The Duke debacle

 

The crotch of controversy.

Over the weekend, my friend Rob Fahey posted this editorial on GamesIndustry.biz, later published on Eurogamer. It’s about Duke Nukem Forever’s ‘Capture the Babe’ mode, which is, as you’re probably aware, a variant of Capture the Flag in which teams compete to carry a tied-up woman to their base, administering the occasional slap on the behind to calm her down if she wriggles.

I don’t really want to talk about Duke Nukem. I’ve been asked to write an editorial on it, but I declined – partly because none of us have actually seen the game yet, and partly because I tend not to engage too much with women and games issues, for reasons I’ll go into later. But what really interests me about this issue isn’t Capture the Babe mode itself. It’s people’s reactions to the controversy, and what that says about us.

The comments thread in this article makes for astonishing reading – it’s at nearly 600 comments at the time of writing. If you object to Capture the Babe, you’re a Guardian-reading bleeding-heart PC-brigade apologist with overdeveloped sensitivities to harmless, satirical entertainment. If you don’t object to it, you’re a knuckle-dragging mono-browed guffawing imbecile who thinks it’s funny to hit women. There is apparently no middle ground. This, it seems, is a politically polarising issue – it goes beyond what you think of videogames and starts to become relevant to who you are as a person.

Most of Eurogamer’s commenters – who, according to readership data, are overwhelmingly adult men – rallied against Rob’s views. A few resorted to questioning his masculinity and journalistic credentials, but most came up with reasoned, intelligent but nonetheless passionately dissenting responses. Many of them were genuinely appalled by the suggestion that Capture the Babe was misogynist.

This vociferous defensiveness is something I’ve encountered in real life, too, and I’ve found myself fascinated by what’s behind it. In the aftermath of an unnecessarily heated argument that I recently had about Capture the Babe, I was offered a plausible answer. The guys who support Duke Nukem’s right to do what it wants – intelligent, socialised men – resent being lumped in with neanderthals at least as much, if not more, than those who oppose Capture the Babe resent its content.

I think this is what’s behind the sheer force of the negative reaction to Rob’s editorial. Eurogamer’s commenters took deep, personal offence at even the inference that they might be women-hating pricks for thinking Capture the Babe is harmless. That is, after all, a pretty serious accusation to make about someone’s character, even if you’re only doing so by association.

Thing is, though, the other side has its reasons too. It’s all about context, and I find it extremely easy to understand why you’d be moved enough by Capture the Babe to plant your feet firmly on the ground and take a stand against it. I wanted to provide a few examples from my own life to illustrate why.

I’ve been writing about games professionally about five years, but I’ve been a Girl On The Internet for much, much longer than that. I know what it’s like for people to think you’re less of a person because of your gender: that your opinions don’t deserve as much respect, that your viewpoint can’t possibly be relevant, that you’re either an attention-seeking slut or an ugly fat bitch because you play online. I am convinced that it is a tiny minority of people who think like this – but equally, you won’t find a female gamer who hasn’t encountered it in some form.

There’s a reason I started writing under Keza MacDonald as a teenager, rather than Kelly. It’s an established nickname, sure – my family and friends almost all call me Keza – but it’s also more gender-neutral than Kelly. It’s not that I was ashamed of my gender. I just wanted to talk about videogames, and I knew that doing so under an obviously female name would only get me unwanted grief or attention. I just didn’t want the hassle.

Similarly, as a journalist, I’ve always stayed the hell away from women in games issues because I’ve never thought that my gender makes my opinion on anything more or less relevant. I also think that the best way to deal with the ‘issue’ of women in the games industry is usually to behave as if it’s not an issue at all – which is the ideal state of events that we’re all shooting for. Drawing attention to particularly objectionable incidences of sexism in games doesn’t often do much except fuel the fire.

But the truth is that there is a lot of sexism in games, and at times it really gets on one’s tits, for want of a better expression. I wouldn’t usually class it as misogyny, because it’s so infrequently intentional. We’ve got Fumito Ueda saying that he doesn’t use female protagonists because girls wear skirts and aren’t as strong as boys, without really being aware of what that sounds like to a non-Japanese audience. Most of it is completely casual and intended to be harmless, and almost all of it IS harmless – but it’s insidious.

And sadly, these attitudes very, very occasionally extend to people who play games as well. As a seventeen-year-old staff writer, I had to listen to people at the publisher I worked at making jokes behind my back about how I must be sleeping with my editor to get the job. I’ve already mentioned the shit you have to contend with on Xbox Live, though the excellent website Fat, Ugly or Slutty does a much better job of illustrating the point. In comments threads, I have more than once been asked whether PMS might be affecting my judgement of a game. From speaking to other women in the games industry, I know that this stuff isn’t that uncommon.

This is the *less* unpleasant end of what we have to deal with.

The thing is that something like Capture the Babe can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back – the one incidence of casual sexism and puerility that finally makes you take a stand, like plenty of female commentators have. I think that was the case for Rob, too. He’s not female, but he’s as fed up as anyone else with the games industry’s mainstream image as an irrelevant or even potentially dangerous adolescent pastime, and things like Capture the Babe, in his view, do nothing to help.

What I’m trying to say here is that we all have good reasons for how we feel about issues like this. I’m amazed by the scale and ferociousness of this argument, and by how eager we all seem to be to jump down each other’s throats about it. I didn’t think that an argument about something as fundamentally silly as Duke Nukem could be so emotionally charged, and yet here we are. It’s worth thinking about why that is, and trying to explain why people are reacting to this the way they are.

As for Duke and his captured babes? On that front, I couldn’t possibly offer an opinion. I haven’t played it yet.

Failed adventures in furniture

Something very important has happened to me in the past few months: I’ve bought a desk. A real, heavy, made-out-of-wood desk, with metal handles, that cannot be disassembled into a flatpack or picked up with the strength of one arm like every other piece of furniture I have ever bought. I paid a random internet furniture store an awful lot of money for it in a fit of fury and self-hatred after an Ikea visit. It has since become an object of huge metaphorical significance.

You see, I’ve always harboured a suspicion that I am, in several significant ways, not proper. I write about videogames for a living. My possessions, in descending order of volume, constitute books, games, plastic instruments and real instruments, and nothing of any practical use. I own one pair of shoes. Flicking through British TV channels provokes such a sudden, searing sense of cultural disconnect in me that I sabotaged my own aerial four years ago. I have no idea why anybody wants things like jobs or children or gardens or cushions from John Lewis.

This is why Ikea particularly gets to me. It’s a place specifically designed to sharpen my closest-held insecurities about my failures as a proper human being. It’s full of people whom I don’t understand and objects/advertisements designed to appeal to them. I invariably come out of Ikea in an abject, miserable state of existential crisis, aware that I neither own nor desire to own anything that adults are supposed to have.

That’s why I bought the desk. A desk! That’s not a book or a game or a pretend guitar! A desk is something that a real person might own. This desk was my key to proper life, my way out of the confusion and dislocation and creeping sense of impending doom that characterise young adulthood. Once I have a desk, I thought, everything else will fall into place. I’ll no longer be bothered by the compulsion to rip my life up by the roots and move it somewhere else every year. The thought of hoovering won’t make me want to run away to Rio and live with the drag queens. I will learn to stop after three pints, I will open a savings account, and the fear of boredom will no longer loom, shapeless but sharp-toothed, in my mind – because I will have a desk.

Immediately, of course, I turned to the internet for help. Shopping for desks is quite difficult when you can’t see them. Some of them seem awfully expensive, others suspiciously cheap. There are lists of weird specifications. There are, usually, no user reviews, and no forums where desk enthusiasts post the weekly best deals on solid mango-wood computer desks with slide-out keyboard compartments.

Desks: COMPLICATED.

I phoned up my Dad to ask for advice; he suggested going to a furniture shop. This hadn’t occurred to me for a second. I don’t even know where I would find a furniture shop that wasn’t fucking, fucking Ikea. Google Maps didn’t know either. So I ordered one off the internet.

It looked awful nice on the website. Then it arrived and it was too big to fit through my door. It turns out that you have to do things like take measurements before you order an enormous piece of furniture off the Internet.

So it sat there, up-ended in the living room, for months until I found a proper adult to take the hinges off my bedroom door and put it in there instead. Also, I’d spent so much money on the desk that I didn’t have any left for a chair, so I haven’t been able to actually use my desk. It just sits there, reminding me of my failures.

Once I have a chair, though – THEN I will definitely be a proper adult. Yes?

The first few hours of Dead Rising 2

Oh HAI!

“As well as being bold, unique and interestingly divisive, Dead Rising was one of the most baffling games of its generation. It constantly teetered on the edge of parody. Was it intentionally making fun of America and its zombie films, with its obese lesbian police officers and chainsaw-juggling clowns? Or was it an honest but strange homage, a Western horror staple viewed through a Japanese cultural filter?

“Assuming the latter to be true, Dead Rising 2 (developed by Canadian studio Blue Castle Games) is a Western interpretation of a Japanese interpretation of Western zombie horror – which gives it the potential to be even stranger. Alternatively, a Western worldview might temper the bizarreness that made Dead Rising so interesting in the first place.”

Read the rest over at Eurogamer, if laying creative waste to the undead tickles your fancy.

Things I Did At Gamescom

There were more than a quarter-million people there this year. That's a whole bunch of people!

Videogame trade shows, then. You know all those attendees who complain about the queues and the workload and the unsatisfactory amuse-bouches that end up constituting most of your daily diet and the running around and the reticent Japanese developers and the overenthusiastic American developers and the dictaphone failures and lack of sleep? All of those people are completely correct. But it’s still a lot of fun.

If you know me, you’ll know I love Germany about 300 times more than I love my own country, so Koeln and Leipzig have always been a pleasure. Gamescom 2010 was my fourth, and apart from the Tokyo Game Show it’s the only trade show I’ve covered. I’m too young for the “glory days” of E3, when the publishers’ stands were loud enough to be borderline illegal and they served champagne in glasses wedged twixt a booth babe’s cleavage and gave you cigars made of money. Gamescom may be the largest game show on Earth, but it’s not given to American excesses. It’s large, but there’s decorum.

There was way too much going on over Gamescom week to post stuff up at the time, but here’s what I did: on Monday, I covered the Game Developer’s Conference Europe for EDGE Online, and watched many passionate and intelligent men tell me about the pain and effort that goes into the games that we tear apart. David Cage made a rather convincing case for running Quantic Dream as an “enlightened dictatorship” with his face pasted all over it. The brilliant and hilarious creative director of Red Steel 2, Jason VandenBerghe, talked about how motion control has and hasn’t changed the world, and spent ten minutes doing spirited impressions of different types of Red Steel 2 player with a walking cane. Then Google’s Mark DeLoura announced precisely nothing, but was goaded by gamesindustry.biz’s deputy editor Alec Meer into admitted that the MIGHT be announcing something soon. Journalism, ho!

Tuesday saw me and every other games journalist in Europe annexed by Microsoft for their Play Day, where I played with a pretend tiger (well, cheetah). Then there were the press conferences, which I had to liveblog for VG247 with my netbook balanced on one raised knee because Sony DIDN’T PROVIDE SEATING, which I think might just be unparalleled for a major press conference. EA’s was far better. It had seats.

And then began the true madness. I’m still not through the write-up backlog. Highlights: I got all short of breath over Fallout New Vegas, I interviewed Ken Levine after seeing the now-infamous Bioshock: Infinite reveal demo, LittleBigPlanet 2 blew my tiny mind with its level-creation possibilities, Bethesda and Splash Damage’s Brink made me actually like a multiplayer shooter for the first time since Halo 1. I didn’t write about Rock Band 3 – I hope to do so a hell of a lot when it’s released, and it’s on the cover of this month’s EDGE – but it taught me how to play the main riff from Du Hast in about a minute and instantly proved its worth as a guitar-learning tool.

I wrote a somewhat hurried summary of the whole show for The Observer, shortly before I ran out of steam and fell onto a plane at 6AM in the morning on Friday. I just had my first good night’s sleep in two weeks. (Yes, it is 3.30PM. I woke up NOT LONG AGO.)

So yeah: that’s what I did at Gamescom. Roll on next year. Or, indeed, TGS, which is in a little over two weeks. *whimper*

DJ Hero 2: Mixing it up?

I love Deadmau5, but I can't say his name properly because of txt sp34k revulsion. It's an issue.

Rhythm-action, more than any other kind of videogame, is a personal obsession. Something about matching sounds to patterns of light makes my brain very happy indeed – kind of in the same way as MDMA, weirdly. DJ Hero was the first taste of variety I’d had in my music-game diet since returning from Japan, so I’m more excited about this sequel than about any other conventional rhythm-action game this year (excluding Rock Band 3, but that appears to be in no way a conventional rhythm-action game).

My local HMV is affectionately known as the Plastic Graveyard at the moment thanks to its full-to-bursting window display of heavily discounted, unsold, mostly Activision-published peripherals. There are ad-hoc sculptures made out of Band Hero boxes and Beatles: Rock Band guitar packs next to disarrayed stacks of justifiably neglected Tony Hawk: Ride skateboards, presumably mirroring the precarious piles of dust-gathering, obsolete guitars and drumkits in the corners of living rooms and lofts across the country.

If you wanted to pick up DJ Hero for less than half the original £90 asking price, now would be a good time. It’s well worth it for the original game alone, but even if you already own it, once DJ Hero 2 comes along you may find yourself itching for an extra set of decks. Multiplayer was under-developed in the first game, limited to surprisingly tedious note-for-note face-offs, but here it’s very much a headline billing.

Read more, if you like – including the Three Rules of Rhythm-Action Multiplayer – over at Eurogamer!

Kirby’s Epic Yarn and Nintendo’s hidden talent for multiplayer

I’ve always wondered why the hell Nintendo bothers to keep Kirby afloat. In real life as in Super Smash Bros, every time he’s flung out of sight he comes floating back infuriatingly into your peripheral vision after a momentary absence. Turns out that Satoru Iwata had a lot to do with Kirby’s creation whilst he was still at HAL. Ah.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn almost redeems him for countless unfair Smash Bros defeats in my eyes. It’s such a beautiful game, stitching levels together out of scraps of material, thread, buttons and zips, and letting you play with it in ways I’ve never seen before. LittleBigPlanet has done this handmade collage aesthetic before, but you couldn’t pull on a button’s thread to rumple the scenery behind it, or unzip a pocket to reveal a hidden passage, or peel layered patches away from the screen. The characters themselves are wonderfully fluid. Dash sideways and Kirby’s form turns into an adorable toy car. Underwater, he’s a tiny submarine. Jump off a platform and he turns into a parachute with a HAPPY LITTLE FACE.

BROOOOM

Nintendo has gotten really very good at multiplayer that flows almost imperceptibly from co-operative into competitive and back again every few minutes. It started with Four Swords – possibly the most underplayed great game ever, and almost certainly Nintendo’s – in which bonding over four-player puzzles was immediately forgotten in the rush for the Force Gems that appeared as a reward, and continued in New Super Mario Bros Wii, where swallowing your co-players with Yoshi can be both a friendly helping hand or an excellent way of annoying the hell out of them, depending on the situation.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn works on the same principle. When all’s well, and you’re gambolling happily around the beautiful thread and patchwork world, picking each other up and chucking each other about is a way to stop the other from collecting the most gems, but when it comes down to it you’ll naturally work together. At the end of the showcase demo, Kirby and his little blue mate transform into a big colourful robot – one of you controls a huge punching arm by tilting the Wiimote, the other changes the trajectory of auto-firing missiles. It’s clever and funny and awfully, awfully cute, and I’m looking forward to playing more of it.

Nintendo 3DS impressions

Wait, that's not right

Had a hands-on with playable 3DS games this afternoon and dear lord, it’s the most exciting piece of game technology I have yet encountered in my life. You know those handheld devices in Star Wars? The communication hologram ones? It’s cooler than those!

I got the play with puppies, planes and puzzles and my mind was absolutely blown by the 3D effect. 3D in movies is a bit dodgy for me because of my broken eyes and their corresponding thick glasses, but besides an initial five seconds of brain-melting perspective-changing, the 3DS gave me no trouble at all. Eurogamer published my hands-on with the machine earlier this afternoon:

“Using a flat touch-screen to pet a 3D virtual animal feels strange at first, but you soon get used to it, and seeing a ball apparently disappear into the distance when you chuck it into the screen can’t help but amaze. The doggies scamper in and out of the screen without screwing with your depth perception at all. When they’re stood up on their hind legs with their paws up against the screen, the instinctive temptation is to reach out and try to touch them.“

I also spent far longer than is reasonable with Just Dance 2, which has no right to be so entertaining, and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, which is possibly the cutest thing that exists. I’ll write some more about those soon.

The Review That Would Not Die

I wonder occasionally whether I’ll ever be allowed to stop writing about Demon’s Souls. The original review I wrote for Eurogamer is, somehow, still being read 15 months on, and I’ve spent a lot of that time persuading anybody who stands still in my vicinity for long enough that it’s the best thing to happen to gaming in recent memory. I was beside myself with delight when Demon’s Souls was finally released in Europe last month. It’s the kind of thing that just doesn’t happen anymore in the games industry: inspired, Japan-only, rock-hard game makes its way across the world just by being so incredibly good that anyone who plays it feels compelled to belt out its praises at the top of their voice.

In the year-and-a-bit since I first encountered it, I got to interview the game’s creator Hidetaka Miyazaki for a post-release retrospective, which was one of the most interesting and enjoyable things I’ve ever had the opportunity to do as a games journalist.  I also managed to persuade The Observer to give over most of our half-page of games coverage to Demon’s Souls the week after its release, which I dearly hope shifted a few extra copies of the game to people who would otherwise never have heard of it.

I really feel that Demon’s Souls is a tremendously important game, and not just because it’s such an unlikely success story. It has a deep understanding of the things that drive us to play videogames in the first place; curiosity, ingenuity, challenge and self-improvement, community. Rather than a nostalgic throwback to Games As They Once Were, it’s a completely unique and deceptively modern re-imagining of how they should be. If you haven’t played it, for God’s sake, do.

Morocco diary

This is a wee extract from something I wrote last month whilst out in Morocco. Interesting place, but I’m not feeling exactly compelled to go back any time soon.

~

The streets in the ancient medinas at Essouira’s centre are crowded markets, with Moroccans selling everything from woodcrafts to fruit and vegetables to freshly-killed lamb, colourful clothing and piles of beautiful spices. We went out to explore them today in search of ingredients for an evening cooking frenzy. It was bustling, baking hot in the sun, the produce protected under canopies. The smells were pungent: mint, fruit and the occasional waft of cat-piss from the strays.

We got lost on our way, stuck in dead-end streets with men doing loud and mysterious things with tools in miniscule shop-fronts. You need a periscope to navigate effectively, the buildings and outer walls are so high. Our riad, with its four floors structured around the high-ceilinged atrium, evidently isn’t at all unusual.

The men at the stalls look straight through you if you’re female; Nina was picking up bunches of mint to take to the vendor, and the vendor looked at Guy, who was standing a while away, and asked whether he wanted some mint. Clare intervened during a haggling session over some sunglasses between Charlie and another merchant, and was told “We are having a men’s conversation!” I’m not sure which I resent more, being objectified or ignored.

Outside one spice stall in the market, quite far off the beaten track, we were looking at a fantastic assortment of things – perfumes, aphrodisiacs, spice mixes and soaps and medicines. Inside an alcove three women were working, grinding mysterious substances in mortars and pestles, sitting kneeled on the floor. I went in and asked in French if I could buy some spices, and they begged me to wait for Josef, the patron. He returned from the mosque shortly afterwards and ushered all of us – all eight or so – into the shop, past the silently labouring women.

The smell inside was incredible. The shelves were lined with powders and essences and oils, some bright yellow or red, some like powdered charcoal, some like tiny flakes of bark. Josef brought out jars of beautiful spice for lamb, chicken and fish, some lemon-aroma pepper, hot cayenne. He handed cinnamon root to one of the women and she ground and sieved it right there whilst we talked with Josef. I wondered whether they were his wives, or sisters, maybe even daughters – I doubt they handed in CVs for the position.

Josef ordered mint tea for us from a friend across the road, beautiful, sweet, hot nectar served from a metal kettle into small glasses. He threw handfuls of dried plants from his apothecary shelves into the pot, poured us glasses and served all of us, but not himself. I wondered, momentarily, whether we might all wake up in a truck with no memory of what we‘d drunk or where we‘d drunk it, or find ourselves handed mortars, pestles and mysterious roots to grind for all eternity, or whether he’d just thrown some herbal Viagra or cocaine in there for giggles, but that’s because I’m Western and suspicious of hospitality.

Josef brought out jar after jar of fascinating hand-made spice. One of the women was grinding nuts to make luscious-smelling oil that they make into cakes for cosmetics or sell for cooking. (What do they think of us, I wonder? Do they wish they were like us, and could go where they please?) I wasn’t allowed to buy any with the communal food funds, lamentably. He showed us blocks of musk from gazelles, sandalwood, bewitching fragrances – “Wear this and you have three men every night!” – and blocks of plant and oil that you grind up and combine with rosewater to make a face mask.

We escaped, in the end, with a face mask cake, far too much cinnamon, and spices for vegetables, couscous and lamb. Josef offered to take us to a Berber market, 30km out of town – a proper one, he says, with tents and camels and honest nomads rather than Essouira’s rip-off merchants. Most strikingly, he shook us all by the hand, and looked us in the eye, not just the men. I plan to go back to him for a block of perfume. I wonder where he learned his surprisingly good English, where he came from, whether he loves travel, how he treats his women when they’re alone.

2010!

We've got ALUMINIUM FOIL, therefore it is THE FUTURE

Apologies for the hiatus. I’ll be back! It’s just been… busy.

I am not complaining! Don’t get me wrong, brother. I said just down there, back in July, that having an unmanageable life is the only thing that makes the very concept of living manageable for me, and if things were any other way I’d probably be bored and decide to move to Argentina to learn Spanish. Actually I’d DEFINITELY be putting plans in place to do that if I wasn’t still sick, after nearly a year of doctors shrugging their shoulders at me and claiming I’ll get better at some point in the next half-decade. Another good reason for the break in normal service, that.