[Aptorian]

My angle on this is that it's missunderstood outrage. This isn't about sensitivity because there's nothing to be sensitive about.

It's an in-world tombstone. It's the epitaph of a dead guy. In the story.

Now you could of course make the accusation that the Kickstarter backer used his pledge to get a transphobic joke into a videogame (by the way, who says it wasn't just a saturday night transvestite?). However that seems like pretty elaborate ruse.

The other way to look at it is that Pillars of Eternity's universe has depth. Within it there will be character who have not checked their privileges and thus will make fun of the idea of fondling another mans penis unwarily. Because that shit is funny in a "you'll never guess what happened last night" sort of way.

That's on the character. Not the Kickstarter backer. Not Obsidian. Would you call Erikson misogynistic because a woman is tied to a bed and raped in one of his books?

Not every element of a book or a video game has to be palatable.

This post has been edited by Apt: 06 April 2015 - 07:42 PM

[amphibian]

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 07:40 PM, said:

The other way to look at it is that Pillars of Eternity's universe has depth. Within it there will be character who have not checked their privileges and thus will make fun of the idea of fondling another mans penis unwarily. Because that shit is funny in a "you'll never guess what happened last night" sort of way.

That's on the character. Not the Kickstarter backer. Not Obsidian. Would you call Erikson misogynistic because a woman is tied to a bed and raped in one of his books?

Not every element of a book or a video game has to be palatable.

If the character/plot was important, the second limerick wouldn't be a thumb in the eye of critics. It'd be about the same thing, except with better execution.

Instead, a suicide becomes a murder and the mentions of sex and transgender people are wiped out in favor of a spirit of "Haha, you misread what I wrote, so I'll give you the baying, irrational crowd a sop."

There's little that's irrational about criticizing a bad poem and its subsequent faux-retraction.

[D'rek]

Just to be clear, this limerick is nothing but random in-game flavour text with no actual bearing on the plot or mechanics of the game whatsoever, right? How on earth do people get that upset about it, no matter what it says? Changing the flavour text of a random object that barely affects the game cannot come even close to rationally being any sort of "win" or "lose" for any sort of societal group or agenda.

They want to argue about character design and gender choices, marketing, diversity in games, etc, then great, there's actually a reasonable discussion to be had there (I know, I know, most of these people are not interested in having a reasonable discussion). But this is just looking for something to complain about and forcibly turn into an issue. Nobody playing the game is going to have their gameplay experience significantly affected by whatever this tombstone says.

Just another occurrence of a small bunch of vocal idiots trying to get attention by making an issue out of nothing.

[Aptorian]

Oh I don't disagree that the ensuing mess is a clusterfuck of bad PR management, however it was just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

[Rictus]

What are the chances of finding that particular not-limerick to bitch about, though, out of all the backer content? There's hundreds of unfunny memorials, some of them almost criminally bad, Were they poring over them for something to be outraged at? It hardly seems an earth-shattering issue to me, certainly not worth hefting the pitchforks for.

[Grief]

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 07:40 PM, said:

My angle on this is that it's missunderstood outrage. This isn't about sensitivity because there's nothing to be sensitive about.

It's an in-world tombstone. It's the epitaph of a dead guy. In the story.

Now you could of course make the accusation that the Kickstarter backer used his pledge to get a transphobic joke into a videogame (by the way, who says it wasn't just a saturday night transvestite?). However that seems like pretty elaborate ruse.

The other way to look at it is that Pillars of Eternity's universe has depth. Within it there will be character who have not checked their privileges and thus will make fun of the idea of fondling another mans penis unwarily. Because that shit is funny in a "you'll never guess what happened last night" sort of way.

That's on the character. Not the Kickstarter backer. Not Obsidian. Would you call Erikson misogynistic because a woman is tied to a bed and raped in one of his books?

Not every element of a book or a video game has to be palatable.

I don't think people are suggesting that every element of a book or video game should be palatable.

I also don't think you can just pin everything to the characters in a work. There is also the question of how the work treats those characters. In Great Expectations, we might say that any character commenting about what is appropriate and suitable for their gender is simply a result of that character's views, and doesn't reflect on Dickens at all. But we should also consider how Dickens presents these comments. In the case of Great Expectations the characters who stick within these expected gender norms pretty consistently get better outcomes than those who don't, and the novel doesn't really frame this as something unfair.

Erikson recently wrote about fantasy universes importing stereotypes from reality. If a stereotype is lifted straight from our universe into another, without any explanation of why it has arisen in that universe, don't you think that it suggests to some degree that there is something essential about that stereotype that would make it arise without it needing explanation? If I write a book set in a universe of dragons and spaceships, but all the women happen to be limited to domestic roles and this passes without comment, I don't really think the message it sends is just "oh, what a coincidence!".

FWIW, I suspect there probably is a reasonable argument to be made that Erikson -- for all that he is far ahead of many authors on this front -- still doesn't prevent a lot of stereotypes sneaking into his work.

[Grief]

D, on 06 April 2015 - 08:20 PM, said:

Just to be clear, this limerick is nothing but random in-game flavour text with no actual bearing on the plot or mechanics of the game whatsoever, right? How on earth do people get that upset about it, no matter what it says? Changing the flavour text of a random object that barely affects the game cannot come even close to rationally being any sort of "win" or "lose" for any sort of societal group or agenda.

They want to argue about character design and gender choices, marketing, diversity in games, etc, then great, there's actually a reasonable discussion to be had there (I know, I know, most of these people are not interested in having a reasonable discussion). But this is just looking for something to complain about and forcibly turn into an issue. Nobody playing the game is going to have their gameplay experience significantly affected by whatever this tombstone says.

Just another occurrence of a small bunch of vocal idiots trying to get attention by making an issue out of nothing.

I'm not that sure that it being a small issue in terms of game signficicance is really that important. Quite often I think the small, throwaway things, can be the things that highlight the implicit assumptions in a work, and can be very important. In fact, a lot of literary criticism focuses on exactly that. Take Bertha in Jane Eyre. She's essentially a plot device, and I doubt that a lot of people who've read the book could even tell you her race off the top of their heads. Yet it is still very signficant, and the focus of some major pieces of discourse criticism.

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Grief, on 06 April 2015 - 08:55 PM, said:

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 07:40 PM, said:

Not every element of a book or a video game has to be palatable.

I don't think people are suggesting that every element of a book or video game should be palatable.

I also don't think you can just pin everything to the characters in a work. There is also the question of how the work treats those characters. In Great Expectations, we might say that any character commenting about what is appropriate and suitable for their gender is simply a result of that character's views, and doesn't reflect on Dickens at all. But we should also consider how Dickens presents these comments. In the case of Great Expectations the characters who stick within these expected gender norms pretty consistently get better outcomes than those who don't, and the novel doesn't really frame this as something unfair.

I don't think it's about an expectation of everything being universally palatable - or if it was everyone's in the wrong game because the story is pretty damned dark. You can present all sort of unpalatable things without pointing the finger at a particular sort of person or group.

And I think we can abandon the universe depth argument. Having looked through a few and found blanks, mixtures of numbers and symbols and lazy film quotes, if anything they just serve to disrupt immersion and throw you out of the setting and feel of the game.

[Grief]

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 08:33 PM, said:

Oh I don't disagree that the ensuing mess is a clusterfuck of bad PR management, however it was just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

Is that a Stewart Lee reference I see?

[Studlock]

I'm sorry but why is there an outrage in any which way here? A trans person asked a developer to remove or change a transphobic joke (which I understand why some people will say it's just a joke but...transphobia is already pretty mainstream and those 'little jokes' add up and sometimes, exceptionally in some where you just want to veg out, it just breaks you down but I digress) because it made them uncomfortable and they did by contacting the original writer of the poem. Everyone involve was satisfied, why does Totalbiscuit (who I'm now convince should just talk about the business, mechanics, and graphics of video games because otherwise--well lets just say he's not as nuanced, or right, or even intelligent sounding) need to get involved in this? Why does anyone but the harmed party, the person who wrote the joke, and the developer?

Seriously.

[Illuyankas]

Yes, though Apt apparently took the exact opposite meaning from that skit (it was not a pro-Top Gear set)

Personally the original poem thing is pretty bad and a little tone-deaf but the change and ridiculously over-the-top baby children having a tantrum reaction to the change is pathetic on levels I can't begin to describe.

[Aptorian]

Grief, on 06 April 2015 - 09:12 PM, said:

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 08:33 PM, said:

Oh I don't disagree that the ensuing mess is a clusterfuck of bad PR management, however it was just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

Is that a Stewart Lee reference I see?

Illuyankas, on 06 April 2015 - 09:28 PM, said:

Yes, though Apt apparently took the exact opposite meaning from that skit (it was not a pro-Top Gear set)

Personally the original poem thing is pretty bad and a little tone-deaf but the change and ridiculously over-the-top baby children having a tantrum reaction to the change is pathetic on levels I can't begin to describe.

The thing is though, as much as I love Stewart Lee's stuff, and I agree with his overall assessement of Top Gear; It's still just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

One of the corner stones of humor is outrage. Shock. The unexpected. That's why people still laugh at a racist joke. Not because they find the stereotype to be true or fair, but because of how outrageous it is to say such a thing. Same thing about this video game character that fondled a dick and killed himself. It's a raunchy joke, in the form of a limerick, that somebody hid in an unexpected place. So you giggle at it and marvel at the strange easter eggs you find in video games.

It's just a joke like on Top Gear. Some people find Jeremy Clarkson to be "a bit of a knob but we quite like him" and other people think the man is dangerously ignorant and insulting.

This of course leads us to the stalemate we are at in video games with Gamergate and Social Justice Activists. Some people want to be able to be politically incorrect. Other people say just putting a joke on a tombstone is like punching a woman in the vagina.

At the end of the day, the question has to be about the intent. Was it "just a joke" or was it intentionally hurtful?

This post has been edited by Apt: 06 April 2015 - 10:19 PM

[Studlock]

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 10:06 PM, said:

Grief, on 06 April 2015 - 09:12 PM, said:

Apt, on 06 April 2015 - 08:33 PM, said:

Oh I don't disagree that the ensuing mess is a clusterfuck of bad PR management, however it was just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

Is that a Stewart Lee reference I see?

Illuyankas, on 06 April 2015 - 09:28 PM, said:

Yes, though Apt apparently took the exact opposite meaning from that skit (it was not a pro-Top Gear set)

Personally the original poem thing is pretty bad and a little tone-deaf but the change and ridiculously over-the-top baby children having a tantrum reaction to the change is pathetic on levels I can't begin to describe.

The thing is though, as much as I love Stewart Lee's stuff, and I agree with his overall assessement of Top Gear; It's still just a joke. Like on Top Gear.

One of the corner stones of humor is outrage. Shock. The unexpected. That's why people still laugh at a racist joke. Not because they find the stereotype to be true or fair, but because of how outrageous it is to say such a thing. Same thing about this video game character that fondled a dick and killed himself. It's a raunchy joke, in the form of a limerick, that somebody hid in an unexpected place. So you giggle at it and marvel at the strange easter eggs you find in video games.

It's just a joke like on Top Gear. Some people find Jeremy Clarkson to be "a bit of a nob but we quite like him" and other people think the man is dangerously ignorant and insulting.

This of course leads us to the stalemate we are at in video games with Gamergate and Social Justice Activists. Some people want to be able to be politically incorrect. Other people say just putting a joke on a tombstone is like punching a woman in the vagina.

At the end of the day, the question has to be about the intent. Was it "just a joke" or was it intentionally hurtful?

Oh hello strawman, I thought we'd get out of today without you being brought up. Humour has been one of the main ways to reproduce and enforce hegemonic racism, or homophobia, or whatever. And the people on the other end of the 'joke' know this hence situation we find ourselves in. People still laugh at racist jokes because they're racist. That's literally the simplest and easiest answer, Occam's razor and all that. Obviously not all people, but the vast majority are racist when laughing at a racist joke. It's confirm their racist ideas and they find it hilarious. So when a trans person ask a developer to get rid of a transphobic jokes its not because they think it's 'like punching a woman in the vagina' nor is the person on the other side just want to be 'politically incorrect', it's because that joke is enforce negative stereotypes about trans people and the hegemonic belief that a straight man should be ashamed about sleeping with a transwoman to the point of suicide and the writer of the joke is attempting to be funny by appealing to society's inherent transphobia. Intent was nothing to do with it.

[worry]

Part of the issue here is the notion of "outrage". The perpetually tantrum-throwing (eg Gamergate) project outrage on anyone making a complaint because that is how they themselves interact with the world outside their bubble. The assumption is that critics are outraged (or feigning outrage) no matter how calm or reasonable they express an idea or criticism (the response to FemFreq is a pretty sterling example of this). It doesn't take outrage or even anger to point out how awful/stupid/cliche/etc the tombstone joke was, for example; just a correct reading of it and a desire to point out the offending material. It takes zero leaps of logic to conclude the poem was a "chicks with dicks ha ha" joke. It takes at least one leap to conclude it was something other than that, or even the opposite of that.

[Aptorian]

Studlock, on 06 April 2015 - 10:31 PM, said:

Oh hello strawman, I thought we'd get out of today without you being brought up. Humour has been one of the main ways to reproduce and enforce hegemonic racism, or homophobia, or whatever. And the people on the other end of the 'joke' know this hence situation we find ourselves in.

People still laugh at racist jokes because they're racist. That's literally the simplest and easiest answer, Occam's razor and all that. Obviously not all people, but the vast majority are racist when laughing at a racist joke. It's confirm their racist ideas and they find it hilarious.

So when a trans person ask a developer to get rid of a transphobic jokes its not because they think it's 'like punching a woman in the vagina' nor is the person on the other side just want to be 'politically incorrect', it's because that joke is enforce negative stereotypes about trans people and the hegemonic belief that a straight man should be ashamed about sleeping with a transwoman to the point of suicide and the writer of the joke is attempting to be funny by appealing to society's inherent transphobia. Intent was nothing to do with it.

I sincerely doubt that most people who tell these jokes even know what hegemonic racism means. Let alone consider the implications of the joke. Occam's razor does not imply hatred, it implies ignorance or indifference.

Your argumentation implies that society as a whole is in on it. That everybody inherently hates the people who are different, in this case the transsexual population. I'd argue that the problem isn't transphobia. It's ignorance. People don't hate transsexuals. People don't think about Transsexuals much at all. For the vast majority of people, except people on internet chat forums, a transsexual is a mythical unicorn. Something you hear about but very rarely will encounter out in the real world.

The issue here isn't some agenda against a sexual minority. The issue is that the people who tell these jokes don't care about the plight of the transsexual. They care about getting a laugh. Being edgy gets cheap laughs. In this case the joke is centered on a guy touching another guys junk and this making this heterosexual man so uncomfortable that he ran off a cliff.

This post has been edited by Apt: 07 April 2015 - 05:26 AM

[worry]

To what degree is "just a joke" a better defense of indifference than it is hatred? If a joke has a butt, is "just a joke" even an honest description? Must the butt of the joke defer to that defense, time and again?

[TheRetiredBridgeburner]

Okay, I just listened to TotalBiscuit's rant about the issue.

He really needs to stick to mechanics and not comment on anything social, because he never looks good when he does.

Let's bear in mind what I've said above, that these memoriams actually break immersion for the most part - they're completely out of place and worth ignoring altogether for that reason - TB's entire opening argument is that the memoriams "add flavour" to the game.

I didn't bother listening to the rest - if you can make as poor a non-defence as that with your opening argument, you're not going to convince me you have anything worth listening to in the rest of it.

Apt, on 07 April 2015 - 05:23 AM, said:

I sincerely doubt that most people who tell these jokes even know what hegemonic racism means. Let alone consider the implications of the joke. Occam's razor does not imply hatred, it implies ignorance or indifference.

The fact that ignorance is more often the underlying problem than outright hatred isn't a defence. It's still a problem that needs addressing - most of it comes down to "we don't like what we don't understand" - but that's never been an acceptable excuse.

Also, you only have to look at the transphobic slurs and abuse being thrown at those who complained to see that certain aspects of the gaming community do indeed have a huge problem.

This post has been edited by TheRetiredBridgeburner: 07 April 2015 - 06:19 AM

[Aptorian]

I'm sorry I think my "It's just a joke" joke only makes sense if you've seen Lee's sketch:





I am not excusing the possible hurt that the joke might cause. I am simply explaining the inherent problem here. People who are not directly involved in the fight for the right to wear a dress do not care. To them the joke is just a joke. And like Lee himself states, that is problematic. But it is not out of some deliberate transbashing agenda it is simply a lack of investment.

Quite frankly if you showed the man on the street that limerick, I doubt they'd even think about transsexuals or transvestites. It would appeal to what the DO know. That a man should behave like a man and a woman should behave like a woman. The discovery of the broken compact, that a guy would touch another mans junk is the joke. The transvestite is not the laughing stock here, the man is. And you would now argue that this is a symptom of the Patriarchal society we live in. The man on the street would simply argue that touching somebody elses junk is fucking gross. Why it is gross I am not sure they could fully explain. Is it a biological revulsion or is it that they have taught that being gay is bad? I don't think an average person would ever get that far. The joke is simply "ha ha you touched somebody elses joke". And yes that IS politically incorrect but it is NOT a deliberate attack on transsexuals.

[Studlock]

Apt, on 07 April 2015 - 05:23 AM, said:

Studlock, on 06 April 2015 - 10:31 PM, said:

Oh hello strawman, I thought we'd get out of today without you being brought up. Humour has been one of the main ways to reproduce and enforce hegemonic racism, or homophobia, or whatever. And the people on the other end of the 'joke' know this hence situation we find ourselves in.

People still laugh at racist jokes because they're racist. That's literally the simplest and easiest answer, Occam's razor and all that. Obviously not all people, but the vast majority are racist when laughing at a racist joke. It's confirm their racist ideas and they find it hilarious.

So when a trans person ask a developer to get rid of a transphobic jokes its not because they think it's 'like punching a woman in the vagina' nor is the person on the other side just want to be 'politically incorrect', it's because that joke is enforce negative stereotypes about trans people and the hegemonic belief that a straight man should be ashamed about sleeping with a transwoman to the point of suicide and the writer of the joke is attempting to be funny by appealing to society's inherent transphobia. Intent was nothing to do with it.

I sincerely doubt that most people who tell these jokes even know what hegemonic racism means. Let alone consider the implications of the joke. Occam's razor does not imply hatred, it implies ignorance or indifference.

Your argumentation implies that society as a whole is in on it. That everybody inherently hates the people who are different, in this case the transsexual population. I'd argue that the problem isn't transphobia. It's ignorance. People don't hate transsexuals. People don't think about Transsexuals much at all. For the vast majority of people, except people on internet chat forums, a transsexual is a mythical unicorn. Something you hear about but very rarely will encounter out in the real world.

The issue here isn't some agenda against a sexual minority. The issue is that the people who tell these jokes don't care about the plight of the transsexual. They care about getting a laugh. Being edgy gets cheap laughs. In this case the joke is centered on a guy touching another guys junk and this making this heterosexual man so uncomfortable that he ran off a cliff.

They don't need to understand what hegemonic racism is to participate in it just like you don't need to know how a gun works or is made it kill someone with, you just need to know how to shoot.

My argument doesn't imply much of anything it directly states that we live in transphobic society (in North America anyways) and we definitely do. This isn't about an agenda (something that implies intent--which again has about shit all to do about it) it' about how society organizes itself around hegemonic beliefs about reality, and how enforcing those beliefs are damaging to individuals who don't fit the hegemony--that being said trans* people routinely rate high very in experiencing harassment (verbal, sexual, and physical) in self-surveys. Causal dismal of one's fucking entire existence for a cheap joke is transphobic, I'm trying to wrap my head around how you think it isn't. And yes I do agree it's about getting a laugh but I disagree about where the laughs coming from. It's not from being 'edgy' it's from societies inherent transphobia. It's the same reason racists laugh at a joke about black people loving bananas, it's not because the joker is being 'oh so edgy' but because the joker is appealing the racists belief the black people are like monkeys. This jokes is getting it's laugh from a hetero man killing himself out of shame because he slept with a transwoman (lets stop calling her a guy unless you mean 'guy' in general term for human). That's not 'edgy' it's grossly dehumanizing and if I was playing a game and ran across a joke that read "A man slept with a Native person, woe is him, he threw himself off a cliff' I would be fucking livid and completely utterly bummed out that one of my favourite developers decided that was okay to throw it in there because it's just a 'joke'.

It's time to retire it's just joke defense. Because if it's just a joke then you're a shit comedian/writer and you're misusing the art. If you're relying on hackneyed truthism that wouldn't sound strange coming out a bigots mouth then stop. You're not good at it. In fact all you're doing is reinforcing those bigoted beliefs and deserved to called on it.

[worry]

In that case I just think you're wrong, I guess. For one thing, it's quite deliberate. The premise of the joke specifically cites a "woman" turning out to be a "man", playing on the transphobic cliche of trans people as tricky predators of unwitting straight men. I don't see how you can get around it, even with this hypothetical dimwitted "man on the street" who's merely homophobic/misogynist rather than aware enough even to be transphobic (which I don't believe either). But if the joke teller is deliberately all of the above, and the average person in the intended audience is only some of the above due to ignorance/indifference (their bigotry horizons needs expanding I suppose), how is any of that a point in their favor?