The SCUMM Manifesto
holding games to a higher standard
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Photoset reblogged from Eliza Gauger
Ten big-name games with nearly identical protagonists, collection 1 of 2.Click to read captions.
Following up with my last post about Problems With Video Games, I chose these particular games because each of them is (or includes) a single-player campaign in which you cannot change the identity of your character, he (you) just is a white male and you have to deal with it. This is the first post of two, because tumblr has a ten image limit per photo post and the number of games with a white male brunette protagonist is “most of them”.
Note that I in no way am criticizing the design of these games (that’s for another post), and have played + enjoyed most of them. These rosters are purely to point out the near-uniformity of the finalized character designs.
EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT: Introducing the DoomGuy (DG), the new unit of measurement for rating how generic a video game character is! The scale goes from 1.0 doomguy (DoomGuy: darkish hair, caucasian, blue eyes, male) to 0.0 doomguys (RayMan, Alyx Vance, etc).
Most of the guys above are at 1.0dg or just below. Thank you for making doomguy your unit of choice.
(doomguy proposed by michael42k in #zumschwarzenferkel)
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What if racists had a city in the sky? Ken Levine asks the hard questions!
The recent announcement that the Bioshock Infinite cover would be a tour de cliche featuring your average dark-haired caucasian protagonist, chin down, eyes up, rather than something like the (brilliant) fanart Rockwell/Leyendecker Saturday Morning Post pastiche (by Alex Garner) is symptomatic of the entire game development, at least as well as I can tell from the trailers and gameplay released so far.
Hey this game looks pretty g-
“THIS TIME IT’S PAYBACK,” SAID JOHN BIOSHOCK GRIMLYThe most striking difference is in the character of Elizabeth, who started out as a pageboy-bobbed hellraiser in copious eyeliner.
Notice the slight widening of the nasal bridge, the freckles, the nasolabial fold and the longer philtrum.
Notice also that the nose is slightly more convex, stronger and more mature here than in the later, infantilized Elizabeth, who has a more typical Malibu snub nose.
Her freckles are gone, her mouth is smaller (more baby-like), and her hair and makeup—previously strongly-styled, indicative of a woman’s agency over her own appearance (see: Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, etc)—have been lightened and softened, brown instead of black, with the sideswept, childish bangs revealing a larger forehead (again, a physical sign of immaturity). Her nasolabial folds are softened and her skin appears to be more tan than her original gothic pallor.
And while it’s hard to tell if the voice actor has changed her reading style or if this is entirely dependent on the different emotional tones of the different scenes, Elizabeth’s voice sounds higher, more ingratiating, and not at all angry. In other words, she’s been defanged—the new Elizabeth is totally unchallenging, and appears to be about 13 years old.
The cleavage was absolutely gratuitous even at the beginning, but at least she sort of appeared to be a young woman (the character is supposed to be 20 years old), rather than a little girl with precocious tits.
Her original appearance in the first gameplay trailer to be released portrays her furiously acting, her brows lowered, her voice hoarse, low and powerful. In each following video release from the developers, she became more and more dilute, until she took on her final form of what appears to be a kewpie-head-on-a-barbie-doll bimbo. “Booker, Booker,” she simpers, holding up some shiny knickknack as they crash through some abandoned store, “gold!” Haha! Stupid girls!
Exciting realtime events!That she has been removed entirely from the final cover design is telling, as her character also appears to have been slowly extracted from the actual game. My enthusiasm for the gameplay has waned with each new trailer.
To quote a friend,
RN: you’ve already experienced ken levine’s horrifying epic about what if objectivists had superpowers
RN: now sit back and enjoy as he takes on battered wife syndrome through the medium of robot birds and racial stereotypes
Adding to this awful morass is Levine’s revelation that Elizabeth is based on an abused woman he knew in real life:
“When you arrive in Columbia, Elizabeth has been trapped in this tower since she was a little girl – and you bust her out. That’s essentially the catalyst that heightens the conflict. You really turn the heat up in a way that it wasn’t before,”
[…]
Levine revealed that Elizabeth’s complicated relationship with her captor, the Songbird, was inspired by his personal experience with a victim of domestic abuse who inevitably returned to her abuser.
And just in case you weren’t tired of books, movies and games vilifying the notion of populist uprisings in oppressive capitalist citystates,
“The Vox Populi [editor’s note: these pseudo-soviets in the trailers appear to contain the only visibly non-white members] believe that the city is corrupt, so they want to demonstrate to the workers and the downtrodden of the world that this symbol of American imperialism has to fall. A prophecy says that if Elizabeth falls then the city falls with her. So they want her dead.”
So, just to be absolutely crystal clear here: Elizabeth is a mental child in a woman’s body, who has been freed from her tower-prison, and who is now being hunted by
the 99%Occupypopulist rabble intent on senselessly smashing the state, as well as by her robot father-monster/ex boyfriend. Only one man can stop them.There is absolutely no way this can go wrong.
CORRECTION: The SEP cover above was not official Irrational art, but fan work by Alex Garner. Kotaku says: “[The official cover is] nowhere near as imaginative or as evocative as what comic-book artist Alex Garner drew earlier this year(featured above), even if that followed a similar magazine-cover design published by Game Informer more than two years ago.” The text above has been corrected to reflect this.
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Post reblogged from Risky Lengths
Holy Crap, Eliza Gauger is writing videogame deconstruction.
It is of course, awesome. Especially since she’s focusing on the one online game I actually play.
Her metaphor of the Pyro as what it’s like to play as a female in the world of online gaming is brilliant. And it almost makes the idea of playing Pyro a conscious act of insurgency/rebellion/rejection/protest if you know why you’re doing it.
Which makes me think of this statement by Flavia Dzodan of Red Light Politics when she was rightfully pissed off at Western Feminism:
To the point that I even considered ditching the label altogether. And if that happened, I would use a new label that pretty much sums up my politics: Flame-throwerism. Wherein I set feminism on fire and with its ashes I fill my cats’ kitty litter box and let them pee on it. That’s how angry I’ve been at feminism this week. Kitty litter levels of outrage.
I can draw no distinct connection to the two that really works, I guess, but adopting the Pyro as some sort of figure for feminist insurgency just seems to make me smile.
As a side note, I’ve managed to never be on crappy servers where women are sexually harassed. The ones that were shitty and had a lot of homophobic or racist harassment going on seemed to be devoid of women, looking at Eliza’s article, they probably weren’t, just that the women didn’t speak up so as to avoid the same harassment.
And I have always made it a point to speak up when I’ve heard harassment. Though I’ve never got around to buying a mic, so usually it’s just in text. One of my favorite days of playing though was a professed gay male griefing a ranting homophobe so bad until the homophobe left the server. The vocal majority of the server was in support of the gay male, and not the homophobe. It’s nice to know these communities do exist in online gaming, but it’d sure be better if that level of tolerance and support were the norm.
{EDIT: On some level, I know the idea of griefing the homophobe was wrong, however thee was something uplifting about the support for the griefing, the idea that someone was standing up to him, and that at that moment everyone else was essentially standing up, too, that made it seem the right thing to do.}
(Source: thescummmanifesto)
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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.
