The Hum-Drum Dullness of Sexual Sin

This will contain spoilers for Fallout: New Vegas.

I shot the leaders of the Omerta crime family.  Shot 'em dead.

Okay, perhaps I'm overstating... actually I roll with Stealth and Speech, so what I really did was talk them in to a room, convince them to shoot at each other, then finish off the survivor with my holdout pistol before quietly slipping out and closing the door behind me.

They know what their crime was: boring me half to death. Attempted murder, as I slice it.

Maybe I had expected too much of Gomorrah, home of the "loosest sluts on the Strip."  Walking in to the casino, after a perfunctory weapons check, I saw exactly what I should have expected given the place's reputation. The prostitutes standing outside the casino are a promise of what is to come inside: more prostitutes. This is accompanied with the occasional NPC dialog drops about how nice or not nice they smell and how loose they are or are not.  Since I've seen more interesting half-naked video game people in... well, almost every video game ever, the prostitutes fail to elicit any interest in me from a sexual standpoint. They are in fact kind of comical, doing their stationary hip-thrust dances for awed onlookers.  Maybe I feel a little bad for them, which is perhaps the intent.

In the spirit of "let's see what happens!" I tried picking up Dazzle, a woman who was standing outside of one of the courtyard tents. My New Vegas avatar is female, like most of my RPG avatars, but, it doesn't matter much.  Every western RPG I have played within the last four years that allows any sort of sex seems to make bisexuality the most interesting option for a female protagonist just by default.  (Note: I have not tried Dragon Age yet. I hear it is different.)  What followed was not a lewd sound drop or a shot of the outside of our little tent but... a whole lot of nothing, except my pockets were a bit lighter after a quick fade to black.

I reset from my last save. May as well keep my caps.  I don't know if there's some kind of consequence for having bought Dazzle, later on down the line, but now I don't think I ever will know.

New Vegas is not really alone in this.  The sex-for-cash in Fable II failed to entice me for similar reasons. Presumably there would at least be some awkward moaning if I took the men or women on the street up on their sex-for-money offer, but if I wanted that, I have a virtual husband waiting for me at home (and a wife, see above) who is always ready to go.  The male prostitutes in Fable are in particular silly, and, seem to be designed to be, but, that doesn't go very far to making purchasing sex tempting at all.  It just makes me wonder why anyone would bother.



You can watch a stripper in Mass Effect.  This is funny for a couple of seconds, then it just feels awkward. "Does anything happen if you keep tipping?" ask YouTube commenters. Spoilers: no.  On the other hand, trying to woo your partner of choice in the Mass Effect series, and establish a relationship, is deeply compelling to me and many.

So I've started to wonder.  Is this a moral position that video games are taking?  Grand Theft Auto's "beat up a hooker and get back your money" notwithstanding, it seems like the common depiction of sex for money in video games is that it's totally hollow, unrewarding, and there is no reason to ever do it when you could be chasing romance.  Are games taking a position on this, or, is it just that, there's no real way to make casual sex narratively compelling, whereas romance actually is?  Is the scrutiny and censorship of sexual depictions in gaming post Hot-Coffee having a chilling effect?

Take for example the first Leisure Suit Larry game, Land of the Lounge Lizards. It's actually possible for Larry to lose his virginity very early on in the game to a prostitute. However, even though "lose your virginity" is supposedly the goal of the game, doing this doesn't complete that task. The only way to actually win the game is to score with... well, another woman you just now met, but she's much more attractive than the hooker and you didn't pay her.  At least this is probably the most interesting hooker I ever bought in a video game, since you get a humorous censored sex sequence out of the deal (and an unforgettable Game Over if you forget your rubber for this encounter).  The LSL games definitely take a position that, despite the protagonist's constant pursuit of sex for its own sake, finding a person you connect with is more important.

That's an overt message in LSL. But it's a covert message in many other games where casual sex itself is simply not made interesting enough to pursue.  And, given that sexual content in games is scrutinized much more heavily than sexual content in almost all other media, games are almost forced to make casual sex uninteresting because they can't expand on its depiction.

So I shot the Omertas.  Not because they were amoral and I am moral.  But because I saw no point to what they do.  The story is set in Vegas: of course it includes prostitutes, but it can't really do anything with them.

My sexual encounters in New Vegas otherwise remain confined to one robot, and one man with a nice hotel room whom shortly thereafter I murdered.

Black Widow?  A hilarious sound drop about "Charlies?"  Hell yes that is compelling.  ...Buying hookers not so much.

I found the picture of Eve from this Valentines' Day themed article which is cute and worth checking out.

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Had a brilliant idea to replace the generic 'books' background for this blog with a few photographs of my actual bookshelf full of video games, warts and all.  Editing them together seamlessly is fairly hard though and the end result is kind of distracting, so I went with this more generic background instead.  Lamenting the lack of good "video game" stock pictures that don't infringe copyright and/or burn your retinas off.  If this one does, let me know.

Monopoly: You're Doing It Wrong

So I've been writing about video games mostly.  But sometimes I also play board games. I'm particularly fond of Dungeons and Dragons, which, while not a board game per se, has board game variants.

Whenever I tell people this, sometimes I add that there are conventions for board games; there are board game enthusiasts.  The response of the average, non-gamer person is "You mean, games like Monopoly?"

...Sure.  Except not really.

By all accounts the American obsession with Monopoly is pretty odd.  For one thing, it's a "serious game," one of the first games with a social agenda to penetrate the mass market (although nobody thinks about Monopoly that way, by some accounts the original intent was to create a game that showed the problems with monopolies in an economic system and how them driving people to bankrupcy is a bad thing).  For another thing, it's not really a great game. It's adequate, but most people who play it then complain that it has problems, such as lasting too long, and taking too long to get interesting.  A larger problem with it, which fewer people mention, is that it's an elimination game, meaning that it isn't over until one player remains, leaving early knockouts from the game out in the cold.  Maybe they can play Catan while they wait.

Of course, since Monopoly is the first board game people think of when you mention a board game, when you say you like board games, the thought process of the person you are talking to seems to go like this...  1) Board games = Monopoly 2) Monopoly is sort of dull 3) Why would anyone like board games?

People...  A big part of the problem with Monopoly isn't Monopoly. It's you.

Zack Hiwiller discusses this on his blog, right about the time I was getting in to regular conversations about it.  You can read that to get the gist of what I'm about to say, but, basically: most everybody I know plays Monopoly with two variant rules. 

1) When you land on Free Parking, you get "the lottery," which is typically a large sum of money. The most common thing to do here is have everyone who pays an income tax throw that money in to the center of the board instead of the "bank," then it becomes the lotto prize for hitting Free Parking. In my family, we also threw $50 in there to start to sweeten the pot.

2) When you land on an unsold property, and you don't want it, just pass.

These aren't the official rules.  Both of these house rules cause balance issues that actually weaken the game.  The Free Parking rule allows for an exciting "come from behind" scenario, but this leads to players who should be knocked out of the game to continue to play, which causes the game overall to be longer.  Being able to pass on properties means properties are sold more slowly, which also isn't in the rules: passed properties are supposed to be auctioned to the highest bidder.

This is why it intrigued me to learn about the new, electronic Monopoly that is being made without dice or paper money.  My number one question about it was "Does it make you play the game by the actual rules?"

Apparently it does.  After a fashion.  It does seem to enforce the auction rule, which most people don't use or know.  (I get why; it's awkward to run an auction without a pure neutral arbiter, and maybe the computer will help with that?)  I would also bet that, therefore, it gets the Free Parking rule correct.  (There's actually no reward at all for landing on Free Parking.  One of the great mysteries I have personally never understood is where exactly that Free Parking "lotto winner" rule came from in the first place, since pretty much everyone seems to play the game with that house rule and everyone who does just learned it from their families.  Who started that, and, since they don't understand game balance and actually made a bad rule, are they still alive to be punished?)

Places the electronic Monopoly seems to differ from the standard rule set is that 1) it adds random events, such as auctions or races (according to the NYT article) and 2) It, apparently, does away with one of Monopoly's best and most important rule sets, the ability to negotiate with other players for trade and sale of properties, Get Out of Jail Free cards, etc.  Being able to sell your properties to other players is in fact part of Monopoly's rules, and one of the only rules that makes the modified version that most people play playable at all.  It's fairly unlikely, after all, that you will just stumble across a perfect Monopoly of three (or two) matching properties while negotiating the board yourself.  The "you give me that one and I'll give you this one and fifty bucks" kind of trading allows players to build up their properties without relying on bare random chance.

It will be interesting to see if this new Monopoly does well. In a perfect world, while everyone might own a copy of Monopoly for the nostalgia (mine is Nintendo Monopoly, natch), they would also realize that there are other board games worth their time and might check a few of them out.  Maybe they might find a new household favorite.  Balderdash, which is very social and a little educational, was always popular in my family, and that's before I knew that they made games in Europe.

Or, I guess you could just play Scene It.

Augh, augh, augh.

Living in the Fridge

This is part... let's say two and a half, in my short series on the FPS.

I should warn you that this particular entry will contain spoilers for a lot of different various shooters, so if you're worried about being spoiled for "stuff in general" don't read this one. Really it's just a spoiler about this one thing that happens over and over again.



So I teach a class on Level Design sometimes, and in the process of that the students write a little backstory for the game they're designing for. It helps with the idea of environmental storytelling and creating a convincing mise en scene. It seems like since I switched to using the Unreal Engine in this class, and, specified that First or Third Person Shooter is a good game idea to create in this engine, the amount of one particular type of character that students include is up about 50 percent overall.

No, not the heavily masculine protagonist. His dead wife.

How Could I Make a Man Out of You?

There's a little discussion on the internet lately about superhero movies. American men aren't men on the screen, casting directors say, so, we need to turn to men from the other side of the pond to play our American superheroes.

Here in the realm of video games, and, specifically, the American First-Person-Shooter, we don't have to deal with getting real actors to play our manly men, so we have less of an issue. Get someone with a great, manly voice, and artists will create the rest of the attitude - body and muscle and lots of manly scenarios for our hero to get himself up in. The world bows down to the manliness of the male lead, who stands up to everyone because the world just happens to revolve around his manly exploits. Like as not, his name is going to be Alex. That's a pretty common one. But it may as well be



Duke Nukem epitomizes this archetype, but he also parodies it; he's totally aware of what he is and has been for over a decade. Whether the audience is aware is a different story, but that's always a risk with satire.

The world of the hardcore gamer is, notoriously, not a terribly safe and inviting place for women. This, I believe, is often due to an incredibly loud group of young male gamers. They make up the majority of "hardcore" gamers by reputation, and, as such, seem to want to ostracize anyone not part of their tribe, which includes women. Witness the new blog "Fat, Ugly, or Slutty," AKA, the reason I don't wear a mike when I play on X-Box Live. Don't witness it for very long, really; it's not a fun read. All you need to understand about it is that it's male gamers acting cool by putting down and/or sexually harassing women who play games.

Now I'll give these guys the benefit of the doubt and assume that they are pretty young, and that in at least some cases they think they are being funny. And they're probably, literally, children, picking on adult women. Adult women are picking back by pointing out that they are, in fact, children, if not literally then at least by their behavior.

If these sort of "get back in my kitchen" comments are being made by men over eighteen, then we have an even deeper problem than I can understand. So here's my thesis. These young gamers have basically two types of men to emulate in their cultural world. And one of those types just happens to be the woman-hating, misogynist douche-bro exemplified by networks like Spike TV. Which of course televises the annual Video Game Awards, such as they are, and finds it necessary frequently to assert masculinity by putting down and objectifying women. When these guys cover video games, these in turn become the kinds of guys that a generation of kids wants to be like when they talk about video games. That makes "video games" the world where men are men, and women get topless and get back in the kitchen.

The other type of men our young men sometimes emulate are the men in anime. Anime protagonists tend to be younger than the protagonists in American media, which young Japanophiles - of which there are now many, many - see as empowering to them. They then want to emulate how their badass, younger heroes behave, which... paradoxically, also tends to warp their thoughts about women, since they start to see them as anime archetypes. They're crazy tsunderes, or perhaps goddesses that need to be put on pedestals and handled with kid gloves because of their magical skirt-wearing woman powers. You don't have to go far on a gaming website to see otaku comments treating women like some kind of strange and mystical other, expressing wonderment and confusion. And, well, again... they're kids, confused, and don't know better, but that's also creepy to adult women.

These two stereotypes of young male gamers are of course exactly that: stereotypes. Not all young male gamers are "douchebros" or otaku. But enough of them are to the point where, collectively, they become a problem for women who might otherwise enjoy gaming communities for their own merits. Sure, kids can enjoy games, but so can adults. Many games are designed for adults, and we are all part of the same community. This is why women frequently seek out to create their own gaming communities: to escape these sorts of problems.

Many young men seem to be using the gaming community as their reinforcement while they find their way from childhood to adulthood. During this period, they need male role models, and, some of the gender roles that they encounter on the way turn out to be less than ideal in that department.

So far, so good. But I started out in this article discussing Splint Chesthair, FPS Protagonist. Why does he appear in games time and time again, but yet, isn't considered a model worth emulating?

Well, because Splint Chesthair can't be you. Splint Chesthair is your dad.



Even when Bruce Willis was badass John McClaine, he was a grown-up guy who had a wife and kids. Now, the action hero is aging, but he's still starring in movies. This may be in some way starting to warp young men's sense of who the action hero is. As what seems like a more recent example, The Matrix, where Keanu Reeves was the lone hero, was in the 90s, not now, and not really relevant to the kids who are playing on X-Box Live. So the action hero is your dad, or else, he's some kind of fantasy hero that will always be etherially older than you even as you round the corner in to age 30. If the protagonist isn't an anime guy, which, in an American game, he isn't, he just seems like an older guy.

And with over a decade out of action, The Duke suits the aging-action-hero archetype perfectly.

However, young men, if you should find him worth emulation, rather than as a surrogate father figure, it still might be a step in the right direction from the guys you see on Spike TV. At least keep this in mind: Women want to be around the Duke.

I'm Here to Kick Ass, Chew Bubblegum, and Elevate the Discourse

(And I am all out of both ass and bubblegum.)

Admittedly, a truly awkward title, but I also intend to discuss People Can Fly's upcoming Bulletstorm in this article, and I couldn't in good conscience name yet another article something like "The Coming Bulletstorm."

Often I link other articles for background material, but today, I will embed videos. Please be warned that if you watch any of these videos, there are swears, violence, and blurred nudity.  If this sort of thing will be offensive you probably don't want to read the rest of the blog entry either.





I had this conversation with other gamers, about Bulletstorm potentially being controversial if the mainstream media should key on to it.  And though we can't be sure, I really hope that it does, and they do. Critics of game violence had already been certain that "Beautiful Escape" existed long before it actually did: a game where one gets points for executing more exquisite torture on helpless victims. Along those lines, a high score is awarded in Bulletstorm for more creative and vulgar kills on your victims. This kind of "style" system has been done before in titles like Mad World, but Bulletstorm takes this to another level.  In Bulletstorm, point values for doing the same kill style twice are lower, so that one is encouraged to experiment with new ways to kill.

Murder simulators, indeed.

Obviously this is done in a comical, over-the-top sci-fi fashion, with disposable minions and rampaging dinosaurs.  The game creators have cited Kill Bill as an inspiration, a movie that uses huge splatters of gore in a way that is in turn an homage to old Hong Kong cinema.  But Mortal Kombat in the 90s was also hugely comical and over-the-top, which didn't stop critics from labeling its cartoonish fatalities as the most realistic gaming violence ever conceived.

Duke Nukem also stands the chance of being reasonably controversial (for reasons other than its delayed release date, which has been discussed to death).  That trailer above (the uncensored version was shown at PAX) has more censored body parts male, and female, than I have seen in any trailer for a console game release.  Sure, Dante's Inferno had lots of breasts, but in the end this game was more controversial for its advertisements.  Duke Nukem really stands a chance of raising a stir with its content - its treatment of women where even female aliens are sex objects, its vulgar dialog, and, like Bulletstorm, its intense and gory violence.

This is the same year where the Supreme Court is finally going to tell us whether video games have constitutional protection as speech, or should be regulated as if they were pornography.  So this is a great time, the right time, to release games that are going to push that envelope as far as it can go.  I've been saying for a while now that, in order to get critics to understand that games really can be for adults, and are a legitimate form of grown-up entertainment that grown-ups can enjoy, they need to follow the path that cartoons followed. They need to release a game that's shocking, vulgar, and a hundred-percent self-aware, to the point where it can't be denied.  The game would have to be not only a violent game, but a commentary about violent games, designed to elicit a reaction from its critics that it mocks just by existing.  There will be controversy, certainly, but at the end of the day the critics will have to throw in the towel because of this 30-ton gorilla of a thing.  Postal 2 almost stood a chance of being this game, but it is too-frequently taken seriously by the critics of gaming as if its message of vulgar violence was sincere.  Bulletstorm, Duke Nukem Forever, they also stand a good chance of being this game.

In other words, we do not need, and may never get "Our Citizen Kane." But we do need, and may get, our "South Park: the Movie."

More later.