pugbutter

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Fabricant451 You'd think people would feel that it cheapens that aspect of their identity, though, right? It basically treats them like novelties; they're being collected like Pokemon. "Here's Iron Bull. He's 'the gay one.'" Check homosexuality off the list and move on to the next niche of identity politics.

I know one of BioWare's big gimmicks is being able to romance most/all the characters in their games' main casts, but if race, sex, and gender aren't playing direct and significant roles in the storytelling, then really it's treating those characters more like circus exhibits (not to mention marketing ploys) than proper entities, with personalities and voices. "Buy our games, we have trannies" isn't totally unlike saying, "Come to Barnum & Bailey, we have a real mermaid and a two-headed elephant," when you get down to brass tacks.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

CD Projekt more or less tell women and brown people to go fuck themselves if they don't have the talent to make a good game

@pugbutter

Spot the white nationalist.

@Ace of Hearts

Actually, you should explain why, apparently, you have to hire women and minorities, even if they lack the necessary skills to function in the company, in order to avoid being a "White Nationalist." (Did screaming "racist!" at people stop working, so we need to think of another default now?)

I gave the textbook definition of meritocracy when I said, "it's [CD Projekt's hiring process] employing the most talented people at hand to make the best product possible." You're the one who equated that to White Nationalism, which I find hilarious because that means you're the one who equates more Whites and more males on a development team with having more merit, independently of a person's ability to code.

Not that this is surprising at all, but you've revealed your personal biases in this thread, a real streak of racism, in your desperate gambit to find an injustice to crusade against, whether real or imagined. You must have realized this too since you're making no attempt at all to actually argue, instead flinging your own feces at me like a rabies-infected capuchin, but that's par for the course with the crazies on either side of the political spectrum. Horseshoe theory is real.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Ace of Hearts Semantics are important when people try to twist them around to conform to your personal definitions. For example, when "meritocracy" and "White Nationalism" somehow become synonymous. (An interesting accusation since you're the one implying that, yes, CD Projekt is more talented than BioWare because it's Whiter and more male.)

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Ace of Hearts You're thinking of White Supremacy, sweetheart, not Nationalism. Not that it matters when your "argument" (lol) is fallacious and irrelevant either way.

Cyaиide Suиs

@pugbutter Hey scrub

@Xandrya

oh lawd



Since Templar doesn't seem eager to post, I guess it's my turn. This is going to be a chaotic week but I'll try to catch up shortly.

E:\cyberpunk\the_deadliest_question.exe

Whereas yesterday she was a beggar, queen only of the filthy alleys of corporate thought, today she felt power, power true and royal, pulsing in the air which followed her, and puddling in her footprints. The difference was like that between the counterfeit watch and the one with a price tag as long as her womanly hand. She felt the bitterness laying on the tongues of the other office women as they complimented her; jealousy, no doubt, whereas they possessed about themselves the security in their status to build another woman up ingenuously when she could not threaten their fragile hierarchy. The men, simpler creatures, stared from afar, or complimented her, or, if particularly daring, touched her bottom as she passed. (Today only one did that: Nick, from Management, who knew damn well why the women of the office exempted him from harassment charges. That same hand moved up to his face, to mischievously stroke his broad, rugged jaw as he retreated through a nearby doorway.)

When she arrived at the joint office it was empty and quiet, as was the control room to their interview panel. By all measures things had gone back to normal, at least externally. Jules arrived not too late thereafter, although his habit of scraping through the doors just before the eight-O'clock tick irritated more people than one. Today it was 7:56 when he clocked in, and slightly after eight when, clammy and panting from the labors of the staircase and the halls, he threw himself into the wheeled chair. In his ringless hand he gripped the same mocha concoction as yesterday, bitterer than the way most others liked their coffee. So everything had fallen into place after all, restoring itself to normalcy; Ona worked herself to death and Jules got by on his graceful mediocrity. His shirt was a pale lime-green today, and his tie purple.

"Morning," he said, nodding. "Who's first?" Groggy. Dulled. Sleep deprivation sagged under his eyelids, and the blue-white tint of holoscreens haunted the shine in his eyeballs.

Cyaиide Suиs

>creates a CS gallery named "My Many Faces"
>only has one post in it

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Well......lets look at Mass Effect Andromeda and how the left wing cucks have changed it from the original trilogy which was more right wing and therefore better.

The first male Squaddie you meet is a black guy SHOEHORNED IN

Mass Effect 2 was the best in series, they would never do something like tha....

AND

They have a female with a BUTCH HAIRCUT, CANT JUST LET WOMEN BE WOMEN

Mass Effect 2 would never do something like that it was the best in the series and....

WELL THEYVE MADE EVERYTHING SUPER GAY! Since OVERWATCH now suddenly every game is gay! it wasnt like that before!

Ahh, well there it is, the only conspiracy here is the mysterious case of the short fucking memory.

@Dynamo Frokane

This is the excerpt which proves more or less that OP is missing the point; comically so. I would have thought this was bad satire if it had been linked from Reddit or an equally shitty site.

"Pandering" is when a character needs to be black, female, or demi-poly-quasi-cashewsexual because a minimum quota needs to be met in each of the respective demographics of race, sex, and gender. This is when the developers think they're widening their target audience by giving a larger number of people fair "representation" in the game; that is, characters with whom the audience can personally identify. It's stupid as hell that you'd need a character's race and sexuality to match yours in order for you to identify with his struggles, but whatever, that's the world we live in.

There is incontrovertible evidence that the Andromeda team pandered to certain demographics of people.

But it's not "pandering" if a character just happens to be Black or gay, and if he has more traits to define his personality than just being from a certain demographic. So even though ME1 still has bad writing and is a game for poopooheads overall, no one is being hypocritical for "forgetting" the Black and butch-lesbo characters in the first game, while lambasting Andromeda for seemingly doing the same thing. The fact that you can't see the difference, @Dynamo Frokane, proves that you're approaching this debate at a laughably superficial level.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

@Fabricant451 Yeah, I get repetition, if it's being used properly. In Planescape you hear, "What can change the nature of a man?" probably fifteen times before you're given the opportunity to propose to Ravel an actual answer to that question. The difference is that the writing in that game is, like...good? And subtle? Whereas in Mass Effect the philosophy was clearly, "We need to say it again just in case someone in the audience doesn't get it yet. We don't want to alienate anyone, we need to be inclusive," blah blah blah. You water down your product by appealing to the lowest common denominator, which includes the polarized morality system (Paragon vs. Renegade, black vs. white, good vs. evil), and the dialogue wheel which results in simplified, cartoonish, downright childish "conversations."

I'm already biased against ME because it's basically pop-SciFi with the palette-swap alien design, the horrible art direction of the ships and tech, and of course, the illusion of grandiosity and significance to the story, where in reality the player is on rails throughout. But ME has no excuse because skilled developers can force you to conform to their design choices without you even realizing it. The evidence I would offer to corrobate this is from the Thief series: the difference between Thief II and THI4F. In the bad game, there are circumstantial pop-up prompts which allow you to shoot your rope arrow only at certain lampposts, ledges, etc. Whereas in the smartly designed game, you're also limited in where you can shoot rope arrows, but the developers did it by placing wood where they want you to be able to shoot, and metal or stone in areas they wish to be off-limits. (Since arrows can only embed themselves into softer materials, bouncing off otherwise.) There are natural and "organic" ways to incorporate your gameplay mechanics seamlessly into the story itself, and Mass Effect's people simply do not know how to do this.

skip to 14:07

Is this because BioWare hires purple-haired hippopotamuses who screech about not enough women in gaming instead of actually going to a tech school and becoming a skilled female developer? I personally think so. CD Projekt more or less tell women and brown people to go fuck themselves if they don't have the talent to make a good game, and their priorities show in the quality of their product. It's not racism or sexism or transdolphinkinmisogyny, it's employing the most talented people at hand to make the best product possible. Almost everything in Andromeda meanwhile is poorly designed and bafflingly incompetent, and staff choices will certainly contribute to that. The bad writing is a microcosm of the game's problems at large, and the developers' design philosophies certainly played a significant part in this failure whether OP likes it or not.

Hider

TL;DR Worrying about how many brown vaginas there are in your game fundamentally means you're spending less time worrying about things which will actually make the game good.

Describe your favourite game in a nutshell

You basically play as that edgy RP character you wrote when you first started up in this shitty hobby (or you're still writing right now, if you're bad at it). Because between stabbing guys in the back, shooting them with arrows, and luring them into strategically placed mine traps, you also steal their coinpurses and break into their homes to run off with their fine china. And while doing all this you shoot off snappy one-liners to prove how witty and snarky you are. And of course you're called upon to save the world from a technocult and its maddened leader, because expecting actual soldiers and heroes to do it would just make too much damn sense. Don't worry, you have a dark and tragic past, but that was already revealed in the first game so there's really no need to explain it here. Fuck this game.

it's actually one of the best games of all time lol

Thief II: The Metal Age