The Tanoubliette: Pussy Hurt and Delusions or TTPHAD for short.
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Tanoomba
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I like the cut of John Brown's jib:
"... before I agree or disagree with someone, I need to understand them. And the best way to understand someone is to ask questions, listen, and verify I've understood accurately. The worst way to understand is to start with an attack."
"... before I agree or disagree with someone, I need to understand them. And the best way to understand someone is to ask questions, listen, and verify I've understood accurately. The worst way to understand is to start with an attack."
Tanoomba
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More from Brown:
"Here?s my take on this. The rhetoric of offense is different than the rhetoric of explication. The latter is meant to explain. The former?s goal is to cause injury. It has no interest in sharing ideas. It only has interest in injuring someone, either to try to gain relief from an attack or to beat someone into submission, or because seeing folks get all riled up provides amusement.
A good portion of Day?s posts that I?ve read, admitting it?s nowhere near exhaustive, seem to contain a lot of the rhetoric of offense. And I think this dramatically undermines his ability to get others to consider his ideas, let alone believe them.
Sure, the attacks might bring like-minded folks to his side. But, for the most part, it does not provide the ground in which insight grows. Offense closes both parties off to challenges, biases, and ideas. It closes them off to new information. And new information is such an integral part of learning.
Some people say that tone shouldn?t matter. For example, you may lace the fact that the earth revolves around the sun with expletives, or say it to me sweetly, but the fact remains that the earth revolves around the sun. So asking for a more respectful tone is an ad hominine attack, a logical fallacy. It has nothing to do with the argument.
But here?s where I believe the anti-tone folks go wrong. Offense changes the message. When you call me a jackass, you?ve selected to promote one message over another. It doesn?t matter if you?ve couched your attack in a well-reasoned point because you have decided to no longer communicate your point. You?ve decided to communicate the offense instead.
Can?t we do both?
Not really. It?s like playing a country western tune of reason softly in the background while shoving a 110 decibel speaker blasting an annoying alarm in my face."
Fucking A, brother. Fucking. A.
"Here?s my take on this. The rhetoric of offense is different than the rhetoric of explication. The latter is meant to explain. The former?s goal is to cause injury. It has no interest in sharing ideas. It only has interest in injuring someone, either to try to gain relief from an attack or to beat someone into submission, or because seeing folks get all riled up provides amusement.
A good portion of Day?s posts that I?ve read, admitting it?s nowhere near exhaustive, seem to contain a lot of the rhetoric of offense. And I think this dramatically undermines his ability to get others to consider his ideas, let alone believe them.
Sure, the attacks might bring like-minded folks to his side. But, for the most part, it does not provide the ground in which insight grows. Offense closes both parties off to challenges, biases, and ideas. It closes them off to new information. And new information is such an integral part of learning.
Some people say that tone shouldn?t matter. For example, you may lace the fact that the earth revolves around the sun with expletives, or say it to me sweetly, but the fact remains that the earth revolves around the sun. So asking for a more respectful tone is an ad hominine attack, a logical fallacy. It has nothing to do with the argument.
But here?s where I believe the anti-tone folks go wrong. Offense changes the message. When you call me a jackass, you?ve selected to promote one message over another. It doesn?t matter if you?ve couched your attack in a well-reasoned point because you have decided to no longer communicate your point. You?ve decided to communicate the offense instead.
Can?t we do both?
Not really. It?s like playing a country western tune of reason softly in the background while shoving a 110 decibel speaker blasting an annoying alarm in my face."
Fucking A, brother. Fucking. A.
Agraza
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Not sure when the Hitman thing got dropped, but like, who has actually played it? I played it. I didn't even really like it. It did not remotely encourage me to kill randoms. It highly encouraged me not to kill anyone unless I had to. There were lots of levels (all? perhaps? perhaps I suck?) where killing anyone except the target was completely optional and negative. The reason I don't like games like Hitman is they quickly become a memory test like many FPS games. You don't learn how to respond properly to situations in the moment so much as you learn how not to fail on the next attempt of the level, performing a sequence of events according to a perfect schedule. My idea of fun isn't replaying through 12 minutes of the same dance steps 7 times to get to the end. Some groundhog day style shit right there. And yea, many of the fail states were prompted by my killing someone I shouldn't have. At no point did the game ever give me points for killing someone randomly. It either didn't matter or caused problems. I prefer games designed around recoverable errors, but that style of game is all about learning to see traps and avoiding them, and most of those traps are slightly inconvenient variables that trigger extremely inconvenient variables if you decide to remove them from the puzzle.
Now GTA actually does encourage you to hurt people, even random ones. It rewards you. It also penalizes you. Basically it raises the stakes, but when you fail to evade the penalties, which is frequent, you just respawn nearby with some money removed. It's enough of a time/cost penalty to disincentivize low skill play, but not to turn you off from taking risks in the first place. And the risks can be so ridiculously awesome that they're a destination whether you succeed or fail. GTA 5 is a good game, but if you think videogames are murder training programs you should have a more significant moral issue with GTA than Hitman, despite the much darker and more distinct flavor of Hitman. At least Hitman tries to show you that killing people has consequences.
Now GTA actually does encourage you to hurt people, even random ones. It rewards you. It also penalizes you. Basically it raises the stakes, but when you fail to evade the penalties, which is frequent, you just respawn nearby with some money removed. It's enough of a time/cost penalty to disincentivize low skill play, but not to turn you off from taking risks in the first place. And the risks can be so ridiculously awesome that they're a destination whether you succeed or fail. GTA 5 is a good game, but if you think videogames are murder training programs you should have a more significant moral issue with GTA than Hitman, despite the much darker and more distinct flavor of Hitman. At least Hitman tries to show you that killing people has consequences.
Tanoomba
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Agraza: "It did not remotely encourage me to kill randoms."
This is a common misunderstanding of what Sarkeesian said.
Sarkeesian: "I should note that this kind of misogynistic behavior isn't always mandatory. Often, it's player-directed, but it is always implicitly ENCOURAGED.... Games ask us to play with them. Now that may seem obvious but bear with me. Game developers set up a series of rules, and then within those rules, we're INVITED to test the mechanics to see what we can do and what we can't do. We are ENCOURAGED to see how the system will react or respond to our inputs and figure out what is permitted and what is not. The play comes from figuring out the boundaries and possibilities within the game space. So in many of the titles we've been discussing, the game makers have set up a series of possible scenarios involving vulnerable, eroticized female characters. Players are then INVITED to explore and exploit those situation during their playthrough."
People assume "encouraged" means "the game uses incentives to get me to act in the way they intended". Sure, it absolutely COULD be used that way, but that is not the way Sark used it, and it doesn't take any suspension of disbelief to see that. She explicitly describes how, within the context of game design, the player is implicitly encouraged to do anything and everything the physics/mechanics will allow. If you can shoot a liquor bottle on a bar, you are implicitly encouraged to do so, especially if that is literally the only way you can interact with the bottle. This is true regardless of whether shooting the bottle has in-game consequences or not (guards being alerted, or "Achievement unlocked: Bottle Blaster!", or nothing).
I can understand why people have difficulty with this concept. We're predisposed to make certain assumptions about what somebody means when they say "encouraged". However, Sark does take steps to make it pretty clear what she means. The whole reason for that tangent about how games are designed and played is to clarify what she means when she says "encouraged". So when Thunderf00t conveniently leaves out the part of her explanation that gives essential context, context that significantly changes the meaning of the words being discussed, it's dishonest. And when his "But the game EXPLICITLY DISCOURAGES you!" narrative, a narrative that objectively does not reflect the point she was actually making, becomes an exceptionally popular argument used to discredit Sark, an argument parroted by many who have no interest in verifying the applicability of that claim, well, we end up with people yelling "LIAR!" and dismissing anyone who HAS made the effort to better understand what's being said as a "white knight" out of hand. That's why I can't stand arguments designed to support personal attacks. They turn what should be an exchange of ideas between people who WANT to understand each other into an ideological battlefield.
Agraza: "... but if you think videogames are murder training programs you should have a more significant moral issue with GTA than Hitman"
Who said video games are murder training programs?
This is a common misunderstanding of what Sarkeesian said.
Sarkeesian: "I should note that this kind of misogynistic behavior isn't always mandatory. Often, it's player-directed, but it is always implicitly ENCOURAGED.... Games ask us to play with them. Now that may seem obvious but bear with me. Game developers set up a series of rules, and then within those rules, we're INVITED to test the mechanics to see what we can do and what we can't do. We are ENCOURAGED to see how the system will react or respond to our inputs and figure out what is permitted and what is not. The play comes from figuring out the boundaries and possibilities within the game space. So in many of the titles we've been discussing, the game makers have set up a series of possible scenarios involving vulnerable, eroticized female characters. Players are then INVITED to explore and exploit those situation during their playthrough."
People assume "encouraged" means "the game uses incentives to get me to act in the way they intended". Sure, it absolutely COULD be used that way, but that is not the way Sark used it, and it doesn't take any suspension of disbelief to see that. She explicitly describes how, within the context of game design, the player is implicitly encouraged to do anything and everything the physics/mechanics will allow. If you can shoot a liquor bottle on a bar, you are implicitly encouraged to do so, especially if that is literally the only way you can interact with the bottle. This is true regardless of whether shooting the bottle has in-game consequences or not (guards being alerted, or "Achievement unlocked: Bottle Blaster!", or nothing).
I can understand why people have difficulty with this concept. We're predisposed to make certain assumptions about what somebody means when they say "encouraged". However, Sark does take steps to make it pretty clear what she means. The whole reason for that tangent about how games are designed and played is to clarify what she means when she says "encouraged". So when Thunderf00t conveniently leaves out the part of her explanation that gives essential context, context that significantly changes the meaning of the words being discussed, it's dishonest. And when his "But the game EXPLICITLY DISCOURAGES you!" narrative, a narrative that objectively does not reflect the point she was actually making, becomes an exceptionally popular argument used to discredit Sark, an argument parroted by many who have no interest in verifying the applicability of that claim, well, we end up with people yelling "LIAR!" and dismissing anyone who HAS made the effort to better understand what's being said as a "white knight" out of hand. That's why I can't stand arguments designed to support personal attacks. They turn what should be an exchange of ideas between people who WANT to understand each other into an ideological battlefield.
Agraza: "... but if you think videogames are murder training programs you should have a more significant moral issue with GTA than Hitman"
Who said video games are murder training programs?
Agraza
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No, I was never even encouraged in the way you claim or she claims. The sexy women available to be shot at were always a bad thing to shoot at, and quite obviously so. It was never "maybe if I just eliminate her this will be all good". it was always "is there anything relevant in here? (brain tunes out 5 irrelevant hot chicks) nope. moving on."
No, because a bottle is shootable does not mean the game encourages me to shoot it. It's likely shootable only as a "hey cool bit of detail there" when you miss a person and hit a bottle. Or because people actually do shoot at bottles IRL for fun (not for real practice unless you have a shit ton of bottles because who goes through bottles that fast?, has a pile of intact ones?, and is willing to destroy their retarded bottle collection with bullets?). The same "what if you missed?" type of thing can be applied to women in hitman or other non-essential characters. What if I shot at them and they didn't actually get shot? Well that's an easy way to show they're extras and unimportant. All actors must be interactable to the player so you can't spoof relevance through indiscriminate violence.
Attention to detail and the interactivity of ancillary characters/objects has been a big push with the improvement in physics engines and frustration of players seeing the edge of the matrix too easily. So the design of games has improved to further muddy up the reality of things by making everything more interactive. Buildings you can walk into, people who will push you back when you push them, etc. It pulls you into the world. Cherry picking that because women exist and can be shot that the game encourages you to shoot them is cherry picking. They're not special. They became more interactive along with everything else. It's also sexist. What if the women are important? There are more men that aren't important that can be shot, but they don't matter? Are they somehow less capable of being vulnerable because they're men? Are the women less capable of being dangerous and central to the plot? Sexist. Sexist. Bitch gives no fucks about men being killed. She is advocating special treatment. And considering her type aren't the audience for Hitman, her input is not relevant to that audience, only to people that are already prejudiced against a game like Hitman. She's preaching a safe message to her people that these other people are bad people because they don't put women on a pedestal. It's a contradiction, and it's moronic to agree, and more so to defend it. I don't even like Hitman, but you could at least criticize it for its bad gameplay rather than claim it promotes misogyny.
"who said that shit?"
Dave Grossman among others. I wanted to raugh, but I was just too annoyed. In just the 20th century we had pulp fiction, comic books, alcohol, reefer (and other drugs), music, movies, videogames, etc. being the reason bad people do bad things. The devil's work blah blah blah. Moralist authoritarians are the same generation after generation. They are ignorant and preach to their ignorant choirs about how everybody unlike them is that way because of X, so we must make sure NO ONE can have X. Shit be tarded. We live in the most musical, cinematic, gamer period of human existence, and violence has never been lower. Hmmmmmm.
No, because a bottle is shootable does not mean the game encourages me to shoot it. It's likely shootable only as a "hey cool bit of detail there" when you miss a person and hit a bottle. Or because people actually do shoot at bottles IRL for fun (not for real practice unless you have a shit ton of bottles because who goes through bottles that fast?, has a pile of intact ones?, and is willing to destroy their retarded bottle collection with bullets?). The same "what if you missed?" type of thing can be applied to women in hitman or other non-essential characters. What if I shot at them and they didn't actually get shot? Well that's an easy way to show they're extras and unimportant. All actors must be interactable to the player so you can't spoof relevance through indiscriminate violence.
Attention to detail and the interactivity of ancillary characters/objects has been a big push with the improvement in physics engines and frustration of players seeing the edge of the matrix too easily. So the design of games has improved to further muddy up the reality of things by making everything more interactive. Buildings you can walk into, people who will push you back when you push them, etc. It pulls you into the world. Cherry picking that because women exist and can be shot that the game encourages you to shoot them is cherry picking. They're not special. They became more interactive along with everything else. It's also sexist. What if the women are important? There are more men that aren't important that can be shot, but they don't matter? Are they somehow less capable of being vulnerable because they're men? Are the women less capable of being dangerous and central to the plot? Sexist. Sexist. Bitch gives no fucks about men being killed. She is advocating special treatment. And considering her type aren't the audience for Hitman, her input is not relevant to that audience, only to people that are already prejudiced against a game like Hitman. She's preaching a safe message to her people that these other people are bad people because they don't put women on a pedestal. It's a contradiction, and it's moronic to agree, and more so to defend it. I don't even like Hitman, but you could at least criticize it for its bad gameplay rather than claim it promotes misogyny.
"who said that shit?"
Dave Grossman among others. I wanted to raugh, but I was just too annoyed. In just the 20th century we had pulp fiction, comic books, alcohol, reefer (and other drugs), music, movies, videogames, etc. being the reason bad people do bad things. The devil's work blah blah blah. Moralist authoritarians are the same generation after generation. They are ignorant and preach to their ignorant choirs about how everybody unlike them is that way because of X, so we must make sure NO ONE can have X. Shit be tarded. We live in the most musical, cinematic, gamer period of human existence, and violence has never been lower. Hmmmmmm.
Agraza
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hodj
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Youre fine. You havent spent nine months arguing this same inane point like A Moon Bat has. Hes had his say and demonstrated repeatedly he has no clue what hes talking about on this subject for ages.
hodj
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Like when he supports her saying just having the option to do things like harm civilians is actively encouraging the behavior, or conflating playing around with a games mechanics with mysogyny and real world violence.
It is the moral authoritarian mindset, the thpe of people who think Tom and Jerry promote real world violence.
These people are a cancer on freedom of thought, artistic expression and freedom of choice.
Its no wonder dipshit Moon Bat supports them to the hilt.
It is the moral authoritarian mindset, the thpe of people who think Tom and Jerry promote real world violence.
These people are a cancer on freedom of thought, artistic expression and freedom of choice.
Its no wonder dipshit Moon Bat supports them to the hilt.
Skanda
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She says you have no individuality and are a major beta for needing to be led through video games by the nose.
She also says you have a terrible sense for naming threads.
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Tanoomba
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Agraza: "No, because a bottle is shootable does not mean the game encourages me to shoot it."
Of course it does. You're just hung up on on tying implicit encouragement to incentive/punishment.
My stance: When Sarkeesian talks about implicit encouragement, she is NOT talking about a game incentivizing certain actions above others.
Evidence that supports this stance:
- She EXPLICITLY makes it clear she's talking about the basics of how we play games and learn about what we can/can't do within the game's mechanics.
- She specifies that the behavior she's talking about (killing sexualized, vulnerable female NPCs) is not mandatory but PLAYER-DIRECTED, ie: the product of the player's decisions and not the result of being pushed by the game.
- She acknowledges that there are often in-game consequences for such actions.
- She acknowledges that not every player engages in said behavior.
Agraza: "Cherry picking that because women exist and can be shot that the game encourages you to shoot them is cherry picking."
It is not. She made several videos focusing on a variety of tropes. In that video, the trope was the presence of sexualized, vulnerable, female NPCs. She found at least 25 modern, reasonably popular games featuring said trope. She never said "This game is sexist because you can shoot women". She did say that the way women are presented in media can have an effect on how women are seen/treated IRL. It is not cherry-picking to find multiple examples of a trend that she believes contribute to this effect.
Agraza: "There are more men that aren't important that can be shot, but they don't matter? Are they somehow less capable of being vulnerable because they're men?"
In Sarkeesian's words: "Typically all the non-essential characters in sandbox style games are killable, but it?s the sexualized women whose instrumentality and brutalization is gendered and eroticized in ways that men never are. The visual language attached to male NPCs is very different since they are rarely designed to be sexually inviting or arousing, and they are not coded to interact with the player in ways meant to reaffirm a heterosexual fantasy about being a stud."
Agraza: "And considering her type aren't the audience for Hitman, her input is not relevant to that audience, only to people that are already prejudiced against a game like Hitman."
Bullshit. I'm the audience for Hitman, and her input is relevant to me. I may not agree with all her conclusions, but I can appreciate her point of view. It honestly seems more to me that the people who DON'T appreciate her work are the people already prejudiced against a feminist criticizing video games.
Agraza: "She's preaching a safe message to her people that these other people are bad people because they don't put women on a pedestal."
Citation most definitely needed.
Agraza: "It's a contradiction, and it's moronic to agree, and more so to defend it. I don't even like Hitman, but you could at least criticize it for its bad gameplay rather than claim it promotes misogyny."
Why is it moronic to defend someone's right to criticize something without being personally attacked for it? Also, dude, I can't believe you haven't realized this yet but her video WASN'T a review of Hitman. Whether or not the gameplay is "bad" could not be less relevant to what she was talking about.
Of course it does. You're just hung up on on tying implicit encouragement to incentive/punishment.
My stance: When Sarkeesian talks about implicit encouragement, she is NOT talking about a game incentivizing certain actions above others.
Evidence that supports this stance:
- She EXPLICITLY makes it clear she's talking about the basics of how we play games and learn about what we can/can't do within the game's mechanics.
- She specifies that the behavior she's talking about (killing sexualized, vulnerable female NPCs) is not mandatory but PLAYER-DIRECTED, ie: the product of the player's decisions and not the result of being pushed by the game.
- She acknowledges that there are often in-game consequences for such actions.
- She acknowledges that not every player engages in said behavior.
Agraza: "Cherry picking that because women exist and can be shot that the game encourages you to shoot them is cherry picking."
It is not. She made several videos focusing on a variety of tropes. In that video, the trope was the presence of sexualized, vulnerable, female NPCs. She found at least 25 modern, reasonably popular games featuring said trope. She never said "This game is sexist because you can shoot women". She did say that the way women are presented in media can have an effect on how women are seen/treated IRL. It is not cherry-picking to find multiple examples of a trend that she believes contribute to this effect.
Agraza: "There are more men that aren't important that can be shot, but they don't matter? Are they somehow less capable of being vulnerable because they're men?"
In Sarkeesian's words: "Typically all the non-essential characters in sandbox style games are killable, but it?s the sexualized women whose instrumentality and brutalization is gendered and eroticized in ways that men never are. The visual language attached to male NPCs is very different since they are rarely designed to be sexually inviting or arousing, and they are not coded to interact with the player in ways meant to reaffirm a heterosexual fantasy about being a stud."
Agraza: "And considering her type aren't the audience for Hitman, her input is not relevant to that audience, only to people that are already prejudiced against a game like Hitman."
Bullshit. I'm the audience for Hitman, and her input is relevant to me. I may not agree with all her conclusions, but I can appreciate her point of view. It honestly seems more to me that the people who DON'T appreciate her work are the people already prejudiced against a feminist criticizing video games.
Agraza: "She's preaching a safe message to her people that these other people are bad people because they don't put women on a pedestal."
Citation most definitely needed.
Agraza: "It's a contradiction, and it's moronic to agree, and more so to defend it. I don't even like Hitman, but you could at least criticize it for its bad gameplay rather than claim it promotes misogyny."
Why is it moronic to defend someone's right to criticize something without being personally attacked for it? Also, dude, I can't believe you haven't realized this yet but her video WASN'T a review of Hitman. Whether or not the gameplay is "bad" could not be less relevant to what she was talking about.
Tanoomba
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Agraza: "They are ignorant and preach to their ignorant choirs about how everybody unlike them is that way because of X, so we must make sure NO ONE can have X."
Sarkeesian never said anything remotely close to this, BTW.
Agraza: "We live in the most musical, cinematic, gamer period of human existence"
Yes, right now is absolutely the best time to be a gamer in the history of gaming, no doubt. Which is exactly why we don't need to worry about anybody "taking our games away". There's NOTHING a pop critic can say that will have a stronger effect than good ol' capitalism.
Sarkeesian never said anything remotely close to this, BTW.
Agraza: "We live in the most musical, cinematic, gamer period of human existence"
Yes, right now is absolutely the best time to be a gamer in the history of gaming, no doubt. Which is exactly why we don't need to worry about anybody "taking our games away". There's NOTHING a pop critic can say that will have a stronger effect than good ol' capitalism.
radditsu
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Arguing that someone is wrong does not equal worry about "games being taken away" you fuck.
Agraza
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You get to have your own definitions for words. Neither does she. Encourage means something. If she's going to add all those caveats to what she means, then encourage is the wrong word to use. A thing being available is not encouragement. It's not even necessarily tempting. What each player brings to their experience in the game is on them entirely. For example, the deeply disturbed Sarkeesian clearly brought a lot of fucked up shit to her experience in Hitman. Or did her puppetmaster McIntosh bring all that nonsense? That ain't on me. It's not a remotely objective analysis to claim the game is a cause of concern because of their warped perception.
Soygen
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Their(Tan and Sark) position is that since it's a game, everything you can do in it, is explicitly encouraged. It's a completely stupid interpretation, but it's one that Tanoomba has not budged from, for a year+ now. I can rip all the money up in Monopoly. It's encouraging me to derive perverse pleasure in destroying the currency.
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