Sexist Game or Sandbox?

[Cloud_Strife]

Intent is irrelevant Akka; I care about the tangible and if "historical accuracy" (in a game where your ruler can be a horse) results in excluding women then I am more than willing to compromise to ensure that the game is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

And please, spare me your words about "intent", death of the author is a recognised theory as well as the fact that these games are primarily a capitalist venture and it's in the interest of the makers to attract as many players as possible, from a wide range of backgrounds.

 

[adcarrymaokai]

Oh, one thing that bother me about historical pedantism is that it is often used to justify some bad behaviors, like disrespecting women or spamming the n-word because it is "historically accurate!!11!!"

As Confucius once said, true transformation of society is impossible without a deliberate electrocution of gamers.

 

[Zardnaar]

Intent is irrelevant Akka; I care about the tangible and if "historical accuracy" (in a game where your ruler can be a horse) results in excluding women then I am more than willing to compromise to ensure that the game is accessible to as wide an audience as possible.

And please, spare me your words about "intent", death of the author is a recognised theory as well as the fact that these games are primarily a capitalist venture and it's in the interest of the makers to attract as many players as possible, from a wide range of backgrounds.

Female ruler is more common than a horse.

It's if your ruler is a lunatic, probably based off Caligula who made his horse a senator.

Glitterhoof doesn't make a very good advisor, skill 0 in everthing which qualifies Glitterhoof as an improvement as American president.

Most of the absurd stuff is also in the DLC it's opt in like if you want to rule as a possessed Satanist immortality type.

Female councilors, bishops, generals can be done but you're risking the wrath of the Pope but you can shatter church cohesion as well.

My current game equal succession, genius ruler, daughter and her is genius and string if she survives she is gonna be great.

There's also some benefits being female or gay. Having a homosexual pope, become his lover.

 

[Akka]

Intent is irrelevant Akka

Then you don't care about morality, then the entire "we should do this because it's morally better" has no basis.

Without intent there is no morality. So if you judge while ignoring intent, your whole argument about morality is void.

And philosophy aside, I find bland games that sanitize themselves to please strident militants to be, well, bland.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Ah yes, "sanitizing" games means including representation of women, having a completely normal one i see as usual.

It makes no economic sense for companies to not include Women, POC, LGBTQ+ characters, white, straight cismales are only a section of the pie after all.

 

[Zardnaar]

Ah yes, "sanitizing" games means including representation of women, having a completely normal one i see as usual.

It makes no economic sense for companies to not include Women, POC, LGBTQ+ characters, white, straight cismales are only a section of the pie after all.

Grand strategy genre is niche and 93% male. It's probably uneconomic to make a new diverse one and it wouldn't do well if you had a game with female popes etc.

Such a game would appeal to history type strategic players and it's not going to appeal to significant amounts of female players.

CK2 is probably the biggest mass market game PDS developed maybe EUIV.

Such a game would be pandering and who would buy it.

I guess you and MaryKB don't play Stellaris which is gender neutral?

Vote with your wallet

 

[Gorbles]

That's, like, your opinion man.

I gave you a developer's blog post for a reason - it's not just opinion. I'm not talking about end user enjoyment of a complete product. I'm talking about how games design works a lot of the time. A lot of individual parameters in the design of the game are tweaked on feel and not how it would exactly play out in reality. They can be obvious things, like letting humans research a made-up space element that lets their ships fly faster, or it could be something completely invisible to the user, like the return time of a thrown axe in God of War.

 

[Akka]

I gave you a developer's blog post for a reason - it's not just opinion.

Yes it is, because :

1) A designer doesn't speak for the whole world. They even disagree between themselves and also do errors.

2) There isn't a single "good design" with all other being "bad design".

3) "realism" is not a binary stat or a switch (it's also a pretty loaded word in game design discussion, which is why I usually tend to prefer to use "verisimilitude" or "immersion" or "believability", because there is just too many bad faith arguments made with "realism" on the kind of "hey, you can shoot someone in the head and they survive SO OBVIOUSLY NOTHING NEED TO MAKE SENSE").

Of course at SOME point a designer will need to cut down on making a 100 % copy of reality, but it's a very subjective point and it heavily depends on the kind of game you do, the public you aim for and your personal preferences.

 

[red_elk]

The level of realism should depend on the game genre IMO. If it's a game about medieval Japan, it would be strange to see half of samurai being female just for the sake of political correctness. The same in sport simulators, mixed gender football team would look fake, because we don't see such things in real world. If it's a fantasy or sci-fi game, then whatever the scenarist invents, everything is possible.

 

[Gorbles]

Yes it is, because :

1) A designer doesn't speak for the whole world. They even disagree between themselves and also do errors.

2) There isn't a single "good design" with all other being "bad design".

3) "realism" is not a binary stat or a switch (it's also a pretty loaded word in game design discussion, which is why I usually tend to prefer to use "verisimilitude" or "immersion" or "believability", because there is just too many bad faith arguments made with "realism" on the kind of "hey, you can shoot someone in the head and they survive SO OBVIOUSLY NOTHING NEED TO MAKE SENSE").

Of course at SOME point a designer will need to cut down on making a 100 % copy of reality, but it's a very subjective point and it heavily depends on the kind of game you do, the public you aim for and your personal preferences.

Of course designers can make errors, but that no counterargument to anything I've provided being incorrect. You yourself complain about bad faith arguments about shooting people in the head about realism; claiming that because designers can make mistakes that this is enough of an argument against what I've provided is a similar kind of nonsense.

There are definitely things that are good design, and things that are definitely bad design. Design isn't wholly subjective. There are things that consistently provide better player feedback, and there are things that don't. I've provided what I can, and I'm not bothering further. You want to dismiss these things as just opinion vs. opinion, that's your prerogative. Not going to stop you.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The level of realism should depend on the game genre IMO. If it's a game about medieval Japan, it would be strange to see half of samurai being female just for the sake of political correctness. The same in sport simulators, mixed gender football team would look fake, because we don't see such things in real world. If it's a fantasy or sci-fi game, then whatever the scenarist invents, everything is possible.

What's your take on the depiction of violence in these games? I've played a lot of sports games, and to my memory they frequently gloss over the implementation of injuries to players for gameplay's sake. They don't want a team's season decided by a random, season-ending injury to a key player - realism is deliberately subverted in the interest of gameplay, because when we're playing a game, we don't want sheer bad luck to ruin everything. This is especially true in multiplayer games, where having a whole season combust because your ace starting pitcher cut his pitching hand while gardening would seem outrageously stupid, but I've played single-player sports games that gingerly dance around realistic, random player injuries ("wear-and-tear" injuries are more common, because those are something the player can plan for and control).

Likewise, every wargame I've ever played grants the player near-perfect command & control. Again, this is in the interest of not frustrating the player. Having units fail to receive your orders, or show a delay in getting and implementing your orders, or be unable to carry them out for reasons you don't understand, would infuriate most gamers. Some games implement a half-hearted "morale" system, but some don't even bother. In Company of Heroes, your men could be pinned, but wouldn't retreat until you told them to, and when they did, they did so in good order and quickly found their way back to your base so you could redeploy them (occasionally, a retreating unit would take a bad route, but that was usually blamed on poor pathing by the programmers and was never cited as 'realistic' panic and fog-and-war on the part of the fleeing men). In the Total War games, I don't believe you ever lose control of a unit that loses line-of-sight (signal flags) and the ability to hear audio cues (horns and drums) from the command unit. Game designers simply presume that gamers don't want even semi-realistic command & control.

p.s. I had another thought: How many men do armies lose to disease and desertion before they ever reach the battlefield in wargames, such as the Total War series? A line of female samurai would be a lot less strange than the miraculous health and fitness of the soldiers in these games, which we tend to take for granted. James Stavridis was on the radio yesterday, and said something like, "amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics." Has there ever been a wargame where the soldiers' footwear and access to clean water were a concern?

 

[Kyriakos]

Paradox games mechanics suck.

 

[Lohrenswald]

For a moment I thought the thread title said sexiest instead of sexist

 

[Zardnaar]

What's your take on the depiction of violence in these games? I've played a lot of sports games, and to my memory they frequently gloss over the implementation of injuries to players for gameplay's sake. They don't want a team's season decided by a random, season-ending injury to a key player - realism is deliberately subverted in the interest of gameplay, because when we're playing a game, we don't want sheer bad luck to ruin everything. This is especially true in multiplayer games, where having a whole season combust because your ace starting pitcher cut his pitching hand while gardening would seem outrageously stupid, but I've played single-player sports games that gingerly dance around realistic, random player injuries ("wear-and-tear" injuries are more common, because those are something the player can plan for and control).

Likewise, every wargame I've ever played grants the player near-perfect command & control. Again, this is in the interest of not frustrating the player. Having units fail to receive your orders, or show a delay in getting and implementing your orders, or be unable to carry them out for reasons you don't understand, would infuriate most gamers. Some games implement a half-hearted "morale" system, but some don't even bother. In Company of Heroes, your men could be pinned, but wouldn't retreat until you told them to, and when they did, they did so in good order and quickly found their way back to your base so you could redeploy them (occasionally, a retreating unit would take a bad route, but that was usually blamed on poor pathing by the programmers and was never cited as 'realistic' panic and fog-and-war on the part of the fleeing men). In the Total War games, I don't believe you ever lose control of a unit that loses line-of-sight (signal flags) and the ability to hear audio cues (horns and drums) from the command unit. Game designers simply presume that gamers don't want even semi-realistic command & control.

p.s. I had another thought: How many men do armies lose to disease and desertion before they ever reach the battlefield in wargames, such as the Total War series? A line of female samurai would be a lot less strange than the miraculous health and fitness of the soldiers in these games, which we tend to take for granted. James Stavridis was on the radio yesterday, and said something like, "amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics." Has there ever been a wargame where the soldiers' footwear and access to clean water were a concern?

Paradox games tend to have some form of attrition and failure is always an option.

Generals get killed in battles as well. Send Panzers to Moscow logistics matter.

Sending armies into black death areas not good.

CK2 is a relative hit sold a million copies circa 2014. Still sold well on steam in 2018.

It's because it's such a bastard of a game it's part of the appeal.

Its almost an RPG and can be played as such.

The Patriarchy just snacked me down and Catholic again my God queen daughter is still gonna inherit but her putz brother is gonna get another title. I foresee a fatal accident.

Azenet of Egypt
Diplomacy 31
Martial 12
Steward 12
Intrigue 15
Learning 16

 

[red_elk]

What's your take on the depiction of violence in these games? I've played a lot of sports games, and to my memory they frequently gloss over the implementation of injuries to players for gameplay's sake. They don't want a team's season decided by a random, season-ending injury to a key player - realism is deliberately subverted in the interest of gameplay, because when we're playing a game, we don't want sheer bad luck to ruin everything. This is especially true in multiplayer games, where having a whole season combust because your ace starting pitcher cut his pitching hand while gardening would seem outrageously stupid, but I've played single-player sports games that gingerly dance around realistic, random player injuries ("wear-and-tear" injuries are more common, because those are something the player can plan for and control).

Likewise, every wargame I've ever played grants the player near-perfect command & control. Again, this is in the interest of not frustrating the player. Having units fail to receive your orders, or show a delay in getting and implementing your orders, or be unable to carry them out for reasons you don't understand, would infuriate most gamers. Some games implement a half-hearted "morale" system, but some don't even bother. In Company of Heroes, your men could be pinned, but wouldn't retreat until you told them to, and when they did, they did so in good order and quickly found their way back to your base so you could redeploy them (occasionally, a retreating unit would take a bad route, but that was usually blamed on poor pathing by the programmers and was never cited as 'realistic' panic and fog-and-war on the part of the fleeing men). In the Total War games, I don't believe you ever lose control of a unit that loses line-of-sight (signal flags) and the ability to hear audio cues (horns and drums) from the command unit. Game designers simply presume that gamers don't want even semi-realistic command & control.

p.s. I had another thought: How many men do armies lose to disease and desertion before they ever reach the battlefield in wargames, such as the Total War series? A line of female samurai would be a lot less strange than the miraculous health and fitness of the soldiers in these games, which we tend to take for granted. James Stavridis was on the radio yesterday, and said something like, "amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics." Has there ever been a wargame where the soldiers' footwear and access to clean water were a concern?

I'm not a big fan of hardcore realistic simulators. Yes, realism is often sacrificed fore the sake of better gameplay in many games. Political correctness is different thing though, in most cases it doesn't affect gameplay. If you just make half of samurai female, many gamers would likely perceive it as game switched its genre from "historical" to "fantasy". Which is not bad per se, just creating different kind of a game.

 

[Lord Shadow]

Grand strategy genre is niche and 93% male. It's probably uneconomic to make a new diverse one and it wouldn't do well if you had a game with female popes etc.

Such a game would appeal to history type strategic players and it's not going to appeal to significant amounts of female players.

CK2 is probably the biggest mass market game PDS developed maybe EUIV.

Such a game would be pandering and who would buy it.

I guess you and MaryKB don't play Stellaris which is gender neutral?

Vote with your wallet

But here's the thing: we've established CK2 offers plenty of integrated options to disregard the historical context and make women equal (or even superior) to men. Even within the game you have means to reshape the society of the time, which I honestly can't see as less empowering than just beginning play with all the doors open to you.

MaryKB argues any extra player effort to that end (presumably even if it's just a couple of clicks, as I've argued and she didn't respond) automatically makes the game sexist, a stance which I find frankly ridiculous. One may well call a good chunk of RPGs with character creation sexist because switching the person's gender constitutes one click.

 

[MaryKB]

What's your take on the depiction of violence in these games? I've played a lot of sports games, and to my memory they frequently gloss over the implementation of injuries to players for gameplay's sake. They don't want a team's season decided by a random, season-ending injury to a key player - realism is deliberately subverted in the interest of gameplay, because when we're playing a game, we don't want sheer bad luck to ruin everything. This is especially true in multiplayer games, where having a whole season combust because your ace starting pitcher cut his pitching hand while gardening would seem outrageously stupid, but I've played single-player sports games that gingerly dance around realistic, random player injuries ("wear-and-tear" injuries are more common, because those are something the player can plan for and control).

Likewise, every wargame I've ever played grants the player near-perfect command & control. Again, this is in the interest of not frustrating the player. Having units fail to receive your orders, or show a delay in getting and implementing your orders, or be unable to carry them out for reasons you don't understand, would infuriate most gamers. Some games implement a half-hearted "morale" system, but some don't even bother. In Company of Heroes, your men could be pinned, but wouldn't retreat until you told them to, and when they did, they did so in good order and quickly found their way back to your base so you could redeploy them (occasionally, a retreating unit would take a bad route, but that was usually blamed on poor pathing by the programmers and was never cited as 'realistic' panic and fog-and-war on the part of the fleeing men). In the Total War games, I don't believe you ever lose control of a unit that loses line-of-sight (signal flags) and the ability to hear audio cues (horns and drums) from the command unit. Game designers simply presume that gamers don't want even semi-realistic command & control.

p.s. I had another thought: How many men do armies lose to disease and desertion before they ever reach the battlefield in wargames, such as the Total War series? A line of female samurai would be a lot less strange than the miraculous health and fitness of the soldiers in these games, which we tend to take for granted. James Stavridis was on the radio yesterday, and said something like, "amateurs talk strategy while professionals talk logistics." Has there ever been a wargame where the soldiers' footwear and access to clean water were a concern?

Beautiful post, I can't like this enough. lol I've seen what you mean, in those war games you have complete telepathic control of your armies! Imagine if you had to dispatch a message with a rider, who'd carry it to your front lines and you hope to God s/he doesn't get intercepted and also that your field commanders actually follow your orders. These guys wouldn't even play!

I find it really sad, yet also funny in a pathetic sort of way, how people like Akka and Zardnaar keep trying to rationalize this stuff ... at least just admit it's sexism and you don't want women playing/enjoying these games.

Paradox games mechanics suck.

Ugh I know .. I've tried a few, like Cities Skylines, Pillars of Eternity, Stellaris, and maybe something else, and I hated all of them. I feel that games should be fun, not work.

 

[Zardnaar]

But here's the thing: we've established CK2 offers plenty of integrated options to disregard the historical context and make women equal (or even superior) to men. Even within the game you have means to reshape the society of the time, which I honestly can't see as less empowering than just beginning play with all the doors open to you.

MaryKB argues any extra player effort to that end (presumably even if it's just a couple of clicks, as I've argued and she didn't respond) automatically makes the game sexist, a stance which I find frankly ridiculous. One may well call a good chunk of RPGs with character creation sexist because switching the person's gender constitutes one click.

Well she's consistent, respect her opinions.

I'm not that good at the game but you can be a real dick in it. You can marry an older women and father only bastards picking the best traits and legitimizing them

 

[MaryKB]

The Patriarchy just snacked me down and Catholic again my God queen daughter is still gonna inherit but her putz brother is gonna get another title. I foresee a fatal accident.

If you don't like your new ruler, can't you just have them abdicate? Or is the game just not realistic?

 

[Zardnaar]

If you don't like your new ruler, can't you just have them abdicate? Or is the game just not realistic?

You are the new ruler, abdication can happen but it's rare/event driven. Abdication was very rare IRL but happened hence it's event driven. That means you can't chose it.

You can suicide if depressed (I did to put genius daughter on throne), or try to creatively get killed in a variety of ways.

The game rewards long reigns though so if you are a baby monarch with regent and live into your 70s you are very powerful as your vassals give you more of everything.

Passing multiple laws is another reason for long reign. You have to rule for 10 years, be at peace and not have vassals hate you.

There's also a variety of reasons you might want a short reign, genetic traits are a big one, not having a well trained monarchs another. Getting around truces and setting up a long reign for your heir is also an option.