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February 27, 2005
Nothing New Under The Sun
Aaaaaaah, shit. You know how I've been talking about developing a MMO horse game? Well, it appears that someone's already done it. MMOh drat.
Posted by me at 1:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 24, 2005
Open Letter to Game Designers: Don't Make Me Be That Bitch (or, Boobies!)
Wednesday night I went to my first real game industry event, a local chapter "mixer" for the International Game Developers Association. For being there only a couple of hours, I learned a great deal about the local industry. First, there almost isn't one; it's not cost-effective to retain game design staff at New York metro area prices. Second, while the locals in the biz are pretty solidly male and well-educated, they are also more racially diverse than I might have expected.
Like I said, they're male. Heaven knows I don't mind the imbalance, for an abundance of reasons not worth mentioning here. But by the end of the evening, the whole roomful of them seemed even more hesitant to make eye contact with me than programmers usually are, and a handful of them felt the need to apologize.
Most of the games exhibited that evening were puzzle or handheld games: small in their scope, but excellent quality for what they were. The final two games of the evening were XBox offerings: a pretty, thematically quirky but otherwise uncompelling platformer called Psychonauts, and then there was Outlaw Golf 2, featuring Summer, Autumn, Clem, and Goober. (I know it requires Windows Media Player, but believe me, you don't get the full effect until you see the pole-dancing.)
After a good five minutes of half-bared-boobie-wagging (in one case, the lower half -- I'm sorry, even Ween's excellent album Chocolate and Cheese couldn't make the appeal of that style clear to me) and lesbian simulations only a male gaze could love, the mood in the room was mixed. A few guys were hooting and hollering; a few were visibly embarassed. I was standing next to Greg Costikyan, who was in the latter category; we shared some snide comments.
Behind us, Jason Della Rocca (head of the IGDA) piped up with a question about the gender breakdown of the game's audience. "Uh... it's a very complicated system with... matrixes and..." mumbled the guy running the demo, and took the next question amid laughter and groans. Then Jason repeated the question, getting a similar response, at which point I made an audible sarcastic comment (in fluent Val) about how there really weren't enough boobies in the game to satisfy me, and could they please give us more boobies, please, um, more boobies. ?
The boobies weren't the only thing. Clem and Goober are just the white trash stereotypes their names imply, with all the trappings of roadkill, moonshine, inbreeding, lost teeth, and overalls employed in rather innovative ways within the golf setting. And then there's El Suave, and then there's Mistress Suki, and then there's the hippies, and need I go on. It's a cheap, shorthand bunch of crappy window dressing for a dull sport which isn't made any more interesting for it.
Still, I was pleased that Jason actually brought the gender divide up, so I approached him afterwards to tell him so. I found him on the defensive even as I complimented him. He tries to get designers to think about sexism and racism, he said, but it's also his job to defend them from censorship. After all, he said, we have to protect free speech.
Who was trying to censor them? I was one of about six women in a room full of guys. I was noisily expressing my distaste in a public forum, and I daresay I wasn't the only one feeling that way. I'm not about to go to the ESRB and tell them there's a new game coming down the pipe which is SO AWASH IN MORAL TURPITUDE it requires a totally NEW AND DRACONIAN RATING to reflect how UTTERLY REPULSIVE it is. Yes, an "H" rating. For "HAS BOOBIES WATCH OUT!!!!1"
And please, let's not dignify this game's window dressing by calling it free speech. Let's be perfectly frank, here. What you are doing is satisfying a market. South Park plays with many of these stereotypes and does some useful work. Your boobies don't cause any cognitive dissonance -- they aren't there to do any work; they're just standing around looking pretty (or grotesque, really. If I had boobies that weird-looking, I'd be inclined to hide them in paper bags, or else find an expert on geodesic domes to give me the odds the lumps would go into remission). You know damn well there are hundreds of cases within the United States right now in which free speech and free thought are fighting a very ugly losing battle; please don't disrespect the people going through that. Your boobies have an eight-hundred-pound gorilla supporting their distribution.
Look, don't make me be That Bitch. I experimented with being a humorless second-wave feminist in college and found it restrictive. I got my sense of humor and my magnanimity back and boy, let me tell you, I don't ever want to lose them again. But I'm going to lose it if I have to work with you and you're putting out all this random-boobies nonsense. And you want me working with you, because I hold the secret to the killer app for twelve-year-old girls.
I am here to make better video games. I really, really hate being put in a position where just because of my gender, it's my job to be the one who says look, this is demeaning and dumb. (Actually, I'm here to communicate to you why there are people out there who find Clem and Goober insulting... but that's a story for my masters' thesis.)
You guys know already how dumb this shit is. I saw you all around me making faces that told me the same. Here I'm finally getting a look at the guys who make the content that Ms. and the NAACP and Jim Goad complain about, and it frustrates the hell out of me. I have seen the results of crappy, heavily-stereotyped content at the ground level; I have worked with third graders who can quote whole scenes from Scary Movie. And I wonder why guys like you have jobs creating media content when I can't seem to get a break.
You look like guys who come from a similar place as I do; if I got you talking I'm sure you'd mostly support wage equity and a reasonable division of labor in the home and women's control of their sexuality and reproduction. And you might shrug and say the decisions on the content come from somewhere else, somewhere higher up.
Guys, the buck has to stop somewhere.
And sure, probably it's not the IGDA's job to police the content its members are producing, so if I gave Jason a hard time it was probably unwarranted. But the producers absolutely ought to be thinking about their role in perpetuating this kind of crap. You can't blame it on people drooling in front of the TV anymore, guys. The medium reinforcing the backward-ass ideas some kids have now is video games. It's you.
Posted by me at 11:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
U.S.D.O.E. v. Buster the Bunny
After a WGBH tour a year ago I have eagerly been following the progress of Postcards from Buster, a spinoff of the popular Arthur franchise which sends bunny Buster around the United States to visit kids in a range of communities. He meets gospel singers, Mormons, rock climbers, Eskimos, cowgirls, all kinds of people. If any show is likely to make American kids more familiar with their diverse neighbors, this is it.
So it was much to my chagrin to learn that PBS yanked the entire run of the show (it's worth watching the largish video clip there) due to a U.S. Department of Education complaint (and threat to withhold future funding). Why? The show's run included an episode featuring a family in Vermont headed by a lesbian couple. Thank god for WGBH, which continued to broadcast the show anyway and distributed it to every interested station (including WNET in New York, where I caught an episode earlier this week). This is really outrageous, and anyone who agrees should write to margaret.spellings@ed.gov, the woman at USDOE who complained. Be aware that this skirmish renews the threat to Sesame Street and other shows which perenially comes up during eras of Republican congressional dominance. (Thanks to my CCTE colleagues for picking this one up.)
Posted by me at 10:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 21, 2005
Oh my god, we're lost
Oh, my god, oh, my god, oh. my god. Hunter S. Thompson has killed himself. Words fail. This is deeply saddening. The world could use more journalists like him right now.
knew I shouldn't have checked the news before going to bed. well, how about this: his suicide is a compelling argument for gun control. not that he would have wanted it that way.
Posted by me at 1:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 11, 2005
Academic Video Insanity
Finally it can be shown! The videos of Grover demonstrating the difference between epistemologically NEAR and epistemologically FAR, and the video of our successful hacking of the player piano at a hotel (it plays the Super Mario Bros. theme -- note both links will load Quicktime video) are up, and I finally have the links and a blog to put them on. There are also more pictures from last autumn and the conference I presented at in Texas. Thanks to Jon C. Dude, the Australians are so much cooler than we are.
Posted by me at 6:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Back In The Saddle
Okeyyyyy! We're back, and as you can see: New year, new URL, and new look, for me as well as the site. I got glasses, and my hair is longer than it may ever have been since I was maybe four.
I'm sorry I've been gone so long. The comment spam really got me down -- I got 800 PIECES OF PR0N COMMENTS IN ONE DAY, all of them with titles so dirty even I was frightened by them. I have half a mind to start billing the posters if it happens again, provided they don't originate in some place where going after them wouldn't work, like Russia. For now, I am pretty confident in the ability of newer versions of Movabletype to control spam, and seeing as I'm on a new server run by more people I know, I figure updates will be easier to pull off.
I have really, really missed blogging and I think I've suffered from its absence in my life. No amount of talking to other people, even trained professional talkers, can substitute for getting my ideas down in text and being able to go back to reconsider them later. I literally haven't been writing at *all*. And not having you all there to add to, adjust, or affirm my ideas has also been very depressing. I was really enjoying some of the heated arguments which developed in response to some posts here. I hope they're not gone for good.
So welcome back; I missed you. I promise I'll try to be in better touch. Things will still be filtering into place for a while -- you'll notice a lot of dead links and no coherent archive pages for the moment, but I'll be working on that in my free moments.
Posted by me at 12:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
Standout Games
Man, the way you know it's been eons since I've posted on my own blog when I haven't posted anything yet about my deep and abiding love for KATAMARI DAMACY. Synopsis of game: You are the prince of the cosmos, your father is the king, and he's a self-centered lush and went on a drunken spree and smashed up all the stars. He tells you that because of filial piety it is your job to replace the stars. The way you will do this is by rolling everything in the world, from thumbtacks on up to football stadiums, into balls and send them into space. To reiterate: The game mechanic is ROLLING THINGS INTO A BALL. This is controlled only with TWO ANALOG JOYSTICKS, possibly the simplest interface ever on these newfangled controllers the kids use today. The music sounds like Pizzicato Five had international digital babies, the visuals look like the Beatles made a game out of Yellow Submarine, your cosmic daddy has a triangular orange nose and a huge purple codpiece, and the name of the game means CLUMP OF SOULS in Japanese. You will especially want to see the online guide, which is funny even if you don't get a chance to play the game -- possibly the funniest guide to a game since Burning Monkey Solitaire's. It costs ONLY TWENTY DOLLARS, so you will go out and buy it RIGHT NOW. You will most likely also want the sequel, which will be out later this year (at least in Japan). I cannot stress this enough.
Also on the list of games I've been obsessed with lately is Vib Ribbon, which I have yet to get my hands on. Been around for about five years, apparently developed by the lovely folks what brought you Parappa the Rapper. Develops each game stage based on the music playing, including your own CDs. Must find this one... the first track on the game's soundtrack is called "Polaroid," and samples the sound of an old camera spitting out its film. The soundtrack itself would be more listenable in its own right if it didn't speed up and slow down a lot, but it's still unearthly good.
Posted by me at 11:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Next Chris Farley
A lot of people seem to think how good a dancer you are depends on how fit you are, but I've found that some of the best dancers I've ever seen are significantly overweight. Take Chris Farley, for example. Damn, but that man could dance -- he could do things people much skinnier than he couldn't pull off, or wouldn't dare try. And then there's this guy. He's kinda chubby. He's only dancing upper-body. But he's dancing with an elegant abandon most people never manage. And he's doing it on the Web. Dance along!
Posted by me at 11:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Clean Your Screen For Free
OK, I know this already went up on Adorablog, but certain members of my family, sisters especially, need to get their screens cleaned for free. Absolutely 100% worksafe. Make sure the sound is up when you play this one.
Posted by me at 11:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack