. It will not be exclusively focused on Valve games, nor will it always be feminist critique, nor will it always be serious. Primarily, this blog will focus on aesthetics, which encompasses everything about the experience of playing a game, and that will involve breaking down, minutely, what went wrong and what went right.
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Just to be clear, “Why is this debate still going on? Pyro is voiced by an adult male and his muffled voice is too deep to be a girl’s.” was a quote from a forum poster who believed the sex of the voice actor automatically determined the sex of the character, which is ludicrous on its face, but also indicative of the constricted concepts of “gender” that many gamers have.
Wuollet brings up a very good point about the assumptions made about who a “gamer” is, assumptions that female gamers often have to use as a sort of nerd-shaped ghillie suit in order to avoid detection and harassment. Unless stated (and sometimes, proven) otherwise, everyone online is presupposed white, male, and between the ages of 15 and 25.
Rule 29 of the Internet clearly states “In the internet all girls are men, and all kids are undercover FBI agents”, and this is widely believed not only by denizens of /b/, but most unaffiliated persons, as well. It’s a double-edged stereotype, because while on the surface, it appears to be an anti-man generalization (“Only men are lame enough to spend hours online, wasting their time playing video games and trolling forums”), what it actually is, is a rehash of the position that women have no agency; that they do not enjoy playing games, posting online, etc. unless they’re doing it to impress men or “get attention”. The bald fact of a woman playing a video game online because she enjoys it is literally unbelievable.
On a personal note, I have been looking for a good, realistic voice-changing filter for my mic for a long time.
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Followed because of your amazing TF2 analyzations. I am amazed by your intelligence and can't wait to read part three.
Asked by serene-shadows
Many thanks, I really appreciate it. I can’t wait to write part three. I’m still looking around for some material I’d like to reference, but I should be publishing another part soon.
As an aside, everyone, if you’re reading these posts and you spot inaccuracies, have questions, or would just like to share your own experiences, ideas, anecdotes, analyses or lore, please send me an Ask. Anon is fine.
Make sure to tell me that you would prefer not to be published, if that is the case.
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Hi, I don't know if this is the right place to ask, but thanks for featuring my picture in your TF2 post (The Team one by Baru). I was just wondering if you could change my website link to either my deviantart link (barukurii@deviantart) or my tumblr (baruyon@tumblr), since I don't use that wordpress account any more. Thank you and sorry for the trouble!
Asked by baruyon
Yes, absolutely! Your TF2 art is some of the best there is, bar none, and I’ve been wondering where to find more of your stuff (TF2 or no) for a long time.
Baru is here, everyone:
http://baruyon.tumblr.com/
http://barukurii.deviantart.com/ -
[continued from part 1: The Oasis of the Real]
PART II
The team lineup. From left to right: Pyro, Engineer, Spy, Heavy Weapons Guy, Sniper, Scout, Soldier, Demoman, and Medic.
The TF2 team members are, each of them, individual archetypes of “classical” masculinity.
The Heavy is the good-natured and huggable bear (protective; physically massive), the Medic is the aloof intellectual (professorial; teutonic), the Spy is the sleazy Eurotrash Lothario (seductive; manipulative), the Scout is the hyperactive teenager (shallow bravado masking youthful self-doubt), the Sniper is the easygoing outdoorsman (rugged; distant), the Demoman is the “damaged goods” drunkard[6] (as symbolized by his eyepatch and slouching shape), Engineer is the cornfed and capable All-American Dad (friendly; mechanically-minded), and Soldier is the aging army man (strict; blustery).
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PART I
The first time I found a Team Fortress 2 thread on 4chan’s yaoi board [1], I was amazed.
Spy and Sniper on a couch, by Kob.As an online multiplayer-only, plotless, mindlessly-violent first-person-shooter, I had assumed that the female fanbase would be limited; confined mostly to diehard first-person-shooter (FPS) enthusiasts, a subset of games with few female devotees. Fewer in number than female WoW players, or Harry Potter readers, certainly. Despite this, the vast majority of the TF2 fanart posters—and artists—seemed to be women. Weirder still, not all of them even played the game, and very few of them played the game regularly. This was stunning. It was as if I had happened upon a cargo cult—imagine someone showing up to a Star Trek convention with exquisite Spock fan art and a beautiful costume, having never watched the show.
