Feminism

[Nappi]

Good. 

 

 

Haha.. wow! That is great!

[Gwardinen]

This makes me think more critical discourse should be delivered in song form.

[Bjorn]

Well that's the most glorious thing I've seen all week.

[SecretAsianMan]

I actually didn't enjoy the song part all that much (mostly because I hate auto-tune) but it was still fantastic.

[Henroid]

That was awesome, and also addressed her line for line from her original video too.

[Merus]

You might be familiar with the idea that there are 'alpha' and 'beta' men, but did you know it goes much further than that? Karalora over at We Hunted The Mammoth explains:
 

Alpha: Men women have sex with
Beta: Men women trick into raising their children (sired by alphas)
Gamma: Men who turn green when angry
Delta: Men who work for major airlines
Epsilon: Men who…uh…can we come back to this one?
Zeta: Men who know they can’t hack alpha status, refuse to accept beta status, and think Z’s make them sound cool and edgy
Eta: Men who want to know when you’re going to arrive
Theta: Men who want to know when their permanent teeth are going to arrive because they’re tired of lisping
Iota: Really tiny men
Kappa: Men who bow back when you bow to them
Lambda: Men who like baby sheep
Mu: Men who like baby cows
Nu: Men who help you level up in 65,000,000 BC
Xi: Men who try to type the number 11 in Roman numerals but let go of the Shift key too soon
Omicron: Men from planets orbiting stars in the constellation Perseus
Pi: Men who like baked desserts
Rho: Men who propel their boats gently down the stream
Sigma: Men who consider themselves the sum of all things
Tau: Men who misspell branches of Eastern Philosophy
Upsilon: Like Epsilon (if we ever figure that one out) but upside-down
Phi: Men who like the Fibonacci Sequence
Chi: Men who draw treasure maps
Psi: Men who compulsively check their tire pressure
Omega: Men who realize that all that wolfpack stuff is bullshit and doesn’t even apply to wolves

[Gwardinen]

I definitely see myself as a Kappa.

[Bjorn]

Pi men unite! 

[Justin Leego]

Good. 

 

 

Data.today

[Problem Machine]

I definitely see myself as a Kappa.

I see myself as Alpha Kappa. GrayFace.

[Cyborg771]

Have you guys seen the animation from Riot celebrating their latest world championship?

It's a really slick video, but I can't help but notice that all the players are male. As far as I can tell these aren't caricatures of existing players (but I know nothing about the pro LoL scene so I may be wrong). It seems like if you have an opportunity to create 10 fictional players you could at least at a token female, but nothing. The pro scene for a lot of games like this are heavily male dominated but why make your content representational when you can make it aspirational.

[osmosisch]

It's also fairly nonsensical in terms of content as far as I can tell. People play the game and turns into beams of light flying around being animes? I dont know man.

Although Riot talks a lot of the right talk lately about their representation of females, their stuff still has a lot of weird tonedeafness.

Just look at this recent effort:

[Merus]

There's also a ton of white dudes in that trailer, which is weird.

 

My patience for contextless fight scenes and showy displays of power is razor-thin, at this point. I just don't find spectacular punches cool.

[Synnah]

Good. 

 

 

Three thumbs up! Autotune is generally grating, and it's not even particularly well Autotuned, but it's a thorough rebuttal, and otherwise well-produced.

[Ben X]

There were only a few bits of her auto-tuned; his stuff wasn't, was it?

[Twig]

Yeah his stuff was actual singing.

[James]

My patience for contextless fight scenes and showy displays of power is razor-thin, at this point. I just don't find spectacular punches cool.

I spent much of that video trying to work out how to express that sentiment. It's weird to watch something so obviously expensive and presumably very popular among its intended audience, and feel utterly unimpressed by it.

That was also the video that made me realize I'm quite irritated by the

cliché.

[iax]

I realized that during this particular steam sale weekend few months ago:

 

[James]

Hahahaha, I didn't even spot that.

[syntheticgerbil]

I skipped through it a bunch. How many three point landings are there? They are a given for pointless fan pandering fight scenes. Unless you are holding something in one hand then fuuuuuuckkkkkk yoooouuuuuuu

[Malfsyde]

There's also a ton of white dudes in that trailer, which is weird.

 

My patience for contextless fight scenes and showy displays of power is razor-thin, at this point. I just don't find spectacular punches cool.

 

Agreed. I legitimately don't understand how anyone can watch something like that and decide that they want to play the game, unless they are already fanboys and this only exists as shameless fan-service. Aside from being completely tone deaf, it has literally nothing to do with the game. The characters could be cosmetically changed to look like Pacman and the Ghosts, and it will have exactly as much relevance to that game as this does to LoL.

 

Wasn't there like an 8 minute trailer for Elder Scrolls: Online that was basically the exact same shit, probably also with the mandatory badass mouthwipe? I think I just find it gross that video games keep trying to advertise themselves as films, but they're all the same shallow fantasy films with zero story.

 

Anyway to tie it back to Feminism - I don't know how anyone can look at this stuff and argue that video games aren't in serious need for some honest to God diversity, whether or not it directly relates to issues of sexism.

[Nachimir]

A minute or so into that video, I noticed how many minutes were left and thought "Jesus".

 

It feels like what's left of triple-A has now completely ossified into a bunch of macho tropes, and while I found it boring before, my brain is now getting pretty aggressive about defining it as irrelevant noise. Gamers weird excitement about guns, which isn't just a games thing but definitely has some strong roots there, is very much another part of that. It's not alienating. It's repellent.

[Cyborg771]

To respond to some of the repeated stuff I've seen. Yeah it's intended to get existing fans hyped, not as an ad. I guess if it's trying to "say" anything it's just "playing video games is actually this epic clash of titans" which is bullshit of course but sometimes in the midst of a game it can feel really important and that's what they're getting at with the visuals.

In regards to the racial aspect, I think like half of the guys are supposed to be of asian descent but it's not super clear and I didn't actually count. Still not very diverse.

[Merus]

That's still an ad, its target market is just existing customers. It's like how Coca-Cola run ads despite there being less than three people at this point who know what Coca-Cola is.

[SecretAsianMan]

Emma Watson gave a pretty great speech about feminism to the UN