/media/ - Media

Misogynistic men fear the normalization of women as people, not objects for consumption. Video games are quite popular with young people, so teaching boys that video games belong to them and that girls should be depicted as objects, if they appear at all, shows the boys how to perpetuate the patriarchy.

>>37190
>Extraction shooter but Overwatch
Tarkov will have some serious competition in the irritating death department.
Another title in the
>[Established vidya genre] but everyone has MOBA abilities
I'll stick to Titanfall 2

i will stop caring about the flaws of the characters and the story once they deliver good gameplay.
if the game is shit its so much easier to find stuff to complain about

>>37191
Fictional characters are objects that exist for our enjoyment.

>>37194
Nta. Fiction can serve multiple purposes. People absolutely do use characters as role models, and this is why having fiction/games/films about strong, smart women is very important (see the Scully effect). But oftentimes characters are only there for entertainment. I agree with both.

>>37190
If you're talking about Marathon, to my understanding the current interpretation of the game to be released has effectively nothing in common with the previous entries. Not even a campaign to pretend as such. Any then prominent deviation will be attacked as a pattern is established. I haven't been following the news around it ever since I learned there will be no main story, and so if there's more drama around it I couldn't say.

>>37195
It just skirts a bit too close to the ‘video games cause violence’ school of thought for my taste. I reject the mentality outright.
While true that someone could develop healthy interests from a fictional character, I don’t think social engineering should be the focus of entertainment.

>>37197
"How it should be" and "how it is" are very different things. Entertainment has been used for social engineering since time immemorial.

>>37190
It's a conflation of "Game is bad" with "female leads". Unfortunately, a lot of devs put female main characters in games without making them either good gameplay-wise of story-wise, and use it as a shield for criticism. The same problem with movies.
Women leads are generally the face of those writers/devs so they associate subconciously girl lead = shit

I do have my own "bad take" regarding the visual elements of new Marathon.

Original Marathon was for its time at a normal level of gore, but by today standards it was very gory. Far moreso than a lot of retro shooter games, though less than the modern Doom games.

People did not just bleed a little, grab their chest and fall over. The game used different death animations dependent on cause of death. They were turned into red mulch and finished their explosion animation dozens or hundreds of meters away from the point where they were explode-shot. They had entrails and offal and bone and their death screams were recorded by a man who was also a lead singer in a band. People would kill civilians with the flamethrower just to hear the unique flame death scream. The video documentary of the college boys who coded the game showed them high fiving after triggering a mass explosion of a bunch of different people with a grenade shot, and the word "carnage" was very prominent both in game and in marketing for it.

If you've only played Doom (original, unmodded, when it only had 1 death animation per enemy), or haven't played any boomer shooters before, and are interested in trying Marathon out–pay some attention to how people die. The humans have two or three different death animations depending on whether a weapon made an enemy (or innocent citizen) bleed, burn, or burst apart–this is more attention than was paid to some of the alien enemies, and in Marathon 2 the multiplayer human enemy death animations are really very good. The means of violence generated a specific visual consequence, and human blood is specifically an important visual and gameplay element because if anyone bleeds anything other than red then they are bombs in human form and will run up to you and explode in a shower of entrails that will also take away half of your health and kill anyone nearby.

Original Marathon had zero (0) female sprites, only an omnipresent disembodied feminine artificial intelligence character with no associated image at all. There was a retro style game whose creator said he wanted to carry over the visual language and gameplay of Original Marathon, but used primarily female-presenting (mostly femboy) sprites–it was called "Citadel" and most of its reviews in English mention how deeply uncomfortable, ero-guro-esque and stomach churning the introduction of female characters to the charnel house of a Marathon-style shooter feels.

New Marathon - people turn blue, they bleed blue, they explode in blue, in the trailer there are bursts of blue-magenta clouds. The visuals of violence no longer immediately register as the specific consequences of violence on human bodies or human beings, and I guess this is necessary and probably even the artistic intention of the piece. A brutal grotesque cyberpunk nightmare where people get mulched but with AAA graphics, I don't think Sony would want to catch all the controversy already demonstrated by Beyond Citadel.

>>37200
With a little consideration I think what made Marathon gore hit different was really that it was very "readable." Especially in the context of four-or-more multiplayer matches. So it's not really any closer to Citadel than to New Marathon.

Marathon had a physics engine such that characters would be thrown in a direction by any projectile that hit them–not just special explosives–and their sprite death would face a specific direction, it would not be an animation that was always facing the player as happened in many contemporary games. If someone else killed another person and you only saw the death, then you saw enough to know the direction of the killer. And if you saw the dead body from a death that you didn't quite get to see, then you saw what kind of weaponry the killer was equipped with, and this was enough to make some playstyle decisions. Bullets in Marathon were dodge-able moving particles, not hitscans, but they are the fastest slow-moving particles in game. You'd want to remain around some obstacles if you were dealing with a bullet death since the weapons that can reasonably cause bullet deaths have mid- and long- range advantage that makes open ground a bad option. If they were explosion deaths, then you would want to try to get to open ground and if you were using the AR you'd want to switch to something orientated more towards mid and long range, or an explosive weapon if you can keep eyes on the points of egress. And if it was a flame death then you'd probably want either higher ground with an explosive weapon or open ground with a shorter range one, but would want to avoid cover and enclosed spaces.

It does seem odd that both of the culturally significant modernized successors to Marathon would receive twitter hate specifically for their handling of deliberately female and androgynous-male character forms. Citadel for being far, far, far too anime and Marathon for being not quite anime enough. Citadel is gorier, by a lot, but the gore has a very different feel to it. Marathon and its weapons and death animations were designed and balanced around the multiplayer deathmatches the dev team had gotten caught up in, so the readability of the deaths was probably intentional and a deliberate way to keep the game flowing when you had anything above a two player match. Citadel was single player only, and every video that I've seen of it makes the gore look more like visual overload which makes the battlefield less readable rather than more. Especially since wounded and partially dismembered enemies seem to have a lot of associated mechanics including playing helpless before sneak attacking. So even though Citadel represents a Marathon successor where human bodies get mulched and burned just like it's still 1995, it isn't really working in the same vein.