Is Borderlands Feminist Tumblr Fluff?

When a feminist writer joined the staff of Borderlands people were very skeptical and began pointing out every single thing they felt might be influenced by it.  It was felt that the game had simply become “Tumblr The Game.”  I’m here to actually say it went the opposite direction by debunking some parts of the game “Borderlands The Pre-Sequel” that people have brought into question.

#1: Strong Females Dumb Males

If you are part of the Male Rights Activist (MRA) movement you’ve probably heard the claim that media likes to portray men as being idiots so that they can have strong females.

In a show like Everybody Loves Raymond, you have Raymond and his father who are the breadwinners of the family who are bozos and idiots.  And then you have their respective wives who have little to nothing to call to their name.  But in order to make the wife of Raymond (Rebecca) into a strong role, they make Raymond into an idiot who is reliant on his wife for answers.

There’s a lot wrong with this dynamic.  In Borderlands you have two female characters who are smart strong independent women.  On the other hand you have the one male character who is a slave to addiction (in this case cyber implant addiction) and a male robot who represents the least capable of the adventurers.  The claim is made that the men are made purposely stupid and the women are made purposely perfect in order to create strong female role models.

The thing, is… that’s just really backwards.  By portraying it this way it means that the only way a woman can ever be strong is if she is competing against an underachiever.  In that dichotomy when you get to med school you have men who sit at the top and get all the scholarships and women who underperform and don’t put in the same sort of effort.  Yet when you look at a field like psychology, a field associated with mediocrity and mass enrollment, you have women at the top.

It’s really not a surprise really with a full generation of media portraying women as only better than men in the light that men have to suck in order for them to be worth anything.

In the end dumbing down males hurts bottom rung males as they learn to see themselves as clowns instead of respectable adults, and it also hurts women who only feel they can compete against someone who is clearly their lesser.

#2: Lesbians and Gays

There is no shortage of homosexual characters in Borderlands.  Sir Hammerlock is the carry forward from Borderlands 2, who “barely seems gay” if you can call that a thing.  Then there is the villain Belly who is desperately in love with his child-aged friend Red.  You have Janie Springs who is the youngest lesbian cougar on the planet.

Other than Sir Hammerlock the game actually doesn’t paint a very nice world for being a lesbian.  A true “Tumblr the game” type comparison would have lesbians and gays being scorned by everyone and being victims in society.  Instead they’re all mostly accepted members of society who are just living their lives.

Belly is a gay pedophile but clearly knows that sort of relationship is wrong… so he never brings it up.  He is however a villain and their relationship is always made to be a bit of a joke.  Belly himself is an imbicle and possibly mentally handicapped and unable to truly understand what his feelings mean.  His character ends up being one of the deeper ones put in the game but is also one they choose not to explore because of the morally contentious topic involved.

Janie Springs is someone who is quirky and weird.  Her sexual leanings are pushed on you very heavily from the very start.  The thing is, she is nothing but a cartoon of a lesbian.  I have known many gay men and women in my life and I can say with some sort of certainty…. she’s weird.

#3: Nurse Nina

Nurse Nina replaces a male doctor.  Some might look at this and see it as diversity in the work place.  Nurse Nina, although the name nurse, is a fully capable surgeon.  She is able to heal all wounds, just like a man.  She is even a dominant personality.  When trying to find a mate she actually straps him up in some sort of wonky medical apparatus to show her dominance of him.  Worst yet she only chooses the most dominant male from the pack so that she gets the one she can most powerfully dominate.

So why is Nurse Nina not an example of a Tumblr feminist conspiracy?  Well, simply put, Nurse Nina fits into the typical role that a woman would fit in real life.

Nina is a nurse. A nurse is nothing more than a doctor’s servant.  In some parts of the world nurses were fully capable doctors capable of treating minor wounds and delivering babies.  That’s the kind of nurse that Nina is.  However with just the nurses’s training she wouldn’t handle the major emergencies that a male surgeon or male doctor would handle.

I mean, at the end of the day when you really need help, it’s a Dahl Male voice that thanks you for your purchase.

Nina also romantically represents a commonly held stereotype, professional women cannot have intimate relationships.  So like the stereotype implies without having had any love in her life until she’s much older (age 30ish) she is now out hunting down men and can’t find anyone worthy of her.

A lot of Tumblr feminists argue that there are just no good men out there.  The real reason of course is the standards of professional women are too high compared to what they can offer a potential mate.

In this particular Tumblr blog the author claims she needs this:

1) Funny and can make me laugh and smile as much as possible. That’s non-negotiable. My levels of happiness are connected directly to my funny bone.
2) Chemistry. Think of a car ride together. You want the comfortable silences and relaxed feeling in the air, not the urge to throw open the car door and roll on out on the 101 freeway instead because that would be less painful and awkward.
3) Well read. Aware of pop culture and cultural events globally. We should be able to sit together for 5+ hours at the bookstore and not feel like we need to be anywhere else.
4) Established. This is a tricky one because I feel like it automatically translates to “having money.” Money is a very fluid thing that comes and goes, but the idea is that the guy would have a good career or a career in the works. I am not on board with the Peter Pans of the world.
5) You need nice grown man clothes. They don’t have to cost a fortune. I can help with this.
6) Optimism.
7) Feeling beautiful around you, even if I’m in my yoga pants without any makeup on. (Does that not look like a Taylor Swift song lyric or what? But it’s true. And knowing that you’ll be beautiful to me no matter what also.)
8) Patience, trust, kindness, spontaneity (of the flower bringing kind, not “hey we’re going kayaking today – take the afternoon off of work!”), comfort in tough times, and love at arm’s length where you can be close but not to a smothering point.

However if a man in a similar position made a list of what they are looking for in a woman, it would be a lot more simple.

Nina is in this particular situation, she knows what she wants in a man so she’s willing to throw out all sorts of potential mates in favor of the one that meets her standards.

It portrays the problem of society, women are expected to marry younger rather than older and perpetrates that pattern.  Nina isn’t a Tumblr inserted character, she’s what they hate the most.  But Nina is a lovable character.  So clearly she can’t be a “hit agent” from Tumblr.

#4. Lilyth is the Good Guy, Jack is the Bad Guy

So at the end of the day the hero is a woman and the villain is a man.

Is this evidence of feminist inserted literature?  Probably not.

At the end of the day someone has to be the bad guy…. or maybe I should say bad person.  Generally speaking the powerful evil heroes of every game are usually male.  The reason for this is the widespread perception that women are not intimidating enough or impure enough to be villains.  Actually having a female villain would have been more refreshing in the end because it would have been something new.

However to make it even less of femme conspiracy, Lylith isn’t even a likable character.  It’s not all that clear that what she is fighting for is all that good.

Borderlands at the end of the day is a universe full of evil and full of bad guys.  There’s no emotional relationship we can have with any of these characters that will make them close to us.

If anything we are more drawn to the evil boss Jack, because he in least represents an attempt to be progressive and implement change.  The vault hunters however are just a bunch of losers who were lured in at the chance of stealing a vault and getting rich but instead were brought into a civil war.  The goal of said civil war… is to implement everything as was…. which isn’t exactly all that good in the first place.

Testing Logic: No Jim, It’s Not a Video Game

JimQuisition is a little program in which a guy rants about something in video games.

Jim Sterling holds the position that games like The Walking Dead (from Telltale Games), Stanley’s Parable and the such are video games and that our standards of what constitutes a video game is too narrow.  He argues that if video games are to survive as a genre what we consider a video game cannot be limited.

Jim makes a very simple logical mis-step, a category mistake.

A category mistake is when you inadvertently place something in one category when it actually belongs in another.

A good example of this would be to say that a basketball court is a game.  No, the basketball court is actually just a location where games are played.   The game that is played there, is basketball.

This is the exact same mistake that Jim Sterling makes.  A lot of these things may be “game” like, but they are not games.

A game is structured play with rules.  So not everyone who is playing is playing a game, but everyone who is playing a game is playing.

Jim quotes the most common definition of a video game:

“A game played by electronically manipulating images produced by a computer program on a television screen or other display screen.”

Note that this definition includes our “game” which in order for it to be a game requires it to have rules and be structured play.

Games like Mario he rightly identifies as most definitely being games because they have rules, scores and objectives.

But “interactive games” are not really games in the same way that a person with homophobia isn’t literally terrified of gay people.  Game in that sense is being used metaphorically to indicate it is game-like, but it is not a game.

So what are these interactive games exactly?  Well, they’re the basketball courts while games are basketball.  They give you the place to play a game, but do not offer up any game for you to play.  When you get there you can either make your own game out of it… or if it lacks enough capability it becomes just an interactive movie or movie set.

No one would argue that an Audio Book is a game.  No one would argue that a television show is a game.  No one would argue that a blender is a game.

So why exactly is it that people are coming to the defense of these game-like video games?

Well simple fact, they’re available on consoles and computers and some people may in the future find them fun or enjoyable.

That however does not stop them from being sold in any market place or gaining distribution.  Games weren’t always popular but they were sold and we had methods of praising them.  All that really needs to happen is change the way in which we label these non-game products.

As a final thought here is a review of The Stanley Parable to illustrate how badly people want these non-games to be games:

“This is one of the best walking simulators I have ever played. You get to walk around and look at things while a man with a beautiful voice narrates your actions. Sometimes you get to click on things and he calls you an idiot. It reminds me of my mother.“

GTA 5: The Media Storm That Never Happened

As all gaming websites lined up for the release of GTA 5 to do response articles to media outlets blowing the game out of proportions.  It happened with GTA 4’s crime drama.  It happened with Mass Effect 3’s gay drama.

It seems that the video game journalism industry has always been able to roll out content in hopes that people will complain in the way they predict they will.

This year Gamespot released a video asking whether or not GTA 5 could train you to kill.  Kotaku released an article explaining that cocaine found at a Gamestop in Australia wasn’t real.  Youtube personalities lined up with video game violence movies.

And when it all was done….

Nothing happened.

Not even Fox News, the most right wing news channel had anything at all to say about the video game’s launch.  No one cared that there was a picture circulating of people snorting cocaine at a Gamestop.  No one cared that an employee threatened to give out someone’s private information at a launch showing poor judgement which could have easily been linked to play video games.  They didn’t even care that a mentally handicapped man was beaten up for his copy of GTA 5.

No the media seemingly just completely ignored the whole thing and just honestly did not care.

But that didn’t stop gaming “specialists” from putting up their articles and videos talking about the media bias and video game violence and making points about how it’s not a shooting simulator or criminal training program and how all those claims that no one was making were ridiculous.

Yeah those articles and videos that took a week to do actually went up regardless of the fact that no one had problems.

Testing Logic #2: Is Nintendo Trapped by Its Legacy

In this second look at gaming journalism’s validity I take a look at an article by Tom McShea of Gamespot titled “Is Nintendo Trapped by Its Legacy.”

Tom McShea is one of the big wigs of Gamespot and can readily be seen as the official voice of Gamespot.

The article illustrates that Nintendo has a formulaic problem that goes like this:

1. Nintendo makes new console and releases early
2. Nintendo fails to get third party developers to make games for their console.
3. Nintendo is forced to make their own games.
4. The only successful games they make are familiar franchises.
5. Nintendo makes a new console and releases early in hopes of getting more third party developers.

That is in a paragraph the entire formula of Nintendo.

The problem might be said is this a criticism of Nintendo or the entire industry?

This is a problem of arguing about a species and a genus.

A genus can be seen as a category of things.  It is all of the things put into a giant set  with similar enough features.

A species is a subset of the set.  A species defined often defined in the format “genus with feature Y.”

So when you define Nintendo you might try and define it as “Entertainment company making children’s games.”

The problem with the article is simply that it applies not to the species (Nintendo) but to the genus (entertainment industry).

This is often called a “category mistake.”  Under this sort of fallacy you make a criticism that is either applied too broadly or not applied broadly enough.

In this case, it is not applied broadly enough.

In the gaming industry you can take this article and replace the word Nintendo with any video game or video game company and it would have the exact same validity.  Let’s give it a try.

“How quickly we forgive Devil May Cry for their mistakes. They have pulled this same maneuver in the past, and it’s tiring to suffer through lengthy neglect followed by effusive apologizing to make us forget about how they wronged us.”

Let’s try it again!

“How quickly we forgive Halo for their mistakes. They have pulled this same maneuver in the past, and it’s tiring to suffer through lengthy neglect followed by effusive apologizing to make us forget about how they wronged us.”

One more time!

“How quickly we forgive Hollywood for their mistakes. They have pulled this same maneuver in the past, and it’s tiring to suffer through lengthy neglect followed by effusive apologizing to make us forget about how they wronged us.”

In truth the concept of ‘milking a franchise’ is not something specific to Nintendo.  It is a symptom of a larger problem in the entire entertainment industry.

When The Hunger Games was announced it was announced as a part of a new series like Twilight.  Hollywood has been jumping on the “series” train by creating movies of 6-12 hour lengths and splitting them up into 3-6 part episodes.

The most outrageous (to me) was The Hobbit, a book 1/3 the size of one of the Lord of the Rings standard books.  The Hobbit will be split into multiple parts as well despite not having enough content to fit into a full book.

It goes even further.  When a new console launches for Microsoft or Sony they make sure to secure some sequels to some major titles.  Microsoft will no doubt launch another Halo game.  Sony will no doubt launch another Battlefield game.  Microsoft will no doubt have a Bethesda game.  Sony will no doubt have a Square-Enix game.

It’s predictability does not make it great business.

Tom McShea misses the point of why Nintendo keeps recycling old games…. because they were good and people demand it.  The fact that they can introduce a new younger audience to Mario, Kirby, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Link, and Samus every 5 years goes to show how much sway these franchises have.

People actually demand these games.

Testing Logic #1: Let’s Talk about Violent Video Games

I rarely mention that my degree was in philosophy.  Philosophy is the practice that deals primarily with theoretical argumentation using tools of logic.  Philosophy as a practice has grown so large in the last 100 years that it has had to branch out and form other fields.

I’d like to start a series on this blog in which I take an article I don’t exactly agree with and instead of discussing the topic at hand look at how lazy the journalism is.

Video game journalism has been criticized as being lazy.  This is because video game journalists are in bed with the subjects of their riding.  It’s not something that is hidden, it’s very obvious and very accepted.

The end result is bogus reviews on bad games and articles that openly defend the industry full of bad logic and poor writing.

So this series will grab articles from popular websites and really look at how they are trying to trick people using bad logic.

I’ll be starting with an IGN article titled “Let’s Talk about Violent Video Games.”

The opening of the article starts off very fallacious with this statement:

Television and print media wasted no time laboring to connect the shooting to video games. The National Rifle Association implicated the video game industry, calling it a “callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people”, and a small nearby town of Southington, CT, was almost ready to host a modern day book-burning.

As it turns out this is a fallacy of straw man.

A straw man argument is when you setup a weak argument to defeat with relative ease.

This is a strawman because it doesn’t actually contain the arguments made against video games… just quotes from a single day.

The straw man of this article however continues.

They attempt to further misrepresent the argument.  The first objection is titled “Video games are for kids.”

Not only is this a straw man, but it is also a misrepresentation of what the NRA said.  The NRA never said at any point that video games are for kids.  What the NRA actually said is that video games are bad for kids.

What the NRA is ACTUALLY saying is the complete opposite of what IGN’s Casey Lynch supposes they say.  The NRA are in fact saying that video games are not for kids and ought not be played by kids.

Interestingly enough science rules in favour of the NRA’s statement that video games are bad for kids.  There is now 40 years of research on violent video gaming that shows increases in aggression.

As an interesting side note non-violent video games have the complete opposite effect.  Leonard Sax indicates that non-violent video games remove the drive from children and cause the “failure to launch” phenomena among adults (pg 103-110. Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic Of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. Aug 13, 2007. Basic Books.).  In fact Sax will go on to state that a boy should choose violent video games over non-violent ones so as to not remove drive.  However he states that games in which you play as a terrorist or are fighting police (*cough* GTA4) are inappropriate.

The next claim that the NRA supposedly made is even odder.  It’s one that the NRA has never said… but here it is:

“Objection #2: Violent video games are “worse” than other forms of violent media.”

Actually the NRA never did a comparative analysis of this.  What they actually said was that both violent video games and violent movies should be out of reach of children. At no point did they do a comparison saying that one form of violent media is worse than the other.  They actually made the blanket statement that all of them are as bad.

This objection was noted because the leader of the NRA is Charleton Heston.  Heston of course is infamously known for his action roles including Moses and the human in Planet of the Apes.  These were all very violent movies for their time.

The NRA actually approached Heston because of his action film bravado.  It worked out for the movie industry as well.  One of their top stars came out and stated that children should not be allowed in theaters with action movies and praised responsible gun ownership.

Next up we have a red herring!

A red herring is a piece of non-relevant material that has been placed in writing to distract.

“What if we switch topics from violence to sex? Should housewives around the country be reading Fifty Shades of Grey? Should everyone everywhere have free internet pornography at their fingertips? How about just access? You can see how this conversation suddenly becomes much larger and incredibly personal.”

A discussion of sex as a topic has absolutely nothing to do with a school shooting.  It is simply a red herring.

A point is made that as an American you should be able to do all of those activities and play violent video games.

But that’s not what the article is about.  It’s about video games and their relation to violence.

How can you take a person seriously who would round out the responsibility of gaming to simply stating that even if it is proven wrong you should be able to do it anyway.

A reductio ad absurdum is when you take an argument and you reduce it to the most absurd possible conclusion.

So let’s take this argumentative style.

What if we switch topics to violence is high schools?  How about reading Nazi literature?  This is America dammit if I want to do either of those I should be free to do so.

Why doesn’t this have the same desired effect?  Well… because you’re dealing with topics that the readership of IGN just might not agree to.  On top of being a red herring it is also pandering to the audience (also known as appealing to the audience).

The final point is made and the final thought comes from IGN.  Although I’ve established how far he has moved from the point his conclusion is a red herring.  It is also a brand new argument.

This argument is actually odd:

Why are so many kids playing violent video games?

“Parents are allowing it, either by direct consent, ignorance, or some combination of the two. Being a parent is tough, thankless work sometimes, single, married, with help, or otherwise. Keeping up with grocery shopping, laundry, homework, sports and activities, chores and bills, who has time to sit down with their daughters and sons to see what they’re playing? You do, Moms. And you do, Dads.”

There is a lot going on here.  First it is admitted now that violent video games are bad for children.  This should be the end and now IGN officially admits that the NRA is correct.

The main problem is that it is just a blanket accusation made.  There is no evidence posited or any arguments made.  All that Casey is saying here is that parents have time to parent and parents can stop their children from playing violent video games… ergo no need to moderate them better.

But can’t the same be said for hand guns and machine guns and nuclear warheads?  How far does this parental responsibility excuse go.

It misses a major qualifier of time, that is how much time is reasonable to parent a child.  The effects of violent video games take years to build up.  The effects of a handgun take seconds… we know this from the tragedy.

If a child was to borrow a video game from a friend and play it or play a game at a friend’s house, the power falls out of the hands of the parent.

The article is unable to reach a conclusion based on any facts or arguments presented and instead relies on “family values” as an excuse.

Overall IGN’s Editor-In-Chief wrote a poor article whose only purpose was to defend the video game industry.  At no point did this article deal with facts or valid arguments.  It was entirely designed to appease it’s audience.