Hilarious. Wrong-headed. Brainwash-y. Roguey in a nutshell
p.s. IWD2 was the worst IE game, quite an achievement
sup lesi
Valid example -> Valid example -> Invalid example. Pure bullshit demagoguery. Aliens license is popular with pop-cult status and Aliens RPG wasn't Sawyer's personal pet project. You can't go from implicating an individual for his individual design choices to such a strawman based on a superficial and irrelevant connection. You need to be a fucking lunatic to make that kind of connection.
Josh Sawyer agreed to be a lead designer of a project that focuses on xenomorphs who rape humans in order to impregnate them.
Sweety, Caesar's Legion is a concept originally written by Chris Avellone for Van Buren. I'm sure you know a LOT of design elements from VB made it into FNV. If you are desperate to make a point about rape (or pretty much anything), don't dilute it with irrelevant bullshit for your own credibility.
When Avellone created CL they were just a vague slaver society. Josh fleshed them out.
What made you decide that it was John Deiley?
Because I linked to Damien Foletto's linkedin elsewhere in the article and he was courteous enough to detail which areas he worked on.
Titles worked on and shipped:
Icewind Dale 2
Levels:
*Horde Fortress
*Fields of Slaughter
*Severed Hand
Third edition-style multiclassing (where any race can take almost any class on level-up) replaces the demihuman multiclassing and human dual-classing of 2nd edition; a boon for the fighter and rogue classes who can benefit from self-only buffs and are only worth taking for 4-5 and up to 10-11 levels respectively
That should read "are only worth taking up to 4-5 and 10-11 levels respectively".
It's an awkward sentence but "up to 4-5 levels" for fighter isn't accurate because it implies you can get by with 1-3 levels of fighter and that would be crazy. You take it to four levels so you can get weapon specialization, maybe 5 if you absolutely need an extra feat.
I agree that the rape aspect is a flaw in a lot of these games, but I suspect that's more to with shortcomings as a writer - for much the same reason that it's a notorious writing flaw in all forms of media...and female writers don't seem to fare any better at it. A large part of the problem is working out what level and kind of horrific events you can put in a work without seeming like you're exploiting them (I use the word 'seeming' because people who have never written, acted or worked on film in any serious capacity massively underestimate how little of a person's intended interpretation ends up manifesting in the readers'/audience's take on it). On the one hand, rape is one of the worst aspects of war, and more than that, it's been a central aspect of every major war ever fought. That gets writers of both genders thinking that they should include it either for realism or because not doing so is simply contributing to hiding a major global problem. What they don't take account of is two things:
1. How it fits with the feel of the work. Rape
almost always ends up feeling exploitative in games. For the same reason that it does in superhero comics. You can't go from playing actiony-fun game, or a strategic game, or even a philosoraptory game like PS:T, and suddenly try to do a serious take on a real-life horror. Ahhh...but why the double-standard - we're killing people by the hundreds (more in games, but I'm trying to keep this reasonably cross-media)? Well, that's not something I can answer, except to say - well done society, we've managed to completely numb ourselves (myself included) to violence. Maybe it's a good thing that rape still bothers us.
2. That if you want to tackle
any real-life horror that people aren't completely numb to, you need to be a rather good writer. Much is made of the 'fridiging' trope, where female supporting characters have a tendency to be killed off in ways that are designed to propel the main character. The thing is, writers as far back as the ancient Greeks have known that in many genres, one way to make an interesting character stand out is to write them a memorable death (examples of both genders abound in Shakespeare - the two most notable being Mercutio's sudden switch from comic relief to his 'a plague on both your houses' death overshadowing everything else in Romeo and Juliet, and Ophelia's madness and death overshadowing a solid chunk of Hamlet - both characters are much more memorable than they would have been if Shakespeare had treated them kindly). In comics there's the eternal attempts to receate the death of Gwen Stacey. But most writers just aren't good enough to do that. Most of the time it fails. Some of the the time it works - sticking with comic books, Batgirl/Oracle becoming a parapalegic is often included in 'frdging' lists, but by getting rid of
both junior side kicks, and giving the character a role that wasn't previously filled, it ended up changing the character from being a one-note plot device into something approaching an actual character. Psychological issues have little to do with that (or one would expect female writers and showrunners to do it better - to run with the pop-culture reference, it's amazing how even the attempt at feminism left the 'Buffy' tv series after Whedon handed the showrunner duties over...and that the infamous Buffy/Spike 'girl falls in love with her attempted rapist' storyline was presided over by a female showrunner and writer). It's not just violence against women - it's any kind of real life horror. There's been numerous attempts to show the full horror of homophobic violence, war and the holocaust that have come across as exploitative despite ample evidence that wasn't the creators' intent (the recent closure of the Nazi-themed opera in Berlin after opening night is a good example). Nor is it a highbrow v lowbrow thing - one of the strength's of early, pulpy, Stephen King novels was his ability to incorporate underlying themes of small-town homophobic and racist violence into many of his works, without doing so in a way that the writing seems to take pleasure in the brutality. That doesn't tell us anything about who King is as a person, or what is fixations are, especially in light of the many of examples of writers with much more compelling evidence of admirable intention creating repeatedly exploitative works.
A lot of this is just talent combined with structural knowledge of writing. Sawyer's strength has long been structural knowledge of gaming....I wouldn't read too much into his writing other than what it says about his skill as a writer.
I rather like it when you and Roguey squabble with each other because you two seem very similar to me.
I do appreciate the non-dev twitter validation though.
