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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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 Posted: Fri Dec 12, 2008 6:46 pm |
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| bloody heartland wrote: |
| At the end of the day, there's just something about gang-rape after a fight (Variable Geo) that's more obscene than Mortal Kombat's fatalities. |
It's because rape is far more disgusting than sexless violence. This isn't some puritanical aversion to sex, but actually a pretty modern, feminist critique of domination in sex.
So, putting the "pretend rape" of hentai games up against the "pretend head-exploding" of your average FPS, and being contemptuous of the first and not the second, isn't contradictory, because raping is objectively worse than exploding heads. I'm sure if you drove the pure violence to deep enough and real enough levels, it would ultimately be just as disturbing as the rape in hentai games. Many people have that reaction to Manhunt, for example.
Of course, not all hentai games are about rape. But one fuck of a disturbing amount of them are.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 9:41 am |
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| chevluh wrote: |
| There's absolutely nothing that indicates it would be any different in the eroge niche and convincing yourself one of them gives you a real relationship would be creepy indeed, but just as creepy as a guy who'd convince himself he's a star soccer player because he's good at the latest FIFA game. |
I think there's a lot that indicates it.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sat Dec 13, 2008 5:57 pm |
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| antitype wrote: |
| Killing in videogames is usually a means to an end, driven by some greater impetus, and it's understood as such by the player -- even if some games make killing a very enjoyable thing to do. |
Only in shitty videogames. In any good videogame, the main mechanic is its own reward. Stringing you along with "goals" ("achievements" "MMOs") is a halfassed solution to a boring game.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 5:05 pm |
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| antitype wrote: |
| CubaLibre wrote: |
| antitype wrote: |
| Killing in videogames is usually a means to an end, driven by some greater impetus, and it's understood as such by the player -- even if some games make killing a very enjoyable thing to do. |
Only in shitty videogames. In any good videogame, the main mechanic is its own reward. Stringing you along with "goals" ("achievements" "MMOs") is a halfassed solution to a boring game. |
Or, you know, there's actually something going on in the narrative that means you're probably going to end up busting some heads open to survive and make it to the next plot point. I'm not just talking about superficially imposed videogame goals, e.g. achievements. |
Again, those "narrative" goals are pretty weak when videogame narratives are almost universally weak. If the mechanical act itself is not enjoyable, the game will not be enjoyable, no matter how compelling you think the narrative is. I didn't get Gordon Freeman out of Black Mesa because I felt sympathetic with his need to survive and the violence was merely a means to this end; I got him out because the combat in Half-Life is really fun; the narrative superstructure made the combat more fun, not the other way around.
As applied to eroge, one of the reasons the genre seems so pathetic is that, in general, the "mechanics" of the games are weak or nonexistent. It's baldly "means to an end" gameplay which is laughable no matter the end - that the end is "to whack off" just makes it seem all the more risible. It's a one-player MMO where the "epic gear" is different cartoon girls' boobs. Note that I'm not critiquing jerking off to cartoon girl boobs per se, but rather the idea of "playing" a terrible "game" to win the right to do so.
Some people have offered examples of games that ostensibly have legitimately good gameplay (man I hate that word). Well, I haven't played them, so I can't say. I can say that even the best eroge (game-wise) seems to pale in comparison to any game that we hold mechanically up on a pedestal, God Hand or Quake 1 or SMB. I daresay that if an amazingly mechanically tight game also featured a lot of naked people fucking, we'd never call it eroge in the first place, because the whole genre of "eroge" is fundamentally based around easy/nonexistent gameplay leading to whack material. I mean no one thinks Shadow Warrior is an eroge because you can find secret naked hentai chicks. There's too much actual game built around it.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Sun Dec 14, 2008 9:40 pm |
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| Chris B wrote: |
| Physicality or the "joy of movement" isn't everything. |
I didn't mean to imply that "mechanical tightness" (quite a loose phrase) was merely physical. If the guy that wrote the Zork text adventures, for instance, wrote one with explicit sex scenes, it would still be a good text adventure and not a lame eroge. Or say if the Fallout 2 sex scenes were totally explicit instead of "fade to black" affairs - suddenly the game would have a heavily erotic element and yet the game is actually good and therefore wouldn't carry that gamer stigma (although a "mainstream media" stigma would almost certainly still attach - see Mass Effect). Daggerfall and Ultima 7 both had blatantly naked chicks doing erotic dances, as well.
Or to come at it from the other side, Leisure Suit Larry is much-maligned in the adventure community. It's not because of its lame softcore-cheesecake theme, it's because they're bad adventure games. If they were good adventure games, the lame softcore-cheesecake theme would come across as funny and good-natured and titillating. Unfortunately, it seems as though designers see the "guaranteed sales" of sexually explicit content as an excuse to withhold resources and produce the game on the cheap. Not that this is any different from porn in any other medium.
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
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Location: Balmer
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CubaLibre
the road lawyer
Joined: 02 Mar 2007
Location: Balmer
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| Posted: Tue Dec 16, 2008 6:28 pm |
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I quit this thread because it is dumb now. Rather; you people are going around in circles.
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