The original Tomb Raider, its remake, and the loss of subtlety

[LarryTyphoid]

This is ostensibly good because it's "relatable" or something, because apparently that's what we're all like these days, we just cry at shit. And we definitely want our heroes to be relatably underwhelming and pathetic, rather than uber-confident role models to aspire to.

Well, she is a woman after all. Didn't Crystal Dynamics say that they tried to get the player to feel "protective" of Lara? When you see nu-Lara crying and sobbing, don't you just wanna reach through the screen and pat her on the head?

 

[Louis_Cypher]

Remember the T-Rex encounter in Tomb Raider?
You enter a strange valley where you're attacked by little raptors. Then, suddenly, a t-rex appears in the distance and attacks you. You pull out your guns, jump backwards, and try to kill it before it gets you in its jaws.

In the remake, they turned it into a lengthy cutscene that robs it of all surprise. Even worse, it has QTEs, and after that it turns into a gimmicky boss fight rather than just a beefy enemy you have to shoot until it dies (ignore the bikini Lara, this is the best video I could find on YT).

The difference between the original's and the remake's t-rex fight is the perfect example of what's wrong with modern game design.
You just can't have subtlety anymore. Where the original just threw you into a situation and made you deal with it on your own terms, the remake forces:
1. a cutscene
2. a QTE
3. a contrived boss fight where you have to make t-rex run his head into pillars or some shit
4. another fucking QTE because they couldn't simply let the fight end normally

Utter fucking shit.

I couldn't agree more.

This has to be one of the most infuriating things about modern games and movies; their utter lack of any understanding of how to create tone or atmosphere, or what scene is iconic and inviolable. Changing the T-Rex into a cutscene or QTE-boss is so fucking tone deaf as to beggar belief. It's wider than games of course; you get this in cinema and television too; iconic things totally trivialised, when, if anything, they could have been enhanced further in the right hands.

Take a recent Star Trek episode which revisited the iconic episode "Balance of Terror", but made almost everything about it inferior to the 1967 original. The Romulan Commander, previously played by the patrician-looking stentonian-voiced Mark Leonard, being played by some random guy with puffy cheeks, just standing there on some bland sound stage, or the completely unimposing Romulan Praetor turning up to 'upstage' him. 'Consoomers' gave this episode high reviews.

It's almost universal, even when they arn't actively sabotaging things, as with Tolkien, because they resent it.

Pretty rare for a genuine fan, who understands the visceral impact of the original to be handed the remake.

Getting back to games however, Tomb Raider is a certified master of tone, like say Star Wars: Dark Forces, or Resident Evil, or Quake, or Thief. Like when we were talking about how boomer shooters nail 'Dark Fantasy' so right. There are some levels in Dark Forces where you feel utterly alone, dropped on an alien moon, with wind howling through alien gorges; when you finally encounter something like a Stormtrooper patrol it's almost a relief. All they need have done with Tomb Raider 1 was replicate the exact game, exact music, exact environmental sounds, but upsampled in quality. Nothing of the level design, enemy placement, or anything else changed. I was cringing when they announced the "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic" remake, being an important game in my youth; I'm half expecting some shite design choices. The ships somehow looked archaic, so watch them put CAD curves or some shit, or turn Taris cyberpunk.

A recent change I disliked was the Demon's Souls remake, not using the original music, the likes of "Phalanx", "Tower Knight" and "Vanguard", are all absolutely iconic, like Mario 1-1:

 

[JarlFrank]

A big problem with most remakes is that they assume that the creative product of the time was somehow imperfect and needs to be improved.

Different tracks for the soundtrack, changes to the level design, rewrites of the story.

The end result is not only unfaithful to the original, but also lacking.
Wanting to improve the visuals is understandable. Perhaps making the levels look less blocky when you convert TR 1 to a modern engine. But outright cutting out entire level sections, adding in new ones in their place, changing existing layouts, and changing the fundamentals of how some puzzles work... that's just disrespectful towards the original. It's working under the assumption that the original was somehow flawed or incomplete, a victim of the technical limitations of its time, when in truth every single level design decision in the original Tomb Raider was deliberate.

TR: Anniversary almost completely cut out Tomb of Tihocan. Yes, it was one of the game's weaker levels, but it served a purpose. After the puzzle-heavy levels of St. Francis' Folly, Palace Midas, and The Cistern, you get something shorter and more linear that's mostly about charging ahead and overcoming a handful of traps. It's been put there for a purpose: to change the pacing. Cutting it out changes the original intended pacing of the Greece section and makes the sudden centaur reveal less impactful, as the place where you encounter it feels less like the end part of a home stretch than it did in the original.

Not to mention that they added some retarded boss fight mechanics to the centaur encounter, too, because of course they did. TR's combat was never great and a remake attempting to improve it isn't a bad idea, but the way they chose to "improve" it is absolutely retarded: gimmicks and QTEs.

 

[Ash]

A big problem with most remakes is that they assume that the creative product of the time was somehow imperfect and needs to be improved.

Different tracks for the soundtrack, changes to the level design, rewrites of the story.

The end result is not only unfaithful to the original, but also lacking.
Wanting to improve the visuals is understandable. Perhaps making the levels look less blocky when you convert TR 1 to a modern engine. But outright cutting out entire level sections, adding in new ones in their place, changing existing layouts, and changing the fundamentals of how some puzzles work... that's just disrespectful towards the original. It's working under the assumption that the original was somehow flawed or incomplete, a victim of the technical limitations of its time, when in truth every single level design decision in the original Tomb Raider was deliberate.

TR: Anniversary almost completely cut out Tomb of Tihocan. Yes, it was one of the game's weaker levels, but it served a purpose. After the puzzle-heavy levels of St. Francis' Folly, Palace Midas, and The Cistern, you get something shorter and more linear that's mostly about charging ahead and overcoming a handful of traps. It's been put there for a purpose: to change the pacing. Cutting it out changes the original intended pacing of the Greece section and makes the sudden centaur reveal less impactful, as the place where you encounter it feels less like the end part of a home stretch than it did in the original.

Not to mention that they added some retarded boss fight mechanics to the centaur encounter, too, because of course they did. TR's combat was never great and a remake attempting to improve it isn't a bad idea, but the way they chose to "improve" it is absolutely retarded: gimmicks and QTEs.

Old games are often imperfect though. They can be improved, but the modern industry typically does the opposite.

Crystal Dynamics suck terribly and always have. I don't think they've been involved with a single good game. Well, Lara Croft GotL is a decent co-op experience but that's it.
If they suck because of incompetence or because they're just chasing the dollar/mass market appeal, who is to say? But they do suck.

Let's not forget that classic Tomb Raider is actually quite hardcore, and by 2001 (the first movie) its mass market appeal had already been proven. We are not allowed good things because most people are declined cucks or are too stupid to handle more than Simon Says gameplay, and also because most devs are sellouts with zero integrity.

And finally, let's also not forget Anniversary was 2007. There wasn't a single ongoing game series that didn't get desecrated around that time. The only series to sort-of keep its integrity was Wolfenstien (2009) and that's quite an unremarkable game. Then came along Wolfenstien The New Order to make sure no game series is left out from getting turned into a non-game.

 

[Lemming42]

Wanting to improve the visuals is understandable. Perhaps making the levels look less blocky when you convert TR 1 to a modern engine. But outright cutting out entire level sections, adding in new ones in their place, changing existing layouts, and changing the fundamentals of how some puzzles work... that's just disrespectful towards the original. It's working under the assumption that the original was somehow flawed or incomplete, a victim of the technical limitations of its time, when in truth every single level design decision in the original Tomb Raider was deliberate.

Worth mentioning that TR1 lead designer Toby Gard worked on Anniversary, and according to him, a lot of the changes do actually reflect what he would liked to have done in 1996. In the in-game commentary, Gard is always going off about how the new levels are "bigger and better". He gives the impression that he was thrilled by the 3D technology when making the original Tomb Raider, and that a huge part of his enjoyment in making the game was the experience of seeing scenes from his imagination come to life in 3D. For him, the Anniversary levels are actually better because they have higher visual fidelity and thus more closely resemble the image he had in his mind when designing TR1's original levels. The fun for him in being a dev was bringing 3D worlds into existence; this was easier to do on a larger scale and with higher detail in 2007 than it was in 1996, ergo Anniversary is the """better""" game of the two.

The problem for the rest of us is that it turns out TR1's greatness lies in part due to Gard's inability to fully achieve what he wanted, thanks to the early 3D tech. I'm not trying to bash Gard, I hold him in some esteem for his work as a developer, but he does claim that Anniversary is representative of what he wanted TR1 to be, so sadly I'm forced to conclude that it's a good thing he was held back by the technology of the time.

It comes back to the old topic people talk about on here a lot, the idea that technical restraints caused 90s devs to accidentally brush up against greatness in a way that they might not otherwise have done. TR1's haunting feeling of desolate loneliness was, it turns out, essentially a result of the engine not allowing Toby Gard to jizz a load of huge "spectacular" vistas all over the screen, and forcing him to infer a lot of things rather than show them outright. The gameplay itself (unsurpassed by any subsequent TR games IMO) was also a result of being made to design the world around cubes and blocks - it's a type of gameplay that could only have existed in those brief few years of the early 3D era and was already considered "outdated" by the time of TR5/AoD in the early 2000s.

The story changes in Anniversary are harder to forgive because, as far as I know, original writer Vicky Arnold didn't participate in the remake at all, so it's a case of some arsehole at Crystal Dynamics taking a look at the highly effective, terse, and evocative story that Arnold wrote for TR1 and thinking "hm, I reckon I can do better by systematically ruining everything about this".

 

[JarlFrank]

There's also a certain issue with developers getting older, or getting overwhelmed with the idea of new technology as it improves with time, that they lose sight of what made their older work great.

Friendly reminder the same people who made Thief, System Shock, Ultima Underworld, spent months just toying around with Unity's physics engines when working on Underworld Ascendant without getting any real work done, because the technology is so superior to what they worked with in the 90s that it made them gape in awe at the possibilities. I think it's a natural part of aging to lose touch with new tech, or be overwhelmed by the new possibilities so you end up thinking "Wow, if I had been able to make a game like this in my youth..."

You also end up having idealized memories of the time you worked on those legendary games that turned you into a big name designer. I'm pretty sure that in retrospect, the ideas you had in your head grow much larger than they originally were, fueled by the fame of your finished product. It even happens to us as players sometimes: a lot of childhood games looked and played a lot better in my memory, when I replay them today I'm surprised at how bad the graphics and simple the gameplay is. Now imagine you made a hit game 20 years ago but haven't played it since then. Memory can be deceiving.

 

[Great Deceiver]

That anecdote proves that limitations drive creativity, and are a net positive, especially in game design. Part of the problem today is that there are too many tools for everything, too many resources. This breeds laziness and disincentivises thinking outside the box. It's why you have game installs nearing 200gb, developers are so inept that they can't even come up with a decent compression routine anymore.

The original developer saying the remake is superior to the original game doesn't mean anything. Great games have always depended on capturing the ephemeral quality of a particular set of circumstances, a perfect storm as it were. They're never attributable to a single person, or their intentions. Plus, having been an intimate part of it, these people often don't realize (lacking outside perspective) that those very limitations that were considered obstacles by them are part of that very same set of circumstances that produced a great outcome.

Another part of it is just business; someone who is detached from the current development of a franchise that he created being a yes-man, I'm sure he got his share of the dough out of the remake or whatever.

 

[Lucumo]

Wanting to improve the visuals is understandable. Perhaps making the levels look less blocky when you convert TR 1 to a modern engine. But outright cutting out entire level sections, adding in new ones in their place, changing existing layouts, and changing the fundamentals of how some puzzles work... that's just disrespectful towards the original. It's working under the assumption that the original was somehow flawed or incomplete, a victim of the technical limitations of its time, when in truth every single level design decision in the original Tomb Raider was deliberate.

Worth mentioning that TR1 lead designer Toby Gard worked on Anniversary, and according to him, a lot of the changes do actually reflect what he would liked to have done in 1996. In the in-game commentary, Gard is always going off about how the new levels are "bigger and better". He gives the impression that he was thrilled by the 3D technology when making the original Tomb Raider, and that a huge part of his enjoyment in making the game was the experience of seeing scenes from his imagination come to life in 3D. For him, the Anniversary levels are actually better because they have higher visual fidelity and thus more closely resemble the image he had in his mind when designing TR1's original levels. The fun for him in being a dev was bringing 3D worlds into existence; this was easier to do on a larger scale and with higher detail in 2007 than it was in 1996, ergo Anniversary is the """better""" game of the two.

Apart from what others already mentioned, it also depends on whether it's an honest opinion or whether it's just marketing talk to sell the New Thing™. I definitely do remember developers complaining many years later that they had to advertise decline to the gaming press, magazines etc.

 

[Ash]

Tech limitations is a big one. The better the graphics, the less abstract level design can be in favor of level design that makes realistic sense. We can no longer have the grid-based gameplay. Things are rounded and detailed now. We can no longer have every room being designed around some elaborate trap, unless that trap is "realistic". We can no longer have minimal gameplay assists because there is so much visual "noise" that it is hard to tell that x item is interactive or y ledge is climbable. We can no longer have the super surreal, almost alien feeling/atmosphere the original games provided because of things like limited draw distance and level design that somewhat resembles reality and yet not quite. And lastly, we must spend much more time & money creating these graphics, which creates further significant issues.

Luckily, we have an entire decade of games in this proposed sweet spot, and it is glorious. Sad it had to end this way though.

Similar case for the Japanese market too. Now they they have the capability, all they make is unapologetic anime games, waifu worship etc. Sad decline.

 

[Taurist]

I think the age of the developers is pretty important. Most great mathematical advances and rock albums are made by people in their early twenties.
I dont know too much about the demographics of a lot of classic video games companies, but the ones I do know about tended to be very young. John Carmack being 22 when DOOM was released, JVC and Richard Garriott starting as teenagers and so on.
Looking up Tomb raider it looks to be have been a bunch of folk in their early twenties, from dates I can find. Nu-Tomb raider was lead by a guy in his 40's.

 

[Ash]

Age counts for something perhaps, but the #1 is the tech limitations.

Men becoming inept and losing their passion as they age is a very common occurrence, as well as putting the dollar first because that is the wise thing to do, but I don't think it is a hard rule.

Fuck, I must fight myself, or I too will decline.


One more possible factor: having already tasted success. Surely once you conquered the market, have all the cash, already made an awesome game or two, you probably kind of get lazy. Your dream is already achieved, and you're too busy enjoying it.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

that's just disrespectful towards the original

That's a good word for what usually corrodes hobbies; disrespect. Respect is a key virtue. One way you can always tell a fan, is their reverence. They know automatically what transgresses taste and rectitude. Look at some modern reboots in cinema, and their 'inside jokes' about how the franchise is seen, often betray sneering disdain, displaying nothing approaching love of material or fan solidarity.

One should love the game they work on. Only through love, can something be created. I love my hobbies. These people go into this industry without much genuine love of the source material, but presume to take moral ownership. They often resent or feel shame or embarassment about the hobby. Only through shame, would they think this beloved artifact needs changing, or wasn't already perfect in it's own way, a way that particular sensetive tastes can discern; just perhaps in need of translation. If they are so ashamed or embarassed by said artifact, they are not fans, they are not qualified to touch it. Acceptance of the axioms of the franchise, is basic to doing it any justice.

I've been in online company before, where people celebrated the tasteless destruction of their supposed hobby, so I know really viscerally, how tragic it is to see a hobby car-jacked from it's own community, by tasteless people, or by activists, and turned into something utterly alien to what engendered it's lasting fandom. It's utterly horrible to see first-hand, how something can come to be represented by the people who have the least qualities of stewardship. It always destroys the said hobby; the golden goose is damaged by this cancer every time, ultimatly losing future money it would have printed them.

Checking out BioWare's studios, one of them has got a lot of "Star Wars: The Old Republic" artwork. Geek ornaments are laid out on shelves. Now, I don't know for sure, maybe I'm wrong, being too judgemental, but this "we are geeks" stuff seems performative. The items don't seem particularily enthralling; busts and other useless things, rather than say, a 2000-piece Lego model of a Star Destroyer, or a miniature diorama, or scale models. The shit that genuinely makes nerds fascinated. There are some shirts with logos specific to their MMO (that don't make sense lore-wise in-universe), some with EA logos, but nothing that grabs me as a life-long fan of Star Wars. The art consists of stills from trailers. Looking at the above photo; I'm sorry, but how many women are actually genuine, dyed-in-the-wool geeks? Be honest readers. So what gives a studio with 9 women and 2 men in a generic team photo, any moral ownership over space opera, which has always been a male dominated pastime? It's possible there are some genuine nerds amongst BioWare still, and to those people I express apology, but my impression is not of an environment where people debate scenes from movies with heated passion; we know that the male and female psyche is different, and one gets the world-building/engineering, but the other thinks in terms of relationships, on average. The sense of perfomance, is because it's like they deliberatly go out of their way to stack shelfs with 'geek items', to maintain the mystique. I imagine they are not composed of autistic nerds like early id Software or Westwood or Raven or BioWare themselves once were.

I think the age of the developers is pretty important. Most great mathematical advances and rock albums are made by people in their early twenties.
I dont know too much about the demographics of a lot of classic video games companies, but the ones I do know about tended to be very young. John Carmack being 22 when DOOM was released, JVC and Richard Garriott starting as teenagers and so on.
Looking up Tomb raider it looks to be have been a bunch of folk in their early twenties, from dates I can find. Nu-Tomb raider was lead by a guy in his 40's.

I think it's more culture. 1990s developers were prestigious geeks, in love with Star Trek, Tolkien, Star Wars, Hellraiser, Dune, heavy metal, etc. Geeks should make geek things, and if normies wanna jump on the train, they can, but geeks eventually let them buy the whole railway. By 2010, almost all of the original culture of the industry had been cleansed, in favour of graduates who might have seen a couple of Farscape episodes once, or 'performative geeks' who think the scene is cool.

No use hiring a 22 year old, if he gets all his opinions off Screenrant.

 

[Tehdagah]

Original Tomb Raider had shitty, slow controls. Fighting enemies was a hassle.

 

[JarlFrank]

The tank controls of the original TR games are fine, especially when played on the keyboard. It takes some getting used to nowadays but back then it wasn't particularly awkward compared to its contemporaries.

More importantly, the original five TR games have extremely precise controls that perfectly allow for its platforming gameplay. There are some incredibly challenging levels out there made by the Tomb Raider fan community (did you know there's a level editor and a huge community making levels for the original games?), but every challenge can be passed by mastering the controls, for they are extremely precise. All you have to do to accurately estimate the distance you can jump is to count blocks. And you always know exactly how much space Lara needs to run before she can do a running jump. And you always know the distance you can cover with a standing jump. Etc etc.

The controls are perfect for a 3D platformer like this.

 

[Lucumo]

I think the age of the developers is pretty important. Most great mathematical advances and rock albums are made by people in their early twenties.
I dont know too much about the demographics of a lot of classic video games companies, but the ones I do know about tended to be very young. John Carmack being 22 when DOOM was released, JVC and Richard Garriott starting as teenagers and so on.
Looking up Tomb raider it looks to be have been a bunch of folk in their early twenties, from dates I can find. Nu-Tomb raider was lead by a guy in his 40's.

I think it's more culture. 1990s developers were prestigious geeks, in love with Star Trek, Tolkien, Star Wars, Hellraiser, Dune, heavy metal, etc. Geeks should make geek things, and if normies wanna jump on the train, they can, but geeks eventually let them buy the whole railway. By 2010, almost all of the original culture of the industry had been cleansed, in favour of graduates who might have seen a couple of Farscape episodes once, or 'performative geeks' who think the scene is cool.

No use hiring a 22 year old, if he gets all his opinions off Screenrant.

Hmm, that actually reminds me of that picture with 90s, 00s and 10s journalists where it goes from fellow fans to serious and cynic to degenerate and disconnected.

 

[Lyric Suite]

What would the 2020 version of that be? That game you like is transphobic?

 

[Lemming42]

I'm sorry, but how many women are actually genuine, dyed-in-the-wool geeks? Be honest readers. So what gives a studio with 9 women and 2 men in a generic team photo, any moral ownership over space opera, which has always been a male dominated pastime? It's possible there are some genuine nerds amongst BioWare still, and to those people I express apology, but my impression is not of an environment where people debate scenes from movies with heated passion; we know that the male and female psyche is different, and one gets the world-building/engineering, but the other thinks in terms of relationships, on average.

This is absolutely nonsensical. Star Wars is a world-famous best-selling movie franchise that everyone's grandma has seen, and is worth tens of billions of dollars. Star Wars expanded universe novels make it onto the NYT bestsellers list. It's not some underground esoteric thing known only to a mystical elite of basement-dwelling "geeks", it's a touchstone of mainstream culture. You could make a Star Wars reference in the boardroom of Goldman Sachs and everyone in there would get what you meant. Same for Tolkien, who of course wrote some of the most popular books of all time which were subsequently made into one of the most popular movie franchises of all time. Women are fans of these things, men are fans of these things, everyone is a fan of these things. You can expand this to videogames too - Tomb Raider, to keep on the theme of the thread, was an extraordinary cultural phenomenon with immense impact. Everyone either played the games or knew of them. Your grandma knows who Lara Croft is, just as she knows who Mario and Pacman are.

You might then attempt to draw a line between "normies" and "geeks", where the two groups consume the exact same things but the "geeks" somehow become more fanatical and appreciate it in some more abstractly patrician way. Okay - the attendees of most early Star Trek conventions were female, and it was a woman who started the letter-writing campaign that secured the third season of TOS. And that's not to mention the numerous female writers who wrote for the show. Every "geek" space I've ever been in has had women in it, from tabletop groups to online gaming to MtG matches held in the basement of this shitty place that I'm pretty sure has since gone bankrupt. In the context of this thread, as mentioned earlier, the first three Tomb Raider games (ie the ones with the best stories, that eschewed shitty melodrama in favour of interesting concepts and concise storytelling) were written by a woman.

The agonising decline of videogames has nothing to do with the sex of the developers, and everything to do with a generational and cultural shift that's taken place. The fact that 90s devs consistently end up making total shit when asked to produce new games serves as proof. Dev teams are too large, publishers throw their dicks around more than ever, development for the biggest AAA titles is sometimes split across disparate offices around the globe (each with hundreds of people who aren't in any real contact with each other), etc.

The all-time worst period of gaming was, of course, the mid-2000s, when most dev teams were still primarily male, and primarily people who were "in" on the gaming scene. Geoff Keighley is a real geek and a true gamer by anyone's standards; he still ended up as the Dorito Pope.

 

[Lyric Suite]

The controls is the reason i never got into this series. I remember trying the demo once, and thinking to myself third person shooting was the worst thing ever created by man. I had no idea at the time the problem was not the third person view as such but the fact the game was multiplatform before that was a thing and was also big on platforming as opposed to being a pure shooter. I subsequently played Max Payne and Heretic 2 without a problem, but Tomb Raider, never. Took me years before i could approach it.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

This is absolutely nonsensical. Star Wars is a world-famous best-selling movie franchise that everyone's grandma has seen, and is worth tens of billions of dollars. Star Wars expanded universe novels make it onto the NYT bestsellers list. It's not some underground esoteric thing known only to a mystical elite of basement-dwelling "geeks", it's a touchstone of mainstream culture.

Yes, but not everyone studies it like a nerd does. There are levels of fandom, and what you are describing is the general audience. What I am describing is the advanced audience. How many of those Goldman Sachs guys know that Darth Malak appears in a flashback in KOTOR II with his jaw intact, or that the Hypermatter Reactor in a Imperial II-class Star Destroyer consumes tons of fuel to stay in FTL, or some other shit like that? Have they read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", or Carl Jung, just to gain insight into their hobby? Can they piece together every scene and line from memory, as many nerds can, or do they just have a general impression of what happens? One or two can do this; if so, then they are nerds. Passion drives such people to know everything, every detail.

Women are fans of these things, men are fans of these things, everyone is a fan of these things.

I would have believed that ten years ago, and backed you up with egalitarian idealism. Even my female family no longer agree with you, and hate this kind of opinion as of 2022. Experience, and seeing the consequences of this kind of thinking, as well as knowing biology, tells me that although there are exceptions, on any bell curve, in general, the preferences of men and women substantially do not overlap; they can share hobbies, but they are not identical. Also this kind of thinking has been incredibly destructive to society, forcing women into social roles they didn't honestly want, destroying fertility, and convincing people there is a patriarchal conspiracy (rather than 2 million years of sound biology). I know women who enjoy these things, but usually not for the same reasons that men do, or to the same degree men do.

Okay - the attendees of most early Star Trek conventions were female, and it was a woman who started the letter-writing campaign that secured the third season of TOS.

Yep, and if you know your Star Trek esoterica, then you must now complete the rest of this common tale of justification; the audience of "Star Trek: The Original Series" had an unusual abundance of women, because women had a wide-on for Spock. They weren't generally getting the floor wet for his correct use of SI units.

Let's cut to the chase; the denial of major biological and psychological differences between men and women has been incredibly destructive for wider society. Women were forced into careers they were not suited to, convinced of a patriachal conspiracy, rather than understanding 2 million years of sound biology. Fertility across the Western world has been sub-replacement for decades, and these lofty ideals you ascribe to, will die without a vector, to propagate them.

When poseurs enter hobbies, for whatever reason, whether liking the idea, the ego image of themselves in the scene, without any real passion, especially people programmed for 'agreeableness', usually because these people make desparate nerds feel better, they have a tendency to corrode the thing in the direction of their biological biases.

 

[Lemming42]

Yes, but not everyone studies it like a nerd does. There are levels of fandom, and what you are describing is the general audience. What I am describing is the advanced audience. How many of those Goldman Sachs guys know that Darth Malak appears in a flashback in KOTOR II with his jaw intact, or that the Hypermatter Reactor in a Imperial II-class Star Destroyer consumes tons of fuel to stay in FTL, or some other shit like that? Have they read Joseph Campbell's "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", or Carl Jung, just to gain insight into their hobby? Can they piece together every scene and line from memory, as many nerds can, or do they just have a general impression of what happens? One or two can do this; if so, then they are nerds. Passion drives such people to know everything, every detail.

I get where you're coming from but this is basically a collection of random trivia shit. My brother is the one who introduced me to Star Trek and we've watched all of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT together. We did a Star Trek quiz book for fun and I beat him by about 650 points, a gap so extreme that it's becoming a running joke between us. I don't think this gives me a special kind of "nerd cred" that he lacks, and I don't think it means my enjoyment of Trek is deeper or more meaningful than his just because I remembered the exact name of the Medusan ambassador from one TOS episode and I know what Geordi's mother's ship was called. If anything, he gets more enjoyment out of it than I do (nobody hates Star Trek like a Star Trek fan). Getting into a dick-measuring contest where I say "ah, well, I know you've seen every episode multiple times and think you're a fan, but you do not enjoy it for the same reasons or to the same degree that I do" would be absurd and make me look like a gigantic knobhead.

I think you'd be surprised at how many people among the general population - even globally, not just in the West - can give you a reasonably accurate rundown of the first Star Wars film, and the LOTR movies. Again, they're massive cultural touchstones. You might as well say Die Hard is unique geek esoterica. You could start sounding off about hypermatter reactors if you wanted to get one over on people by coming up with some off-the-wall factoids they're not familiar with, but I don't think that would really demonstrate anything either way. And then someone could do the same thing to you, and equally prove nothing.

We could do this now and try to determine which one of us has the deeper and more nuanced appreciation of Tomb Raider, but it'd of course be a categorically insane way to spend our time in which nobody gets anywhere or proves anything.

Yep, and if you know your Star Trek esoterica, then you must now complete the rest of this common tale of justification; the audience of "Star Trek: The Original Series" had an unusual abundance of women, because women had a wide-on for Spock. They weren't generally getting the floor wet for his correct use of SI units.

And I like Star Trek because of the characters, the tales of humanist optimism, and the high-concept stuff, not because I remember how an intermix chamber works. I don't really understand where you're going with this one - these people loved the show enough to organise and attend conventions, wrote letters that saved the show, and formed the bulk of the early fandom that would propel Star Trek into the phenomenon that it is. However, they (according to you, anyway) don't know about Spock's use of SI units - and nor do I - so... what, exactly? They were enjoying the show wrong?

I'd reject the premise you're offering here in general because there are plenty of women who will blitz through a Star Trek trivia quiz, having watched every episode enough to memorise the most pointless shit imaginable. Your characterisation of people who set up their own conventions and made their own perfect replica Star Trek costumes and props as being there purely because they think Nimoy is hot is dumb. They liked the show enough to go out there and form entire communities based off it and correspond with the writers directly, two things that I've never bothered to do, and I consider myself a big-time fan. Which brings us to the next point:

I know women who enjoy these things, but usually not for the same reasons that men do, or to the same degree men do.

No offence but this is where your post starts to get brain-melting. I'm ignoring all the stuff about fertility rates because - and I'm not trying to be a dick - I'd rather get bladder cancer than hear about the fall of Western civilization for the thousandth time, especially in the context of a Tomb Raider thread. But I'll pick up on the quoted part above. So far the explanation you've offered is:

we know that the male and female psyche is different, and one gets the world-building/engineering, but the other thinks in terms of relationships, on average.

Star Trek is, of course, about relationships, as is most of all fiction. The workings of the Enterprise are inconsistent and change from week to week, warp speed is typically whatever the writers want it to be and "communications range" is completely random, but Kirk and Spock will always have their unique chemistry, and Kirk will (almost) always win the day with empathy, reasoning, and interpersonal communication. "Devil In The Dark" isn't a great episode because you get to see a big mining device in the background, it's a great episode because it's about Kirk and Spock debating with each other about how to approach a problem, and Kirk ultimately having the emotional intelligence to put his anger aside and trust the Horta.

I don't know if I agree with your quoted assertation and I genuinely don't care about alleged sex differences in humans at all (the one exception being the shockingly high prevalence of violence committed by men, which I am interested in knowing if there's a biological cause for), but if it is the case, and women are more prosocial and have superior interpersonal skills and higher emotional intelligence, then on average they ought to make better writers for things like Star Trek - and Star Trek has, of course, frequently been written by women, in both TV and novel form, ever since the first season of TOS and ever since the very first original Trek novels. Star Trek should also naturally appeal to them (and hey, it looks like it does!).

If the appeal in Star Wars is learning facts about hypermatter reactors and whipping that info out when in conversation with "poseurs" who think they're fans of Star Wars just because they like Star Wars*, then sure, but I wonder if most people - including dedicated geeks and people who've written their own Star Wars novels - see it that way. (I can't comment, I hate Star Wars and as far as I can see, the appeal is in watching laser fire fly around the screen while Harrison Ford does his usual thing. I like Dark Forces but I definitely wouldn't characterise any of it as an ULTRA-MASCULINE WORLDBUILDING EXTRAVAGANZA).

*they haven't even read the works of Carl Jung!

When poseurs enter hobbies, for whatever reason, whether liking the idea, the ego image of themselves in the scene, without any real passion, especially people programmed for 'agreeableness', usually because these people make desparate nerds feel better, they have a tendency to corrode the thing in the direction of their biological biases.

Again, the darkest period for gaming was IMO the mid-2000s, featuring the rise of the military shooter, the Diablo-clone flatpack aRPG, and the identical popamole cover shooter, an era where every other game was brown and grey. The 2010s were, if anything, something of a minor renaissance ("minor" being the operative word). Men still comprised the vast majority of developers during the 2000s and they more or less killed gaming stone dead. Focusing on the sex of the developers is an embarrassing waste of time, because the ongoing quality crisis has nothing to do with the genitals possessed by the dev teams and everything to do with seismic shifts in culture, both wider culture and the culture of games development.

 

[Black Plague]

I just wanted to play video games.

 

[Louis_Cypher]

However, they (according to you, anyway) don't know about Spock's use of SI units - and nor do I

Not what I said at any point.

Look, recently I've had to say this to someone else too, who sought contention with me over something I didn't even say, in another thread (I simply left, as there is little point participating in most cases): stick to what a person actually states. Carefully weigh the meaning of their words, before accusing them of something they never stated. It's already hard enough communicating carefully. Don't bring any assumptions into the conversation, as far as is humanly possible (difficult I know). If not there is no point in discussion.

Everyone does this at times, myself included. It's no shame, but I'm pointing it out because genuine discussion ends the moment this happens; the fact I'm bothering to respond, is because you are a fellow Trekkie (therefore a brother geek), you seem like a nice enough individual, so I owe you the effort.

Perhaps I am wrong, or perhaps I am right, but weigh the merit of my argument on it's own reasoning, not on feelings.

Getting into a dick-measuring contest where I say "ah, well, I know you've seen every episode multiple times and think you're a fan, but you do not enjoy it for the same reasons or to the same degree that I do" would be absurd and make me look like a gigantic knobhead.

Nobody is suggesting that; this is where I have trouble with forum discussions, which begin deteriorating. I will however reply because I feel this is an important point. You have introduced an 'axiomatic assumption'. The assumption is that levels of expertise always neccecitate crass displays of power. In fact, it is insecure people who must do this. The modern egalitarian world-view, which is collapsing, automatically thinks that natural differences in nature, competence, gradiation of expertise, or heirachies of any natural kind must cause, in themselves, tyranny or bullying. It does not. The absense of egotism, which we used to train into people, is what creates gentlemen, not an absense of capacity. The most secure, competent individuals, have no need to use their relative expertise for a mere momentary sensation of power over another; which is fleeting, hollow, and unsatisfying anyway.

This sadly cuts to the heart of why things are going to shit in thr West. We each have different natures, and everyone understood this for much of history. Now, in the dying days of the Washington Consensus, as the Dao De Ching says, people get even more keen to state what is increasingly revealed to be a sham. Democracy seems to have a major downside, that different natures, competencies, etc, can be seen as threatening the idea of one person having equal say to another, so must be denied by insecure democratic cultures.

That is the heart of why despite biology and history revealing that there are major cognitive differences in men and women (which can be overcome, through self-awareness, to a degree), such a thing is difficult to say in 2022, while the arguments otherwise become more frantic and insistent.

 

[Pound Meat]

I don't know much about Toby Gard except he's talked about regretting making Lara so sexy and giving her big boobs, which means he's probably a filthy vaxxed leftist who's a few months from trooning out. Hard to tell if he really approves of nuLara or he's just pretending to in order to stay uncanceled.

 

[Lemming42]

That is the heart of why despite biology and history revealing that there are major cognitive differences in men and women (which can be overcome, through self-awareness, to a degree), such a thing is difficult to say in 2022, while the arguments otherwise become more frantic and insistent.

I get the feeling that this, and the accompanying stuff about Western democracy, is the topic you're actually interested in talking about, and all the stuff about Tomb Raider and Star Wars and BioWare was just sugar for the pill. It's an odd thread to attempt it in, though, given that Tomb Raider is one of the foremost games renowned for having an obsessive female fanbase, and you also brought up Star Trek which is a similar case, not only in having an expansive female fandom but also in having perhaps more female writers than any other show I can think of and having most of its novels (and almost all the ones actually worth reading) be written by women.

I'm not great at conducting myself in forum discussions and I tend to write in a way that comes across as unintentionally sardonic, so apologies if I come across as hostile to any extent - one thing I really appreciate is that you're unfailingly polite, which is a trait I wish I could replicate more successfully myself - but I truly found what you said baffling about how "the male and female psyche" feature differences that mean women are typically unfit to "take moral ownership over space opera, which has always been a male dominated pastime", reason being that women like "relationships" while men like "engineering" (for what it's worth, I don't like engineering, and do like relationships, to engage with those terms on the extremely broad level in which they're presented here). This strikes me as unbelievably absurd for and doesn't make any degree of sense at all to me for the reasons I hopefully outlined, and your overall point that women are less likely to engage with "geek" stuff than men (or typically do so "not to the same extent" and for "different reasons") is straightforwardly not representative of reality in my experience of being a "geek" for the better part of 30 years, and spending vast amounts of time in both meatspace and online communities geared towards these types of hobbies.

Posting the BioWare dev team pic in the way that you did struck me as a very trite and unfair attempt to play to the crowd on this site, who we both know will never miss the chance to piss and moan about the existence of women and/or other demographics, to the point where a lot of them have actually mentally degraded to such an extent that they've lost the ability to see an imaginary woman as a character in a videogame without being triggered, in the most unironic sense of the word (see: The Outer Worlds hairstyle thread, one of the all-time lows of a site that's on a neverending freefall into the abyss. The Selaco thread is another winner - a new FPS game is coming out and our thread on it is 5% gaming talk, 95% people scouring the dev's Twitter to "catch him out" for not hating homosexuals).

One reason this site is becoming increasingly unusable to me to the point where I barely post anymore is because any actual videogame discussion (which is the only thing I'm here for at this stage) will invariably be redirected into the hobby horse agendas of the userbase, which frequently have nothing to do with videogames at all. I appreciate that your post was actually tied to the topic at hand but I still rolled my eyes out of my skull when I saw the pic of the BioWare team and the accompanying stuff about the "male dominated pastime" of space opera, to the point where I felt compelled to respond - not only because I think you're almost entirely wrong, but also because I could feel the discussion about to derail (which, amusingly, I suppose I've ended up contributing to more than anyone else). The thread was very nearly on the brink of having an interesting discussion (an ultra-rarity on the modern day Codex) about videogame development, especially with regards to technical limitations acting upon developers in the 90s, and the thought of it so quickly turning into the usual indistinguishable Codex thread was gutting.

 

[agentorange]

This is ostensibly good because it's "relatable" or something, because apparently that's what we're all like these days, we just cry at shit. And we definitely want our heroes to be relatably underwhelming and pathetic, rather than uber-confident role models to aspire to.

When you see nu-Lara crying and sobbing, don't you just wanna reach through the screen and pat her on the head?

it just makes me want to masturbate