Really?! I had no idea. Good thing we had a man here to remind us that straight men love boobies.
...What freedom of speech? This is a privately-owned, moderated forum.
We totally do though! :)
That isn't at all what this study says. I see this one thrown around a lot and it's clear either it's not read or understood when it's linked. The researchers themselves discuss the extreme limitations here and really what they were doing was laying groundwork for new kinds of research in communication and media studies, where cultivation theory is most often leveraged. Because, the time of this research, cultivation theory had been used in a limited capacity in studying games, particularly with regard to sexist behaviors, the researchers wanted to try a new approach. Understanding what a study is trying to accomplish is key to knowing how to read it.
Thanks for the background and details on the era. Yea, for what it is I'm having quite a good time experiencing this bizarre, messed up old game. It is pretty interesting viewing the time-capsule of even more gratuitous misogyny and forgotten gameplay. Although, it's hard to imagine playing this game in it's release period and not being aware of how vile it is.
I'm very much a proponent of tagging in and out of long-term discussions like this to give oneself a chance to rest and recuperate before a fuse blows, personally, because it's exhausting. On an internet discussion forum, at least, we have the benefit of being able to pace ourselves--something that's not a luxury we have in real life, and it can be beneficial to take advantage of that. Sometimes you just have to step away and tag somebody else in. Humans just aren't wired for not getting heated about stuff that they're personally invested in, so it's natural that things like this can take a lot of retries and persistence. I think we agree on basically everything, here.
I love Jason, but you're absolutely right that the well was poisoned from the minute that discussion started, and neither of the bigger personalities involved did much to help that. I vividly remember how horrifyingly heated the entire thing was as a lurker at the time. I'm genuinely not sure he even realized the sheer severity (and more importantly contextual inaccuracy) of the accusations he made beyond the schoolyard insult, as someone who later admitted less than familiar with the terminology he threw around at the time. Kamitani exploded and retaliated in an extremely immature way that also brought to light some of his culture's more notable issues with gay people, which really REALLY didn't help, and from that moment no productive conversation was ever going to happen about the game or its design until things cooled off in the general public conscious, which as we witnessed took years, and as Jason himself knows very personally somehow still hasn't happened for everyone.
I just wanted to note as someone who came out of the American academic system that nobody actually ever talked about the tools you use to read, understand, and interpret studies and their findings until I was in Grad School. I think that, well, says something. In fairness to my undergrad, studies don't come up very often for someone who's spending most of their time in studios, but I feel like this is something that should be taught in high school, bare minimum.
Oh, absolutely, I'm being...generous and operating with the assumption that a lot of people seem to think reading the abstract gives you everything you need, with no assessment of the study in full. Always gotten the impression that it's a pretty widespread misconception (without ill intent). You're right that it's, strictly speaking, a separate issue from ability to parse the data itself, and the actual content here is pretty straightforward and easy to grasp, heh.
Oh, I had to do plenty of writing about studies in High School, but instruction was more a matter of teaching students how to use databases to find academic literature and then cite accurately by format. Grading was, looking back, likely far more based on grammar and ability to format citations properly and avoid plagiarism than anything, though obviously if you wrote nonsense or quotes pulled from your citations flat out didn't match your assertions it wasn't going to end well (I'd hope, anyway).
Yeah, I mean, we can't even get teachers who have actual degrees or training to fill our schools in a lot of places, and the burnout rate is so high that it'd be hysterical if it wasn't so depressing. In my case my school and teachers were generally great (and certified), and even then things that should really probably be taught fall through the cracks.
Sorry, I think we were all out to lunch at the same time. :D
English and literary classes are generally looked down upon by STEM students, but having experience writing is a huge boon for anyone in those fields.
Um, I studied Mechanical Engineering and I was required to write. Our Intro to Mech Eng class covered Technical Report writing in detail, and it repeatedly came up again and again during the course. This is in the UK of course, and in all honesty the American system seems to be quite different and confusing. You seem to get to choose a lot more classes, whereas my course was quite defined, I got to pick from like either the Energy, Materials or Manufacturing set of modules, then there were base modules that everyone did. From my firends experiences doing Art courses, they got to pick more classes (i.e they weren't part of a set) but there were still a base set of modules they had to do. And they didn't get to pick modules outside their degree.
No wonder this thread suddenly slowed down so much. I've actually been getting work done ahead of time, here.
Nah, I wasn't complaining about moderation, just laughing about the mindset and direction that discussion had gone.
I should have specified this was in the US. Of course I was required to write for engineering classes, technical writing, but the amount and quality expected of you was not comparative to humanities classes.
Yeah, HS was similar for me, it just touched on the basics of doing a research paper to start off with. In college I had to take a methods course that spent the first 2 weeks covering how to interpret a study and its data, and I was required to take a later class that was more comprehensive and taught me the basics of how to do my own study. The last class was a new requirement though, so maybe in some cases they're getting a bit wiser to what they need to teach people.
Yeah. I had to take a methods course myself--I think that's standard, though I don't recall it going into much detail specifically on parsing studies in the ways that'd later be grilled into me in Grad. At the time I recall it felt to me like a recursion of a high school class, but as I said it's been a lot of years and I was also still a cynical, precocious teenage brat at the time so I mean, memories. It's entirely possible I'm doing The System a disservice here, but it does definitely seem to be a cultural trend that people aren't quite equipped to properly parse studies, so it's definitely a problem on some level.
I found a lot of the longer posts in this thread really interesting, but it's true that some threads move more quickly than others at times- this one had its moments too :D
You definitely have a point there. Good luck in the other thread :x
As a person who has taught in that system, I can tell you that the biggest problem is simply a lack of time, which is due to a lack of teachers and a lack of funding. It is genuinely difficult to find time to properly do everything people expect of the job and still a) have a life outside that job and b) properly perform all the duties and responsibilities expected. The expectations for teachers is also extraordinarily high when we sometimes struggle with just making sure all our students get a meal every day, which is just one of many issues that impede our ability to teach. Additionally, I don't think the system works because it tends to teach, even at the highest levels, towards highly specific ideas. It's a highly robotic, standardized system, and it's unsurprising that people would rebel against a system teaching people to be drones. And I'd argue that as standardized testing becomes more pervasive, that problem has only continued to get worse. And it creates a culture of not questioning what is seen as normal, leading to the extremely polarizing discourse we see on these forums and elsewhere, all the time.
I have immense respect for you for fighting the good fight in a climate where providing proper education itself can be subversive.
Maybe as a point of discourse - why does this look have to be considered male in the first place? I think it's perfectly fine to put a body image out there that, while many may read as male, is still designated as a female design. In fact, I'd like to see more of this in worlds where things are decidedly imaginary. Why not have a design we typically read as female be male? The roles and genders that are assigned by people, culturally, are arbitrary. What a male or female is supposed to look like is a point that society has pushed on us, not one that is inherently attached to us. Creators should have as much leverage as they want to break those molds and provide an alternative, whether it is something that reads as completely feminine, masculine, or as something that conforms to neither body type or the assumptions that go along with it.
Torchbearers.
When I saw them first I got an idea that some members are "maybe" females but only later through the some wiki I found that the whole crew are female.
Maybe its just me but even now when I look at them its hard to see non male design, + as non native speaker its hard to get since English does not have pronounce to genders outside of He/She. And they have been presented in different artworks where its still easy to confuse.
So here are the questions:
What are great female robot designs (not androids like but have human features) in games that are not too feminine or sexualized? Is it possible to create distinguishable enough so it wont be easy to misunderstand for male? Are these Transformers female designs fall into those categories?
Uhm, if we are talking about non human representation of women, I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend Night in the Woods.
I'd put it alongside Persona 5, Nier:A and Yakuza 0 for my best games of the year, but it's the only one that didn't have jarring representation issues.
Mae is really cool, has very few if any gender identifiers (ribbons, bows, lipstick, heels, gender norm stuff), she's also not slender or objectified.
The game features gay characters that it makes no attempt to draw attention to, it just treats them as normal. Besides all that, the game is honestly great. It's very story focused, but with some sidescrolling and slice of life stuff merged in. It deals with some pretty interesting themes that felt very relevant in 2017.
It's also not a furry game, don't worry. The characters are actually some of the more real down to earth or relatable that I have seen in a recent game.
My comment here is that usually with non-human characters we often automatically assume male gender, there often don't need to be any male tells, i.e. Pacman, ghosts or other creatures in Mario, many animals or animorphised characters in games. Samus makes a strong case for this too, everyone automatically assumed she was a guy. The devs usually have to put some pink color or a ribbon on the base character to inform us that a character is female.
