A Doll's Beach

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the world of video game programming remains predominately male.  Video games, as well as their packaging, seem geared entirely towards the infamous “Male Gaze.” It’s an influence that surfaces throughout the entertainment world. It’s why, in the movie industry, “empowerment” and “half naked” remain so easily confused. It’s why female characters in comic books can’t seem to shop for clothing that covers more than ten percent of their bodies.

            Sure, the girls in Sucker Punch wear sexy clothing, but it is an action movie. How many times have we seen male, action stars take off their shirts for no apparent reason? Male characters in comic books possess biceps larger than NBA-approved basketballs.

However, in the gaming world, the male gaze runs amok to the point of complete lunacy.

            It’s almost as if the creators of certain video games have never actually seen a real, live female. The female cast of the Dead or Alive franchise serves as perfect examples.

Dead or Alive is a series of fighting games that has, for years, featured perfect-bodied individuals who couldn’t stop beating the snot out of each other. Eventually, Team Ninja decided to create a spin off series (Beach Volleyball), in which their female characters put on bikinis, prance around on the beach, and engage each other in such challenges as jumping and giggling. It’s rather generous to call it a “game,” really.

I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy watching it, though (at least the first edition, but more on that later). Female geographies have a wonderful and distracting habit of filling my blood with happy chemicals. I naturally want to defend what makes me happy.

As much as I want to stand up for Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball, its developers haven’t given me much with which to work. I want to argue that I most certainly can enjoy looking at a female while still respecting her as a human being (Yes. I know. We’re not truly discussing human beings so much as lines of computer code, but you get the idea). I defy anyone to play Beach Volleyball and share with me a single characteristic regarding a single character.

This is because at no point are any such characteristics expressed. The characters really haven’t any. If you do a little research, you can learn these characters’ backstories, but good luck connecting those dots to anything that takes place in the game.

Despite this, I’m unconvinced that there’s anything wrong with it. A person might argue that such a game dehumanizes women, but I would have to counter with the observation that fewer feminists took issue with these same girls kicking the crap out of each other as they did in the original Dead or Alive franchise.

How is it less dehumanizing to depict a person beating a woman in the face before tossing her headlong into an electric fence, rather than depicting that same woman dancing around half naked?

(Interesting side note: To purchase the violent Dead or Alive, game, you must be of thirteen years of age or older. To purchase the sexy version, you must be eighteen. Something to think about.)

Someone else might argue that Beach Volleyball reverses the Women’s Rights Movement. While I can’t claim to know what circulates in the minds of others, I can swear that I’ve never watched a woman in a bikini (real or computer generated) and thought to myself, “That settles it. She gets paid two-thirds what I make.”

(Another side note: Equal Pay for Equal Work has yet to see actualization.)

I’ve meandered from my earlier point, though, haven’t I? Several lines ago, I questioned whether the creators of these games had ever seen a real woman. My doubts arise from the depictions of female characters in several games. Let’s alight upon the most relevant, given the earlier references of this article.

In Dead or Alive Beach Volleyball 2, someone replaced the female characters with strange, life-size dolls whose breasts seemed filled with Jell-O. At that point, I discovered myself flashing back to all the female characters found in comic books, the sort whose bodies fail to make any sort of mathematical sense.

This is the point where I get annoyed. Not because these characters insult the notion that women possess anything more noteworthy than their bodies, but because the bodies I’m watching don’t even look like women.

If you’re going to appeal to gamers via half naked woman, get the woman right. At the risk of rolling your eyes, I’m going to add another suggestion. Personalities and actual skills can be very sexy. I haven’t a problem with sticking large breasts on a female character, but I ask that those breasts look biologically feasible. I furthermore ask that the developers don’t stop at large breasts. If sexy is a developer’s goal, that developer must dig deeper than large breasts alone.

(Final side note: Our military has employed countless female soldiers. How often do you see a female option when you construct a character in a military based video game?)

I’m not asking video game developers to tone down the sexy. Quite the opposite. I’m a heterosexual, human male. I therefore like women with human bodies and human qualities. If Team Ninja adds these to Beach Volleyball 3, the changes will serve them well.

For the Common Welfare

Consider how organized crime surfaced in this country. Employers refused to hire Irish or Italian immigrants. As a result, many Irish- and Italian-Americans formed gangs. Plenty of hungry people would. So what could we reasonably expect as the consequences of ditching support systems such as welfare?

Many people, most of them well-meaning Republicans, believe that anyone anywhere at any time can find work so long as he or she looks for it. Fifteen years ago, I would’ve stood closer to agreement with these Republicans. However, in today’s world, I see no sanity in the assumption that by removing welfare altogether, everyone currently using the system will simply go out, find a job, and live a productive life.

Many people take advantage of welfare, but many people actually need that systems to survive. If you're on welfare, you either want a job and can't find one (we’ll call this Situation A), or you're unwilling to find one (Situation B). Remove welfare from either of these situations, and the people within them discovers themselves without a source of, let's say, food.

A rumbling stomach makes for a poor conscience. If you find that hard to believe, you’ve never enjoyed honest-to-God hunger. Will the threat of prison prevent criminal activity? No. The threat of prison food holds little weight against someone who’s starving. The threat of a prison cell holds little terror to an evicted person who’s standing in the rain.

While a person in Situation A might’ve gone to college or started a business, they cannot do either once their support system vanishes. True, many people on these systems fall into Situation B, but it’s still better for us all, in the long run, to support them.

Calm down. Hear me out.

If someone becomes desperate for money in an economy that offers few jobs, that person will likely consider crime an option. While such criminal activity provides immediate, bad news for its victims, the situation for the country and its tax-payers sinks to even worse levels after the “criminal’s” apprehension.

It cost far more to imprison a person than to send him or her a welfare check. I know how disheartening, how defeatist, that sounds, but the math doesn’t lie (here’s something else to consider: in most cases, it would prove cheaper to send a person to college than to imprison her).

By removing “entitlement programs,” we risk turning many lazy people, and down-on-their-luck-but-honest-hard-working-people, into criminals. We'll shell out larger sums of money to imprison these people than to just let them continue their existences on welfare.

If we follow the Republicans' line of thinking, we would save money by cutting entitlement programs, but we would create more criminals and spend more money policing and imprisoning them. That equation isn’t even taking into account the consequences of the actual crimes, themselves.

Actually, there's another reason why Republican policies would likely raise crime rates. Remember those “experts” who predicted a massive rise in crime by the early 90s? That increase didn't happen. You know what happened sixteen years before '89? Roe vs. Wade. With that piece of legislation, poor people, who, statistically, would have been more likely to give birth to future criminals (statistically. statistically!) could have abortions. So, if the Republicans ever manage to overturn Roe vs. Wade, it stands to reason that . . .

If the government loosens environmental restrictions on manufacturing corporations (another common, Republican goal), we can assume that said corporations will return to their previous lifestyles of building factories that fail to adhere to those now nonexistent restrictions. Maybe that sounds cynical, but consider the environmental destruction caused in third-world countries, where manufacturing corporations already stand safely out of said restrictions’ reaches.

Such pollution frequently destroys crops and drinking water, resulting in a greater number of hungry people in nations prone to civil violence. That spells political unrest, civil war. Which political party proves more likely to “send in the troops” when civil war erupts in a foreign land? The Republicans, even though war proves monstrously expensive.

It's cheaper to keep the entitlement programs. Let’s use the extra cash to build greater upward mobility through education. Most people want to walk proud and contribute. Many just don't believe, for a variety of reasons, that they can. We need to change that point of view. Fix the sickness, not the symptoms.

This brings us to the subject of domestic jobs. I’ll take another cheap shot at the Republicans here and remind you that they are the party that believes in rewarding corporations, via tax credits, for shipping jobs overseas. Furthermore, the Republicans blocked the Democrats’ “insourcing bill,” which would have provided the opposite effect and helped create jobs here in America.

Republicans blame Obama and his fellow Democrats for our nation’s lack of employment, but we swam in available jobs during Clinton’s lucrative terms. Our current troubles started under Walker Bush’s watch. Yes, we have Obama now, but a Republican legislative branch refuses to cooperate with him, openly preventing Obama from accomplishing anything (“Our goal is to make him a one-term president”).

You could argue (I do) that when Obama first took office, he had a democratic majority, with which he failed to take full advantage. Perhaps Obama wanted to play nice and work with Republicans. (He possesses a habit of surrounding himself with those who don't always agree with him. Lincoln did much the same.)

Clinton placed our country in a fruitful position. Walker Bush reversed that. Obama inherited the aftermath, and the Republicans refuse collaboration in rectifying the mess.

Unemployment leads to increased crime, but whose actions created that unemployment? Whose actions prevent an economic recovery? Perhaps Obama's policies are terrible, but we haven't had much opportunity to discover that on account of Washington infighting. Electing Republicans only rewards them for behaving in such reckless fashion.

Judge so, lest someone fear judging you.

After producing a piece of creative work—a sculpture, a short story, a comic book—you will likely ask someone to review it for you, to tell you what she or he “honestly thinks” about your work. One of two results follows. 1) Your critic tells you that your work is “Wonderful. Don’t change a thing.” 2) Your critic makes suggestions.

While the first consequence is nice to hear, it leaves you nothing with which to work, no direction to follow in improving your craft. This grows maddening. It always feels a bit dishonest, as well. You know that you haven’t yet mastered your craft. Surely, your work cries for improvement. Did your critic believe that you couldn’t handle her or his honest opinion? If so, that opinion must’ve seemed devastating. Now you know your work sucks, but you don’t know why or what to do about it because your critics won’t tell you!

This proves remarkably irritating after you’ve gone through the trouble of joining a writer’s workshop, perhaps one at your local university. You and your classmates exchange your works (I am assuming in this case that your work involves writing, a short story perhaps). You go home, read your classmates’ stories. You struggle to offer your most sincere thoughts regarding it.

Afterwards, everyone returns the stories (critical analysis affixed) to their owners. You eagerly scan your returned drafts, but discover only useless scribbling to the tune of: “Good job” or “I liked it.”

Even your professor returns a paper with a weightless, red checkmark on it and nothing more. You deflate. You wanted nothing more than a list of helpful suggestions, thoughtful considerations regarding your protagonist and how to improve her. You want naked, heartless criticism.

Until you acquire it.

I imagine that everyone goes through the same stages when she or he finally receives an honest list of suggestions, opportunities for improvement.

·         Stage One: Denial. Your critic is an idiot. He clearly doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He clearly failed to grasp the point of your work. He clearly lacks the intelligence to “get” your work.

·         Stage Two: Reconsideration. Hmmm. Not everyone’s a genius. If you’re writing only for the super intelligent, you’re not going to sell many copies of your work. Perhaps you ought to dumb-it-down a bit. Perhaps you ought to rework your material so that the average person (whatever that is) can “get” what you’re trying to say. How to do that . . . Oh! That’s right. Your critic’s advice. Surely, it can’t be good, but it’s all you have. You might as well try it.

·         Stage Three: Experimentation. Against your better judgment, you undertake your stupid, moron critic’s advice. The strangest thing happens. Your work’s better now, clearer.  You don’t want to believe it.

·         Stage Four: Acceptance. Your critic isn’t such an idiot after all. You grow suspicious that when a reader fails to “get” your work, perhaps the failure is your own as a writer. Hmmm.

Even the nastiest, snottiest, dumbest critics can offer the most priceless guidance. It’s never worthwhile to dismiss a critic, not if you want to polish your work into the best possible version of itself. Sometimes though, it can prove an effort to wallow through all the nastiness and snot that some critics spew while sniffing their own asses.

I don’t encounter a lot of nastiness or snot in writer’s workshops. Every contributor faces the same firing squad; they don’t want the negative karma. However, nameless, online critics do not face such a firing squad.

Sometimes, I suspect the best critics are those whose own projects are approaching their début. Notice that I say “best,” not “only acceptable.” The more critics you have, the more criticism you receive. So much the better. Just follow the stages to Acceptance and a better, finished project. Your ego has no place in revision.

Critics of entertainment—may they discuss movies, books, television, video games, or whatever else—used to serve two important purposes. 1) They identified for entertainers the weaknesses and opportunities of their published projects for consideration upon future endeavors. 2) They suggested for the entertained where they ought to invest their time and money. However, over the years, the role of the critic has morphed into something hideous, something that serves neither of the aforementioned purposes.

I suppose it started with a critic who made jokes about those movies, shows, or games that she or he didn’t advocate. Eventually (and I am still speculating, here), the jokes grew more insulting. The fun caught on.

Now, audiences turn to critics not for constructive guidance, but for humorous trash-talk served against those who risk everything in the hope of entertaining the masses (and making money, I imagine, though there are far easier ways of obtaining it).

If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If you can’t entertain for fear of sarcastic critics, become a critic and entertain via sarcastic criticism. It’s not as if critics have critics of their own.

If there exists an audience hungry for these sorts of roastings, are the roastings bad?

The Escapist, an online magazine featuring movie- and video game critics, employees the talented Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. He calls his hilarious video publications Zero Punctuation

Yahtzee mercilessly insults the video games he reviews, and his language and references are not for the easily offended. However, his publications lack the spite-for-spite’s-sake formula that has crept into so many other critics’ works. Furthermore, Yahtzee’s ridicule often targets Yahtzee. Most importantly, he offers criticisms that call attention to his subjects’ missed opportunities, granting those game creators useful considerations for their future endeavors.

Video game designers can learn a lot by checking their egos at the door and humoring such a critic. I walk away from Yahtzee’s videos with a solid idea of whether or not I would want to spend time playing a game he has reviewed (the answer is usually “No,” but I’m more of a bookworm).

Even the meanest critics offer a seed of good opportunity. Humor them. Try every suggestion, no matter how absurd or malicious. The road to great opportunities is often paved with bad intensions.

As much as we want to report optimistically when reviewing a friend’s stinker of a project, sometimes it’s shortsighted to consider that friend’s feelings over the wellbeing of her or his project.

If someone asks you, “Does my butt look big?” the obvious answer is, “Of course, not. You look perfect.” Depending upon with whom you’re dealing, that might prove your best move. Then again . . .

·         Stage One: Denial. What an insensitive jerk! How could he say something like that to me? My butt does not look big.

·         Stage Two: Reconsideration. Hmmm. I suppose that I asked. Let’s face it, we live in a society where looks count. While my butt looks perfectly normal, “normal” might not cut it. Perhaps I ought to humor the shallow pig and speak with a personal trainer.

·         Stage Three: Experimentation. My trainer agrees with my shallow, significant other. I could stand to lose a pound or two. My trainer and I are going to work on a reasonable exercise schedule, and I’m going to drop the doughnuts from my diet while continuing to eat sensibly.

·         Stage Four: Acceptance. I dropped the weight. I look better. I feel better. I’m healthier. When I ask my “shallow,” significant other if my butt looks big, he says, “No,” and I know he means it, because he would say so otherwise.

Not everyone can digest honest criticism. Few people are graceful at presenting it. The trick is knowing when someone is asking for honest criticism, and when they are not. If you ask, accept that you may receive. Which do you want more, a nurtured delusion . . . or constructive advice with which you might struggle to turn your delusion into your reality?

What to do with this Theater?

What to do with the Aurora, Century 16 Movie Theater, where James Holmes killed 12 people and injured over fifty others? Many people suggest that the auditorium’s owners shut it down out of respect for those who lost their lives inside it. Some feel that the owners should shut down the entire theater, not just that specific auditorium. Still others express the opinion that the theater’s owners ought to transform it into a memorial. While I understand these points of view, and I can only imagine how long it will take for anyone to comfortably sit before that haunted, big screen, I don’t believe we should close it to the public.

Why do people spend ten-to-twenty dollars per person to go to the theater when they could split a buck renting a movie out of a Redbox machine? Theaters offer amazing, human opportunities. They provide stages for reconnecting with friends and family. They are places where couples hold hands or perhaps share their first kiss.

Keep the theater open. Allow wonderful events to transpire there once again. The Aurora theater ought not to close on such a sad, monstrous note as Holmes’s rampage.

In the aftermath of destruction, we must rebuild and continue moving forward. Evil people (and there’s just no better word for them) wish to derail us from our missions to entertain, love, and unite with each other. We mustn’t allow these pitiable (yes, pitiable) monsters their victories.

Should there be a memorial honoring those who died during Holmes’s killing spree? There are. One victim, Jonathan Blunk, served as a seaman with the United States Navy. He also served the civilian world as a certified firefighter and emergency medical technician. During the horrific shooting, he threw himself in front of his friend, Jansen Young, shielding her from the gunman’s bullets. The lives he saved, those are his memorials.

Another victim, Matt McQuinn dove in front of his girlfriend during the shooting. He protected both her and her brother. They are Matt’s memorial.

The victims deserve commemoration for all the positive influences generated during their lives. James Holmes does not deserve commemoration for having concluded them, for having cut short his victims’ accomplishments.

Would it prove tasteless of me to turn this tragedy into a political statement? At such heavy risk, I discovered myself compelled. You see, I have grown shocked by the quantity of people who blame gun control laws for Holmes’s massacre. Let me be clear: I am not discussing the argument that loose gun control laws allowed Holmes to obtain his arsenal (a blog for another day, perhaps). I am discussing the argument that blame rests with gun restrictions.

The debate goes something like this: “Had everyone in that theater possessed a firearm, this tragedy would never have happened. Holmes could never have killed so many people before someone else in the theater had shot him. With that in mind, Holmes would have never attempted his murders.”

Like most easy answers, this is simply wrong. I assure you that in a packed, panicked, dark theater, filling with teargas, additional firearms will not remedy the situation. The belief that violent criminals are deterred by armed victims holds less water than misguided (but usually well intended) logic suggests. Sure, criminals prefer unarmed victims, but a person looking to steal your wallet hasn’t a clue beforehand whether or not you’re packing heat.

Shooters come in two groups. The desperate. The bloodthirsty.

Desperate criminals want to separate you from your money any way they can. These people might be starving, dying for a drug fix, or perhaps owe money to other criminals. The point is, they’re desperate. To them, death proves more desirable than failure. These types of attackers will face any threat to accomplish their goals. They will not say to themselves, “I had better not try to mug someone, because that someone might have a gun.” A possible firearm is a threat already accepted.

The bloodthirsty do not expect to walk into a school, kill several people, and return to normal life. How many shootings end with “Before he turned the gun on himself” or “Before surrendering to the police”? These killers don’t expect to escape their crimes. Few even expect (or want) to survive them. The possibility of an armed victim means little to such irrational people.

Even if Holmes had known that every person in that theater possessed a gun, he wouldn’t have abandoned his mission and gone on to live a normal, productive life. Thirsting for a larger body count and a higher concentration of chaos, he might’ve welcomed such variables (he would’ve been the only one wearing body armor, after all). He entered the theater knowing his life would soon end, in one sense or another. That didn’t stop him.

Fear remains the prized weapon of victimizers. If I purchase an alarm system, train a guard dog, sleep with a gun under my pillow, live under a security camera, and surrender my privacy to the police, then it matters little whether my intruder ever materializes or not. That criminal, real or imaginary, has already instilled in me fear powerful enough to interrupt and lessen the quality of my life.

Living in fear is not living. Feeling naked without a firearm is not daring.