19Feb

Dog and Pony Show

Posted in Games Journalism, Sexuality in gaming | 1 Comment

So as some of you may have read, yesterday Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo posted a story based on an interview with Zelda mastermind Eiji Aonuma about Majora’s Mask and other topics. One of said other topics was the creation and history of series NPC and running gag, Tingle. And if you follow me on Twitter? Well…

…you know I had Feelings™ on the matter.

Totilo’s certainly not the only one to blame here — we’ll get to that in a moment — but generally speaking, I’m a little tired of how characters like Tingle are used to confirm existing, harmful ideas about queerness while simultaneously being used to suggest those harmful ideas aren’t real or harmful. More on this after the cut.

(more…)

09Feb

You Can’t Take It Off

Posted in Games Criticism, Narrative in Games, Sexuality in gaming | Leave a comment

Lately, I’m beginning to feel like a bit of a crank when it comes to LGBTQ issues in games.

Specifically, I’m worried that I’m being too hard on people who are potential allies. And while I am vehemently against that as a critique coming from allies themselves (“you’re not making any friends, you know”) I think it’s a valid thing we queers can ask ourselves when it comes to treating allies with respect. Sometimes, allies making the effort can and should count for something. So occasionally when I bust out a critique like… well, spoilers, like the one I’m about to write… I get worried that I’m being too hard on people that are trying.

What I’m saying is, if you get to the end of this and are mad at me, cut me some slack.

So recently Jamin Warren released a video in his “Game/Show” webseries for PBS called “The Value of Playing Gay in Videogames,” which I have included below:

I have some concerns about this video, or maybe more accurately, I’d like to add some nuance to the discussion of this video that it very likely had to cut to fit everything into an 11 minute video. I’ve also got some thoughts about Mike Rougeau’s Kotaku article on “playing gay” in Dragon Age, which is cited in the video. Details after the cut.

(more…)

14Jan

She’s Not That Into You

Posted in Games Criticism, Gendered gaming, Narrative in Games, Sexuality in gaming | 2 Comments

I want to talk about the part of Dragon Age: Inquisition that made me cry, or at the very least to tear up and force myself to not cry.

There are a lot of narrative beats, a lot of moments, in DA:I. I am sure you might expect that this emotionally-impacting scene is one of many in the rather large, global scope of the game’s story. Right?

Nope. It’s about a woman. Specifically this woman:

Cassandra Pentaghast, Seeker of the Chantry

Cassandra Pentaghast, Seeker of the Chantry

Probably my biggest, tear-jerking-est emotional moment in Dragon Age: Inquisition came when Cassandra Pentaghast had finally had enough of my flirting and had to tell me, in no uncertain terms, that it wasn’t meant to be.

While this post is mostly spoiler-free, I’m still going to put everything behind the cut just in case.

(more…)

11Jan

I’ll Be Watching

Posted in Rants, Real Life, Television | Leave a comment

So, this is an open missive to the creators of HBO’s Looking, about their upcoming second season of the show.

Now, I know that on the eve of the premiere tonight is too late to reach them before these episodes were filmed. Consider this gesture symbolic, perhaps. Certainly, I feel like it’s a necessary step for my own peace of mind. And in light of my current trend toward trying to feel more body positive about myself and to speak up about these issues more, it’s a necessary step forward for me.

Basically: I saw you include a bigger guy in your trailer for the second season, show. And I’ll be watching you.

(more…)

10Jan

Lewd-ology

Posted in Bizarrely Out of Character, Games Criticism, Rants | 1 Comment

So I’ve been doing everything in my power to… well, power through the end of Dragon Age: Inquisition, since I’ve already sunk 70 hours into it. With the sudden reversal of the games press’s game-of-the-year sentiments, it seems like now is the time before my motivation evaporates.

Probably the most widely-discussed critique of DA:I to make the rounds lately was by Patrick Klepek in his new job at Kotaku. I didn’t get along with that article terribly well, not because of its sentiment — which I agree with, as we’re about to discuss — but its phrasing, as I bristle whenever there’s the implication that some ways of engaging a game are “meaningful” and others by extension are “meaningless.” But that’s neither here nor there.

Certainly, the discussion right now seems to be centered on what I am calling the game’s “MMO bullshit:” pointless fetch quests with no strong narrative ties, no meaty rewards, no fun party banter. Just, as I said on Gayme Bar’s year in review show for 2014, “endless runs to Wal-Mart in the Wal-Mart Hills.” And like Klepek I think they don’t do much for DA:I, which is a problem because the game is full of that content. The main storyline, what would normally be called the “meat” of the game, is quite small by comparison.

However, the point of this blog post is to point out that this sudden explosion of “MMO-like” content doesn’t come out of nowhere. It is, in fact, a positional response to critiques of Dragon Age 2. And it is that situation that led me to make this tweet, this afternoon, as I tromped through the Hinterlands in DA:I —

Since there are some potential spoilers (and uh, naughty language) involved here, more after the cut.

(more…)

01Jan

The Lady Boss Project

Posted in Real Life | 1 Comment

Sorry again for a not-about-gaming post. As before, if you’re here mostly for games crit, you’re free to go.

So if you follow me on Twitter, you know a few things about me. One of them is that I live on Twitter, basically, and the other is that I decided for the month of December, to close out the year, I was going to take a selfie a day and post it, without fail. I technically decided this on the 2nd, but to my surprise I actually kept it up.

If you’re interested, you can read every post I made with the associated hashtag, #LadyBossProject, which has all the pics (including a couple bonus shots).

This blog post is my wrap-up now that the experience is over. I’m going to say this: a lot of these thoughts are raw and untempered, so please indulge me before freaking out. Nothing here is set in stone; I am basically working through my observations in blog form.

More after the cut:

(more…)

08Dec

Taxonomy

Posted in Rants, Real Life, Sexuality | 1 Comment

Hey there. So normally I use this blog for like… 80% games criticism, 15% general media criticism, and maybe 5% personal stuff I just need to talk about. This post falls in that last 5%, so if you usually come here for games stuff you’re free to go.

Also I wanna warn you that it’s impossible for me to talk about this subject without going into some personal stuff about myself. I’m not saying this out of embarrassment — to be honest, part of me wishes we could talk about this stuff more — but because it might just straight up be things you don’t wanna know about a stranger or casual acquaintance. If so, that’s cool! I will not be offended.

Okay. Warnings delivered, here’s what I wanna talk about: body types in gay manga. Details after the cut.

(more…)

05Dec

Eat This

Posted in Rants, Real Life | Leave a comment

Okay. It’s 2:30am, and this has been stewing all night, and on the heels of my GaymerX talk hitting YouTube and my expanded version of it getting into GDC, this feels like the right thing to do. So I’m gonna make a quick blog post to talk about a thing that bothers me, and perhaps pre-emptively address some of the critiques of why I’m angry that are gonna pop up.

This is about a Weight Watchers commercial that I saw tonight during Peter Pan Live (shut up). More info after the cut.

(more…)

07Nov

Two of a Kind (Bayo-Sutra Verse 5)

Posted in Bayo-Sutra, Games Criticism, Gendered gaming | Leave a comment

[“Bayo-Sutra” is a week-long series of short blog posts on Bayonetta that leave discussions of her body and sexuality behind, in the hope of finding more about this fascinating game series to discuss than one issue alone.]

I want to close out this week-long project with a discussion of one of my favorite things from the Bayonetta series:

Relationship status

Relationship status

Umbran sistership.

For those of you who don’t know the lore of the series, history knew two “clans” that kept the balance of the world as we knew it: one clan of light, called the “Lumen Sages,” and one clan of the darkness, the “Umbra Witches.” Each clan possessed one half of the “Eyes of the World,” a treasure that granted them great power. However, 500 years ago the clans, which had to that point paid each other respect, suddenly began to fight amongst each other. The Lumen Sages were wiped out by the Umbra, but the Witches were in turn wiped out by humans during the “Witch Hunts.” The premise of the original Bayonetta is that only one Umbra Witch survived: Bayo herself. But that’s not actually the case. Very early into the first game, another Umbra Witch — the platinum-haired Jeanne — appears.

Sadly, I can’t say much more without spoiling both games, so if you’re interested, follow me after the cut.

(more…)

06Nov

Lights, Camera, Bayo (Bayo-Sutra, Verse 4)

Posted in Bayo-Sutra, Games Criticism | Leave a comment

[“Bayo-Sutra” is a week-long series of short blog posts on Bayonetta that leave discussions of her body and sexuality behind, in the hope of finding more about this fascinating game series to discuss than one issue alone.]

So I’m going to come close to breaking my own prohibition with this post, because the topic is going to make it impossible not to discuss, in some small way, Bayonetta’s physicality as a character. However, I’m going to hope that instead of masticating endlessly over the Is it okay to like this?! question I am now entirely bored of (as are plenty of others), it will be a consideration of a design element that I think is really interesting.

To coin a phrase: the camera loves Bayonetta.

If the earlier post on music didn’t make this apparent, Bayonetta is a performer. Her fighting style is based on dance-like movements and they are filled with excess. Her movements are huge and dramatic when they don’t need to be; she is highly vocal and playful (one of my favorite additions in Bayonetta 2 is that when Bayo succeeds a Witch Time-enabling dodge, she’ll make a quip, like “So close!”); the combat is characterized by excess and being over the top through things like Wicked Weaves. This is the essence of combat in the Bayonetta games: it is as much spectacle as it is combat. In fact it might be more spectacle than it is combat.

One of the cute and interesting ways this plays out is in the use of the camera, both as a literal thing and as a metaphor. More on this after the cut:

(more…)