The slices pointing at the crotch really hold the costume together.
Holy shit.
The Chinese government has announced a new universal reputation score, tied to every person in the country's nation ID number and based on such factors as political compliance, hobbies, shopping, and whether you play videogames. (more…)
It's interesting that none of the other changes over time in gender roles and cultural norms have significantly affected this ratio. You'd think that meant it was some sort of innate drive mediated by hormones, but then there's this:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2009/11/25/mental-illness-vs-suicide/#.VhLWwyvrtKi
What's going on here?
An unwritten journalism rule: nothing ever exists until it appears on iOS.
...but the numbers are still damning.
Legendary producer, engineer and musician Steve Albini—notorious mensch and grouch—does not like electronic dance music, but he also doesn’t care if you use his songs to create your own! Big Black, Shellac, and Rapeman might not seem the prime candidates for a dance beat, but electronic artist Oscar Powell,...
"This is where we're all headed. Somewhere, in a grotty and undiscovered corner of the world, a bird will shit on someone's window. Within an hour, there'll be three trending hashtags, 20 reporters hammering on the doors and screaming through keyholes, and thousands of essays about how #TheBirdrepresents nature's revenge for anthropogenic global warming, or how homeowners should be properly armed to defend against intruding fauna, or how we're neglecting guano as a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilizer. We already have the technology needed for every boring thing that ever happens to briefly become the subject of a global debate, across hundreds of essays just like this one. And you'll read them. And nothing will change."
Via twitter user Jamie Osman
This article originally appeared on VICE UK.
At long last, it's time for humanity to come together andfight to eliminate that most ancient and pernicious prejudice, the hatred ofwindows. Who will speak for the voiceless? Who will stand up for those whocan't stand up themselves (at least, not without some kind of surroundingframe)? From the smashing of stained glass during the Reformation, toKristallnacht, to some anarchists throwing paint at the cereal caf inShoreditch, London: Why do people think it's OK to commit acts of violence againstwindows?
This is, apparently, the discussion we're having after members of a protest group called, bizarrely, "Fuck Parade"threw paint bombs and cereal at the Cereal Killer Caf on Brick Lane, East London, a disquieting outpostof our inevitable candy-colored future dystopia that only sells breakfast cereal. The caf's official Twitter accountdescribed it as a "#hatecrime"helpfully hashtagging the word in case youwanted to be one easy click away from more exciting #hatecrime news. Others, including Old Holborn (described by the Daily Mail as "one of Britain'svilest trolls"), appeared to seriously compare it to Kristallnacht, as if thereal victims in 1938 were all those innocent windows.
Across the countryor, at least, across the internet, which is by nowfunctionally the same thingthousands of people are trying to work out whatthe correct opinion on all this is. Was it wrong to attack a locally-ownedindependent business when there are plenty of big chain stores nearby? Is thislegitimate political violence or ultraleft deviationism? Aren't hipstergentrifiers also sometimes the victims of gentrification? Isn't vandalizing awindow appropriate when so much of London is being taken over by blank glassboxes, windows with nobody inside? But don't windows have human rights, too?
This is the first stage, next there are the thinkpieces. TheGuardian's Comment is Free, alwaysreliable for that sort of thing, has already got in on the act. Their's is a bold line: Apparently, if you're not too keen on establishedcommunities being taken over by a pair of creepily identical breakfast-peddlers,or a pop-up bar that only serves tap water, out of a single tap (which, againstall sense and reason, briefly existed),you may as well don a purple rosette and start goose-stepping with the Ukippers.It won't be the last: This stuff is what thinkpieces live on, the leakydrainpipe that nourishes their mossy, parasitical sprawl. The story is silly,sure, but doesn't it say something important about where we are as a society?And it does: It shows that it's now all but impossible for anything to happenwithout also having to mean something.
I visited the Cereal Killer Caf when it first opened; Ieven imagined a pitched battle taking place outside its doors. The place is weird and dark and strangely seedy, given that what it essentiallydoes is sell food for children. It's an innocence-deficit that the customerstry their best to close up, dressing in colorful onesies and bringing big-boyspoons to eat bowls of milk and sugar designed for people whose brains haven'tfully developed yet.
Related: Watch 'The Disturbing Truth Behind the 'Spitman' Urban Legend'<span id="selection-marker-1" class="redactor-selection-marker"></span>
Tom Whyman has written persuasively on the generalcultural trend toward infantilization, the mass abandonment of the adult worldfor a snug and secure parody of childhood, where we can live off tap water andcereal and everything will be lovely. (There's an adult preschool in Brooklyn where grown men and women can dofinger-painting and have nap time, and this is in a country that has over seventhousand nuclear weapons.)But there's another kind of infantilization going on outside the caf, in whichpeople choose to perform social activism under the name "Fuck Parade," crowdfund the revolution on IndieGoGo, and scrawl the word scum on the kiddiecaf during a late-night brekkie break as a means of fighting against theunchecked expansion of finance capital.
This is the political struggle that briefly entranced anation: tots versus teens. Two groups of monstrously overgrown children had asquabble, and some paint got on a window. Sometimes windows get messy; ithappens. And national newspaper after national newspaper rushed to cover thestory.
Socrates is supposed to have said that the unexamined lifeis not worth living, but then Socrates never read the Huffington Post. To contemplate, first you need life. There's astrand of thought from Aristotle to Fichte to Marx that sees the act ofcontemplating something as potentially active and transformative. But, as thelatter noted, thought always has the potential to coil up on itself, to giveevery impression of fighting for some kind of change while actually doingnothing of the sort. "Philosophy and the study of the actual world," he wrote, "havethe same relation to one another as masturbation and sexual love." In thisschema, the average wanky thinkpiecewhat Lana Del Rey says about feminism,what the Siege of the Cereal Killer Caf says about gentrificationdoesn'tsuffer from being too shallow, but precisely from being too philosophical.
This is where we're all headed. Somewhere, in a grotty and undiscoveredcorner of the world, a bird will shit on someone's window. Within an hour,there'll be three trending hashtags, 20 reporters hammering on the doors andscreaming through keyholes, and thousands of essays about how #TheBirdrepresents nature's revenge for anthropogenic global warming, or how homeownersshould be properly armed to defend against intruding fauna, or how we'reneglecting guano as a sustainable alternative to chemical fertilizer. Wealready have the technology needed for every boring thing that ever happens tobriefly become the subject of a global debate, across hundreds of essays justlike this one. And you'll read them. And nothing will change.
Follow Sam Kriss on Twitter.
Two words: Orgasm. Gun.
Welcome to the latest in Kotaku’s series of explainer articles where we drag in a random disembodied voice and have a little intimate chat about a game, comic, or something else our readers might find interesting.
However, this time I am just exploiting the system. After spending two solid days doing nothing but playing Gal Gun, I need to talk with someone about it.
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And I drew the short straw.
Deal with it.
::Sigh:: Alright, so what is Gal Gun?
As far as gameplay goes, Gal Gun is a rail shooter…
I’m sensing a “but.”
How do I put this? Gal Gun is the story of an angel who comes to earth on a cupid-esque mission to get a high school boy together with his true love.
Okay…
However, she accidentally shoots him with more than one of cupid’s arrows, turning him into the most sexually attractive man on the planet.
Typical teenage boy’s fantasy. Go on.
Unfortunately for the boy, there is a major downside to this. If he is not able to win the heart of his true love by the time the effects wear off at sunset, he will be destined for a life alone.
I don’t think I get the conflict. Shouldn’t he just be able to walk up to his “true love” and bam! they’re together? I mean he is the sexiest man in the world.
Well, therein lies the trick. The three possible love interests all have their hearts completely closed off for various reasons—making them immune to his magnetism. Unless he is able to find out why and help his chosen girl overcome what haunts her, he’s doomed.
Look, while this is obviously a juvenile love fantasy, I’m not seeing why you felt the need to talk with me about this.
I… may have left one little detail out.
I’m listening.
You see. Being the sexiest guy in the world means the female students on campus (and even the female teachers) all attempt to mob the poor guy with confessions and love letters, preventing him from helping his true love. So to save him from the female hoards, the angel gives him the “pheromone gun”—a gun that shoots cupid’s arrows. And while it doesn’t harm the girls, it does incapacitate them, leaving them collapsed on the ground in fits of ecstasy.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Back up. It sounded like you just said that this is a game where you go around shooting high school girls with a magic orgasm gun.
Yes, that’s pretty much exactly what I am saying.
The fuck!?
There we go.
So, it’s House of the Dead… but with orgasming school girls?
Yup.
And I suppose next you’re going to tell me there are tentacle monsters!
Actually…
Oh come on!
There’s no denying it. Gal Gun is 100% pure fanservice—and to the game’s credit, it never pretends to be anything but.
The girls you shoot are in school uniforms, gym clothes, or swimsuits. And you can even enter “doki doki mode” (“doki doki” being the Japanese onomatopoeia for an excited heartbeat) where you can isolate any of the random attacking girls and zoom in on individual body parts as they squirm and moan.
Okay, wait a sec. A quick google search shows that this game came out in 2011.
Yup. In fact, when it came out, the first Gal Gun was one of Japan’s few rare Xbox 360 exclusives—though it did eventually come to PlayStation 3 (with Move support).
Wait… the “first” Gal Gun? You can’t mean…
Indeed. For the past few days I’ve been playing the sequel: Gal Gun: Double Peace.
http://kotaku.com/the-up-all-nig...
Sweet mother of god.
That is an appropriate reaction.
So, I ask with trepidation, is it simply more of the same?
Yes—only turned up to eleven.
I know I am just a disembodied voice, but you should know: I am face-palming right now.
Basically, Double Peace takes place a year later and follows another angel and boy pair suffering a similar fate. Only this time the main romance options are a pair of devil-hunting sisters—the typical true feelings-hiding tsundere older sister and quiet dandere younger sister. Of course, why this pair is unaffected by his charm is obvious: Each thinks that he should be with the other sister.
Is going after both an option? It totally is, isn’t it.
Of course, it is. It’s also hilarious.
Oh? They aren’t down with the idea?
Well one throws ninja stars his way while the other shoots him with a rocket launcher.
Fantastic.
There’s also a devil running about with the demonic equivalent of the pheromone gun.
Which would be?
In this case? Little dolls that turn the girls chasing our hero into man-stomping sadists.
Of course. Why did I even bother asking? And I assume you can date the devil, too?
Indeed you can—or the angel if you prefer.
I assume the whole “shooting teens with an orgasm gun” is the same, though.
Actually, on gameplay alone, Double Peace is a darn good rail shooter. The whole system this time around is designed on looking down the sight of the pheromone gun. While it lowers your reticle movement speed and restricts your vision, it allows you to see and shoot through objects—helping you find secrets and hidden girls.
By “hidden girls” you mean, girls about to jump out and ambush you?
Well, that and ghost girls.
… You’re saying that you shoot dead girls with an orgasm gun which then allows them to move on to the afterlife without regrets?
That is what I am saying.
Wait, if you can see through objects, does that mean…?
Yes. You can see through the girl’s clothes while using the scope.
Called it!
However, the clothes are only semi-transparent—you can see the outline of what’s underneath but not the details. Unless…
Unless?
Unless you spend about $90 on the DLC item “Pheromone Z.”
Wait. How much is the game?
The list price is about $70.
So that means the DLC item that lets you see through the girl’s clothes is a fair amount more than the price of the game?
Yup.
And I thought Bandai-Namco’s DLC prices were bad.
I suppose I should also mention that now, instead of zooming in on one girl in “doki doki mode” you can now do up to three at once. But that’s not the biggest change. That comes from Double Peace being on PS4 and Vita.
Wait, you can’t mean…
Yep, touch controls. Several times throughout each route, you use touch controls in suggestive ways—be that massaging oil on both sisters or pushing the older sister’s butt when she gets stuck crawling through a window.
I hate you so much. You know that, right?
The younger sister gets attached to the ground with sticky goo.
So. Very. Much.
Look, when it comes down to it, Gal Gun and its sequel are boys’ adolescent fantasies. They are unabashed titillation and fanservice, pure and simple. As an adult, I look at these games and laugh at the ridiculousness of each and every scene. It’s just so over-the-top. It’s like a car crash, you know you shouldn’t watch but you can’t tear your eyes away.
Oh, I realize that. I was just making sure you understand that I hate you on a deeply personal— almost spiritual—level.
Huh. Well, I’m glad we got that cleared up.
Gal Gun: Double Peace was released for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on August 6, 2015. Its developers are currently searching for a publisher to bring it West.
Kotaku East is your slice of Asian internet culture, bringing you the latest talking points from Japan, Korea, China and beyond. Tune in every morning from 4am to 8am.
To contact the author of this post, write to BiggestinJapan@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @BiggestinJapan.
Artist Riikka Hyvönen from Lapland in Finland, has spent the last year collecting photographs of roller derby girls’ bottoms and converting the athletic injuries and bruises – which she calls ‘kisses’ – in giant pop artworks, some of which currently make up part of an exhibition at the Finnish institute in King Cross, London.
When National Security Agency director Michael Hayden told then-CEO-of-HP/now-Republican-presidential-hopeful Carly Fiorana he needed servers to put the entire USA under unconstitutional surveillance, she leapt into action to supply him with the materiel he needed.
Fiorana has proposed an increase in military spending as part of her platform: an additional $500B over the next decade.
Fiorina, who had been named HP CEO in 1999 and is now running for president as a Republican, promptly redirected truckloads of HP servers that had been destined for retail stores into the custody of federal officials who took them to NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Md.
The servers were needed for a massive new warrantless surveillance program codenamed “Stellar Wind” that had been approved by President George W. Bush.
Fiorina acknowledged providing the HP servers to the NSA during an interview with Michael Isikoff in which she defended the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance programs and framed her collaboration with the NSA in patriotic terms.
“I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did,” Fiorina said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats... What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked.”
Carly Fiorina: I Supplied HP Servers for NSA Snooping [Sam Gustin/Vice]
Jonathan Payne, a sculptor and concept designer, was inspired by the stories of a relative who had a teratoma removed and thus created his series of teratoma monstrosities he calls Fleshlettes.
Contains spoilers
In Bethesda’s 2011 open world masterwork Skyrim, despite the level of freedom the game offered you, the matter of political choice was pathetic. Aside from a few interpersonal developments of no importance in the grand scheme of things, the only real choice was which idiot side you were going to take in a civil war that might have been interesting if its principal actors weren’t boring ideologues who existed purely to give the player new quests. There was no sense that any of it mattered, and when it was all over the world was exactly the same.
So when CD Projekt Red started teasing information about The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt, each announcement about the high-stakes decision making in the game was met with real excitement. There were to be not two or four but thirty-two possible endings to the game, and with an open world that was a fifth bigger than Skyrim, players were promised the ability to have their actions make a noticeable impact on the world around them.
The decisions are not black-and-white either: sometimes you’re forced to make agonising choices where something must inevitably be sacrificed or go wrong. This is not a good versus evil high fantasy – it is a brutal world whose violence stretches well beyond the game’s combat system and into the very social fabric of the place.
I decided that the shades-of-grey political backdrop and the sheer potentiality of every decision would be the perfect game world in which to test whether or not it’s possible, in a medieval fantasy RPG that boasts freedom and complexity, to be an anarcho-feminist.
Why? Mostly because you’re never meant to play a game like that, in this genre at least. The average videogame hero, even the tiny percentage who aren’t white dudes, always follows certain conventions, in both the writing and the gameplay. They’re tough, not just physically but emotionally, either boisterous or silent. They stick to quite a boring gender performance, with animations that reflect conventional Euro-American notions of strength and beauty. And they’re always the fucking hero: they’re the leader of the group, they’re the toughest of all the goodies, they’re the one who makes everything important in the plot move forward.
I wanted to see if instead I could play a character whose interests were a bit less tedious than being some empty, unquestionable Nietzschean superman. I wanted to test the so-called freedom of what is clearly the most groundbreaking open world game of our generation, to see if I could reject the usual triple-A heroism and play a character who is sensitive, humble, committed to social justice rather than self-aggrandisement. I wanted to play a male character who could be an actual ally to the empowerment of his female co-stars, a-la the new Mad Max, rather than just the tough guy who saves them. I wanted to immerse myself in this world committed to freeing its inhabitants from their miserable feudal bondage, rather than just saving the day and making sure that the system can survive.
I wanted to play a hero that Gamergate couldn’t wank over.
The Witcher series stars Geralt of Rivia, a gruff, wry fighter with the ridiculous scratchy voice of a hypermasculine videogame hero from the mid noughties (which he originally is). He sounds just as silly as the Master Chief, but sadly has a lot more to say. Geralt is a witcher, a professional monster hunter from a reclusive male-only school of magical mercenaries. All witchers are genetically modified as children, which gives them significant strength, as well the ability to cast basic magic spells and to recover from diseases and toxins far better than normal humans. They have yellow eyes as a result of this modification, a physical trait which makes them easily identifiable. Many common folk hate witchers, and I passed much of the game with peasants hurling casual abuse at me as I rode through their villages.
The world in which Geralt operates is famously brutal, but it is characterized by different layers of nastiness. There is an overwhelming sadness to the place that manifests itself in different ways. You operate for the most part in two separate regions: Velen, which resembles Western Europe with its fields like Languedoc and its swamps like Devon; and Skellige, an archipelago of Norse-type islands where, charmingly, everyone is basically a Viking with an Irish accent.
The variety of landscapes throughout these regions is consistently well thought-out, with CD Projekt Red not letting you binge on epic vistas all the time. Instead, as you explore the place, you are gradually rewarded little by little with more of the world’s miserable beauty, in modest slices that you’ve really worked hard to enjoy.
Politically, the world is suffering from tyranny and imperialism. From the south, the immensely powerful empire of Nilfgaard (whose head honcho is voiced by Tywin Lannister!) is pushing upwards into the bitter no-man’s land of Velen. Nilfgaard may have medieval trappings, but its discourse is harshly Enlightenment: anywhere you travel where its soldiers are garrisoned, there is endless propaganda that talks about ‘order’ to a small degree and ‘reason’ to an overwhelming one. Their message to the frightened peasantry is clear: abandon your rural superstitions and your lazy work ethic, and instead toil away in our glorious modernity. It is an attitude that manages to embody a range of dodgy Eurocentric beliefs, from ‘cogito ergo sum’ to ‘arbeit macht frei’. I don’t care how much science and order the Nilfgaardians are bringing with them: they’re total dicks. They even put out signs threatening to hang benefit cheats, in case it wasn’t obvious enough that they’re a bunch of Tory scum.
Meanwhile in the north, the Kingdom of Redania, ruled by the increasingly insane King Radovid, is imposing its will on the formerly ‘free city’ of Novigrad, and it is doing so in a fit of religious and racial hysteria. Their official faith, the Eternal Fire, has echoes of late medieval Christianity, complete with inquisitions, burnings, and pogroms against ethnic minorities (okay, elves and dwarves, but still). Both empires really have it in for mages and sorcerers and the like, occasionally including witchers.
Against this backdrop, Geralt is in pursuit of his ward, a daughter-like figure called Ciri, who is on the run from an apocalyptic band of magical warriors called the Wild Hunt, and who the player controls in occasional small sections of the game. I chose to play on Death March, the hardest difficulty setting, because I wanted Geralt’s activism to be difficult. Fighting for social justice is a fight, after all, and making it easy would have taken something away from the difficult decisions I expected to face in the game.
Geralt is not an empty vessel: he was originally a character in Andrzej Sapkowski’s novels on which the game is based, and has been morphed into a hero in his own right by the events of the two previous Witcher games (which I haven’t played). This is a form of game writing I prefer: a main character who you have control over, yet whose personality is always already separate from the player’s. Simply not writing a lead character, as with Fallout 3 or Skyrim, normally comes across as more lazy than liberating. Having a character with some, well, character, provides some actual basis for emotional struggle. What kind of masculinity is Geralt wrestling with? Does he sometimes just want a hug?
The wealth of dialogue options in the game made this struggle interesting. Geralt is, at the core of his writing, sexist and creepy. Throughout the entire Witcher series he has become famed amongst gamers for being quite the sleazebag, with his ‘romantic’ pursuits usually leading to sex through lines that really would not work in real life. Part of the lore is that witchers have a ‘high libido’, but this seems like a weak excuse to design a character who makes the kind of weird macho advances people go to gay clubs to avoid.
I got around this by deciding to play Geralt as socially anxious and mildly repressed, as if he’s slightly genderqueer but doesn’t really know how to go about being as tender and fabulous as he deep down wants to be. This is why, when Geralt has the opportunity to take the lead part in a play, I elect for him to do so, and even insist on making design decisions for a cabaret theater, with the lovely dialogue options leading Geralt to say “boudoir seems like a better choice for cabaret. Just don’t go overboard on stuffed upholstery.” For at a short time at least, Geralt is a thespian, darling.
In terms of roleplaying his social anxiety and aversion to displays of manly aggression, tropes of the genre do not make it easy. Sometimes, even if I pick the dialogue option that I suspect will lead to the most empowering outcome for Ciri or one of Geralt’s sorceress friends (all of whom you get the chance to shag), Geralt would make a sexist joke.
Case in point, when I plotted with the sorceress Triss Merigold to sneak into an aristocratic ball. I had the option of not sneaking in stealthily, I think, but it was Triss’s idea and I wanted Geralt to follow her lead like his (2015) Mad Max template, which was a helpfully empowering option. But before we go in, Geralt just can’t help himself and says “eighty five desserts, while you’re trying to keep your waist at 22 inches”. I might support your cause, little lady, but don’t you dare get fat. It was a moment of knee-jerk nastiness that I think has more to do with the writers not thinking than in them saying ‘let’s make Geralt mean because art’. Compared to the sensitive and funny depiction of Ellie, a fat-positive self-proclaimed sex icon in Borderlands 2, this writing comes across as reactionary and stale.
Of course, sometimes the writing allows for a joke that isn’t necessarily awful. On another escapade, Triss suggests that I fake-arrest her, and withdraws a pair of handcuffs. I choose the dialogue option to make a sexy handcuff joke, because anarcho-feminists are still allowed to make hilarious jokes about shagging. I’m a sex-positive social justice witcher, innit.
There are two moments in that particular sub-plot that give me the opportunity to have Geralt hook up with Triss. The first was at the aforementioned ball, where we had an important mission to smuggle a mage out of Novigrad, and yet for some stupid reason Triss decides to get drunk and flirt with Geralt like a teenager. The game gives me the opportunity to have Geralt kiss her, but I found that writing the serious woman who had made the plan in the first place only to get wasted and get off with the main character to be too fucking dumb. I also didn’t like the idea of making Geralt a dudebro who takes advantage of the drunk girl at the party, so I had him pull away and remind her of the mission she’d carefully plotted. It felt like mansplaining was the best option.
The second opportunity to seal the deal with Triss was at the end of that mission, when she was rescuing a boat full of mages and was about to leave with them. Geralt says to her ‘stay’, and she’s tempted, but not convinced, and then I get the option to have him say ‘I love you’. Much as I support Geralt getting laid, the game hasn’t really given me any reason to believe that my version of Geralt would love her. So I let her go, because even though I’m a sex-positive social justice Witcher, none of the opportunities to get with Triss are unproblematic.
I also later discovered that the sex scenes are by far the most utterly cringeworthy parts of the game. This isn’t artistic grittiness, this is, again, weirdly sexist writing, this time spilling over into the part of the game studio where they actually make it happen. I was reminded of the SNL skit about Game of Thrones having a special advisor on set, a repulsive teenage boy whose advice in every case was “this scene needs more boobs”, and who took a lot of bathroom breaks. Awful.
There is a problem with the game’s writing of women in general, though not necessarily in the characters themselves, who are often powerful and complex. The problem is that however strong or interesting a female character, they so often still seem to revolve around Geralt’s penis. He gets four chances to bed various women, two of them major characters, and one of them explicitly rewarding Geralt with sex for completing a mission. They might pursue their own interests for the most part, but having so many women fawning over Geralt with a sexy reward hanging so obviously in front of the player, makes it impossible to play through the game without seeing Geralt as faintly disgusting.
Worse, in the brief sections when you play as Ciri, you march her over all kinds of terrain – ice, mud, cobblestones – in big fucking great high heels, which of course never slip on the snow or sink into the dirt, even though it’s raining. That rendering of a character’s appearance to please the male gamer’s gaze with no corresponding explanation or matching gameplay is a hideously lazy trope that really doesn’t belong in a modern game with claims of complexity.
Roleplaying Geralt’s anxiety, which was probably the biggest stretch of all my character decisions, was more down to my interpretation than anything else. I worked with a Baron whose stillborn child turned into a monster, and when he started shouting about it in public after we’d agreed to kill it, I picked the dialogue option telling him to quiet down – not because he was annoying me, but because I’m anxious and what if people are listening and please don’t give me a panic attack. On one infiltration mission, a guard tells me to leave my weapons at the door, and I pick the option to do so – not because I’m confident of my ability to win the day through cunning or stealth, but because it makes my Geralt feel awkward to refuse social convention.
One time I met a hunter in the woods, who in conversation referred to himself (and his elective social isolation) as ‘a freak’. I decided to pry his story out of him and said “I’m a freak, too”, at which point the hunter revealed that he was gay, and had been chased out of his village after his lover was killed. The connection between the two characters for their respective ostracism was a moment of tenderness in the game that felt a little deeper thanks to my Geralt probably not being 100% cis, and it made me wonder what possibilities for videogame writing may exist for LGBTQ protagonists to increase the depth of a story or world.
At most points when some bloke down the pub threatens to start a fight, the game gives you the option to instead buy them a pint. My Geralt might be a conventional dude sometimes, but having the option to reject toxic masculinity and make friends with someone felt like a real saving grace for my social justice witcher, and not just a helpful way to avoid brawls. My rule throughout the game, to reject manly competition when there was a gentler option, was given a fair few opportunities to play out, and was quite often rewarded. Liberating Geralt throughout the game was only a partial success, but The Witcher 3 still sets a far better example than most in that regard, and I hope it inspires writing teams to marry good gameplay with player/character self-expression in the future.
As a liberator of others, Geralt has the greatest opportunities when it comes to questions of nationalism. Since poor broken Velen is part of the shattered kingdom of Temeria, now swallowed by Nilfgaard and Redania like wartime Poland, I had plenty of opportunities to see people harmed by the machinations of empire. People would hide their Temerian flags that used to hang in their village pub for fear of Nilfgaardian soldiers burning the place to the ground, while Geralt occasionally makes contact with Temerian resistance fighters and can decide whether or not to help them. In every case I can think of where I had the chance, I chose to help the resistance, against both Nilfgaard and Redania. Only one of those exchanges was violent, attacking some Nilfgaardian soldiers to liberate a village, and the rest were largely humanitarian. Neither of the two empires, despite their promises, were out to help the peasants, but the resistance soldiers were keenly aware of poverty, famine and so on, and so supporting their efforts to provide welfare for the people made perfect sense. The game gives many such opportunities, and it felt good to be able to choose to do so rather than simply be forced by consequence of driving the central plot forward. My stake in their success was personal.
So, naturally, when the chance arose to take part in the assassination of King Radovid alongside various Temerian resistance fighters and the Machiavellian manipulator, Djikstra, I couldn’t refuse. Djikstra used to be the spymaster of Redania, back before Radovid and the mad religion of the Eternal Flame ruined it, and he looks wistfully back to an age of reason, with fair courts, a strong arm against corruption, and people who were secure and healthy. His reason for killing the king is largely patriotic, but it sounds pretty fair in the geopolitical circumstances, so anarchist Geralt lets it slide for the time being.
Once the job is done and we’ve nailed Radovid, though, Djikstra turns on his Temerian comrades. Their plan had been to submit to Nilfgaard as a client state, so that they could at least run their own legal and social systems with relative autonomy. Djikstra, however, is a nationalist at heart, and he’d done another deal on the sly, to hand over the old Temerian lands to a new coalition of northern kingdoms that could fight Nilfgaard under singular Redanian command. He tells me that he has no choice but to kill his erstwhile Temerian allies with whom we’d worked, and that I ought to leave so that I didn’t have to see it.
Aside from the interpersonal issue of the fact that killing your revolution buddies after a successful regicide makes you a total dick, I also chose to defend them because I was in no hurry to betray the political choices and autonomy of Temeria as they themselves saw fit. I killed Djikstra, an ally for most of the game and a character I found quite likeable, but it was made easier by the fact that he described himself as a patriot – ultimately, humanitarian concern was beneath him, and he would rather let thousands die for his (not even their own!) nation than give them a break and let them keep their own courts and customs.
The issue of religion, too, gave plenty of room for political exploration. The depiction of different aspects of different faiths is sensitively done in this game, perhaps more than any I’d ever played. Making decisions about when to beat the shit out of someone for their faith’s crimes and when to try and protect believers from the machinations of bullying rationalism was consistently thoughtful. On the one hand, any time the Spanish Inquisition bastardry of the Eternal Flame nutters got out of hand, I could violently overthrow them, tear down the propaganda, and generally punish them for their oppressive ways.
On the other hand, I also took on quite a funny quest around the swamps of Velen, after several pagan shrines had been knocked over by unknown hooligans. Reaching the final shrine to put upright, I found myself confronted by them: a gang of snivelling, virginal Richard Dawkinses, university students all, who were spouting (verbatim) famous adages from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil and claiming that they were fighting evil by attacking the ignorant religion of the commoners. Luckily they attacked me – I wouldn’t have chosen to use religious violence against atheism, since I am one and since religious violence sucks – and so I had the digital delight of running a sword through Sam Harris’s idiot fan club of New Atheists. The fact that they initiated the violence rather than me reflected the inherent ugliness of their creed: in the name of reason, I must die? How very Iraq War. It felt good that even in death I could somehow tell Christopher Hitchens to go fuck himself.
Fighting for the economic autonomy of the people of Velen and Novigrad was a mixed bag. I’m an anarcho-feminist witcher: I don’t just want people to be nursed like some milksop social democrat, I want to liberate them from the structures of oppression that crush their autonomy! Down with feudalism!
In the first hour of the game, it became clear that this was not going to go well: I was tasked with finding an arsonist who had burned down the smithy of the dwarven blacksmith Willis. I found him, caught him, and he said something racist about dwarves, so I wasn’t inclined to sympathy when he offered me a bribe for silence, and turned it down. He threatened to fight me, but I am a pacifist so I used a magic spell to lead to Willis, who decided to report him to the soldiers. They found him guilty without any evidence, except for the fact that I had declared him the criminal. A Witcher’s word clearly has unquestionable social capital for some unexplained (and unchallengeable) reason.
The soldiers hanged the arsonist, which was not my plan at all. I was trying to help everyone in the village to get along whilst protecting the economic autonomy of a worker who controlled his own means of production! This was practically a cooperative! Willis’s final words in the quest are that maybe the Nilfgaard soldiers aren’t so bad because they’ll finally bring some order to the place. Great; I’ve just helped some shitty Daily Mail reader go all military industrial complex on a wayward lad. The game’s inflexibility, and my innocence towards it, caused me to unwittingly help out a violent fascist; Nigel Farage would have vigorously nodded his stupid face at that subplot.
In other cases of blacksmith liberation, however, I had slightly more success, my favourite being helping out a master armorer in the city of Novigrad who was unable to carry out his life’s work and was reduced to using his forge to cook dumplings, thanks to a crime syndicate that controlled the local smithing trade and refused to let him sell in the city. Unelected thug lords be damned, I bet they’re hurting the common folk – and went about plotting their downfall in violent street exchanges. My blacksmith friend was eventually free to continue his good work, and he forged me a shiny new sword as a result. Liberty..?
I began to realise fairly early on that the economic choices in the game were bending me inexorably towards being a libertarian instead of an anarchist. In every single case of helping someone have autonomy, it was ultimately only in the service of petit bourgeois liberation, be it a monster that was making business difficult, or local thugs or feudal lords demanding a cut – they, especially, could quite easily have been viewed as lazy big government lackeys sapping the essential energy out of free trade.
There is plenty to be said by some anarchists for a kind of market socialism, with the main institution being democratic worker cooperatives, and I tried to keep those ideas of money and exchange and autonomy in mind as I freed numerous entrepreneurs through the world. But ultimately it was all done in good faith, as well as a sense of resignation that there was no way for me to guarantee helping cottage industries was going to help the workers. There were very rarely apprentices, which made each smithy and merchant’s shop a kind of Ayn Rand utopia in which the only visible labour is that of the brilliant entrepreneur, the source of all value and creativity. This, though subtle, was for me one of the blandest features of the game, because it is an accidental trope rather than a philosophical decision.
Of course, slaying monsters and driving bandits out of town is still a socially useful exercise. The first Witcher contract I take on, to slay a Griffin, is given extra importance not just because the man with the contract has information I need – you also see the Griffin preying on innocent villagers in the countryside. Most of the monsters Geralt is asked to slay are pests in this way, and the game is deftly crafted to really show you that this is the case every time, rather than just tell you ‘werewolves are bad’ and expect you to believe them. There is a lot of delicately crafted blood and strife in this world, and CD Projekt Red has done a superb job of rendering it visible.
The problem for an anarcho-feminist Witcher is that the ambiguity of Geralt’s success is never explored. One of the features of the game that best demonstrates this is a series of abandoned villages containing either bandits or monsters. You clear the village out in a bloody spree (which is great fun), and the villagers move back in, the advantage of which is that there are now new shops! Have I accidentally participated in nothing better than gentrification? It isn’t possible within the game’s limited mechanics to know – I am forced to assume (or hope) that the peasants are automatically better off because I’ve smoothed the system out for their baron and merchant overlords. The discourse hidden within that emptiness feels inherently capitalist.
I did get some satisfaction at the end of a Witcher job when I chose to let the monster, who I decided was innocent, go, and the customer (another fucking merchant) threatened to withdraw his payment. “There’d better be one, or you’ll feel the invisible hand of the market smack you so hard you won’t be able to sit down for a week.” I saved an innocent from a merchant and made an Adam Smith joke to threaten him with violence – that felt good, a reminder that the writers of The Witcher 3 are clearly an erudite bunch on a good day.
Some of the decisions occasionally felt contrived and slender, however, where they seemed less interested in creating the freedom of choice the game promises, for the sake of gratuitous bloodshed. Geralt is asked to find Ravvy, a card collector who has a particularly rare card that I need to buy. When I arrive at the pub to meet him, Ravvy is tied to a chair with a knife to his throat, and the bandits present tell me that I have to beat them in a card game or he dies. In other hostage situations in the game I’d taken the choice to initiate combat, but for some reason that wasn’t an option here – I had to play cards with them. I lost, they killed Ravvy, so I got up and slaughtered the bastards like I should have done in the first place, instead of trying to be ‘the good guy’ whilst submitting to a framework of power set by villains and enforced with violence. No game has ever made me feel so much like a social democrat, simpering and ineffective. Stop faffing about and fight the power already, damn it.
I’m convinced that The Witcher 3 is an important moment in gaming, a breathtakingly complex open world that delivers a more consequential scale of shifts in its world than anything that came before. Though it never directly intended to give a radical option and fails to truly offer one to the player (as this joke experiment hopefully demonstrates), it makes groundbreaking advances in the relationship between gameplay and writing that show what the platform is becoming capable of.
Little things in the gameplay helped strengthen the writing enormously. Time-sensitive dialogue options, with a visible time bar running out, added urgency to scenes that lesser games all lack – but which would not have been effective unless your choices led to often painful consequences, something this game achieves brilliantly. Having an economy and ecology that you could see and to a certain extent participate in was full of brilliant touches, from the remarkably well-considered layout of villages and farms (unlike Skyrim it’s actually plausible that these people grow enough to feed their kids), to the incredible weather systems that let you see a rainstorm approaching and whose wind stirs each individual branch. Liberating villages did make the world feel more stable, too, despite their vacuous redevelopment.
My favourite feature was the roads: Geralt could ride his horse off road, of course, but if you galloped it would sap the limited stamina of your horse, and riding through a thicket or a forest is as annoying and difficult as it would be in real life. But get yourself on a road, double-tap the canter button, and your horse will not only be able to gallop indefinitely, it will even stay automatically on the path so that you don’t have to wrestle with fiddly controls. This isn’t just immediately more satisfying than other games with horses that are often cumbersome and stupid, and helps you to actually want to ride through a landscape rather than pick the fast travel option, it also genuinely works to create a sense that this world has unity of purpose, that the lives of these people are interconnected, that a village doesn’t just exist for the benefit of Geralt to ride through and save the day. It creates a wonderful feeling of irrelevance and organic majesty, where the world has more to it than simply revolving around a muscly white dude and his amazing traveling wiener – there were people here before Geralt, and they will be here after he is gone.
The combat system, too, is good not just in its own right but also for helping you to understand Geralt’s place in the world. For one thing, playing through the increasingly puissant Ciri sections of the game shows you that she is a sorceress of wicked power, and returning to the comparatively slow and fragile Geralt gives a helpful insight both into Ciri’s power (which is significant to the story) and into Geralt’s weakness, that the main character isn’t the toughest guy in the world for a change.
Witchers are freakish strong, and fighting against a human opponent always makes you feel like you have a natural advantage. But come up against a monster, and you’re vulnerable; they’re huge, quick, some of them have big fucking great tails or breathe fire and so on. If you haven’t researched a monster before approaching its lair, it can kick your ass in seconds – ditto if you haven’t taken the time to prepare the appropriate bombs and potions, taken care of your gear, etc. Being tougher than humans makes your chosen profession make sense, but it also highlights that a Witcher’s work is both dangerous and necessary. Perhaps that is why Witchers are tolerated more than other magical creatures, who are ostracised and abused? The gameplay makes this aspect of the writing much more plausible.
Speaking of racism in the game, there were two things that struck me. The first was that the only people of colour that I encountered in the entire game were overly sexualised black satyr women frolicking attractively at the feet of a big bad demon. This is pathetic, probably even worse than not including them at all, and Jesus Christ it’s 2015 and we shouldn’t need to be saying any more that black women doing an exotic dance for your pleasure is a racist trope.
The second thing, however, is that the game showed a rare sensitivity towards a classic fantasy trope: racial absolutes. Tolkien is of course the arch-fuckup of this way of thinking, with his “elves are wise and gentle” and “dwarves are gruff and love dirt” and “men are corrupt” shtick. It is basically eugenics – a dwarf character is a dwarf before he is a character, and conforms rigidly to his proto-Nazi archetype. The Witcher 3 has elves and dwarves, but it does them a little differently, and sets a good example for how a game can deal with racism a little more intelligently than just thinking “what would Tolkien do?” The elves and dwarves live largely on the margins of society and experience structural racism that the writers make clear is the result of rulers stirring up peasant suspicions for political games. This racism is used to justify surveillance measures, which was a clever touch.
But what makes the writing really impressive here is that it demonstrated on several occasions that if a character did live up to its ethnic archetype in some way, it was not because of her biology but her culture. This touches on struggles in fantasy writing that go back to the 1960s or so, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that some of the more thoughtful discourse about ethnicity and culture in fantasy worlds has finally started to dribble into videogames. It’s about time.
Ultimately any critique of the discourse of a game that includes both the writing and gameplay is a question about technology and freedom. I played Geralt as an anarcho-feminist because he so clearly isn’t one, and I knew that the project would fail. But it fails in a way that inspires me. Geralt’s character is sexist and hypermasculine, but I felt like I had enough freedom to act as if he were struggling against that, even if he couldn’t just change himself automatically – just like men in real life. The economy is a weird mix of capitalism and feudalism, but it manages to manifest itself more plausibly than most and does not go overboard about praising its virtues; this is the way of the world, and the world is shit, and you are allowed to think that. Some nations and religions were evil and oppressive, but I was given the choice to side with the ones that weren’t necessarily so, and the game didn’t force me into either violent rationalism or mindless hippy bullshit about what-is-truth-maaan and loving everyone equally. It was a series of genuine choices that allowed me to think seriously about the context and values of the Geralt I was playing.
The whole point of a game is essentially to reflect a certain bureaucratic ideal. Games, digital or otherwise, must have rules. A big part of child’s play is agreeing on what rules to collectively impose on whatever dumb activity you’re taking part in, and these rules always already have some kind of cultural basis, even if it seems like they’re original thoughts. After that point, play is all about twisting something from its original purpose, of bending or breaking those rules for fun. A videogame is probably a purer form of the rule-setting dynamic than pure child’s play, because children at least can change the rules of a game through collective whimsy, whereas a gamer is trapped eternally within the algorithms of a world that someone else has built. Espousing radical politics is never about winning the game: it is about deposing the referee, tearing off the team colors, distributing all the hotdogs for free, and sometimes getting everyone safely out and burning the goddamn stadium to the ground.
So when a game promises freedom to the player, they mean the same thing as when a politician promises freedom to the citizen: the freedom to do a specific list of things, outside of which you must never stray, otherwise you are a pariah, a terrorist, or an idiot. Half the trick is to expand the choices available, and the other half is to obfuscate, to disguise the lack of freedom. There were plenty of dialogue options and side objectives that often lead to nothing, or to rejection – there is no way in The Witcher 3 to feel like you’re checking boxes simply to make things easier. There is an extra cloak of uncertainty to every little interaction, that disguises either enormous changes or nothing at all: in my one play through, I couldn’t possibly tell.
This is the true art of videogame making. I couldn’t play Geralt as an anarcho-feminist exactly, but perhaps that isn’t entirely the fault of the producers? I suspect it is, but I can’t outright prove it (not unless I play the game 31 more times), and that sense of mystery and bottomlessness is becoming increasingly more possible with every advance in the technology. This question of defining freedom within strict technological constraints, and how to widen the paradigm a little further with each new videogame, has enjoyed considerable strides with The Witcher 3, and I hope it is remembered as a moment when freedom in gaming began to morph into something truly spectacular.
When Nietzsche talked about the duty of parenthood, he said that one must “create a creator” instead of an image of oneself. After my Geralt had gone through many supposedly earth-shattering adventures and had made all this effort to hand some of the reins of this beautiful world over to its perpetually downtrodden peasantry, the world system had stayed the same. Our challenge to videogame producers is no different to Nietzsche’s: must this game world be so forever, or are you willing to use the powers you clearly have at your disposal to create a little revolution?
Awesome. This is important.
The Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination would be breached if two insider trading suspects were forced to turn over the passcodes of their locked mobile phones to the Securities and Exchange Commission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
"We find, as the SEC is not seeking business records but Defendants' personal thought processes, Defendants may properly invoke their Fifth Amendment right," US District Judge Mark Kearney of Pennsylvania wrote.The decision comes amid a growing global debate about encryption and whether the tech sector should build backdoors into their wares to grant the authorities access to locked devices. Ars reported today that an Obama administration working group "considered four backdoors that tech companies could adopt to allow government investigators to decipher encrypted communications stored on phones of suspected terrorists or criminals."
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I don’t understand the issue people have with polyamory
like
if all parties are down, what’s the issue?
The Bible says Adam and Eve, not Adam and Eve and Lilith and occasionally Lilith and Eve sleep independently with Steve but Adam doesn’t like him enough to do foursomes but they all occasionally have dinner together ‘cuz Steve cooks a mean carbonara and Lilith knows this Italian deli on her way home from work with pancetta to die for but everyone’s really concerned because Eve might get a job with Apple soon and it would be great for her career but she would have to move hundreds of miles from all three of her partners and is that really worth it?
