GamerGate? Really??

Over the weekend, a friend of mine expressed a lot of super-heated arguments and complaints over the recent phenomenon of "GamerGate," and I have to say, I just don't care.

I am most definitely a gamer, but I don't consider myself a part of gamer culture -- that is to say, I don't spend any time in gaming forums discussing characters or plots, nor do I really concern myself with the Internet's general opinion of games.  Sure, I might check Metacritic for a rough idea of how good the game might be, and I'll certainly poll my friends, but that's about it.  I don't feel the need to immerse myself in that flood of other people's opinions (plus, with a 50-60 hour per week job, I don't have the time even if I wanted to).  I'm involved in games in as much as I play those I think sound good, and that's it.  Occasionally I post about them here, and if you're reading about my opinions and even somewhat caring, then I thank you greatly.

My point is this: until my friend brought it up, I hadn't given this topic a single thought.  According to him, here's what happened (please note that I have no idea if this is actually what happened; I'm just reporting what I was told):

Zoe Quinn, a game developer, slept with a bunch of game reviewers in exchange for positive reviews of her most recent release.  One of them got pissed when he realized she'd slept with lots of them and lashed out; she claimed they were all boyfriends, but since there were about five of them at a time, the internet does not believe her.
From there, a lot of people inside and outside the gaming community tried to 'hush' things up by deleting posts or comments in forums like Reddit.  Pretty soon it started to explode and what sounds like some femi-Nazi got hold of the story.  She raised a shitload of money on Kickstarter to make 6 videos critiquing the video game world, spending most of those videos calling games misogynistic and citing obscure moments as evidence, such as in Bioshock when there's a pile of naked dead bodies in the background and some happen to be women.  She apparently calls this "intended to titillate men," while my friends who have played Bioshock don't even remember this moment because they were terrified by whatever else was happening in the game at that moment.
True gamers find this woman to be full of shit, not least because she admits she's not a gamer.  People like David Wong, one of the head writers for Cracked.com, find this woman to be a visionary.  The internet community is thus in an uproar because of all the attention she's getting, which apparently is too much bad press for a community that's already persecuted (?) and they're upset about it.

I'm sorry for any inaccuracies here; this is how my friend explained it, and I wrote it down before I did any additional research.
Frankly, I think this provides an insight into how a devoted member of the online gaming community sees the issue, as when I googled "gamergate," I got a lot of Forbes and NYTimes stuff, which is unlikely to come from within the community.

Still, and I'm hesitant to admit it, but here goes, my primary reaction is this: who cares???

Now that I've done a little research, the story doesn't seem any less ridiculous.  It's still a lot of people shouting about stuff and few real points.
The starting argument seems pretty straightforward: don't trade sex for game reviews.  From what I understand, no one seems really sure if that's what actually happened or not; I've read things that claim both sides.  But "Don't trade sex for ANYTHING" is a generally accepted piece of advice, so regardless of what Zoe Quinn actually did, I'm sticking with that diagnosis.

That apparently set off a lot of other close-to-boiling bad blood, with a feminist charity and 4chan setting up camp together and a lot of vicious internet-anonymous name calling and personal attacking on both sides.  There are even some claims of hacking Twitter and YouTube accounts, which seems unnecessary to me.  What all that boiled down to is that gamers aren't sure that the media reviewers and the developers aren't in bed together (pun definitely intended!).

All of sudden then, this erupted into an overall indictment of gamer culture as misogynistic and the stereotypical gamers (fat, white nerds who are afraid of women) as dead.
Frankly, I would think that the end of gamer stereotyping is a good thing; after all, I see gamer kids get stereotyped at school on a daily basis, and I would think they'd embrace the opportunity to hang up the basement-dweller title and get laid.
Apparently not.  The death of the stereotypical gamer is, according to those writing many of these articles, a point of sadness for gamers, who are thus lashing out at Zoe Quinn and this feminist charity in as direct result.  Reading this, I'm pretty sure I'm missing some of the evidence being used to make that connection, but whatever.

Do gamers want to be stereotyped? That seems to be one of the suggestions I'm getting from that, and I imagine it's wrong.  Who wants to be stereotyped, lumped into a one-size-fits all box and left out for others to interpret?  But as I continue researching, I'm seeing that this suggestion is part of what's pissing gamers off so much.

What seems to have happened is that actual Social Justice Warriors, the kinds of people who take to Tumblr to accuse basically anything of hurting some small group (which they probably don't belong to, in my experience) in order to benefit, got hold of this topic, hence the Kickstarter videos calling all games misogynistic and adding fuel to this insane fire.  Others who genuinely care about social issues, without benefiting, those who just care about others' rights and well-beings, then got lumped in with the SJWs and shot down along with them.  As a result, everyone is pissed at everyone else, whether it's SJWs yelling at gamers for participating in what they see as perpetuating the issue, gamers are pissed because everyone is accusing them of something they didn't really do, and the people who want things to be better are caught in the middle.

My apathy comes in roughly when I get to this point, because both sides are right.  There is misogyny in some games, no question.  When the Assassin's Creed people bitched about how many extra hours it would take to make a female character, only to have one of their former developers pop up online to go, "yeah... not really..." that's an issue.  Bishop tells me that a lot of Japanese games have gender-related issues as well, which I already knew since I've read the Cracked.com article about how many Japanese dating games are essentially "you are a girl dating a pidgeon" or something similarly ridiculous.  So the people who want things to be better, and the SJWs who aren't just creating click bait, do have a point.

But the gamers do too, and that's this: Not every single game is like that, and not every single gamer holds the "misogynerd" title.  There are plenty of gamers, guys and girls, who have issues with Grand Theft Auto's beating the shit out of hookers or the fact that Lara Croft, even in 2014, still has an anatomically impossible figure.  Naturally, those gamers want to be acknowledged, not tossed into a giant melting pot of asshole as the internet has apparently done.

So if both sides have points, then what's to be done?

The answer is this: nothing. The only way to solve the issues at hand is for future game developers to try to avoid targeting women, and for the current media to shut the f*ck up about GamerGate.

At its heart, that's the bigger issue of GamerGate.  On both sides, everyone is suspicious, and on both sides, they are left with the same source of information: the media.  And no one trusts what information they're getting.

The media may be the most successful click-bait creators I've ever heard of -- every day, I pull up msn.com, yahoo.com, GoogleNews, and a host of other news or social media sites to the same results: small stories blown into sensational crises designed to get people to open up that page.  Facebook is covered with "This started small. What happened next will (choose one: surprise, shock, warm your heart, scare, etc) you!" pages meant to get clicks.  That's it.  When you do click, there's only rarely legitimate content and usually just a bunch of ads and maybe 10 sentences of story.

And that's why I don't care.  The media today is less about news and more about pageviews.  So if this has turned into some giant mess, I know the culprit.

I understand that gamers are very upset by how they're being portrayed, and I can empathize.  But ultimately, I have to ask why they care about what people outside the community think about them.  One of the first things I learned about being a nerd was that not everyone gets it, and they'll offer you their negative opinions with almost no prompting.  I just had to get over that; if I let it bother me, I'd sink under all the misunderstanding and hatred and BS spouted at me and my community.

Plus, I'm not that concerned because it sure sounds like most of the 'opinions' circulating are just parroting the first ones: games are misogynistic, and so are those who play them.  A parrot can't think; all they can do is repeat.  So if you repeat someone else's argument to me, without evidence to back it up, or any sense of your own thinking added to it, I just don't care about your opinion.  The original authors don't seem to be trustworthy in this case, or really capable of finding anything other than exactly what they were looking for.  A self-fulfilling prophecy isn't necessarily the truth.

Like all other issues, the argument will peter out eventually, and I'm sure it won't get resolved to anyone's satisfaction.  Louis C.K. puts it best when he says, "Nobody ever wins an argument. Nobody ever goes, "oh, I'm wrong." Somebody eventually just goes, 'Shut up. We gotta eat, so let's shut up for a minute.'"

I realize that I may get some flack over this post, and quite frankly, I'd have to say that as someone both only marginally informed or invested in the topic, I don't really care. (The irony of how much I had to say over a topic I don't care about has not escaped me, never fear. :))

The Plight of the Motion Sick

I can't play first-person shooters.  It's not that I don't like them, or that the game titles don't appeal to me; it's that they make me motion sick.  I nearly puked the first time I tried to play Portal -- the second I made an infinite loop and jumped in, I had to turn it off -- and Bishop tried for almost an hour to teach me how to play Half-Life 2, but to no avail.

I don't get motion sick normally.  Cars don't bother me, and planes only make me nauseous when I'm travelling with certain family members.  The only time I can recall a vehicle making me sick was when I went on a cruise during high school, wherein the ship spent approximately two days in the midst of a crazy storm that made it swing from side to side like a teeter-totter.  I spent most of that trip lying in my bed, unable to stand up without vomiting.

But nothing else really upsets my stomach.  Until I crank up a first-person video game, that is, and then I'm sick in minutes and down for the count for the rest of the night.

This has never really bothered me: sure, I would love to enjoy Portal or Half-Life, but I understand their stories enough to participate in discussions about them. But so many first-person games are ones I have no interest in, like Call of Duty or Left for Dead (to be fair, I'm not interested in Left for Dead partially because the witch music scares the shit out of me, but that's a different point).  Bishop desperately wants me to play Battlefield 4, his current obsession, but I figure, hey, WWII is over and I don't want to live it.  Other than me holding out hope that someday this affliction might abate so I can play Bioshock, getting motion sick from games has never bothered me too much.

Then three days ago, I started Alan Wake.

I didn't get very far when I first booted it up.  After about 30 minutes -- enough time to make it through the first nightmare -- I had to shut it down to go do adult stuff like laundry.  Game play is a little clunky: the way you're supposed to fight/duck isn't exactly intuitive and while changing weapons just takes the tap of a button, firing said weapon is luck of the draw; there's no aiming or anything, just pulling the trigger and assuming the gun will fire at the bad guy ahead of you.  The story, though, is really cool, especially for a Stephen King fan like myself.  Alan Wake is a novelist (who quotes King in the opening lines of the game!), vacationing in Bright Falls with his wife, who is trying to help him overcome his writer's block.  However, his wife vanishes, and he starts discovering novel pages credited to him but with no memory of writing them.  The whole game, thus far, has a dark, mysterious tone enhanced by the isolated forest setting and the battles against 'the darkness,' a force from the opening nightmare that hasn't yet been fully explained.

Fighting the forces of darkness takes pistols, flare guns, and apparently, lots and lots of flashlight batteries.  

I'm not very far into it, so I don't know what's coming or really any more than that.  I'm enjoying it -- it has the thriller atmosphere of many King novels without the jump-out-and-scare-you factor that I hate about scary movies.

The problem is this: this game makes me feel like throwing up.  It's third person, like so many other games I love, so I wasn't expecting a problem; when I started feeling nauseous after about 45 minutes of playing, I assumed it was something I'd eaten for dinner and ignored it.  When it didn't get better with some Tums, I wondered if maybe it was the camera movement -- I normally turn the camera sensitivity down on games so I don't feel like I'm being whipped around all the time -- so I turned this one's down as far as it would go.  No luck.

After that, it didn't take long for me to realize that this game was making me motion sick.

I still don't totally get it, even after figuring out the cause.  Sure, the weapons handling is clunky and there's this odd 'focus' feature that zooms the camera off to some far away action without warning, but that shouldn't that big of a deal.

The main character being off-center might be the culprit.  Sure, lots of games have this; Resident Evil 5 and Mass Effect both keep your character slightly off to the left when armed, a body movement that feels natural for me, since I'm right-handed.  But Wake stands waaaaay off to the right, more peripheral than merely off-center, and that's hard to get used to.  He's difficult to control as a result; I'm constantly walking him into things or having to turn him around.

You can see his location during play here. And really, I think this image is with the camera rotated toward him, because he always seems even further to the right from my perspective.  

And even with the sensitivity turned all the way down, the camera movement in this game is really fast, both horizontally and vertically.  All I have to do is barely tap my mouse and the camera goes flying all over the place. Combined, these two features are too much for my brain, and I had to turn the game off.

I did some research. Apparently, game play is a common complaint for fans of this game, and plenty of others seem to get motion sick too.  A lot complain about the movement speed, and there is even a mod for adjusting the "blur effect" of this freaking game to try to make it more palatable:

I might need to download it if I want to continue playing... which, at least right now, I really do. 

Maybe that's what the creators wanted this game to do: disorient you so badly that you feel sick so you can truly empathize with Wake's mindset in the game.  If that's the case, then bravo! Mission Accomplished.

It seems silly that motion sickness should be so restrictive, that it should be a deterrent to game play when it affects basically nothing else in my life.  I really like the game, and I want to continue playing it, but for now... I'm not sure I can handle it.

The Hobbit: Needs More Desolation

Let's face it: there is very little actual desolation happening in The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug.  I admit, it's an intimidating name for the second movie of a trilogy (the second movie always needs whatever help it can get -- I'm looking at you, Matrix Reloaded).  But Smaug doesn't even eat anyone, let alone destroy anything.  Erebor survives with some minor wear and tear, and Peter Jackson couldn't even write in the death of one of the lesser dwarves?? I mean, seriously, of the 12, there are at least three that even an uber-nerd like me can't name; I would have happily sacrificed a little literary accuracy for Smaug to live up to his name.

And truly, a little more inaccuracy really wouldn't have changed much.  I enjoyed the Lord of the Rings books immensely -- I can even slog through the chapters where Tolkien pretty much just describes Frodo and Sam walking for several hundred pages -- but there's no arguing that they could never transfer perfectly to the screen, no matter how good the screenwriting is.  It's pretty damn good here too: Peter Jackson of LOTR fame combined with Guillermo del Toro of Pan's Labryinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army make for a legendary duo, and then you add Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh, both of whom helped adapt the original trilogy of the screen as well.  That's no shortage of writing power right there.  These writers clearly worked their asses off to make these movies work as adaptations of the books; they cut the right stuff, added the right characters (such as Arwen, who only appears in the Return of the King appendices but makes a beautiful, emotional addition to the trilogy), and managed to keep the right tone for all three movies.  The addition of del Toro in The Hobbit series clearly changed some of the art and costumes -- just compare the Goblin King in the first movie to the terrifying creatures of Pan's Labryinth -- but Tauriel and Legolas serve as solid evidence that accuracy doesn't need to be perfectly maintained here for the stories to work, to still be told with respect and beauty and awe.

And even with all that, the desolation promised in the title remains merely a hint at what's to come in the final movie, The Battle of The Five Armies.

I don't yet know what to think about the final movie of the Lord of the Rings.  I'm excited for it: it's the end of the series, the end of an era really. After December, there will be no more LOTR movies.  (Yes, it's possible someone, somewhere, will make another. But books like The Silmarillion are such dense high fantasy that I have trouble believing someone will undertake the task. Don't forget that originally, Peter Jackson wasn't even on board to make the Hobbit movies. Plus, apparently there are some legal issues with the Tolkien estate anyway.)  After December, The Hobbit will end and the stories will come full circle.

I'm also worried about it.  So far, I'm unimpressed with the trailers I've seen.  The main one features a lot of dramatic, eerily quiet scenes while Bilbo narrates rather sadly over them before transitioning into Pippin's song from The Return of the King.  Now, I might be alone in this and I'm fine with that, but I hated that song.  I know songs are an important part of Tolkien's writing, his world-building, but that song just irks me.  Its lyrics come from a poem in the first book, and I don't find that the song adaptation does the poem justice, nor does it offer any additional emotional depth to the movie.  If anything, its placement as a background to Denethor feasting while his son Faramir's forces get pummeled makes it seem cruel and hopeless, carrying no value at all.  So adding it to the trailer makes the whole movie seem dark and depressing and only vaguely worth watching.  I usually love the LOTR soundtracks; in fact, I own several of them.  Their music always washes over the films in such epic beauty, composed to carefully mimic the mood of the story, like the Misty Mountain song in the first Hobbit movie.  My god, I'm not sure there is a better example of a perfectly matched story and song (go listen if you haven't heard it, it's incredible).  So the music for the trailer, to me, sets it up for potential issues.

I'm also wondering about the reception this final movie will receive.  Bishop has been on a movie review conspiracy streak lately, convinced that movie people are paying off the Rotten Tomatoes people for excellent ratings; his primary evidence is that Guardians of the Galaxy has a higher rating than The Godfather, which, while I'm sure isn't a conspiracy, is pretty damning evidence that something sure is amiss.  With that in mind, I've been thinking about The Return of the King.  When it was released in 2003, it basically swept the Oscars, winning everything from Best Sound Mixing and Costume Design to Best Picture and Best Director and tying with Titanic (and Ben-Hur, oddly enough) for most Oscars won ever (11).  It's considered the only fantasy movie to have won Best Picture (I haven't fact-checked that, just IMDB'd it, so I'm not positive) and IMDB users have it listed as the #9 movie ever made.

I don't think that's going to happen to The Battle of the Five Armies.  Thus far, The Hobbit movies haven't received great reviews;  the first came across as a little too Disney for more serious fans, and the second got a lot of "this is just more of the same."  Neither bodes well for the final movie.

I don't know where my expectations are for this, the 6th and final LOTR movie.  I am so excited about it, I really am, but I am trying hard not to set myself up for disappointment.

The Hobbot: The Battle of the Five Armies opens December 17, 2014.  Hopefully, we'll end this thing right.