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Metro: Last Light is fucking gross

So anyway, I'm replaying the Metro games and jeez, Metro: Last Light might be the most blatantly skeezy, sexist, male gazey game I have ever seen outside of just straight up porn.

The world of Metro has exactly one female character of any significance (Anna), who is a sniper and scout. Every other woman in the game is depicted as a mother, sex worker or, on occasion, an old lady doing chores.

Everyone of any consequence or note is a big mean looking sweaty dude. There are times where the game goes for hours without a single woman being present.

Metro goes out of its way to portray women as exclusively weak, docile and emotional. There are multiple instances where the player has the opportunity to save women from being sexually assaulted/tortured, and most women with dialog spend those lines screaming, crying, or mourning dead husbands or children.

The worldview here is one of complete and total patriarchy. We're not talking mere paternalism. Women in this universe are portrayed as borderline slaves whose only role is to have children, or be used as sex objects or domestic workers, while men go and do everything else.

Also, kind of an aside, but I don't think there is a single non-white person in the entire franchise. So that's a thing.

I Don't Even Know How What To Call This Header

You'd think being the main supporting character in the game, Anna would have a positive role. But nope. She disappears after the intro - which she mostly spends calling the main character "little rabbit" and chiding him (aka the player) for looking at her ass - then spends most of the game absent until she almost immediately gets captured by the bad guys so she can be saved by our hero.

During this escape, both almost die from smoke inhalation, but are rescued at the last second by allies. This is apparently the exact moment that she decides she loves the main character, even though she has been on screen with them maybe ten minutes at this point. There is barely a single line of dialog to justify why she suddenly wants to have Artyom's babies, but look, jiggle physics!

Of course, even though both she and Artyom are patched up enough to have hot steamy sexual intercourse, the doctor inexplicably says Artyom can go while Anna has to stay and rest. Because big man big and strong, and small woman weak!

One really gets the sense playing this game that they were going for an "Alyx Vance" type character who is meant to make the assumed male player character feel good about protecting, but the writing is so incompetent and the lack of screen time for her causing such incredible emotional whiplash, that the entire thing comes across as borderline surreal.

It Gets Worse

Metro: Last Light is also just grossly horny. there are multiple situations where the player gets to see women in lingerie or topless, either as cabaret performers (with an extended show that goes almost ten minutes, mostly featuring them), sex workers getting groped by actual fucking Nazis, or in one case a fully naked woman taking a shower that the player can spy on and get a "moral point" for peeping on her for long enough.

At one point the player infiltrates a brothel and spies on someone, gets interrupted by a sex worker, puts her hand over her mouth and slams her against a wall telling her to "be quiet", which in the moment feels like sexual assault playing out.

In what is maybe the single greatest moment of tonal and thematic dissonance I have ever seen, after the cutscene ends, this same sex worker offers the player a lap dance - which they can pay her for and experience, with yet more jiggle physics.

The game does not comment on how extremely fucked up this shift is at all and seems to assume the player is just going to be into it.

Anyway

I remember feeling skeezed when I originally played this game a decade ago, but coming back to it now I had forgotten just how awful it really is.

I realize this is a game that is based on a series of novels, which have an established world, tone and characters. I have never read them. But it doesn't matter. These are fictional works, and the writers and developers made these choices.

The fact that I can find zero discussion of this in reviews or in the game's fan communities is incredibly fucking telling about the audience for these games, too. Let's be real, I didn't expect a lot, but given the fairly recent sequel you'd think it would have showed up in discourse by now.

Which I guess means I'm going to have to move on to Metro: Exodus next. Surely one will be better, right?

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Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 is kinda fucked up

So anyway, I finished playing Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 last night because I love modern, current video games that all the cool kids are into. And hoo jeez, is this game really a time capsule.

Did They Even Talk To Anyone?

For a game centred around a bunch of disabled soldiers with bionic limbs, it is shockingly, stupidly ableist.

First, the plot is centred around the disappearance of Colonel Brubaker - a triple amputee who is a brilliant tactician but uses a floating hover chair to get around - orchestrating a staged mission in a Latin American-inspired dictatorship, so that he can wipe out his team and steal their bionic limbs for himself.

Of course, installing someone else’s bionic limbs on your body doesn’t just risk rejection, it literally, canonically “drives you crazy”. So naturally, this happens not just to the main villain... it also happens to another squadmate, who does the same out of desperation when his unit is all but wiped out. The final couple of bosses of the game both have you killing these characters who have been turned "crazy" by their bionic implants.

So not only do we have a pretty bad depiction of visible disabilities, we also have a super cool depiction of mental health as well, implying that using technology to better live with their disabilities is actually dangerous and risks insanity. Great.

Oh also, this game has by far the number of instances of the word "cripple" I've seen used in a long time. So there's that.

America, Fuck Yeah

So anyway, this vaguely Latin American country. It's led by a dictator named General Sabio, who is perhaps predictably heavily modelled after Fidel Castro. He's basically everything you'd expect - a tyrant, works his people to the bone for his own good, and has a military full of giant robots with extremely specific weaknesses that he rides around in.

Alas, Not-Castro ends up being an unwitting pawn in Brubaker's plan, who lies to him about the purpose of the whole scheme, and when confronted with the information that he's been duped by the main character, rather than come to his senses, he doubles down and decides he'd rather go down fighting. Truly a great showing for the game's only non-white character.

Women, What Are They Good For

Surprisingly, this game isn't colossally sexist... it's only kinda sexist. The only female character in the entire game is Jayne "Mag" Magdalene. She spends the vast majority of her time off-camera, only showing up at the very end in an injured state, telling the player to go on without her.

But! She's the only character in the game other than the player who survives the story. Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 is truly a champion of egalitarianism!

Granted, since this is a video game from 2011, she still gets to wear a skintight outfit with a low cut top, despite being in the military. So I guess a step forward, a step back?

Speaking of...

Sexual Assault is Funny Actually?

So yeah, this is a relatively small one, but let's get this one out of the way. The game's level select screen has a prison rape joke. No I could not make this up.

In Conclusion

Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 is obviously a product of its time. It's not a great game, and it's not one anyone cares about. I only played it because I like mediocre video games and apparently enjoy self-abuse.

But it really is shocking playing this game in a modern context just how incredibly dated it all feels. A total lack of sensitivity and maturity in its approach to its themes, and despite being a game about disabled people, it's pretty apparent the developer didn't do much to consult with the disabled community to see if they could maybe improve their language and depictions of people. I don't exactly expect high art from a game called Bionic fucking Commando, but come on.

I know the game's developer, Fatshark, is still around. I would be really curious how the people who worked on Rearmed 2 feel about it today.

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the internet is broken

the revelations from 404media that Discord is complicit in mass scraping, storage and use of public user data are incredibly concerning, as are the connections to noted harassment site Kiwi Farms.

there are massive privacy implications. now advertisers, law enforcement, harassers and other actors can pay a small fee to Spy Pet and get access to trillions of user messages and potentially personally identifying photos. this can then be correlated from information with other data brokers to gain an even more complete profile on virtually anyone using the public or semi-public internet.

Discord's boilerplate commitments to user privacy and safety are not remotely backed up by any of its actions, and its slow, half-hearted response makes it clear that it absolutely does not value any of those things. so I guess the question becomes, is it time to drop Discord?

beyond that, this is yet another in a long string of major problems in big tech's handling of user data that makes clear that the current system is increasingly broken.

in previous years we were "fine" with privacy via obscurity. the internet is simply so big, who would possibly track down everything everyone says? and anyway, the ones doing it en masse are "only" using that info for ad targeting, or the government going after "terrorists".

but when fucking Kiwi Farms of all groups is the one that holds the keys, seemingly completely under the nose of big tech platforms, you know it's bad. because now bad actors have carte blanche to personally target and harass pretty much anyone who simply wishes to use the internet like a normal person, with more or less total impunity.

and everyone responsible for allowing it simply throws up their hands and goes "well it's too hard to fix, it's too expensive, it's baked into the nature of the internet... and besides, it's not our problem anyway."

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Resident Evil 5 hates women

Replayed Resident Evil 5 and decided to look up the discourse from the era. The blatant racist imagery is obvious, and frankly I don't think the games press was in a great spot to discuss it adequately on release. Frankly, as a white person I'm also not the most appropriate person to do so either, so I'm not going to get in into that.

But for all the racist shit in the game, I was not prepared for just how overt the sexism would be. Sure, it's from 2009, and things have changed a lot since then, but... yeah, there's a lot.

Character Designs

Obviously, the RE games are no strangers to giving their lady characters scantily clad outfits, and even sexualizes a character who is arguably a minor in RE4, but RE5 really takes it to an extreme.

Literally every female character in the game has some kind of skimpy skintight outfit or dress, solely to accentuate their bodies, regardless of any possible practicality for a combat situation.

This is contrast with the male characters. While they’re also basically models as far as their body shapes go, they at least get to have much more practical fatigues and body armour.

But there’s also aspects of sexism that are coded into the gameplay. For starters, Sheva is relegated to a “2nd player” role. You can’t even play as her by default if you’re not in co-op. Instead she’s an unlockable character.

Presumably, Capcom either thought nobody would want to play as a woman by default, or maybe worse, because they thought that they could dangle a woman as a reward for completing the game.

But that's not the only unlockable! There's also the costumes. Sheva’s standard one isn’t modest, but the costumes all find a way to put her into even more skimpy clothes, including shiny gold “club” attire, a business suit with a skirt so short it wouldn’t make sense outside of a porn scene, and the infamous “tribal bikini”.

All of these costumes are things you have to spend your points to unlock, so not only is your reward for finishing the game getting to play as a woman, but dressing her up in increasingly pervy ways. Hooray!

Narrative Stuff

But the character designs aren't enough. Capcom also felt it fitting to cement its misogyny in the narrative. Pretty much every significant action in the story is driven by a man.

Sheva, despite being one of the featured protagonists, is basically just along for the ride, despite being the “local guide” for the area who should know much more than Chris. Yet Sheva never uses her skills and knowledge to move things along. She’s just there to help Chris do co-op stuff, like getting vaulted up to higher areas by him because she weighs less. Girl power!

In fact, the tertiary character Josh, Sheva’s mentor, arguably helps more to move the plot along than Sheva does, since he helps drive the boat and tells them where to go on a couple of occasions. This would have been ideal for Sheva, but I guess the game couldn't let her do anything important.

Jill returns in this game, but spends most of the game mind-controlled by Wesker using some kind of magic device implanted in her chest, I guess because her cleavage is the one part of her latex catsuit that has exposed skin? The fight against her has Chris and Sheva trying to tear this off her chest in an *extremely* awkward QTE.

After getting her butt kicked, instead of zipping up her top or bandaging herself up, she just leaves it open, chest wounds oozing. For the rest of the game she basically has no role except to deliver some deus ex machina plot advice over the radio, even though it'd make a lot more sense for her to help out as an active participant.

Excella Gionne, meanwhile, is the female villain, whose two character traits are worn on her chest. She’s vain, manipulative, and ultimately expendable when Wesker turns her into a monster to attack the protagonists near the end of the game.

Throughout the story, she basically does nothing except to occasionally taunt the player and unintentionally provide info to help them. Despite being the head of Tricell, a biotech company, we never get to see her business or scientific abilities on display, just her lust for power and attempts to seduce Wesker. Her ultimate role is instead to be betrayed by Wesker, cementing him as the true baddie at the end.

Get That Dilc

And yeah, I’m going to the DLC as well. The first is pretty good and actually has Jill in a fairly equal role to Chris, with a significantly less sexualized outfit, so that's cool. I wish I could play as her by default, but hey, progress!

But the second DLC has you playing as Jill during the campaign, back in her catsuit, chest still seeping. The dialog in this is gross. both Josh and new character Doug spend almost all their lines hitting on her, and instead of telling them to fuck off, she inexplicably entertains their advances. It's ludicrously tone deaf.

This part feels extremely triggering for me, and I'm sure for others. The frequency at which women are forced to accept unwanted compliments from men, and show some sign of reciprocation for fear of retaliation, is a disappointing aspect of lived experience for many women. That someone at Capcom thought this was "charming" or appropriate for the situation shows just how incredibly, deeply backwards their views were at the time.

Anyway

When I went searching online for discussion about the constant casual sexism and misogyny in RE5, I came up pretty much empty handed, save for a bunch of gamers on reddit and GameFAQs saying how hot they think Sheva's costumes are. So I guess mission accomplished?

Not only was games journalism of the time the game released not in a place to adequately talk about the racism, the sexism was also apparently barely touched on. Was it just normal back then? Were we blind to it? I'm a different person today than I was then, so maybe.

So yeah, old lady screaming about a nearly 15 year old game, what gives? Well, in all honesty, I have to give Capcom credit for how much they improved. The turnaround in portrayals of women for the RE2 and RE3 remakes really is appreciated, and shows a genuine effort to present them as real characters.

I don't know if Capcom is going to remake RE5. I have a hard time envisioning how the devs could sidestep the fundamentally racist imagery baked into the premise, or handle it with the grace it deserves. But if it does come to pass, I'll be very curious to see how its portrayal of women changes. They deserve better.

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On Starfield

The more I play Starfield, the more I get annoyed at how incredibly uncreative and unambitious its vision of a futuristic spacefaring world is.

There is a lack of any distinct culture among the game's different planets and factions. Aside from different aesthetics between the UC and FC, and the different political structures, there is basically no distinct religion, ideology, practices, or real sense of identity across any of them.

All of the non-joinable factions are the same. They're spacers, mercenaries, pirates, or cultists. They don't have motives, they don't have goals, they don't have agendas, they're just there for you to shoot on sight. In terms of gameplay they are all identical as well - they don't have different equipment, tactics, etc.

There are some positive nods towards these ideas at times, like the two major religions, but these rarely come up. There are also things like Vlad's "pirate speech" that hint at more distinct culture, but he's he only NPC in the game who talks this way - even other pirates don't.

Enhance?

I also have to call out how badly Enhance breaks the setting.

This is technology that apparently lets you cheaply, safely, and easily alter your appearance in nearly every way. Sculpt your body. Remove signs of aging. Heal scars, skin conditions, and tattoos. Change your sex characteristics. All for 500 credits.

Yet you never meet an NPC who changes how they look regularly. You never see anyone experimenting with radical new looks, or experimenting with different gender presentation. You never hear about the medical implications for things like quality of life.

Obviously some people wouldn't want to make use of Enhance for various reasons, but the knock-on effects to society would be massive and nearly irreversible. For instance, wouldn't being able to constantly change how you look become a class signifier?

This also extends to gameplay - why isn't there a quest to track down an assassin who keeps changing how they look? Why can't you do the same to infiltrate a corporate HQ?

Starfield also features implants which are implied to be brain interfaces of some kind. You can install (and even easily swap) chips that plug into your head that make you more persuasive, intimidating, etc.

Why doesn't the impact of cybernetics that can alter human intelligence and capability ever come up? You'd think that this would be highly controversial - basically requiring workers to get modded or become obsolete. You'd also think the religions of the setting would have thoughts on these technologies and how they affect the human body as well.

There are already profound discussions about the impact of AI happening in our society, and this technology is barely a couple of years old. Why hasn't it completely changed Starfield's setting after presumably being around for many years now?

LGBTQ Stuff

This also more broadly ties into the game's trans and non-binary representation. Even though Starfield features a pretty big variety of fashion styles, hair colours, etc. and even lets the player select non-binary pronouns, you almost never come across anyone who is visibly queer-presenting. Nobody has fun hair colours, and you absolutely never see any kind of gender bending.

This isn't a cultural thing in the game - gay and lesbian relationships are frequently mentioned and seem commonplace, and it's clear there is no persecution of LGBTQ people in the setting.

Despite this, pretty much everyone presents as cis and heteronormative, even though this is a futuristic setting with all the tools available for maximum gender expression. It would have been great to see visibly AFAB people with facial hair, AMAB people wth femme presentation, or androgynous people who aren't obviously one or another gender. But we don't.

And for all the talk of pronouns, so far I haven't found a single NPC who uses they/them.

Starfield's vision of the future is boring

There are plenty of other questions beyond politics, culture, identity, presentation as well, that I haven't even touched on, like the fact that the game can't decide how its communication technology works (do people have the internet? email? do phones exist? why can't I just call or text people?). But I think the point I'm making here is pretty clear.

Basically, the more I play of Starfield, the more it just feels like a massively boring setting that squanders every single chance it has for creating a vibrant, colourful setting that feels truly futuristic.

This game doesn't need to be Cyberpunk 2077 - it has a different setting and different priorities. But it almost never, ever explores any of the ideas it sets up at any more than a surface level, it never bothers to pursue them to their conclusions, and it never offers answers or explanations for why things aren't more interesting.

What makes me most disappointed is how this seems to reflect on Bethesda as a game developer.

If this flat, sterile, unambitious vision for the future is the best that Bethesda can present its players, what does that say about the creative direction and leadership of the studio? Is this a reflection of its own team makeup? Or is it a reflection of the future it wants to see?

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the bad net

I think I've come to the conclusion that internet communities are broadly just bad.

you don't own your data, ever, it's property of wherever you post it as soon as you post it.

social media is run by corporations that want to maximize growth over user safety, and in many cases actively incentivize harm. most are run by narcissistic, capricious egomaniacs who see them as their personal fiefdoms.

independent communities such as forums can be better, but you are subject to the whims of the moderators. in many cases you can find that the space you were in is not actually safe after all, or the owners are unwilling to listen to feedback.

there are dark corners of the web that exist solely to harass, stalk, and generally make people's lives miserable. if you get unlucky, you can find yourself on the receiving end of absolute misery.

the only real solution is to hope you find a nice gated community with good membership and where the people who run it are aligned with you, and can't be easily unseated.

on some level it really just feels like at this point, the only winning move on the internet is to never post anything ever - or barring that, only in places you control.

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oh no

what have I done