[michael1123]

Personally I just like interesting characters. I don't care or really even think about if the main character is a man or woman. As long as the characters are interesting I'm happy.

[michael1123]

Originally Posted by subbi

Should there maybe be a thread called:

Have all Wizarbox games a horrible cutscene style?

I have only played Gray Matter, but from what I see from the trailers of So Blonde and Captain Morgan, this horrible cheap style seems to leak through to all of their games?

Mind you, I can't confirm it as I haven't played all of their games, but it surely seems so....Maybe they really think it looks good?

All I see is graphic novel style, no real animations, no lip sync, paper cut objects seemingly moved by hand, style cutscenes....

Is it just me, or do other people appreciate this style? Is it cheap or art? I'm not quite sure, but I don't like it...and it takes away the cinematic feel the rest of game may still offer.

How can you bring accross emotional moments in such a style?

I think it's just their solution to limited funding.

It's possible to do it well. (see GK1, which had some VERY emotional moments done well in that style) But usually it isn't done very well. (see Gray Matter)

[chrissie]

Originally Posted by subbi

Should there maybe be a thread called:

Have all Wizarbox games a horrible cutscene style?

Why not start one?

[chrissie]

Originally Posted by michael1123

Personally I just like interesting characters. I don't care or really even think about if the main character is a man or woman. As long as the characters are interesting I'm happy.

I totally agree - it really doesn't matter!

[WitchOfDoubt]

Let's suppose that they flipped a coin to decide whether to have a male or female protagonist.

This calls to mind a classic fallacy in probability. Most people think that if you flip a fair coin many times in a row, you won't get long runs of heads or tails by chance. When you ask someone to write out a "random" sequence of ten heads or tails, they might write something like this:

"HHTHTTHTHT"

That looks pretty random, right? But it's not how random 50-50 chances really behave.

Let's see what an actual random number generator gives us if we try it a few times: (I used random.org's coin flipper, and have not omitted any results. This is what I got in four trials.)

HTTHHHHTHH <- four heads in a row!

HHTHTHTTHH <- no runs

TTTHTTHHHT <- three tails in a row on the first three flips. Analogous to the Wizarbox situation.

TTTTHHHHHT <- If they assigned the sexes this way, people would complain that "they had a bunch of games with heroes of one sex, then they thought they had to 'fix it' by making all their games about the opposite sex." Or something equally irrelevant.

Long runs of one sex or the other are what we expect by chance. What we don't expect by chance alone, given a totally random choice of male or female hero/heroine, is for most video game protagonists in the entire population of games to be of one sex or the other.

If I had the time, I'd take the top 100 list and count the number of male and female leads, and then see to what extent it was different from the chance 50-50 result. But life's too short.

Edit: On second thought, what the heck.

RULES: I will look at the top 100 games - not a random sample of adventure games, but a convenience sample, and seeing if they have male, female, gender-neutral, or male/female team protagonists:

#50 – Infocom text adventures - Mostly gender-neutral, one female (Plundered Hearts)
#49 – Sam & Max: Season Two (aka Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space) - Male
#48 – Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers - Male
#47 – Professor Layton and the Curious Village - Male
#46 – The Journeyman Project 3: Legacy of Time - Gender-neutral?
#45 – The Curse of Monkey Island - Male
#44 – Simon the Sorcerer - Male
#43 – John Saul's Blackstone Chronicles - Gender-neutral? I forget
#42 – Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood - Male
#41 – Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective - Male (mostly)
#40 – Myst IV: Revelation - Gender-neutral
#39 – Last Window: The Secret of Cape West - Male
#38 – Full Throttle - Male
#37 – Stacking - Male
#36 – Sanitarium - Male
#35 – The Neverhood - Male (Klayman sounds male to me)
#34 – Amnesia: The Dark Descent - ? haven't played
#33 – L.A. Noire - Male
#32 – Gabriel Knight: Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned - Both
#31 – Portal - Female
#30 – Bad Mojo - Male
#29 – Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Male
#28 – Sam & Max Hit the Road - Male
#27 – Discworld Noir - Male
#26 – Heavy Rain - Both, leaning towards male
#25 – Tex Murphy: Under a Killing Moon - Male
#24 – Police Quest 2: The Vengeance - Male
#23 – Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness - Male
#22 – The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel - Male
#21 – Blade Runner - Male
#20 – Still Life - Female
#19 – Beneath a Steel Sky - Male
#18 – Myst - Gender-neutral
#17 – Machinarium - Gender-neutral
#16 – Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers - Male
#15 – Syberia - Female
#14 – The Secret of Monkey Island - Male
#13 – King's Quest VI: Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow - Male
#12 – Zork Grand Inquisitor -Gender-neutral
#11 – Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis - Male, with brief exceptions
#10 – Portal 2 -Female
#9 – Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive - Male
#8 – Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge - Male
#7 – The Last Express - Male
#6 – Day of the Tentacle - Both, leaning male
#5 – Riven - Gender-neutral
#4 – Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars - Both
#3 – Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within - Both
#2 – The Longest Journey - Female
#1 – Grim Fandango - Male

... I think 50 is enough for the pattern to become clear. Barring a miscount, the results are:

64% Male
16% Gender-neutral
10% Team
10% Female

So... if we go by the top 50 results, which is a pretty hefty chunk of quality adventures, we get a ridiculous skew. The odds of this happening by chance alone are TINY.

If we ignore the team/gender-neutral results (and these teams are all at least half male), we get something like 13% female and 86% male out of the 37 or so games remaining.

This is so far from 50% male/female that I can't even look it up on a statistical table in a textbook because the probability of it happening by chance, rather than bias, is less than .00005.

And adventure games are generally considered a "girl-friendly" genre...

Anyone want to gamble on whether or not including games 51 - 100 will significantly change this result?

[millenia]

I think you already talked about this on your previous post but the lack of female characters is most likely because it's really risky to have female characters that aren't young, pretty, clean and nice. And those kind of persons tend to be on the boring side. If you want tastier, rougher characters, you go male.

I love different kind of characters - and flawed characters. I would definitely play a grandma or grandpa, a big person (especially great if the game in question then would not be about fat jokes but the person just happened to be fat because some people just are fat), a neurotic, a psychopath, a child... anything really.

But the "mainstream" (whatever it is) is turned off by "too weird" (this is seen also in these forums how some characters are not very much liked because they are different) and rare people really want to take the chances of doing games which main protagonist is a turnoff for a big part of the customer base.

I also don't mean to forget the basic fact that most games are done by males to males.

[Banter]

I guess the standard fare when it comes to enjoyable and original lead characters in any format of fiction is the "likeable loser" type. It can be done in billions of different ways and it never stops being original when done right. It can be a down and out boxer(Rocky Balboa) a womanizer failed pulp writer(Gabriel Knight) a struggling dead travelling agent(Manny Calavera), whatever! Why? Because you must be able to relate to the character and for that it must be flawed and have weaknesses. The fictional nietzchean super-humans that some of us use to mirror our ideals get old and boring really fast.

For some reason female lead characters are nearly always put into this perspective, and that must be the reason why they are so unoriginal. We either get the "lesbianic uberfrau" "I mentioned(Ripley in Aliens 4, Sarah Connor in T2, every action movie chick ever) or the rugged and strong willed individual that goes against the odds and triumphs on her merits(pretty much every other female lead).

Funny, the only "likeable loser" female lead character in adventure games that comes to mind now is Rosangela Blackwell of the blackwell series. And guess what? She is really original and far from "generic". Grace Nakimura fits that bill as well, though I am not sure if she qualifies as a lead character. Humm... there must be some truth behind this mentally challenged rant of mine.

[Jannik]

Originally Posted by Banter

It is true, feminist characters would be lesbianic überfrauen such as Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor.

Just because they're a bit buff and "take action" doesn't make them "lesbianic überfrauen"

In my opinion they are both pretty nuanced and interesting characters, and actually there are pretty well-written reasons for the way they're acting. Sarah Connor looking buff is also explained.

EDIT: Just saw, that you mentioned Alien 4 in a later post - I'm mostly talking about Alien 1 and 2/the original vision for the character. It's true the vision got somehow derailed in Alien 4.
EDIT 2: Should clarify that I don't think Ripley became feminist-like in Alien 4, just that the people behind the movie didn't seem interested in following James Cameron's vision.

[Banter]

That is what I meant, Ripley was an interesting and relatable character in the first 3 movies. I don't know why they turned her into a dyke with superpowers in the 4th flick.

As for Sarah Connor, she was believable in the first movie and then... letting herself be locked away in an asylum and then becoming the female version of Rambo aren't necessary preparations for the apocalypse. The whole of T2 was silly like that, it doesn't compare to the first movie at all.

[VampireNaomi]

I'm pretty surprised by how many people think a feminist character would automatically be "a lesbianic überfrau". In my opinion, a good feminist character can look and act like absolutely anything. What would make her a feminist character is that she plays an active role in her own life (not constantly getting rescued, having all decisions made for her by men etc.), has dreams and goals that are her own and is an integral part of the story rather than being there to look pretty or be the token woman. For example, I would count Nicole Collard from Broken Sword a feminist character.

Feminist doesn't have to mean anti-man or abandoning everything that's traditionally female. It's about women having the choice to be anything they want and not being judged for it.

This is slightly off topic, but I'll talk a bit about a recent gaming experience. I just finished playing Tex Murphy: Overseer the other day, and there were moments when I felt like the game was urging me to laugh at or judge its female characters. This was especially the case with Delores Lightbody because the major point of her character seemed to be that she was a joke because she showed obvious sexual interest in several men and flirted with Tex even though she was overweight and not that attractive. I also didn't like the whole business of how almost every character judged Sylvia for her past with the escort business and her involvement with several of the male characters. She was a bad person because she was selfish and only cared about money. Her sexual history and behaviour should have nothing to do with her value as a person, and yet Chelsee and several others made plenty of malicious comments about her sex life.

It seems to me that when a female character has a sexual history with several partners, it's always explained either by that she's a sl*t or that she has a tragic past and needs to be saved from it. When a male character has a sexual history with several partners, it's almost always because he enjoys sex and likes adventure. Why aren't women allowed to enjoy sex and have one-night stands? Why can a man be a single womanizer all his life, but a woman is pitied or judged if she doesn't settle down with just one person?

[Banter]

Sorry, that is just the way it is and always has been. No man in his right mind would think highly of a woman that sleeps around. Hell, no woman would. I don't think that is social conditioning. I think that could actually be an evolutionary trait. Promiscuity is fairly common nowadays and even so it makes people turn their heads when it comes to morally judging women. One has to wonder...

Sure, a man that screws around is usually idolized. Is it fair? Probably not. Do I think it is right? I don't. It must be that pesky biology again. A man who sleeps with many women is a biological success in nature and in human society. A woman that spreads her legs to every john doe that comes her way isn't. Most of us must know that on an almost subconscious level.

Originally Posted by VampireNaomi

Feminist doesn't have to mean anti-man or abandoning everything that's traditionally female. It's about women having the choice to be anything they want and not being judged for it.

Maybe it was like that 50 years ago. Not anymore. The whole "equality between genders" has crossed the line and the modern feminist is basically a woman that tries as hard as she can to assume a position of male dominance.

[VampireNaomi]

I completely disagree with your first two paragraphs, Banter. As long as every party consents, I don't see why having a lot of sex is wrong. Sex isn't evil. It doesn't harm anyone. I believe the judgemental attitudes are majorly a social construct, but even if biology plays a part, surely we as human beings have the capacity to reflect on those attitudes and our actions and realise they are wrong?

As for the last part, I don't deny that there are people like you've described, but your comment gives me the impression that you think it's okay to brush off feminism altogether because of the radical voices. The situation is better than 50 years ago, but there's still plenty to improve in terms of women's rights. The current debates around the elections in the US more than prove that.

[Banter]

Originally Posted by VampireNaomi

I completely disagree with your first two paragraphs, Banter. As long as every party consents, I don't see why having a lot of sex is wrong. Sex isn't evil. It doesn't harm anyone.

It harms the woman. See, I am not a hypochrit. I would be hard pressed to deny an attractive woman or casual sex. Mostly because it is in my nature and because it feels good. But every honest dude on the face of the earth knows that it is right to settle down and that this doesn't go both ways. That is why every good man feels so inclined to protect the women in his family from becoming "whores". To preserve their honor. Specially when it comes to daughters. It is beyond social conditioning. It is in the genes.

This generaltion of girls idolizes the "sex and the city" lifestyle. You know, banging a different dude every week and shopping all day is seem as a vision of heaven on earth for a woman. This kind of lifestyle isn't as new as you think, in fact it happened in the days of my parents and I have an aunt that lived that way. Let me tell you how it ends: It ends with a barren and lonely 40 year old woman taking too many sleeping pills and dying in the bathroom.

Hedonism has been tried since ancient times. It leads to the ruin of civilization, collapse of family structure and corruption of self. It doesn't work. Trying to make a case for it is like spraying perfume on a turd. Sex can be good and can be evil, it should never be considered on absolute terms.

Originally Posted by VampireNaomi

As for the last part, I don't deny that there are people like you've described, but your comment gives me the impression that you think it's okay to brush off feminism altogether because of the radical voices. The situation is better than 50 years ago.

Is it? Women leaving home to work wasn't a conquest of any social movement. It was part of the war effort. It was profitable to the people on top and so it stayed. It increased the work force, it lowered job competition and it lead to social instability.

Just think about this: in the best part of the first hald of 20th century a man working on a factory could support a large family, own a large house, a good car and fill the pine three to the top every Christmas. How are things today? As a woman, do you think you would receive more respect now or then? When was the last time soneone opened the door for you? When was the last time someone treated you like shit? Because let me tell you, back in the day even a dock worker knew that not treating a lady as a jewel would be a serious social offense in a good neighbourhood. Now many women are objects, disposable human condoms or mannish copies that can compete. Things sure are great for you.

By the way, can you honestly tell me the social status quo is working for western civilization? We lost the will to live. We don't breed and we bring outsiders to take the places of our non-existant families. We abandoned our culture and morality in exchange for cheap hedonism and a position of confort. I don't want to sound like a loony here, I'm just trying to tell the hard truth. The "sex and the city" civilization has no future. It is just like Rome in its last days.

[Kurufinwe]

[VampireNaomi]

Banter, I'm speechless. I won't address all of your points because I honestly don't know what I could possibly say except that I think you're completely wrong.

The fact that you think women need to be protected from our own sexual urges, that we shouldn't make our own decisions about our sex lives (or that we aren't capable of making them) and that you think women should be treated like jewels is incredibly telling. I don't need a man to talk pretty words to me, open doors for me or treat me like an object that needs to be protected from being tainted. Your entire post was insulting to me. A man who respects women would accept that we are free to make our own choices and would respect these choices, even if he disagrees with them.

I don't want to stay home while my husband works and be respected as a house wife and mother and nothing more. There's nothing wrong with people who want to live that way, but it's not for everyone. I want to have a career, travel the world with my friends and enjoy life the way I want to. If you think that wanting to have the freedom to do whatever we want with OUR lives without being judged for it is selfish and the downfall of our society, you have absolutely no respect for women at all.

[Banter]

You can do whatever you want and I never said otherwise. I don't really care. Did I ever stated that I thought women should be confined to housewivery? I didn't. My mother was a college professor and she is the female role model for me. I was trying to criticize this:

"It's about women having the choice to be anything they want and not being judged for it."

That is a real silly fantasy. Men don't have that. Nobody has that. *does a bogart impression* Sorry babe, that ain't how the world works. People will judge you wether you want them to or not, your family will judge you and eventually you will judge yourself. You sleep around, society will brand you with a 4 letter word.

Yes, even our liberal society will do that. Sorry.

[Banter]

Originally Posted by VampireNaomi

The fact that you think women need to be protected from our own sexual urges, that we shouldn't make our own decisions about our sex lives (or that we aren't capable of making them) and that you think women should be treated like jewels is incredibly telling.

By the way, I also didn't really meant or say any of that. Well, except the part about treating women well. Are you against that? Are feminists against that? It would be a hell of a conflicting desire. Bizarro world like.

I would say women have to protect themselves, just as men. Erm, without chastity belts there ain't much a father can do beyond giving away moral lessons.

It is funny that you think it is right to give yourself to any whim and then expect not to be judged by others. Both the Tex Murphy characters you mentioned were seedy and charicaturesque, why would you imagine other characters should respect and admire them is beyond me. It would be unrealistic.

[VampireNaomi]

I was a little unclear with my wording, so sorry for that. I don't mean that we should be free to do absolutely anything we want without judgement because nobody can have that. I mean that we should be able to make the same decisions men can make and not get crap for it.

The fact that society sees it justified to judge people based on how often they have sex, with whom and what kind of sex it is is wrong. Maybe it will never change, but that doesn't mean we should just be quiet and accept it without fighting back.

[aimless]

Originally Posted by Kurufinwe

Totally
Banter, get off it.

[Banter]

Well what do you suggest? Should we petition the vatican to sanctify Paris Hilton? Make a statue of her in central manhattan? I don't know what role models do you live by, but usually the "public bathroom soap" kind of girl isn't really the type you bring home to show your parents. You know, the Hiltons and the Kardashians in life... they entertain people(specially those that go to bed with them), but they usually are devoid of personal worth. It is reality, it is not some phony judgementality people made up.

"I mean that we should be able to make the same decisions men can make and not get crap for it. "

Oh boy, you feminists should try embracing reality sometimes. Men and women are different. And that difference amounts to much more than penis, balls and vaginas. This forced equality you people suggest isn't happening. You have to understand that nature is much stronger than the imaginary "social constructs" you keep blabbering about.

You won't be perceived as a man and your average dude won't be perceived as a woman. You won't be judged as it also. What the hell is so wrong with that? Be careful what you wish for anyway. Being a man isn't a joyful parade where you dangle your member through life in a carnival of happiness. We have our own exclusive difficulties and pressures as well. I would say in many ways you ladies have many things easier from the moment you are born.