Grab yourself a whore and settle in

I'm getting increasingly bored by the glut of super-hero films: the studios are now run by men in their late 40s trying to recreate the witty glee of 1978s Superman and its ilk, unhampered by reflection on the fact that their feelings about such films is coloured by seeing them when they were boys. The nostalgia is accompanied by cold hard commercial concerns: they conceive of the audience as a later generation of teen boys and find it nigh on impossible to make films for adults, women, teenage girls (other than vilely patronising rom-coms).

The latest bit of boy-man rubbish is that some extra, once caught, will be fined $5 million (affect a Dr Evil tone for that bit) for leaking the top-secret hush-hush news that the new Batman movie will have a FEMALE Robin.

O.M.F.G.

I just think it's embarrassing that in this day and age, it's considered a major transgressive, progressive move to make a familiar and relatively unimportant character female. It suggests that the studio chiefs, directors, producers and scriptwriters still think of women as The Other, and assume that their audience does the same. Of course it's possible that the female Robin has been cast so that homophobes behind the camera and in the stalls can't giggle about the homosocial bond between these two men. Far better that Batman has a female junior: 'normal' gender roles return!

She-Robin will become a symbol rather than a character: every time we point out that female superheroes are always sexualised in ways the men aren't, their defenders will whine that they 'let' us have a female Robin (and hope that we don't notice the inevitable marginalisation and gendered nature of said representation). Commissioning 'erotic artist' Milo Minara for Spider-woman is just the latest example of a tawdry, sleazy tradition:

The obvious rejoinder to this is to say that it's better than nothing. As a Doctor Who fan, I was disappointed by the latest selection of yet another white male Doctor, however excellent I think Capaldi is. It's about time such roles were taken by women without any fuss being made about it whatsoever. I'd like the next director to say 'we auditioned x number of people and she was the best fit', rather than – as the Batman people evidently have in mind – using the moment as a big shock.

A friend tells me that Robin's been female in the comics for some time – I wonder whether the same arguments popped up when that happened. Films are different, of course: the history of comic book adaptations is of massively widened audiences consuming watered-down versions of characters held dear by 'real' fans: The Kick-Ass films, for instance, skipped the gang-rape of KA's girlfriend, thankfully.

We seem to be at a particularly low point in gender representation. The whole Gamergate thing reminded me of a particularly good undergraduate dissertation one of my former students wrote. A keen gamer, she simply recorded and analysed the comments, conversations and behaviours of fellow players when she played as a supposed male and as a female. So the vile poison of Gamergate was no surprise: I've read all the rape threats and torture propositions before – my student was a tough cookie but I still worried about the cumulative effect of this stuff. Gamergate, in case you have a life, started off as a nasty personal spat between games developer Zoe Quinn and her ex-partner, who posted some petty and apparently untrue accusations on his blog relating to her professionalism and morality. Before long, certain corners of the internet spawned regiments of male gamers pouring out misogynistic bile and claiming that the real problem is journalists' failure to 'understand' the ethos of online gaming, which they feel should be a space removed from 'real life' politics and social movements. To them, games are goal-oriented quests with pretty basic requirements: killing, and scantily-clad women to provide sexual services or be killed. And perhaps some magic rings thrown in. This, they feel is 'normal'. Anything else is 'political' or (perhaps even worse) 'art'. Ugh. To recap: games which privilege white males slaughtering Vietnamese/Native Americans/Orcs/aliens etc., and reducing women to sidekicks, prostitutes or slaves isn't political, while mentioning this is political, and engaged in by SJWs, or 'social justice warriors'. No wonder Charlie Brooker is driven to despair:

Never, ever choose “woman” on your first playthrough of The Internet, because you’ll face an immediate difficulty spike. Suddenly it’s a stealth game with nowhere to hide, one with hundreds of respawning enemies waiting to attack you the moment you make a noise or stand out in any way whatsoever.
OPEN MAILBOX.
I SAID DIE U FUCKN WHORE says the game, accompanied by an animated gif of your head on a porn star’s body.
You decide to see what you’re carrying, by typing INVENTORY.
YOU HAVE: A LAMP, A ROPE, A FAT ASS AND SAGGY TITS, chuckles the game.
You try something else. You type GO NORTH.
The game thinks for a while, then distributes your home address and phone number and threatens to murder you and your entire family.

They particularly hate independent games authors who don't provide said slaughter'n'slags action. Some of them are even WOMEN. Which just proves to them that women aren't gamers and have no sense of humour. Apparently.

Take this well-spoken chap who has recorded a 20 minute walk-through of Dragon Age in which he matter-of-factly goes looking through the brothel, in which he meets a woman who describes her time as a prostitute as 'fun times' (around 3.45).



This is also the game Anita Sarkeesian points out contains the injunction to



Having made that point, Sarkeesian has had to cancel several lectures because she's received death threats, and left her home. Quinn wrote a game about suffering from depression: this is apparently 'too dark' for gaming (despite the multiple games in which you can play an SS officer for instance), and like Sarkeesian these critics have made their points through the medium – again – of death threats. As she explains,

"the Internet spent the last month spreading my personal information around, sending me threats, hacking anyone suspected of being friends with me, calling my dad and telling him I'm a whore, sending nude photos of me to colleagues, and basically giving me the 'burn the witch' treatment"

Amusingly, said threats come from people who say that online content and other media activity have 'no effect on real life'. I don't like this false distinction, and it seems that someone who'll simultaneously say 'it's just a game' while sending assassination threats doesn't really believe it either.

Does it matter, given that these keyboard warriors are a small band of men? It does, because they're vocal, they drown out debate far beyond their numbers. They've hijacked the terms of the discussion and they've moved from issues to identity. To them, it's not enough to disagree with other people's opinions - they issue personal threats or stay silent when others do the same. They've achieved the silencing of women and their male allies, and even ended careers. Depressingly, there's the inevitable hashtag for these anti-political warriors: #NotYourShield, which claims that accusation of misogyny are used as a weapon to evade the 'real' core of the argument: journalistic ethics when writing about games. The bigots even funded a supposedly feminist group to design a fantasy character called Vivian James – the result is an embarrassing tamed girl-woman whom the loons are now depicting as an innocent victim of these ball-breaking commie man-haters:

It reminds me of break time at school, when the girls mooched around the edges of the playground while the boys took up the space to play football, and this was accepted as natural.

BY this point, you're probably as bored and depressed as I am. The difference is, I'm going to have to teach this stuff, in media ethics classes, to male and female gamers. I'll say one thing for cultural studies: there's never any shortage of new material for discussion. I think I'll stop now – I'm pretty certain the #NotYourShield people will have enough death threats lying around to spare one for little ol' me.

PS. I'm such a politically-correct pinko liberal that I stopped playing games when I realised Civilisation II was rigged so that you couldn't win by running a peaceful, socialist economy.

Hail Lycerius, General Secretary of the World

Lycerius, you may have heard on the radio or other media, has been playing the same game of Civilization II for ten whole years (or several thousand years in-game time). He is now far into a dystopian future in which the ravaged earth is divided between his Communist dictatorship and two other aggressive empires.

The world is a hellish nightmare of suffering and devastation.
There are 3 remaining super nations in the year 3991 A.D, each competing for the scant resources left on the planet after dozens of nuclear wars have rendered vast swaths of the world uninhabitable wastelands.

 big cities are a thing of the distant past. Roughly 90% of the worlds population (at it's peak 2000 years ago) has died either from nuclear annihilation or famine caused by the global warming that has left absolutely zero arable land to farm. Engineers (late game worker units) are always busy continuously building roads so that new armies can reach the front lines. Roads that are destroyed the very next turn when the enemy goes. So there isn't any time to clear swamps or clean up the nuclear fallout. 

And of course the UN is no good at all at peace-keeping. Fascinating how one man's game pretty much mimics what I think is happening to us. Perhaps less war in our future, but the reckless destruction of the globe is very much around the corner.

Hearing this story warmed the very cockles of my heart in a way that hasn't happened since I last saw a child fall over. Civilization II was both the core of my being and the darkest moments of my student life many years ago. To that game I owe my status as an Apple Macintosh user - because Civilisation II didn't exist on Macs and I wanted my life back.

Imagine the scene. A scummy shared student house in rainy North Wales. A ground floor room packed with books and quite possible the worst PC ever made, the Time PII 8.4Gb piece of beige shit. I bought it to start my MA (everything was hand-written on my BA) and after a few months of getting it fixed (a courier told me he kept his family fed on carting broken TIME PCs around), I bought the computer game I'd seen the big boys playing in the students' union media office. I was transfixed: a game which allows you to macro- and micromanage an entire planet. Nerd heaven.

Sadly, I sucked at the game. Not my fault, you understand. Capitalism's fault. The game-play is clearly ideologically rigged to prevent players succeeding by running a peaceable, green, communist regime. This is clearly where it departs from the real world, as I intend to demonstrate just as soon as I can get you bastards in the camps and rebuild the world according to me. I loved Civilization II (and very much didn't love Civ III or Alpha Centauri), but became very, very frustrated with this political bias. So I played it less and less. However, my friend Richard - an addictive personality - really took to it. Not having a computer of his own, he basically moved into my room. 'Just one more go' was his catchphrase - usually uttered at 6 a.m. as I begged him to go home so I could get a couple of hours' sleep before going to university. At one point, I recall being quite ill and deliriously watching him removed the PC, screen, keyboard, mouse, speakers etc etc so that he could carry on playing without becoming infected. At no point did it cross his mind to make me a cup of tea or Marmite on toast, or even check that I was still alive. This is the kind of thing we had to do in those days, before blogging, Facebook and Twitter, you know.

Gradually it became clear that the only way to ever sleep - or work - again was to dump the PC. I also had a little problem with Minesweeper too. I never bothered with speed, but concentrated on adding more and more mines to successfully clear. Someone told me that Macs didn't have any games, so my mind was made up. Soon enough, the university chucked 50 Mac IISe machines into a skip and I got hold of one (curiously enough, it contained the membership list of an Edinburgh Freemasons' Lodge) and my problems were over (and I rarely saw Resentful Richard again). Although there's a Mac version of the new Civ… many times I've been tempted to buy it. No doubt Civ II seems hilariously archaic compared to the stuff you young chaps and chapesses run: little video, no prostitution or murder, blocky graphics, lots of statistics and little gore… but it was and I suspect still is, compelling.

I salute Lycerius. I'm amazed he's still able to run it on whatever ancient machine it's compatible with, I admire his patience, his dedication and his optimism. One day - with the help of the Redditors - he'll achieve his goal of world domination. Rather scarily given the past few years, their collective wisdom recommends turning to Fundamentalism as a system of government and smiting everyone in reach.

And then he'll step blinking into the sunshine, wondering what on earth he can do with the rest of his life.

Is picking up a prostitute (electronically) educational?

I read an entertaining piece of journalism today which declares that video-gaming is educational, because it involves problem-solving, patience and learning moves. No doubt you've read of research claiming that kids, old people and pretty much anyone can 'train' their brains by playing games, and thus stave off senility or whatever.

I'm not particularly convinced - the 'skills' required by many games aren't particularly transferable. I'm not certain that learning how to score drugs, dally with prostitutes or (as a very good dissertation I read a few days ago boasted) smash enemies' heads against the kerb until they're dead really count as educational. For one thing, the physics of cranium-crunching and the economics of the sex-trade aren't included in the experience: these are worlds of naked, individualistic capitalism.

But then, I'm not really in much position to preach. I know someone who never completed The Hobbit on a ZX Spectrum, and I'm not much better. The last game I played obsessively was Civilization II in about 1996. I loved it, but got bored because it was so ideologically loaded. To win, you had to be a ragingly violent capitalist ready to nuke your neighbours without cause, whereas I always tried to build a socialist, peace-loving society, and got nuked by said neighbours: clearly the game's designers are Hobbesians, and it disturbed me. Civ 3 and Alpha Centauri just looked rubbish and didn't play as well.

I've tried to play Scrabble, but my copy is a cheating American version. It continually gets all seven letters down while refusing to provide a meaning for the made-up words, and gives me 7 vowels. It got so frustrating that I ended up demanding the suggestions every go and sitting back watching the computer play itself, which damaged my play against actual humans because my mental flexibility had been sapped.

I do occasionally go online to play the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy game, which is ridiculously difficult: try it, and then wonder where the summer (and your sanity) went.

So, tell me: what games do you play, which games do you recommend I play (and are available on Mac) and what have you learned from them? I see that Civ 5 is coming this year, and will hopefully be Mac-friendly!

Nerds! Queue here

I know that many of you are addicted to computerised games. Now you can listen 'live' to chiptunes, computer game music from all your old favourites and other related computer noise at 8BitFM!

I haven't played a computer game with any enthusiasm since Civilization II, which really was brilliant, even if it was so ideologically loaded that taking a socialist approach led inevitably to defeat thanks to the capitalist running dogs of the California computer industry. After that, Civ III and Alpha Centauri were disappointing. I was also addicted to Minesweeper, so took the decision to buy a Mac, and never looked back. Though I do remember an online game involving calculating the force and best location required to kick a man down the stairs causing maximum damage. That was both educational and fun - I'll need those skills one day.