Sexist Game or Sandbox?

[Gorbles]

It's not an ad hominem. It is an ironic warning that going down the identity-fundamentalist rathole (e.g, the argument is right or wrong based on the identity of the person making it) is not a good idea.

It's an ironic warning you made by using the exact same logic you're complaining about (by claiming that it's dangerous for men to presume they can call out sexism perpetrated by women)? Have I misread you?

Egon made a very fair argument about societal norms, and you seem to have taken it somewhat personally. That's my read on this.

 

[Lexicus]

It's an ironic warning you made by using the exact same logic you're complaining about (by claiming that it's dangerous for men to presume they can call out sexism perpetrated by women)? Have I misread you?

I mean, yeah, because I wasn't actually being serious. I guess I should have made that more obvious.

Egon made a very fair argument about societal norms, and you seem to have taken it somewhat personally. That's my read on this.

Maybe so. It's difficult to avoid taking it personally.

 

[Gorbles]

I mean, yeah, because I wasn't actually being serious. I guess I should have made that more obvious.

Maybe so. It's difficult to avoid taking it personally.

1. The key point about irony is to make it abundantly clear that you don't believe in the position, so, yeah?

2. I guess the constructive way forwards is to ask you why? If you want to. There are goodness knows how many of these threads nomatter how loaded the opening question, and I've never once felt the need to go "woah #notallmen" here. Sexism takes constant introspection. Most forms of bias that lead to discrimination (however unintentionally) do. It is virtually impossible to be past it, but taking such things personally is definitely not going to help.

 

[Lexicus]

1. The key point about irony is to make it abundantly clear that you don't believe in the position, so, yeah?

Hmm. An interesting perspective. Mine is close to the opposite: the best-done irony is when you almost can't tell whether it's meant seriously. Key word being almost, of course.

2. I guess the constructive way forwards is to ask you why? If you want to. There are goodness knows how many of these threads nomatter how loaded the opening question, and I've never once felt the need to go "woah #notallmen" here. Sexism takes constant introspection. Most forms of bias that lead to discrimination (however unintentionally) do. It is virtually impossible to be past it, but taking such things personally is definitely not going to help.

I've said all I intend to say about this already. If someone can respond to the arguments I've already made and show me why it is sexist (in particular, I would like to hear what @EgonSpengler has to say in response to my elaboration on my point, and I would also like to specifically apologize to him for my comment in that post) I will be grateful. But as of now...I'm not convinced.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Existence of "other ridiculous immersion breaking things" in the game doesn't cancel the fact that female Sultan would be immersion breaking too.
Ridiculous things are usually unintentional results of bugs and imbalances.

Sure, yes, bugs and design errors can do that, too, but the things I mentioned up above are very much deliberate design decisions, and they're nearly ubiquitous.

I suppose I should clarify: a female Sultan just handed to me by the game by default would be immersion-breaking. It would not be immersion-breaking, as I've already said, if the player made the right choices, which are apparently already made available by the game, to make a female Sultan happen.

Right, I agree, although "immersion-breaking" wouldn't be the right word for me. "Consistent" maybe? When a game (or a book, movie or television show) proclaims itself to be something, even implicitly, I expect it to actually be that. When I'm judging a work of art, I always try to judge it by whatever criteria it embraces for itself (and figuring out what a work of art is trying to do is sometimes difficult). So, for example, I judge the portrayal of violence differently in Avengers than I do in Saving Private Ryan, because of what those movies seem to tell me is how they want to portray violence (one of the criticism of Saving Pvt Ryan that I thought was a real eye-roller was that there were so few Black people in it; well, yeah, the US Army didn't have integrated units in WWII - I couldn't tell if the people making that criticism simply didn't know that). If a PC game apparently begins with a purely historical setting, then yes, its setting ought to be historical at the beginning. CKII and Civ VI present very different starting points. But as you and @AmazonQueen and @red_elk say, once the game begins all bets are off, which is pretty much why we're playing it in the first place.

And what other "ridiculous things" do you suppose are not immersion-breaking for me, anyway?

Specifically? I don't know. More generally, I named the command & control capabilities that the player enjoys in wargames, because that's something that is commonplace and rarely commented upon. (I've actually proposed more realistic C&C systems for wargames and had the idea swatted back in my face like I'd suggest playing the game naked while hanging upsidedown from the ceiling. Not in this forum, elsewhere.)

So you think what I just said is as bad as saying the N-word, or am I misunderstanding you?

No, sorry, I was just using Rodriguez sticking her foot in her mouth as an example of a person being labeled as being a thing when she said something that was a thing, and then not being allowed to simply say "whoops, sorry." fwiw, I don't think anybody believed that she was using the N-word maliciously. It seemed as though everybody understood that she was singing a song written by someone else, which kind of makes the overreaction worse, in a way. People understood that she was just clumsy, and they still jumped on her for it, and then jumped on her some more for apologizing in a way they didn't like. It seemed like making a mountain out of a molehill, when there are already plenty of real mountains that we need people to climb.

Yeah, but the entire point of the game is that realizing the "what ifs" should require player input. If the Ottoman Empire can conquer Russia without the player putting in any real work to see that outcome, it is not fun. Similarly, if the game just hands us female Ottoman Sultans without the player putting in any work it's not fun (for me anyway).

I've only played CKII for a few-dozen hours, and I've never play HOI or EU at all. Do the AI-controlled nations in those games follow historical events or patterns? I've played Total War games a ton, and I can say for certain that the computer-controlled nations do not follow historical behaviors or events in those games. Those games may begin with a historical starting point, but once the game begins, everything goes bat[stuff] insane, with or without player input (fwiw, I enjoy that, watching crazy [stuff] happen is part of the fun, for me).

I mean, I even say I'm fine with the game including an option to allow female rulers by default without the player having to transform these medieval societies at all (the Paradox historical simulator I'm familiar with, Hearts of Iron IV, includes a bunch of options when you start a game to create ahistorical AI behavior and so on which is fine, but I mostly don't play with those options checked because they often lead to immersion-breaking outcomes).

Yeah, right, those options ought to be standard in every game by now. I play Path of Exile a lot, and one of the game's glaring shortfalls is that there isn't an avatar of either sex for all of the archetypes. If you play a Templar or a Marauder, you're male. If you play a Witch or a Ranger, you're female. You can't play a male witch or a female Templar. It's just the avatars, it has no impact on gameplay. But Mass Effect has been doing that for years, and those games have a fully-voiced protagonist, so they had to record the whole script twice, once with a male actor and once with a female actor. And the depth and attention to detail in the Path of Exile artwork is one of that game's greatest strengths. When it comes to alternative avatars, it's like they just forgot or something, I dunno.


p.s.

I've said all I intend to say about this already. If someone can respond to the arguments I've already made and show me why it is sexist (in particular, I would like to hear what @EgonSpengler has to say in response to my elaboration on my point, and I would also like to specifically apologize to him for my comment in that post) I will be grateful. But as of now...I'm not convinced.

(Not ignoring this, thinking about it.)

p.p.s Crap, I just noticed I pasted the wrong name several times. I think I fixed it.

 

[Gorbles]

Hmm. An interesting perspective. Mine is close to the opposite: the best-done irony is when you almost can't tell whether it's meant seriously. Key word being almost, of course.

I've said all I intend to say about this already. If someone can respond to the arguments I've already made and show me why it is sexist (in particular, I would like to hear what @EgonSpengler has to say in response to my elaboration on my point, and I would also like to specifically apologize to him for my comment in that post) I will be grateful. But as of now...I'm not convinced.

1. I think that works best within close groups, and not often contentious threads in places like this - even between members that get on. But yeah, it does depend on the reading of it (from all involved parties).

2. Yeah, completely fair, I was more commenting on the "man commenting on sexism" angle than anything else.

 

[Lexicus]

If a PC game apparently begins with a purely historical setting, then yes, its setting ought to be historical at the beginning. CKII and Civ VI present very different starting points. But as you and @AmazonQueen and @red_elk say, once the game begins all bets are off, which is pretty much why we're playing it in the first place.

Yes, I've been trying to make this point but haven't been able to find the right words.

Specifically? I don't know. More generally, I named the command & control capabilities that the player enjoys in wargames, because that's something that is commonplace and rarely commented upon. (I've actually proposed more realistic C&C systems for wargames and had the idea swatted back in my face like I'd suggest playing the game naked while hanging upsidedown from the ceiling. Not in this forum, elsewhere.)

I actually do find that stuff immersion-breaking, when I remember to. But it's not immersion-breaking in a way that makes me not want to play the game, and for the record neither would the game handing us a female Ottoman Sultan by default. But it would be immersion-breaking.

The degree of historical realism also matters here. Paradox games tend to try to be true to the time period they're depicting and do a better job than most, and they are marketed to an audience for whom that kind of thing is important. Medieval 2: Total War also supposedly depicts a historical time period but the degree of realism is much lower and I don't think that game would lose anything by having women available as generals, or units displaying half male, half female soldier graphics. It is already too far from an accurate depiction of history for stuff like that to matter at all.

I've only played CKII for a few-dozen hours, and I've never play HOI or EU at all. Do the AI-controlled nations in those games follow historical events or patterns?

I can only speak to HOI4 as I've never played EU, but in HOI4 there is a vague historical pattern to events, but no two games are likely to be the same even with "historical AI focuses" checked. You can codify ahistorical AI behaviors by checking various options in the starting menu, like as an example you can make the German AI ditch Hitler and bring back the Kaiserreich, or you can make the Soviet AI invade Afghanistan and Iran rather than focusing on the Baltic states and Poland. I don't see an option for "gender equality" or something similar to be fundamentally different from any of those kinds of options.

No, sorry, I was just using Rodriguez sticking her foot in her mouth as an example of a person being labeled as being a thing when she said something that was a thing, and then not being allowed to simply say "whoops, sorry."

Fair enough, I've made the same point any number of times. I do try to give people that space when I'm on the other end of this sort of thing, as in "that thing you said was bad" rather than "you are bad", but I probably don't always succeed.

Yeah, right, those options ought to be standard in every game by now. I play Path of Exile a lot, and one of the game's glaring shortfalls is that there isn't an avatar of either sex for all of the archetypes. If you play a Templar or a Marauder, you're male. If you play a Witch or a Ranger, you're female. You can't play a male witch or a female Templar. It's just the avatars, it has no impact on gameplay. But Mass Effect has been doing that for years, and those games have a fully-voiced protagonist, so they had to record the whole script twice, once with a male actor and once with a female actor. And the depth and attention to detail in the Path of Exile artwork is one of that game's greatest strengths. When it comes to alternative avatars, it's like they just forgot or something, I dunno.

I like how the Halo series has added some female Spartan characters. Back in the days of the original Halo trilogy you had to read the novels to be aware that there were any female Spartans at all. The Marines always had a scattering of women though, I think the first game is the only exception to that, but even then there were female Marine officer characters in the novelization.

Hell, I would be fine with a game like Total War including a gender-flip option so that your main faction characters and soldier avatars are all female. That could actually be very cool and would probably be preferable to including female units with some factions as a gimmick, which is what some Total War entries have done (e.g. in Rome Total War you could train Screeching Women as the Germans, who inflicted morale penalties on nearby enemy units with their "battlecry" ability).

(Not ignoring this, thinking about it.)

Well you did what I wanted there, lol.

1. I think that works best within close groups, and not often contentious threads in places like this - even between members that get on. But yeah, it does depend on the reading of it (from all involved parties).

The internet really screws irony up.

 

[MaryKB]

Hell, I would be fine with a game like Total War including a gender-flip option so that your main faction characters and soldier avatars are all female. That could actually be very cool and would probably be preferable to including female units with some factions as a gimmick, which is what some Total War entries have done (e.g. in Rome Total War you could train Screeching Women as the Germans, who inflicted morale penalties on nearby enemy units with their "battlecry" ability)

I played a game called "Fallen Enchantress", which is kind of like Civilization only fantasy, and one fun thing about that game is you can create your own units. And you have full customization: I made my entire armies of women knights, archers, pikes, wizards, etc, and it was absolutely glorious.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

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.

Bear in mind the original OP makes no mention (I don't think) that you can configure all this in the options before even starting the game, it just described the default configuration and how you can play the game within these rules. And all the initial reactions were to that.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

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?

Depending on the game, a ton. It's not uncommon to have attrition be the #1 casualty source in EU 4 for example, even if you took ideas to reduce it. Especially true in late game wars.

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

You can do much worse than that. At least that has a downside of some risk of game over if your only legalized bastard dies just after you take over as him.

Example of some broken stuff:

You can raid and kidnap or favor recruit foreign women. Say the daughter of a duke who has no children. If your nation allows women to be landed, you can then grant them a kingdom title + immediately murder them. The father will inherit, and since the kingdom title is higher he will be your vassal rather than whoever he was under previously. Now you get at duchy...without actually declaring war for it or generating a truce. Once you have multiple kingdom titles you can give out at once this kind of expansion tactic can run away.

Since your new king+duke happens to be a different religion, you can just revoke ALL of his titles and nobody of your true faith will care. If he tries to rebel by himself...well good luck with that.

Women's rights FTW! Very strong ability in CK2. You can also recruit a ton of old ladies with no children and give them titles. It's like having viceroyalty techs, but at the start of the game! Even better, if you're a master seducer your harem of old lady subjects will all be very loyal!

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

Ah so it sounds like it's not a real historical simulator then, but rather a game with mechanics-driven objectives.

You actually can abdicate really easily, even just by antagonizing nobles and then "losing" the war (insta-surrender) so your heir takes over.

Abdication because it suits the player isn't realistic though. Many bad kings hung on to the bitter end.

In CK2 this is no limitation if you know what you're doing .

I've only played CKII for a few-dozen hours, and I've never play HOI or EU at all. Do the AI-controlled nations in those games follow historical events or patterns?

Sometimes the game tries to shoehorn it, which almost always functions poorly. Generally the answer is "no". HOI 4's focuses make them kind of follow the patterns, and since it covers a relatively short period of time the game is less likely to have wild outcomes unless the player does something drastic to alter the course of history.

 

[Lord Shadow]

Bear in mind the original OP makes no mention (I don't think) that you can configure all this in the options before even starting the game, it just described the default configuration and how you can play the game within these rules. And all the initial reactions were to that.

Not sure if just the initial ones.

By now I'm quite aware the discussion has either gone down several tangents, or focused on criticising a game CK2 actually isn't.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

As I read this thread, I can't believe that we are having this stupid argument yet again. Can't we just play a goddamn game without involving gender politics?

IMO, if you play a game based on history, you should be prepared to accept that not a lot of women were in the armies back in the middle ages, much less commanded one. Yes, there were probably women who did pick up a sword or a bow to help defend their villages from plunderers and they died along with their male comrades. I fully expect that that occurred. The problem is that it is not well historically documented. The armies of the middle ages were predominantly male, (if not all male). That is simply an historical fact. It's hard to integrate women into a story line where in reality, none participated. It's immersion breaking, and often downright stupid. I'm sorry if the bleeding hearts among you disagree, but gee whiz, that's life and how it was back then.

Now, if I play a modern game, based in the modern or future eras, I fully expect that there is the equal possibility for a male or female protagonist, and it would be nice if I could play the protagonist of my choice. The exception to this is a game such as the Tombraider series where Lara Croft is necessarily female because it was written that way. It is the story of a person as much as it is a video game. There are similar male characters who are part of a story and the game tells that story as you play. (I can't think of any male characters like this ATM, unfortunately, but I know they exist.) Replacing Lara Croft with a male character would be silly as the story would have to be rewritten to be male-centric and it would lose part of it's charm. The hew and cry from female gamers screaming "sexism" if this happened would be deafening at the very least, but replacing a male character with a woman would be totally OK. (See how sexism works? It's fine for women to get what they want, but don't you boys do the same thing.) This is what makes me angry about the whole thing. There are characters and situations in life, fiction and games where the protagonist must be male or female in order to serve the story, or be realistically accurate. Replacing one with the other just to placate half of the population does service to no one. It is simply pandering to a special interest group.

A very good example of destructive sexism in games is Civ6. A decision was made by the developers to be more diverse in their leader choices to appeal to the female demographic. OK fine. But the problem here is that some of the female leaders (and it's been so long for me I can't remember who they all are) never led a country! How does this compute? It's a game based on history. Margaret Thatcher would belong in the game, Dido or Catherine Di Medici do not. It's one of the reasons that I won't buy Civ6 (beyond the fact that it is a lousy game and still has 1 UPT). It is insulting to me, and assumes that I, as a woman, am either too stupid to understand history, or that I want to ignore it completely and whitewash the past.

As some of you may know, I am a modder for Civ4 and I am responsible for the BAT Mod. Civ4 has a variety of leaders, including some women: Victoria and Elizabeth of England, Catherine the Great, Hatsepsheput of Egypt. They all lead countries or kingdoms, so it is realistically plausible to have them in the game. There are mods if you want them that add Dido, the Trung sisters and a couple of Chinese women to the game, if you should so choose. I find those mods unrealistic as those women never actually lead a civilization. They lead rebellion groups or were "the power behind the throne." Sorry, but that doesn't cut it for me. I want real history. But back to my original point. I did feel that women were a little under represented in Civ4 so as part of the BAT mod I added female corporate executives and missionaries. You have a 50/50 chance of spawning one when the unit is created. I also expanded the great people listing to include many female historical figures in the various categories. Another addition in one unreleased version was that you had a certain percentage chance that one of your combat units would have at least one art depiction of a female soldier in the modern era where it was actually plausible. This was as far as I was willing to go with it as otherwise it would be immersion breaking to those playing the game. As it is, I have received a number of complaints asking me to remove the female units, which I will not do. I have made a couple of sub mods and leader packs (on request) where there were alternate female leaders for those who wish to face them or play them, but that is not part of the core game or my main mod, so I'm OK with that.

When playing an RPG where I must have a party of adventurers, I try to make them an equal split of male and female, with no preference in the roles they play. Women can be fighters, men can be mages, it doesn't matter. That's because I believe in the equality of the sexes, not the superiority of one over the other. Each gender has the opportunity to be anything they want to be, just like in real life.

tl;dr:
Any modern game set in the modern or future eras should have the ability or opportunity to have the protagonist be either male or female, and/or the opponent has the possibility to be either gender. An historical game on the other hand, should be true to the history it is portraying and have gender roles assigned accordingly. Now the bleeding-hearted PC among you will be mortally offended by what I have said here, but I don't really care. The gender divide is not a war. It will not be won by one group or the other. The fact is that we need each other, and shredding the other group in the cause of political correctness is not only stupid, it is disingenuous. It does a disservice to many women who don't see men as the enemy, but as collaborators in the game of life. There are exceptions, for sure. Some men can be truly Neanderthal, and some women can be over the top militant. Those are outliers and will get us nowhere. The real test is if we can work together to build a better world. Antagonizing one group or the other gets us nothing but acrimony and heartache.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

As I read this thread, I can't believe that we are having this stupid argument yet again. Can't we just play a goddamn game without involving gender politics?

But if you don't give women equal rights in CK2 you can't murder them for titles! You ~halve your potential claimants to land, that's not optimal!

When playing an RPG where I must have a party of adventurers, I try to make them an equal split of male and female, with no preference in the roles they play. Women can be fighters, men can be mages, it doesn't matter. That's because I believe in the equality of the sexes, not the superiority of one over the other. Each gender has the opportunity to be anything they want to be, just like in real life.

Bah, so many RPGs do that already. Though I guess every potential configuration of characters in an RPG has been done (all men, all women, mix of various ratios, complete freedom of creation), so it's hard to be original.

I do like that one scene in FF8 where you get different comments from the characters based on who you put in your party. If you take only women with Squall one of the other characters says something like "yeah, I figured you'd do that". But the girls will make an amusing comment if you only bring guys in your party too.

 

[Senethro]

Buncha thoughts:

1: Men recorded history and now modern men think those records constituted reality.
2: Some people want to see the result of sexism in history but sanitized kinda. They don't want any examination of the social forces that put men in a position of overrepresentation, especially if those forces are still present and active. NO POLITICS IN THE WARGAME!
3: As a man I'm rarely if ever wrong because of "Thats just reality!" or some variation of.

 

[Gorbles]

@Lemon Merchant, nobody's stopping you playing games without talking about political angles to it. But this is a thread literally entitled "sexist thread or sandbox", so that's something that's clear going in

That said, as many words as there are there, I don't think it's fair to have a discussion when you repeatedly characterise a buncha people as "bleeding hearts" and outright state you don't care if people disagree. That's venting, which is all good and well, but venting does not a discussion make.

 

[red_elk]

The exception to this is a game such as the Tombraider series where Lara Croft is necessarily female because it was written that way. It is the story of a person as much as it is a video game. There are similar male characters who are part of a story and the game tells that story as you play. (I can't think of any male characters like this ATM, unfortunately, but I know they exist.)

The Witcher.

 

[Lemon Merchant]

That said, as many words as there are there, I don't think it's fair to have a discussion when you repeatedly characterise a buncha people as "bleeding hearts" and outright state you don't care if people disagree. That's venting, which is all good and well, but venting does not a discussion make.

Oh I don't care if people disagree, but that isn't the point. If that's all you picked up on in my post, you either clearly didn't read it all, or you are cherry picking. You see one thing and go "lalala" for the rest of it, obviously missing the point I was trying to make. It wasn't just venting, though I will admit that the first line was. It was a critique of rampant political correctness gone awry.

@MaryKB I saw what you posted before you deleted it. "Practically" running things is not the same as being a de facto head of state, I'm sorry, but that doesn't wash with me. And as for "defending da boyz", I'm not defending anyone. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of toxic feminism and PC gone wild. Sorry, but I have no patience for either. Pardon me for being a moderate feminist. Unlike you I'm not out to castrate and emasculate every man I see. I actually see the good in some people. I don't expect you to understand that as your misandry is legendary at this point.

 

[Commodore]

Men recorded history and now modern men think those records constituted reality.

This sounds like a convenient excuse to ignore historical fact and engage in historical revisionism to suit your political views.

 

[Gorbles]

This sounds like a convenient excuse to ignore historical fact and engage in historical revisionism to suit your political views.

Men recording history is a historical fact.

"history is written by the victor" is another relatively well-known truism, to the point of being a cliche. Maybe you should bring more to the discussion than accusing people of having a political agenda, @Commodore.

 

[red_elk]

I didn't get the point about Catherine either, she wasn't just practically running things, she was actual empress...