Stochastic Gamer

Next Gen[eration] Games and Game Consoles

I didn’t watch the Xbox One reveal press conference but my twitter feed told me all I needed to know. So I tweeted a few things after being inspired by Sony’s focus on specs a while back during the PS4 reveal and now the new Call of Duty game having a playable dog before having a playable female character.

There’re more animals in games than ethnic minorities, women, LGBTI persons. Next-gen shouldn’t be about hardware; it should be about people

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Who gives a shit how many polygons are being rendered if major chunks of the population are non/under-represented or can’t connect to chars?

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Less shaders, less CPU cores, less social networks. More games that pass the Bechdel Test. More games that don’t exploit racial stereotypes.

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Next-gen is Apple letting developers sell critical, thought provoking games on iOS. Next-gen is games as more than distractions. Next-gen is a different way of interacting with, thinking about, and designing games. I’m not sold on next-gen meaning more, better graphics. No thanks.

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Forza Motorsport 5 giantbomb.com/videos/here-s-… sure looks pretty. There’re 2414 racing games giantbomb.com/games/?genre=6 Not one about single mothers.

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Microsoft. Gamify human decency. Make it a 10K-points Achievement to never say a racist/sexist/bigoted thing on Xbox Live. Verify w/ Kinect.

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Actually that idea is philosophically really gross, but still sounds like a fascinating academic exercise in study of human social behavior.

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Re: BioShock Infinite

Dear idiots on tumblr,

There is a world of difference between a work of art having racism and a work of art being racist.

Sincerely,
SG

Update: Good job on misinterpreting what I said and imposing a lot of assumptions about me as a person. I have no problem with people being offended by the content of the game and I empathize with you, I do. Look, BioShock Infinite does not in any capacity condone racism (and I doubt it would be published if it did). I am not calling the people who were offended idiots. I am calling idiots anyone who equates inclusion of racism (which may be bad depending on context) with actually being racist (which is bad regardless of context).

My annoyance is with people who pull certain moments in BioShock Infinite out of context. Should Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a whole be banned for its inclusion of racism? Should Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man be called racist? Should J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books be deemed ableist?

Update (04/29/13): Having played Bioshock Infinite to the end, and after reflecting on it and reading about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that Bioshock Infinite does a really piss-poor job of handling race. I still stand by my original post, but I do want to add that using racism in the game solely for window dressing may not have been the best decision Irrational could have made.

is.R(): To plot them is my real test