- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
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...no offense, but you do realize that in a 50+ hour product, it is very likely that you will have already paid for and be unable to refund it long after you have realized that the creator is an unpleasant sex creep? Honestly, any justification that hinges on me being psychic and knowing that kind of thing in advance smells of bullshit to me.
It's not like there was a "Kojima is a creeplord" warning on the cover of MGS 5.
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Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
Well, we're currently talking about sexualized character designs, which tend to make themselves apparent pretty quick.
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- Do you really care?
For a character that is only introduced after 10+ hours like Quiet, it does not. *shrug*
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
That's why I said I have less of a problem when the developer isn't trying to obfuscate their intentions.
The average game full of sexy anime girls makes it's character design intentions apparent pretty early on.
Though I'm also, in retrospect, not that surprised by Quiet given the shit Kojima did in the previous metal gear game.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm no fan of Quiet's design but it's more then a little excessive to call Kojima a "creeplord" and "unpleasant sex creep" over it. Just because something makes you uncomfortable does not mean it's a moral failing. Quiet is a shitty character but let's keep things proportionate, a stupidly skimpy design is nowhere close to an actual wrongdoing.
Certainly not to degree that would justify this type of rhetoric.
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I suppose I'll have to agree that this is not an unfair thing to say, either. Kojima has been a horny weirdo for a long time, but I think you understand what I'm getting at in general.
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
The creep part is more how he tried to justify it.
As opposed to Yoko Taro's "I like girls" response, and request for fans to collect all the fanart of 2B's butt.
- Location
- Georgia, US
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Even so, I associate "unpleasant sex creep" with behavior that involves actually hurting women. Stupid justifications for a skimpy design are bad but not at the level where it's reasonable to describe someone like that.
To be clear, my problem is not criticizing Kojima over Quiet's design (and the justification for it) or his broader treatment of women. Both are completely deserved. My issue is that excessively harsh descriptions aren't necessary. We can criticize Kojima without taking it weirdly far. Dude's flawed but not that bad.
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Yeah, say what you want, but I can respect the honesty in that. It helps that aside from being basically dressed like a goth-y maid cafe employee, 2B is never sexualized in any noticeable way. There is none of that creepy-ass strip show shit like what Kojima included.
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Ugh, god, yeah, I had forgotten about the "someone inserted a bomb into my vagina!" plot point. That was so damn superfluous. Thanks bunches for reminding me, by the way...
Kingcrusader
The King of the Crusades
- Location
- Tennessee
I mean, I'm not talking about a specific time period here. I'm talking more in a environment sense.
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Morganite
Happiness is a large book.
- Location
- Dynamis - Firefly Alley
Well, for one thing, because I'm not convinced that fan projects that try to take over control of the original IP are common enough for it to be even vaguely rational to base policy upon them.
But also, the second half of your sentence is incorrect. Being mod/fan project friendly, hostile, or indifferent are decisions that have PR implications. That doesn't mean a C&D is always the wrong decision, but I really do think companies should ask themselves if systematically pissing off their most devoted fans is really the best choice.
(What would the world look like if Nintendo had asked the AM2R developer to put a "if you liked this, please buy Metroid: Samus Returns when it releases" message in the game?)
By no means would that stop them from requiring the original game files to have access to that content, though it might make it more legally fraught.
Serious-mode, I have no idea what you mean.
Plus there's a difference between "you can use our stuff as a library in your closed source project, but you have to open source any modifications to the library" licensing and "you can make fully closed-source derivatives" licensing.
The really dangerous one is the GNU GPL, because that license is contagious to non-derivatives in a way most aren't. Not all GNU licenses do that, but are you sure you know which ones? Really really sure?
A lot of times it feels to me like it just boils down to someone saying "this content is offensive towards women", except if you put it that way it's harder to argue that the large female fanbase is irrelevant.
Speaking as someone who works in video game retail: Bold of you to assume that people read the warnings on the wrapper.
(I've stopped even trying to explain to people that Grand Theft Auto is not a kids game. I don't have it in me anymore.)
-Morgan.
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"Itchy. Tasty." (sorry, typo in the original) is a particularly famous line from a File from the remake. It's completely unvoiced, which guarantees that they cannot have been drawing merely on the in-game files and that they intend to distribute sound files which reproduce parts of them. That's definitely copyright infringement, full stop.
Not that I have bought a game in a brick-and-mortar store in at least 20 years, but yeah, there are warnings on everything and most of them are meaningless. When you're constantly bombarded with worthless information, you start tuning it out.
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Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
A little of both? You actually still get people cosplaying like, say, Regensburg and Akagi, despite the physical impossibility of Akagi's ship bits (they're not even solid objects in her art) or the sheer size and complexity of Regensburg's rigging, which is basically separate entity that's essentially a mechanical dragon. They just don't do the riggings. (If you want that as part of cosplay then the Kancolle scene is much better about it.) But most of the cosplays are for individual alternate skins, which don't have the ship bits.
The weird bit is that a bunch of them are only moderately horny, they're just too much work or demand hyperspace clothing technology. Like some of them are just genuinely so horny that they can't be made, Alabama's Untarnished Silver, but some are too much work even for professional cosplayers like Cheshire's The Cat and the White Steed, and some of them demand hyperspace clothing technology that doesn't exist despite being only moderately horny like many of the party dresses. There's a reason why many of the most enduring cosplays are actually pretty simple outfits like St. Louis' Luxurious Wheels being basically a sequined dress.
Comrade Future
Man from Zeerust
- Location
- USSR
- Pronouns
- He/His/Him
It seems that this is why there are age ratings and a warning system.
Honestly, I don't think this is a good time to argue about "horny" design - considering that I'm trying to be a progressive communist and at the same time I'm too warm to such character designs and will end up trying to sit on two chairs (and most of the women in the thread appreciated Eva's design negative).
But I definitely won't scold Kojima-san - he realized the truth and gave us Snake's ass.
I think that a lot of people have trouble wrapping their heads around large numbers. The thing for a company as large and with as many IPs as Nintendo is that the chance that some weirdo with a dream is going to hold them up in court for a year and potentially prevent the production of a key game approaches 100% if they don't take action until the crazies take them to court. On the other hand, C&Ds are really cheap. Nintendo isn't even asking you to scrap your game, just to not use their IP, after all. And every C&D also signals to multiple other fan projects to keep their head low.
Besides, who does Nintendo actually piss off with the move, anyway? The most devoted fans don't give two whits about fangames, they consume only Nintendo branded products. There's a lot of people who vaguely like fangames, but Nintendo isn't systemically hunting every fan project down, just the ones that make too many waves to risk, so most of these people will migrate to another fangame. If the fan project is good enough, it should be able to pivot to a IPless version, so fans of the specific project might grumble but still get their game (besides, are these people Nintendo customers anymore?)
The kind of people for which the C&D will meaningfully affect their buying pattern are either people who are extremely principled on this matter (rare, and also hard to predict if something else might set them off) or people who want a very specific mechanical execution of an IP, in which case either Nintendo produces the same and they get lured back anyway, or they don't and were never going to get back the money.
(Side note, it always weirds me out when people say that the choosiest fans are the most devoted fans. They aren't! The blind buyers are the company's devoted fans, anyone who says things like "if there was mods" or "only on discount" or "when they patch" are not your core customers. Which doesn't mean you don't want to appeal to them but if you could trade two of these picky guys for one of the pre-orderers that's absolutely a good trade.)
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- Do you really care?
Fun fact, by the way: Nintendo makes multiple billions a year in gross revenue. Their actual profit every year is in the realm of sixteen million dollars. I looked it up once. It's kind of insane, isn't it?
- Location
- Finland
Eh, not really.
I expect they have plenty of very well paid accountants making sure their "profits" stay as low as possible.
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- Do you really care?
I have no doubt that they do, but that can only do so much. I'm more impressed at the difference and that this is considered entirely believable. All the rest is going into investments and fixed costs, like buildings and salaries.
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
It's very believable when you realize that Nintendo is one of these few companies that people pay attention to (as opposed to huge but boring conglomerates that do important, but uninteresting, things) that still behaves like its purpose is to sustain itself while creating and supporting products/services as opposed to some weird stock pumping monetization scheme intended to capture all of the money ever.
I think well over half the reason Nintendo has stuck around is the fact that they bowed out of the tech arms race and focused on making toys that are, y'know, fun.
Edit : Which is funny because Nvidia, despite being at the heart of the current tech frenzy, is also much the same, resisting the cycles of manic/panic hiring and firing.
I don't think it's impossible to be both progressive and horny at the same time.
You just have to lay firm ground rules on when and where the horny stuff is appropriate. Which is generally - 'not in public and not in media that isn't being honest about its intentions'.
Like, NGL, I would absolutely play some of the weird XCOM/dating sim clones if the production qualities were decent and they weren't gatcha games.
I mean, I wouldn't be raving about them on SB/SV as the GotY material, or probably talk much about them outside of appropriate online venues, but I'd play them.
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People indeed seem to forget that it is possible to be horny without it being on main.
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A lesson that a lot of people could really stand to learn.
Triggerhappy
Stick with Trigger and You'll Make it Through
- Location
- SoCal
A big problem with fighting societal prudishness is that once you get people to break from it, much like religious zealots, they tend to go all in on their new direction.
To quote a line from one of the Stormlight Archive Books - "Hedonism isn't the seeking of pleasure. It's excess until pleasure loses all its savor."
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I think you meant converts. "No zealot like a convert" is a common idiom.