So I was asked to write some things for this article, but most of my comments went unused. This is perfectly fine, but I figured I’d go and edit them (a ton) a bit and post my opinions about this whole thing. This will be a little weird since it was written before the Dev’s opened their mouths, so bare with me.

Always! This is a terribly grey area and while I can understand why Tentacle Bento has upset a lot of people, there is a part of me that is bothered by this. Now, Tentacle Bento is not a product I would buy, and it didn’t seem particularly well done. Heck, at best it seems “Terrible”, rather crude and immature. Kickstarter was within their right to cancel it, and considering the public nature of the service, it really probably shouldn’t have rape humor on it. Kickstarter should be a safe place! It’s also not a free speech issue. What happened was free speech at work — a call and response between free people. It was something about the attitude exhibited by *SOME* people (primarily people in the video game “scene”) that compelled me to even have an opinion.

So my first thought was “This is pornography”, which to me means “leave it alone”. it’s rather surreal for me to see Brandon Sheffield mention this or Rapelay in the same sentence as “GTA” or “Capcom” and refer to it as “our industry”. These games are as much “our industry” as pornography is a part of the movie industry. Cinema about sex does not include the latest release from Brazzers. It’s movies like Deliverance or Monster and even most uncomfortably, Irréversible. For games, it’s mostly stuff in the indie scene (auntiepixelante’s work, or maybe even Catherine (though your mileage WILL vary).

But while Rapelay is clearly porn, comments from the developers have made indicates that the Tentacle Bento guys want to REALLY, HONESTLY be ‘cheeky satire’. So fuck em. Still, I get bothered by the idea that you have to be some sort of horrible person to enjoy stuff like this. THAT I can’t let stand.

So forget being an indie game designer, I come to this as a pervert (though the venn diagram there has a lot of overlap there). When I play creepy Japanese sex simulators, I don’t have my game design sensors go off in the same way they go off when I play any ‘actual’ game. I don’t consider them a direct part of our craft or industry. I grew up looking at hentai and at a young age was roleplaying online in scenarios involving non-consent (on both sides of the field!). I look at hentai on 4chan while I drink my morning coffee before I start my design work for the day. Fantasy rape is a pretty common fetish in all gender/sexuality/role configurations and for the most part, people keep themselves and their fetishes under total control. A lot of people even avoid the term ‘fantasy rape’ and prefer using ‘ravishment’ or other terms to try and block out the negative connotations. This gets complicated because Rape *IS* a huge a social issue. But is fantasy rape as separate from real rape as Fantasy Violence is from real violence? I would venture to say it is as separate, if not more so, though there is no study I could find on precisely this. There is plenty of studies that say More Porn = Less Reports of Rape (just google for them). Even if it doesn’t increase the chance of violence, does it negatively influence our opinions? A big issue a lot of people have isn’t that more people will become rapists, but that our REACTION to rape will be diminished, and we’ll all be a bunch of victim blaming pricks. Sadly nothing can be said for certain on that front, though I would venture a guess to say, like with most other things, the answer is “no”. Social injustice is ingrained on the subtle level, not with ridiculous violence or porn. Maybe. Who knows.

If something is pornography then I am of the opinion that people should not be shamed for what they enjoy as long as no one was hurt in making it and they can keep their feelings under control. I am of the opinion that porn is the safest place for people to enjoy these fantasies. Sexism in general media I think is a far far far worse problem (and where Tentacle Bento’s dev team seemingly wants to be). It’s hard to play a game like Rapelay and think of it as a normal part of culture — it is so intentionally taboo and terrible that it even becomes part of the experience. It throws up red flags in your brain that reminds you “this isn’t real”, just like ridiculously violent games do. Sexism in general media, or the attitude about rape in open culture is a lot more subversive and should be fought whenever it can. We should hold our ‘public’ media to a higher standard… But hands off the porn. Porn is indulgent and self aware and very much a part of our culture and how we deal with our un-vented sexual feelings. Porn is the retreat we use to stroke the dark parts of our psyches in safety. My issue does not come from the idea that this thing is terrible, but the occasionally common idea that one would have to be terrible to like something LIKE that. I just don’t think that follows.

So I think Tentacle Bento’s problem is it ISN’T PORNY ENOUGH (and it’s probably being made by slapdicks). Seriously! I mean that. Especially with some of the stuff the creators are saying now, maybe their ‘cheeky satire’ does fall under the label of ‘harmful subtle subversion’. It’s also public presence is also a huge issue. For better or for worse, if you wanna do really fetishy, questionable porn, it’s better not to bring a ton of attention to your self.

Also, I think people SHOULD say things like this are sexist and misogynistic. That’s totally cool and a good thing! People who enjoy these things SHOULD know what they are. It helps protect your brain… but at the same point, I don’t think people should be shamed for liking things like this. Our criticism of a piece of media should not NECESSARILY implicate it’s fans. Now, if the fans are saying wild, stupid shit, sure, but we should try not to implicate the whole fan base. People can enjoy things in different ways and for different reasons. I’m really disappointed that a number of fellow perverts were really quick to point the finger. I don’t want any kink-elitism going on. It’s like putting calorie counts on food. It’s not to say “ONLY A FUCKING FATASS FOOL WOULD EAT THIS”, it’s to make them aware of what they’re putting in their body. Equally, we should know what we’re putting into our brain so we can hope to treat it responsibly. And if we do prove to be sexist or fatasses or sexist fatasses it might be totally in line to go “WELL MAYBE IF YOU DIDN’T THINK PORNOGRAPHIC SEX/BIG MACS WERE NORMAL SEXUAL INTERACTION/FOOD, MAYBE YOU WOULDN’T BE SO SEXIST/FAT”, but we should try not to generalize.

So humorously when I wrote this for Ethan I was sorta begrudgingly pro Tentacle Bento, but I just can’t anymore. They deserve to be ripped to shit. I can still be Pro-Pervert though! And I will enjoy my creepy Japanese rape porn while striving to be a friendly, gentle human being in real life.

edit: I just read about the tier where you could put someon e’s likeness into the game. What the fuck are wrong with these guys? That’s not cool, even if they were obviously in porn territory.

Well, my ROFLcon Panel is up. I’m a bit too afraid to watch it my self, but here you can see me, Bennett Foddy (QWOP), Jesper Juul (Game design PhD) and Jamin Warren (Moderator and Killscreen dude) talking about hard games in semi sophisticated ways!

Enjoy!

I really really really am starting to hate this system. For those who don’t know, Skullgirls’ IPS stands for “Infinite Protection System” and is the system the game uses to make sure you’re not doing infinite combos. It does this by detecting looped sequences and ‘discrete’ parts of combos. If you do an ‘infinite’ the other player can hit a button to burst out of it.To quote Mike Z…

I’m not sure why people think this IPS is complicated [...] the rules are still simple to explain – “don’t start a chain with something you already hit with, and your combo is always legit.” You get 2 free sections before moves are even counted toward this limit (your first and second chains) and one more free section where moves are kept track of but the limit isn’t enforced yet (the entirety of your jump if you’re in the air, or your next chain if you aren’t). That’s it. You can determine exactly whether or not a combo is possible just by writing it out: “Did I already use s.LP? OK, can’t start another chain with that.” And if something doesn’t work, the hitsparks change color and you immediately know which move caused it. You also immediately know why, because the ONLY THING that would cause it is you having used that move before.
“Don’t start a chain with something you’ve already hit with” is the only rule. The exception is your first jumpin sequence, first ground chain and first air combo.

Okay, so it stops infinites and dumb loops, right? Well, no. It really doesn’t help any problem at all, and makes certain problems worse. All it succeeds at is limiting the length of combos. Not to a reasonable length either, just enough to make sure they eventually have to end. What the system demands is very carefully planned and practiced combos with very few liberties. Adding an extra jab somewhere can lead to another part of the combo not working. It stifles mid-match creativity. It doesn’t even stop loops. As a Parasoul player, most of my combos have this segment…

… LP->MP->HP->HP->LP Tear Shot
LP->MP->HP->HP->LP Tear Shot(sometimes allowed when starting in the ‘free section’)
c.LP->MP->HP->HP->LP Tear Shot
LK->MP->HP->HP->LP Tear Shot
c.LK->MP->HP->HP->LP Tear Shot

It looks sometiming like this. And you might go “That’s not too bad”, but then it gets included in a competent combo and you get this. Desk shows another ‘loop’ with Cerabella. You also get issues where the order of segments effect the IPS. For example (to make up a fake combo), something like, Launcher -> j.LP – .j.MP – j.HP relaunch j.MP – j.HP would trigger IPS, but j.MP – jHP relaunch j.LP – j.MP – j.HP would not. It’s a quirky, dumb thing that’s hard to keep track of mid match, leading to a reliance on pre-canned combos you read online, just like every other game.

So what does the IPS do for us?

Well, it makes sure combos end, like I said, but so does gravity, increasing pushback and hitstun decay. Does it do anything better? Well, for one it’s very deterministic. Gravity, hitstun and pushback are very “analog” and hard to track. IPS is super reliable, which IS a plus. But what else does it do?

*Promotes very long combos where players can continue until all their buttons are exhausted.
*Makes improving combos on the spot very difficult.
*Makes combo corrections for things like height and stuff very difficult since one errant move throws off the whole combo.
*Makes improvisation much harder in general.
*Makes memorization harder, since loops have to be ‘obfuscated’ from the IPS.

It really doesn’t have any positive qualities outside of it’s very clear, obvious deterministic nature. Everything else seems like a straight con. Funny enough, I still get messages from people when I complain about it saying that it promotes creative combos when that is so obviously not true. It has all the old problems of any old system, just slightly rearranged and much more rigid. It almost makes me wonder if these players are even good enough at the game to know what they’re talking about. “Lemme just copy combos like I always did but the devs tell me it’s more creative so imma think I’m bein’ more creative!” Okay maybe that’s being a little unfair, but whatever.

While the system sounds good on paper, in practice it seems like a hamfisted, awkward solution to a non-problem. Alas, Guilty Gear will continue to have the best combo system out of any chain combo based game. A shame too, because I like the rest of the game soooooo much.

Okay this one is a shorty. I’ve been arguing about Smash a lot lately so reading stuff has exposed me to how the community uses metagaming again. They’re not the only ones though. People murder this term. Now, this is purely a definitions argument, so technically it’s a ‘who cares’ topic, but fuck you.

Wikipedia has this example…

In fighting games such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl, metagaming may occur at the character select screen. The opposing character has various strengths that can be avoided and weaknesses that can be exploited more easily depending on the character you choose provided you are aware of those strengths and weaknesses (called a “match up”). For a basic example, a character with a projectile attack has the advantage over a grappler who must be close to the opponent to be effective.

Now I understand how my college professors felt about Wikipedia! This is NOT metagaming. This is knowledge OF THE GAME, not knowledge of the trends surrounding a game. Here’s a good little test to see if something is metagame related. If you locked like, 10 people together in a room in space time for a thousand years to play one game, would they not be aware of the aspect in question? They definitely could know the matchups of every character in a fighting game. Conversely, they would not know the current deck trends of MTG. Or the build order trends in an RTS (though their builds after so long might smash the current metagame. Still, it would factor into their build optimizations). Or whatever is going on in a MOBA at any given time. They might have the knowledge and skills now to adapt to the metagame faster than other people, but thats neither here nor there.

Now, if you’re double blind selecting and you know who someone is playing and counter pick them, you’re quite possibly meta gaming. If you’re playing to a known person’s behaviors, you quite possibly be metagaming. I don’t like using the term in these situations (definitionally speaking, I prefer to use it for macro trends, not personal ones), but it isn’t wrong as far as I can figure. Either way, if you could, in theory, figure it out without the community, it is not metagaming, even if the community helps speed up the process.

So awhile ago I wrote a little thing about the concept of Peak Effort, which is that, given equal motivation, top players of various competitive games put in a relatively equal amount of effort, even if the returns are more less in any given game. The hardest games to play at a high level are often those with the most hype communities or biggest prize purses (higher motivation). If that still doesn’t make sense, read the article real quick, I’ll wait.

Okay so — I was having some conversations about fighting game accessibility and everyone wants to make it easier for players to “be good”. That always seemed odd to me, not due to some meritocracy-ish reason, but because it didn’t just make sense for a reason I couldn’t put together. If accessibility so important, why are hard games super popular? If super hard, games are so accessible, why are so many more people accessing them than other games?

Well I got it, I think.

The difficulty of getting into a game at a competent level is based almost exclusively on the community/people you play with. You can’t design a game where it’s easy to get into high level play because the best players, on average, will be putting it waaaay more effort than you. If you manage to truly offset effort, you’ve probably shot the chances of your game being taken seriously in the foot. It’s sort of an inversion of peak effort. The better people are at your game, on average, the harder the game will be to get into.

So what can you do, as a designer? Well, lets look at Street Fighter and Smash bros. I’m going to say something a lot of design people will probably find crazy.

Smash Bros is not intuitive, nor is it elegant. It is not ‘Accessible’ in the way people assume it is.

Besides having a button to do Specials and control unity between characters, the game is pretty obtuse. Just getting into the game, you have the reliance of smash attacks to kill people — something that does not have a discrete button. Recovering properly is hard. It’s super easy to fall and die on accident. Knocking someone off the screen is not intuitive. The concept might be, but what’s required is not. Nor is even surviving! Then when you get better you got things like tilts and fast falling and multiple kinds of jumps, some of which sometime take super brief inputs to perform… And then you got all the CRAAAAZY Stuff and glitches that I won’t even hold the game responsible for. In highschool, my friends made me play Smash 64 and I was pissed off because of how complex the game was and how impossible it was for me to do anything significant. When a friend forced me to play melee, the skills me and him developed put up the same ‘skill barrier’ street fighter did.

… So why is Smash Bros more accessible than Street Fighter?

Well the short of it is the communities. While the competitive Smash Community could be described as a bunch of manbabies, Smash has a huge community of casual players , while almost everyone who plays fighting games knows what the hell they’re doing. You can easily find someone to play Smash with you at your skill level, but if you’re getting into fighting games, you’re always going to be dealing with people who know everything. You can find groups of players who will even be playing Marvel vs Capcom casually together and it’ll be indistinguishable from the casualness of Smash. They’re little bubbles of accessibility where no one is trying hard enough to ruin it for everyone.

The real difference is that Smash makes you care less. Items, four players whimisical attitudes and generally a source of “hilarity” and “craziness”. You rarely can’t do the thing you want, you only don’t know it’s there. The game is “fun” to play when you’re awful. While in SF, you FEEL the parts of the game you’re missing. You know what a hadoken is and can’t do it. You’ve seen the combo videos. You play online and you can’t do anything. Playing street fighter at a low level isn’t particularly fun. When you lower the skill barriers earlier on in a game, what you’re doing is trying to hook the player in. As long as players are having fun at low levels, you can almost be as unintuitive as you want (though I would not recommend it).

Designing for accessibility is hard, dawg.

Okay, so Sine Mora is a 3d Shmup for XBL with some pretty high production values. The game lends it’s self beautifully to screen shots. But this has to be one of the flatter games I’ve seen of it’s production value. It’s a shame too, because I like a lot of the stylistic choices in the game. I love that everyone’s speaking Hungarian. I love the boss title cards and UI elements. But the game is flat as hell — flatter than even PS1 era games. Lets compare some “Level 1s”

Compared to…

or something a bit more modern.

Everything is flat and in a straight line. Not just the backgrounds, but even the enemies. Coming on screen in straight, simple boring lines with no energy. Einhander has tons of energy and visual pacing. Enemies come on screen form different angles or linger in or out of the foreground and background. The angle of motion and the speed you’re traveling at changes. Ikaruga uses the ‘scripted’ nature of shmups to throw screen after screen of beautiful compositions at you. You move through the background in dynamic ways. Very thing in Sine Mora, while beautiful on a screen shot level is flat and without energy, save maybe the bosses (which still doesn’t really compare to Einhander’s or, more so, Ikaruga’s first bosses).

I have to wonder why this is. When I first saw videos of the game, I didn’t write anything because I figured it was “work in progress” footage, but now I’m amazed that a shmup with such high production value didn’t put the time in to really make their assets sing, by really playing with the composition of the screen and the pacing of how the player moves through the background of the game. Am I missing something here? Perhaps someone might say that einhander and Ikaruga are too busy (I can understand someone hating on Einhander’s 3/4th views for example), but does anyone actually think Sine Mora wouldn’t be visually improved by taking lessons from these two games? I KNOW they’re aware of them. The ship in Sine Mora has the radiant sword, so I know they looked into Radiant Silvergun.

Now this also isn’t a comment on the overall quality of the game. It could still be loads of fun and I heard the difficulty scales quite well. I’m just befuddled that a bunch of people who obviously cared about their game a ton missed this one artistic facet that really has made some games before it sing. I really want to know what you guys think, because I could easily be missing something here.

It’s been awhile, so lemme give some updates on Naomi and Sinlen!

Naomi

First change is one to Naomi’s attack animation. While original the game had more of a “Castlevania 1″ vibe, the tone of the game has been different from that for quite awhile. At the time, a simple attack animation seemed appropriate, but over time it began to feel outdated. As such a much more ‘ribbony’, fluid attack felt more appropriate. I’m rather pleased with the results.

Naomi’s shield has also been changed. Unpowered, her shield can be held out indefinitely for a small energy cost. Damage is then redirected to your energy. It’s not efficient, but it’s almost impossible to screw up. The parry is similar to the old version, but with a larger window and lower cost. It’s hard to use, but exceedingly powerful.

Sinlen

Bomber Sinlen’s Arsenal always seemed a little too small. With Gunner being the ‘boring default’, and the Forbidden Knife being an weapon many players will avoid, Sinlen was left with 2 ‘normal’ weapons. Sinlen also had a lot more design space to work with, so I figured “Sure, why not?”. Bomber is a slow firing, high powered spell that detonates when the fire button is released. While expensive and slow, Bomber can one shot most enemies in the game and can do massive damage to bosses if aimed right. The projectile can also bowl through multiple enemies in a row!

Magic Break: Barrage Barrage’s homing projectiles helps balance out bomber’s slow speed. Barrage summons out 3 projectiles that, after a moment, rush toward the nearest enemy. They don’t do a lot of damage, but can clear out hard to enemies with ease.

Gunner and Renka have some updates too. Gunner not only gets a nicer sprite, but a slower projectile speed with higher damage. It makes it a little harder to spam, but all together more useful as it can do real damage now. While Gunner still scales with energy, the effect is much less severe. Renka’s spreading shots have had more projectiles added, but has a slower rate of fire and lower range.

I feel the balance is much better now, with Renka no longer being a clear upgrade from Gunner and Bomber being a fun new addition.

With the Cross Assault stuff going on, I’ve read a number of pro-woman (though not always expressly feminist) pieces and it’s great to see this kinda of out pour of support. Classier, older members of the gaming community are starting to take a stand. That said, there are a number of poor arguments I’ve seen over the years that I want to address. The issue with most of these arguments as ‘laziness’, though I am not comfortable using that word when many of these people are going out of their way to try and help a cause. Instead, I think the problem is many people don’t go the extra mile in crafting their arguments. People make this mistake all the time in all sorts of fields, but this issue is important and the better the quality of argument, the better the result.

Let me also express before I begin that I am not an expert and I say this all while being perfectly willing to be wrong. These, in the very strongest sense of the word, are my opinions and only by sharing them can I refine them. I am not the guy with all the answers.

The “That’s not Anatomically Correct/Possible!” Argument

This is the argument where “Going the Extra Mile applies the most. Whenever I see this argument used wrong, it almost always could be corrected to be right. Generally the writers are properly identifying that something is wrong, they’re just articulating it incorrectly in my opinion.

First, I’m going to talk about art. I’ll admit that I’m a pretty bad artist (Though to some extent, that will be relevant to the discussion), but even at a low level of skill, something is clear. Illustration is not about accurately portraying reality. Depending on an artists style and skill, realism and anatomical accuracy can be all over the charts and not one configuration is ‘correct’. People stylize for various reasons. Aesthetic, ease of drawing, whatever. Sometimes parts of the anatomy do wacky stuff just to be distinct or because it’s part of the artist’s voice. Akagi has an impossible nose and the Knight from Dragon Crown has impossibly wide shoulders.

When Bob Mackey of 1up pointed out that a character in DS2 had impossible upward slanting breasts, my thought was “So what?”, in regards to his argument. The image it’s self is pretty awful, but the fact that the breasts are wrong are not an argument in and of themselves. The whole “Chicken Psylocke” thing comes to mind to mind too. This awesome person writes a cool piece on the flaws with a traditional female pose from the perspective of a contortionist and martial artist. The blog is pretty great, but one problem is that the focus is too much on the realism. He successfully also points out that the poses are more so, overused to death at this point, but there are a lot of factors to consider. One argument I didn’t like was bringing up Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar traditionally exists as animation. Comics exist as still pictures. The whole concept of ‘dynamic’ poses are to instill energy into a motionless drawing. Also composition becomes much more of a factor. Realism is often a low priority in these situations. You’re TRADING realism to achieve other, more important things. Harping on realism just makes people yell at you for being too serious. I mean, it’s just a comic, right? Well, no. These Psylocke and Wonder Woman poses are still not beyond critique. The trade in of realism certainly is partially to impart energy into each piece, but they also want something else.

These poses (and most female comic book poses) exist to show off the characters chest and ass in one shot… and they do it ALL the time. Now, I like me some nice butt shots and honestly, I’ve done the same thing at points, but they do it all the time. They can barely show a female character without trying to fit tits and ass in a picture at the same time. So far so that they are willing to trade big chunks of reality and anatomy to do it. Now that’s okay for fun or for porn, but when you’re releasing a comic to the public, have some responsibility and don’t be booty-greedy! For those of you criticizing this stuff, go the extra mile and EXPLAIN why they’re doing it. Explain why pose, or anatomy or outfit in context is inappropriate (and remember, just because the men wear silly outfits too doesn’t mean there isn’t a case to be made. Similar is not necessarily equal!). You do NOT want to make it easy for people to blow you off for being a prude. This Comic does a good job explaining the absurdity of Miranda’s character from Mass Effect and the comic-comment under it shows the gratuitous lengths they went to to show her butt. It’s not that Miranda has a fine ass — because it certainly is fine — it’s that they put so much attention on it that it becomes downright comical and disrespectful. Don’t end your argument early — GO THERE. Most of the people who agree with you already know what ‘there’ is, but they don’t. If you stop without going there, your argument is basically fluff and style all building to an ultimate point that never comes. Give no refuge to those who you wish to enlighten, because if they can find a hole in your argument to hide in, they’ll hide in it.

Some more on Art

Art wise, breasts are hard. They’re also very fun! Also, you know what the easiest breasts to draw are? Big, stupid, bubble boobs. Amazingly, they’re even easier to draw than no boobs at all! They hide parts of the chest that can be hard to draw well! Some people also enjoy big goofy dumb bubble boobs (I admit I do as well to some degree!). Now, this doesn’t make them good, or acceptable (Though I don’t think they’re inherently unacceptable either, context depending), but having some clue why they might be that way can be enlightening to some degree. Also, impossible fabrics. Wonderful breast wrapping cloth that is almost as good as nudity! That too is also easier to draw and shade than more realistic breast drapings. In fact, drawing the faint impression of breasts through a shirt is hard as hell and can be thrown by the style of the piece as a whole.

Men on the other hand get drawn with missing/extra muscles and impossible bulbous chests (like the Liefeld example). The less realistic you are, the more leeway you get. Learning art favors unrealistic depictions. Now, you can simplify the female form in ways that are less sexual (IE, old fashion style expressional drawings), but copying and imitation is unfortunately also a stepping stone, even if the artist means the best. This doesn’t necessarily excuse anything or make it okay, but a lot of articles about media act like art manifests from out of nowhere, fully formed and it’s never that simple. A lot of disagreements I tend to have come from my perspective as a content creator.

Porn Games and Pervert Shaming

Battle Raper and Rapelay need to stop coming up in arguments. These in the battle against sexism in media are the least important things to fight (unless you’re anti porn in general, in which case I very much disagree with you, but that’s another argument). No one who isn’t already crazy is going to play Rapelay and think “Yeah, this is normal”. Porn is a fun indulgence and fantasy. The most dangerous media is the media that people take seriously. Nothing tells you that the depictions of females in comics or video games is inherently flawed. It invades the culture subtly and subversively. Most porn is self aware. Like watching a horrible slasher movie, you KNOW what it is. You can enjoy murdering people in a game without wanting to actually kill something, so why can’t you enjoy content about dubious consent, from either perspective, safely?

This gets into Pervert Shaming. People have fetishes. People enjoy them safely all the time (even rape fetishes, which rarely have any association with actual rape) and there is no shame in that. Or just enjoying sexual stuff in normal games in general. That isn’t wrong from a consumer standpoint, but instead from a producer standpoint. The argument should be that mainstream media is an inappropriate place to enjoy scantly clad women all over the place. It’s not the time or the place. We’re treating guilty pleasures as normal and that can be bad!

When you shame people for their sexual fetishes, you only make them hate you. It’s also not fair — women are perverts too! We all are and we shouldn’t pretend that we’re not. We just have to be adults about it. Even if it’s something like Lolicon in games — it doesn’t matter if the player enjoys it. He COULD be a pedophile or he might not be. He might be perfectly normal. Do not throw accusations at him without evidence! THROW THE ACCUSATIONS AT THE DEVELOPER.

That’s all, I hope this little writeup isn’t terrible.

This will probably be a rambly mess, so here we go.

First off I’m not going to rehash all that happened, so read This piece from PA Report, But also this piece by Tom Cannon (also on PA Report). Also read this fine piece of work by The Brog, and some of the things he links to (Aris’s apology and Sp00ky’s comments).

I guess if you already know whats up, you can skip all that, but seriously, read The Brog’s post if you haven’t. He’s covers some stuff I wanted to cover (and probably will cover anyways).

So first I want to talk about Aris. I never interacted with Aris personally but I know several people who have. Everyone seems to like the guy. He’s smart and clever and funny, apparently. I believe all of that. Then I hear someone describe him as a Lunatic on the GiantBomb podcast. I certainly understand why someone would say that, and saying it offhandedly is fine, but we gotta remember, you don’t need to be a lunatic to say crazy, misogynistic things. If you needed to be a lunatic to say or do awful things, we’d have an easier time fighting this sort of thing. Instead this comes from someone that people enjoy to be around and that’s unfortunate.

Now truth is, Aris is a repeat offender, from what I understand, having been thrown out of a smaller event for similar behavior before. At worst he’s a horrible scumbag and at best he’s got a lot of shit to work out, as does a lot of the community.

There is an upside to this though. While the stream monsters were certainly in full force with the sexual harassment, there were plenty of people, especially on twitter who basically said that Aris wasn’t speaking for them. So many FGC members who were embarrassed by his terrible comments. Tom Cannon is right though when he says there is a grain of truth to what Aris said. The FGC is loud and rowdy and it’s generally hard to draw lines. It’s hard to tell when someone is being legitimately sexist and when someone is just using vulgar language for the fun of it. Aris was so well over the line that it may have served as a wake up call for some people. There is a difference between a bunch of guys yelling “Rape her!” when someone is comboing Phoenix compared to when a guy causes legitimate emotional grief to a woman, live on air. There are people who are going “This is different, and I don’t like it”. Seeing who sides with Aris and against Miranda is giving us a way to see who the real fuck ups are. We get to see a clearer picture of the issue.

Unfortunately that might not happen due to this being a PR disaster. The Media has been fairly responsible with the FGC. I wasn’t able to put into words how they were being unfair, but The Rog did it for me. We’re being used as a spectacle and no one wants to look at whats good in the community (see: Tom’s article). No one looks for the professionals in the community who would speak out against Aris’s statement. They just want the drama and they just want to point and say “Wow, these guys suck”! In a lot of ways we as a community do suck, but stereotyping a diverse community isn’t helpful.

Unfortunately I think this is more than just “not helpful”. It might actively hurt the cause. The FGC is very insular and anti authority already. This is the community that scorns sponsorship and scoffs at the concept of eSports. The community could just as easily put up new walls rather than open up from the poorly handled criticism and opening up is desperately what we need.

Starcraft didn’t get where it is now, community wise, by virtue of their character. Being in the public eye did that. Sponsorships and events made people clean up their act. The top players acted professional and the community, to a degree, followed. We’ll never be the SC community and I don’t think anyone wants us to be that. But we can, lead through example by the community leaders, be made to see the line better. We can be rowdy without being exclusionary. The most important people who can speak up now aren’t random gaming journos, but people in the community it’s self. We’ll probably always have asshole stream monsters. I think we’d even miss them if they were gone, but we can’t condone them. Even the SC community has a seedy underbelly, but everything above that is much more presentable. Team Liquid even had their own sexism scandal. But they don’t put it on GOM TV and when it does happen, personality figures within the personality don’t defend it. Classiness trickles down. We emulate the players we idolize.

We’re growing faster than we can keep up with. Miranda having to deal with sexual harassment is a symptom of that. As long as the community doesn’t reflexively yank back and top community figures act appropriately, we should slowly move toward being a stronger community.

I’m deepely disappointed about this whole incident, but in some ways it had to happen for what may be everyone’s ultimate benefit. I hope Miranda doesn’t give up either I enjoyed watching her play and she’s no joke. If you were to compare Sherry, Miranda, ChocoBlanka and BurnYourBra to any random sampling of Male tournament players, they’d almost certainly be better. As the community grows and open, we’ll only receive more female players and we need to learn to treat them fairly and know the difference between trolling and harassing.

That was all surely one big mess of a post, but I felt like I needed to post something.

Featuring: Kayin, April, Eric, Flick, AJ

We all watched the HBO Game of Thrones series as a group and we take the time to talk about Season 1 a bit. Spoilers obviously! (We argue about whether or not I give a spoiler warning in the beginning, so just in case I didn’t give one, we will spoil everything about Season 1. Anything from the later books will have their own spoiler warnings. If Flick says spoilers, cover your ears for 15 seconds and you should be good, though none of it is particularly big stuff).
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