Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons

General Off-Topic Discussion
61

I haven’t played “Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons”, and I can’t speak to the exact example people are using. But you cited a game I worked on (Revolution 60), and I care a lot about the subject of minority representation in video games. So:

Revolution 60 isn’t perfect. I’m not going to claim that it is. There are a few balls we dropped - in a CNET interview, for example, the studio head talked about how we can improve next time by diversifying the body types further. (cnet.com/news/revolution-60- … ass-women/)

But: the vast majority of video game characters are white, able-bodied, conventionally attractive, heterosexual cisgender men, aged approximately 18 to 35. (This matches the vast majority of professional video game developers.)

Getting away from that is a good thing.

I’m not going to claim that Revolution 60 is perfect. But I am going to point out that its all-female casting is extraordinarily unusual (the original Portal is the only other example coming to mind.)

How many games have all-male casting?

Worse, in many ways - how many games have all-male casting, except for one or two token female characters, who are depicted as less - less important, less effective, less admired, less worthwhile - than the males around her?

No one is trying to take your video games away. Moreover, it’s okay to love things that are problematic. (For a non-video game example, I can’t shake my love of Piers Anthony’s early writing, although a lot of things he does and says are spectacularly problematic.)

But to cover your eyes, and say that just because you love something, it isn’t problematic… first, you’re wrong. And second, it’s harmful to the people around you.

If the only representations of someone like you are representations where you are shown as weak, evil, less than human - that’s a problem. That causes pain, and it’s not reasonable to tell someone who’s harmed by it that it shouldn’t hurt them. It does hurt them! Skewed representations like this are actively harmful to everyone who isn’t white, isn’t able-bodied, isn’t conventionally attractive, isn’t heterosexual, isn’t cisgender, isn’t male, and isn’t aged 18 to 35.

And if we don’t call out video games and video game companies that follow that model, then we’re part of that harm.

I believe in diversity. I believe that every aspect of that default model - the white, able-bodied, conventionally attractive, heterosexual cisgender male, aged approximately 18 to 35 - should be questioned and examined and subverted, because everyone deserves to be depicted, not as stereotypes, but as people.

Video game developers have control over what characters they create.
Every time a video game developer creates a game, they have an opportunity to actively change the world for the better by including minority characters.
Every time a video game developer creates a game without minority characters at all, they are actively rejecting that chance to change the world for the better.
And every time a video game developer creates a game where the only minority characters are less competent/important/effective than the default model, they are actively reinforcing that harm.

There’s an analogy I’ve heard a few times that seems pertinent here.

Imagine you’re at a crowded party, and Awesome Guy is there. He’s lots of fun to talk to and hang out with. But after a while, people start complaining about him and say he’s a problem. When you ask why, they say, “He seems nice, but every time he comes near me, he keeps stomping on my feet! I asked him not to, but he won’t stop, and it hurts! And by now, my feet are really hurting and I’m really sick of being anywhere around him.”

The correct response to this isn’t, “You’re just imagining it - he never stomped on MY feet, so he can’t be stomping on yours.”
The correct response is to turn to Awesome Guy and ask, “Hey, how come you’re stomping on all these people’s feet? That’s not cool.”

And maybe Awesome Guy doesn’t realize that he’s been stomping feet - maybe he’s just a giant klutz. In which case, there’s some education that can be done, and then he can stop smashing everyone’s instep.

But maybe Awesome Guy doesn’t care that he’s been causing active pain - or maybe he thinks some people deserve to have their feet stomped. In which case, that’s worth knowing too, and worth pointing out so that people can clear out when he’s around.

tl;dr: I object to stereotypical and harmful images of minorities in video games because they actively hurt me or people I care about. Just because you don’t see the harm, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Video game developers can and should do better than this.

62

Carolyn, your post says the first quote is Trummgottist’s, when it should be Peter Pears.

63

Sure. Absolutely. The narrative comes first, always, and no single work should have to represent everyone. But there are some huge caveats that come with this.

  1. If ‘don’t shoehorn’ means you end up with a situation where the vast majority of game characters (and particularly protagonists) are white straight cis able-bodied American males aged 18-35, then the system’s producing some really limiting game premises. Or something else is going on.

  2. Who decides ‘where they don’t belong?’ Often the person saying this is doing the equivalent of your awful grandpa’s rants about how back in the day there were no gay people in his town. Yes there were, grandpa. You just weren’t looking. (See: ‘there were no black people in medieval Europe!’ One, if you’d actually done your homework you’d know that there were, and two, I don’t see you getting upset about the pumpkins and maize and freedom of movement.)

  3. In the great majority of videogames (though not Brothers, I suspect) the writing and characterisation is so shallow that there’s no compelling narrative reason to make the protagonist, or most of the supporting characters, any particular race, gender, sexuality or culture. And yet.

64

ah, good old “get over it”

such a valuable rhetorical tool

65

“gender is irrelevant here […] A male “allurer” wouldn’t have worked AT ALL.”

Gender is relevant here, and you explain why it’s relevant.

[spoiler]She’s an evil seductress were-spider, trying to eat you, and that’s why you rip her legs off.

I mean, slow down for a second. This is a fantasy game in which the player rips the legs off of an evil seductress were-spider.[/spoiler]

I think we even agree that this is not a positive representation of women. On the face of it, gruesome fantasy violence against underprivileged people is not a good thing. It’s harmful by default; it it stands in need of defense, or in need of apology. (The author has offered the latter.)

You say that it’s “true to folklore,” but that’s hardly a defense. We know that our society was regressively sexist. Being true to that makes the new thing sexist, too.

I, too, was raised in a sexist culture, and I have a lot of nostalgia for sexist books, TV shows, and video games. A lot of sexist tropes take me back to a happy place when I was a boy; girls were gross and life was simple. But those are guilty pleasures of mine, and I’m already in a position of great privilege.

This game would be just as good if there were women playing a positive active role. It might not have been as awesome for you (though it might have been!) but that’s OK if that makes it more awesome for people less privileged than us.

It could go too far, but we’re nowhere near gender equality yet. When we reach gender equality and we go too far, folks who used to have privilege and lost it will most certainly let us all know about it. In the meantime, if we’re on some sort of slippery slope to gender equality, then I’m more than happy to jump on that Slip’N Slide.

66

Oops. Thank you maga, apologies Trummgottist, fixed the attribution.

67

This echoes an article that came out about a week ago by Katherine Cross: The nightmare is over: They’re not coming for your games

I agree that this is an essential motivation for fervent defenses of the status quo of violent sexist games. However, I think the nightmare isn’t over.

In the IF community in particular, I think we have to acknowledge that global capitalism totally did take our games away. There was a thriving market for text adventures; dozens of people were working on them full time. Then the market fell out of text adventures, but at least there was a thriving market for puzzle+story+exploration graphical adventures. Then the market fell out of that, too.

We still have/make that kind of game, but nobody spends AAA dollars on them; they’re a niche market.

It is totally imaginable that Peter’s “where does it stop?” argument is right, and we’re on a slippery slope to a world where it’s just not affordable to devote years of work to make lush 3D games based on traditional sexist folklore, and so it’s important to make a public defense of that kind of game if you liked it and you want there to be more games like that.

We are trying to take the boys club away, or at least minimize it, even though some people are really happy there. We shouldn’t be surprised when they complain about it!

68

A few points chiming in with the excellent points that other folks have been making:

  1. “It’s a folkloric environment” doesn’t excuse an atavistic portrayal of women. Emily Short has many many games that draw on folklore. They don’t just reproduce the folkloric depiction of women, or men for that matter. I think I’ve read an interview with her where she talked about how when she made Bronze she just couldn’t depict someone who behaves the way the Beast behaves as a positive romantic figure.

  2. Hanon said “It’s tricky to second-guess what characters an author should use, without homogenizing the cast of every story into a bland vanilla sitcom which must requisitely include a spunky girlfriend.” But it’s not all that tricky to find a middle ground between “every story must have a spunky girlfriend” (and, you know, why not a female protagonist?) and “in my story all women are treacherous.” Look at Emily Short’s work again. Are the women in them one-dimensionally positive spunky girlfriend types? Snow White? The Queen? Cinderella? Andra, to take a step beyond folklore? But they’re real characters, not just one-dimensional foils for the male protagonists. Not to say that there’s a problem with having male protagonists and female supporting characters. But please, let’s have the women be more than props.

  3. It would be madness to say that the depiction of women and men in games, or any other media, is anywhere near balanced in this way. Think about the Bechdel test; how many of any representative collection of games you find have two women conversing about something other than a man? How many have two men conversing about something other than a woman? Or interacting, if you want to include mostly non-verbal games. If you’ve got a non-cherry-picked list of games where these numbers are equal, I’d love to see it.

  4. I think there’s some idea here that raising these kinds of concern is applying politics to art. Well, if a game or artistic corpus has a shallow depiction of half of humanity, that’s an artistic fault. We’d make fun of a comics artist who can’t draw hands; why is a writer who can’t write women better? This doesn’t mean it’s a fatal artistic flaw; there aren’t any women in Moby Dick for good reason and it’s still great, and I think JG Ballard is fantastic even though, well, let’s say he can’t draw hands. But I can understand why people would reject works for these artistic faults. Here’s Belle Waring on a similar subject (scroll down to “8-bit Mario” if you want). (On preview: What Carolyn and Dan said about “No one is trying to take your videogames away.”)

Also, Peter, I think it’s pretty shabby of you to complain about my tone and my supposed failure to consider your arguments immediately after personally attacking me in a thread I wasn’t even participating in.

69

I feel compelled to point out that

The troll woman and the (dead) mother are portrayed positively.

So I don’t see where “all women are portrayed negatively in the game” comes from.

70

(post removed as being something the original poster regrets, apologises for and wishes to dissociate himself from)

71

In the sentence immediately after the sentence I quoted, you attack an unnamed poster. That poster was me. What response did you expect from the poster you had just attacked, a hug?

No, you hyperbolized it. I pointed out that the thing you had said was so far from the truth that, even when you adjust for hyperbole, it’s still wrong. Very wrong. And if you didn’t like the swear word, well, if you’re going to be hyperbolic in your dismissal of someone’s critique of sexism, you really ought not to be so sensitive to the kind of language you get in response. Which is more extreme, “fuck” or “The two greatest threats of our time are definitely Health & Safety and Political Correction”?

72

(post removed as being something the original poster regrets, apologises for and wishes to dissociate himself from)

73

I’m not sure you can say ‘the marketplace will decide what works best’ in an interactive fiction forum with a straight face, bro.

I agree, completely, that it’s the author’s discretion. (Including how much to listen to critics, and to which.) The discretion, the responsibility; ultimately, the blame. Authors can, and often do, make bad decisions.

(Except when, as is the norm in big-budget games, artistic freedom is not the province of any one person; decisions are made, if not precisely by committee, then by a great many people with a lot of different interests. You don’t get to modify your game to fit what the CEO and the CFO and the creative director and the marketing department want, then turn around and say ‘what? suggesting I change the game to make it less hostile to women? But my pure untrammeled artistic prerogative!’)

And the reader, in turn, is not obliged to agree with the author’s decisions. They can say whatever they like about the author. If the author’s discretion leads to bad results, it’s right and proper to complain about it.

It is in the nature of minorities that when they have a grievance, they have to complain loudly; otherwise nobody will pay it any attention. (Yes, of course some grievances are trivial, imaginary, or illegitimate. I’m not sure how that changes things.)

OK, look: there’s no such thing as ‘just folklore.’ Folklore comes in many versions. Folklore is inherently a form without canonical versions, a form that evolves. Authors change it to fit their needs, which are always contemporary needs. As you say, it’s often raw and brutal: and it comes with politics baked in, and sometimes those politics are pretty horrible. And if you accept the whole package, you’re responsible for the whole package.

Like, if you’re writing a story about Thor, you have a lot of different versions. Are you going for the watered-down Thor that you read about in your kid-lit Norse Myths And Legends anthology? The bloody brute of the Lay of Harbard, who brags about his rapes and murders and threatens to kill his own father over a minor disagreement? The oafish straight-man in the Lay of Thrym? The Romantic Germanic-identity version? The clean-cut Marvel version? What attitude are you taking to the guy? The choice is not made for you. And the choice is always made with modern sensibilities, whether you mean to or not.

74

Was Thor a random example? If so that’s a bizarre coincidence, because Marvel’s Thor is female now, and female in a strong, positive way, which is cool.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/thor-as-woman-marvel-reveals-new-incarnation-of-superhero-in-comic-series-9608661.html

I love this quote from the series writer, Jason Aaron:

“This is not She-Thor. This is not Lady Thor. This is not Thorita. This is THOR."

75

It seems like you’re disagreeing with my argument in a spoiler tag upthread, but you’re not directly responding to it. Using MUDs to introduce people to IF? Did you see that argument? (The spoiler tag makes it easy to overlook.)

Anyway, it’s not spoiling anything to say that the (dead) mother dies in the non-interactive intro of the game. The movie fade-cuts from her death to the little brother weeping at her grave.

We call that a “disposable woman,” a woman who dies as a plot device to motivate a male character.
As for the other woman you mention, in the most charitable light, you’d call her a “damsel in distress.”

We give these roles names because they are extremely common. They are not positive portrayals of women, especially because they are so common. (And let’s not forget the other portrayal of a woman in this game, which I think we can all agree is a negative portrayal.)

But, as I argued above, Brothers takes these tropes further by juxtaposing the (dead) mother and the damsel with male characters who can be trusted to help. (And then tosses in an achievement for being pointlessly cruel to a little girl, just to put a cherry on the cake.)

76

Okay. I believe you.

It looked to me as if you were using Brothers as an example for the general case, rather than a specific instance separated from the general case, which is why I reacted as sharply as I did. I have (very) strong opinions on the general case.

However, I don’t have an educated opinion on Brothers specifically, since I haven’t played it yet.

77

OK. I’m not yet in the mood for a virtual handshake, but I’ll accept the apology.

Well look, let’s just say that the term “Political Correctness” for various reasons is very troublesome to me – because I think that it’s often used to demand that other people turn off their sexism/whatever detectors, or to stop expressing criticism of perceived sexism/whatever – and that they bother me a lot more than swear words on the internet. I could’ve expressed my point more tactfully, and I apologize for that.

78

I don’t call for censorship, but I know why it seems similar to you. People who apply political criticism of art often call for laws to ban certain kinds of art.

I don’t call for censorship, but I do call for artists to make their art less sexist.

I don’t call for censorship, but if you (like me) enjoy a lot of sexist art, especially nostalgically, you might worry that people would take me seriously and stop making it, cutting themselves off from a rich tradition of art that is sexist, but very good despite that. You might be worried that something of value to you (and others like you) would be lost if we cut ourselves off from sexist traditions.

Artists might make a lot fewer sexist games some day. I think something would be lost if that happened; some of us would miss having a strong connection to traditional culture. But the loss would be far outweighed by the benefit to everyone else. (Even the men.)

(It looks like you’ve dropped the spoiler tag on this topic, so I will, too; anyone reading this far knows what’s up by now.)

Let’s start by agreeing that she starts off as a “woman,” as you call her, not just an unthinking animal. She converses with the brothers; they understand what she says, and she understands what they say. She thinks. She solve problems with good ideas. “The woman assists in many ways.” She is a woman.

In her spider form, you say “there’s nothing human or female about it,” but she still has the woman’s head and torso. The author could have used a spider’s head and body, with four pairs of fuzzy inhuman eyes, but he wanted to make sure you knew that this spider is the same woman you were just talking to. The spider is a woman, too. Just look at her face!

And anyway, that’s the whole problem: sexists think of women as non-human objects, unworthy of empathy or respect. So representing a woman who turns out to be a non-person is exactly the sort of portrayal we ought to criticize, precisely because “that woman isn’t even human” is the point of view we’re trying to combat.

I think we agree that the folklore is sexist, and we may even agree that building a story based on sexist folklore is also sexist. The question then becomes, is it OK for a story to be sexist if it’s based on sexist folklore? Is sexism in art OK in cases like this?

Which is to say, yes, this art is sexist. Maybe it’s OK to be sexist in this case, but that doesn’t make it non-sexist.

79

(post removed as being something the original poster regrets, apologises for and wishes to dissociate himself from)

80

I think you’re sincere in your doubt that there’s a gender problem in games. I’m asking you to re-examine that.

Recently there was a study about accuracy in estimating gender ratios. You put a bunch of men and women together into a room on some pretext, then take them out again, and ask them what the percentage of women was.

Turns out that men seriously overestimate the proportion of women. When women made up 20-25% of a group, men generally estimate that it was about half. When you raise that to a third, men estimate that women are in the majority. So I think that a lot of guys sincerely don’t see a problem in videogames, or in the tech industry, or whatever industry - they look around, see 20% women, subconsciously estimate it as 50%, and feel that everything’s fine. If you come to them with the stats, they get angry, because their own estimates have built up an impression that women are already equally represented, and they think you’re asking for overrepresentation.

This is why it’s important to do your research, rather than relying on your impressions. Because that’s what informed, intelligent people do.