I decided early on that I didn’t want to offend people without a good reason. I wrote short sketches for a comedy group and, while by no means would I ever suggest I have any level of expertise in the form, for whatever it’s worth, people told me I was good at it and I believe them. The first creative writing I’ve ever had released in a public forum was comedy. But its immaturity came with a lot of baggage and I want to look at how the humour in the series works. There’s nothing wrong with a comedy being immature. There’s a really well timed fart joke in Chaos on Deponia. The only thing that’s made it worth going through is that it’s a decent comedy in fact, by the time the game ends, the mechanics start to be frustrating in service of the game’s comedy in a brilliant instance of ludonarrative resonance. As a game, Deponia is actually pretty frustrating. Which means that if it isn’t funny than there’s no point in playing it. The game enforces a patriarchal view of women and queer people. There were a few things in the review I left out that really deserve mentioning. I had the pleasure of reviewing Chaos on Deponia recently for PopMatters ( Review: Chaos on Deponia. I don’t think I changed anybody’s mind, but if this sort of thing is called out enough times from enough different sources then-well-who knows. They have to draw a line of what is a respectful and dignified portrayal of a woman and what is an exploitative and unfair portrayal of a woman and they have to form some ground for their argument that Tekken‘s portrayal of women is acceptable. They have to come to an understanding-however skewed-of what unfair portrayal and treatment is. In my mind, it was worth talking about because, at the very least, if somebody wants to take the position that Tekken is not sexist, than they have to actively think about the cultural gender binaries to place Tekken on acceptable ground. I got a lot of great support from a lot of writers I really respect, so I felt like I had done the right thing. I got plenty of the knee-jerk counterarguments of “all video games are misogynistic†” and, “Listen man, sex sells, it’s just the way the people work†” and of course, “Who cares? Women don’t even play video games†, especially not fighting games†” and the mentioned-at-least-once-every-time-this-conversation-arises, “sexism is just a part of nerd culture†.” But, like I said, I think it’s important to call things things out when people see them. So when the series starts to portray its women in such an exploitative fashion, I thought it was something to bring up. Men have always outnumbered women in the series, but in the polygonal days of the series’ youth, the women were fully clothed, not all of their victory poses were burlesque and they were not built from the ground up with fan service in mind. Recalling Tekken games past, I don’t remember the portrayal of women to be so, well, gross. That was why I was proud of myself for writing about unfair portrayals of women in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 on PopMatters (“ One Dimension: Women’s Bodies in Tekken.” Sep 25 2012) and my followup comments on this very blog (“ Sexism and Tekken.” Sep 27 2012). Anytime somebody is subjected to unfair treatment they should speak up. I call myself a feminist and so far nobody has had a problem with that who doesn’t already have a problem with feminism at large. “ Twitter hashtag ‘#1reasonwhy’ exposes sexism in game industry.” Gamasutra. I realized today that I can’t expect to be taken seriously as a writer on video games and stay silent on the #number1reason hashtag that took over twitter this week (Rose, Mike.
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