Women in Video Games

And now for something completely different.

Catholic Gamer (a site referred to me by JC Saunders) writes about women in video games and geek culture in general.  I like her perspective on the situation and I think a sane voice in gaming culture is a welcome sight.

Her post got me thinking about an article I read in Game Informer about the challenges from both a tech perspective as well as the more obvious issues with political correctness and whatnot.  To put it simply, adding women into video games and making it believable is quite difficult.

One of the main issues with having women in video games is that the medium isn't exactly a place for nuance.  Oftentimes the story is simply a backdrop for adding context to the tasks to be performed.  For games like Role-Playing games the emphasis shifts to more developed characters, but even then the focus on a good game is what the player actually does.

Another obvious issue is how do game developers represent women in a way that will both appeal to women and men, while still maintaining a traditional focus on game goals.  If the woman is too butch, she runs the risk of being unattractive.  If she is too frail, she doesn't make a good heroine for traditional game goals.  If she is sexy, ultra-strong, etc. she runs the risk of being labeled a male fantasy.  With this in mind it is entirely understandable why game developers would say "screw it" and make a traditional male-centered game.  This last point is especially relevant to AAA developers trying to reach the largest segment of the market, which is (drum roll please) men.

Finally I will, not without some risk, point out from a purely male perspective, that to a man in general the female perspective makes no sense.  We don't get you.  Sorry.  Your goals often make no sense to us, and when they do they are achieved in a fashion that is unfathomable to us.  We can't read the blueprint.  And once we think we have cracked the code the rules change on us.  This is especially true of our perception of the modern woman, who seems to want to be both man and women.  

Speaking as a nerd male I think there is a lot of enthusiasm among my fellow nerd males for nerd women to be more involved in the gaming culture.  But as it stands a great deal of communication must take place before that occurs.  And there are going to be great growing pains in the process.  For myself, I don't see it happening in the near future.  As video games become more mainstream, more criticism is going to be levied against honest efforts to portray women.  This is a bad thing.

For the nerd women, I have a piece of advice.  Please start talking about how a woman should be portrayed in video games.  We got the picture of what is wrong (sort of).  What positive things would you differently?  How can women be developed as characters more appropriately in video games?  And finally with any suggestion ask yourself, does this make sense in a video game context?

Ah memories

Good and Evil: Analysis

My offering for IGNITUM TODAY.

Update:  Thanks to New Advent for linking to my post.

It's IGNITUM Wednesday again!

So as usual my regular Wednesday post is pushed to Thursday with a link to IGNITUM TODAY.

In short, no post today.  We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Sincerely,
The Management

One of the curious things

about the Obama admin is how it wades into things that arguably has no business in and only proceeds to polarize the country.

One of the comments to me explains it best:

It's the natural reaction of somebody in over his head. Every bad boss I ever had micro-managed everybody else's work because they didn't know what they were doing. The feelings of anxiety and despair at not knowing what to do are alleviated by the illusion of control that focus on some trivial matter provides.

This isn't particular to the Obama Admin.  But this administration seems to have a particularly acute case of it.

Broken Families - Broken Lives

One can simply look around and see the mistrust in institutions today.  From religion to academics to politics, the institutions that formed the bedrock of the Great Experiment are now treated with scorn and contempt.  The only arbiter of truth is the individual, and even truth itself is subject to the whims of such.

To me the crisis of the family lies at the heart of the loss of religious and civic identity today.  The collapse of the family as an institution in the West is responsible for the widespread mistrust of those institutions that are necessary for the Republic to continue.

The family is the most basic unit of society.  And through the family the children learn about the basics of duty.  Duty to one's parents.  Duty to one's siblings.  They learn that life points to something outside themselves, and it is both normal and healthy to turn one's attention outward toward others rather than inward on themselves.

The family is an institution of the most intimate sort.  The institution which forms the view of a child at their most vulnerable stage.  It is the rock on which a child's sense of love and the importance of the practice of virtue is taught in the most intimate of ways.

Our culture has all but shattered this institution.  It has become the plaything of our worst desires.  Its dignity reduced to a mere contract, which can be terminated at any time for any reason.  It is no longer the expression of love. And the product of that love, children, are at best a burden and at worst a disease.  The institution is turned inward rather than outward.

To me then it is no surprise then that trust in other institutions is at an all time low.  Churches, government, media, and schools all have suffered from a lack of trust (a lot of it deserved).  The bond between citizen and government is broken, between student and teacher, between pastor and layman.  Without the foundation of trust in the most intimate of institutions the ability to form a bond with other institutions is greatly compromised.

Because of this lack of trust it naturally follows we as a society are less religious, less educated, less civic minded, and less sacrificial.  The discourse of such issues is not one of the exchange of ideas but of wounded people venting rage at one another.  And the cohesiveness that is needed for a society to survive is nonexistent.

As a people we need to relearn what true marriage and what true family is.  Until we recover the fundamental understanding of this most basic institution, we will continue to find ourselves at the mercy of our wounded nature.  And we will only continue to lash out at each other.

In order to heal these wounds, we must turn to God.  But that is a subject of another post.

Words mean things

When I used to listen to Rush Limbaugh, there was one phrase he often used when calling out the lies of President Clinton.  "Words mean things."  It was a critique of the method of warping words to suit one's purposes while attempting to retain the original feeling of the words.  Such as using the word "accommodation" while the action itself is simply one side imposing one's will on another.

We see this all the time in modern discourse.  Torture becomes "enhanced interrogation".  Abortion is "choice."  The warping of these words is used to disguise the actual actions being performed.  By dressing up evil using neutral language, the nature of the action itself is softened when it is communicated to us, and therefore becomes more acceptable.

The problem with such a strategy is that it corrupts the process of communication.  As stated, "words mean things" and to misuse the words corrupts their meaning.  When we misappropriate words to attempt to redefine an action, we corrupt our ability to communicate effectively.

A personal example.  When I first heard of the notion of "worker's rights" was in the context of Communism and the "revolution of the proletariat."  So imagine my surprise (and ignorant horror) to find that Catholic Social Doctrine has such a concept of "worker's rights."  The Communist revolution used a valid concept to launch their bloody wars.  This in turn prevented me from recognizing a real truth, and for years I held this notion that Catholic Social Doctrine was "Communism-lite."

Perhaps the most obvious abuse of a word today is "bigotry."  There was a joke around the late '50s where it was said "when someone said 'Mr. So-and-So a fascist', he meant 'I don't like Mr. So-and-So'".  I feel today that such tactics are used with the word "bigot".

The word bigot has morphed from "an ignorant hatred of a class of individuals" to "someone who thinks homosexual acts are sinful."  The attempt on the part of the pro-gay movement to silence the critics fundamentally warps the word itself.  And sadly they have had great success in this.

But the thing about warping words is that it eventually backfires.  The word bigot is now so overused it has lost its original meaning, and with it the force of the charge.  Thus legitimate bigots, such as white-supremacists, will find themselves no longer hampered by the term 'bigot'.

By overusing words and ripping them bleeding from their original definitions, the word loses its meaning.  It simply becomes a name, and conversation quickly dissipates in the face of such ignorance and dishonest tactics.

We as Christians must do our part to adhere to objective truth.  This includes words.  As our Lord says, "Let your yes be yes and no, no".  To do anything less is to obscure our meaning at best and at worst deceive our listeners.