The Gaming Den

I'd be more concerned about that giant dick shaped bulge.

That is in fact to what I was referring.

Bayonetta has similar proportions to other action game protagonist like Dante:


Think the character designer Mari Shimazaki said she designed Bayonetta to be of similar stature to him.

As for Erica, Toby, and other Catherine characters... I've seen trans and cis friends in Thailand say things like that around each other. If you're comfortable around your friends and in an environment where you don't feel threatened because of your identity, it's easier to joke about things that would be taboo in less accepting places.

Except this isn't a joke heard only a group of friends, it's a joke heard by an audience playing the game. And it's insulting a portion of that audience.

Also, I want to be very clear- when I talk about Bayonetta's "proportions," I mean the fact that it looks like she didn't bother tucking her dick for that gif I posted.

Now, I haven't played this game yet, but I am sure there is at least one trans character in the game Read Only Memories.

Bayonetta shares the same body design as other Umbra witches, including the rival and faceless nameless mook #381. It's just how the art designers decided to roll with in that game.

Prak wrote:

maglag wrote:

Prak wrote:Or a canonical one, anyway. Because nothing is stopping me from playing Bayonetta and just believing she is a trans woman.

Well, nothing other than my lack of money, anyway.

That and Bayonetta verse's fluff, since she belongs to the Umbra-witches, an all-female clan whose recruitment requirements are "must be born with spirit power and a vagina".

Unless the game literally says "you must be born with a vagina" I still choose to believe my version. Because there's a lot of gender fuckery in old magic folk lore.

Well, a bit of spoilers, but Bayoneta at a moment of the game meets her younger self because time magic, and she's a little girl.

maglag wrote:I don't know how everybody forgot it until now, including me, but Touhou is a videogame and one of its main themes is "(almost) every legend and myth is now a girl".

Touhou 13 in particular had Prince Shoutoku turned into a woman because magic.

No, Touhou posits a secret history where Prince Shoutoku was in fact a woman, and her being a bearded old guy is just part of the legends somehow. Nothing in the setting makes legends girly, they just tend to appear that way with no comment.

maglag wrote:Bayonetta shares the same body design as other Umbra witches, including the rival and faceless nameless mook #381. It's just how the art designers decided to roll with in that game.

Prak wrote:

maglag wrote:
That and Bayonetta verse's fluff, since she belongs to the Umbra-witches, an all-female clan whose recruitment requirements are "must be born with spirit power and a vagina".

Unless the game literally says "you must be born with a vagina" I still choose to believe my version. Because there's a lot of gender fuckery in old magic folk lore.

Well, a bit of spoilers, but Bayoneta at a moment of the game meets her younger self because time magic, and she's a little girl.

...what's your point?

I haven't checked in on this thread, but have our resident reactionaries and Gamergators threadshat this thread into oblivion yet for 'How dare you involve non-white straight male protagonists'? Or is this like, a reasoned discussion about diversity in video games on the internet? Because if it is, it needs to stop and devolve into namecalling, otherwise, what do I even anymore?

vagrant wrote:I haven't checked in on this thread, but have our resident reactionaries and Gamergators threadshat this thread into oblivion yet for 'How dare you involve non-white straight male protagonists'? Or is this like, a reasoned discussion about diversity in video games on the internet? Because if it is, it needs to stop and devolve into namecalling, otherwise, what do I even anymore?

Well on the bright side, you are a piece of shit that needs to go the fuck away for using gamergators as a pejorative for . . . whatever dumb thing you meant here.

I'm confused by what you're objecting to here, Kaebae. The implication that gamergators and our own resident racists and biased fucks, are, well, racist fucks?

vagrant wrote:I'm confused by what you're objecting to here, Kaebae. The implication that gamergators and our own resident racists and biased fucks, are, well, racist fucks?

I've never followed gamergate, but wasn't that about a female gamedev sleeping with journalists for reviews, and the following reddit censorship campaign?

Longes wrote:

vagrant wrote:I'm confused by what you're objecting to here, Kaebae. The implication that gamergators and our own resident racists and biased fucks, are, well, racist fucks?

I've never followed gamergate, but wasn't that about a female gamedev sleeping with journalists for reviews, and the following reddit censorship campaign?

It was pile of ass flavored ass, where there were and are huge problems with games journalism and games . . . not journalism . . . that dumb thing where publishers produce 90% of information about their games prior to release.

And then, a specific issue sparked a firestorm where it looked like some specific writer was sleeping with the subject of his article. Timeline wise, he allegedly had stopped sleeping with her before he wrote the article or something, but he never disclosed this to his bosses who presumably could have had some other person write the review, not that it matters, because everyone in games journalism is friends with everyone who makes games because it's basically as incestuous as congress and lobbyists.

But then, because the one specific spark that started to get press involved a women tangentially somehow, even as not the actual person who did anything wrong (yet), a bunch of misogynists jumped onto the bandwagon and pretended to some degree to care about the issue.

EDIT AS Corrected below: Meanwhile, some random youtuber made some completely comment to the effect that whatever, people should probably not sleep with other people and then write reviews at the same time, if that happened, and then Zoey Quinn issued a false DMCA takedown of his video, because she apparently cracked under the pressure of a bunch of misogynists waging war on her and went insane. In what would become a common trend, Total Biscuit said something completely sane and reasonable "false DMCA claims are bad" and the entire games journalism/game developers industry attacked him for a month and a half and called him a misogynist every chance they got.

So then for a period of X months the following three things happened.
1) People who cared about gaming journalism being shit tried really hard to use the attention paid to the issue to help improve gaming journalism.
2) Some misogynists said misogynists said misogynistic things.
3) Gaming journalism closed ranks, refused to improve in any way, and did everything they could possibly think of to pretend that people in 1) didn't exist, and only 2) exists. Such as writing a writing articles about gamergate where they talk about how some guy who never said gamergate ever sent a bomb threat about an Anita Sarkeesian Speech that also had nothing to do with gamergate, therefore all gamergaters are monsters. Or trolling comments on youtube videos or twitter to find literally the dumbest comments and then pretend they were the entirety of the movement.

And then dumb idiots like vagrant fell for the trap and have come away with the impression that Martin Luther King Jr. is a segregationist who advocated violent revolution because other black people said dumb things at some point.

And then everyone who actually wanted to improve games journalism just gave up and accepted that people are too stupid to see through really pathetically transparent attempts by the people we are asking to improve, the "journalists" who get paid by companies to give them glowing reviews, to divert any attempt to get them to improve to being about some dumb side topic instead.

I hereby request that everyone avoid derailing this thread with a gamergate fight.

According to an original designer in a 1994 interview, Samus is a "newhalf", which was at the time an accepted term for pre-op transsexual. This does not appear to have been carried forwards, but then again the setting's tech is basically magic and we don't talk about Other M.

Newhalf appears to be the standard-ish Japanese term for a trans woman. It's Wasei-eigo, which is a Japanese weird made from English words. That is literally all I know about it, so I don't know if it's pejorative or innocent intended.

Longes wrote:

vagrant wrote:I'm confused by what you're objecting to here, Kaebae. The implication that gamergators and our own resident racists and biased fucks, are, well, racist fucks?

I've never followed gamergate, but wasn't that about a female gamedev sleeping with journalists for reviews, and the following reddit censorship campaign?

That was the straw that broke the camel's back, the spark that lit the powder keg, in essence it's what started it.

----

Now back on topic: Read more on Read Only Memories, the game allows the player to be trans with it's selection of preferred pronouns at the beginning of the game.

Leress wrote:

Longes wrote:

vagrant wrote:I'm confused by what you're objecting to here, Kaebae. The implication that gamergators and our own resident racists and biased fucks, are, well, racist fucks?

I've never followed gamergate, but wasn't that about a female gamedev sleeping with journalists for reviews, and the following reddit censorship campaign?

That was the straw that broke the camel's back, the spark that lit the powder keg, in essence it's what started it.

----

Now back on topic: Read more on Read Only Memories, the game allows the player to be trans with it's selection of preferred pronouns at the beginning of the game.

In ROM you are Ageless-Faceless-Gender-Neutral-Culturally-Ambiguous-Adventure-Person. AFGNCAAP for short. You get to specify the pronouns used (you can even make your own), but the protagonist's gender doesn't matter at any point in the game. You might as well say that Myst features a transgender hero.

name_here wrote:I hereby request that everyone avoid derailing this thread with a gamergate fight.

According to an original designer in a 1994 interview, Samus is a "newhalf", which was at the time an accepted term for pre-op transsexual. This does not appear to have been carried forwards, but then again the setting's tech is basically magic and we don't talk about Other M.

http://www.themarysue.com/metroids-samu ... der-woman/

http://thefederalist.com/2015/09/02/no- ... ans-woman/

Now both articles have a lot of problems, but there doesn't seem to be much proof behind the claim that Samus Aran is trans.

Oh, speaking of: the Choice Of Games guys are big on gender/sexuality diversity. All of their games give a male/female choice and most of their more recent ones have some form of "it's complicated." The hero series has some NPCs who are nonbinary (I forget exactly how) and one incident where someone makes some crude remark about wondering what sort of genitals they've got and gets yelled at. Also, in Choice Of Robots you do not have to give your robot a gender.

name_here wrote: According to an original designer in a 1994 interview, Samus is a "newhalf", which was at the time an accepted term for pre-op transsexual.

Source? Because I read the exact opposite, that Samus was a woman and they used gender neutral pronouns in the Japanese manual to preserve the surprise at the end. (then some clown who didn't play the game translated the manual to English changed it to male pronouns because he didn't know better).

EDIT: Ah, I see. That article Leress posted where Samus is a trans woman? Brianna Wu is a reprehensible person who is only famous because she rode the anti-gamergate wave. She's pretty close to the stereotype of an SJW that the fedora crowd has and is not a credible source for anything.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

name_here wrote: According to an original designer in a 1994 interview, Samus is a "newhalf", which was at the time an accepted term for pre-op transsexual.

Source? Because I read the exact opposite, that Samus was a woman and they used gender neutral pronouns in the Japanese manual to preserve the surprise at the end. (then some clown who didn't play the game translated the manual to English changed it to male pronouns because he didn't know better).

EDIT: Ah, I see. That article Leress posted where Samus is a trans woman? Brianna Wu is a reprehensible person who is only famous because she rode the anti-gamergate wave. She's pretty close to the stereotype of an SJW that the fedora crowd has and is not a credible source for anything.

The second article I posted, while the author doesn't like Wu still post that the validity of the source is tenuous at best. Now I don't have the source mentioned ( I will look for it later). So I will try to get a better grasp of that situation.

Also regarding Poison:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lj-9np ... w&index=48

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

name_here wrote: According to an original designer in a 1994 interview, Samus is a "newhalf", which was at the time an accepted term for pre-op transsexual.

Source? Because I read the exact opposite, that Samus was a woman and they used gender neutral pronouns in the Japanese manual to preserve the surprise at the end. (then some clown who didn't play the game translated the manual to English changed it to male pronouns because he didn't know better).

EDIT: Ah, I see. That article Leress posted where Samus is a trans woman? Brianna Wu is a reprehensible person who is only famous because she rode the anti-gamergate wave. She's pretty close to the stereotype of an SJW that the fedora crowd has and is not a credible source for anything.

Actually, the Japanese manual used "kare", which is explicitly masculine, and the other posted source agrees that the interview in question occurred. What precisely this all means is probably known only to the people who actually worked on the first game. I'm inclined to suspect they were originally planning on a male protagonist, switched at the last minute, and had people suggest the transgender thing with varying degrees of seriousness internally.

name_here wrote: Actually, the Japanese manual used "kare", which is explicitly masculine, and the other posted source agrees that the interview in question occurred. What precisely this all means is probably known only to the people who actually worked on the first game. I'm inclined to suspect they were originally planning on a male protagonist, switched at the last minute, and had people suggest the transgender thing with varying degrees of seriousness internally.

Eh, Japanese is rarely explicitly anything.

Take their porn for example!

"Kare" is historically gender-neutral, and neither "kare" nor "kanojo" were popular terms until they were used in translations of Western books, since *something* had to be used for "him/her". So "kare" has a mixed history of being either neutral or masculine, making it pretty suitable for an armor-encased mystery warrior I'd think.

Kaelik wrote:Meanwhile, Total Biscuit made some completely innocuous comment to the effect that whatever, people should probably not sleep with other people and then write reviews at the same time, if that happened, and then Zoey Quinn issued a false DMCA takedown of his video, because she apparently cracked under the pressure of a bunch of misogynists waging war on her and went insane.

Correction: Some random nobody named MundaneMatt made a video about the original allegations of impropriety. That video got taken down with a DMCA claim in Zoe Quinn's name. Shortly thereafter, John Bain (TotalBiscuit) weighed in on the matter with a twitlonger rant that boiled down to "don't know, don't care, I don't feel like trying to sort through 4chan bullshit. But false DMCA claims are not okay, and if that wasn't a troll using Zoe Quinn's name (which it damn well could have been because Youtube's DMCA system is fucking broke), then it was completely unethical of her to do that." This prompted an indignant twittersplosion from a bunch of people within the industry.

I really don't want to have the GG discussion again (particularly since we've been asked not to derail the thread), but it's important to understand that being hated by misogynists does not make you right. There are very few issues so neat that the world divides evenly into two little camps, and there are very camps which don't have their own assholes in them. If you suggest that maybe we should consider using our financial leverage over Israel in order to curb their mistreatment of the Palestinian people, antisemites will cheer. Not because they necessarily give a fuck about the Palestinians, but because they want to see Israel weakened, and pretending to give a fuck about Palestinians is a way to do that. The world is fucking complicated, and I can guarantee you that no matter how right you think you are somewhere out there there's an asshole who agrees with you for reasons that disgust you.

When John Bain dipped his toes into this clusterfuck, he did not regurgitate the misogynist bullshit that was floating around the dark corners of the internet. This is what he had to say. It's a pretty fucking weak and inoffensive assessment of the situation. But that post is what earned him his own twitter lynch mob. Not by random jackoffs on the internet, but by Zoe Quinn's friends and supporters within the industry. He had the dev/journalist clique (the fact that that's one clique should really make you kind of uncomfortable to begin with) shouting him down as a misogynist. He had indie devs threatening him with wrongful legal action. Phil Fish called him a "gross youtuber nerd" and then ragequit the industry (again), because Phil Fish is actually still in gradeschool.

Zoe Quinn's decision to DMCA the video is forgivable. I'm sure having your sex life at the center of an internet shitstorm is deeply unpleasant, and a momentary lapse of judgment does not make you the worst person on the fucking planet. Some kind of "oops, my bad" is probably appropriate, because it's actually kind of a big deal, but what-the-fuck-ever. But the treatment of John Bain at the hands of Zoe Quinn's supporters within the industry? That is completely reprehensible. When John Bain says false DMCA's are not okay, he's fucking right and that's something we all need to be able to agree on. Abusing the legal system to censor things that make you uncomfortable is a great big fucking no-no. The fact that the industry chose to viciously berate him for saying that means that that part of the industry actually is as corrupt as the misogynist shitstains thought it was. That is the moment you should have realized that GG didn't have a happy ending, because no matter which side "won" the people who came out on top were always going to be assholes.

And that giant wall of text is all I have to say. Promise. Swear on me mum. I really, really, really strongly suggest you read TB's twitlonger post (or just the tl;dr at the bottom, really) and ask yourself if you think that deserved the rage it actually got.

Kaelik wrote:And then, a specific issue sparked a firestorm where it looked like some specific writer was sleeping with the subject of his article.

people are too stupid to see through really pathetically transparent attempts by the people we are asking to improve, the "journalists" who get paid by companies to give them glowing reviews

I think it's the disjunction between these two points that was the turning point for Gamergate. Whilst the people who supported Gamergate claimed to be fighting to minimise the corrupting influence of Big Money on games journalism, the thing that sparked the most frenzied action was an indie developer maybe getting a good review for a free game from someone she was at some point sleeping with. The fact that the actual "corrupt" reviewer that apparently Gamergaters hate so much got no attention but the female indie dev caught all the flack was quite eye opening too. At that point the mysogynist, indie-game hating "real gamer" crowd had latched onto it so virulently that I don't think there was any hope of coming back.

If there had been a few more think pieces like the one by RPS Boardgames columnist Rab Florence about the Spike TV Video Game Awards and less attack threads on 4chan the debate might have gone somewhere. Nowadays people just have to accept that the Gamergate label is associated with the worst of the reactionary crowd and come up with a new angle. There is plenty of real journalism to be done on the business practices of triple-A developers when it comes to reviews, but tagging it onto something now known mainly as a hate group is not going to increase credibility.