Mass' Effect: Why Are Fat People Vilified In Video Games?

Description: Screenshot from Silent Hill 2. A fat, white man
with blond hair wearing a backwards baseball cap & striped shirt
points a finger towards the camera, with the subtitle "You've been
laughin' at me all along, haven't you?" displayed at the bottom.

As a fat guy, I've gotten a lot of strangers commenting on my right to exist in public space over the years (and I have it easier than a fat woman or person of color). The way fat people are pilloried as character in the virtual space of video games is pretty gross, too. Producer and essayist Anshuman Iddamsetty looks at the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry that is video gaming contributes to this in "How Video Games Demonize Fat People" for The Outline. Idamsetty's essay goes into a deep dive in speaking with professors, motion-capture actors, game players, game developers and others connected to the industry to take a long look at both the root causes and the effects, intended or otherwise, of demonizing fat bodies.

Here's an excerpt:

if the fear of alienating a player is so great that lazy tropes are somehow safer, this alone doesn’t account for their frequency — if a fat body appears at all.
Sunset Overdrive was released in 2014 by Insomniac Games. Part zombie shooter, part Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the Xbox One exclusive boasted a robust customization system that let you be whatever you wanted — except fat. “We wanted to put our time into wild outfits instead of technology to bloat up people or bloat them down,” Sunset Overdrive director Drew Murray told Kotaku. (“Bloat” — what a word to describe my body. )
Later in the piece, a shape emerges. “You have so much other complexity in all the things you can wear, the hair, the animations,” said Insomniac CEO Ted Price. “We had to pick our battles, and that was kind of where we chose to draw the line.”

The essay is a bracing but necessary look at not just the history of video games as technical development, but also as popular entertainment, and how certain story telling and design decisions in video games as a medium seem baked into the process from the beginning. Please, give the whole essay a read.

I'm also interested in hearing from other gamers-- have any of these examples ever made you feel a certain way? Do you have any to add yourself? Sound off in the comments.

Listen Up: Fresh Out of Tokens

Fresh Out of Tokens is a bi-weekly podcast that recently celebrated its 2 year anniversary. Hosted by David & Tanya, the podcast focuses on addressing issues of diversity, inclusion, intersectionality and feminism in video games. Tanya and David are lifelong video game enthusiasts, and this podcast is obviously a labor of love. They bring their combined experience and insight to a podcast that has already featured some intense discussions and amazing guest interviews. They're not afraid to ask difficult questions of interview subject or do deep dives into the culture surrounding video game development and video game fandom and culture.

You can follow along via the Fresh out of Tokens  simplcast site, or on iTunes via iOS. 

Listen Up is an ongoing series devoted to shining a spotlight on podcasts by diverse creators. You can check out all the podcasts previously featured here. If you have a podcast you'd like to recommend, post it in the comments or email me at shawnstruck at gmail dot com.

What You Know About The Death of Point & Click Games Is Wrong

The popular narrative about the history of point and click adventure games goes a little something like this: they were invented in the mid-80s with the rise of VGA graphics and mouse-based navigation and GUIs. Seirra On-Line pioneered the genre. LucasArts was responsible for the genre's golden age, starting with Maniac Mansion and ending with the released of Grim Fandango. then the genre lay dormant for a decade and a half until Telltale games single-handedly revived and rescued the genre,bringing it back from the dead and introducing a new generation to the joys of point and click, puzzle solving and managing inventory systems.

The problem with that notion? It's completely wrong. It ignores reality? Why? Penguin King Games' David J Prokopetz points out that some of it is tied to sexism in the video game press:

The fact of the matter is that point-and-click adventure games never died.
The chronology just doesn’t add up. To pose a few obvious examples:

• The Nancy Drew series, a point-and-click adventure franchise as old-school as they come, put out over a dozen titles during the early 00s. 

• Funcom’s Dreamfall: The Longest Journey was enormously successful, both critically and commercially, during a period when the gaming press would have us believe the genre was almost wholly moribund. 

• Likewise, the Dream Chronicles series managed three sequels during a period when point-and-click adventure games allegedly weren’t a thing... 

When FPSes began to dominate the young male gaming audience in the mid 90s, point-and-click adventure games saw the writing on the wall, and shifted their target audience en masse to young girls. And it worked fantastically - but as far as the gaming press was concerned, that was high treason.

New Video Series About Race In Gaming Needs Our Help

MYNG's Samantha Blackmon and Alisha Karabinus have announced "Invisibility Blues" which will be an online video series that aims to cast a critical eye on how video games deal with the issues of race and minority representation in video games. They plan to produce a five part series presented in a web documentary format and feature their own analysis as well as input from other gamers. The are looking to crowdfund the series via Kickstarter because "We love what we do, and we want to bring the discussion to a wider audience. We hope you’ll stand with us, by sharing, supporting, and talking about the project as we work."

Check out their progress at the hub page here and think about kicking in a few bucks to help out. They have 16 days left and are 3/4 of the way there.

Austin Walker On Video Game Critics & Influence

Description: The word JUDGE looms over a stick figure drawing
of a person frowning at a computer monitor, hands steepled.

Austin Walker has been a hot new hire for video game website Giant Bomb,and with his latest essay for the site, it's not hard to see why. In his latest editorial in the "Why We Write Series", he tackles the importance of critique, the reasons behind it and the influence of games criticism and games as entertainment.

First of all, he wants to dispel the notion of critics trying to "force changes" on unwary developers:

So, what if instead of thinking about all of this in terms of a binary relationship (either a critic forces someone to do something or they don’t), we thought about this on a spectrum. On one end of the spectrum is absolute disconnect from influence: A writer pens long form essays about how developers should always do whatever they want. On the other end of the spectrum is critical work demanding that devs actually be “forced” to do things. But most critique exists in between those two extremes. 

He also puts the boots to two other ideas behind pulling punches when it comes to criticism of games-- targeting and timing:

When we note that a game is filled with slurs and offensive caricatures, we’re told that we should be less offended because, hey, it's just satire. When we point out how a game leverages a history of racialized, coded imagery to elicit fear, people link us to wiki articles and explain the deep lore as justification. When a game made me spend a half hour of my real time every day just to keep my skin color on point, I was told that, no no, of course games have a problem with race, but why did I have to go after Animal Crossing...

Yes, writing about diversity and The Witcher 3 is especially complicated because of the perspectives involved. Polish history is filled with outsider groups minimizing, controlling, ignoring, and erasing the nation's unique ethnic and cultural character. At the same time, people of color in white-dominant spaces have struggled to develop the vocabularies of critical race studies and post-colonialism only to then be told to mind their tone. These things mix here in an especially volatile way. But this doesn't mean that we should shy away from addressing it, afraid of stepping on toes, afraid of what we don't know. It means we step forward in good faith, with sympathy for the other perspective, and with a willingness to incorporate the complexities of someone else's view.

He also covers ideas of American standards, media influencers, and the emotional core that drives him to write. A great read.

Jump Up And Get Down: 5 Critical Moments in Platform Game History

Jeremy Parish has a long history of insightful writing and analysis of video games, especially action-platformers. His work as editor at USGamer.net's continues this tradition with a fascinating article examining five of what he calls "Critical Moments In Platform Game History". For example, here is an excerpt from that article talking about Pitfall! and what it brought to the genre:

Pitfall! feels admittedly primitive compared to latter-day platformers, with flip-screen scrolling and simple two-level world design, yet it marked an important moment not only for the genre but for the medium at large. It introduced the idea that fast-paced action games could take place in settings rather than simply exist as isolated scenarios. Pitfall!'s quest dropped players into a jungle maze, one whose simple visuals belied structural complexity (traveling underground took you along a different route than going overland) and required both twitch skill and mental discipline to master.

The entire article is a fascinating read and traces the crucial moments of the platform genre of video games, from Donkey Kong to the debt that Super Mario Brothers owes Pac-Land! Check it out!

Game Developer Works With Alaska Native Community to Create Awesome Video Game

Never Alone - Game Trailer from Never Alone on Vimeo.
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is an atmospheric puzzle platformer currently in development at Upper One Games in partnership with E-Line Media and members of the Alaska Native community.

Leigh Alexander sat down with Sean Vesce to talk more in depth about the game for a recent article on Gamasutra. An excerpt:

"Sean Vesce left Crystal Dynamics after 20 years in commercial games, with a few goals not uncommon to veterans of the triple-A machine: He wanted to collaborate with small, focused teams, aimed to create social impact, and wanted to create games he could play with his young daughters. Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) seems to fit the bill: Its trailer presents a dreamlike, beautiful and playful experience, starring a young Alaska Native girl, Nuna, and her arctic fox friend as they solve puzzles together. First shown during E3, the $15 PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One game favorably caught the attention of all the big consumer sites, and received an Editor's Choice award from Polygon."

When asked what his greatest hope for the game was Vesce answered, "Our hope is that as players play, they begin to develop an appreciation for some of the core values of Inupiat culture - including interdependence (mutual reliance on each other), resiliency (the ability to persevere through seemingly insurmountable challenge), and respect for wisdom and knowledge that is passed from one generation to another.

It's a really great article, so I urge you to read the whole thing.

Gamespot Steals Content, Gets PWNED

Danny "Sardius" Cowan compiles a weekly feature for gaming industry news site Gamasutra called "Release This!" which compiles worldwide video game releases. As you can imagine, this feature takes him quite a bit of time and effort.

So when GamePro began syndicating this feature across all of the IDG family of sites without permission of Gamasutra, and without crediting Danny, he could have gotten mad.

Instead, he got even.

Not once, but twice.

"In brightest day/
in darkest night,/
Crtl+C, Ctrl+V is how GamePro writes."

So You Wanna Be A Video Game Writer?

"One question I'm asked all the time is: What do I have to do to become a game writer? Well, at last I'm going to tell you. Are you ready for it? You're sure? Okay!

To become a game writer you must be good at writing for games.

I'm glad that's settled.

Oh ... were you looking for a little more than that? I guess you're persistent and curious -- that's a start. I'll tell you what I know."

Writer James Portnow explains how the art of writing for video games is different from writing for any other medium - and how making that distinction is the all-important first step towards being a GOOD writer for video games.

Be warned, there are some BioShock spoilers in the article proper.

(via gamesetwatch)

In-Gamw Ways To Turn Abusive Gamers Into Bugs Instead of Features

Bill Fulton, a former Microsoft developer writes about the need for instituting features into games that discourage players from acting like jerks.

"[W]hy do I care? Because the online behavior of our customers is dramatically reducing our sales, and continues to stunt the growth of our industry. Non-gamers simply don’t love games enough to put up with the crap they get online. The reason they would consider playing online is to have fun with other people -- and right now, playing games online with strangers rarely delivers that for anyone outside the hardcore demographic.

Are these problems even solvable?

Short answer: yes. Social environments and culture can be designed. Just like good game design creates fun gameplay, good social design creates fun social experiences. Unfortunately, online games seem to have allocated very few resources to designing the social environment."

Essentially, he proposes finding a way to engineer social expectations into games rather than just glumly accepting that people who play online are going to be complete tools.

The comment section is almost as interesting as the article itself.

Is It Too Loud, or Are You Too Old? Video Games In The Eyes of Non-Gamers

"Inevitably, after I finish speaking, the strong opinions come. It happens the same way every time: People listen and then they say what they've been feeling. 'Videogames are not good for you'. 'Videogames are a waste of time. They isolate children. Kids never go outside to play. They just sit there and stare at the TV all day'."


This choice is from an enlightening, and at times, sobering look at what prominent game designer Brenda Brathwaite has written for The Escapist.
After a dinner table discussion of what she did for a living lead to an exchange like th one quoted above, she was inspired to ask 40 people over the age of 30 (who were not gamers) what they thought about video games as a whole.

The answers wre surprising: most of them were completely negative, and seemed grounded in second or third hand media reports, or buried resentments.

From later in the article:

More and more, Edison sees a split between two extremes. "I see popular thought divided starkly between those who play, enjoy or appreciate interactive media and those whose feelings fall somewhere along the lines of 'I hate videogames,' 'Videogames are for kids' and 'There is no redeeming value to be found in gaming.' If you take the latter group, you hear two contradictory beliefs: that videogames are a child's medium, and that videogames are too violent and explicit for children. Just those two conflicting biases alone would be enough, I think, for a person unfamiliar with videogames to throw up their hands and be done with the subject until someone more invested works it all out."

The article's entitled "The Myth of the Media Myth", and is worth a read.

How about you, dear readers? What do your parents, friends or other relatives who are non-gamers? What do they think? Any readers over 30 who'd care to chime in?

Two More Great Tributes To Gary Gygax

There are two more great articles released in the wake of Gary Gyx's death that I wanted to call your attention to:

Jeremy Parish and the 1UP.com editorial staff compiled a wonderful article entitled Five Things Games Have Learned from Dungeons & Dragons that shows just what sort of far-reaching effects on video games and computer games Gary Gygax has wrought.

From the 1Up article:

It's taken three decades, but videogames are finally catching on to one of the most fundamental elements of D&D: emergent gameplay. Because the rules and guidebooks for the tabletop game were merely a suggestion, a set of conditions and constraints for building an adventure, the actual content and outcome of every group and every session varied wildly. This wasn't a matter of the random math, though -- it was the human factor. The dungeon master was a sort of guide, nudging the heroes in the right direction and adapting rapidly when they strayed. Not surprisingly, videogames have generally kind of sucked at this. The computer serves as a dungeon master by proxy for the creators, and computers aren't known for their boundless imagination. But they're catching up thanks to canny design. MMOs are very much the successors to D&D, bringing people together to deal with the randomness that results from so many real players gathered in a single place (not to mention the occasional interference of the game masters). But even smaller-scale games like Battlefield and Halo 3 have become sandboxes for goofing around, and single-player games like The Sims and Grand Theft Auto give players enough freedom to make their own fun.

And Wired has a great article chronicling the life of Gary Gygax, and includes lots of little-known games and some photos from Gygax's family. A choice personal bit of trivia from the article:

Gygax and a few of his buddies carried that DIY spirit even further, devising a game of their own around WWII tank combat. He was determined that his game would avoid the "goofy bell curve"that resulted from rolling a pair of six-sided dice (2s and 12s are rare, while 6s, 7s, and 8s are comparatively frequent). To achieve a more linear curve, he determined that players must pluck 1 of 20 numbered poker chips from a hat, so that there was an equal 5 percent probability of each outcome. Gygax later found the perfect replacement for this clunky system: In a school supply catalog, he discovered dice shaped like all of the Platonic solids, including the icosahedron: A 20-sided die.

But don't just take my word for it; check 'em out!

Raph Koster: "I sit and I look at what we do and I think 'Goddamn we're irrelevent.' "

Raph Koster, the lead designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies kicked off the Worlds in Motion summit with a keynote address. The address was nominally about "...why virtual worlds and online spaces are more than a fad-and why you absolutely should care."

It turned into something that has echoed across the game development blogosphere, touching off a firestorm of criticism, commentary and (one would hope) some self-reflection.

The quote that makes up this entry's title comes during the slideshow presentation where he says

"... the Neal Stephensons dreamt of the infinite promise, and you wonder how it addresses the things that we wrestle with in the real world... The collective venture capital at the summit has to be north of 50 million; enough to replace the FEMA trailers the people of New Orleans are living in. "I sit and I look at what we do and I think 'Goddamn we're irrelevent.' Have I brought you down enough yet?"

But all is not lost, he says. Gaming and virtual worlds do have importance because

"What we do in this room can have an impact... We see windows into virtual worlds when we download the [World of Warcraft]client. The metaverse is more windows -- breaking down the barriers between the worlds. We're heading for a world full of windows -- the question is what we'll be seeing through them. Will it be like a mirror or something new? We're not playing with toys but with people. We need to use what we already have and make a difference. Whether we empower each other makes a difference."

Definitely a lot of food for thought. It's not just video games, but our everyday lives are becoming more and more virtual every day: online banking, shopping, craiglist, ebay, online dating, message boards, blogs, you name it.

How can we harness this focus and energy to help others? It's not like there's zero reach. Ralph said "We have cybercafes in rural Senegal -- people without food and water still have Google. ".

Is this pie-in-the sky idealism, or will virtual world building lead to real social change for the good of others?

And even if it can, does that mean it should? OR should games be games, social movements be social movements and never the twain shall meet?

So You Want To Be A Video Game Journalist?

This series is a bit of an oldie, but a goodie.

I've written feature articles for 1UP.com and been published in PC Magazine, I have written for 411Mania Games, and I blog for RPGX.org. What insight can I offer to those wishing to become a Games Journalist?

Hell if I know.

Seriously, I'm not some big special person, I just had the right ideas at the right time, and was a little bit lucky. As passionate about the medium as I am, I do other things besides write about video games; it's nowhere near a full-time job. I don't really have any authority in the matter. I don't think I'd be up to writing a guide, personally.

CMP, the company behind Game Developer and Gamausutra recently published an article titled "So You Want to Be a Games Journalist" by Aaron McKenna. Criticism leveled at the article was that it was written in what seemed like an overly optimistic, condescending and starry-eyed tone that wasn't helpful in conveying what it REALLY was like to be a video games journalist.

This article got Kieron Gillen and Tim Edwards so hot under the collar that they arranged for as many games journalists as they could think of to publish articles titled "So You Want to Be a Games Journalist" of their own at the same time. Matthew Kumar of Insert Credit says:

There are currently 12 entries, and you can read my take at my workblog, but readers might particularly be interested in the Triforce's extended metaphor, John Walker's frontal attack on the original piece, and Kieron Gillen's completely straight (and certainly useful) guide. But there's also Tim Edwards, Tom Bramwell, Suki, Bill Harris, Jon Blyth, Richard Cobbett, Stuart Campbell and Jon Hicks.

You've never heard of any of them? Well, as my guide explains, that's practically the point.

The entire series in incredible reading; I particularly recommend the Triforce's piece, along with Tim Edwards' and Kieron Gillen's article, but they are all good, all useful, and they all ring true (even the contradictory parts).