This somewhat reminds me of "Tomb Raider (2013)": Lara's first kill is a brutal and traumatic experience, even if it's for self defense. Later in the games, some cutscenes imply how killing is still a big deal for the protagonist, that she is forced to do so because her life is at stake and the men she's fighting against are ruthless murderers, that she's a survivor. And yet, before reaching that point in the story I've already slaughtered countless thugs and living beings, while being rewarded with EXP points and resources that I can use to get even stronger weapons. I mean, I don't mind games where I have to fight, but I found incomprehensible this detachment between gameplay and story, especially regarding a theme so important for the narrative.
Assassin’s Creed was like this for me, especially 2 and Brotherhood. To the point I started playing Brotherhood barehanded, technically not killing anyone except the targets
This is why a game like Dishonored speaks to me so much. In that game, while you tend to get rewarded more for not giving in to brutality at the end of the game, being brutal and killing a lot of people makes more sense for most of the game; you're royally pissed off and looking for revenge, meaning that being cautious and sneaky feels like the ludonarrative dissonance choice. Except in the end, the game rewards you for having the restraint to only deal with the main targets, and preferably not even sullying your hands with their blood, whenever possible. I.E.: The reason it speaks to me, is that both ways of playing the game are fully supported and also rewarded. The sneaky, restrained one by the ending, and the brutal, full force one by the story (the catharsis of revenge).
I really don't know what game you were playing where you think the cutscenes were still showing her having an emotional problem with killing later on - it never happened. Her transition from innocent student to murder hobo might have been quicker than a lot of people could buy, but it was still a consistent narrative transition, i.e. she made that transition early in the game and you should just accept that killing got a whole lot easier for her from that point on. Using Tomb Raider 2013 as an example of ludonarrative dissonance is simply a poorly thought through example where you have to make shit up to try and support your stance.
I do wonder where the line is between "well the game punishes you for doing X," and "the game allows you to do X, but the framing, mechanics and story all act as a critique of doing X." Obviously there is a line where the former shuts down the argument, while the latter is an invitation to discuss whether the game sufficiently critiques X or ends up replicating it.
I would say that the best example of this is Dishonored. Corvo is, of course, a highly capable killer: that's an established part of his identity, and it's never described as something he's unable to do. However, what I'm talking about is how it treats "secondary" killings. Killing generally is heavily discouraged through the Chaos system but, unlike most games that "discourage" killing, it considers a character to have died at your hands even if you didn't wield the knife. If you knock a person out and then leave them for the rats to devour alive, you're still considered to have killed them. If you nudge them off a ledge, the force of your impact didn't kill them but they would not have died without your actions. Essentially, unlike most games, you are punished not only for killing but for intentionally ALLOWING death to occur through your action or negligent inaction. While the game absolutely ALLOWS you to do this, and it's clearly a style of play the game has anticipated and that the authors have established as a valid story, the reading is clearly meant to say that "your actions have consequences and a wilful inaction is the same as acting yourself". The actions are permissible, but the framing is clearly teaching you a trolley-problem-esque message about the ethical value of wilful inaction.
@@Abigail-hu5wf dishonored however also run into the 20% arbitrary barrier problem If you only kill less than 20% of the human npc per mission you are golden when it comes to the ending - no penalties as opposed not killing anyone, which is actually a possibility in dishonored So killing is good, as long you only kill less than 1 in 5 people you meet? (I would say not killing your targets most of the time is being sadist petty move however due to the target's alternative fates often being worse than death)
I feel that a discussion of game mechanics is closer to a discussion of camera work and framing than it is to an appeal to lore. Unlike lore, which under the Thermian Argument framing is divorced from any authorial agency or larger meaning (a state of affairs I call Watsonian Myopia), game mechanics are a part of the narrative, the way that the player interacts with the world and experiences and/or suffers the consequences thereof. The player, as an actor in the world, does bare some responsibility, even if the creator, who set up all the interactions possible and their consequences, is no more a neutral figure than in any other medium. This doesn't mean that mechanical discussion can't be used in a Watson-myopic fashion (as I'm sure some lore arguments could be intelligent and good-faith), but I feel it is less inherently prone to it. It all depends on context, of course. In Assassin 47, the player can kill sex workers, and they lose points for it. Ok. How often does the player meet sex workers, versus other occupations? How does the story treat them? How can the player interact with them besides shoot-bang? How do the mechanics influence decision making, in a general sense? Is there a bias to the points scoring system? Etc. There is then of course "is a points system a good way to mechanize the value of a human life?" but that's another question again. The problems, as with chainmail bikinis and orc rapes, is not in the situation in itself, but the way everything else around it interacts with it, and the meaning or implications thereof. To take an example from the recent CoD: the player cannot shoot their teammates, but they can shoot a baby. Babies are depicted as less valuable than (torture-using, potentially treasonous) soldiers, friendly fire as more improper than infant murder. It is a cheap way of generating headlines, and of claiming grim-gritty "reality", while elsewhere that "realism" is denied when convenient. In short, it's shit writing.
This hypothetical is tricky to engage with, because it's so closely related to an actual, non hypothetical franchise. It's hard to know what you mean when you say the game "lets you kill strippers and drag their bodies around." In the Hitman games, there are indeed several instances where the game "lets you" do just that, but only really by virtue of including strippers in the level and largely adhering to the rule that everyone in a level is mortal. The games let you do the same to priests, waiters, small business owners, the vice president of the united states, et cetera. Of course, the specific cases of strippers and prostitutes is different, because they occupy a particular and troubling place in society and popular culture, so an act of violence against a stripper character perpetuates the idea that their life is worth little. But, is the solution then to not include strippers in the game at all? Here's the thing - as Hitman games are structured, strippers and prostitutes are actually pretty unlikely to get murdered. They don't have usable disguises (though the distinct lack of male strippers in the games I've seen is its own can of worms), they aren't armed, and they don't have any particular power or authority in their environment. You suggest that an appeal to mechanics is equivalent to the Thermian argument, but if mechanics and structure in games is equivalent to a director's choices in film-making, then the ludic message can and should be held up alongside the narrative message. I mean, you address that very idea in your section on ludonarrative dissonance. The scripted story, unfortunately, can't yet directly acknowledge and make significant every person that you kill in the vast, sandboxy levels of the Hitman games, but the mechanics actually tend to overwhelmingly discourage you from killing people who aren't in positions of authority. Heck, even scripted sequences go to some lengths to frame Agent 47 as preferring to kill only the target of a given contract, and the "Silent Assassin" playstyle is often expected to be the canon one. My point is this; suggesting that appeals to the mechanics are unsuitable rebuttals to thematic and scripting criticisms may well be just as destructive to complete discussion of games as the Thermian argument. Disclaimer: I have not played all hitman games. I've played Blood Money, Silent Assassin, and seen a playthrough of Absolution. Even of those, I can't promise I remember every stripper you might have killed. If you know of a counterexample to my analysis, please bring it up!
See, the problem with your criticism is that it just falls into the same Thermian argument trap. The game designers and developers were the ones that made the conscious decision to make a strip club a level in their murder simulator. They didn't have to do that. Furthermore, just because the game expects the player to take the Silent Assassin route doesn't actually mean that's what the players are gonna do. You are vastly overestimating the amount of people who play the Hitman games without just turning into a mass murdering monster.
Hello from 2017! I can see where you're coming from. While I hesitate to ascribe axiomatically to the idea that there's no middle ground between "Strippers can possibly get shot, and thus this game's design is denigrating this particularly vulnerable population" and "Strippers don't exist," It's not like the games are willing to throw every human life in the potential crosshairs. Wisely, there are almost no children in any Hitman level. I think there's one moment in Absolution where there's a child NPC in a gameplay segment, but I don't imagine you can shoot her. I mostly stand by my original argument. Take Dan's later video on colonialism in Minecraft, where he acknowledges that the systemic replication of slavery wasn't intentional on the part of the developers, merely incentivized by the emergent mechanics. On the other hand, in Hitman games shooting strippers is neither intended by the developers (admittedly, this is speculation) nor encouraged by the mechanics (Strippers aren't armed guards and don't have useful disguises). Sure, it's easy to subvert both designer intent and mechanical pressure when you've got a gun in your hand and a westworldesque attitude toward the NPCs around you, but I'm not sure it's productive to totally ignore subtleties in the design. I want to make it clear than I'm not defending Absolution here. All it did with its strip-club level was attempt to alternately titillate and gross-out the player with its singularly distasteful style, and if I recall it even had a bit where you discover a dead stripper the designers intend for you to pitch over a balcony to distract some cops. Awful. If I'm arguing anything here, it's a (possibly misguided) question of theory: Is the only way to avoid this problem to exclude strippers from the game space entirely, or could there be any mitigating factors in the writing, framing, or mechanics?
@@gordongraham2064 It's largely irrelevant what the actual intention of the game is when its impact is so harmful and contributes to a widespread problem in gaming. What matters is that the developers actively chose to design a level designed to be a strip club, chose to allow you to kill strippers with little penalty outside of a slight penalty that can be mostly ignored, and actively chose to put in a section where you have to throw a dead stripper over a balcony to distract from cops. And even if intent did matter, you yourself conceded the level intended to tittillate and gross out the players no other level in the game intends to do. To answer your theory: the solution depends on whether or not you want to preserve the mildly-sandbox "do whatever you want to kill the target" style of game that Hitman fundamentally is at its core. If you do want to preserve that, then yeah the only real way to avoid this problem is to avoid writing strippers in it entirely, because actively punishing you for killing people - even if you don't actually technically need to kill them to complete the mission - is antithetical to how the franchise currently operates. And no, minor point deductions don't really count as a "punishment" since they do nothing to impede your progression on the game and can for the most part be ignored entirely unless you get nothing BUT point deductions somehow. However, if that's not important to you and you really want to include a strip club level for some reason to the point where you'd rather fundamentally alter the core gameplay of the game you're making than just not do that, then you could do what the early Assassin's Creed games did but kind of dialed up to 10. If you kill any innocent people you don't absolutely have to, Agent 47 automatically drops dead. You could justify this in the lore by having it so that he implanted a chip in himself that's set to fry his brain the second he steps out of line, because the core themes of that games story are Agent 47 learning to not be such a cold-hearted stonefaced killer anyway. That's perfectly in character for him to do as some sort of failsafe.
@@ravenfrancis1476 I don't think it's strictly accurate to say that killing strippers is "only" disincentivized via an easily ignored point system. Traditionally, the whole of Hitman's game structure is about emphasizing the messiness and difficulty of killing, and randomly murdering civilians is only going to make completing a mission harder. If you shoot someone casually, suddenly you've got witnesses to worry about, a body to hide, blood to clean up, and if any of those things are noticed, guards go on alert or your cover is blown and suddenly you're hip-deep in gunfighting mechanics that, frankly, aren't usually tuned for empowerment. You're likely to get shot to death in return, for virtually no benefit. Talking only about what it's possible to do in a game without acknowledging the message imparted by mechanics strikes me as a reductive frame to use. It's equally possible to build eight-hundred foot tall swastikas in minecraft, but we understand that as a reflection of the player's intent and not the designer's. The practice of games analysis supposes that mechanics DO carry implicit meaning, and just as the mechanics of Factorio or Satisfactory can impart themes of colonialism, manifest destiny, and other highly "western" views of civilizational "progress," the Hitman games are uniquely tuned around the idea that death ISN'T best casually doled out, and that violence is a tool to be applied judiciously.
@@gordongraham2064 Sure, but a punishment you can avoid facing if you're skilled enough isn't exactly a good way of discentivizing bad behavior. There's no guarantee the body will even be found, especially if you're even mildly competent at the game.
The thing about Hitman is everyone on the map responds to just about any stimuli in a unique way. The characters aren't treated as equally _disposable;_ they're treated as equally _indisposable._ ... I don't think the strippers really do anything else though.
One criticism I have of this analysis is the conclusion that the Thermian argument is interchangable with this one of Ludoptional content. In the Thermian argument, content is fixed. In a book, the author is the only one who has 'canon' input into that world. That author establishes whether or not you MUST sit through pages of nigh-pornographic violence. The only other option is to not engage. In the Thermian argument, the thought is, "Just accept this problematic thing cuz it makes sense with rest of Author's World." While never once questioning whether the Author is right for doing so. For games, the narrative is not solely driven by the author. How does one take the Thermian argument, and simply replace words, to make this one make sense. I don't see how, because I don't see how they're interchangable. One argument defends the inclusion as being in universe. The other defends its inclusion by saying, while possible, it's objectively bad to do so.
This and the previous video about the Thermian argument made me recall the case of Quiet in MGSV, which is a prime example. "This girl goes about almost naked because she is photosynthetic, 'cause snipers and such!" Fortunately, I think most people didn't buy it, and even the "artistic vision defenders" agreed it was shameless fanservice.
It's as if the people who actually consume the media are aware of the connotations that media holds... Hitman is not a sexist game, saying otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Or does the mere setting of a strip club make a work of art sexist.
What? "It's as if the peopl who actually consume the media are aware of the connotations that media holds..." No, that's why you point that out in the criticism. The video talks about the indefensible excuses people use when the criticism is brought up. Instead of saying "oh, yeah, dead hookers is kind of a ugly thing, but the rest of the game is fine!", they try to make up an excuse using the game mechanics. Hitman is not as a whole a sexist game. Just some parts of it are problematic, like in every other game. The criticism is valid nonetheless. "Hitman is not a sexist game, saying otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Or does the mere setting of a strip club make a work of art sexist" That's kind of a strawman there. Nobody said that Hitman was a sexist game, nor anybody said anything remotely similar to the strip club bit.
Jonathantheweirdo Hitman is a game where you can kill every non-player character. If you want hitman to never kill strippers you must never allow strippers to enter a hit man level. Hitman being a game for adults about assassination naturally lends itself to grimy places like stripclubs or gang hideouts. People are essentially asking for the developers to blackout part of the world, ignoring that hit man already explores many other scenes.
I don't think people are asking the developers anything like that. You can kill cooks in Hitman, you just don't go to the annual cooking convention in every game. I don't think they are so incompetent to the point of being unable to make an "adult, grimy" game without prostitutes. It would seem an immature facade of reality, akin to the young adult action films of the early 2000s with, say, vin Diesel. Not in every grimy game there has to be a strip club nor prostitutes in bulk. The fact that it is relentlessly common points to a deeper issue. HItman may have its prostitutes wherever it wants. It is just that it can and will be criticised for that. The developers don't fight the criticism. It is some players who take issue for whatever reason. I play and enjoy Hitman. I think it is a fine assassination game. I don't think it has a great arch nor a sensible plot, and I don't care. I see the criticism and I agree with it, but it does not take from my ability to enjoy choking people, or shooting to the floor of their glass-pool to plunge them to the abyss. By the way, what does any of this have to do with my comment about Quiet?
I agree that this argument is dumb, but I think that the context of the game is important. In the hypothetical game, if the strippers are killable in the game and their is no story consequence that the player will be punished with than it is a problem, because it reinforces the idea that they are disposable. It also is interesting to think of what the implication would be if the strippers are male, and the game has mechanics similar to the real hitman series. In it killing a female stripper would be considered bad by the game and its mechanics because you can't exactly disguise yourself as a stripper of the opposite gender, but the male strippers clothes could be useful in getting to the target. Finally, I do find it weird that the fact that when you use killing strippers as an example that the audience immediately thinks of them as female is an odd part of the cultural perception of that word.
Honestly, this happens with any kind of criticism at all. For them being "just games", a lot of people act damn defensive about the media they consume.
+Asgar Zigel Maybe gamers are defensive over the media they consume because of how much it has been attacked ? Remember :/ Jack thompson was called a "critic" as well this attitude is not new and was cheered for in the jackthomspon era it is now taht every one suddenly went " Hey we should like not get angry at people who whine "
+elmar maria Jack Thompson didn't *whine*. He literally wanted to ban media. You are partially right, though. "Gamer" has become something of a fake oppressed minority label, and the moral panics and Jack Thompsons of the past help fuel the victim complexes of the present.
mightyNosewings The gamer identity is a sub culture just like comic fans have their own sub culture . and the moral panics of the past are not the only things fueling it . There was a more left oriented moral panic last year when femenists demanded target ban gta v from their stores based on bocus claims . There were events in other sub cultures such as the killing joke varient cover panic by again feminists . And let us not forget frank cho a well known artist that drew a fan art piece of spider gwen and got called a misogynist by feminists on twitter for fan art . FAN ART.
+elmar maria In a comment thread about fans of media being defensive of that media, you dismissed all criticism as 'panics' which comes with the implication that dismissing that criticism outright is justified. Not sure if trolling...
Gaylen Oraylee Did you understand my comment? What i said point per point 1. a group of femenists got gta v pulled out of stores based on bogus claims ( such as the game is about murdering and torturing women which it is not ) 2.A varrient cover of batgirl was released , only the fans that would have wanted it could have bought it . Femenists again cause a uproar and got it pulled from stores point 3 , Frank cho made a personal piece with spider gwen in the pose of another drawing that was banned for being "offensive" There was a barrage of femenists on twitter calling him a mysoginist for his own Fan art . To me this is exactly like when christians in the 50s would see vampires and other fictional monsters in books and started a moral panic about satan worshipping and other nonesense . With the excuse of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN ' now its "THINK OF THE WOMEN
Definitley felt that way about BioShock Infinite. It was a very intriguing and compelling story but in between it were long sections of brutally murdering hundreds of people. I'm not against games with violence and play a lot with them, but the gameplay really conflicted with the story.
+Mega Hobbit (megahobbit) I think the one place where the violence disrupted the message was in terms of the way it turns the Vox Populi into enemies. The game wants to make an equivalency between Comstock's violence and the Vox's violence, but it can't effectively shame both sides since you're just as violent as everyone else. Either judging the revolution on their methods should place criticism on your own methods, or accepting extreme violence as a valid method you have to judge the revolution based on the goals and ideologies (which are completely valid and nothing like those of the racist society oppressing them). I guess it kinda sorta comes together with the twist that Booker ends up becoming the villain Comstock so Booker making false equivalencies sort of works but then Elizabeth also seems to go along with his "both sides are just as bad" rhetoric. So yeah, it's a bit of a confused mess.
I disagree, I interpreted the violence Booker commits in BioShock Infinite as intentional. To me the game seemed to be obviously drawing the character of Booker as a villain.
Darth Shredrax I mean, considering the ending, I agree. I'm not sure OP played the game all the way to the end. Or they failed to understand the themes being presented. Also, it's a sci-fi shooter. You shoot people and play with fantasy powers to explode them to bits. I'm not sure what else they were expecting.
The argument being made here is pretty great, and I agree with it 100%, but I think the example you're using is... pretty fundamentally flawed, and while it technically works if you squint and make admissions, I personally find it better to choose the best possible example for your argument. In a nutshell: Hitman Absolution allows you to kill literally anyone in the game, there's no mechanical difference between strangling + dragging around a stripper and strangling + dragging around, say, a chef in the Chinatown level, or a scientist in that one weapons factory level. There /is/ a difference between killing them and killing the various guards/policemen/soldiers in the game, because you can disguise yourself as them, which has actual benefits. The game only presents you negatives for killing civilians like the strippers, or neutral judgement on knocking them out. My intent isn't to knock the idea- far from it, I agree with you- just to point out that fans of "assassin 47" are actually pretty justified in objecting to that specific example, even if most of them either fail to recognise the validity of the sentiment or even go so far as to conclude it must be bullshit. Hope I conveyed that properly!
I think there is a pretty significant difference between discussing the Thermian Argument in the context of games and films. In films, there is a very clear barrier in place between the fictional world and the real world (i.e. the screen). In games there are at least 3 levels to consider. Using Assassin 47 as an example, there is the fictional game world, the real world, and between them is the HUD. The HUD itself isn't a barrier as a film screen is though, it's still in-game, just not part of the fictional world. 47 doesn't visually know how close he is to death or how many points he has, nor does he have a number floating around in view telling him how much ammo he has left. I just think more consideration should be taken for framing these discussions.
Another thing I've noticed is that when people defend a game using The Thermian Argument, they're actually sort of contradicting their position that media doesn't have any influence on them. They're trying to argue "it's not sexist because X reasons", but if media doesn't influence people why would it _matter_ if it were sexist? If they actually believed media has no influence on people, they would simply dismiss all criticism as irrelevant.
+Zennistrad1 Those are two completely separate arguments. Media could effect us and be sexist, not effect us and not be sexist, effect us but not be sexist, not effect us and be sexist. None of those are contradictions.
Zennistrad1 By that same token, discussing and interpreting any art form would be equally as pointless. You may think star wars is an excellent example of good cinematography, and I may think its the worst example. We can talk about the reasons we have those opinions, it's not pointless, that's what art and media is largely for, to provoke discussion and emotion.
ittybittykittycommittee The difference is that those kinds of criticisms are generally directly related to the critic's ability to enjoy the film, and as such talking about them inherently ties the criticism to some real world impact.
It seems to me that the argument about points in Hitman isn't about consistancy, but about framing. The game mechanics aren't just a part of the world of a game; in fact, often they're completely divorced from the actual world of the game (i.e., phoenix down in Final Fantasy resurrects people in the mechanics, but not in the story). They also express the frame through which the creator expresses the world of the game, in the same way that camera angle or music does in a movie.
OK. I’m gonna try to ask a question and it may just be another mechanics argument. Let’s assume that the conceit of a game like assassin 47 is that you can in theory kill anyone. If that is a problem, then is there no value to it? If it is acceptable, is it therefore a better decision not to have sex workers represented in the game at all? The argument of ‘it’s just a game’ is a terrible argument on its own.
I was thinking this exact thing, and I'd like to see it responded to. Assuming the game doesn't give you an objective to kill a sex worker, nor places them in a position to spot you, you have absolutely no reason to kill them aside from your own personal sadism. Then considering that within the game's mechanics the only means it has of punishing you is with unwanted attention and with a score reduction, what would be a satisfactory way to avoid treating sex workers as expendable? Already within the recent Hitman entries, they're not treated as being any more expendable than anyone else. Within Absolution, there's even a mission that requires you to gain information from sex workers so you can kill their exploitative boss; meaning that you can't even complete the mission normally if you kill the sex workers. If all this isn't good enough, what else could they do? Make the strippers unkillable? Make them even more uniquely important? Not feature them at all? Perhaps this is simply a case of a bad example being chosen, but I'm legitimately left wondering what the expected "good" solution would be here. People complain about a lack of sex worker representation, but you can't also complain that you can kill them in a game where you can kill everyone. You can say "thermian argument" all you want, but what is a practical alternative? Looking at a response from folding ideas to another similar comment, it seems he prefers the "Not feature them at all" option which is practical at least, but still has problems. It totally excludes a very real class of people from being included in a game series that prides itself on gritty realism. The game can avoid settings where sex workers would appear, or it could simply not have them in the world. I could be wrong here, but I doubt the community at large including real life sex workers would be totally satisfied with this answer. Plus it leaves me with a lot of questions. Should we do the same thing for other groups of people? Sex workers are indeed discriminated against, but they're certainly not the only ones. I don't think it's a slippery slope, as much as it's just a confused idea being presented. I doubt any of this will be put into action because how could it be? I agree that we should strive for a gaming culture that respects people and values the lives of everyone, and I think perhaps we should seriously look at whether we should accept depicting violence as an inherent part of gaming the way we currently do. I also think that Hitman as a series has, as of late, actually been fairly responsible with their depictions of violence. They seem to suggest that violence should be used against those misusing power, rather than those who are vulnerable to violence. They reject the sort of consequence free attitude of some sandboxes in favor of a more thoughtful approach. In my mind it then follows that the best thing you can do with this problem is to depict sex workers as regular people. We should have them as part of our media, and we should take the effort to characterize them as being no less human than anyone else, and a huge part of being human is our ability to die. Dissociating the concepts of sex-work and violence will be a worthwhile task in the years to come, so having them featured in a story that doesn't involve their boss killing them would be a good place to start. However the player being able to kill them isn't really the problem here. If anything making them invincible or removing them entirely would further reinforce the connection between these concepts because people would notice and they would talk about it, having to answer the question for themselves why sex workers and only sex workers needed to be protected; and they'd likely answer that question with their existing biased and uninformed view of sex work as being a profession that inherently involves violence.
I interpreted Dan's comment differently. I think what he means is that if devs include strippers in a game about killing whoever you want, they probs did it because they know some players will enjoy killing strippers. (And I know it's not literally just about killing whoever, but for some people that is the appeal)
@@brookejohnson9914 But the game explicitly isn't about killing whoever you want, it's a game about killing a specific target while avoiding collateral damage. It's also a game that typically takes place in a gritty urban setting meant to reflect locations the adults who play it might recognize from their own life. With that in mind, the strippers have a clear function, that being to bring to life a club setting and add character to the level. Dan sorta dismissed the idea that you're penalized for killing them, but it's not just that. If I remember correctly, in that mission your goal is to kill this predatory boss who is taking advantage of the strippers and you rely on them to do the job. If you just decide to kill them, the mission is over. I'm all about the rights of sex workers, though in this case I don't agree with Dan. The way he presents it, simply including them at all would be impossible to do ethically unless perhaps you make them invincible, at which point you've completely changed the way the game functions since nobody else is unkillable. So can we just not have strippers in any game with guns? How would this apply to other disadvantaged groups? People of color have been subject to discrimination and violence, so is it problematic to allow you to kill them in the game? I don't think it's a slippery slope argument to say that, without taking this logic any further than he did, it seems the only solution is to populate every violent game with nothing but straight white men. Otherwise, we're drawing a very odd distinction between sex workers and everyone else on the planet. I'm even sympathetic to the problem, but suggesting that we simply can't have sex workers in any game that allows you to kill everyone? That's a completely unworkable solution. So would be making them and no one else immortal.
@@brookejohnson9914 Perhaps you disagree regarding their intentions, but their reasoning seems pretty straightforward. Have you played the level in question? It is pretty heavy handed in making sure the player can't kill the sex workers and get away with it. It seems clear to me they were consciously trying to avoid the kind of controversy that has followed games like Grand Theft Auto, a game that legitimately does allow anyone who wants to kill sex workers to do so, and even rewards them for it with money.
I don't understand this. I've played some Hitman games and you can kill and drag any NPC apart from certain levels with dense crowds. There's plenty of possibly sexist things in Hitman you could talk about, but that's not really one of them.
@@Abigail-hu5wf That's a criticism you could make about Hitman, most of people would agree. But choosing to only talk about sex workers and how their role as in game NPCs is just to be killed and dragged, and disregard the whole lot of regular people, guards, gardners, cooks or old people that serve the exact same purpose is a fallacy. It's not a conversation about sex workers, it's a conversation about NPCs and their place in a narrative. What would be the solution? Allow you to kill everyone in the game BUT sex workers? Wouldn't that be a way of excluding and calling attention to the fact they are something else from the rest, kind of discriminated?
@@danibiendi7829 I belive you are missing the point. Starting from the top, as I see it - this video is not a critique of Hitman games, it's why he calls it Assassin 47 - it is called that way to put the idea of a specific game and the way it plays, to the audience who knows it, but to actually talk about a problem only loosely connected to that game itself. You are forcing the topic into political correctness, while the video doesn't go this way. This was about game mechanics and game narrative, conflicting wit each other, and how putting mechanics that penalize players immoral actions doesn't really deal with the question of immorality of the actions themselves - the player is being steered into not killing NPCs because he will "lose points" not because killing innocents is immoral. And this, by the way, is a major problem of all games with morality systems, because morality get objecified, it assigns a number value (+5 good, or -5 evil) and profitability (in-game money reward for being good, higher difficulty of play for being evil) to moral actions.
The argument against "Assassin 47" has fundamental flaws. The assertion is that because the game allows the player to murder strippers, the game views them as lesser than NPCs with other occupations. True the game allows the player to kill strippers, but it also allows you to kill all human characters in each level, be them cops, body guards, mercenaries, gang members, or innocent bystanders. As far as raw what-you're-able-to-do mechanics go, all NPCs are equally disposable. The argument would have ground if the player could kill strippers, but not other NPCs. The reason the player can kill strippers is because the player can kill anyone in the game and there are strippers in the game. The argument is that the game allowing the player to kill strippers is the game viewing them as lesser. If the game views anyone as lesser due to mechanics it's everyone the isn't under the player's control, as all are equally killable. On some level the argument has some ground: Some NPCs aren't able to be strangled and dragged around, but those NPCs are almost exclusively the randomly generated people of the crowds. While one could say that makes strippers more disposable than crowds, the same goes for chefs, store clerks, truckers, and cops. That puts strippers mechanically on the same level as the game's many police officers. The games mechanics say that stripping as an occupation is on the same level of respect as the police. The game is about an assassin and allows indiscriminate assassinating. Discrimination is the act of singling out a certain group or groups. The game isn't singling out strippers for being killable, it merely puts on the same level as every other NPC. If one hates the game for allowing the murder of strippers they can chose to not kill them or not play the game at all. But if one is to criticize the game for being opposed to an occupation then they must present evidence from the game that NPCs of other occupations get better treatment. The treatment as described by the argument is that the sex worker is more disposable since they are able to be killed. If the game hates sex workers for making them killable then NPCs in different lines of work wouldn't be able to be killed. Since all NPCs in a stage can be killed then strippers are not more disposable. If I didn't present my argument well please tell what isn't clear or I missed and I will try to explain myself better.
Yes. The problem is not that killing a sex worker is somehow less appropriate, but that they get disproportionately targeted for victimization and degradation. Hitman doesn't do that. Including them is no more problematic than including a whiteboard the player can write on: It's only a problem to the extent that the players are encouraged to create something problematic themselves. Besides, I don't think it'd be doing people any favors by pretending they don't exist.
Liz Lee For pity's sake, this comment doesn't help our cause. I don't give a rat's ass about strippers in Hitman because the great majority of people can disassociate the murder-fantasy of vidya games from real life. There is NO real evidence that says "problematic" media desensitizes people in a way that makes them more likely to afterwards turn around and apply these "problematic" attitudes to real-life people. If somebody plays a "problematic" game then turns around and treats their partner or wife, or sister, or daughter, in a disgusting, violent way, you can bet there's a MUCH deeper problem than "Hitman game lets me kill strippers, hurr". The conservative right tried this shit in the past and we laughed them off the stage. Let us not, collectively, excuse this shit now on the vague assumption that somebody's feelings are being hurt. tldr: i'm a lady, I play vidya games, I'm not on my period and y'all should feel free to enjoy whatever the f*ck you like without fear of judgement or censure and anybody claiming otherwise is, as far as I'm concerned, a meddling busybody. Thank you, move along.
No, no, no, honey, you don't understand. You can complain about games being sexist as long as you like. But, just as people will argue about whether or not Last of Us was heavy-handed with the easy angst or its gameplay being too repetitive, or how people will bitch at each other that no, in fact, the new Assassin's Creed games are not good just because they're pretty and everything about triple-Aaaaayyyy sucks... People will argue with you. I disagree with what you said, and my opinion is as valid as yours, just as some dude's rant about Fallout 3's intro being utter shite is as valid as some other guy's counter-argument that, actually, the narrative value of the gamey tutorial starting at your character's birth ties into the game's plot. I don't care, my money is as valid to the industry as yours. You are not morally superior simply because you feel offended. I disagree. That's just my opinion. And I will consume my media according to my opinion. You can demand changes as much as you like. And if the market agrees, then changes will happen. I still think it's stupid. Just as Jack Thompson's "violence in vidya games is baaaaaad m'kay" argument was stupid. You don't like, buy something else. I dislike online multiplayer shooters. I don't buy CoD and then bitch because there was too much shooting. /shrug Edited to add: Minecraft and Fortnite and Overwatch target teens and kids. The point is moot, because the discussion of "Assassin 47" is about a mature-audience game. A mature game pre-supposes your audience is old enough to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and know that the narrative may present things that are sensitive and/or mature. That's sort of the point.
Easiest answer is, people are tired of this debate. Like I said, it's essentially the same debate that Jack Thompson brought to the table in... what, the 90's? It's pointless. It's a free market, people will buy whatever they like, and if the industry doesn't provide, smaller indie studios will sprout and open up new market avenues for people to obtain the content they want. That's how it works. You don't have to ignore it. Equally, I can disagree with you. People jump on the S word because it's thrown around every time someone so much as twitches wrong. I've worked in industries that were EXTREMELY male dominated, and when actual real sexism happened, it was taken extremely seriously. Sexism isn't a word I throw around lightly, and, to me, pixel babes being in a video game where NPCs of all genders routinely get murdered is just .... a nothing issue. Like most issues surrounded by fauxtroversies these days. You can have your opinion. But your opinion is inherently reactionary and so people..... react? I'm not certain what you find surprising there. How is you voicing your opinion about, say, hookers in GTA any different than a dudebro coming into a TheSims thread and bitching about the fact that you can get two dude sims to bone? Historically, GTA has long had hookers. And historically TheSims has long let players make two dudes bone. These are equally non-issues. You can discuss it all you like, I just think it's... pointless. (And yeah, depending where you throw these opinions around, sometimes you WILL get shat on. It's the Internet. Shit happens. Frequently. Often humourously.)
The other issue with the "It's OK because you lose points" argument is that it fails to look at the big picture when it comes to how the game rewards and punishes your actions and choices. In 'Assassin 47', you're docked points for killing strippers, but is earning points a *primary* goal, or a *secondary* one? In real mission-based games - Metal Gear Solid V springs to mind - points and rankings are secondary: good for achievements, unlocking bonuses, and for bragging rights, but failing to get them never halts your progress, because the primary goal is simply to complete the story objectives given to you in whatever way you can. In which case, killing strippers in 'Assassin 47' could yield a far greater reward than punishment, insomuch as it might make the mission/level much easier to complete (or for some, more fun). If so, the game is actively incentivizing the player to kill strippers, because the greater reward for NOT doing it isn't big enough to justify the extra difficulty involved. Especially as these types of games almost always allow the player to re-do the level later for that greater reward. If you run an apple cart, and you sell Adequate Quality apples for $1 each and High Quality apples for $10 each, you can't use "They had every chance to buy the High Quality apples!" as an excuse if everyone who bought the Adequate Quality apples gets sick.
+Jack Christmas Yes but what if killing the strippers doesn't only not advance your main mission but makes it harder to achieve? Strippers run about and make noise, attracting attention, and after they are dead there bodies can be found. What is they are killable but there is no mechanical or story incentive to do so?
+Jack Christmas This is a good point, one that I'd originally made (intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards) but cut in order to stick to the topic at hand. It'll probably pop up as a minisode in the next couple weeks.
Jeremiah B In that case, the argument holds a bit more water. It doesn't quite defeat the criticism, because any possible route to victory is something the developers deliberately authored, but it's closer. Of course, often a game encourages you to experiment, meaning the player might be encouraged to kill the strippers just to find out if it helps them win the level or not, so that ought to be considered too. I think the only situation where a game *indisputably* punishes you for killing strippers is if it triggers an immediate Game Over.
Jack Christmas So are you against games that give you freedom to interact with the game world in logical ways? Or should underprivileged groups just not be represented in these games?
Jeremiah B No. I am only against the idea that technically optional elements of a game are above scrutiny. It's not really about how much freedom the player has, it's about the environment and tools that the player is provided with to express that freedom. So, in regards to Assassin 47 and hypothetical stripper-murder, a proper defense should look deeper than simply saying "You don't have to do it", "You lose points" or even "It makes it more difficult if you do it". Instead (or in addition), you want to consider things like: - Is it really important to the story to set this level in a strip club? - Are the level and its objectives set up in such a way that common routes are going to give the player more-ample-than-necessary opportunities to kill the aforementioned strippers? - How are the strippers characterized as NPCs? Are they made to feel properly human and sympathetic, or disposable on some level? This can be as simple as the amount of pain and emotion they show when you try to harm them. (Think how Battlefield: Hardline deliberately omitted this.) The inclusion of kill-able strippers in a game is not necessarily *indefensible*. It's just that the particular defenses talked about in the video do not hold water. Also, on the representation front, I feel like underprivileged groups might hope to do a bit better than being murder-able extras... Though I don't know, maybe if Assassin 47 existed it would receive an award from the Exotic Dancers Union or something. You never know.
Connecting the fact in Hitman you can kill strippers (as much as you can kill any other npc in the entire game) to a ludonarrative dissonace argument against Hitman doesn't quite cut it. Hitman has dissonance, not because you can kill sex workers, but because you can kill everyone. Just highlighting the fact of being able to kill sex workers is selected in order to highlight an opinion. This is not a gamer rant either, I love your videos and enjoy your arguments even when I don't share your viewpoints, I just felt that realtionship was flawed.
Being consistent with in game mechanics does not mean that said mechanics don't run contrary to the narrative being spoken (rampant killing is bad) or the narrative of the development team (killing sex workers is bad).
@@brutalbeard9441 it does, strippers aren't special or single. All of the hitman games has you play male character where knocking out or killing a stripper is far less valuable than doing the same to another male npc - because of the excellent disguise mechanic in these games. It is telling that what the hitman games considers the perfect way to play is to ensure absolutely none other than the target is killed in the course of a mission (while ensuring nobody else grows the wiser) Point docking is the wrong way to counterague against the argument that being able to kill strippers in hitman gams makes them sexist - essentially strippers like every other npc are just side dressing, none of them are usually any more special than the other. If anything, hitman games should be criticised for representing stereotypes among different archetypes of targets its portrays.
@@aravindpallippara1577 nothing I said was about strippers being special or single. Being less valuable isn't relevant either. If the narrative is "Killing is bad" but the game play is "Kill as much as you need to" saying 'one target doesn't reward you as much' does nothing to the disconnect of those two statements. How much benefit wasn't in question. "It is telling that what the hitman games considers the perfect way to play" In moments, but unlocking a scope from scoring enough headshots tells a different story. "none of them are usually any more special than the other." Again, nothing in my statements or Folding Ideas was about them being unique. The topic was brought up because of a 'long history of putting sex workers in games to be killed' (because as you said, they're not their to give you a costume) and a discussion of tools of debate. I know that killing them is not special when compared to the other generic npcs in a mechanical sense. I never said nor implied that. "If anything, hitman games should be criticised for representing stereotypes among different archetypes of targets its portrays." Games don't have to be criticized for only one thing. It can be criticized for both :-)
@@brutalbeard9441 so essentially you don't have a problem with hitman's long history of soldiers, guards, cooks, valets, accountants, janitors, assassins who are all significantly more presented in hitman games than sex workers (the running joke of cook being the poisoner has been very very consistent throughout the series), thus making them more prone to player arbitrary player violence carnage and whims - why don't I see anybody worried about how cooks are represented in the game? what about the security guards who are most often the casualty in normal runs? since they are more affected, why aren't we discussing about them? You can definitely claim I am making it whataboutism dismissal but, I would argue the situation is comparable enough, but I have seen no-one defend the representation of cooks or security guards in these games yet, absolutely none now if countering that with percentage of population I would argue there are far more sex workers than professional assassins in the world, and hitman has plenty of professinal assassins in it's setting. If you are going to set your game in the seedy underworld, liberties has to be taken to strive with at-least what the players consider the underworld is like (pretty sure the number of sex workers are vastly less compared to all other criminals in hitman when you compare it to the real world, because that's the reality) Yes the headshots for the attachment was a degradation from the older games which is what I am more comfortable with (yet to play the modern trilogy) - the games became psudo live services, and thus players has to be kept in the content treadmill with inane tasks that are little more than time wasters and often run counter to the original vision of the series - I can't defend that, and won't do either. the thing that annoys me of folding idea's argument is that there are plenty of other games that does sexism blatantly without any kind of defensibility and this was definitely a case of not understanding the subject material enough to criticise it. There are far better easier targets that could have been showcased, from mario and princess peach (at least historically) to most military shooters, to farcry 3 and gta
@@aravindpallippara1577 " you don't have a problem with" Again, you're arguing against something I'm not talking about. I didn't say anywhere that killing sex workers in games are bad, or are uniquely bad, or are the priority bad thing. My contributions have always been about how game play does or does not represent the message of the game or team. " why don't I see anybody worried about how cooks are represented in the game?" Easy, because cooks don't have a long real world history of being subjects of consistent physical violence, abuse, and degradation - nor are they so routinely murdered. You are making a what-about-ism fallacy, but I'm addressing it anyways :-) And fyi, ALL whataboutisms are done with "I would argue the situation is comparable enough" - that's not the issue with whataboutisms. "there are plenty of other games " Sure, but this again is whataboutism. This is 1 video, using 1 example. It was never intended to be a comprehensive list of every game with a problematic element in order of their severity.
After looking at all the previous videos, it occurs to me that the Thermian Argument could be avoided altogether if the criticism of the object in question were phased differently. If the actual question is concerning the creators ambivalence in incorporating scenarios in their work which have real-world ramifications -- since these things are there for the most part because the creator consciously put them there, that is what the question should specifically be. Not, "why is this problematic thing here?"
This sounds similiar to the whole "Sansa got raped, therefore GoT hates women" argument to me. Portraying something bad is fine, as long as You don't use "this is awesome!!1" filiming techniques like happy music and so on You let other characters react negativly to what you are doing You show the negative consequences for the victim and the criminal You can argue wether or not "people reacting in horror to what you are doing and you getting minus points" is sufficient to make it clear that the game isnt okay with what you are doing. But if you are saying "this shouldnt be here at all, no matter what mechanics the game uses to portray it as bad" you basicly just moved into "games arent art, stop talkikng about serious things" territory. Games should be able to portray bad things. What we should judge is what they had to say about the subject, not what the subject was.
This is a really interesting question to ponder from the game design perspective. I mean, if our hypothetical game allows you to kill NPCs, and for narrative reasons some of those NPCs are strippers, then players are then going to try to kill strippers whether the developer had any intent for that to happen or not. Keep in mind that the narrative in games can be as much written by the player as it is the developer. The game doesn't necessarily let the player kill strippers so much as it's something that simply exists with-in the game's "possibility space" (a term you should look up). Only 2 options are really there for the developer to try to stop the player: 1) disincentivize killing strippers, like your lose of point example, or how Assasisn's Creed would actually kill the player for killing certain NPCs, or 2) expressly disallow killing strippers. And this second option developers try to avoid as much as possible because there are few things that kill a gaming experience as much as the mechanics not working the way the player is taught to expect them too. A player firing their assault rifle into a stripper without her being effected at all is the sort of thing that gets put up on TH-cam to mock a game. Ultimately players are going to play the game however they want and the authorial intent of the developer will have little sway over that.
+Giant Evil Robot Any dev that doesn't think the players might kill NPC-X in a Hitman game is dev who couldn't get work. Come on, now. And they have a large team of people. This is not a case of a simple oversight. There are way more options than that. 3. Don't include strippers. Set the mission to occur during closing. 4. Don't set the stage at a strip club so there is no question of whether to include them or not. This is FH's point. The writers wrote this. They choose the setting. They did so knowing what NPCs would populate that setting. They did so knowing that players experiment with killing NPCs. And they did so in a culture where "dead hookers" is a common joke, so arguing they were unaware of the implications is naive at best and disingenuous at worst.
+Gaylen Oraylee I completely disagree. Let me offer another hypothetical game to use as an example. Let's call it... Law & Homicide. Law & Homicide is a dramatic detective action/adventure with a strong focus on the moral implications and gravitas of using a gun for law enforcement. For instance there would be a point where you try to catch a pedophile in the act of kidnapping a child, but he runs off into a crowded area before you can catch him. Do you shoot to take him down and risk hitting bystanders? Do you chase and risk him getting away to offend again? The game would give harsh punishments for injuring civilians, but also for letting the pedophile escape. The difficulty of this choice in entirely dependent on the player's ability to accidentally shoot and kill anyone, other wise there wouldn't be anticipatable consequences. A not insignificant amount of players will just go around shooting strippers until they get a game over screen for it, load up their last save, and then continue to shoot strippers. And this is in no small part specifically because they game doesn't want them to. The problem is that there is always some level dissonance between the story the developer wants to tell and the story the player is going to tell (in fact, I recommend checking out The Stanley Parable some time, as that's pretty much the entire theme of the game). Other than absolutely static elements of a game like written text, voice overs or environmental story telling, the narrative of a game is pretty much entirely written by the player. It's NOT the developer who decided that strippers would get shot, it was the player who decided that. And the repercussions of that decision lies completely in the hands of the player.
The mission involves killing a man who exploits and kills women. Every single person you kill in the beginning of Hitman is an evil person. That is why it's in a strip club, because the horrible monster runs a strip club, he's the evil kind of person who devalues people who work at strip clubs and that's why he's going to die.
I could be wrong because this was years ago. But if I remember correctly Anita Sarkisian's claim specifically was that the game *encouraged* you to kill strippers and drag their bodies around treating them like objects. But it doesnt. Not from the narrative nor the mechanics. Sure you lose points, but its not as if you lose the points because the gsme is taking a moral stance, the idea is thats a "dirty less proffesional" way to he a murderer. Howeber the narrative in the game doesnt encourage it either. There are characters whose lines of dialouge make sure the player know "know this isnt your target, but oof he sure is a bastard. Do whatever idk" and the strippers aren't an example of this. So I think its fair to reject the criticism of "its encouraged" by citing game mechanics.
Except no it isn't. A core part of the Hitman series is player freedom, it actively encourages you to play the missions however you want, whatever that entails, aside from maybe a couple of deducted points that don't really matter. So by giving you the option to do that and not significantly punishing you for it, it is encouraging it on some level.
You could go into any hitman level and specifically murder every person of color, or every woman, or every homeless person. What's the solution? You white-wash out every oppressed category of person? I don't think I need to explain why this isn't a good option. You make the oppressed people invulnerable? Then either they can't count for witnessing crimes (because a core mechanism is being able to knock out people so your crimes go unreported, and would imply they don't care about you committing crimes) or they only are only in areas with other invulnerable npcs. The only real solution I see is that the game cannot exist in its current form, period. Nor can any other sandbox game exist within a pseudo-realistic setting (though considering the minecraft video even that may not be sufficient) Video games are a medium whereby the player is given agency to interact with the world, and in that moment you can only do so much in keeping them from interacting in problematic ways. I generally agree with the take about the inadequacy of the thermian argument, especially in non-interactive media, and even in interactive media where it does encourage such behavior (see GTA games), but when the game's interactions and mechanics are generalized to just humans, it's a bit disingenuous to point to people abusing those mechanics to engage in morally bankrupt behavior, and then blaming the developer for not sufficiently disincentivising the behavior. At some point, the game (and especially sandbox games) become a medium, and you can't blame a paper and pencil for the things people create with it.
I think that "you lose points" isn't a rejection of criticism so much as it is a statement that the thing being criticized is being taken out of context. It's not "don't criticize games"; it's "don't misrepresent games by omitting relevant details".
Having discovered the game in question during quarantine, I definitely think the intentions of the game are a bit misrepresented in this video. The game isnt nearly as smart as it pretends to be but it clear prefers that you create as little chaos as possible. Then again, it's not like the creators didn't know people would seek out the most over the top and/or violent approaches. A few days of OxBox will show you that.
Thing is, it's not necessarily a "relevant detail". Like in the Thermian argument, it's about using irrelevant information to try and respond to criticism. Dan frames it as denying/rejecting criticism because it's often presented in a way that doesn't accept a counterargument (e.g. laughing at the notion that it is something serious to consider). Whether or not the point system is enough to make a proper statement and justifies allowing such a loaded situation in the game is a very interesting discussion. One that isn't made when people respond to criticism in non constructive ways.
This isn’t a relevant detail losing points in a game like Hitman or losing money/being chased by cops in GTA simply does nothing to actually disincentivize abusive play
Just because a game allows a player to perform an action, does not mean that the game or its developers are condoning that action. For the most part, games should *allow* players to engage in any activity which a human could reasonably perform in that situation, rather than limiting those options based on the values of the producers. It is up to the player to determine which moral choices to make. Being *capable* of killing strippers in a game does not "reinforce negative stereotypes about strippers," it is just a stripper, being human, are vulnerable to the same mortal conditions that would apply to, say, gangsters, who you can also kill in the game, who you receive no penalties for killing, and who nobody seems to care about.
This argument to me seems to show a lack of understanding of how video games are designed. A game may let you do something, and even spend extra dev time on something, without condoning that action. The action is allowed because the game is not trying to just create a specific story, but is also trying to simulate a scenario. Hitman isn't just the story of Agent 47, it's also asking the player "what if you were a hitman?". The game is saying, not only through the point system (which i agree is really a immaterial point), but also through the environment and dialogue, that killing the strippers is wrong. In fact, the strippers are probably the most sympathetic characters in the entire game. This video is quite old now, and it seems to me this Hitman argument was mostly defended because gamergaters used it to discredit Sarkeesian. The defenses ignore the sex-negative undertone of Sarkeesian's arguments, just as the the entire industry has (see for example Nier Automata getting praised with basically no-one critiquing the sexualised protagonist, as Sarkeesian would have). The rest of the argument isn't really applied either, for example, no-one critiqued Rockstar for letting you murder feminists in RDR2.
Using a gameplay mechanic to respond to a moral criticism, such as the Hitman example, isn't necessarily a dismissal of the criticism rather than an answer. Because, while the ability to kill prostitutes is in the game is a moral issue on the side of the developers, it IS also a gameplay mechanic. Games are about freedom, and the choice to do objective evil has been a longstanding tradition of the medium. However, if we make that argument, then we should talk about this: How important are the points that they're losing? Is it like Assassin's Creed, where you lose a bit of health (but you can get that back very easily), and will mission fail if you kill too many civilians at once? An annoyance at best? Or is it a consequence in line with the moral misstep they've just made? Do they lose points that they can't get back, points that they need? Then again, we're talking about negotiating the worth of a fictional life at that point.
Only six years late. The Thermian argument was a great video. This one is terrible because of the example chosen and the strawmen set up. It's not just a way to shut down criticism. The criticism only lands when you strip the context of the game away and squint narrowly at it. That makes it a pretty invalid criticism from the start. Not sure why you would defend it. While you can make the point that they could avoid the situation by choosing not to include those elements at all, is that really where you want media to go? Should a sandbox game that allows any character to be killed be off limits? Or are sex workers off limits except where they can't be harmed? To dismiss the framing because it's technically possible, even though discouraged narratively and by mechanics, seems silly. I've seen others compare this to your colonialism in Minecraft video, but there are clear incentives there that don't exist here. The argument seems to be that the mere possibility of the action, even if it discouraged, is too much. What's the reasonable limit here? Should there be no portrayal of sex workers in such games? What about other oppressed groups? Take them out, too? Another commenter said it's not about how the game should be, just using it as an example to criticize. But if in your criticism you can't specify what should have been done instead or make a coherent argument for why the media shouldn't exist then it's not good criticism. To be fair, I think it is good criticism. I just think it's targeted at a really bad example where it doesn't really apply.
I see your point but I think you're kind of grasping at straws and the way you and anita frame the question is incredibly misleading to someone who hasn't played the game such as myself. Why are the hookers were put in the game and made killable? Probably as set pieces to establish the setting and probably so the player didn't run into a strange situation where players and critics have to ask the question "Why are hookers seemingly immortal?" The "you lose points" thing is a non argument but this is splitting hairs so intensely on top of being misleading.
You make a really good point in rejecting the “but you loose point” argument. However, I will go back to what seems to be the origin of the debate: the critic of _Hitman_ by Anita Sarkeesian. Disclaimer first: I do really like her work and fine it highly relevant as a whole. It actually helped me a lot to understand the socio-cultural issue of sexism. But sometimes, the examples are bad, and _Hitman_ is I think one of them. In fact, female characters are not more disposable than male characters, and their limbs physics (also attacked by Sarkeesian) is the very same for male characters. Male characters might be even more considered as tools through the “cloth stealing” mechanic. So not only men and women are equally disposable -which does not avoid the repetition of pre-established sexist behaviors-, but men are probably more “disposed of” in practice. I am not stating that _Hitman_ is fine with regard to sexism, just that the stressed arguments were really questionable if not plain bad. On the other hand, we can still underline the under-representation of women in the game (that is still problematic despite the mechanistic reasons behind it) as well as the typical roles of the present women, and criticize the choice of having a strip club level. And all of this does not make the point of the video any less relevant.
As someone who has studied sexism in gaming longer than Anita, I can assure you none of her work is "fine" or is even close to "relevant". Anita Sarkeesian did a great job of highlighting white women privilege, and how first world society worships women. Fun fact: If someone making an argument uses a single example that is "invalid", its more than enough to invalidate their entire argument. The only reason Anita Sarkeesian's entire body of work isn't dismissed entirely is because first world society worships women. Objectively speaking when it comes to entertainment industries, the video game industry is the most inclusive, and has the least problems with misogyny. Women and female characters are worshiped in the gaming industry. The Last of Us 2 is a great example of female worship and sexists misandrist tropes. Fun fact: Sexualizing a character whether that character is male or female; is objectively speaking not sexist, or sexism. It is worship, which is a form of privilege. Anyone, man or woman, who takes issue with a character being sexualized, IS sexist. In order words; Anita Sarkeesian is a misogynist. Notice how angry she gets when attractive female characters are sexualized, but completely unbothered when unattractive female character, or male characters are sexualized? Notice how Anita Sarkeesian body shames "attractive" body types, she is anti-body positivity which is misogyny. Don't worry, it isn't a "might", male character in the gaming industry are treated far worse than female characters. If you are torturing, killing, or witnessing a sexual assault or rape joke in a video game; the victim of it is a male character. Hitman isn't fine when it comes to sexism, but it is 100% fine like every other mainstream title when it comes to misogyny. The only misogyny that really exists in the gaming industry today, is the same type of misogyny that misogynists like Anita Sarkeesian perpetuate; attractive women body shaming, and treating women as if they are inferior, or victims. And the fact that this youtuber did not focus on Anita Sarkeesian, is an example of anti-intellectualism, hes also a hypocrite who is doing the same shit he accuses other people of doing. And as someone who is actually intelligent; the use of excessively big words directed at a mainstream audience is the mark of a stupid person with a superiority complex. Intelligence is the ability to understand, and going out of your way to use words that people are unfamiliar with, alienates people, and makes it more difficult for them to understand you. If Anita Sarkeesian actually had a problem with unrealistic bodies in gaming, she would be furious about Abby in The Last of Us 2. Plenty of women exist that have the body of Lara Croft, yet almost none have the body of Abby.
@@LegendLeaguer Traditional cultures that were sexist towards women, made it culturally unpopular to be attracted to women. For example, powerful Romans and Greeks would claim to fuck exclusively men, preferably powerful ones. There is plenty of righting about powerful figures of that period claiming to obtain no pleasure from being with women. Also, the most powerful people in the Wild West, a lot of them were women, specifically hookers, dry-cleaners, tailors, and cooks...which were again...mostly women.
@@LegendLeaguer He made a very solid argument that holds up about how historically society pushed people down, by implying they couldn't be attractive and builds other people but by implying they're insanely beautiful or seductive. Which is entirely true for anyone who is familiar with any famous female rapper, mob bosses, guerilla leaders, Cleopatra, etc etc. This video is trash, because it's shortsided, and if you work out it's logic, it's sexist.
I’m not entirely convinced the argument holds water. This is, of course, a broader discussion than ‘It’s okay because you lose points,’ but even speaking to this hypothetical, games are escapism by nature. It’s hard for me to see criticism of one element somehow being more valid than another. If violence against hookers coupled with a point-loss deterrent is bad, then violence against this assassin’s target being rewarded should be even more egregious. Violence in general is bad, why do games allow that and even _reward_ that? I’m not suggesting this in some form of mockery. I’m more curious why violence to _anyone_ gets an ‘of course’ sort of free-pass in these games, and yet maintaining that consistency combined with believable world-building (you can assault anyone, you lose points for attacking anyone besides the target but their bodies can be used, it happens to be that sex workers are in the location where this mission takes place; it would call attention to itself if you _couldn’t_ be violent to this one protected class) is somehow a negative. This can of course spiral a back and forth for a while. ‘Well they shouldn’t show up at all because violence against this group is bad.’ I would make the case it’s a greater error to disallow their inclusion in certain situations (for example, a game where every enemy is male implies violence is purely a male problem while a game where you fight both genders does _not_ imply some concept of violence against women). Is there a case to be made that having purely female sex workers implies tainted intent? Sure. Is there a case to be made that their portrayal is misrepresentative? Certainly. Is perhaps their reaction to violence somehow singled out as ‘more entertaining’ than other optional kills? That’s a problem I’m willing to discuss. But so long as we keep the bar at ‘You can express violent behavior consistent with the rest of the game toward a group of people that shouldn’t face such violence in real life’ there’s no argument for me without implying all played actions in games are somehow manifestations of real-life intent.
"games are escapism by nature" Not exactly, games (like everything else) are many different things. For some they are escapism, for others they are avenues for new narratives and exploration of real world themes, and they are able to shape our behaviors and influence our subconscious. Understanding where, how, why, and when helps us engage in the content when these lead to good things (Certain games can cause decreases in stress/anxiety brought on subconsciously by those with violent PTSD), and can help us avoid situations where they lead to problematic behavior (people getting killed because a false SWAT call was called on them by a frustrated gamer). Videogames are a tool - they're neither wholly innocent nor completely at fault. "If violence against hookers coupled with a point-loss deterrent is bad" Dan wasn't stating that killing in a game is bad in a moral sense, but that it can run in contrast to the story/themes presented. From a narrative standpoint - the message being presented in dialogue isn't matching the message delivered by the mechanics of the game. "combined with believable world-building... is somehow a negative." It's not that either element (the killing or the narrative) are bad on their own (necessarily) but more-so that if you change the mechanics or you change the narrative than the two would work more harmoniously together. It's not that the elements are bad, but that they don't mix as they are being presented. "without implying all played actions in games are somehow manifestations of real-life intent." At least in terms of Dan's points here, it's not implied - it's explicit, but more so from the perspective of the development of the game than the player. If the games make killable targets, they intend for you to kill them. Games are fictional worlds with fictional rules and limitations - these can emulate elements of real life, but every decision of where to allow fantasy and where to impose the modern world are determined by the creator's intent (as well as system limitations).
While I usually love your takes, I think this video lacks the concept of procedural rhetoric. Narrative rhetoric can be criticized for its mode of representation, i.e. does the camera linger on the exposed breasts of the dead sex worker (i.e. male gaze), is the violence shot in a gratifying way, does the act of killing sex workers feature prominently in the story, etc. You ask those questions to establish the resulting message: Does the medium represent the act as valuable to voyeurism or not? The ludological equivalent of this is to ask whether the game represents the act as valuable to play or not. It prompts questions such as: Is the phenomenon fun to play out? Does it bring one closer to the winning condition? Is it rewarded in any way? I agree that an argument about whether something is represented in the first place is worth having: Why even have strippers with death animations in your game? Games are not coincidental representations, not holistic models, they are bespoke worlds that required their creators to pick and choose what they would represent, how they would abstract things, and what they would deem irrelevant. However, to dismiss procedural rhetoric entirely is short-sighted. There is an obvious difference in terms of communicated ideology between a hypothetical game with the winning condition of having killed 10 sex workers and another game that immediately sends you to the "game over" screen as soon as you killed one sex worker. The fact that both games chose to include the simulation of killing sex workers becomes trivial by comparison. In fact, diegetic rewards for in-game actions are a core dimension used for age ratings of video games in, e.g., Germany. The USK, our age rating committee, might put a game that rewards you for killing sex workers on the index, i.e. disallowing it from advertising anywhere, while ludically punishing it might grant it permission to be sold to adults in stores. You yourself have used the argument of procedural rhetoric in your video about Minecraft encouraging colonialism. You do not merely criticize the game for the fact that it lets you abduct natives for quasi-slavery but that it actively encourages you to do so through its rules and goals. Had Minecraft instead discouraged you from this through some contrived rule, the outcome would be vastly different, even if the action were still technically possible to carry out. And yes, I know those videos are 4 years apart. Your entire initial comparison doesn't work. You say that the Thermian argument appeals to the diegetic world logic while its mechanical equivalent appeals to the mechanical logic. But the Thermian argument quotes diegetic rules (she breathe's through her skin) that explain why a character does a thing (that's why she wears little more than a bikini), while its mechanical equivalent in your example quotes mechanical rules (killing sex workers is disadvantageous) that explain why a character does a thing (that's why he kills sex workers). You see how the latter argument doesn't line up? That's because it doesn't make any sense.
This seems like a poor example. Unlike your excellent Thermian Argument example, the point that "this behavior is penalized," while perhaps beside the intended point, does actually seem to stand against the criticism being made. If the game doesn't actually let a sex worker's death pass without remark or penalty, is that character really being treated as disposable? That was the claim you made, and this is a legitimate argument around that claim. There's a potentially valuable discussion to be had in this space quite aside of the intended, but not actually stated, point of "why is this here at all?"
+Robert Richter Except the original criticism, as per the hypothetical, is that Assassin 47 represents one more tick in a very long tally. That, internally, Assassin 47 perhaps handles it with more or less tact than other examples is still arguing past the original criticism.
I don't see how. It can't be added to the tally unless it's in the class of objects being tallied. That would indeed be an unfair criticism. The long tally exists, surely, but whether this item can be added to it is not a moot point.
+Folding Ideas The original criticism being that Hitman was not a good example of the trope she was discussing and that she lied about the game to make it a better fit (which was true).
Robert Richter She said the game encourages you to kill strippers drag their bodies around and get a perverse thrill out of it. That's something the game never acknowledges or hints at. It is a lie.
what are you actually arguing for though? in games where you can kill every NPC, should there not be strippers ever? should they be uniquely invincible? would a sufficiently harsh in game punishment make it permissible in your view? I don't understand what you want that game to be like instead.
There is no argument for how a work ought to be, just pointing out that a certain aspect of a work contributes to a harmful societal attitude as an example to explain a concept.
I thought that the criticism that you're talking about in this video without directly naming it was a stupid one, but not for the reason that was brought up here. The game doesn't make it possible to kill hookers and strippers--it makes it possible to kill anyone and everyone to achieve the goal. My criticism of the criticism is why are you just focusing on the strippers? That's not seeing the forest through the trees. I understand your argument, and it's a valid one, but the example given is a poor one. And my icon isn't a skull. It's the pokemon Gengar on a shirt that I wore as a mask when larping a few times.
I dont like the thermian argument or this one for that matter. I do agree they argue past the statements one person is making but that's because the point being made is inane at best. A thing existing doesn't increase the likelihood of other versions of that thing happening and unless you are arguing that videogames (or movies or books or stories) can somehow impart morals on an emotionally healthy individual you aren't actually even making an argument to meet. How can someone argue with a point that is a nonstarter? Again unless you are insisting that I will play Assassin 47 and decide that strippers are okay to kill or somehow worth less than any other person then what even is your argument? You are saying it degrades people and I say it doesnt, those aren't people. The problem with making arguments like that is it creates a black list of things you can't put into media or entertainment, if this was followed to the end nobody would write a story where a stripper was murdered and the body toyed with in any way. I don't necessarily want that story but people getting killed in fiction then being dismembered or otherwise disposed of in a non-respectful way is something that you need to do for certain stories to tell the story. The "you lose points" counter is the correct response, you are saying you CAN do it and I am saying it is not encouraged, it is a negative thing to do. I guess I don't understand how a story allowing you to do what you want but telling you this is a bad thing is encouraging or reinforcing doing the thing they are specifically encouraging you not to do. This game is an open level sandbox with people and objectives, you can kill anybody and drag them around. It doesn't put special emphasis on the strippers or on anybody that isn't your target, it holds them all at the exact same level. The only reason anybody is even talking about it is because someone decided to cherry pick this one scenario out of millions of possible scenarios and point to it as problematic. If I make a game, lets say Big Car Steal 5, and make it a huge sandbox. Give you tools, abilities and an objective and set you on your way. Am I a racist if someone shoots a minority in my game, writes a hit piece about it and says my game encourages you to kill minorities? Even though I did not specifically encourage that and actively made the game discourage you from killing random people for no reason. Am I then required to defend my game for not being racist? How do I do that? What possible argument could I use? You are saying I can't claim any defense because any defense I make is fundamentally missing the point the other side is making but the point the other side is making is dumb. Should I just say, your argument is dumb, and move on? Refuse to engage? Just flatly deny it? To anybody who has played my game it's apparent this isn't a minority killing simulator, you can just kill people in game and I included minorities in the pedestrians. To anybody else, who only interacted with the hit piece, they lack that context and are highly unlikely to wish to engage with my game or me for that matter after forming their opinion based on said hit piece. What choice to I have but to try and refute their point in the most basic way without requiring you to have extra knowledge that, if you had, would almost surely prevent me from having to explain any of this to you at all? This argument would prevent 80% of videogames at inception from being made if it was strictly followed. Any illegal behavior or problematic actions you were capable of taking, no matter how discouraged, would have to be removed. It would be immersion breaking for me to try to kill an NPC in Assassin 47 only to have the game stop me and say "no" flatly or have me instantly fail on any collateral damage. You could do that but they didn't want to. Ultimately this comes down to narrative freedom and stepping on the side of the thermian argument and the argument you appear to be making here is highly damaging to people who enjoy creating fiction. Do I want to read a book about someone doing unspeakable things to another human, getting away with it only to do it again with zero problems? No. Do I think that person should be incapable of writing that story on the base of JUST it's narrative subject material? Hell no, I can't say there is no value in that, nobody can and I think it's awful to try and block it. I guess what I am saying is who cares? It's fiction. If we blocked fiction from containing anything that was problematic we might as well stop making stories because everything from that point on is just documentaries about the founding of Walmart and puff pieces on kittens playing in a field.
My issue with this controversy is that you're able to kill any character in the game, not just the strippers. It is actively punished to kill anybody, but they're all killable, it isn't like the strippers are the only "disposable" npc
The assassin game lets the player kill any character and drag the body around. Male or female and general, doctor or sex worker. I can understand people questioning the inclusion of sex workers at all but there is no obvious motivation to kill and abuse sex workers more than any other character.
my main problem is in my experience though this does not apply to all who made this legitimate criticisms of violent media is that it was less about criticizing the media and more "hey you like video games you must be a loser or bad person because you consume such media",im not saying im perfect but making a generalized statement about who i am as a person solely on one type of media i enjoy just makes this argument point irk me a bit, its a valid criticism but has been used as a way to label me, my friends and gamers in general as deviant or less of a person when gamer are quit a diverse group of people. tl;dr problem w/ the argument is how its used not the critic itself.
I felt this with the Tomb Raider reboot. Really enjoyed playing it, but the whole "trial by fire" survival message didn't really gel with murdering soldiers by the dozen.
When you use your camera stand as a pretend rifle, you really should extend one of the legs as the barrel, for maximum verisimilitude. You can also position the swing arm as a gun stock. Hope this helps. --'Rich Fantasy Life'
it's funny, but the "you get points taken away if you kill strippers" isn't even necessarily true. There's a hierarchy of things you need to do in Hitman. 1st you need to kill the target (preferably making it look like an accident) and get away. 2nd you need to do it without any witnesses. Without any witnesses means either nobody saw you, or the people that did have been taken care of. Sometimes the bystander is put in such a position, that it's easier to kill them rather than risk being caught and turned in, than whatever abstract slap on the wrist they give you by taking away points (the loss of which, can be cut down, by properly disposing of the body)
So lets review what you wrote here under a critical lens. "you get points taken away if you kill strippers" isn't even necessarily true. 1st you need to kill the target (preferably making it look like an accident) So it IS necessarily true that you have points taken away for killing strippers, because by that action you have made your murder look less like an accident. You have to go through a couple of mental hurdles to state that the game doesn't punish you for noticeable actions such as killing, and even more to believe that the game encourages you to kill strippers. It's not good to mix words around until they mean whatever you want.
+Shoot Right Here "So it IS necessarily true that you have points taken away for killing strippers" There are situations where killing a stripper would actually give you points, and/or make the mission easier to complete (whether or not you get points taken away) If you committed murder in front of a stripper you lose points. If you then kill the stripper, you regain some of the deducted points because you took care of the witness. Sometimes, witnesses (including strippers) are placed in such a way in the level, that it is much easier to kill them (witnesses alert other people) than not. Getting points taken away is a weak compared to the very real in-game punishment of leaving witnesses alive, or not completing the mission.
Espurr But it's not just strippers that applies to is it? In fact most npcs you would do that to are in fact men, as the majority of npcs are. It also is ignoring that you would have done better by distracting the npc in some way.
The target is a man who kills strippers. The game physically has you find the person killing strippers and kill them. If you kill a stripper, a bunch of guards show up to kill you. Ergo, killing strippers = The world opens up and throws people with guns at you.
That seems like cherry-picking, somewhat. A more convincing counter-argument to Anita Sarkesian's argument on Hitman (because let's face it - that's what you're addressing) isn't that the game docks you points, but rather that that's simply the result of how game mechanics work. Unlike storytelling where things only ever happen because an author explicitly made that decision, in games things happen as a result of automated systems working as intended with whatever variables designers put into them. Hitman has civilians, those civilians can be killed. Hitman has corpse management requiring the moving and hiding of corpses, with potential hiding places including dumpsters and such. From the perspective of game mechanics, "civilian" is a class of items which all work the same way regardless of the "skin" that a specific level designer may have put on them in that particular case. If one civilian is killable and their body hideable in a dumpster, the same is true for everyone. There are two solutions - scrap the entire civilian system and gut the game of one of its core mechanics, or else add a special-case exception to sex workers, women and I don't know what else. The former solution is not workable on its face - managing civilians is a core concept of Hitman and the game would be fundamentally weaker without it. The latter solution IS workable, but questionable because it runs hip-deep into a quagmire of politics as to which kinds of civilians need the special-case exception and which don't. That's the sort of thing that you typically find in Germany's weird censorship laws where the ability to use civilians as human shields can brand a game as Adults Only on the same level as pronography but the ability to use enemies as human shields is A-OK. A game mechanic with potential unfortunate interpretations being excused by developers not creating a special-case exception to prevent it from working under those specific circumstances is a wholly different argument from "but you lose points." Not every possible collusion of mechanics inside a video game is intentional, not all unintentional collusions of mechanics are worth the time and resources to add exceptions for.
This I don't deny. They are there just as chefs, and sous chefs are. just as guy drinking coffee and barista are. just as the florist and her assistant. the hairdresser, the clown for the children's party. The franchise has long included a broad swath of people that they chose to include. Did they feel that sex workers were a contextually accurate inclusion, or did they add them for some other reason? That question would make sense, and where I believe most of the contention is. Many believe they are there to convey the same level of context and believe-ability as any other background civilian NPC. TBH I can't for the life of me remember when/where sex workers were. I have played a number of the Hitman games. Some of them quite exhaustively. I can remember a LOT of other background NPCs, and I know that most levels do not have sex workers in them, but almost all of them have had some sort of kitchen staff. If someone believes sex workers were added in for a nefarious reason (aka other than just fitting the context as all other background NPCs) the responsibility is on them to explain why they are any more out of place than other professions portrayed. Neither Malidictus, nor I have stated that sex workers are spontaneous generation by the source code ;) we know humans decided to put them in. Perhaps the reason why is because some people thought sex sells, so they threw them in a level. But hey, I am not prone to conspiracy theory, I prefer to employ Zeno's paradox instead of assuming they were added because of a cultural spite so some people could do to them in particular that which can be done to a plethora of other NPCs.
(That being said, thanks for the videos and engaging discussion. I totally agree everything in media is put there by the creators making decisions. That being said, I know better than to assume 'artists' can predict all the ways their art will be interpreted. ceci n'est pas une pipe)
@Folding Ideas While that's very much true, that's also not the argument you're making in the video. Paraphrasing: "Assassin 47 is reinforcing a trend where sex workers are treated as disposable." The existence of strippers in the game doesn't back up the above argument and is, in fact, a wholly different albeit superficially related argument all its own. You are, in essence, jumping between two different narratives here - "Assassin 47 has a bad representation of sex workers" and "Assassin 47 HAS sex workers" in it. Let me break those down individually. The implied narrative of the video and the one you draw your arguments from is that Assassin 47 has sex workers as a deliberate "artistic" choice. This is true - there's nothing which forced the developers to include a strip club level into the game. However, it's also means nothing on its own. The developers chose to give Assassin 47 a red tie and they equally didn't have to do that. Absent of any context, it's an inert decision. In essence, it "doesn't prove anything." The stated narrative of the video and the one your apply your arguments to is that Assassin 47 has a bad representation of sex workers. That's debatable. While, yes, players are allowed to treat strippers like literal garbage, they aren't required to and are indeed penalised for doing, albeit superficially. If the developers intended for strippers to be murdered and stuffed into bins, they could have made that into a mission objective. You can argue that giving players that choice is in itself a problem, but you didn't do so in the video. The issue of player choice never came up. Instead, you chose to argue authorial intent. This is where the two narratives cross over. You took the implied narrative to derive a generic notion of "intent" and then applied it to the stated narrative in a way that simply doesn't follow logically. Your "proof," as it were, proves something other than what you're using it to prove. Strippers exist by author's intent and their existence could have been avoided at no extra cost. That intent doesn't extend to their treatment, however, both because their treatment depends on player choices and because it's derived from core game systems not specifically designed to handle that special case. The only way you can use your implied narrative as evidence to back up your stated narrative is to draw a straight line between them, and that leads to the same unfortunate inferences that got Anita Sarkesian criticised in the first place. Here, you make an implied argument that an author's intent in putting strippers in a game naturally extends to the author's intent that these strippers be violently murdered and thrown in the trash. Your argument implicitly excludes the possibility of coincidence in this case, for no reason given. You also make an implied argument that if players have the ability to commit a heinous act in the game, this naturally extends to them following through with that and actually committing this act if not always then in most cases. Your argument implicitly excludes the possibility that many or even most players will refrain from killing strippers for no reason given. Your argument that Assassin 47 reinforces a bad representation of sex workers by author's intent is essentially based on a number of implied and unjustified assumptions and inferences wrapped around a superficially reasonable statement. You can't transfer intent a decision to the consequences of that decision, especially when those consequences depend both on the actions of an independent third party and a complex system which doesn't always act in predictable ways. Yes, someone decided to put strippers there. You can't argue that that same someone also intended for them to be violently murdered and thrown at the trash. That is a possibility borne of their actions, yes, but you need to put a lot more effort into proving intent behind it. Because from where I'm standing, what you're looking for can easily be argued as unforeseen consequences.
I think you brought up a really good point when discussing the disjoint between the story prying open it's excuse window for the 'limited murder' it was preparing you for, juxtaposed with game mechanics that actively rewarded the exact opposite behavior. This can be a number of things, but working in a larger organization it is no surprise to me to see that people in charge of 'weapon unlocks' were not well coordinated with the people in charge of 'cut scenes' and 'story'. To me this smacks of poor management which there are other examples of throughout the franchise. It is really jarring as a player to experience this sort of thing which is why I have taken to on most games turning off aids that explain game mechanics, and going out of my way to not know about game mechanics, unlocks, and achievements during my first play troughs. So I can experience the story as a story before I delve back in and explore the further depths of the game play. But maybe I am just explaining how I make up for games with less cohesive construction. How do you play? Where do you think these disjointed trends come from and how can they be fixed?
One example that comes to my mind is when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out. You could argue that the game isn't sexist because you can hog tie ANYONE and drag them around with your horse, but that doesn't stop people from interacting with the game in a sexist way. For example, the dozens upon dozens of videos of players intentionally seeking out that one suffragette and "punishing" her because it's "funny".
This fictitious game Hitman 47 in which the only possible action is apparently "kill a prostitute and lose points" doesn't sound remotely like any game I've ever encountered so I'm not sure how an analysis of it speaks to analysis of any actual games. It seems extremely anti-intellectual to analyze something that no one is actually defending.
I get that people can be sensitive to anything that could seem like a video game being held responsible for societal ills. Cause we've lived through aloooot of stupid like that. But this notion that you can't simultaneously enjoy a game AND think critically about it (which can also be enjoyable) is so weird to me. It really just seems like a deflection.
I will never get tired of the skull jokes. I also love how *this* is the example that always gets brought up. It immediately lets you know that the hypothetical people using it haven't watched the hypothetical critical video.
+mightyNosewings I have and it's a fine example of her being full of shit. She literally says that players are EXPECTED to get a perverse thrill from desecrating the bodies of female victims and there's nothing in the work that supports that theory. In fact she's so far off the mark that I can only conclude she did no research or she's deliberately being dishonest. I still don't get why people defend it.
+FatherTime89 Well aren't games supposed to be fun? Why would a game let you do something not fun for a slap on the wrist in points that you can get back if you just do the expected thing of hiding the body?
TheNJerk Fun is subjective but the point is that it's part of the challenge of doing your job unnoticed. Most people don't think getting killed by an enemy is fun but they still put them in games as part of the challenge.
+FatherTime89 And game developers cannot expect at all that emergent gameplay and fun can go against their point mechanics? They can just go "well we made it real fun to shoot people, but we can only expect gamers will minmax themselves all the goddamn points and find no enjoyment from things that don't gain them or maybe even lose them points." and all criticism is necessarily bunk? Games are to never to be seen as exploratory rather than minmaxing point gaining simulators.
TheNJerk Stop putting in straw man. The argument I'm debating against was that the developers expected gamers to get a perverse thrill from dragging bodies around. It's something that assumed to know what the developers wanted. And to say "well it's something you can do therefore it's what the designers wanted you to do" is bullshit. It would mean that blowing yourself up is also something the developers wanted you to do. And if you're going to defend this stupid argument how about you give evidence or even reasoned arguments that that's what the developers intended, Anita certainly didn't. All she did was state the opinion and give no reasoning for it.
I also want to bring up the point that the criticism that is brought up sometimes like in the game assassin 47 is the criticizer will point out that you can kill the strippers. but that is just to make the game look bad as a whole on the idea that "look at this bad thing you can do in the game. look how awful supporting it is". when in fact in agent 47 supporter would argue on the notion that yes that is in the game but like killing the towns folk in Skyrim its not really the reason for the game (at least in the eyes of the defender). arguing that something being in the game does not make it the purpose or intention of the game. Do you get what i'm saying?
The original criticism insisted that you would get rewarded for killing the strippers and that the game treated the death of sex workers as particularly unimportant. Thats why so many people talk about it. Its plain not true. The game has multiple locations. You game is about not killing random bystanders. The mechanics and the story of that game make that perfectly clear. If the original criticism would have been more about your line of arguments (If strippers face more violence in the real world than waiters do, should a game about violence avoid including sex workers at all?), the reasonable people would probably have talked about that. Which is a much more interesting subject, too.
Why would a game about killing rapists and sexual predators, not involve the places these sick twisted people exist in? If I make a game about going back in time to kill Hitler, it's going to be where Hitler is. That is what so many people in these comments sections miss.
Want to collaborate on a game called "Assassin 47" where you unlock components for cupcakes and make friends? I really want to do that now; no mechanics in place for killing, just... cupcakes. But still named after the act of killing as a career.
Bit late to this, but I think this argument is a bit of a strawman, niether the game narrative nor the gameplay mechanics treat the killing of any non target as part of the story. The player character is a ghost who only kills his targets. There is no branching narrative to my knowledge where the story acknowledges you as a serial killer. So if the game was to play as a film then that is how it would play out the character remains in his suit avoids all interactions or evidence kills his target in an inconspicous way and disappears. So if like a film it was a passive experience no strippers would even appear. However games are not a passive experience so just because a game allows you to kill anyone doesn't make it part of the narrative (hence ludonarrative dissonance in games like uncharted). As such it is surely more a reflection of the player that they seek out to harm women in the game, than a reflection of the game itself.
There is an important difference between justifying something offensive and actively discouraging it. Also, if the diagetic explanation doesn't matter, then why do people care for continuity errors and ludonarrative dissonance? "It's fictional", after all.
Hey I love your videos and I agree with all points made, and here comes the but... You can kill ANYONE in Hitman games and drag ANYONE's body around. That's what makes the game not sexist. Sexism implies bias and the mechanics are unbiased.
I don't think this is anything like a Thermian argument. When asked "why can 47 kill strippers", a pure Thermian argument is "because his target is in a strip club". Instead, the argument being made is "to show murder of strippers as evil". I don't care to argue how good this argument is on it's own or how well it fits the real 47, but it's very different from the first one.
Since you've used 47 i'll just assume you're using hitman. In the case of Hitman, it wouldn't make sense lore wise for a super professional ghost assassin to kill everyone he comes across. It's difficult to implement this lore bit into the gameplay because denying players the ability to kill hookers would be seen as restrictive and etc. So the best option is to penalize players who do kill hookers (or non-target/civilians NPCs). The point of a video game is that it's a movie/book/some form of a fictional adventure where the audience (in this case gamer) has a bit more control in the narrative, you're not just in the passenger seat, you occasionally get to shift gears or change the radio station, and so the gamer is presented with choices, do I role play a bit and try to sneak through everywhere undetected and only eliminate my target or do I go in guns blazing because I can. If the story is set in China Town or A Strip Club or some multi-million dollar mansion that's just a way to diversify the game's settings and increase the immersion and you can't really have 20 contracts that go to the same barren desert location because the game would be stupid and boring.
Also, he ignores the target of that mission. A game that has you kill Nazis, and rewards you for killing Nazis, is anti-nazi. If you accidently kill someone else that Nazis hate, it's not pro-nazi suddenly.
@@Seth9809 and you're ignoring the argument. In your example: why did the developers include someone who would have been persecuted by Nazis into the game which could then be killed by the player?
@@LegendLeaguer The argument is we should never have hookers in video games, or black people, or women, or homosexuals, or transgender people. In other words, the argument calls for games to be entirely old white men. But then the game would be called racist and sexist, etc etc.
@@Seth9809 that is not the argument. At worst it's "why have historically marginalized people put into positions in the story for them to be further brutalized?"
@@LegendLeaguer So you're saying we should make WW2 games completely devoid of Jewish, Slav, or black people. Which would be almost a copy of the kind of world the Nazis were trying to make.
I will say the real question in my mind is why are there random strippers in the game to begin with? That said, A negative penalty for doing a thing often means that it's saying that the act you are doing is bad, and if you can't have a thing in your media even when portrayed negatively, you lose the ability to talk about it. Much like you portray those who use these arguments as shutting down discussion. The idea of making some NPCs invincible decreases the sense of immersion, which is why the discussion of having children in open world games is such a sticky wicket. That's why mechanics are important in this discussion. Again, considering these facts, the real question is "why are there strippers there in the first place?". More so with the understanding that being able to kill anyone in the game is an important aspect to the integrity of the game's mechanics. There are other places that can give a similar feeling of debauchery in a tight but also not overcrowded space, which wouldn't give a feeling of objectification(drug dens for example). So I'd say that their point is a valid defense against the argument being raised, but that there is another, better argument to be raised tangentially to the original.
While I agree completely that the mere presenting of a choice of acts to the player often tacitly endorses or normalizes those acts, even when the game's incentive systems discourage certain choices, this brings up an issue I've found myself having with this particular argument but which I've never seen addressed: In the strictly hypothetical case of Assassin 47™, /is/ the game in fact contributing to the devaluation of the lives of women or sex workers when the game devalues all life more or less equally?
+SFtheWolf It's kind of hard to say, but it's more the point that it represents a trend of dehumanization that sex workers face whenever they openly state their profession.
+Aaron Widenor Wouldn't it be worse to just remove them from the game and pretend that they don't exist, or put them in a special bubble where they are separate from the normal mechanics of the game world?
+SFtheWolf If I steal $500 from everyone I have, in theory, lowered everyone's economic station equally, but in practice, in % total wealth, I have impoverished some while others are offended only by the principle of the thing. So i would say, yes, the game is contributing to that because the fact that it is *also* presenting the lives of straight white middle class white dudes as expendable, that doesn't suddenly mean that it's *not* presenting sex workers as disposable. If you devalue all life equally you don't net out at zero. You're still devaluing life. And some groups are better positioned to absorb, deflect, or ignore that than others. I'm still taking $500, even if I also took everyone else's $500.
Woah! This is a total non-sequitur to your thermian video (which I thought was pretty good btw). The point in the aforementioned video was that lore explanations of circumstances are hollow because we ultimately chose to make the lore the way it is therefore referencing it as a justification for something is arbitrary. That was a smart and fair criticism. With "Assasin 47 on the other hand, the lore and the means by which you affective demonstrate skill in the game discourages a problematic cultural issue, implying that the world crafted by the designers is actually dissuading perpetuating problematic behavior but you take issue with the fact that the devs give the player agency???? WTF man. You can kill anyone in that game. Hookers and strippers aren't special cases. You can kill cooks, guards, custodial staff, you name it. But to make you feel good the devs should have put a barrier up for some types of characters and not others. The game attempts to make you experience being a deadly assassin. Someone who could kill anyone in every room they enter (ideally without getting caught). You wouldn't get that sensation if some classes were immune and not others. You've lost the plot here.
what if there was a game where the mechanics and the story go completely against one another. Imagine mechanics and achievements that encourage the player to just live a normal life, but the game's story refuses to progress unless you commit horrible acts of crime. The game is fine as this simple sandbox that let's you live the life of a normal joe, but you keep getting an incling in the back of your mind that encourages you to go killing and torturing because you want to see what's next. and as you complete the mechanic, you find it hard to return to playing like before, because bits of the mechanics change. The original sandbox becomes slightly less fun and you slowly begin to want more and more to do the horrible quests and the game constantly points out that you are choosing to go down this route and that you're a horrible person for doing so
The first level of Postal does this. You're supposed to collect your (last) paycheck, cash said paycheck at the bank, and then pick up some milk before returning home to your wife. It's all completable without pissing off any NPCs but is set up to encourage violence (Protesters will bother you at your ex-workplace, the bank will get robbed if you wait in line long enough but police will handle it for you, and the corner store will have NPCs cut in front of you in line.) Following levels have more NPCs that are inherently hostile or situations that force NPCs to go hostile but you're not forced to kill anyone to progress, and the whole thing is more or less a painfully 90s satire of the minor irritants of daily life and a few hot button news items. Also FC4's opening sequence. You go to Unnamed Mountainous Asian Country to scatter your mom's ashes as per her will, get invited to dinner by the big bad, and he leaves to go take care of something or other. At this point, the player is obviously supposed to get accustomed to the controls and begin their ultra-violent adventure. if you wait around long enough, the big villain comes back, drops some humanizing backstory, you get a ride to go scatter the ashes, and the game ends with an invitation to "Finally go shoot some fucking guns". Less about "living a normal life" but plenty of shooters have played with the concept. MGS1 chastises the player for killing and IIRC makes one boss fight harder depending on how many people you've killed. MGS3 features a "boss fight" on the river Styx that features the ghosts of all the guards (and parrot) you may have killed. MGS4 will have snake get nauseous from violence if you kill more than 100 people in a single "act" (narratively speaking, as in one series of levels/chunk of the narrative). Spec Ops: The Line has your characters' call-out lines become more deranged as your kill count gets higher and your NPC partners will start to refuse your orders and the whole plot basically asks "Why are you, the player, continuing to be complicit in this senseless violence?". Even other genres do it: Factorio starts off as a slightly cute assembly line game but before long is an aesop about the environmental toll of large-scale production.
I get that this is meant to be abstract - but I don't really get the criticism of Hitman. The game lets you kill anyone - it doesn't matter who they are or what they do. So why specifically single out strippers? Sure, some levels include them. But they also include a huge variety of people - mechanics, waiters/waitresses, cooks, accountants, guards, musicians and random civilians. The game at a design level doesn't set strippers aside in any way - so why are *you*? It's not like there are more of them in the game then other civilians or something like that.
One question that I never see asked of people that give the "you're docked points for killing a stripper" argument is: If you're docked points for said action, are you the player less likely to do it because you don't want to lose those points? Or are you still going to do it anyway because you find it fun, or you just don't care about point loss? As another commenter asked: Are the points a primary or secondary factor of the game? Can you not progress further into the game because you don't have enough of these points? Or are the points arbitrary (eg. are these points like the equivalent of the achievements or trophies console companies use, where you can acquire them, but they don't do much besides sit there)?
Imagine if the next GTA had a mechanic where after you go on a killing spree and die, you have to spend x amount of time in jail or do AA and parole missions.
They already do this. in RDR1, if you get busted a little cutscene plays where Marston is in jail, showing the days going by in fast-motion. All the HD era games have plot hooks about working for the Not-FBI: they all have at least a scene or to where they hand-wave away why the police are so bad at holding you and take a dig at the player for being a psycho in free roam mode. No AA meetings, but in GTAV one character has a therapist you can actually visit, and the dialog will change based on your actions in free roam. It tracks stuff like how many times you've seen a prostitute (if at all), Michael's anger issues will be portrayed differently based on how many non-combatants you kill, etc.
Hey, a good example of the Ludonarrative Dissonance is in Bioshock 1: the Message of Rapture City is: You are free to do what ever you want. You decide, what is right and what is wrong, and nobody decides Morality but you. This theme then is broken in the end, when is revealed the main character was a slave the whole time, and he breaks himself finally free. But in the Mechanic, you can always choose to rescue or to extract "little Sisters", of which the last one is obviously conveyed that it is the "evil, but high rewards" choice. So the Mechanics tell the Player to Chose between exactly two Choices of almost no difference in outcome except the last cutscene of the game, which is highly morally biased. The Player never feels real betrayal in the end, because he knew he did what the game told him to the whole time anyway. So the whole theme carefully set up by the story loses all of its impact. I hope that explains the concept well. There are some articles to be found only, if you want to read up on this.
I've been on a rampant binge of your content, and can't believe that I haven't found it sooner. Great work! In response to your assertion that it doesn't matter what you wrote down as an answer to the question "how do you kill a vampire?" because vampires aren't real, I would like to counter with the words of a wise fictional character named Bobby Singer. *ahem*. "Woodchipper beats everything". ;)
This video deals with three issues: 1: The overall anti-intellectualism in the gaming community 2: The dead hooker argument 3: Ludo-narrative dissonance I agree with your view on points 1 and 3, so I'll focus on 2 instead: Being able to drag bodies around is a mechanic present on every NPC in the game, male or female. I completely fail to understand being able to also use this mechanic on stripper NPCs would somehow make the game "sexist". It was a bad argument when Anitta made it (And in fact "making a non-gendered game mechanic/limitation into a gender-issue" was a recurring theme in her series", and it feels like it is a terrible example for the point you're trying to prove.
Yeah... this isn't as sound as your video on the thermian argument. It seems more like you are trying to defend someone's opinion on a game, not because it is actually fair and sound, but because it pushes a series of thoughts that might be useful to gaming. The game designer uses many rewards and punishments to guide the player to the "intended" way to play, the designer view of the game. Saying "if the game is going to punish me for a undesirable action, why not remove that action altogether " is just not understanding the medium at all. A medium that is all about choice would be impoverished by reduction of it. What is the point of getting a pacifist run on a game like Undertale if everyone is going to get it because Toby Fox suddenly decided to get rid of the attack button because it deviates from the intended experience. The gane could no longer talk about your choices in a meaningful way because there was no choice to be made. The game suddenly loses all its value as a piece of interactive media. In order to make the pacifist run meaningful, the existence of the attack button is a must. The strippers are NPCs and share behavior code with the rest of the NPCs in the game. This not only sets a consistency to the NPC class but also benefits emergend gameplay. The thing about NPCs is that they can be killed. Under common sense the act of killing a civilian is wrong. Okay that much is fair, and the game actively punishes you for doing so. Why not remove this option altogether? NPC management is a core mechanic of the game and stripping the game from it would make it more 2-dimensional. Being able to kill the civilian once the civilian has noticed the player is a way to give choice to the player even though they fucked up. Once the civilian is killed they become corpses, another class that will trigger panic in civilian if seen and an aggressive search if seen by the enemies. Killing the civilian brings more problems than not. But the intelligent player would, upon being discovered by the civilian, hide in a safe place until the waters calm themselves. This not only leaves the player with more points but also no corpses to take care of. The game is tightly design to benefit a certain way to play, the designers view of their work. Hitman Absolution depicts a strip club as one of it's levels. NPCs are also not only created to bring a core mechanic to the game, but also to bring consistency to the environment and visual cues for the player to dicern in what kind of room they are in. As such, the stripper NPC is treated as a worker in the environment. They not alienated but treated as people at work (in the same manner that the games handles chefs, sailors, models, etc). It normalizes a line of work in their game world that is oftenly alienated by society. Strippers are getting the same fair treatment as any other NPC in the game. So, again: what wrong with that?
I think that there are two sides to this. I mean, while sex workers are dehumanized on a regular basis, should they be exempt from being killed in a game where you can kill anyone else? While the "it's okay because you lose points" argument is at it's core pretty dumb, I do think that it's a valid way of handling these things. I mean, failing for murdering civilians works in Assassin's Creed. Or did back when I played it and you lost health for murdering people, and could "desynchronize" if you killed two in a row. Of course, even if you have the strippers for some reason unkillable, chances are one of the first things people mod in will be "killable strippers mod". I mean, look at all of the Killable Children mods for Skyrim. It's honestly an interesting problem, even outside of the "Assassin 47" issue, and I think that Ludonarrative Resonance (as I've taken to calling it) is an important thing. Gameplay should encourage the tone of the game. You should get through levels without killing *anyone* before you get the sniper rifle that can shoot through walls and the game says "here, now you can murder the crap out of people, you've earned it". Or, you know, something more appropriate.
why are their deaths sexualized and why do they point you directly toward them to suggest they're targets when they're supposedly unnecessary? Why is the penalty so small? Where is the emotional or mechanical consequence? Where did we get the automatic reflex that "I can kill in this game" + "there are sex workers in this game" = a disproportionately high rate of killing the sex workers? And in assassin's creed, there are missions where you can let a seemingly unending number of sex workers be killed without failing, so there's a contradiction mechanically as well. This isn't about "why should they be exempt," that's a dishonest presentation of the concern and ultimately an example of the Many Questions Fallacy. It's a much larger conversation about how characters are treated overall, and in the context of our real life.
There's a disproportionately high rate of killing sex workers because so many of them are intended to be very obvious and stand out from the average person on the street in these games, and in GTA, the ur-example, you pay them and have your "fun" (the car shakes and moans play) and then kill them to get your money back and more. I don't actually know what mission you're talking about in Assassin's Creed. I mean, as long as you don't personally kill anyone, it doesn't matter what happens, but none of the ones I've played have any "murder the courtesans" missions, other than Fiora Cavazza. I don't feel that it's wrong to ask "should they be exempt". I mean, there are plenty of reasons to involve sex worker NPCs in a game. They are after all a thing that exists, and the seedy people in games like Hitman are going to be around them. But, yes, you're right. It's not just a question of how we disincentive "bad behavior" from players, but also how we portray these things in the first place.
In Super Mario you can jump over a ledge and die. Sure, you lose a life for doing so but you can still do it if you want. Does that mean that Super Mario glorifies suicide?
47 is canonically depicted as a psychopath, heavily implied he's asexual or at least not interested sexually in women (in the first game a girl rewards him with a kiss and he acts disgusted when she's gone). It fits the character for him to murder a stripper if that's what he has to do in order to get the job done, which is the only time the player should be killing prostitutes. The game doesn't just "take points away", if you get caught murdering anyone you'll get killed and lose the mission entirely, just like GTA and the other sandbox games.
+Dylan Boller The point here, in case you still haven't picked up on it since two weeks ago, is that a game can go to whatever lengths it wants to justify itself within the narrative of the game, but those justifications shouldn't be used to stifle conversations about the inclusion of that subject matter in the first place. Your response here is built entirely on in-game rationalization, to the point that it's borderline comical to have posted it on this video.
The problem with this is that it ignores what is unique about interactive experiences: user/player choice. When a criticism is aimed at what can be done, and not what is required or encouraged, then it isn't suited for the video game medium. (And, no, what isn't explicitly punished is not implicitly encouraged.) It's very reminiscent of the horrible anti-atheism argument of "Why be moral if there is no God?". Is the only thing stopping you personally from killing every killable NPC in a game the fear of being punished by the game designer? Player choice may mean a game designer loses some control of the game's message or theme, but is that really a bad thing?
And the problem with THAT is that it ignores that player choice isn't infinite and players are put into a context by developers. An analogy commonly used here is this: Imagine a tabletop roleplaying game where the GM constantly has the players come back to town and have strippers or hookers in town and as part of their quest leads. Sure, the players COULD ignore that, but any reasonable person would say that the GM in question at the least has a fetish for hookers and strippers, and many players would start getting really annoyed. See The Stanley Parable to see just how much developers can anticipate your actions through playtesting. They know what titillates their audience, they know what tools they have in the game to do it, and the messaging in the game can therefore help to repeat bad tropes. But let's say I'm wrong. So what? The devs could have thought that they were being super-sensitive to sex workers and depicting them super-realistically in a way that would cut back on their dehumanization. The players could think that too. The question is, what does the text ACTUALLY say, and what do the players' engagements ACTUALLY do? What is the message being promoted? If you want to argue that Hitman games skillfully depict sex workers as fully-fledged human beings and not as props, go right ahead. The rest of us will call bullshit
The thing about the Hitman games is that they emphasize player choice. They are all about doing things your way as the player. This means you can do things by killing everyone in the level. What message is being promoted in this action? That human life has no value? The thing about it is that they are focusing solely on the fact that you are able to kill a stripper, ignoring the fact that the game allows you to kill every single NPC that exists in the game. It does not push a message, besides one of "do what you want". This is like arguing that, in the GTA games, since you are able to kill strippers as well, sex workers are discriminated against even though a huge portion of what that game sells on is killing everyone. The developers know that the reason people play these games is, in part, the violence. So, they allow the player to kill anyone they like, from a random dude on the street to a stripper. This does not say that strippers should be dead because there is no in game mechanic or out of game story element that reinforces this. The developers merely allow you to kill indiscriminately because the game is about what you want to do to approach the situation. The text ACTUALLY says that if you murder people, you will be arrested or killed, and the player's engagement in said game merely show what the player is willing to do to kill their target. Yes, the sex workers are depicted as "props", but so is every single NPC besides ones that are named because they are your targets. That means strippers, policemen, firefighters, the whole nine yards. The actual question should be: are the sex workers the ONLY ones being treated this way? And the answer is no.
The arguments of this video are "These people are marginalized, so they shouldn't be in the game. You chose to put them in a game where they can die, you chose to have them possibly be a liability." I'm going to say something no one so far in the comments has appeared to have said. "Did you stop and wonder why they are in the game, besides your assumption, of being something to kill?" I know a lot of people pointed out that you lose points for killing them, but how about this.... What is that mission about? Why are you in a strip club? To find this one really sick guy who kills strippers, and thus naturally works at a strip club or in this case runs it. You don't have a name in this game, you don't say much, you don't think much, you are cold and a machine. Effectively, the game has a character who does bad things to strippers and thus a cold machine shows up to kill him. Like Karma. Like this fundamental rule that can't be broken.
The point being made here is that the material is presented in a way that is derogatory to IRL people who are sex workers, because the hookers are presented as objects rather than people with intents and feelings and agency. Basically, this argument can't be won. Media that depicts the brutal reality of these situations will always be shat on because it's "objectifying" no matter the tone taken. Eventually, people will simply shy away from representing certain groups in media because they get bombarded with criticism every time they try and it's NEVER GOOD ENOUGH. I find this over-analysis of "protected classes" to be counter-productive at best, and downright disingenuous at worst. Yes, the hookers are wearing next to nothing. Yes, they can be killed, and discarded brutally. You think sex work is always roses and rainbows? Spoiler, it's not. Many of these people, women AND men, live in abject poverty and suffer through horrific drug abuse issues. But let's not talk about it, else we'll offend someone. /tableflip
@@Seth9809 Bruh, at the rate we're going of one reply a year, we're going to be here a while. I lol'ed when I saw this notification pop up, I'd forgotten this video.
Ludonarative dissonance is a thing that exists within the text of the actual work and usual defense against it is some variation of "It's just a game" which is completely different from Thermian argument. Thermian argument is mostly a reaction against turning reviews into opinion pieces tangentially related at best to the work being critiqued. It's a somewhat misguided way of saying "We don't need your ideology. Go away."
But you can kill anyone in the game. Why should it matter if they are blank rather then anyone else. If you don't like the game because you kill can anyone then say. The way you worded it cherry picks and make the game worse then it actually is. The point of the game is to approach the level over and over. Continually improving and getting a higher score. It's up to the player to choose how to approach this situation. Assassin 47 is built on this foundation so losing points is a big deal, and ultimately stops you from winning the game. The story in assassin 47 is mostly secondary and the actual game take center stage. It's like a transformers movie, there is a story but people come to see robots fight. In Assassin 47 there is a story but you come to play the game. And the story does reflect the gameplay if you play the game right. You take on the role of the 47 and therefore control the situation. The game dosent force anything onto you except kill the target. You could go through the entire game and never kill anyone except for the objective. If you play the game the way you are supposed to with stealth and planning then the gameplay matches the story.
Although you did have a good argument, and the video is very entertaining. Honestly although I disagree with the example you used, I respect the message you are trying to get across. Video games and their cultural are a tricky task argue. Sometimes people have a difficult time understanding something due to how systematically complex they are. Then even if you are right gamers will spam dislike and resort to name calling and just being idiots. Got to give you credit for standing up to bullies. Sorry if you got a lot of unjustified hate, death threats, or general rudeness because of your opinions.
I'm kind of curious what an FPS whose rules support the "killing is a bad but sometimes necessary thing" would be like. Anyone know of any that do something like that? i.e, don't reward killing mechanically but instead reward finding a way to avoid it
This idea has become more and more annoying to me, in part because people that use it seem to believe that it is impossible to enjoy something while also recognizing that it has issues. I can recognize that some elements are subtextually or meta-textually problematic while enjoying the work as overall.
I like Folding Ideas videos a lot and the Thermian arguement video is valid, but this is a painfully naive follow up. Hitman is a game about killing people, the mechanics are global, you can kill all people. Hookers are people. You do not lose points for killing hookers, you lose points for killing people. (That aren't related to your objective.) Hookers dying do not redudct any more or less points than if a male construction worker dies. The text is set up to allow the murdering of people, not hookers, people. The criticism isn't about killing. It is not about the portrayal of women as sex workers, its about sexism. The only way sexism can exist is if you intentionally separate hookers from people. The criticism sets up the stipulation that the game is either sexiest, or protective of hookers. This would be like if an action movie had white, black, latino, and asian gang members in a highly multi-racial city who are all bad people, being killed by the protagonist, and you go "Oh my god this movie is set up to kill black people." This is different to say, making that same movie but taking a highly white populated town and coincidentally making ALL of the bad gang members black. In that instance, the creator is setting up the text in a way that allows black people to be murdered on mass through justification of text. Players being able to express violence towards a specific demographic in hitman is the same as a viewer taking offense to a specific demographic being killed in this hypothetical movie. Any text if viewed through a radical enough lens can be misrepresented to allow for X immoral action to occur, because the only way to disallow this perspective is to protect the class that you don't want to be held to the same standards. If you make it so hookers are unkillable in hitman, or you make the racial proportion of gang members irregularly white with the nature of the multi-racial city, you imply that these are protected classes not worthy of being normalized, which in itself is a form of sexism / racism. This is why the Hitman criticisms are fake criticisms. They're just another example of feminist with an axe to grind applying their lens to create a controversy where non exist. It's also worth mentioning that this criticism was aimed at the game for (paraphrasing) "Being tasked to kill hookers", and not because killing hookers was allowable, which is a lie. Never in the game are you tasked with such.
Why are there hookers in the game in the first place? Are there kids? Are there pregnant mothers? More importantly (never played the game but I think I remember watching the level in question) if there are killable kids is there an entire level based around having kids as the nearby civilians you aren't supposed to murder? Hitman absolution takes you to the strip club but does it take you to a day care? Would the same responses come if the game gave you negative points for shooting up a school? (Etc.) It's not feminists with an axe to grind it's feminists making a valid observation about macro patterns in culture and advising that it isn't necessary (is the strip club assassination critical to the game's story or mechanics?)
@@freddiekruger3339 The entire point of the video is it is focusing on game mechanics as a substitute for text when discussion the Theramian arguement. The entire point of this video is that the MECHANICS disproportionately apply to hookers than it does to others. In text, yes, only women are represented as sex workers. In mechanics though, they are indistinguishable. If your not familiar for what a mechanic actually is, it's the fundamental interaction of rule sets. IE; If I press button A on object X, I get Y Points. Pressing "A' can be contextualized with a kill, a flirt, a basketball shot. X Can be a net, a person, a robot. The mechanics aren't interested in what text represents them, the mechanics are simply interacting rule sets. If mechanically, both hookers and bankers are equal to X, there isn't a mechanical distinction and thus there is no theramin arguement. The game mechanics do not regard hookers as disposable and construction workers as less disposable, the game recognizes both as civilians. Also just as an FYI, In Hitman your target is literally the owner of the strip club who is depitcted as sexist and disrespectful. The game is literally painting the male sex club owner as a villian, and women as victims. The only text criticism here is the 'damsal in distress' trope, if anything it is glorifying women rather than condescending. Could you have a problem with that depending on your views through feminism? Maybe, it's totally unrelated. Hooker = Civilian. Bar patron = Civilian, person on bench = civilian. There is no mechanical distinction, Folding Ideas is just factually wrong here.
A lot of games allow you to kill civilians but explicitly punish the player mechanically for doing so. A good example is payday, which charges the player money for any civilian killed during a heist. Unlike stories/movies, the gameplay is in the players control so criticizing the designer for what you can do seems unfair. I don’t find it a problem to include the possibility of this type of content as long as it isn’t explicitly encouraged by the game, since ultimately it’s the players choice to engage with it, separating it from the thermian argument.
I feel like the people raging against any serious criticism of games are taking them as a criticism of their person. If the game is problematic, the you must be too for playing it. So they must deny any criticism or they admit personal responsibility.
The thing that I think is so galling about the response to ludonarrative dissonance is that in my mind even the Thermian argument's own logic doesn't fucking work. Even internal to the story, two parts of the game are telling you two different things. Many people who use a version of the Thermian argument either want to just shut up and play their game or they honestly feel like a story that addresses some problematic component in some way is at least indicating that they get it and trying not to actually make it an Aesop. That's all fine, but ludonarrative dissonance actually hampers even a very casual playthrough of the game. Think about GTA IV and people talking about the wacky cousin and other fun parts. In my mind, that's because they're focusing on the things that make sense for a GTA game rather than the dreary story, which is even in their mind compartmentalized somewhere else. GTA V, on the other hand, I've heard better reviews of from GTA fans, because they aimed to give you a real gangster experience, not Mope Khruschev's Existential Adventure. Even when I go into a game without intending to be critical, ludonarrative dissonance can just make me feel like I'm going insane because I'm getting two sharply distinct signals. I suspect lots of people actually get bothered by ludonarrative dissonance but just write it off as "That's a video game".
but wouldn't that also come down to player agency, you're able to kill strippers, but not nessarily encouraged to, so is a game maker providing you with the ability to carry out the action of killing a hooker the same as a film maker putting a scene where the main character kills a hooker. I'd say it isn't cause the act of doing it lies on the player. in dark souls for example you aren't encouraged to kill npcs, in fact it would be stupid of you try to kill certain ones, but you have the option to, it is in the players hands. in the end this comes down to execution but I feel that punishing the player for actions like these like a point deduction is a legitimately reasonable argument.
Dark Souls clearly intends for you to be able to kill numerous NPCs, even ones that are, ostensibly, critical to the plot. Not only is this loosely intended by virtue of making it possible, it is explicitly intended because many variant events, different endings, and such are contingent on doing the "unintended." The player is "punished" for killing Gwyndolin, but in actual fact they are rewarded with whole new avenues of gameplay. The characters don't encourage you to behave that way, but the game itself, the system, rewards you with progress and content for ignoring the diegetic discouragement. Also you're missing the core: why are strippers there in the first place?
Folding Ideas, true, I did forget about that, and I kinda get more of where your coming from now, though I still feel that there is a definite diffrence in what games allow you to do as opposed to what a film shows you and that it can change the situation a fair bit in these cases. If a game gives you options and is based around molding itself to your choice, like some sandbox games then not giving you the ability to to shitty things would be weird. Kinda like what undertale is commenting on, how it gives you the option to kill literally everyone but also says that you defenitly shouldn't do that and if you do its on you. Anyway thank you for responding so quickly.
Something I've been thinking is that some points, some stories that simply cannot be told effectively or meaningfully in certain games. The sex industry and the issues facing sex workers is a complex network of issues. One of the big things is how sex workers are undervalued and dehumanised, which can enable their poor treatment. In terms of numbers I don't know if that's the biggest thing sex workers care about, I've seen at least one video that suggests that their legal status and interactions with law enforcement are more pressing issues. My point is that it's a complicated topic. I believe the stories of sex workers can be told in a way that humanises them and addresses the issues they care about. I believe it's possible to write a game that does this, though it may be a more artsy game that's mechanically very different to anything in mainstream. I do not think a video game where you play a super awesome secret assassin, with a focus on the different ways he might do his murdering, is capable of telling the story of sex workers in a respectful manner. Not that I'm suggesting the Hitman games should try to tell respectful stories about sex workers. I'm not sure if sex workers should be prominently in the games at all. The Hitman games are not realistic, "hookers" are not included in the game for "realism". The creators choose where Agent 47 goes and what he can do, and they make those decisions based on what is fun for the player. When they include "hookers" it's to add to the feel of the game / to add mechanical assets or barriers to the players / to titillate the players. Obviously, I am making a moral judgement. The creators are ALLOWED to include whatever they like in the game. They are not legally required to do anything about their representation of sex workers, they do not have to justify their actions in the slightest. But hopefully if people are engaging with this topic, they understand that groups and topics can be represented in more or less ethical ways. I believe having "hookers" as window dressing that you can easily kill with very few consequences is pretty bad representation for sex workers and harms them to some extent. I think a step up is the courtesans in Assassin's Creed. In those games the courtesan's were portrayed as confident, clever and great allies to the assassins. I do not believe Ezio could use his hidden blades on them, I'm not sure what it was like for him to use his other weapons on them. But I'm sure that representation has its flaws, maybe the fact that none of their problems are represented or the fact that they're just used as tools. I do not know what "ideal" representation of sex workers would be like in a video game. Indeed there will always be different things that different groups have a problem with. But that does not mean that all criticism of certain portrayals should be ignored. In good representations of sex workers their deaths are treated seriously. The impact of any death and how it happened is properly explored. A game where the player can kill a sex worker and just keep playing a few seconds later and complete the game as normal, isn't treating the topic seriously. I'll reiterate, nobody HAS to do anything like this. Nor would I advocate for any sort of law or standard that would force games to be a certain way. You can create a game called "Wh*re Slaughter 3000" where all you do is brutally eviscerate sex workers in gruesome detail. I'd think you were a horrible misogynistic asshole if you did that and I'd hope nobody would ever play your awful game. But I believe you should be legally allowed to make such a game and release it on whatever platform will have it (including appropriate content warnings of course). But while anyone is allowed to make anything, I think games where the player can casually murder sex workers cause some sort of harm. I believe the moral thing to do is not have such events in your video game. I believe we should socially discourage developers from including casual "hooker murder" in their games.
I did not get the point nor stance in this video at all, if there even is one. I'll just keep playing games that give me the freedom to do whatever i want.
Just a bit late here but we all have to remember that this all starts before money even changes hands, advertisements are usually handled by a different group than the creators of the media being made, so even if you started Spec Ops the Line but didnt finish it because you by some miracle disagree with the main character's decisions, as per creator intent, it wont matter. Money has been spent, showing that, in a general sense, the blanket discriptor for the game (brown military shooter) is desireable and since the horrid things you do with a morter probably isnt in the trailers, from the publisher POV, brown military shooters are in demand lets pump them out 'cause these wallets with limbs want violence. also you bought this military shooter, wasnt this what you signed up for, wallet with limbs.
I mean yeah, you can kill sex workers, but then again you can kill any npc in the game. I don't understand how not limiting who can be killed, dragged and hidden is somehow sexist. as well as the inclusion of sex workers in the game as npc's being sexist in any way. sex workers exist, I don't understand how pretending they don't for the sake of not upsetting certain groups of people is really useful.
I'm not unwilling to listen to points or change my view if I'm corrected to be fair. Hitman is slightly more in your face with prostitution than say something like grand theft auto is surprisingly, I mean you could play through the entirety of the grand theft auto series without knowing you can even pick up sex workers and then kill them for your money back. Implementing systems that are completely optional and need a player to go out of their way to trigger them isn't sexist, neither is giving the player choice. If the player wants to kill a sex worker, drag her round until her corpse is left in a revealing position and then angle the camera to get a close up shot, that's completely on the player to do so, the game hasn't told them to do it, the developers haven't told them to do it, it's completely on the player and not the product.
I don't know these games (Hitman, GTA) too well, because I never played them. But isn't it wrong to even GIVE the players such an opportunity - to pick up sex workers and kill them for your money? As was discussed in other videos on this channel, games, their rules, and what is coded in them - that's the games' 'box'. What can be said about the developers who had the choice not to program the possibility of such behavior in, but decided to do it? Isn't this akin to promoting such behavior? It's like the developers are saying 'we know that such deeds exist and we're OK with you doing them'.
The better argument I've heard for the hitman games is that you can kill and drag *Anyone* and no special emphasis is placed on sex workers, initially I thought the comparison was to either hitman 2016 or the series in general, but I see someone saying absolution, absolution is the one I have the least experience with as I've played the first two and have seen gameplay of the rest. So maybe there is a special emphasis there I wouldn't know.
Sarkeesian and McIntosh are certainly entitled to their opinions, but I feel like this is just another chapter in the growing pains of gaming as a medium. Not just games themselves but how we view them. There is, in my personal opinion, long-standing problem with trying to take the classical language and vocabulary of literary criticism and trying to apply to a medium that it doesn't necessarily apply to. Player agency is a tricky thing to take into account, and yet the entire medium revolves around it. Even trying to apply Martha Nussbaum's seven qualifications for objectification gets fuzzy when applied to a medium where every character effectively IS an object within a set of algorithms that's meant to serve a specific purpose.
+KashelGladio To be fair, your argument is legit but at the end of the day someone needs to study game criticism and develop related set of concepts. There is just not enough study of games as an academic discipline as of yet.
***** Or just someone who's a bit less of a prude and slightly more reasonable? For example, I've met tons of feminists who love Bayonetta. She's such a fun character, and yet Sarkeesian literally can't think of a single positive thing to say about her. My issue isn't so much that Sarkeesian and McIntosh have their extreme opinions, but rather that their extreme opinions are what's controlling the conversation atm.
KashelGladio Agreed I do however think Feminist Frequency is really sophomore. Her methodology is so sloppy and lazy I'm in awe of the fact the media thinks she's a legitimate commentator. But then the standards are pretty low generally. (hence this guy) If you're looking for a sex positive femminist I'd recommend lana k. She's smart funny and is actually a gamer so doesnt make inccesant gafes
I'm just going to point out a previous dan argument that authorial intent does not matter cause the text has to stand on its own you can't expect to have the creator explaining his work too you all of the time. This i think is even more relevent in the medium of games because of player agency. sure in hitman you can kill hookers but the hookers are treated exactly the same as every other npc in the game. As such the mechanics don't insentivise or decentivise killing them anymore than any other type of Npc.the games mechanics ultimately do not care if the Npc is a sex worker or not. there just an Npc and its the player agency that decides whether it's fun or not too kill them. This is where the word reinforcement comes in the game does in no way incentivise or decentivise killing strippers the person who makes that call is the player. so if the player goes in thinking that killing strippers is fun then yeah he's gonna leave thinking killing strippers is fun. just as easily as a player can go in with the notion that minimising casualties is a fun approach can leave thinking exactly that. the game can only effect you in a way that it can reinforce your preconceived ideas and beliefs. To simplify you only get out what you put in. So ultimately it comes down too agency and what the player decides to do regardless of authorial intent. And that Maybey we should apply a more critical lense too ourselves rather than arguing about whether videogames or any media is reinforcing or guiding our ideas against our will.
This somewhat reminds me of "Tomb Raider (2013)": Lara's first kill is a brutal and traumatic experience, even if it's for self defense. Later in the games, some cutscenes imply how killing is still a big deal for the protagonist, that she is forced to do so because her life is at stake and the men she's fighting against are ruthless murderers, that she's a survivor. And yet, before reaching that point in the story I've already slaughtered countless thugs and living beings, while being rewarded with EXP points and resources that I can use to get even stronger weapons.
I mean, I don't mind games where I have to fight, but I found incomprehensible this detachment between gameplay and story, especially regarding a theme so important for the narrative.
The game goes from "I'm sorry" to ""She's back! And she has a rocket launcher!" by the halfway point.
Ludonarrative dissonance!
Assassin’s Creed was like this for me, especially 2 and Brotherhood. To the point I started playing Brotherhood barehanded, technically not killing anyone except the targets
This is why a game like Dishonored speaks to me so much. In that game, while you tend to get rewarded more for not giving in to brutality at the end of the game, being brutal and killing a lot of people makes more sense for most of the game; you're royally pissed off and looking for revenge, meaning that being cautious and sneaky feels like the ludonarrative dissonance choice. Except in the end, the game rewards you for having the restraint to only deal with the main targets, and preferably not even sullying your hands with their blood, whenever possible.
I.E.: The reason it speaks to me, is that both ways of playing the game are fully supported and also rewarded. The sneaky, restrained one by the ending, and the brutal, full force one by the story (the catharsis of revenge).
I really don't know what game you were playing where you think the cutscenes were still showing her having an emotional problem with killing later on - it never happened. Her transition from innocent student to murder hobo might have been quicker than a lot of people could buy, but it was still a consistent narrative transition, i.e. she made that transition early in the game and you should just accept that killing got a whole lot easier for her from that point on.
Using Tomb Raider 2013 as an example of ludonarrative dissonance is simply a poorly thought through example where you have to make shit up to try and support your stance.
I do wonder where the line is between "well the game punishes you for doing X," and "the game allows you to do X, but the framing, mechanics and story all act as a critique of doing X." Obviously there is a line where the former shuts down the argument, while the latter is an invitation to discuss whether the game sufficiently critiques X or ends up replicating it.
I would say that the best example of this is Dishonored. Corvo is, of course, a highly capable killer: that's an established part of his identity, and it's never described as something he's unable to do. However, what I'm talking about is how it treats "secondary" killings. Killing generally is heavily discouraged through the Chaos system but, unlike most games that "discourage" killing, it considers a character to have died at your hands even if you didn't wield the knife. If you knock a person out and then leave them for the rats to devour alive, you're still considered to have killed them. If you nudge them off a ledge, the force of your impact didn't kill them but they would not have died without your actions.
Essentially, unlike most games, you are punished not only for killing but for intentionally ALLOWING death to occur through your action or negligent inaction. While the game absolutely ALLOWS you to do this, and it's clearly a style of play the game has anticipated and that the authors have established as a valid story, the reading is clearly meant to say that "your actions have consequences and a wilful inaction is the same as acting yourself". The actions are permissible, but the framing is clearly teaching you a trolley-problem-esque message about the ethical value of wilful inaction.
"It's a feature"/"It's a bug"
@@Abigail-hu5wf dishonored however also run into the 20% arbitrary barrier problem
If you only kill less than 20% of the human npc per mission you are golden when it comes to the ending - no penalties as opposed not killing anyone, which is actually a possibility in dishonored
So killing is good, as long you only kill less than 1 in 5 people you meet?
(I would say not killing your targets most of the time is being sadist petty move however due to the target's alternative fates often being worse than death)
I feel that a discussion of game mechanics is closer to a discussion of camera work and framing than it is to an appeal to lore. Unlike lore, which under the Thermian Argument framing is divorced from any authorial agency or larger meaning (a state of affairs I call Watsonian Myopia), game mechanics are a part of the narrative, the way that the player interacts with the world and experiences and/or suffers the consequences thereof. The player, as an actor in the world, does bare some responsibility, even if the creator, who set up all the interactions possible and their consequences, is no more a neutral figure than in any other medium. This doesn't mean that mechanical discussion can't be used in a Watson-myopic fashion (as I'm sure some lore arguments could be intelligent and good-faith), but I feel it is less inherently prone to it.
It all depends on context, of course. In Assassin 47, the player can kill sex workers, and they lose points for it. Ok. How often does the player meet sex workers, versus other occupations? How does the story treat them? How can the player interact with them besides shoot-bang? How do the mechanics influence decision making, in a general sense? Is there a bias to the points scoring system? Etc. There is then of course "is a points system a good way to mechanize the value of a human life?" but that's another question again.
The problems, as with chainmail bikinis and orc rapes, is not in the situation in itself, but the way everything else around it interacts with it, and the meaning or implications thereof. To take an example from the recent CoD: the player cannot shoot their teammates, but they can shoot a baby. Babies are depicted as less valuable than (torture-using, potentially treasonous) soldiers, friendly fire as more improper than infant murder. It is a cheap way of generating headlines, and of claiming grim-gritty "reality", while elsewhere that "realism" is denied when convenient. In short, it's shit writing.
This hypothetical is tricky to engage with, because it's so closely related to an actual, non hypothetical franchise. It's hard to know what you mean when you say the game "lets you kill strippers and drag their bodies around."
In the Hitman games, there are indeed several instances where the game "lets you" do just that, but only really by virtue of including strippers in the level and largely adhering to the rule that everyone in a level is mortal. The games let you do the same to priests, waiters, small business owners, the vice president of the united states, et cetera.
Of course, the specific cases of strippers and prostitutes is different, because they occupy a particular and troubling place in society and popular culture, so an act of violence against a stripper character perpetuates the idea that their life is worth little. But, is the solution then to not include strippers in the game at all?
Here's the thing - as Hitman games are structured, strippers and prostitutes are actually pretty unlikely to get murdered. They don't have usable disguises (though the distinct lack of male strippers in the games I've seen is its own can of worms), they aren't armed, and they don't have any particular power or authority in their environment. You suggest that an appeal to mechanics is equivalent to the Thermian argument, but if mechanics and structure in games is equivalent to a director's choices in film-making, then the ludic message can and should be held up alongside the narrative message. I mean, you address that very idea in your section on ludonarrative dissonance. The scripted story, unfortunately, can't yet directly acknowledge and make significant every person that you kill in the vast, sandboxy levels of the Hitman games, but the mechanics actually tend to overwhelmingly discourage you from killing people who aren't in positions of authority. Heck, even scripted sequences go to some lengths to frame Agent 47 as preferring to kill only the target of a given contract, and the "Silent Assassin" playstyle is often expected to be the canon one.
My point is this; suggesting that appeals to the mechanics are unsuitable rebuttals to thematic and scripting criticisms may well be just as destructive to complete discussion of games as the Thermian argument.
Disclaimer: I have not played all hitman games. I've played Blood Money, Silent Assassin, and seen a playthrough of Absolution. Even of those, I can't promise I remember every stripper you might have killed. If you know of a counterexample to my analysis, please bring it up!
See, the problem with your criticism is that it just falls into the same Thermian argument trap. The game designers and developers were the ones that made the conscious decision to make a strip club a level in their murder simulator. They didn't have to do that. Furthermore, just because the game expects the player to take the Silent Assassin route doesn't actually mean that's what the players are gonna do. You are vastly overestimating the amount of people who play the Hitman games without just turning into a mass murdering monster.
Hello from 2017!
I can see where you're coming from. While I hesitate to ascribe axiomatically to the idea that there's no middle ground between "Strippers can possibly get shot, and thus this game's design is denigrating this particularly vulnerable population" and "Strippers don't exist," It's not like the games are willing to throw every human life in the potential crosshairs. Wisely, there are almost no children in any Hitman level. I think there's one moment in Absolution where there's a child NPC in a gameplay segment, but I don't imagine you can shoot her.
I mostly stand by my original argument. Take Dan's later video on colonialism in Minecraft, where he acknowledges that the systemic replication of slavery wasn't intentional on the part of the developers, merely incentivized by the emergent mechanics. On the other hand, in Hitman games shooting strippers is neither intended by the developers (admittedly, this is speculation) nor encouraged by the mechanics (Strippers aren't armed guards and don't have useful disguises). Sure, it's easy to subvert both designer intent and mechanical pressure when you've got a gun in your hand and a westworldesque attitude toward the NPCs around you, but I'm not sure it's productive to totally ignore subtleties in the design.
I want to make it clear than I'm not defending Absolution here. All it did with its strip-club level was attempt to alternately titillate and gross-out the player with its singularly distasteful style, and if I recall it even had a bit where you discover a dead stripper the designers intend for you to pitch over a balcony to distract some cops. Awful. If I'm arguing anything here, it's a (possibly misguided) question of theory: Is the only way to avoid this problem to exclude strippers from the game space entirely, or could there be any mitigating factors in the writing, framing, or mechanics?
@@gordongraham2064 It's largely irrelevant what the actual intention of the game is when its impact is so harmful and contributes to a widespread problem in gaming. What matters is that the developers actively chose to design a level designed to be a strip club, chose to allow you to kill strippers with little penalty outside of a slight penalty that can be mostly ignored, and actively chose to put in a section where you have to throw a dead stripper over a balcony to distract from cops. And even if intent did matter, you yourself conceded the level intended to tittillate and gross out the players no other level in the game intends to do.
To answer your theory: the solution depends on whether or not you want to preserve the mildly-sandbox "do whatever you want to kill the target" style of game that Hitman fundamentally is at its core. If you do want to preserve that, then yeah the only real way to avoid this problem is to avoid writing strippers in it entirely, because actively punishing you for killing people - even if you don't actually technically need to kill them to complete the mission - is antithetical to how the franchise currently operates. And no, minor point deductions don't really count as a "punishment" since they do nothing to impede your progression on the game and can for the most part be ignored entirely unless you get nothing BUT point deductions somehow. However, if that's not important to you and you really want to include a strip club level for some reason to the point where you'd rather fundamentally alter the core gameplay of the game you're making than just not do that, then you could do what the early Assassin's Creed games did but kind of dialed up to 10. If you kill any innocent people you don't absolutely have to, Agent 47 automatically drops dead. You could justify this in the lore by having it so that he implanted a chip in himself that's set to fry his brain the second he steps out of line, because the core themes of that games story are Agent 47 learning to not be such a cold-hearted stonefaced killer anyway. That's perfectly in character for him to do as some sort of failsafe.
@@ravenfrancis1476 I don't think it's strictly accurate to say that killing strippers is "only" disincentivized via an easily ignored point system. Traditionally, the whole of Hitman's game structure is about emphasizing the messiness and difficulty of killing, and randomly murdering civilians is only going to make completing a mission harder. If you shoot someone casually, suddenly you've got witnesses to worry about, a body to hide, blood to clean up, and if any of those things are noticed, guards go on alert or your cover is blown and suddenly you're hip-deep in gunfighting mechanics that, frankly, aren't usually tuned for empowerment. You're likely to get shot to death in return, for virtually no benefit.
Talking only about what it's possible to do in a game without acknowledging the message imparted by mechanics strikes me as a reductive frame to use. It's equally possible to build eight-hundred foot tall swastikas in minecraft, but we understand that as a reflection of the player's intent and not the designer's.
The practice of games analysis supposes that mechanics DO carry implicit meaning, and just as the mechanics of Factorio or Satisfactory can impart themes of colonialism, manifest destiny, and other highly "western" views of civilizational "progress," the Hitman games are uniquely tuned around the idea that death ISN'T best casually doled out, and that violence is a tool to be applied judiciously.
@@gordongraham2064 Sure, but a punishment you can avoid facing if you're skilled enough isn't exactly a good way of discentivizing bad behavior. There's no guarantee the body will even be found, especially if you're even mildly competent at the game.
The thing about Hitman is everyone on the map responds to just about any stimuli in a unique way. The characters aren't treated as equally _disposable;_ they're treated as equally _indisposable._
... I don't think the strippers really do anything else though.
One criticism I have of this analysis is the conclusion that the Thermian argument is interchangable with this one of Ludoptional content. In the Thermian argument, content is fixed. In a book, the author is the only one who has 'canon' input into that world. That author establishes whether or not you MUST sit through pages of nigh-pornographic violence. The only other option is to not engage. In the Thermian argument, the thought is, "Just accept this problematic thing cuz it makes sense with rest of Author's World." While never once questioning whether the Author is right for doing so.
For games, the narrative is not solely driven by the author. How does one take the Thermian argument, and simply replace words, to make this one make sense. I don't see how, because I don't see how they're interchangable. One argument defends the inclusion as being in universe. The other defends its inclusion by saying, while possible, it's objectively bad to do so.
This and the previous video about the Thermian argument made me recall the case of Quiet in MGSV, which is a prime example.
"This girl goes about almost naked because she is photosynthetic, 'cause snipers and such!"
Fortunately, I think most people didn't buy it, and even the "artistic vision defenders" agreed it was shameless fanservice.
It's as if the people who actually consume the media are aware of the connotations that media holds...
Hitman is not a sexist game, saying otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Or does the mere setting of a strip club make a work of art sexist.
What?
"It's as if the peopl who actually consume the media are aware of the connotations that media holds..."
No, that's why you point that out in the criticism. The video talks about the indefensible excuses people use when the criticism is brought up. Instead of saying "oh, yeah, dead hookers is kind of a ugly thing, but the rest of the game is fine!", they try to make up an excuse using the game mechanics.
Hitman is not as a whole a sexist game. Just some parts of it are problematic, like in every other game. The criticism is valid nonetheless.
"Hitman is not a sexist game, saying otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Or does the mere setting of a strip club make a work of art sexist"
That's kind of a strawman there. Nobody said that Hitman was a sexist game, nor anybody said anything remotely similar to the strip club bit.
Jonathantheweirdo Hitman is a game where you can kill every non-player character.
If you want hitman to never kill strippers you must never allow strippers to enter a hit man level.
Hitman being a game for adults about assassination naturally lends itself to grimy places like stripclubs or gang hideouts. People are essentially asking for the developers to blackout part of the world, ignoring that hit man already explores many other scenes.
I don't think people are asking the developers anything like that. You
can kill cooks in Hitman, you just don't go to the annual cooking
convention in every game. I don't think they are so incompetent to the
point of being unable to make an "adult, grimy" game without
prostitutes. It would seem an immature facade of reality, akin to the
young adult action films of the early 2000s with, say, vin Diesel.
Not in every grimy game there has to be a strip club nor prostitutes in bulk. The fact that it is relentlessly common points to a deeper issue.
HItman may have its prostitutes wherever it wants. It is just that it can and will be criticised for that. The developers don't fight the criticism. It is some players who take issue for whatever reason.
I play and enjoy Hitman. I think it is a fine assassination game. I don't think it has a great arch nor a sensible plot, and I don't care. I see the criticism and I agree with it, but it does not take from my ability to enjoy choking people, or shooting to the floor of their glass-pool to plunge them to the abyss.
By the way, what does any of this have to do with my comment about Quiet?
Wasn't there a guy in MGS 3 who had the same condition as Quiet, but wore a full ghillie suit?
I agree that this argument is dumb, but I think that the context of the game is important. In the hypothetical game, if the strippers are killable in the game and their is no story consequence that the player will be punished with than it is a problem, because it reinforces the idea that they are disposable. It also is interesting to think of what the implication would be if the strippers are male, and the game has mechanics similar to the real hitman series. In it killing a female stripper would be considered bad by the game and its mechanics because you can't exactly disguise yourself as a stripper of the opposite gender, but the male strippers clothes could be useful in getting to the target. Finally, I do find it weird that the fact that when you use killing strippers as an example that the audience immediately thinks of them as female is an odd part of the cultural perception of that word.
Honestly, this happens with any kind of criticism at all. For them being "just games", a lot of people act damn defensive about the media they consume.
+Asgar Zigel Maybe gamers are defensive over the media they consume because of how much it has been attacked ? Remember :/ Jack thompson was called a "critic" as well this attitude is not new and was cheered for in the jackthomspon era it is now taht every one suddenly went " Hey we should like not get angry at people who whine "
+elmar maria
Jack Thompson didn't *whine*. He literally wanted to ban media.
You are partially right, though. "Gamer" has become something of a fake oppressed minority label, and the moral panics and Jack Thompsons of the past help fuel the victim complexes of the present.
mightyNosewings The gamer identity is a sub culture just like comic fans have their own sub culture . and the moral panics of the past are not the only things fueling it . There was a more left oriented moral panic last year when femenists demanded target ban gta v from their stores based on bocus claims . There were events in other sub cultures such as the killing joke varient cover panic by again feminists . And let us not forget frank cho a well known artist that drew a fan art piece of spider gwen and got called a misogynist by feminists on twitter for fan art . FAN ART.
+elmar maria In a comment thread about fans of media being defensive of that media, you dismissed all criticism as 'panics' which comes with the implication that dismissing that criticism outright is justified. Not sure if trolling...
Gaylen Oraylee Did you understand my comment? What i said point per point
1. a group of femenists got gta v pulled out of stores based on bogus claims ( such as the game is about murdering and torturing women which it is not )
2.A varrient cover of batgirl was released , only the fans that would have wanted it could have bought it . Femenists again cause a uproar and got it pulled from stores
point 3 , Frank cho made a personal piece with spider gwen in the pose of another drawing that was banned for being "offensive" There was a barrage of femenists on twitter calling him a mysoginist for his own Fan art . To me this is exactly like when christians in the 50s would see vampires and other fictional monsters in books and started a moral panic about satan worshipping and other nonesense . With the excuse of "THINK OF THE CHILDREN ' now its "THINK OF THE WOMEN
Definitley felt that way about BioShock Infinite. It was a very intriguing and compelling story but in between it were long sections of brutally murdering hundreds of people. I'm not against games with violence and play a lot with them, but the gameplay really conflicted with the story.
+Zombie Ducklings If you haven't seen it, I've got a lot to say about this exact issue th-cam.com/video/sWxCBZ2xFGw/w-d-xo.html
+Mega Hobbit (megahobbit) I think the one place where the violence disrupted the message was in terms of the way it turns the Vox Populi into enemies. The game wants to make an equivalency between Comstock's violence and the Vox's violence, but it can't effectively shame both sides since you're just as violent as everyone else. Either judging the revolution on their methods should place criticism on your own methods, or accepting extreme violence as a valid method you have to judge the revolution based on the goals and ideologies (which are completely valid and nothing like those of the racist society oppressing them). I guess it kinda sorta comes together with the twist that Booker ends up becoming the villain Comstock so Booker making false equivalencies sort of works but then Elizabeth also seems to go along with his "both sides are just as bad" rhetoric. So yeah, it's a bit of a confused mess.
I disagree, I interpreted the violence Booker commits in BioShock Infinite as intentional.
To me the game seemed to be obviously drawing the character of Booker as a villain.
Darth Shredrax I mean, considering the ending, I agree. I'm not sure OP played the game all the way to the end. Or they failed to understand the themes being presented. Also, it's a sci-fi shooter. You shoot people and play with fantasy powers to explode them to bits. I'm not sure what else they were expecting.
@@roelani So you are saying the game rules mean that criticism of the story is invalid? Ironic...
The argument being made here is pretty great, and I agree with it 100%, but I think the example you're using is... pretty fundamentally flawed, and while it technically works if you squint and make admissions, I personally find it better to choose the best possible example for your argument.
In a nutshell: Hitman Absolution allows you to kill literally anyone in the game, there's no mechanical difference between strangling + dragging around a stripper and strangling + dragging around, say, a chef in the Chinatown level, or a scientist in that one weapons factory level.
There /is/ a difference between killing them and killing the various guards/policemen/soldiers in the game, because you can disguise yourself as them, which has actual benefits. The game only presents you negatives for killing civilians like the strippers, or neutral judgement on knocking them out.
My intent isn't to knock the idea- far from it, I agree with you- just to point out that fans of "assassin 47" are actually pretty justified in objecting to that specific example, even if most of them either fail to recognise the validity of the sentiment or even go so far as to conclude it must be bullshit.
Hope I conveyed that properly!
Well, someone played Hitman Absolution
More like didn't play it.
I’m not sure why he goes on about being “hypothetical.” I agree with him, I just wish he’d address it more precisely.
I think there is a pretty significant difference between discussing the Thermian Argument in the context of games and films. In films, there is a very clear barrier in place between the fictional world and the real world (i.e. the screen). In games there are at least 3 levels to consider. Using Assassin 47 as an example, there is the fictional game world, the real world, and between them is the HUD. The HUD itself isn't a barrier as a film screen is though, it's still in-game, just not part of the fictional world. 47 doesn't visually know how close he is to death or how many points he has, nor does he have a number floating around in view telling him how much ammo he has left.
I just think more consideration should be taken for framing these discussions.
I agree with most of your analysis, aside from one crucial point.
Skull avatars are good, actually.
Another thing I've noticed is that when people defend a game using The Thermian Argument, they're actually sort of contradicting their position that media doesn't have any influence on them.
They're trying to argue "it's not sexist because X reasons", but if media doesn't influence people why would it _matter_ if it were sexist? If they actually believed media has no influence on people, they would simply dismiss all criticism as irrelevant.
+Zennistrad1 No one is saying media has 0 influence on people.
+Zennistrad1 Those are two completely separate arguments. Media could effect us and be sexist, not effect us and not be sexist, effect us but not be sexist, not effect us and be sexist. None of those are contradictions.
ittybittykittycommittee But if games have no impact it's a waste of breath to argue that they're not sexist because it literally does not matter.
Zennistrad1 By that same token, discussing and interpreting any art form would be equally as pointless. You may think star wars is an excellent example of good cinematography, and I may think its the worst example. We can talk about the reasons we have those opinions, it's not pointless, that's what art and media is largely for, to provoke discussion and emotion.
ittybittykittycommittee The difference is that those kinds of criticisms are generally directly related to the critic's ability to enjoy the film, and as such talking about them inherently ties the criticism to some real world impact.
It seems to me that the argument about points in Hitman isn't about consistancy, but about framing. The game mechanics aren't just a part of the world of a game; in fact, often they're completely divorced from the actual world of the game (i.e., phoenix down in Final Fantasy resurrects people in the mechanics, but not in the story). They also express the frame through which the creator expresses the world of the game, in the same way that camera angle or music does in a movie.
Except when Phoenix Downs actually cure KO.
OK. I’m gonna try to ask a question and it may just be another mechanics argument.
Let’s assume that the conceit of a game like assassin 47 is that you can in theory kill anyone. If that is a problem, then is there no value to it?
If it is acceptable, is it therefore a better decision not to have sex workers represented in the game at all?
The argument of ‘it’s just a game’ is a terrible argument on its own.
I was thinking this exact thing, and I'd like to see it responded to. Assuming the game doesn't give you an objective to kill a sex worker, nor places them in a position to spot you, you have absolutely no reason to kill them aside from your own personal sadism. Then considering that within the game's mechanics the only means it has of punishing you is with unwanted attention and with a score reduction, what would be a satisfactory way to avoid treating sex workers as expendable?
Already within the recent Hitman entries, they're not treated as being any more expendable than anyone else. Within Absolution, there's even a mission that requires you to gain information from sex workers so you can kill their exploitative boss; meaning that you can't even complete the mission normally if you kill the sex workers.
If all this isn't good enough, what else could they do? Make the strippers unkillable? Make them even more uniquely important? Not feature them at all?
Perhaps this is simply a case of a bad example being chosen, but I'm legitimately left wondering what the expected "good" solution would be here. People complain about a lack of sex worker representation, but you can't also complain that you can kill them in a game where you can kill everyone. You can say "thermian argument" all you want, but what is a practical alternative?
Looking at a response from folding ideas to another similar comment, it seems he prefers the "Not feature them at all" option which is practical at least, but still has problems. It totally excludes a very real class of people from being included in a game series that prides itself on gritty realism. The game can avoid settings where sex workers would appear, or it could simply not have them in the world. I could be wrong here, but I doubt the community at large including real life sex workers would be totally satisfied with this answer. Plus it leaves me with a lot of questions. Should we do the same thing for other groups of people? Sex workers are indeed discriminated against, but they're certainly not the only ones.
I don't think it's a slippery slope, as much as it's just a confused idea being presented. I doubt any of this will be put into action because how could it be? I agree that we should strive for a gaming culture that respects people and values the lives of everyone, and I think perhaps we should seriously look at whether we should accept depicting violence as an inherent part of gaming the way we currently do. I also think that Hitman as a series has, as of late, actually been fairly responsible with their depictions of violence. They seem to suggest that violence should be used against those misusing power, rather than those who are vulnerable to violence. They reject the sort of consequence free attitude of some sandboxes in favor of a more thoughtful approach. In my mind it then follows that the best thing you can do with this problem is to depict sex workers as regular people. We should have them as part of our media, and we should take the effort to characterize them as being no less human than anyone else, and a huge part of being human is our ability to die. Dissociating the concepts of sex-work and violence will be a worthwhile task in the years to come, so having them featured in a story that doesn't involve their boss killing them would be a good place to start. However the player being able to kill them isn't really the problem here. If anything making them invincible or removing them entirely would further reinforce the connection between these concepts because people would notice and they would talk about it, having to answer the question for themselves why sex workers and only sex workers needed to be protected; and they'd likely answer that question with their existing biased and uninformed view of sex work as being a profession that inherently involves violence.
I interpreted Dan's comment differently. I think what he means is that if devs include strippers in a game about killing whoever you want, they probs did it because they know some players will enjoy killing strippers. (And I know it's not literally just about killing whoever, but for some people that is the appeal)
@@brookejohnson9914 But the game explicitly isn't about killing whoever you want, it's a game about killing a specific target while avoiding collateral damage. It's also a game that typically takes place in a gritty urban setting meant to reflect locations the adults who play it might recognize from their own life. With that in mind, the strippers have a clear function, that being to bring to life a club setting and add character to the level.
Dan sorta dismissed the idea that you're penalized for killing them, but it's not just that. If I remember correctly, in that mission your goal is to kill this predatory boss who is taking advantage of the strippers and you rely on them to do the job. If you just decide to kill them, the mission is over.
I'm all about the rights of sex workers, though in this case I don't agree with Dan. The way he presents it, simply including them at all would be impossible to do ethically unless perhaps you make them invincible, at which point you've completely changed the way the game functions since nobody else is unkillable.
So can we just not have strippers in any game with guns? How would this apply to other disadvantaged groups? People of color have been subject to discrimination and violence, so is it problematic to allow you to kill them in the game?
I don't think it's a slippery slope argument to say that, without taking this logic any further than he did, it seems the only solution is to populate every violent game with nothing but straight white men. Otherwise, we're drawing a very odd distinction between sex workers and everyone else on the planet. I'm even sympathetic to the problem, but suggesting that we simply can't have sex workers in any game that allows you to kill everyone? That's a completely unworkable solution. So would be making them and no one else immortal.
@@coaxill4059 Okay, we disagree about why the devs decided to include strippers
@@brookejohnson9914 Perhaps you disagree regarding their intentions, but their reasoning seems pretty straightforward. Have you played the level in question? It is pretty heavy handed in making sure the player can't kill the sex workers and get away with it. It seems clear to me they were consciously trying to avoid the kind of controversy that has followed games like Grand Theft Auto, a game that legitimately does allow anyone who wants to kill sex workers to do so, and even rewards them for it with money.
I don't understand this. I've played some Hitman games and you can kill and drag any NPC apart from certain levels with dense crowds. There's plenty of possibly sexist things in Hitman you could talk about, but that's not really one of them.
What purpose do those characters serve EXCEPT to be killed?
@@Abigail-hu5wf That's a criticism you could make about Hitman, most of people would agree. But choosing to only talk about sex workers and how their role as in game NPCs is just to be killed and dragged, and disregard the whole lot of regular people, guards, gardners, cooks or old people that serve the exact same purpose is a fallacy. It's not a conversation about sex workers, it's a conversation about NPCs and their place in a narrative. What would be the solution? Allow you to kill everyone in the game BUT sex workers? Wouldn't that be a way of excluding and calling attention to the fact they are something else from the rest, kind of discriminated?
@@danibiendi7829 I belive you are missing the point. Starting from the top, as I see it - this video is not a critique of Hitman games, it's why he calls it Assassin 47 - it is called that way to put the idea of a specific game and the way it plays, to the audience who knows it, but to actually talk about a problem only loosely connected to that game itself.
You are forcing the topic into political correctness, while the video doesn't go this way. This was about game mechanics and game narrative, conflicting wit each other, and how putting mechanics that penalize players immoral actions doesn't really deal with the question of immorality of the actions themselves - the player is being steered into not killing NPCs because he will "lose points" not because killing innocents is immoral. And this, by the way, is a major problem of all games with morality systems, because morality get objecified, it assigns a number value (+5 good, or -5 evil) and profitability (in-game money reward for being good, higher difficulty of play for being evil) to moral actions.
@@Abigail-hu5wf Set dressing, witnesses, (if male) disguise source and (in dense enough crowds) camouflage.
The argument against "Assassin 47" has fundamental flaws. The assertion is that because the game allows the player to murder strippers, the game views them as lesser than NPCs with other occupations. True the game allows the player to kill strippers, but it also allows you to kill all human characters in each level, be them cops, body guards, mercenaries, gang members, or innocent bystanders. As far as raw what-you're-able-to-do mechanics go, all NPCs are equally disposable. The argument would have ground if the player could kill strippers, but not other NPCs. The reason the player can kill strippers is because the player can kill anyone in the game and there are strippers in the game. The argument is that the game allowing the player to kill strippers is the game viewing them as lesser. If the game views anyone as lesser due to mechanics it's everyone the isn't under the player's control, as all are equally killable.
On some level the argument has some ground: Some NPCs aren't able to be strangled and dragged around, but those NPCs are almost exclusively the randomly generated people of the crowds. While one could say that makes strippers more disposable than crowds, the same goes for chefs, store clerks, truckers, and cops. That puts strippers mechanically on the same level as the game's many police officers. The games mechanics say that stripping as an occupation is on the same level of respect as the police.
The game is about an assassin and allows indiscriminate assassinating. Discrimination is the act of singling out a certain group or groups. The game isn't singling out strippers for being killable, it merely puts on the same level as every other NPC. If one hates the game for allowing the murder of strippers they can chose to not kill them or not play the game at all. But if one is to criticize the game for being opposed to an occupation then they must present evidence from the game that NPCs of other occupations get better treatment. The treatment as described by the argument is that the sex worker is more disposable since they are able to be killed. If the game hates sex workers for making them killable then NPCs in different lines of work wouldn't be able to be killed. Since all NPCs in a stage can be killed then strippers are not more disposable.
If I didn't present my argument well please tell what isn't clear or I missed and I will try to explain myself better.
ThatGuy7431 In a game where you can murder anyone, should hookers be in the game at all? That seems to be an alternative
Yes. The problem is not that killing a sex worker is somehow less appropriate, but that they get disproportionately targeted for victimization and degradation. Hitman doesn't do that. Including them is no more problematic than including a whiteboard the player can write on: It's only a problem to the extent that the players are encouraged to create something problematic themselves.
Besides, I don't think it'd be doing people any favors by pretending they don't exist.
Liz Lee For pity's sake, this comment doesn't help our cause.
I don't give a rat's ass about strippers in Hitman because the great majority of people can disassociate the murder-fantasy of vidya games from real life. There is NO real evidence that says "problematic" media desensitizes people in a way that makes them more likely to afterwards turn around and apply these "problematic" attitudes to real-life people. If somebody plays a "problematic" game then turns around and treats their partner or wife, or sister, or daughter, in a disgusting, violent way, you can bet there's a MUCH deeper problem than "Hitman game lets me kill strippers, hurr".
The conservative right tried this shit in the past and we laughed them off the stage.
Let us not, collectively, excuse this shit now on the vague assumption that somebody's feelings are being hurt.
tldr: i'm a lady, I play vidya games, I'm not on my period and y'all should feel free to enjoy whatever the f*ck you like without fear of judgement or censure and anybody claiming otherwise is, as far as I'm concerned, a meddling busybody. Thank you, move along.
No, no, no, honey, you don't understand.
You can complain about games being sexist as long as you like. But, just as people will argue about whether or not Last of Us was heavy-handed with the easy angst or its gameplay being too repetitive, or how people will bitch at each other that no, in fact, the new Assassin's Creed games are not good just because they're pretty and everything about triple-Aaaaayyyy sucks...
People will argue with you.
I disagree with what you said, and my opinion is as valid as yours, just as some dude's rant about Fallout 3's intro being utter shite is as valid as some other guy's counter-argument that, actually, the narrative value of the gamey tutorial starting at your character's birth ties into the game's plot.
I don't care, my money is as valid to the industry as yours. You are not morally superior simply because you feel offended. I disagree. That's just my opinion. And I will consume my media according to my opinion.
You can demand changes as much as you like. And if the market agrees, then changes will happen.
I still think it's stupid. Just as Jack Thompson's "violence in vidya games is baaaaaad m'kay" argument was stupid. You don't like, buy something else. I dislike online multiplayer shooters. I don't buy CoD and then bitch because there was too much shooting. /shrug
Edited to add: Minecraft and Fortnite and Overwatch target teens and kids. The point is moot, because the discussion of "Assassin 47" is about a mature-audience game. A mature game pre-supposes your audience is old enough to tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and know that the narrative may present things that are sensitive and/or mature. That's sort of the point.
Easiest answer is, people are tired of this debate. Like I said, it's essentially the same debate that Jack Thompson brought to the table in... what, the 90's? It's pointless. It's a free market, people will buy whatever they like, and if the industry doesn't provide, smaller indie studios will sprout and open up new market avenues for people to obtain the content they want.
That's how it works.
You don't have to ignore it. Equally, I can disagree with you. People jump on the S word because it's thrown around every time someone so much as twitches wrong.
I've worked in industries that were EXTREMELY male dominated, and when actual real sexism happened, it was taken extremely seriously. Sexism isn't a word I throw around lightly, and, to me, pixel babes being in a video game where NPCs of all genders routinely get murdered is just .... a nothing issue. Like most issues surrounded by fauxtroversies these days.
You can have your opinion. But your opinion is inherently reactionary and so people..... react? I'm not certain what you find surprising there.
How is you voicing your opinion about, say, hookers in GTA any different than a dudebro coming into a TheSims thread and bitching about the fact that you can get two dude sims to bone? Historically, GTA has long had hookers. And historically TheSims has long let players make two dudes bone. These are equally non-issues. You can discuss it all you like, I just think it's... pointless.
(And yeah, depending where you throw these opinions around, sometimes you WILL get shat on. It's the Internet. Shit happens. Frequently. Often humourously.)
The other issue with the "It's OK because you lose points" argument is that it fails to look at the big picture when it comes to how the game rewards and punishes your actions and choices. In 'Assassin 47', you're docked points for killing strippers, but is earning points a *primary* goal, or a *secondary* one?
In real mission-based games - Metal Gear Solid V springs to mind - points and rankings are secondary: good for achievements, unlocking bonuses, and for bragging rights, but failing to get them never halts your progress, because the primary goal is simply to complete the story objectives given to you in whatever way you can.
In which case, killing strippers in 'Assassin 47' could yield a far greater reward than punishment, insomuch as it might make the mission/level much easier to complete (or for some, more fun). If so, the game is actively incentivizing the player to kill strippers, because the greater reward for NOT doing it isn't big enough to justify the extra difficulty involved. Especially as these types of games almost always allow the player to re-do the level later for that greater reward.
If you run an apple cart, and you sell Adequate Quality apples for $1 each and High Quality apples for $10 each, you can't use "They had every chance to buy the High Quality apples!" as an excuse if everyone who bought the Adequate Quality apples gets sick.
+Jack Christmas Yes but what if killing the strippers doesn't only not advance your main mission but makes it harder to achieve? Strippers run about and make noise, attracting attention, and after they are dead there bodies can be found. What is they are killable but there is no mechanical or story incentive to do so?
+Jack Christmas This is a good point, one that I'd originally made (intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards) but cut in order to stick to the topic at hand. It'll probably pop up as a minisode in the next couple weeks.
Jeremiah B
In that case, the argument holds a bit more water. It doesn't quite defeat the criticism, because any possible route to victory is something the developers deliberately authored, but it's closer.
Of course, often a game encourages you to experiment, meaning the player might be encouraged to kill the strippers just to find out if it helps them win the level or not, so that ought to be considered too.
I think the only situation where a game *indisputably* punishes you for killing strippers is if it triggers an immediate Game Over.
Jack Christmas So are you against games that give you freedom to interact with the game world in logical ways? Or should underprivileged groups just not be represented in these games?
Jeremiah B
No.
I am only against the idea that technically optional elements of a game are above scrutiny. It's not really about how much freedom the player has, it's about the environment and tools that the player is provided with to express that freedom.
So, in regards to Assassin 47 and hypothetical stripper-murder, a proper defense should look deeper than simply saying "You don't have to do it", "You lose points" or even "It makes it more difficult if you do it". Instead (or in addition), you want to consider things like:
- Is it really important to the story to set this level in a strip club?
- Are the level and its objectives set up in such a way that common routes are going to give the player more-ample-than-necessary opportunities to kill the aforementioned strippers?
- How are the strippers characterized as NPCs? Are they made to feel properly human and sympathetic, or disposable on some level? This can be as simple as the amount of pain and emotion they show when you try to harm them. (Think how Battlefield: Hardline deliberately omitted this.)
The inclusion of kill-able strippers in a game is not necessarily *indefensible*. It's just that the particular defenses talked about in the video do not hold water.
Also, on the representation front, I feel like underprivileged groups might hope to do a bit better than being murder-able extras...
Though I don't know, maybe if Assassin 47 existed it would receive an award from the Exotic Dancers Union or something. You never know.
Connecting the fact in Hitman you can kill strippers (as much as you can kill any other npc in the entire game) to a ludonarrative dissonace argument against Hitman doesn't quite cut it. Hitman has dissonance, not because you can kill sex workers, but because you can kill everyone. Just highlighting the fact of being able to kill sex workers is selected in order to highlight an opinion. This is not a gamer rant either, I love your videos and enjoy your arguments even when I don't share your viewpoints, I just felt that realtionship was flawed.
Being consistent with in game mechanics does not mean that said mechanics don't run contrary to the narrative being spoken (rampant killing is bad) or the narrative of the development team (killing sex workers is bad).
@@brutalbeard9441 it does, strippers aren't special or single.
All of the hitman games has you play male character where knocking out or killing a stripper is far less valuable than doing the same to another male npc - because of the excellent disguise mechanic in these games.
It is telling that what the hitman games considers the perfect way to play is to ensure absolutely none other than the target is killed in the course of a mission (while ensuring nobody else grows the wiser)
Point docking is the wrong way to counterague against the argument that being able to kill strippers in hitman gams makes them sexist - essentially strippers like every other npc are just side dressing, none of them are usually any more special than the other.
If anything, hitman games should be criticised for representing stereotypes among different archetypes of targets its portrays.
@@aravindpallippara1577 nothing I said was about strippers being special or single.
Being less valuable isn't relevant either. If the narrative is "Killing is bad" but the game play is "Kill as much as you need to" saying 'one target doesn't reward you as much' does nothing to the disconnect of those two statements. How much benefit wasn't in question.
"It is telling that what the hitman games considers the perfect way to play"
In moments, but unlocking a scope from scoring enough headshots tells a different story.
"none of them are usually any more special than the other."
Again, nothing in my statements or Folding Ideas was about them being unique. The topic was brought up because of a 'long history of putting sex workers in games to be killed' (because as you said, they're not their to give you a costume) and a discussion of tools of debate. I know that killing them is not special when compared to the other generic npcs in a mechanical sense. I never said nor implied that.
"If anything, hitman games should be criticised for representing stereotypes among different archetypes of targets its portrays."
Games don't have to be criticized for only one thing. It can be criticized for both :-)
@@brutalbeard9441 so essentially you don't have a problem with hitman's long history of soldiers, guards, cooks, valets, accountants, janitors, assassins who are all significantly more presented in hitman games than sex workers (the running joke of cook being the poisoner has been very very consistent throughout the series), thus making them more prone to player arbitrary player violence carnage and whims - why don't I see anybody worried about how cooks are represented in the game? what about the security guards who are most often the casualty in normal runs?
since they are more affected, why aren't we discussing about them? You can definitely claim I am making it whataboutism dismissal but, I would argue the situation is comparable enough, but I have seen no-one defend the representation of cooks or security guards in these games yet, absolutely none
now if countering that with percentage of population I would argue there are far more sex workers than professional assassins in the world, and hitman has plenty of professinal assassins in it's setting.
If you are going to set your game in the seedy underworld, liberties has to be taken to strive with at-least what the players consider the underworld is like (pretty sure the number of sex workers are vastly less compared to all other criminals in hitman when you compare it to the real world, because that's the reality)
Yes the headshots for the attachment was a degradation from the older games which is what I am more comfortable with (yet to play the modern trilogy) - the games became psudo live services, and thus players has to be kept in the content treadmill with inane tasks that are little more than time wasters and often run counter to the original vision of the series - I can't defend that, and won't do either.
the thing that annoys me of folding idea's argument is that there are plenty of other games that does sexism blatantly without any kind of defensibility and this was definitely a case of not understanding the subject material enough to criticise it. There are far better easier targets that could have been showcased, from mario and princess peach (at least historically) to most military shooters, to farcry 3 and gta
@@aravindpallippara1577
" you don't have a problem with"
Again, you're arguing against something I'm not talking about. I didn't say anywhere that killing sex workers in games are bad, or are uniquely bad, or are the priority bad thing. My contributions have always been about how game play does or does not represent the message of the game or team.
" why don't I see anybody worried about how cooks are represented in the game?"
Easy, because cooks don't have a long real world history of being subjects of consistent physical violence, abuse, and degradation - nor are they so routinely murdered.
You are making a what-about-ism fallacy, but I'm addressing it anyways :-) And fyi, ALL whataboutisms are done with "I would argue the situation is comparable enough" - that's not the issue with whataboutisms.
"there are plenty of other games "
Sure, but this again is whataboutism. This is 1 video, using 1 example. It was never intended to be a comprehensive list of every game with a problematic element in order of their severity.
After looking at all the previous videos, it occurs to me that the Thermian Argument could be avoided altogether if the criticism of the object in question were phased differently.
If the actual question is concerning the creators ambivalence in incorporating scenarios in their work which have real-world ramifications -- since these things are there for the most part because the creator consciously put them there, that is what the question should specifically be. Not, "why is this problematic thing here?"
This sounds similiar to the whole "Sansa got raped, therefore GoT hates women" argument to me.
Portraying something bad is fine, as long as
You don't use "this is awesome!!1" filiming techniques like happy music and so on
You let other characters react negativly to what you are doing
You show the negative consequences for the victim and the criminal
You can argue wether or not "people reacting in horror to what you are doing and you getting minus points" is sufficient to make it clear that the game isnt okay with what you are doing.
But if you are saying "this shouldnt be here at all, no matter what mechanics the game uses to portray it as bad" you basicly just moved into "games arent art, stop talkikng about serious things" territory. Games should be able to portray bad things. What we should judge is what they had to say about the subject, not what the subject was.
This is a really interesting question to ponder from the game design perspective. I mean, if our hypothetical game allows you to kill NPCs, and for narrative reasons some of those NPCs are strippers, then players are then going to try to kill strippers whether the developer had any intent for that to happen or not. Keep in mind that the narrative in games can be as much written by the player as it is the developer. The game doesn't necessarily let the player kill strippers so much as it's something that simply exists with-in the game's "possibility space" (a term you should look up).
Only 2 options are really there for the developer to try to stop the player: 1) disincentivize killing strippers, like your lose of point example, or how Assasisn's Creed would actually kill the player for killing certain NPCs, or 2) expressly disallow killing strippers. And this second option developers try to avoid as much as possible because there are few things that kill a gaming experience as much as the mechanics not working the way the player is taught to expect them too. A player firing their assault rifle into a stripper without her being effected at all is the sort of thing that gets put up on TH-cam to mock a game.
Ultimately players are going to play the game however they want and the authorial intent of the developer will have little sway over that.
+Giant Evil Robot Any dev that doesn't think the players might kill NPC-X in a Hitman game is dev who couldn't get work. Come on, now. And they have a large team of people. This is not a case of a simple oversight.
There are way more options than that. 3. Don't include strippers. Set the mission to occur during closing. 4. Don't set the stage at a strip club so there is no question of whether to include them or not.
This is FH's point. The writers wrote this. They choose the setting. They did so knowing what NPCs would populate that setting. They did so knowing that players experiment with killing NPCs. And they did so in a culture where "dead hookers" is a common joke, so arguing they were unaware of the implications is naive at best and disingenuous at worst.
+Gaylen Oraylee I completely disagree. Let me offer another hypothetical game to use as an example. Let's call it... Law & Homicide.
Law & Homicide is a dramatic detective action/adventure with a strong focus on the moral implications and gravitas of using a gun for law enforcement. For instance there would be a point where you try to catch a pedophile in the act of kidnapping a child, but he runs off into a crowded area before you can catch him. Do you shoot to take him down and risk hitting bystanders? Do you chase and risk him getting away to offend again? The game would give harsh punishments for injuring civilians, but also for letting the pedophile escape. The difficulty of this choice in entirely dependent on the player's ability to accidentally shoot and kill anyone, other wise there wouldn't be anticipatable consequences.
A not insignificant amount of players will just go around shooting strippers until they get a game over screen for it, load up their last save, and then continue to shoot strippers. And this is in no small part specifically because they game doesn't want them to.
The problem is that there is always some level dissonance between the story the developer wants to tell and the story the player is going to tell (in fact, I recommend checking out The Stanley Parable some time, as that's pretty much the entire theme of the game). Other than absolutely static elements of a game like written text, voice overs or environmental story telling, the narrative of a game is pretty much entirely written by the player. It's NOT the developer who decided that strippers would get shot, it was the player who decided that. And the repercussions of that decision lies completely in the hands of the player.
The mission involves killing a man who exploits and kills women.
Every single person you kill in the beginning of Hitman is an evil person.
That is why it's in a strip club, because the horrible monster runs a strip club, he's the evil kind of person who devalues people who work at strip clubs and that's why he's going to die.
I could be wrong because this was years ago. But if I remember correctly Anita Sarkisian's claim specifically was that the game *encouraged* you to kill strippers and drag their bodies around treating them like objects.
But it doesnt. Not from the narrative nor the mechanics.
Sure you lose points, but its not as if you lose the points because the gsme is taking a moral stance, the idea is thats a "dirty less proffesional" way to he a murderer.
Howeber the narrative in the game doesnt encourage it either. There are characters whose lines of dialouge make sure the player know "know this isnt your target, but oof he sure is a bastard. Do whatever idk" and the strippers aren't an example of this.
So I think its fair to reject the criticism of "its encouraged" by citing game mechanics.
Except no it isn't. A core part of the Hitman series is player freedom, it actively encourages you to play the missions however you want, whatever that entails, aside from maybe a couple of deducted points that don't really matter. So by giving you the option to do that and not significantly punishing you for it, it is encouraging it on some level.
You could go into any hitman level and specifically murder every person of color, or every woman, or every homeless person.
What's the solution?
You white-wash out every oppressed category of person? I don't think I need to explain why this isn't a good option.
You make the oppressed people invulnerable? Then either they can't count for witnessing crimes (because a core mechanism is being able to knock out people so your crimes go unreported, and would imply they don't care about you committing crimes) or they only are only in areas with other invulnerable npcs.
The only real solution I see is that the game cannot exist in its current form, period. Nor can any other sandbox game exist within a pseudo-realistic setting (though considering the minecraft video even that may not be sufficient)
Video games are a medium whereby the player is given agency to interact with the world, and in that moment you can only do so much in keeping them from interacting in problematic ways.
I generally agree with the take about the inadequacy of the thermian argument, especially in non-interactive media, and even in interactive media where it does encourage such behavior (see GTA games), but when the game's interactions and mechanics are generalized to just humans, it's a bit disingenuous to point to people abusing those mechanics to engage in morally bankrupt behavior, and then blaming the developer for not sufficiently disincentivising the behavior.
At some point, the game (and especially sandbox games) become a medium, and you can't blame a paper and pencil for the things people create with it.
I think that "you lose points" isn't a rejection of criticism so much as it is a statement that the thing being criticized is being taken out of context. It's not "don't criticize games"; it's "don't misrepresent games by omitting relevant details".
Having discovered the game in question during quarantine, I definitely think the intentions of the game are a bit misrepresented in this video. The game isnt nearly as smart as it pretends to be but it clear prefers that you create as little chaos as possible.
Then again, it's not like the creators didn't know people would seek out the most over the top and/or violent approaches. A few days of OxBox will show you that.
Thing is, it's not necessarily a "relevant detail". Like in the Thermian argument, it's about using irrelevant information to try and respond to criticism. Dan frames it as denying/rejecting criticism because it's often presented in a way that doesn't accept a counterargument (e.g. laughing at the notion that it is something serious to consider).
Whether or not the point system is enough to make a proper statement and justifies allowing such a loaded situation in the game is a very interesting discussion. One that isn't made when people respond to criticism in non constructive ways.
This isn’t a relevant detail losing points in a game like Hitman or losing money/being chased by cops in GTA simply does nothing to actually disincentivize abusive play
Just because a game allows a player to perform an action, does not mean that the game or its developers are condoning that action. For the most part, games should *allow* players to engage in any activity which a human could reasonably perform in that situation, rather than limiting those options based on the values of the producers. It is up to the player to determine which moral choices to make. Being *capable* of killing strippers in a game does not "reinforce negative stereotypes about strippers," it is just a stripper, being human, are vulnerable to the same mortal conditions that would apply to, say, gangsters, who you can also kill in the game, who you receive no penalties for killing, and who nobody seems to care about.
This argument to me seems to show a lack of understanding of how video games are designed. A game may let you do something, and even spend extra dev time on something, without condoning that action. The action is allowed because the game is not trying to just create a specific story, but is also trying to simulate a scenario. Hitman isn't just the story of Agent 47, it's also asking the player "what if you were a hitman?". The game is saying, not only through the point system (which i agree is really a immaterial point), but also through the environment and dialogue, that killing the strippers is wrong. In fact, the strippers are probably the most sympathetic characters in the entire game.
This video is quite old now, and it seems to me this Hitman argument was mostly defended because gamergaters used it to discredit Sarkeesian. The defenses ignore the sex-negative undertone of Sarkeesian's arguments, just as the the entire industry has (see for example Nier Automata getting praised with basically no-one critiquing the sexualised protagonist, as Sarkeesian would have). The rest of the argument isn't really applied either, for example, no-one critiqued Rockstar for letting you murder feminists in RDR2.
Using a gameplay mechanic to respond to a moral criticism, such as the Hitman example, isn't necessarily a dismissal of the criticism rather than an answer. Because, while the ability to kill prostitutes is in the game is a moral issue on the side of the developers, it IS also a gameplay mechanic. Games are about freedom, and the choice to do objective evil has been a longstanding tradition of the medium.
However, if we make that argument, then we should talk about this: How important are the points that they're losing? Is it like Assassin's Creed, where you lose a bit of health (but you can get that back very easily), and will mission fail if you kill too many civilians at once? An annoyance at best? Or is it a consequence in line with the moral misstep they've just made? Do they lose points that they can't get back, points that they need? Then again, we're talking about negotiating the worth of a fictional life at that point.
Could be worse...
Ace Combat 7 GIVES you points for blowing up refugee tents.
Only six years late. The Thermian argument was a great video. This one is terrible because of the example chosen and the strawmen set up. It's not just a way to shut down criticism. The criticism only lands when you strip the context of the game away and squint narrowly at it. That makes it a pretty invalid criticism from the start. Not sure why you would defend it.
While you can make the point that they could avoid the situation by choosing not to include those elements at all, is that really where you want media to go? Should a sandbox game that allows any character to be killed be off limits? Or are sex workers off limits except where they can't be harmed? To dismiss the framing because it's technically possible, even though discouraged narratively and by mechanics, seems silly.
I've seen others compare this to your colonialism in Minecraft video, but there are clear incentives there that don't exist here. The argument seems to be that the mere possibility of the action, even if it discouraged, is too much. What's the reasonable limit here? Should there be no portrayal of sex workers in such games? What about other oppressed groups? Take them out, too? Another commenter said it's not about how the game should be, just using it as an example to criticize. But if in your criticism you can't specify what should have been done instead or make a coherent argument for why the media shouldn't exist then it's not good criticism.
To be fair, I think it is good criticism. I just think it's targeted at a really bad example where it doesn't really apply.
I see your point but I think you're kind of grasping at straws and the way you and anita frame the question is incredibly misleading to someone who hasn't played the game such as myself. Why are the hookers were put in the game and made killable? Probably as set pieces to establish the setting and probably so the player didn't run into a strange situation where players and critics have to ask the question "Why are hookers seemingly immortal?"
The "you lose points" thing is a non argument but this is splitting hairs so intensely on top of being misleading.
And it’d be odd to have hookers be immortal when every other npc is killable
This
You make a really good point in rejecting the “but you loose point” argument.
However, I will go back to what seems to be the origin of the debate: the critic of _Hitman_ by Anita Sarkeesian. Disclaimer first: I do really like her work and fine it highly relevant as a whole. It actually helped me a lot to understand the socio-cultural issue of sexism. But sometimes, the examples are bad, and _Hitman_ is I think one of them. In fact, female characters are not more disposable than male characters, and their limbs physics (also attacked by Sarkeesian) is the very same for male characters. Male characters might be even more considered as tools through the “cloth stealing” mechanic. So not only men and women are equally disposable -which does not avoid the repetition of pre-established sexist behaviors-, but men are probably more “disposed of” in practice.
I am not stating that _Hitman_ is fine with regard to sexism, just that the stressed arguments were really questionable if not plain bad. On the other hand, we can still underline the under-representation of women in the game (that is still problematic despite the mechanistic reasons behind it) as well as the typical roles of the present women, and criticize the choice of having a strip club level.
And all of this does not make the point of the video any less relevant.
As someone who has studied sexism in gaming longer than Anita, I can assure you none of her work is "fine" or is even close to "relevant". Anita Sarkeesian did a great job of highlighting white women privilege, and how first world society worships women.
Fun fact: If someone making an argument uses a single example that is "invalid", its more than enough to invalidate their entire argument. The only reason Anita Sarkeesian's entire body of work isn't dismissed entirely is because first world society worships women.
Objectively speaking when it comes to entertainment industries, the video game industry is the most inclusive, and has the least problems with misogyny. Women and female characters are worshiped in the gaming industry. The Last of Us 2 is a great example of female worship and sexists misandrist tropes.
Fun fact: Sexualizing a character whether that character is male or female; is objectively speaking not sexist, or sexism. It is worship, which is a form of privilege. Anyone, man or woman, who takes issue with a character being sexualized, IS sexist. In order words; Anita Sarkeesian is a misogynist. Notice how angry she gets when attractive female characters are sexualized, but completely unbothered when unattractive female character, or male characters are sexualized? Notice how Anita Sarkeesian body shames "attractive" body types, she is anti-body positivity which is misogyny.
Don't worry, it isn't a "might", male character in the gaming industry are treated far worse than female characters. If you are torturing, killing, or witnessing a sexual assault or rape joke in a video game; the victim of it is a male character.
Hitman isn't fine when it comes to sexism, but it is 100% fine like every other mainstream title when it comes to misogyny. The only misogyny that really exists in the gaming industry today, is the same type of misogyny that misogynists like Anita Sarkeesian perpetuate; attractive women body shaming, and treating women as if they are inferior, or victims.
And the fact that this youtuber did not focus on Anita Sarkeesian, is an example of anti-intellectualism, hes also a hypocrite who is doing the same shit he accuses other people of doing. And as someone who is actually intelligent; the use of excessively big words directed at a mainstream audience is the mark of a stupid person with a superiority complex. Intelligence is the ability to understand, and going out of your way to use words that people are unfamiliar with, alienates people, and makes it more difficult for them to understand you.
If Anita Sarkeesian actually had a problem with unrealistic bodies in gaming, she would be furious about Abby in The Last of Us 2. Plenty of women exist that have the body of Lara Croft, yet almost none have the body of Abby.
@@CondorCalabasas that's a really long way of saying "I don't know what I'm talking about"
@@LegendLeaguer Traditional cultures that were sexist towards women, made it culturally unpopular to be attracted to women.
For example, powerful Romans and Greeks would claim to fuck exclusively men, preferably powerful ones. There is plenty of righting about powerful figures of that period claiming to obtain no pleasure from being with women.
Also, the most powerful people in the Wild West, a lot of them were women, specifically hookers, dry-cleaners, tailors, and cooks...which were again...mostly women.
@@Seth9809 I don't see how any of that pertains to what is being said
@@LegendLeaguer He made a very solid argument that holds up about how historically society pushed people down, by implying they couldn't be attractive and builds other people but by implying they're insanely beautiful or seductive.
Which is entirely true for anyone who is familiar with any famous female rapper, mob bosses, guerilla leaders, Cleopatra, etc etc.
This video is trash, because it's shortsided, and if you work out it's logic, it's sexist.
I’m not entirely convinced the argument holds water. This is, of course, a broader discussion than ‘It’s okay because you lose points,’ but even speaking to this hypothetical, games are escapism by nature. It’s hard for me to see criticism of one element somehow being more valid than another.
If violence against hookers coupled with a point-loss deterrent is bad, then violence against this assassin’s target being rewarded should be even more egregious. Violence in general is bad, why do games allow that and even _reward_ that?
I’m not suggesting this in some form of mockery. I’m more curious why violence to _anyone_ gets an ‘of course’ sort of free-pass in these games, and yet maintaining that consistency combined with believable world-building (you can assault anyone, you lose points for attacking anyone besides the target but their bodies can be used, it happens to be that sex workers are in the location where this mission takes place; it would call attention to itself if you _couldn’t_ be violent to this one protected class) is somehow a negative.
This can of course spiral a back and forth for a while. ‘Well they shouldn’t show up at all because violence against this group is bad.’ I would make the case it’s a greater error to disallow their inclusion in certain situations (for example, a game where every enemy is male implies violence is purely a male problem while a game where you fight both genders does _not_ imply some concept of violence against women).
Is there a case to be made that having purely female sex workers implies tainted intent? Sure. Is there a case to be made that their portrayal is misrepresentative? Certainly. Is perhaps their reaction to violence somehow singled out as ‘more entertaining’ than other optional kills? That’s a problem I’m willing to discuss.
But so long as we keep the bar at ‘You can express violent behavior consistent with the rest of the game toward a group of people that shouldn’t face such violence in real life’ there’s no argument for me without implying all played actions in games are somehow manifestations of real-life intent.
"games are escapism by nature"
Not exactly, games (like everything else) are many different things. For some they are escapism, for others they are avenues for new narratives and exploration of real world themes, and they are able to shape our behaviors and influence our subconscious. Understanding where, how, why, and when helps us engage in the content when these lead to good things (Certain games can cause decreases in stress/anxiety brought on subconsciously by those with violent PTSD), and can help us avoid situations where they lead to problematic behavior (people getting killed because a false SWAT call was called on them by a frustrated gamer).
Videogames are a tool - they're neither wholly innocent nor completely at fault.
"If violence against hookers coupled with a point-loss deterrent is bad"
Dan wasn't stating that killing in a game is bad in a moral sense, but that it can run in contrast to the story/themes presented. From a narrative standpoint - the message being presented in dialogue isn't matching the message delivered by the mechanics of the game.
"combined with believable world-building... is somehow a negative."
It's not that either element (the killing or the narrative) are bad on their own (necessarily) but more-so that if you change the mechanics or you change the narrative than the two would work more harmoniously together. It's not that the elements are bad, but that they don't mix as they are being presented.
"without implying all played actions in games are somehow manifestations of real-life intent."
At least in terms of Dan's points here, it's not implied - it's explicit, but more so from the perspective of the development of the game than the player. If the games make killable targets, they intend for you to kill them. Games are fictional worlds with fictional rules and limitations - these can emulate elements of real life, but every decision of where to allow fantasy and where to impose the modern world are determined by the creator's intent (as well as system limitations).
While I usually love your takes, I think this video lacks the concept of procedural rhetoric. Narrative rhetoric can be criticized for its mode of representation, i.e. does the camera linger on the exposed breasts of the dead sex worker (i.e. male gaze), is the violence shot in a gratifying way, does the act of killing sex workers feature prominently in the story, etc. You ask those questions to establish the resulting message: Does the medium represent the act as valuable to voyeurism or not? The ludological equivalent of this is to ask whether the game represents the act as valuable to play or not. It prompts questions such as: Is the phenomenon fun to play out? Does it bring one closer to the winning condition? Is it rewarded in any way?
I agree that an argument about whether something is represented in the first place is worth having: Why even have strippers with death animations in your game? Games are not coincidental representations, not holistic models, they are bespoke worlds that required their creators to pick and choose what they would represent, how they would abstract things, and what they would deem irrelevant.
However, to dismiss procedural rhetoric entirely is short-sighted. There is an obvious difference in terms of communicated ideology between a hypothetical game with the winning condition of having killed 10 sex workers and another game that immediately sends you to the "game over" screen as soon as you killed one sex worker. The fact that both games chose to include the simulation of killing sex workers becomes trivial by comparison. In fact, diegetic rewards for in-game actions are a core dimension used for age ratings of video games in, e.g., Germany. The USK, our age rating committee, might put a game that rewards you for killing sex workers on the index, i.e. disallowing it from advertising anywhere, while ludically punishing it might grant it permission to be sold to adults in stores.
You yourself have used the argument of procedural rhetoric in your video about Minecraft encouraging colonialism. You do not merely criticize the game for the fact that it lets you abduct natives for quasi-slavery but that it actively encourages you to do so through its rules and goals. Had Minecraft instead discouraged you from this through some contrived rule, the outcome would be vastly different, even if the action were still technically possible to carry out. And yes, I know those videos are 4 years apart.
Your entire initial comparison doesn't work. You say that the Thermian argument appeals to the diegetic world logic while its mechanical equivalent appeals to the mechanical logic. But the Thermian argument quotes diegetic rules (she breathe's through her skin) that explain why a character does a thing (that's why she wears little more than a bikini), while its mechanical equivalent in your example quotes mechanical rules (killing sex workers is disadvantageous) that explain why a character does a thing (that's why he kills sex workers). You see how the latter argument doesn't line up? That's because it doesn't make any sense.
This seems like a poor example.
Unlike your excellent Thermian Argument example, the point that "this behavior is penalized," while perhaps beside the intended point, does actually seem to stand against the criticism being made. If the game doesn't actually let a sex worker's death pass without remark or penalty, is that character really being treated as disposable? That was the claim you made, and this is a legitimate argument around that claim.
There's a potentially valuable discussion to be had in this space quite aside of the intended, but not actually stated, point of "why is this here at all?"
+Robert Richter Except the original criticism, as per the hypothetical, is that Assassin 47 represents one more tick in a very long tally. That, internally, Assassin 47 perhaps handles it with more or less tact than other examples is still arguing past the original criticism.
I don't see how. It can't be added to the tally unless it's in the class of objects being tallied. That would indeed be an unfair criticism.
The long tally exists, surely, but whether this item can be added to it is not a moot point.
+Folding Ideas The original criticism being that Hitman was not a good example of the trope she was discussing and that she lied about the game to make it a better fit (which was true).
FatherTime89 "Lie" is a strong word, and not wholly applicable to a matter of opinion. Also, strictly speaking, you're off-topic.
Robert Richter She said the game encourages you to kill strippers drag their bodies around and get a perverse thrill out of it. That's something the game never acknowledges or hints at. It is a lie.
what are you actually arguing for though? in games where you can kill every NPC, should there not be strippers ever? should they be uniquely invincible? would a sufficiently harsh in game punishment make it permissible in your view? I don't understand what you want that game to be like instead.
There is no argument for how a work ought to be, just pointing out that a certain aspect of a work contributes to a harmful societal attitude as an example to explain a concept.
I thought that the criticism that you're talking about in this video without directly naming it was a stupid one, but not for the reason that was brought up here. The game doesn't make it possible to kill hookers and strippers--it makes it possible to kill anyone and everyone to achieve the goal. My criticism of the criticism is why are you just focusing on the strippers? That's not seeing the forest through the trees.
I understand your argument, and it's a valid one, but the example given is a poor one.
And my icon isn't a skull. It's the pokemon Gengar on a shirt that I wore as a mask when larping a few times.
I dont like the thermian argument or this one for that matter. I do agree they argue past the statements one person is making but that's because the point being made is inane at best. A thing existing doesn't increase the likelihood of other versions of that thing happening and unless you are arguing that videogames (or movies or books or stories) can somehow impart morals on an emotionally healthy individual you aren't actually even making an argument to meet. How can someone argue with a point that is a nonstarter?
Again unless you are insisting that I will play Assassin 47 and decide that strippers are okay to kill or somehow worth less than any other person then what even is your argument? You are saying it degrades people and I say it doesnt, those aren't people. The problem with making arguments like that is it creates a black list of things you can't put into media or entertainment, if this was followed to the end nobody would write a story where a stripper was murdered and the body toyed with in any way. I don't necessarily want that story but people getting killed in fiction then being dismembered or otherwise disposed of in a non-respectful way is something that you need to do for certain stories to tell the story.
The "you lose points" counter is the correct response, you are saying you CAN do it and I am saying it is not encouraged, it is a negative thing to do. I guess I don't understand how a story allowing you to do what you want but telling you this is a bad thing is encouraging or reinforcing doing the thing they are specifically encouraging you not to do. This game is an open level sandbox with people and objectives, you can kill anybody and drag them around. It doesn't put special emphasis on the strippers or on anybody that isn't your target, it holds them all at the exact same level. The only reason anybody is even talking about it is because someone decided to cherry pick this one scenario out of millions of possible scenarios and point to it as problematic.
If I make a game, lets say Big Car Steal 5, and make it a huge sandbox. Give you tools, abilities and an objective and set you on your way. Am I a racist if someone shoots a minority in my game, writes a hit piece about it and says my game encourages you to kill minorities? Even though I did not specifically encourage that and actively made the game discourage you from killing random people for no reason. Am I then required to defend my game for not being racist? How do I do that? What possible argument could I use? You are saying I can't claim any defense because any defense I make is fundamentally missing the point the other side is making but the point the other side is making is dumb.
Should I just say, your argument is dumb, and move on? Refuse to engage? Just flatly deny it? To anybody who has played my game it's apparent this isn't a minority killing simulator, you can just kill people in game and I included minorities in the pedestrians. To anybody else, who only interacted with the hit piece, they lack that context and are highly unlikely to wish to engage with my game or me for that matter after forming their opinion based on said hit piece. What choice to I have but to try and refute their point in the most basic way without requiring you to have extra knowledge that, if you had, would almost surely prevent me from having to explain any of this to you at all?
This argument would prevent 80% of videogames at inception from being made if it was strictly followed. Any illegal behavior or problematic actions you were capable of taking, no matter how discouraged, would have to be removed. It would be immersion breaking for me to try to kill an NPC in Assassin 47 only to have the game stop me and say "no" flatly or have me instantly fail on any collateral damage. You could do that but they didn't want to.
Ultimately this comes down to narrative freedom and stepping on the side of the thermian argument and the argument you appear to be making here is highly damaging to people who enjoy creating fiction. Do I want to read a book about someone doing unspeakable things to another human, getting away with it only to do it again with zero problems? No. Do I think that person should be incapable of writing that story on the base of JUST it's narrative subject material? Hell no, I can't say there is no value in that, nobody can and I think it's awful to try and block it.
I guess what I am saying is who cares? It's fiction. If we blocked fiction from containing anything that was problematic we might as well stop making stories because everything from that point on is just documentaries about the founding of Walmart and puff pieces on kittens playing in a field.
My issue with this controversy is that you're able to kill any character in the game, not just the strippers. It is actively punished to kill anybody, but they're all killable, it isn't like the strippers are the only "disposable" npc
You can kill children in this game I think, you can almost kill asians.
How come no one mentions this?
The assassin game lets the player kill any character and drag the body around. Male or female and general, doctor or sex worker. I can understand people questioning the inclusion of sex workers at all but there is no obvious motivation to kill and abuse sex workers more than any other character.
my main problem is in my experience though this does not apply to all who made this legitimate criticisms of violent media is that it was less about criticizing the media and more "hey you like video games you must be a loser or bad person because you consume such media",im not saying im perfect but making a generalized statement about who i am as a person solely on one type of media i enjoy just makes this argument point irk me a bit, its a valid criticism but has been used as a way to label me, my friends and gamers in general as deviant or less of a person when gamer are quit a diverse group of people. tl;dr problem w/ the argument is how its used not the critic itself.
I felt this with the Tomb Raider reboot. Really enjoyed playing it, but the whole "trial by fire" survival message didn't really gel with murdering soldiers by the dozen.
When you use your camera stand as a pretend rifle, you really should extend one of the legs as the barrel, for maximum verisimilitude. You can also position the swing arm as a gun stock. Hope this helps. --'Rich Fantasy Life'
it's funny, but the "you get points taken away if you kill strippers" isn't even necessarily true. There's a hierarchy of things you need to do in Hitman. 1st you need to kill the target (preferably making it look like an accident) and get away. 2nd you need to do it without any witnesses. Without any witnesses means either nobody saw you, or the people that did have been taken care of. Sometimes the bystander is put in such a position, that it's easier to kill them rather than risk being caught and turned in, than whatever abstract slap on the wrist they give you by taking away points (the loss of which, can be cut down, by properly disposing of the body)
So lets review what you wrote here under a critical lens.
"you get points taken away if you kill strippers" isn't even necessarily true.
1st you need to kill the target (preferably making it look like an accident)
So it IS necessarily true that you have points taken away for killing strippers, because by that action you have made your murder look less like an accident. You have to go through a couple of mental hurdles to state that the game doesn't punish you for noticeable actions such as killing, and even more to believe that the game encourages you to kill strippers.
It's not good to mix words around until they mean whatever you want.
+Shoot Right Here
"So it IS necessarily true that you have points taken away for killing strippers"
There are situations where killing a stripper would actually give you points, and/or make the mission easier to complete (whether or not you get points taken away)
If you committed murder in front of a stripper you lose points. If you then kill the stripper, you regain some of the deducted points because you took care of the witness. Sometimes, witnesses (including strippers) are placed in such a way in the level, that it is much easier to kill them (witnesses alert other people) than not. Getting points taken away is a weak compared to the very real in-game punishment of leaving witnesses alive, or not completing the mission.
Espurr But it's not just strippers that applies to is it?
In fact most npcs you would do that to are in fact men, as the majority of npcs are.
It also is ignoring that you would have done better by distracting the npc in some way.
The target is a man who kills strippers.
The game physically has you find the person killing strippers and kill them.
If you kill a stripper, a bunch of guards show up to kill you.
Ergo, killing strippers = The world opens up and throws people with guns at you.
That seems like cherry-picking, somewhat. A more convincing counter-argument to Anita Sarkesian's argument on Hitman (because let's face it - that's what you're addressing) isn't that the game docks you points, but rather that that's simply the result of how game mechanics work. Unlike storytelling where things only ever happen because an author explicitly made that decision, in games things happen as a result of automated systems working as intended with whatever variables designers put into them.
Hitman has civilians, those civilians can be killed. Hitman has corpse management requiring the moving and hiding of corpses, with potential hiding places including dumpsters and such. From the perspective of game mechanics, "civilian" is a class of items which all work the same way regardless of the "skin" that a specific level designer may have put on them in that particular case. If one civilian is killable and their body hideable in a dumpster, the same is true for everyone. There are two solutions - scrap the entire civilian system and gut the game of one of its core mechanics, or else add a special-case exception to sex workers, women and I don't know what else.
The former solution is not workable on its face - managing civilians is a core concept of Hitman and the game would be fundamentally weaker without it. The latter solution IS workable, but questionable because it runs hip-deep into a quagmire of politics as to which kinds of civilians need the special-case exception and which don't. That's the sort of thing that you typically find in Germany's weird censorship laws where the ability to use civilians as human shields can brand a game as Adults Only on the same level as pronography but the ability to use enemies as human shields is A-OK.
A game mechanic with potential unfortunate interpretations being excused by developers not creating a special-case exception to prevent it from working under those specific circumstances is a wholly different argument from "but you lose points." Not every possible collusion of mechanics inside a video game is intentional, not all unintentional collusions of mechanics are worth the time and resources to add exceptions for.
well put!
Hitman doesn't take place in a bubble universe.
The strippers are there because someone put them there.
This I don't deny. They are there just as chefs, and sous chefs are. just as guy drinking coffee and barista are. just as the florist and her assistant. the hairdresser, the clown for the children's party. The franchise has long included a broad swath of people that they chose to include.
Did they feel that sex workers were a contextually accurate inclusion, or did they add them for some other reason? That question would make sense, and where I believe most of the contention is. Many believe they are there to convey the same level of context and believe-ability as any other background civilian NPC.
TBH I can't for the life of me remember when/where sex workers were. I have played a number of the Hitman games. Some of them quite exhaustively. I can remember a LOT of other background NPCs, and I know that most levels do not have sex workers in them, but almost all of them have had some sort of kitchen staff.
If someone believes sex workers were added in for a nefarious reason (aka other than just fitting the context as all other background NPCs) the responsibility is on them to explain why they are any more out of place than other professions portrayed.
Neither Malidictus, nor I have stated that sex workers are spontaneous generation by the source code ;) we know humans decided to put them in. Perhaps the reason why is because some people thought sex sells, so they threw them in a level.
But hey, I am not prone to conspiracy theory, I prefer to employ Zeno's paradox instead of assuming they were added because of a cultural spite so some people could do to them in particular that which can be done to a plethora of other NPCs.
(That being said, thanks for the videos and engaging discussion. I totally agree everything in media is put there by the creators making decisions. That being said, I know better than to assume 'artists' can predict all the ways their art will be interpreted. ceci n'est pas une pipe)
@Folding Ideas
While that's very much true, that's also not the argument you're making in the video. Paraphrasing: "Assassin 47 is reinforcing a trend where sex workers are treated as disposable." The existence of strippers in the game doesn't back up the above argument and is, in fact, a wholly different albeit superficially related argument all its own. You are, in essence, jumping between two different narratives here - "Assassin 47 has a bad representation of sex workers" and "Assassin 47 HAS sex workers" in it. Let me break those down individually.
The implied narrative of the video and the one you draw your arguments from is that Assassin 47 has sex workers as a deliberate "artistic" choice. This is true - there's nothing which forced the developers to include a strip club level into the game. However, it's also means nothing on its own. The developers chose to give Assassin 47 a red tie and they equally didn't have to do that. Absent of any context, it's an inert decision. In essence, it "doesn't prove anything."
The stated narrative of the video and the one your apply your arguments to is that Assassin 47 has a bad representation of sex workers. That's debatable. While, yes, players are allowed to treat strippers like literal garbage, they aren't required to and are indeed penalised for doing, albeit superficially. If the developers intended for strippers to be murdered and stuffed into bins, they could have made that into a mission objective. You can argue that giving players that choice is in itself a problem, but you didn't do so in the video. The issue of player choice never came up. Instead, you chose to argue authorial intent. This is where the two narratives cross over.
You took the implied narrative to derive a generic notion of "intent" and then applied it to the stated narrative in a way that simply doesn't follow logically. Your "proof," as it were, proves something other than what you're using it to prove. Strippers exist by author's intent and their existence could have been avoided at no extra cost. That intent doesn't extend to their treatment, however, both because their treatment depends on player choices and because it's derived from core game systems not specifically designed to handle that special case.
The only way you can use your implied narrative as evidence to back up your stated narrative is to draw a straight line between them, and that leads to the same unfortunate inferences that got Anita Sarkesian criticised in the first place. Here, you make an implied argument that an author's intent in putting strippers in a game naturally extends to the author's intent that these strippers be violently murdered and thrown in the trash. Your argument implicitly excludes the possibility of coincidence in this case, for no reason given. You also make an implied argument that if players have the ability to commit a heinous act in the game, this naturally extends to them following through with that and actually committing this act if not always then in most cases. Your argument implicitly excludes the possibility that many or even most players will refrain from killing strippers for no reason given.
Your argument that Assassin 47 reinforces a bad representation of sex workers by author's intent is essentially based on a number of implied and unjustified assumptions and inferences wrapped around a superficially reasonable statement. You can't transfer intent a decision to the consequences of that decision, especially when those consequences depend both on the actions of an independent third party and a complex system which doesn't always act in predictable ways. Yes, someone decided to put strippers there. You can't argue that that same someone also intended for them to be violently murdered and thrown at the trash. That is a possibility borne of their actions, yes, but you need to put a lot more effort into proving intent behind it. Because from where I'm standing, what you're looking for can easily be argued as unforeseen consequences.
I think you brought up a really good point when discussing the disjoint between the story prying open it's excuse window for the 'limited murder' it was preparing you for, juxtaposed with game mechanics that actively rewarded the exact opposite behavior.
This can be a number of things, but working in a larger organization it is no surprise to me to see that people in charge of 'weapon unlocks' were not well coordinated with the people in charge of 'cut scenes' and 'story'. To me this smacks of poor management which there are other examples of throughout the franchise.
It is really jarring as a player to experience this sort of thing which is why I have taken to on most games turning off aids that explain game mechanics, and going out of my way to not know about game mechanics, unlocks, and achievements during my first play troughs. So I can experience the story as a story before I delve back in and explore the further depths of the game play.
But maybe I am just explaining how I make up for games with less cohesive construction. How do you play? Where do you think these disjointed trends come from and how can they be fixed?
One example that comes to my mind is when Red Dead Redemption 2 came out.
You could argue that the game isn't sexist because you can hog tie ANYONE and drag them around with your horse, but that doesn't stop people from interacting with the game in a sexist way.
For example, the dozens upon dozens of videos of players intentionally seeking out that one suffragette and "punishing" her because it's "funny".
This fictitious game Hitman 47 in which the only possible action is apparently "kill a prostitute and lose points" doesn't sound remotely like any game I've ever encountered so I'm not sure how an analysis of it speaks to analysis of any actual games. It seems extremely anti-intellectual to analyze something that no one is actually defending.
I get that people can be sensitive to anything that could seem like a video game being held responsible for societal ills. Cause we've lived through aloooot of stupid like that. But this notion that you can't simultaneously enjoy a game AND think critically about it (which can also be enjoyable) is so weird to me. It really just seems like a deflection.
I will never get tired of the skull jokes.
I also love how *this* is the example that always gets brought up. It immediately lets you know that the hypothetical people using it haven't watched the hypothetical critical video.
+mightyNosewings I have and it's a fine example of her being full of shit. She literally says that players are EXPECTED to get a perverse thrill from desecrating the bodies of female victims and there's nothing in the work that supports that theory. In fact she's so far off the mark that I can only conclude she did no research or she's deliberately being dishonest.
I still don't get why people defend it.
+FatherTime89 Well aren't games supposed to be fun? Why would a game let you do something not fun for a slap on the wrist in points that you can get back if you just do the expected thing of hiding the body?
TheNJerk Fun is subjective but the point is that it's part of the challenge of doing your job unnoticed. Most people don't think getting killed by an enemy is fun but they still put them in games as part of the challenge.
+FatherTime89 And game developers cannot expect at all that emergent gameplay and fun can go against their point mechanics? They can just go "well we made it real fun to shoot people, but we can only expect gamers will minmax themselves all the goddamn points and find no enjoyment from things that don't gain them or maybe even lose them points." and all criticism is necessarily bunk? Games are to never to be seen as exploratory rather than minmaxing point gaining simulators.
TheNJerk Stop putting in straw man. The argument I'm debating against was that the developers expected gamers to get a perverse thrill from dragging bodies around. It's something that assumed to know what the developers wanted. And to say "well it's something you can do therefore it's what the designers wanted you to do" is bullshit. It would mean that blowing yourself up is also something the developers wanted you to do.
And if you're going to defend this stupid argument how about you give evidence or even reasoned arguments that that's what the developers intended, Anita certainly didn't. All she did was state the opinion and give no reasoning for it.
I also want to bring up the point that the criticism that is brought up sometimes like in the game assassin 47 is the criticizer will point out that you can kill the strippers. but that is just to make the game look bad as a whole on the idea that "look at this bad thing you can do in the game. look how awful supporting it is". when in fact in agent 47 supporter would argue on the notion that yes that is in the game but like killing the towns folk in Skyrim its not really the reason for the game (at least in the eyes of the defender). arguing that something being in the game does not make it the purpose or intention of the game. Do you get what i'm saying?
The original criticism insisted that you would get rewarded for killing the strippers and that the game treated the death of sex workers as particularly unimportant. Thats why so many people talk about it. Its plain not true. The game has multiple locations. You game is about not killing random bystanders. The mechanics and the story of that game make that perfectly clear.
If the original criticism would have been more about your line of arguments (If strippers face more violence in the real world than waiters do, should a game about violence avoid including sex workers at all?), the reasonable people would probably have talked about that. Which is a much more interesting subject, too.
Why would a game about killing rapists and sexual predators, not involve the places these sick twisted people exist in?
If I make a game about going back in time to kill Hitler, it's going to be where Hitler is.
That is what so many people in these comments sections miss.
Want to collaborate on a game called "Assassin 47" where you unlock components for cupcakes and make friends? I really want to do that now; no mechanics in place for killing, just... cupcakes. But still named after the act of killing as a career.
Bit late to this, but I think this argument is a bit of a strawman, niether the game narrative nor the gameplay mechanics treat the killing of any non target as part of the story. The player character is a ghost who only kills his targets. There is no branching narrative to my knowledge where the story acknowledges you as a serial killer. So if the game was to play as a film then that is how it would play out the character remains in his suit avoids all interactions or evidence kills his target in an inconspicous way and disappears. So if like a film it was a passive experience no strippers would even appear. However games are not a passive experience so just because a game allows you to kill anyone doesn't make it part of the narrative (hence ludonarrative dissonance in games like uncharted). As such it is surely more a reflection of the player that they seek out to harm women in the game, than a reflection of the game itself.
There is an important difference between justifying something offensive and actively discouraging it. Also, if the diagetic explanation doesn't matter, then why do people care for continuity errors and ludonarrative dissonance? "It's fictional", after all.
Hey I love your videos and I agree with all points made, and here comes the but...
You can kill ANYONE in Hitman games and drag ANYONE's body around. That's what makes the game not sexist. Sexism implies bias and the mechanics are unbiased.
I don't think this is anything like a Thermian argument.
When asked "why can 47 kill strippers", a pure Thermian argument is "because his target is in a strip club". Instead, the argument being made is "to show murder of strippers as evil". I don't care to argue how good this argument is on it's own or how well it fits the real 47, but it's very different from the first one.
Since you've used 47 i'll just assume you're using hitman. In the case of Hitman, it wouldn't make sense lore wise for a super professional ghost assassin to kill everyone he comes across. It's difficult to implement this lore bit into the gameplay because denying players the ability to kill hookers would be seen as restrictive and etc. So the best option is to penalize players who do kill hookers (or non-target/civilians NPCs). The point of a video game is that it's a movie/book/some form of a fictional adventure where the audience (in this case gamer) has a bit more control in the narrative, you're not just in the passenger seat, you occasionally get to shift gears or change the radio station, and so the gamer is presented with choices, do I role play a bit and try to sneak through everywhere undetected and only eliminate my target or do I go in guns blazing because I can. If the story is set in China Town or A Strip Club or some multi-million dollar mansion that's just a way to diversify the game's settings and increase the immersion and you can't really have 20 contracts that go to the same barren desert location because the game would be stupid and boring.
Also, he ignores the target of that mission.
A game that has you kill Nazis, and rewards you for killing Nazis, is anti-nazi.
If you accidently kill someone else that Nazis hate, it's not pro-nazi suddenly.
@@Seth9809 and you're ignoring the argument. In your example: why did the developers include someone who would have been persecuted by Nazis into the game which could then be killed by the player?
@@LegendLeaguer The argument is we should never have hookers in video games, or black people, or women, or homosexuals, or transgender people.
In other words, the argument calls for games to be entirely old white men.
But then the game would be called racist and sexist, etc etc.
@@Seth9809 that is not the argument. At worst it's "why have historically marginalized people put into positions in the story for them to be further brutalized?"
@@LegendLeaguer So you're saying we should make WW2 games completely devoid of Jewish, Slav, or black people.
Which would be almost a copy of the kind of world the Nazis were trying to make.
I will say the real question in my mind is why are there random strippers in the game to begin with? That said, A negative penalty for doing a thing often means that it's saying that the act you are doing is bad, and if you can't have a thing in your media even when portrayed negatively, you lose the ability to talk about it. Much like you portray those who use these arguments as shutting down discussion.
The idea of making some NPCs invincible decreases the sense of immersion, which is why the discussion of having children in open world games is such a sticky wicket. That's why mechanics are important in this discussion. Again, considering these facts, the real question is "why are there strippers there in the first place?". More so with the understanding that being able to kill anyone in the game is an important aspect to the integrity of the game's mechanics. There are other places that can give a similar feeling of debauchery in a tight but also not overcrowded space, which wouldn't give a feeling of objectification(drug dens for example).
So I'd say that their point is a valid defense against the argument being raised, but that there is another, better argument to be raised tangentially to the original.
While I agree completely that the mere presenting of a choice of acts to the player often tacitly endorses or normalizes those acts, even when the game's incentive systems discourage certain choices, this brings up an issue I've found myself having with this particular argument but which I've never seen addressed:
In the strictly hypothetical case of Assassin 47™, /is/ the game in fact contributing to the devaluation of the lives of women or sex workers when the game devalues all life more or less equally?
+SFtheWolf It's kind of hard to say, but it's more the point that it represents a trend of dehumanization that sex workers face whenever they openly state their profession.
+Aaron Widenor Wouldn't it be worse to just remove them from the game and pretend that they don't exist, or put them in a special bubble where they are separate from the normal mechanics of the game world?
No, because that doesn't address the issue, it's no different than the countless CSI programs that just treat them as disposable hooks to outrage.
Aaron Widenor So do you think strippers just shouldn't be represented in games?
+SFtheWolf If I steal $500 from everyone I have, in theory, lowered everyone's economic station equally, but in practice, in % total wealth, I have impoverished some while others are offended only by the principle of the thing.
So i would say, yes, the game is contributing to that because the fact that it is *also* presenting the lives of straight white middle class white dudes as expendable, that doesn't suddenly mean that it's *not* presenting sex workers as disposable. If you devalue all life equally you don't net out at zero. You're still devaluing life. And some groups are better positioned to absorb, deflect, or ignore that than others. I'm still taking $500, even if I also took everyone else's $500.
Woah! This is a total non-sequitur to your thermian video (which I thought was pretty good btw). The point in the aforementioned video was that lore explanations of circumstances are hollow because we ultimately chose to make the lore the way it is therefore referencing it as a justification for something is arbitrary. That was a smart and fair criticism.
With "Assasin 47 on the other hand, the lore and the means by which you affective demonstrate skill in the game discourages a problematic cultural issue, implying that the world crafted by the designers is actually dissuading perpetuating problematic behavior but you take issue with the fact that the devs give the player agency???? WTF man. You can kill anyone in that game. Hookers and strippers aren't special cases. You can kill cooks, guards, custodial staff, you name it. But to make you feel good the devs should have put a barrier up for some types of characters and not others. The game attempts to make you experience being a deadly assassin. Someone who could kill anyone in every room they enter (ideally without getting caught). You wouldn't get that sensation if some classes were immune and not others. You've lost the plot here.
what if there was a game where the mechanics and the story go completely against one another. Imagine mechanics and achievements that encourage the player to just live a normal life, but the game's story refuses to progress unless you commit horrible acts of crime. The game is fine as this simple sandbox that let's you live the life of a normal joe, but you keep getting an incling in the back of your mind that encourages you to go killing and torturing because you want to see what's next. and as you complete the mechanic, you find it hard to return to playing like before, because bits of the mechanics change. The original sandbox becomes slightly less fun and you slowly begin to want more and more to do the horrible quests and the game constantly points out that you are choosing to go down this route and that you're a horrible person for doing so
Really late reply but that's kinda what Papers Please is like, just not a sandbox game though.
I think youre talking about the Sims here
The first level of Postal does this. You're supposed to collect your (last) paycheck, cash said paycheck at the bank, and then pick up some milk before returning home to your wife. It's all completable without pissing off any NPCs but is set up to encourage violence (Protesters will bother you at your ex-workplace, the bank will get robbed if you wait in line long enough but police will handle it for you, and the corner store will have NPCs cut in front of you in line.) Following levels have more NPCs that are inherently hostile or situations that force NPCs to go hostile but you're not forced to kill anyone to progress, and the whole thing is more or less a painfully 90s satire of the minor irritants of daily life and a few hot button news items.
Also FC4's opening sequence. You go to Unnamed Mountainous Asian Country to scatter your mom's ashes as per her will, get invited to dinner by the big bad, and he leaves to go take care of something or other. At this point, the player is obviously supposed to get accustomed to the controls and begin their ultra-violent adventure. if you wait around long enough, the big villain comes back, drops some humanizing backstory, you get a ride to go scatter the ashes, and the game ends with an invitation to "Finally go shoot some fucking guns".
Less about "living a normal life" but plenty of shooters have played with the concept. MGS1 chastises the player for killing and IIRC makes one boss fight harder depending on how many people you've killed. MGS3 features a "boss fight" on the river Styx that features the ghosts of all the guards (and parrot) you may have killed. MGS4 will have snake get nauseous from violence if you kill more than 100 people in a single "act" (narratively speaking, as in one series of levels/chunk of the narrative). Spec Ops: The Line has your characters' call-out lines become more deranged as your kill count gets higher and your NPC partners will start to refuse your orders and the whole plot basically asks "Why are you, the player, continuing to be complicit in this senseless violence?". Even other genres do it: Factorio starts off as a slightly cute assembly line game but before long is an aesop about the environmental toll of large-scale production.
I get that this is meant to be abstract - but I don't really get the criticism of Hitman. The game lets you kill anyone - it doesn't matter who they are or what they do.
So why specifically single out strippers? Sure, some levels include them. But they also include a huge variety of people - mechanics, waiters/waitresses, cooks, accountants, guards, musicians and random civilians. The game at a design level doesn't set strippers aside in any way - so why are *you*? It's not like there are more of them in the game then other civilians or something like that.
You can kill everything in Hitman.
One question that I never see asked of people that give the "you're docked points for killing a stripper" argument is: If you're docked points for said action, are you the player less likely to do it because you don't want to lose those points? Or are you still going to do it anyway because you find it fun, or you just don't care about point loss? As another commenter asked: Are the points a primary or secondary factor of the game? Can you not progress further into the game because you don't have enough of these points? Or are the points arbitrary (eg. are these points like the equivalent of the achievements or trophies console companies use, where you can acquire them, but they don't do much besides sit there)?
Imagine if the next GTA had a mechanic where after you go on a killing spree and die, you have to spend x amount of time in jail or do AA and parole missions.
They already do this. in RDR1, if you get busted a little cutscene plays where Marston is in jail, showing the days going by in fast-motion. All the HD era games have plot hooks about working for the Not-FBI: they all have at least a scene or to where they hand-wave away why the police are so bad at holding you and take a dig at the player for being a psycho in free roam mode.
No AA meetings, but in GTAV one character has a therapist you can actually visit, and the dialog will change based on your actions in free roam. It tracks stuff like how many times you've seen a prostitute (if at all), Michael's anger issues will be portrayed differently based on how many non-combatants you kill, etc.
Hey, a good example of the Ludonarrative Dissonance is in Bioshock 1:
the Message of Rapture City is: You are free to do what ever you want. You decide, what is right and what is wrong, and nobody decides Morality but you. This theme then is broken in the end, when is revealed the main character was a slave the whole time, and he breaks himself finally free.
But in the Mechanic, you can always choose to rescue or to extract "little Sisters", of which the last one is obviously conveyed that it is the "evil, but high rewards" choice.
So the Mechanics tell the Player to Chose between exactly two Choices of almost no difference in outcome except the last cutscene of the game, which is highly morally biased. The Player never feels real betrayal in the end, because he knew he did what the game told him to the whole time anyway.
So the whole theme carefully set up by the story loses all of its impact.
I hope that explains the concept well. There are some articles to be found only, if you want to read up on this.
I've been on a rampant binge of your content, and can't believe that I haven't found it sooner. Great work! In response to your assertion that it doesn't matter what you wrote down as an answer to the question "how do you kill a vampire?" because vampires aren't real, I would like to counter with the words of a wise fictional character named Bobby Singer. *ahem*. "Woodchipper beats everything". ;)
This video deals with three issues:
1: The overall anti-intellectualism in the gaming community
2: The dead hooker argument
3: Ludo-narrative dissonance
I agree with your view on points 1 and 3, so I'll focus on 2 instead: Being able to drag bodies around is a mechanic present on every NPC in the game, male or female. I completely fail to understand being able to also use this mechanic on stripper NPCs would somehow make the game "sexist". It was a bad argument when Anitta made it (And in fact "making a non-gendered game mechanic/limitation into a gender-issue" was a recurring theme in her series", and it feels like it is a terrible example for the point you're trying to prove.
Yeah... this isn't as sound as your video on the thermian argument. It seems more like you are trying to defend someone's opinion on a game, not because it is actually fair and sound, but because it pushes a series of thoughts that might be useful to gaming.
The game designer uses many rewards and punishments to guide the player to the "intended" way to play, the designer view of the game. Saying "if the game is going to punish me for a undesirable action, why not remove that action altogether " is just not understanding the medium at all.
A medium that is all about choice would be impoverished by reduction of it. What is the point of getting a pacifist run on a game like Undertale if everyone is going to get it because Toby Fox suddenly decided to get rid of the attack button because it deviates from the intended experience. The gane could no longer talk about your choices in a meaningful way because there was no choice to be made. The game suddenly loses all its value as a piece of interactive media. In order to make the pacifist run meaningful, the existence of the attack button is a must.
The strippers are NPCs and share behavior code with the rest of the NPCs in the game. This not only sets a consistency to the NPC class but also benefits emergend gameplay. The thing about NPCs is that they can be killed. Under common sense the act of killing a civilian is wrong. Okay that much is fair, and the game actively punishes you for doing so. Why not remove this option altogether? NPC management is a core mechanic of the game and stripping the game from it would make it more 2-dimensional. Being able to kill the civilian once the civilian has noticed the player is a way to give choice to the player even though they fucked up. Once the civilian is killed they become corpses, another class that will trigger panic in civilian if seen and an aggressive search if seen by the enemies. Killing the civilian brings more problems than not. But the intelligent player would, upon being discovered by the civilian, hide in a safe place until the waters calm themselves. This not only leaves the player with more points but also no corpses to take care of. The game is tightly design to benefit a certain way to play, the designers view of their work.
Hitman Absolution depicts a strip club as one of it's levels. NPCs are also not only created to bring a core mechanic to the game, but also to bring consistency to the environment and visual cues for the player to dicern in what kind of room they are in. As such, the stripper NPC is treated as a worker in the environment. They not alienated but treated as people at work (in the same manner that the games handles chefs, sailors, models, etc). It normalizes a line of work in their game world that is oftenly alienated by society. Strippers are getting the same fair treatment as any other NPC in the game.
So, again: what wrong with that?
I think that there are two sides to this. I mean, while sex workers are dehumanized on a regular basis, should they be exempt from being killed in a game where you can kill anyone else? While the "it's okay because you lose points" argument is at it's core pretty dumb, I do think that it's a valid way of handling these things. I mean, failing for murdering civilians works in Assassin's Creed. Or did back when I played it and you lost health for murdering people, and could "desynchronize" if you killed two in a row.
Of course, even if you have the strippers for some reason unkillable, chances are one of the first things people mod in will be "killable strippers mod". I mean, look at all of the Killable Children mods for Skyrim.
It's honestly an interesting problem, even outside of the "Assassin 47" issue, and I think that Ludonarrative Resonance (as I've taken to calling it) is an important thing. Gameplay should encourage the tone of the game. You should get through levels without killing *anyone* before you get the sniper rifle that can shoot through walls and the game says "here, now you can murder the crap out of people, you've earned it". Or, you know, something more appropriate.
why are their deaths sexualized and why do they point you directly toward them to suggest they're targets when they're supposedly unnecessary? Why is the penalty so small? Where is the emotional or mechanical consequence? Where did we get the automatic reflex that "I can kill in this game" + "there are sex workers in this game" = a disproportionately high rate of killing the sex workers?
And in assassin's creed, there are missions where you can let a seemingly unending number of sex workers be killed without failing, so there's a contradiction mechanically as well. This isn't about "why should they be exempt," that's a dishonest presentation of the concern and ultimately an example of the Many Questions Fallacy. It's a much larger conversation about how characters are treated overall, and in the context of our real life.
There's a disproportionately high rate of killing sex workers because so many of them are intended to be very obvious and stand out from the average person on the street in these games, and in GTA, the ur-example, you pay them and have your "fun" (the car shakes and moans play) and then kill them to get your money back and more.
I don't actually know what mission you're talking about in Assassin's Creed. I mean, as long as you don't personally kill anyone, it doesn't matter what happens, but none of the ones I've played have any "murder the courtesans" missions, other than Fiora Cavazza.
I don't feel that it's wrong to ask "should they be exempt". I mean, there are plenty of reasons to involve sex worker NPCs in a game. They are after all a thing that exists, and the seedy people in games like Hitman are going to be around them. But, yes, you're right. It's not just a question of how we disincentive "bad behavior" from players, but also how we portray these things in the first place.
In Super Mario you can jump over a ledge and die. Sure, you lose a life for doing so but you can still do it if you want. Does that mean that Super Mario glorifies suicide?
47 is canonically depicted as a psychopath, heavily implied he's asexual or at least not interested sexually in women (in the first game a girl rewards him with a kiss and he acts disgusted when she's gone). It fits the character for him to murder a stripper if that's what he has to do in order to get the job done, which is the only time the player should be killing prostitutes. The game doesn't just "take points away", if you get caught murdering anyone you'll get killed and lose the mission entirely, just like GTA and the other sandbox games.
Whooosh, that was the point flying over your head.
and you're entitled to a full discussion on your "points" because of what exactly?
+Dylan Boller The point here, in case you still haven't picked up on it since two weeks ago, is that a game can go to whatever lengths it wants to justify itself within the narrative of the game, but those justifications shouldn't be used to stifle conversations about the inclusion of that subject matter in the first place.
Your response here is built entirely on in-game rationalization, to the point that it's borderline comical to have posted it on this video.
The problem with this is that it ignores what is unique about interactive experiences: user/player choice. When a criticism is aimed at what can be done, and not what is required or encouraged, then it isn't suited for the video game medium. (And, no, what isn't explicitly punished is not implicitly encouraged.) It's very reminiscent of the horrible anti-atheism argument of "Why be moral if there is no God?". Is the only thing stopping you personally from killing every killable NPC in a game the fear of being punished by the game designer? Player choice may mean a game designer loses some control of the game's message or theme, but is that really a bad thing?
And the problem with THAT is that it ignores that player choice isn't infinite and players are put into a context by developers. An analogy commonly used here is this: Imagine a tabletop roleplaying game where the GM constantly has the players come back to town and have strippers or hookers in town and as part of their quest leads. Sure, the players COULD ignore that, but any reasonable person would say that the GM in question at the least has a fetish for hookers and strippers, and many players would start getting really annoyed.
See The Stanley Parable to see just how much developers can anticipate your actions through playtesting. They know what titillates their audience, they know what tools they have in the game to do it, and the messaging in the game can therefore help to repeat bad tropes.
But let's say I'm wrong. So what? The devs could have thought that they were being super-sensitive to sex workers and depicting them super-realistically in a way that would cut back on their dehumanization. The players could think that too. The question is, what does the text ACTUALLY say, and what do the players' engagements ACTUALLY do? What is the message being promoted?
If you want to argue that Hitman games skillfully depict sex workers as fully-fledged human beings and not as props, go right ahead. The rest of us will call bullshit
The thing about the Hitman games is that they emphasize player choice. They are all about doing things your way as the player. This means you can do things by killing everyone in the level. What message is being promoted in this action? That human life has no value? The thing about it is that they are focusing solely on the fact that you are able to kill a stripper, ignoring the fact that the game allows you to kill every single NPC that exists in the game. It does not push a message, besides one of "do what you want". This is like arguing that, in the GTA games, since you are able to kill strippers as well, sex workers are discriminated against even though a huge portion of what that game sells on is killing everyone. The developers know that the reason people play these games is, in part, the violence. So, they allow the player to kill anyone they like, from a random dude on the street to a stripper. This does not say that strippers should be dead because there is no in game mechanic or out of game story element that reinforces this. The developers merely allow you to kill indiscriminately because the game is about what you want to do to approach the situation. The text ACTUALLY says that if you murder people, you will be arrested or killed, and the player's engagement in said game merely show what the player is willing to do to kill their target. Yes, the sex workers are depicted as "props", but so is every single NPC besides ones that are named because they are your targets. That means strippers, policemen, firefighters, the whole nine yards. The actual question should be: are the sex workers the ONLY ones being treated this way? And the answer is no.
The arguments of this video are "These people are marginalized, so they shouldn't be in the game. You chose to put them in a game where they can die, you chose to have them possibly be a liability."
I'm going to say something no one so far in the comments has appeared to have said.
"Did you stop and wonder why they are in the game, besides your assumption, of being something to kill?"
I know a lot of people pointed out that you lose points for killing them, but how about this....
What is that mission about? Why are you in a strip club?
To find this one really sick guy who kills strippers, and thus naturally works at a strip club or in this case runs it.
You don't have a name in this game, you don't say much, you don't think much, you are cold and a machine.
Effectively, the game has a character who does bad things to strippers and thus a cold machine shows up to kill him.
Like Karma. Like this fundamental rule that can't be broken.
The point being made here is that the material is presented in a way that is derogatory to IRL people who are sex workers, because the hookers are presented as objects rather than people with intents and feelings and agency.
Basically, this argument can't be won. Media that depicts the brutal reality of these situations will always be shat on because it's "objectifying" no matter the tone taken. Eventually, people will simply shy away from representing certain groups in media because they get bombarded with criticism every time they try and it's NEVER GOOD ENOUGH.
I find this over-analysis of "protected classes" to be counter-productive at best, and downright disingenuous at worst. Yes, the hookers are wearing next to nothing. Yes, they can be killed, and discarded brutally. You think sex work is always roses and rainbows? Spoiler, it's not. Many of these people, women AND men, live in abject poverty and suffer through horrific drug abuse issues.
But let's not talk about it, else we'll offend someone.
/tableflip
@@roelani They aren't presented as objects, they're presented as people with problems.
@@Seth9809 Bruh, at the rate we're going of one reply a year, we're going to be here a while. I lol'ed when I saw this notification pop up, I'd forgotten this video.
@@roelani Someone less informed then you replied to one of my comments and I came back to this video.
Ludonarative dissonance is a thing that exists within the text of the actual work and usual defense against it is some variation of "It's just a game" which is completely different from Thermian argument.
Thermian argument is mostly a reaction against turning reviews into opinion pieces tangentially related at best to the work being critiqued. It's a somewhat misguided way of saying "We don't need your ideology. Go away."
jesus man he could’ve had his phd in media criticism 10 years ago but he’s making that #content god bless folding ideas
But you can kill anyone in the game. Why should it matter if they are blank rather then anyone else. If you don't like the game because you kill can anyone then say. The way you worded it cherry picks and make the game worse then it actually is.
The point of the game is to approach the level over and over. Continually improving and getting a higher score. It's up to the player to choose how to approach this situation. Assassin 47 is built on this foundation so losing points is a big deal, and ultimately stops you from winning the game. The story in assassin 47 is mostly secondary and the actual game take center stage. It's like a transformers movie, there is a story but people come to see robots fight. In Assassin 47 there is a story but you come to play the game. And the story does reflect the gameplay if you play the game right.
You take on the role of the 47 and therefore control the situation. The game dosent force anything onto you except kill the target. You could go through the entire game and never kill anyone except for the objective. If you play the game the way you are supposed to with stealth and planning then the gameplay matches the story.
Although you did have a good argument, and the video is very entertaining. Honestly although I disagree with the example you used, I respect the message you are trying to get across.
Video games and their cultural are a tricky task argue. Sometimes people have a difficult time understanding something due to how systematically complex they are. Then even if you are right gamers will spam dislike and resort to name calling and just being idiots. Got to give you credit for standing up to bullies.
Sorry if you got a lot of unjustified hate, death threats, or general rudeness because of your opinions.
HOT DAMN this episode got really good.
Really bad.
I'm kind of curious what an FPS whose rules support the "killing is a bad but sometimes necessary thing" would be like. Anyone know of any that do something like that? i.e, don't reward killing mechanically but instead reward finding a way to avoid it
Undertale
Spec ops: the line, does this well to what ive heard
If you write a book, I will buy that book.
This idea has become more and more annoying to me, in part because people that use it seem to believe that it is impossible to enjoy something while also recognizing that it has issues. I can recognize that some elements are subtextually or meta-textually problematic while enjoying the work as overall.
I like Folding Ideas videos a lot and the Thermian arguement video is valid, but this is a painfully naive follow up. Hitman is a game about killing people, the mechanics are global, you can kill all people. Hookers are people. You do not lose points for killing hookers, you lose points for killing people. (That aren't related to your objective.) Hookers dying do not redudct any more or less points than if a male construction worker dies. The text is set up to allow the murdering of people, not hookers, people. The criticism isn't about killing. It is not about the portrayal of women as sex workers, its about sexism. The only way sexism can exist is if you intentionally separate hookers from people. The criticism sets up the stipulation that the game is either sexiest, or protective of hookers.
This would be like if an action movie had white, black, latino, and asian gang members in a highly multi-racial city who are all bad people, being killed by the protagonist, and you go "Oh my god this movie is set up to kill black people." This is different to say, making that same movie but taking a highly white populated town and coincidentally making ALL of the bad gang members black. In that instance, the creator is setting up the text in a way that allows black people to be murdered on mass through justification of text. Players being able to express violence towards a specific demographic in hitman is the same as a viewer taking offense to a specific demographic being killed in this hypothetical movie.
Any text if viewed through a radical enough lens can be misrepresented to allow for X immoral action to occur, because the only way to disallow this perspective is to protect the class that you don't want to be held to the same standards. If you make it so hookers are unkillable in hitman, or you make the racial proportion of gang members irregularly white with the nature of the multi-racial city, you imply that these are protected classes not worthy of being normalized, which in itself is a form of sexism / racism.
This is why the Hitman criticisms are fake criticisms. They're just another example of feminist with an axe to grind applying their lens to create a controversy where non exist. It's also worth mentioning that this criticism was aimed at the game for (paraphrasing) "Being tasked to kill hookers", and not because killing hookers was allowable, which is a lie. Never in the game are you tasked with such.
Why are there hookers in the game in the first place? Are there kids? Are there pregnant mothers? More importantly (never played the game but I think I remember watching the level in question) if there are killable kids is there an entire level based around having kids as the nearby civilians you aren't supposed to murder? Hitman absolution takes you to the strip club but does it take you to a day care? Would the same responses come if the game gave you negative points for shooting up a school? (Etc.) It's not feminists with an axe to grind it's feminists making a valid observation about macro patterns in culture and advising that it isn't necessary (is the strip club assassination critical to the game's story or mechanics?)
@@freddiekruger3339 The entire point of the video is it is focusing on game mechanics as a substitute for text when discussion the Theramian arguement. The entire point of this video is that the MECHANICS disproportionately apply to hookers than it does to others. In text, yes, only women are represented as sex workers. In mechanics though, they are indistinguishable. If your not familiar for what a mechanic actually is, it's the fundamental interaction of rule sets. IE; If I press button A on object X, I get Y Points. Pressing "A' can be contextualized with a kill, a flirt, a basketball shot. X Can be a net, a person, a robot. The mechanics aren't interested in what text represents them, the mechanics are simply interacting rule sets. If mechanically, both hookers and bankers are equal to X, there isn't a mechanical distinction and thus there is no theramin arguement. The game mechanics do not regard hookers as disposable and construction workers as less disposable, the game recognizes both as civilians.
Also just as an FYI, In Hitman your target is literally the owner of the strip club who is depitcted as sexist and disrespectful. The game is literally painting the male sex club owner as a villian, and women as victims. The only text criticism here is the 'damsal in distress' trope, if anything it is glorifying women rather than condescending. Could you have a problem with that depending on your views through feminism? Maybe, it's totally unrelated. Hooker = Civilian. Bar patron = Civilian, person on bench = civilian. There is no mechanical distinction, Folding Ideas is just factually wrong here.
A lot of games allow you to kill civilians but explicitly punish the player mechanically for doing so. A good example is payday, which charges the player money for any civilian killed during a heist. Unlike stories/movies, the gameplay is in the players control so criticizing the designer for what you can do seems unfair. I don’t find it a problem to include the possibility of this type of content as long as it isn’t explicitly encouraged by the game, since ultimately it’s the players choice to engage with it, separating it from the thermian argument.
I feel like the people raging against any serious criticism of games are taking them as a criticism of their person. If the game is problematic, the you must be too for playing it. So they must deny any criticism or they admit personal responsibility.
The thing that I think is so galling about the response to ludonarrative dissonance is that in my mind even the Thermian argument's own logic doesn't fucking work. Even internal to the story, two parts of the game are telling you two different things. Many people who use a version of the Thermian argument either want to just shut up and play their game or they honestly feel like a story that addresses some problematic component in some way is at least indicating that they get it and trying not to actually make it an Aesop. That's all fine, but ludonarrative dissonance actually hampers even a very casual playthrough of the game.
Think about GTA IV and people talking about the wacky cousin and other fun parts. In my mind, that's because they're focusing on the things that make sense for a GTA game rather than the dreary story, which is even in their mind compartmentalized somewhere else. GTA V, on the other hand, I've heard better reviews of from GTA fans, because they aimed to give you a real gangster experience, not Mope Khruschev's Existential Adventure.
Even when I go into a game without intending to be critical, ludonarrative dissonance can just make me feel like I'm going insane because I'm getting two sharply distinct signals. I suspect lots of people actually get bothered by ludonarrative dissonance but just write it off as "That's a video game".
but wouldn't that also come down to player agency, you're able to kill strippers, but not nessarily encouraged to, so is a game maker providing you with the ability to carry out the action of killing a hooker the same as a film maker putting a scene where the main character kills a hooker. I'd say it isn't cause the act of doing it lies on the player. in dark souls for example you aren't encouraged to kill npcs, in fact it would be stupid of you try to kill certain ones, but you have the option to, it is in the players hands. in the end this comes down to execution but I feel that punishing the player for actions like these like a point deduction is a legitimately reasonable argument.
Dark Souls clearly intends for you to be able to kill numerous NPCs, even ones that are, ostensibly, critical to the plot. Not only is this loosely intended by virtue of making it possible, it is explicitly intended because many variant events, different endings, and such are contingent on doing the "unintended." The player is "punished" for killing Gwyndolin, but in actual fact they are rewarded with whole new avenues of gameplay.
The characters don't encourage you to behave that way, but the game itself, the system, rewards you with progress and content for ignoring the diegetic discouragement.
Also you're missing the core: why are strippers there in the first place?
Folding Ideas, true, I did forget about that, and I kinda get more of where your coming from now, though I still feel that there is a definite diffrence in what games allow you to do as opposed to what a film shows you and that it can change the situation a fair bit in these cases. If a game gives you options and is based around molding itself to your choice, like some sandbox games then not giving you the ability to to shitty things would be weird. Kinda like what undertale is commenting on, how it gives you the option to kill literally everyone but also says that you defenitly shouldn't do that and if you do its on you. Anyway thank you for responding so quickly.
This video I think pairs well with your Minecraft colonialism video.
Fiction is not reality. And it IS relevant that it is punished, bc it does not encourage that action
You need to analyze MGS4.
Something I've been thinking is that some points, some stories that simply cannot be told effectively or meaningfully in certain games.
The sex industry and the issues facing sex workers is a complex network of issues. One of the big things is how sex workers are undervalued and dehumanised, which can enable their poor treatment. In terms of numbers I don't know if that's the biggest thing sex workers care about, I've seen at least one video that suggests that their legal status and interactions with law enforcement are more pressing issues. My point is that it's a complicated topic.
I believe the stories of sex workers can be told in a way that humanises them and addresses the issues they care about. I believe it's possible to write a game that does this, though it may be a more artsy game that's mechanically very different to anything in mainstream. I do not think a video game where you play a super awesome secret assassin, with a focus on the different ways he might do his murdering, is capable of telling the story of sex workers in a respectful manner.
Not that I'm suggesting the Hitman games should try to tell respectful stories about sex workers. I'm not sure if sex workers should be prominently in the games at all.
The Hitman games are not realistic, "hookers" are not included in the game for "realism". The creators choose where Agent 47 goes and what he can do, and they make those decisions based on what is fun for the player. When they include "hookers" it's to add to the feel of the game / to add mechanical assets or barriers to the players / to titillate the players.
Obviously, I am making a moral judgement. The creators are ALLOWED to include whatever they like in the game. They are not legally required to do anything about their representation of sex workers, they do not have to justify their actions in the slightest. But hopefully if people are engaging with this topic, they understand that groups and topics can be represented in more or less ethical ways.
I believe having "hookers" as window dressing that you can easily kill with very few consequences is pretty bad representation for sex workers and harms them to some extent. I think a step up is the courtesans in Assassin's Creed. In those games the courtesan's were portrayed as confident, clever and great allies to the assassins. I do not believe Ezio could use his hidden blades on them, I'm not sure what it was like for him to use his other weapons on them. But I'm sure that representation has its flaws, maybe the fact that none of their problems are represented or the fact that they're just used as tools.
I do not know what "ideal" representation of sex workers would be like in a video game. Indeed there will always be different things that different groups have a problem with. But that does not mean that all criticism of certain portrayals should be ignored. In good representations of sex workers their deaths are treated seriously. The impact of any death and how it happened is properly explored. A game where the player can kill a sex worker and just keep playing a few seconds later and complete the game as normal, isn't treating the topic seriously.
I'll reiterate, nobody HAS to do anything like this. Nor would I advocate for any sort of law or standard that would force games to be a certain way. You can create a game called "Wh*re Slaughter 3000" where all you do is brutally eviscerate sex workers in gruesome detail. I'd think you were a horrible misogynistic asshole if you did that and I'd hope nobody would ever play your awful game. But I believe you should be legally allowed to make such a game and release it on whatever platform will have it (including appropriate content warnings of course). But while anyone is allowed to make anything, I think games where the player can casually murder sex workers cause some sort of harm. I believe the moral thing to do is not have such events in your video game. I believe we should socially discourage developers from including casual "hooker murder" in their games.
I did not get the point nor stance in this video at all, if there even is one. I'll just keep playing games that give me the freedom to do whatever i want.
Lol you didn't get it did you
Just a bit late here but we all have to remember that this all starts before money even changes hands, advertisements are usually handled by a different group than the creators of the media being made, so even if you started Spec Ops the Line but didnt finish it because you by some miracle disagree with the main character's decisions, as per creator intent, it wont matter. Money has been spent, showing that, in a general sense, the blanket discriptor for the game (brown military shooter) is desireable and since the horrid things you do with a morter probably isnt in the trailers, from the publisher POV, brown military shooters are in demand lets pump them out 'cause these wallets with limbs want violence.
also you bought this military shooter, wasnt this what you signed up for, wallet with limbs.
Apparently the Last of Us Part 2 has this kind of issue. Perhaps it's be closer to Ludonarritve Dissonance.
I mean yeah, you can kill sex workers, but then again you can kill any npc in the game. I don't understand how not limiting who can be killed, dragged and hidden is somehow sexist. as well as the inclusion of sex workers in the game as npc's being sexist in any way. sex workers exist, I don't understand how pretending they don't for the sake of not upsetting certain groups of people is really useful.
Well, you got something right: you don't understand
Bill Zoeker
Then explain. If you cannot explain, then you don't understand your own position
I'm not unwilling to listen to points or change my view if I'm corrected to be fair. Hitman is slightly more in your face with prostitution than say something like grand theft auto is surprisingly, I mean you could play through the entirety of the grand theft auto series without knowing you can even pick up sex workers and then kill them for your money back. Implementing systems that are completely optional and need a player to go out of their way to trigger them isn't sexist, neither is giving the player choice. If the player wants to kill a sex worker, drag her round until her corpse is left in a revealing position and then angle the camera to get a close up shot, that's completely on the player to do so, the game hasn't told them to do it, the developers haven't told them to do it, it's completely on the player and not the product.
I don't know these games (Hitman, GTA) too well, because I never played them. But isn't it wrong to even GIVE the players such an opportunity - to pick up sex workers and kill them for your money? As was discussed in other videos on this channel, games, their rules, and what is coded in them - that's the games' 'box'. What can be said about the developers who had the choice not to program the possibility of such behavior in, but decided to do it? Isn't this akin to promoting such behavior? It's like the developers are saying 'we know that such deeds exist and we're OK with you doing them'.
Is allowing players to kill npc's or enemy characters promoting killing as a real world activity?
I just learned so many vocabulary words
The better argument I've heard for the hitman games is that you can kill and drag *Anyone* and no special emphasis is placed on sex workers, initially I thought the comparison was to either hitman 2016 or the series in general, but I see someone saying absolution, absolution is the one I have the least experience with as I've played the first two and have seen gameplay of the rest. So maybe there is a special emphasis there I wouldn't know.
Sarkeesian and McIntosh are certainly entitled to their opinions, but I feel like this is just another chapter in the growing pains of gaming as a medium. Not just games themselves but how we view them. There is, in my personal opinion, long-standing problem with trying to take the classical language and vocabulary of literary criticism and trying to apply to a medium that it doesn't necessarily apply to. Player agency is a tricky thing to take into account, and yet the entire medium revolves around it. Even trying to apply Martha Nussbaum's seven qualifications for objectification gets fuzzy when applied to a medium where every character effectively IS an object within a set of algorithms that's meant to serve a specific purpose.
+KashelGladio To be fair, your argument is legit but at the end of the day someone needs to study game criticism and develop related set of concepts. There is just not enough study of games as an academic discipline as of yet.
+Maxben L
True but could we have someone who isnt just arguing because they're trying to make a quick buck through sophomore ideological niche?
***** Or just someone who's a bit less of a prude and slightly more reasonable? For example, I've met tons of feminists who love Bayonetta. She's such a fun character, and yet Sarkeesian literally can't think of a single positive thing to say about her.
My issue isn't so much that Sarkeesian and McIntosh have their extreme opinions, but rather that their extreme opinions are what's controlling the conversation atm.
KashelGladio
Agreed I do however think Feminist Frequency is really sophomore. Her methodology is so sloppy and lazy I'm in awe of the fact the media thinks she's a legitimate commentator. But then the standards are pretty low generally. (hence this guy)
If you're looking for a sex positive femminist I'd recommend lana k. She's smart funny and is actually a gamer so doesnt make inccesant gafes
"yet Sarkeesian literally can't think of a single positive thing to say about her." whereas you can't seem to avoid telling blatant lies
I'm just going to point out a previous dan argument that authorial intent does not matter cause the text has to stand on its own you can't expect to have the creator explaining his work too you all of the time.
This i think is even more relevent in the medium of games because of player agency. sure in hitman you can kill hookers but the hookers are treated exactly the same as every other npc in the game. As such the mechanics don't insentivise or decentivise killing them anymore than any other type of Npc.the games mechanics ultimately do not care if the Npc is a sex worker or not. there just an Npc and its the player agency that decides whether it's fun or not too kill them.
This is where the word reinforcement comes in the game does in no way incentivise or decentivise killing strippers the person who makes that call is the player. so if the player goes in thinking that killing strippers is fun then yeah he's gonna leave thinking killing strippers is fun. just as easily as a player can go in with the notion that minimising casualties is a fun approach can leave thinking exactly that. the game can only effect you in a way that it can reinforce your preconceived ideas and beliefs. To simplify you only get out what you put in.
So ultimately it comes down too agency and what the player decides to do regardless of authorial intent. And that Maybey we should apply a more critical lense too ourselves rather than arguing about whether videogames or any media is reinforcing or guiding our ideas against our will.