Kaz and Spyda dumpin' on blonde characters and Femshep

Kaz says:
 So how about that video game news.
 Uhhh... femshep poll round 2.
Spyda says:
 Ugh. Saw your thing on Twitter, haven't seen it yet.
Kaz says:
 The proportion of votes hasn't changed.
 Like... is the fact that redhead Shepard is winning a sign that not as many people voted for "blonde bimbo Shepard" as voted for that specific hairstyle or face, or what happens when all the people who didn't want blonde Shepard are able to enact their revenge without their votes being as split, or both?
Spyda says:
 I guess I understand the idea of voting style, then color, but... fuck people for being such haters for blonde. Some of the comments actually were kinda offensive.
Kaz says:
 I think if nothing else it's a clear sign that not as many people voted for blonde Shepard BECAUSE she was blonde, or because she was "the hottest one", as have been accused of that.
 Or else blonde Shepard would still be the one with 10,000 votes, rather than redhead Shepard, which just cleared that number.

Kaz says:
 Someone made the point that ME has a canonical reason for so many people having dark hair, which is that humanity has cross-bred into a big ol' mongrel race...
 But they also mention that changing skin and hair colour is as easy as applying nail polish in the ME future, so I dunno where that leaves us.
Spyda says:
 Yeah... A natural blonde or redhead in ME is probably as rare as a male calico.
Kaz says:
 This puts my femshep's red hair and freckles under serious scrutiny.
 Still, it certainly makes Shepard stand out. And it wouldn't kill us to have one significant blond character in ME. Although we could do with some more non-whites first.
Spyda says:
 "Shepard. Wake up. This facility is under attack. Your scars haven't healed up yet, but we need you to get moving."
"Wait, you didn't have time to fix the glowing wounds on my face, but you put on my favorite black lipstick and green eye shadow?"
"Well... we were bored."

Spyda says:
 Ugh, I wish I had more data to back up my claims that there haven't been many female blonde characters in the past few years, and that there've actually been quite a number of redheads.
 I feel like that's been the case. Mostly in secondary characters, but still.
Kaz says:
 Do you refer to blondes in video games or movies or both? Because I could swear the same thing is true of movies.
Spyda says:
 Mostly vidjas.
 I don't feel like I could make an accurate statement about movies in either direction.
Kaz says:
 Yeah, we still get the blonde bimbo, but it's mostly in comedies these days. In a lot of big-budget movies we've actually gotten a lot more brunettes and black-haired women, and when a blonde is the lead/love interest, she tends to be intellectual. In my somewhat limited memory and experience, anyway.
 Or if not intellectual, at least pretty tough and independent.
Spyda says:
 Just thinking of BioWare games from the last 5 years. Basically ME and DA 1 and 2.
 Default femshep had redhair, but we're not counting that.
 DA actually had a lot of blonde men. Alistair, Anders, Varric...
 Aveline and Leliana were redheads...
 Mass Effect had a few minor red and blonde NPCs, but most of your characters worth noting were brunettes.
 The humans, of course... the caucasian humans. >_>

Spyda says:
 Lesse... Notable video game blondes...
 Well, there's the big 3 from Nintendo: Peach, Zelda, Samus. Who all actually weren't blonde in their original NES sprites. Go figure that one out.
Kaz says:
 Hmm. Maybe Japan thought they needed to be more exotic? Or something?
 When did Peach first become blonde? Super Mario World?
Spyda says:
 I think so. MAYBE Mario 3?
 Nope. Red in Mario 3.

 So yeah, it was pretty much SNES for all 3.
Kaz says:
 Huh.
Spyda says:
 Fighting games... boy, if you're a white American, you're blonde in a lot of fighters. Ken, Guile, Cammy, Rufus, uhhh...
 SNK side: Blue Mary, King, Boggards Terry and Andy...
 So, Japan makes a lot of white people blonde. But that's because they make their asian people look white, so you have to find a way to make them look different.
 Hell, in Dead or Alive... well, let's not get into THAT mess.

Kaz says:
 I think for Japan blonde is just shorthand for American. So boisterous, boastful, rude... well-endowed...

 Money-grubbing...
Spyda says:
 Since blonde seems to be interchangible with white.

 And monster people.
Kaz says:

And neanderthals!


Kaz says:
 I'll admit we Westerners tend to oversexualize our blonde female characters a lot. Although they're usually not weak as characters. Shallow, maybe, but not inherently weak. Unless they're a princess or whatever.
 Although we get a thousand points for Elena from Uncharted.
Spyda says:
 Yeah, I was about to bring her up. I feel like I thought of another good example of a blonde who fit that character type.
 Maybe it was Anya.
 I don't even know where to put her. GOWs 1 and 2, she was just a pretty lady voice who did tech stuff and so that you didn't have to listen to gruff dudes through the whole game.
 But now I guess she's a tough, battle-hardened whatever.

 

Kaz says:
 But when I think of blonde characters in games today, what I mostly think of are characters like... uh... Archer, from Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes.

 Anwen.
Spyda says:
 Yeah...
 Again, something about the natural blonde just makes me think "down to earth" and not... shallow and superficial who wants to be in Playboy.
Kaz says:
 It just makes me think of elves. Or Eowyn from Lord of the Rings. Who wasn't an elf, but shut up.


Spyda says:
In the 90's, we had the big stereotype about blondes being dumb. The character Kelly from Married With Children was a big ...I wanna say lampshading of that, but it wasn't even doing it to be satirical. And shows like Baywatch contributed to the stigma.
 I hear that it becomes a lot more true if you live near Hollywood, or other places in California where fake tits and bleach blondes are the norm...
 But it feels really stupid that some people still propagate this stereotype of hair color having any affect on personality or intelligence.

Kaz says:

 Part of the reason for me that I'm okay with more blonde characters in general, is that I feel like we actually go too far in the other direction sometimes. Any time we set out to make a female character who is meant to be taken seriously, we automatically say "Well, she should be black or brown-haired, obviously, and single, and living alone, and..."

 And we often end up creating characters that, to me, really feel like non-entities and cliches. Carla from Indigo Prophecy. Madison from Heavy Rain. What's her name from Still Life. Women who are just as one-dimensional as bimbos, except instead of boys and makeup they obsess over their work, and they never joke or relax like real people.

 That's a deeper issue than hair colour when it comes to our difficulties writing layered, believable female characters, but damned if there isn't a correlation.

Kaz and Spyda Dumpin' on Nintendo (now with swearing)

Spyda says:
 80 dollar price drop on 3DS. Now I can afford to pick one up and play... uhh... hmm...
Kaz says:
 It's okay, though. They're giving anyone who already has a 3DS 80 dollars worth of NES and a couple crappy GBA games.
 So it's not like they dicked you out of your money, they just tricked you into buying 80 dollars of shit you don't want.
 But hey, Ocarina of Time again. I bet that was a fun 8 hours you probably won't bother to play again.
 Well, there is the Master Quest.
 I think this is the fastest, most significant price drop I've seen on a Nintendo system since... well... I hate to make the obvious comparison, but the Virtual Boy.
Spyda says:
 I don't want to sound like a vanor, but here it is:
 No one really cares about 3D.
 Not on the consumer level, at least.
Kaz says:
 Pretty much.
 And the WiiU... I'm sure there are lots of smart people at Nintendo in R&D and strategy who know what they're doing, but I can't help thinking someone said "Hmm. These portable games on the iPhone and such are doing great. But we're not gonna sell cheap games, it would be a waste of our valuable IPs and rabid install base. What do people like about these smartphone games besides the price?"
 "I know... the TOUCHSCREEN!"
Spyda says:
 It has all the inconveniences of modern video gaming, and all the inconveniences of iphone gaming!
Kaz says:
 I don't feel bad about being small-minded about the potential of the WiiU, because God knows the Kinect and Move turned out to be just as useless as I predicted, but how the hell are you going to make a Mario game on the WiiU? How the hell are you going to do ANYTHING besides WiiU Sports?
Spyda says:
 Other than practically ignoring the screeny controller, which... why even make it?
Kaz says:
 Do you guys even know? I don't believe you do anymore. I think you're just waiting and praying and hoping a third party comes along and figures out how to do something brilliant with it you haven't thought of, like you did with the Wii and like Sony and MS did with their shit and totally failed.
 God, the MotionPlus. What a fucking joke. Three years for it to come along and restore the potential we all believed the Wii would have, only to find out that that didn't actually have any fun application either.
Spyda says:
 Well... uh... here comes Skyward Sword?
Kaz says:
 Yay. And all the Nintendo fanboys will choke back their tears and tell themselves it was so worth it. It was so much better than stupid Red Dead Redemption and Uncharted 2 and Portal. Those fags with their other consoles just WISH they had a game as good as Skyward Sword.
 Don't you understand? NINTENDO LOVES ME!
Spyda says:
 They gave me a Pikachu!

Dumpin' on SMB3

After getting the Hammer Bros. theme stuck in my head while trying to read something earlier today, I decided the only way to restore my sanity was to boot up the ol' ZSNES and play SMB3 in Super Mario All-Stars, because that version is totally superior no matter what you've heard. And that got me thinking...

Of course the levels of World 1 fell before my mighty boot like they have since I was a kid. Hit the left side of the block so the mushroom falls to the right, fly up and get the "3" made of coins, grab the star in the last note block, get the warp whistle... until I hit 1-4 and was suddenly very lost and confused.

Uhh... what the hell is all this?

I'm... in the sky? Autoscrolling? With a bunch of slow-moving platforms and Ls made of bricks coming my way? I... oh no! I don't know what's coming next! This... this is difficult suddenly! And that's because in all my years of playing SMB3 since I was a little Kazmo I can't have played 1-4 more than a handful of times. And why the hell would I? The far more familiar 1-3 is the only one you need to beat to reach the first mushroom house, and then you can just go back the way you came, skipping all those stupid floating autoscrolling platforms, on to the castle, and to glory!

Later, you dumb wooden suckers!

My young mind grasped it perfectly. Why waste time and potential lives on a level that doesn't get you any closer to the end of the game? We're not here to sightsee, sparky, we're here to beat this sumbitch! But it seems somehow in these intervening years I've changed without realizing it and I reckon a lot of other people have too. Now, I just can't play through SMB3 skipping all the levels and making a beeline for the end. I have to visit every one because, for whatever reason, experiencing them all is more important to me than actually beating the game. If I lose because of my stubborn refusal to skip anything, so be it.

I put forth a couple of theories to Hutch on why this is. Have I played SMB3 so much and become so confident in my ability to finish it that I instead try to wring as much out of the experience as possible? Do I feel some kind of duty to the creators to play everything they put into the product, like a Let's Play-er trying out a community hack project? Or have all these 360 games finally broken me down and made me into an achievement whore, only able to feel pleasure by jumping through hoops and completing arbitrary challenges?

I really don't know. Hutch replied that he thinks it's more of a consequence of the way games are designed now, and pointed out that, hey, once upon a time, people didn't even have a goal they were trying to reach, they just played for the sheer fun and challenge of surviving, setting and beating high scores. And he's right. As the complexity of games has increased exponentially and the budgets have more than increased to match, almost nobody designs a game nowadays that they expect to be truly difficult to at least finish on SOME level. And for the love of God, when it costs so much and takes so many people to design and model and playtest a level, why would you include content that you're not going to force the player to experience?! 

"This took 100,000 dollars and two months of our artists' lives to make

and you're going to look at it until I tell you to stop!"

So maybe that's it. And maybe that explains why some folks are so enamored with achievements, as well (I won't lie, I try to get them if they're not too far out of the way, just for the satisfaction). Us folks who cut our teeth on old-school games, where you had to practice and suffer and make a real concerted effort to finish the game, unable to find that same challenge we once craved, turn to self-imposed challenges and completionist-ism-ing to wring that last little bit of satisfaction and exclusivity out of games that are now all too happy to roll over and flash the goods to anyone with a pulse. Not that giving people the full experience they paid 60 dollars for is such a bad thing. And I guess I've gotten so used to doing it, I even do it when I go back in time to games I've played a hundred times.

But that's a cynical way of looking at it. I think what Hutch really meant to imply was that, on some level, we're all still just in it for the sheer joy of the game, even if what we think we're seeking has changed. As kids, beating the game was the way we wanted to find our fun. Now that endings are a pleasure that are not so regularly denied us we can really stop and smell the virtual roses and experience the levels - and if you're going to do that, why not do them all? Perhaps the real reason I can't stop myself from playing through every level in SMB3 is that I just love the damn game, even more than fresh-faced little me did.

Or maybe I was just drunk and didn't realize I could back out and go around level 1-4. I dunno, I'm trying to cover the full spectrum of possibility here - I don't want to generalize. I'm sure tons of folks loved to play all the levels back in the day, and some would just shoot straight for the end if they picked it up today. But I know I'm not alone in this change, whatever brought it on.

So... I guess my point is that games are easier now. Oh, did you think I was building up to some kind of interesting revelation or observation? Sorry about that. But I'd love to hear what you think.