Adrian Chmielarz throws out his gauntlet, right from the start.
I consider Polygon’s review of The Witcher 3 poisonous to the industry: to gamers, to game developers, to game journalists.
Oh, geez, what horrible thing did Polygon say in their review, which earned an 8/10?
The result is still a game that often feels like a stunningly confident, competent shot across the bow of the open world genre, folding in an incredibly strong narrative and a good sense of consequence to the decisions that present themselves throughout, presenting a fun bit of combat creativity into a genre that desperately needs it. With that going for it, The Witcher 3 is a great game though it isn’t a classic — and it can carry a somewhat qualified recommendation.
Those monsters! No, wait, what? Let’s cut back to Adrian.
[t]he review goes full social justice in two places and exposes the level of poisonous — or should I say toxic? — incompetence I wish a big website like Polygon never displayed.
One of his big reasons is that the review says the following.
That said, the world CD Projekt has created is oppressively misogynist.
Adrian then goes on to talk about how the review author is a mindless Sarkeesian fan, and acts as if this is just mindless repetition of her canon. In fact, the review talks about the nuance quite a bit.
The Witcher 3‘s expanded cast of characters doesn’t preclude more screen time for just about everyone, and CD Projekt has done work to make for more interesting, influential women that feel just a bit more fleshed out than they’ve been previously. This includes a number of powerful women with complicated motivations and goals of their own.
That said, the world CD Projekt has created is oppressively misogynist. In some ways, the game deals directly with this — characters acknowledge again and again that it’s hard to be a woman there, that it’s a place of violence and terror and that women must work harder to be recognized and respected.
Then it kills them, over and over. There are several monster types devoted to murdered and wronged women whom Geralt is frequently asked to destroy, and other villainous characters are shown torturing or even butchering women to show just how evil they are. One sequence seemed specifically designed to see how long I could listen to a major female character have her fingernails pulled out before I ended the conversation to attack the individual in question. A later scene shows a villain literally surrounded by the bodies of murdered prostitutes.
In another, a character who admitted to beating his wife so badly she miscarried is given an opportunity to explain why she had it coming, complete with a sympathetic conversation response option to go with it. The performances all around in this scene are excellent, the presentation among the best, most reined in anywhere in the game, but the message I saw it conveying was abhorrent.
I get that the setting of The Witcher 3 is meant to be a dark, dirty fantasy. But in a world that so explicitly goes out of its way to build a believable, distinctive take on the genre, the inclusion of so much violence explicitly directed against women feels like a clear, disconcerting choice. It’s not just present, it’s frequently a focus.
This seems to me like a pretty fair explanation to the player of what he’s getting into, with even some highlighting that CD Projekt has attempted to flesh out this world with skill and nuance. Polygon then gives the game a good review score and a glowing exit paragraph. Back to Adrian.
I wonder: is the review a cynical click-bait or is it all just musings of a true social justice zealot? I honestly don’t know. But I know it doesn’t matter, the result is the same: poisoning the industry that is already sick.
Oh, for Christ’s sake. Look. Polygon attracts a more progressive audience. It’s an audience of the sort of people who love games but may actually be inclined not to buy a game if it has a lot of violence towards women. Reviews exist to help consumers decide whether or not to buy something. Letting them know that if you don’t like watching women being the repeated victims of violence – even if it is otherwise an excellent game- is not ‘poisoning the games industry’. It’s the fucking job of reviewing games for your magazine’s audience, so they can make an informed decision with their sixty bucks. Which, I want to stress, Polygon’s audience may not be full of Bro Gamers like Adrian, but is still large and growing.
Also, and this is just a teensy bit relevant, RPG audiences tend to have a heavy female component. Do you think THEY might want to know beforehand what they’re getting into? I suspect they might.
I love Game of Thrones. I heartily recommend it to anyone who shows any vague interest. However, if I think they are going to be turned off by gratuitous sex and the death of every character they hold dear, I feel the need to let them know what they’re getting into. It’s not really all that different than warning someone that if they go see Team America, they’re going to watch an awesome movie but you might not want to see it with your parents if you don’t want the extended puppet sex scene to kill all discussion in the car ride home.
But no. Instead, let’s describe cultural criticism we don’t agree with as ‘poison’.
This is one of the glaring problems with gamebros and gators. They throw the most massive of hissy-fits not over their own point of view vanishing or being neglected, but rather the idea that some other gamer might have a different perspective or care about different things leads them to hyperventilate. Is Polygon in some sort of monopoly position with respect to video game reviews?
How fragile is Adrian Chmielarz? So fragile that any disagreement anywhere constitutes ‘poison’.
The review makes me interested in buying and playing the game. The response by Adrian makes me not want to buy it. Which one is supposed to be poisonous again?
The tweets the reviewer sent out are anything but inclusive of opinions opposite his own:
“i guess the problem is that you see cool things and assume they’re made by cool people who act like decent humans and often you’re wrong”.
I don’t know who specifically he is calling out but if it’s the game developers – what are you supposed to think of a game reviewer who calls CDProjekt horrible human beings? If he is calling out the devs in that tweet then fuck yes Adrian had every right to be indignant.
Horrible themes and abhorrent characters can be just as compelling an experience as any good Disney flick. It’s not like this is the first witchef game. Anyone remember the card collection system from Witcher 1 for girls you’d had sex with?
I see now on a second read he’s attacking Adrian personally with that tweet. Dont exactly know where the bad blood started between those two but between those attacks, calling out the Witcher 3 world for being racist “I don’t recall seeing a single non-white humanoid anywhere” to the accusations of a mysoginistic game world – the Polygon reviewer then followed up by his tweeting about trying to locate and download a pirated copy of a Game of Thrones episode. Kind of sending mixed messages. Don’t throw the racist/sexist card in a game review, then admit you too enjoy themes in entertainment that has both in spades.
The tweets at the beginning are directed towards Adrian himself, who developed (or helped develop) The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. In this case, Adrian liked the game but disliked how the developer conducted himself or what he stood for. Which is pretty fair from where I’m sitting, given Adrian’s past input on gamergate-centric topics, even if Arthur’s comments might be a little unprofessional.
For what is ostensibly a “consumer movement”, GamerGate seems to have very little faith in the intelligence or discernment of the average consumer. If you think a review is bullshit, disregard it and move on. If a review site constantly focuses on things you don’t think are relevant, find a different site. Read several reviews, synthesize the information against your own tastes and priorities and make a decision that way. Read reviews from sites and reviewers who have consistently guided you towards enjoyable games in the past. Avoid sites and reviewers that don’t focus on the stuff you care about, be that story, graphics, genre, mechanics, diversity, music, voice-acting, whatever.
It feels so banal explaining this, but GG’s attitude to reviews feels so backwards. If anything is poisonous, it’s this idea that reviews should toe the line of popular opinion and that “bad” reviews could “trick” gamers into buying the “wrong” games. A review is a guide, a point of view, a data point on the graph of your purchasing decision. It’s an opinion, not a gospel truth, and most consumers are perfectly capable of making that distinction.
The lie begins with the title, “In a World Where Devs Get Offended by 8.0s”. I never questioned the score, and I don’t talk about the score. Except that one time when I say: “[…] obviously we need games analyzed and critiqued and reviewed from multiple angles. The end result is that a game can get 10/10 from one publication, and 5/10 from another. But that’s fine.”
And then the lie continues. “Adrian then goes on to talk about how the review author is a mindless Sarkeesian fan” — no, I don’t. First, I usually talk about Feminist Frequency, and not Sarkeesian alone, as I think it’s not fair to never include the other writer, Jonathan McIntosh. Second, and obviously way more importantly, while I do think that Feminist Frequency fans are misguided, you will not find any value judgment on the subject in this particular post. I merely make a connection between FF and parts of Gies’ review. One may agree or disagree with this assessment, but you will not find any implication of anything approaching “mindlessness” there.
And then the rest of your post is basically “It’s the fucking job of reviewing games for your magazine’s audience, so they can make an informed decision with their sixty bucks.”, i.e. telling people I object to cultural criticism and would like it if publications did not inform their readers that a game features “a lot of violence towards women”.
Meanwhile, what I actually say in my post is the opposite. Examples:
“In short, I am all for variety in opinion, and […] we should not fight against that variety […].”
“I know that people criticize this fragment [on alleged sexism in the game] but I won’t. The reviewer has the right to be a neo-puritan American who warns the like-minded people that if sexy offends them they should maybe neither play The Witcher 3 nor frequent Suicide Girls. It’s fine.
“I wouldn’t mind if Gies did not like the violence, if it was somehow too much for him. That’d be okay, we all have different sensitivities.”
I make it very clear in my post I don’t mind differences of opinion, and the reason I criticize Gies’ review is not because his opinion is different, but because he pushes a false narrative. You know, exactly like what you do in your post. I explain it with:
“Note this is not about being a bad or good critic, that one is different. A good critic […]. A bad critic pushes their agenda even despite facts or reason. And in the case of the Polygon’s review of The Witcher 3, we deal with the latter.”
Finally, we have the “Bro Gamers like Adrian”… Because, as we all know, games like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter are exactly what Bro Gamers like to create and play.
You just lie openly and think you’ll somehow get away with it. No, you won’t.
As a side note, I find it hilarious how you defend the right to cultural critique by throwing a lie-ridden tantrum over a cultural critique you disagree with. Hilarious, but not surprising.
The difference is Damion criticized the content of your post, and critiqued your viewpoint alone.
You, on the other hand, suggested that criticizing your game on cultural grounds was poison to the *entire industry*. You weren’t engaging in honest criticism. You were simply being a demagogue.
No, Damion misrepresented the content of Adrian’s article so that he could make snarky comments about things that Adrian concedes to in the very article Damion purports to be critiquing.
Arthur uses “misogynistic” to describe the presence of violence against women, but this makes no sense without the context of the level of violence against men. Perhaps there truly is no comparison, but it appears this could be as dumb as the bulk of Sarkeesian’s criticism of Hitman.
Gies is a troubled white knight who is desperate to find black people in fantasy Poland. That sort of ridiculous criticism just inspires tokenism if taken seriously.
Gies implicitly accuses the devs of, at least, unconscious misogyny. Don’t forget that he also gave Bayonetta a high score despite the intentional “sexist and gross” objectfication of her in the game.
Arthur is right to give his audience a description of the content. That doesn’t mean his criticisms are intelligent and it doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be harmful to free creative expression if publishers were to take his inane criticisms too seriously and impose some sort of “diversity quotas” on developers.
Nope! Sorry.
“Arthur uses “misogynistic” to describe the presence of violence against women, but this makes no sense without the context of the level of violence against men.”
If the violence against women is in particular to them being women, then it doesn’t matter how much violence is directed to men. Like you said, it’s in context, but the context is not one of balance.
If there is one thing that I can count on from you, it is taht you will mindlessly and faithfully parrot what idiotic talking points are proffered by the gamergate hivemind no matter how nonsensical it is.
Violence vs. men in terms of battle and combat is a vastly different beast than sexual violence and spousal abuse, both of which can cause triggering effects in certain audience members. This is not to say that these elements should never be used (and the review makes it clear that he thinks these elements are used well), however, it does mean that some audience members might want some sort of warning that those elements exist.
People of Color most certainly existed in Poland in that period of time – it is not nearly as monochromatic as is implied by Adrian. They also already exist in the Witcher’s extended universe. Also, when you are creating an IP that is wholly your own, it is good to consider that representation in media dramatically increases the appeal of that media. But hey, Geis doesn’t consider that a deal breaker, he considers taht a mysterious omission. Adrian’s notes of tokenism are laughable — millions of other content creators throughout the world are capable of creating diverse casts in their content.
Geis himself points out that the WORLD is misogynistic, not so much the creators. He even muses about how this world is crafted and the explorations of those themes. As for you mentioning Bayonetta, I find it amusing given that the last time that gamergate lost their fucking mind over a pretty good review was when Polygon gave them a 7.5.
In short, your response is pretty much wrong about everything.
“…however, it does mean that some audience members might want some sort of warning that those elements exist.”
Sure a warning – 2 sentences or a paragraph. Gies goes goes on for 6 paragraphs. And where do your SJW warnings stop? What is the perfect wet dream game design that satisfies all nationalities/sexual preferences/opinions? It doesn’t exist. There is an overwhelming catering to ‘Offend No One’ going on thanks to the fucking media right now – your post feeds right into that by taking a respected game designers opinion and twisting it around, taking quotes out of context to make him sound like the bad guy. Gies shows by his tweets that he’s a hypocrite pure and simple.
Coppertopper> And Adrian wrote a friggin novella in his ineffectual attempt to prosecute Polygon for thought crimes. Who the fuck cares? Internet column space is practically infinite, and you are limited solely by the attention span of your audience. If Polygon’s audience cares about this topic (and these sorts of cultural examinations is one of the reasons why Polygon is among the last of the gaming sites I frequent), then they should feel empowered
Attempting to limit discussions to a certain number of paragraphs smacks of an attempt to censor opinions you don’t care about to me. Why does it frighten you so much that people who have different viewpoints on games can do so in an extended format?
And incidentally, for someone who gets mad when people get outraged about silly shit, you sure are getting mad in this response at people for no good reason.
I don’t “mindlessly parrot” anything. I’m quite capable of forming my own opinions.
Sure, men dying in battle is different from domestic violence. That’s putting them in context, something Gies did not do. Anita compleely failed to do this with Hitman, and I don’t trust Gies. Are the women being tortured just the wives of male soldiers, or are they soldiers themselves? Does it matter to Gies? Gies criticism isn’t just some warning, and can’t be justified on those grounds.
Where is this research you have done on the history of Poland? The existence of people of color in a region does not mean that they need to be included in every story. It is worth considering, but leaving them out of a game made in eastern Europe about a fantasy version of eastern Europe is not a “mysterious omission.” It’s a perfectly reasonable and sensible thing to do however it fits the world. The best fiction with diverse casts features diverse cultures. If the cast member is not represented in the culture of the game, the cast member is a token that people look to to represent the entire group. Not every piece of fiction with limited cultural diversity needs some stranger from a strange land to round out the cast.
Gies does say that the world is misogynistic, and appears to speculate about the creators as well. Someone above said that he wouldn’t have given a high score if he though the creators were sexist, but it was clear that he thought the creators of Bayonetta were sexist and still gave the game a high score.
You didn’t really refute anything.
You misrepresented Adrian’s post.
Arthur does not present the context to differentiate the violence against women from the violence against men.
Arthur is indeed a white knight who gave Bayonetta a high score despite calling it sexist.
Arthur is fine to describe the content to warn his audience but his criticisms are inane.
As for your response to Adrian:
You titled the post “In a World Where Devs Get Offended by 8.0s.” Then you deny saying he was offended by the score. Then you again contradict yourself by saying that he called the 8.0 “poison.” Which, again, he didn’t. Scores are not poison. Stupid ideas are poison. Stupid ideas spread and harm things. Scores do not.
Just stop with the “all cultural criticism makes things better” crap. You don’t believe it. Otherwise, you’d believe gamergate is making the game industry better. You don’t. Bad ideas only make things better when people point out how bad they are.
You know what else is poison? Accusing someone unironically of “rape denialism” for pointing out that there isn’t an epidemic of sexual violence. Rape and sexual assault rates fell by 49% between 1993 and 2013. Where did you get stats on US versus other counries? Several countries define it differently, study it differently, and report it differently. Is it “rape denialism” to want reliable stats about a horrible crime where reports of victimization rates differ by orders of magnitude depending on the study? Is it “rape denialism” to point out that the sexual assault victimization rate is higher for college-aged women who aren’t in college? Accusing people of “rape denialism” is just a way to deligitimize reasonable perceptions and opinions by implicitly comparing them to fucking Nazis. It’s fucking poison to civilized discourse.
If you can’t understand the difference between violent gameplay that is inherent in the core gameplay loop of a game that you pick up, and domestic or sexual violence that (a) is almost always entirely gendered and (b) may have a triggering effect in the playing audience, then you may be hopeless. Gies didn’t differentiate it because educated and informed people discussing these topics understand that conflating the two is idiotic.
Poland was by no means a Benetton ad, but it most certainly did have people of other nationalities, and was in fact invaded by a mongol horde. The argument about tokenization is as ridiculous coming from you as it was coming from Adrian – good writers can make good, well-rounded characters even if they are one-ofs.
Your argument that creating misogynistic worlds necessarily results in lower scores among the media is belied by the fact that Grand Theft Auto V has a sterling review score average on Metacritic despite being a mindbogglingly misogynistic world. For that matter, last night Geis wrote a glowing review about Mad Max, which is – wait for it – a movie about a deeply misogynistic world.
Adrian is, indeed, offended by a review that was in generally glowingly positive. I didn’t mention the score – the 8.0 refers to the review. He refers to the review as ‘poison’ and as rational, says that it is poison because it is either clickbait, or is full of social justice crap. Both of these viewpoints are plain from reading my article plainly. Both of these viewpoints are bad, and Adrian should be condemned for them. Magazines SHOULD be writing in order to curry readership – and there is no attempt here to make ‘clickbait’ headlines or other attention-making grabs to earn it – and writers SHOULD be able to write about issues of race, sexuality, and gendered violence without people having a conniption fit. Glomming onto either of these ideas as ‘poison’ is Adrian attempting to tear down a legitimate news organization for having viewpoints about games and culture that are different from his own. If Adrian had simply said that he disagreed with them, I likely would have given no fucks. Instead, he attacked the integrity of one of the better consumer-oriented sites on the internet for exploring more complex and intricate aspects of the cultural impact of gaming. You don’t like it – fine. Go read the Ralph Retort.
As for your statistics, its very telling that you are eager to glom onto statistics that show that sexual assaults have fallen steadily since the mid-90s (which is true) but cast into doubt statistics that show that sexual assaults are still both very much a problem, and that the united states is among the clear leaders in sexual assaults among first world countries – and yes, the people who measure these things know there are problems with reporting . In short, the stats that support your cause are fine, and the stats that show there is still a big problem to be dealt with are a fraud. It would be laughable if it weren’t a concentrated effort to get people to ignore what is clearly still a very real problem in American society that is, even if one were to accept your argument (which I don’t) somewhere between a large problem and a very large one, and one that affects one in five American women in their lifetime.
Of course you would misrepresent what I said. And, of course, I am the Holocaust denier, now. I’m just a bad, bad person that wants women in the third world to be able to safely go to school and wants women in America to not irrationally fear going to college when doing so actually reduces their risk of sexual assault. But who cares about accuracy, amirite?
“Holocaust denier”, eh?
I never mentioned anything about campuses vs. not campuses. The fact that women are very slightly safer if they go to college than not does not change the fact that women in America still are victims of sexual assault at rates that far outpace most of the rest of the civilized world, a fact you cannot dispute (because its pretty much indisputable by all known available evidence). You’re simply trying to move the goalposts.
Damion,
Showing that one aspect of rape hysteria leads to irrational fears that can cause real harm to women shows that it is important to accurately measure statistics. Irrational fears cause women to change their behavior when they don’t need to. The real fear and the irrational fear needs to be eliminated. Hysteria increases the incidence of false reports (which range anywhere from 2% to, I believe, 40%, depending whom you ask. It increases the risk of undermining due process.
As for why I didn’t refute your claim about America being so much worse than everyone else, I simply can’t find a good international comparison. Can you? Some countries differentiate between rape and sexual assault. Some include rape within the definition of sexual assault. Some countries define rape as only penile intrusion into a woman’s vagina. So, show me a quality cross-country comparison of sexual assault statistics that uses a uniform definition or I’m just going to assume you are talking from your ass. Hell, just looking at wikipedia, the U.S. is dramatically lower than Australia and Sweden, and comparable to the U.K. And, again, the definitions are slightly different, the reporting rates are different, and it’s incredibly difficult to do cross-country comparisons.
If you don’t understand that “rape denial” of saying “Holocaust denial,” I don’t know what to tell you. Anyone who denies that there is a sexual holocaust going on in every country is a rapist, rape denialist, or rape apologist. I’ve been called all a fair number of times.
It’s not even a reliable statistic that sexual assault affects 1 in 5 women, depending on how broadly you define “assault” and how broadly you define “affect.” It’s a throwaway statistic. It’s not 1 in 5 women and the risk is far from uniform so women don’t need to be in existential fear of going about their daily business. I don’t blame them if they are, but more responsible people should understand that overblown rhetoric has real-world consequences. Including some of the ridiculous rhetoric and hysteria that goes on at KiA and especially on twitter. Much of my time there is spent telling them to calm down, and I’ve been dogpiled on twitter for calling out The Ralph Retort for being everything that they supposedly hate.
Daniel – I fail to see how hysteria increases the incidence of false reports, but for the most part, the incidence of false reports is shockingly low. The study that claimed 40% has been long since discredited due to statistical error, and was always a massive outlier from the rest of the field, which put the range reliably in the 2 to 8 percent range. But let’s actually unpack that math. The FBI found that only 83000 rapes were reported in the last year I could find numbers for them. A false report requires a report. What this means is that, even if we assume the worst case of our range (8%) that would mean there were about 6400 false rape accounts in the last year I could easily find (2011).
By comparison, a massive number of rapes are NOT reported, which makes this number seem pale. The NCVS put the rape rate last year at about 240K. However, the CDC had a different approach to their methodology, which was to, instead of asking ‘were you raped’, to ask questions about whether or not they were forcibly penetrated without their consent – i.e. to ask if the women had experienced the legal definition of rape, without actually forcing them to understand what the technical definition of what rape is. Their number is closer to 2 million – a striking number to be certain, and one that has raised heckles.
Some scholars, such as Cathy Young have attempted to minimize the work of the CDC, particularly are critical of the CDC’s asking about whether or not intoxicated women have had sex when they were unable to consent – she argues that this is fear mongering, as many college aged students (as well as older people) frequently get blotto and get it on. However, that’s not the point – consent was always included as a key component of the question and consent is, in fact, required for the legal definition of sexual congress, and getting a woman blasted is not a free pass.
The truth of the matter is that the CDC’s numbers are probably too high, and the NCVS’s numbers are probably too low. Date rape is something that is seen as an enormous problem, and one that goes massively underreported, and feminists have been quite correct in my estimation, and quite active, about trying to improve the fidelity of measuring it.
At any rate, if you want to talk about hysteria, let’s go back to your false reports, which sits at a paltry 6400. If we utterly disregard the CDC’s stance and take the NCVS’ numbers to heart, then a woman is 37.5 times as likely to be raped as to falsely report one. If we take the CDC’s numbers as accurate, then a woman is 312 times as likely to falsely report a rape than to falsely report one.
Just as every rape has a chance to destroy lives, so does every false report. In a perfect world, both would be eradicated from this earth, and I hold in incredibly high contempt the women who would cloud the issue by making them. However, attempting to create any kind of equivalency for the incidence count of false reports compared to actual rapes is simply an ugly distraction – actual rape occurrences utterly dwarf false rape accusations. This is pretty much indisputable by all available information.
Daniel,
You could be less absolutist and inflammatory in your reactions to other people’s writing. This is Damion’s blog. You don’t have a blog. Unless you really do want to be dogpiled, don’t nail yourself to a cross. People are not actually going to be out to get you for your opinions, but you could be more careful about how you express them.
If your contempt for Damion’s writing is so high, maybe you shouldn’t post here. I say that not understanding fully what your point is, other than you think Damion is wrong and it makes you feel bad, so you think Damion should feel bad.
Damion,
Hysteria may not statistically increase the number of false claims, but it does increase the number of claims latched onto by the media, and they just seem to have a habit of publicizing the most dubious claims. You have someone like Emma Sukowicz who went to the cops and they didn’t see a cause to proceed, went to the university and lost in an administrative hearing, and the accused was still referred to as “her rapist” in just about every progressive outlet. You get Rolling Stone looking for a story and willing to believe anything. You get a “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative playing out nationwide over the words of a few lying witnesses. And if you happen to mix hysteria with puritan oppression, you get something like the accusations against the Statesboro Boys. And when we highly publicize the more dubious claims, it undermines rape prevention.
That also illustrates the problem with the 2-8% statistic that you are fond of. It’s not the number of false claims. It’s the number of retracted claims or sometimes the proven false claims. In many studies the Duke rape case would still be in the 92-98%, Emma Sulkowicz, Jackie, and every other person who didn’t retract an unproven claim for fear of being prosecuted. The 92-98% is not the number of true claims. It’s just a matter of reversing the criminal justice presumption from presumed innocent to presumed guilty. And by repeating these false claims, we actively undermine the criminal justice system because this reverse presumption “women don’t lie about rape” meme can get embedded in the minds of juries.
The Kanin study was not discredited, though it was criticized. It attempted to determine the number of actual false claims through rigorous investigation, and not merely count the retracted claims as the only false ones. But perhaps nobody wants a study that doesn’t presume guilty or innocence and actually investigates each claim.
So, starting from a false premise, your math is basically garbage in garbage out. Here someone does a better job of doing the math under various assumptions: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/17/lies-damned-lies-and-social-media-part-5-of-%E2%88%9E/.
The CDC study is problematic for several reasons. It indicates a 1:1 male:female victimization ratio while the NCVS indicates a more plausible 1:10 ratio.
You also have a problem with people not understanding that they can still consent to sex while drunk. Activists like Laci Green tells people that if they are too drunk to drive, they are too drunk to consent to sex. This is absurd. People can be quite lucid while too drunk to drive. Even if you black out afterward, even if you don’t remember it, it doesn’t mean you were too drunk to give legal consent. The legal standard for incapacity is “wholly insensible.” It’s laid out pretty clearly in the case law. So we have people confused about a question that makes them think that perhaps anytime they’ve had drunken sex it was nonconsensual, and we get 10x the numbers from the NCVS and parity between males and females. Certainly seems curious to me.
Meant Scottsboro Boys. Not sure why I said Statesboro.
Are you wanting to have a conversation here? Because that’s a lot of opening questions and answering them right after.
You can probably be a “bro gamer” and be involved with making games that aren’t aimed at you.
Your representation of Gies piece was a bit misleading. You say “The quote can be understood in two ways. One, the fictional world itself is misogynist. Two, the creators are misogynists. ” But the very next sentence “In some ways, the game deals directly with this…” makes clear that the first understanding is correct. Would you expect Gies to give an 8 to an ‘oppressively misogynistic’ game?
Or when you ask “And can I ask for some consistency as for which violent worlds full of sex are okay to enjoy and which are not?”, where did you get the idea that Gies didn’t think it was okay to enjoy this game that he said so many complimentary things about?
“A bad critic pushes their agenda even despite facts or reason. ”
The problem here is that some of what you call “facts or reason” are actually subjective aesthetic judgments. That’s true throughout your piece, but I’ll confined myself to the issue of “non-white humanoids”. Gies did not say that every fantasy game has to include them. But would The Witcher 3 be a better, worse, or just-as-good if it included more non-white humanoids? I dunno, but it’s a reasonable question, and it would take a lot more than what either of you have written on it to answer it definitively.
Sorry, when I asked “Would you expect Gies to give an 8 to an ‘oppressively misogynistic’ game?”, what I mean is that if Gies really thought that the creators had “oppressively misogynistic” intentions, he would presumably write the review with a very different tone.
I called you a bro gamer because it seemed more polite than calling you a ‘faithful and willing dupe of a frenzied, MRA extremist campaign of harassment, intimidation, slander and fearmongering against progressive views in games that has plunged the industry that I love into into its darkest chapter since I entered it nearly twenty years ago’. Also, bro gamer is shorter. However, since you decided to paint me as a lying liar who lies, before launching into this logic pretzel in an attempt to backpedal and obfuscate your original point to make yourself seem less like a misguided dupe, sure whatever.
At no point did I say that you were offended by the score. However, it is absolutely true that you decided that a solid score of an 8.0 was a ‘poison’. The reasoning why is that its because the review goes ‘full social justice in two places’. Combined with your other statements in here, you make it clear – it’s fine and dandy to discuss and criticize games, so long as you don’t approach them from THAT point of view. That’s POISON. It’s your fucking THESIS STATEMENT..
You go on to state that while having different opinions is fine, that you wonder; “is the review a cynical click-bait or is it all just musings of a true social justice zealot? I honestly don’t know. But I know it doesn’t matter, the result is the same: poisoning the industry that is already sick.” You accuse the article of being clickbait, perhaps, but the headline isn’t clickbait, and if it wasn’t for the idiotic hysterics of demagogues like yourself, no one but Polygon’s regular readers would likely encounter it. Or are they the musings of a true social justice zealot? In that case, you are basically saying that people who approach gaming from this point of view are inherently invalid. Which is a fucking idiotic point of view. Cultural criticism makes the games industry stronger. This includes cultural criticism from ALL points of view, including the die-hards who only care about pushing poly counts higher and breast physics more realistic, as well as the cultural critics who think that games could be reaching a lot more people and even have a more positive cultural impact if they’d just keep some minor things in mind.
You try to say that Geis does not have ‘facts or reason’ on his side, despite the fact that his review seems entirely accurate, and the reason he has to approach things from his point of view is based largely on the audience of his magazine. Here’s a hint: DailyKos probably wrote a very different review of Game Change than Fox News. You simply whitewash his facts, and decide that his ‘reason’ must be an ulterior motive that you are unwilling or unable to name, because anything you said to that effect would seem like a neurotic conspiracy theory.
Your diversion into Anita is equally laughable, including your attempts at rape denialism. I find it interesting to claim that you have no value judgment over Anita’s stuff here, when your original article is full of judgments over
Anita’s points on sexual violence against women. For what its worth, while life across the world has been improving dramatically over the years, sexual assault rates in America still are dramatically higher than most other places in the civilized world, something that is of great concern to feminists here. Also, your attempt to minimize Anita by bringing up Josh pretty much betrays your true biases. You would not feel the need to bring up the writers or producers for, say, Jon Stewart, Bill O’Reilly, or Brian Williams. This is pretty much only the sort of bullshit that true diehard gamergators do, so I thank you for blatantly demonstrating that your bias here.
You don’t know the difference between creating a misogynistic world, and a misogynistic work. You don’t acknowledge that it is completely viable — and COMMON — for people to like — or even LOVE– works they consider problematic. And don’t even get me started on your idiotic stance that it’s impossible to deal with minorities, so we shouldn’t even try.
Both of these show that you have a problem with Polygon’s coverage, which as I point out, has a dedicated fan-base of people who LIKE TALKING ABOUT ISSUES LIKE THESE. Just because you don’t, does not make this review ‘poisonous’ . It simply means that you are opposed to outlets who talk about games from a viewpoint that you don’t approve of, and actively oppose attempts of cultural critics to push the state of the art forward. Which seems like a career limiting world viewif you’re a game designer, but hey, you seem to be doing okay.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by!
“The reviewer has the right to be a neo-puritan American who warns the like-minded people that if sexy offends them they should maybe neither play The Witcher 3 nor frequent Suicide Girls. It’s fine.”
God, you’re a fucking disingenuous shit. Of course you lie and make this about ‘if sexy offends them.’ How about you actually engage with what they’re actually saying instead of assigning them viewpoints you just made the fuck up?
Adrian, Arthur, as far as Danny’s concerned, you’re BOTH irritating demagogues.
“In another, a character who admitted to beating his wife so badly she miscarried is given an opportunity to explain why she had it coming, complete with a sympathetic conversation response option to go with it. The performances all around in this scene are excellent, the presentation among the best, most reined in anywhere in the game, but the message I saw it conveying was abhorrent.”
Just came across this conversation in the game. And Gies’s description simply is incredibly dishonest. It just goes to show his agenda.
He’s offended by the very idea that there’s a wife-beater in the game that we are forced to do quests for in order to find Ciri. That this character seeks to justify his actions while Geralt berates him and belittles his excuses. This all occurs after Geralt had accused this character of the abuse and beaten the shit out of him with his bare hands. After all this, you can express sympathy for his sense of loss that they are gone.
So, the character is upset that his family that he abused is gone. You can express sympathy after (1) accusing him, (2) beating the shit out of him, (3) letting him ramble, and (4) belittling his excuses. The player doesn’t have any choice in those matters, and Geralt has to fulfill his end of the deal to get vital information.
What “message” is sent by any of this? That abusers can regret that consequences of their actions yet still make excuses for them? In no way does Geralt condone the abuse, accept excuses for it, or anything even approaching this.
I hadn’t played any of the Witcher games when this review was published, and thought perhaps Gies was saying that you could role-play a character who sympathized with spousal abuse. Which, hey, it’s role-playing, so no big deal as far as I was concerned, considering how evil some games let you be. But, no, that’s not it at all. Geralt is a well-defined character, the player does not get to define his personality, and Geralt condones no excuses by evil people. You get to choose (1) what jobs he has time for, (2) what genuinely hard choices he will make between 2 or 3 generally equally bad outcomes, (3) whom he will sleep with, and (4) how he will kill enemies. You don’t get to condone spousal abuse. There’s no bad message conveyed here, unless simply acknowledging the humanity of an abuser is something we shouldn’t be exposed to.