I toyed with posting a comment, and thought perhaps it’d be best to get my thoughts down here instead.

This post mainly stems from Part 2 – Deconstructing the arguments. I admit for me it’s hard to get a response down in words that doesn’t boil down to one from gaming sexism bingo – I’m guilty of “It’s just a game, no-one cares”, “But men are all super-buff, they’re sexually objectified too”, and “Yeah, the story, dialogue and character design is all sexist, but everyone can enjoy the amazing gameplay”.

In the past I’ve been more reactive, but now I tend to be dismissive, because I’ve accepted that Ivy’s skimpy attire is the norm in a beat ‘em up, along with the men’s equally overdone proportions. I do feel in a lot of cases, we ‘give as good as we get’, the women are ridiculous, but so are the men. But Harris’s words have been a bit of an eye-opener in this department.

The idea that the male characters, as ridiculous as they are, are who men aspire to be, but the female characters are designed purely to please the men, is new to me. And in the example used, suddenly it does make sense to me.

It may sound stupid, but in reading this article I’ve abruptly remembered the only time a game genuinely managed to put me off playing it any further due to.. well… this.

This is Shahdee from Prince of Persia: Warrior Within. I played and thoroughly enjoyed the previous game, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. In Warrior Within, playing as the Prince, I’d boarded a ship and was quite engrossed in the gory combat, but then Shahdee made her appearance early on, and I felt incredibly awkward. I think my first thought was, what would my parents think if they saw me playing this game? 14 year old Emily was intimidated and confused by scary bondage woman.

I look at Shahdee now and think – what on earth is her costume made of? It looks like it’s supposed to be a shining metal , but it flexes around her legs and chest. Why is she wearing shoulder pads? Or bracers, for that matter? What’s the point? Why isn’t she just completely naked?

I’ve come to realise that some true equality between men and women can really enhance my enjoyment – but when it’s there, it’s so good that I’ve never really noticed it.

In Metal Gear Solid (let’s ignore 4 and the models for now, just for this), I feel as though the characters have had pure division, never based on gender, but based entirely on their profession. Everyone in Metal Gear Solid is either a soldier or a scientist.

Meryl Silverburgh, a soldier more comfortable with a desert eagle than a bra, Olga Gurlukovich who doesn’t shave her armpits, and Sniper Wolf, who puts more layers on in cold weather. 11 year old Emily loved Meryl, and her one line of dialogue about not wearing make up changed my life.

You might think that Eva in Metal Gear Solid 3 was bucking the trend here, but there’s a reason for this – she’s a spy, and she’s trying to seduce Snake. Infiltrating ranks among Ocelot and Volgin, she dresses as so:

And this is how Eva dresses when addressing Snake:

On a side note, thorough players will learn that Eva has breast implants.

And here are some scientists:

Pictured at the top, Emma Emmerich – she’s a young genius who I can only really describe as a computer wizard. Snake and Raiden fight to protect her because she has programmed a virus capable of destroying GW (let’s not go into more detail than that). Mei Ling on the bottom left is a data analyst, all the player sees through the course of the game is her face from the codec screen – a vital piece of equipment which she designed. Naomi Hunter on the right was head of FOX-HOUND medical staff. She prides herself on being a scientist, not a doctor, although often comes across as an amalgamation of the two – in Metal Gear 4 it is revealed that she has terminal cancer, and has only been able to fight it with the help of nanomachines, and she willingly takes her life by disabling them.

Para-medic saves data for Snake (later Big Boss) in Metal Gear 3, in addition she also advises medically, and offers knowledge on local creatures and plant life to assist in jungle survival. Nastasha Romanenko fulfills a similar role in Metal Gear Solid, this time advising on nuclear weapons. Born in the Ukraine, Nastasha’s parents unfortunately succumbed to the affects of radiation after the Chernobyl incident, and she works pro-actively to prevent others suffering the same fate, and helps Snake and Otacon form Philanthropy.

Metal Gear Solid has such a strong female cast, I’m surprised they don’t get mentioned more often in the discussion to have stronger, sensibly-dressed, and intelligent female characters that aren’t merely eye-candy.

I still don’t think the abundance of scantily-clad women will put me off a great game, and while I can see in some cases the issue isn’t just in a characters appearance, I definitely believe it is worth celebrating and paying note to the games that put the effort in to make all their characters truly brilliant, powerful, and somewhat believable. Except Raiden.

I only had the will to continue during the last few minutes because I had the most wonderful news that day – I’m going to start working for Eutechnyx in January, and I absolutely can’t wait!

I also played Skyrim. Again.

The best places to dine in Skyrim?

Arrived in Markarth for the first time, blown away by Skyrim yet again.

I’m completely enchanted by this game. I know that visuals alone aren’t everything – but Skyrim is not just beautiful. Every detail feels bespoke, and it’s an improvement in every conceivable aspect from Oblivion. Sensible menus, characters on the street have far more meaningful, believable dialogue that can actually draw you into a quest out of curiosity, rather than a necessity.

The levelling I’d describe as ‘broad’, as there are so many ways to improve your character, not just in combat and magic, but in a whole range of crafting skills. It’s genuinely enjoyable, fun, highly addictive, and the world, Skyrim, is an absolute joy to explore and experience. I feel as though there’s something wonderful to marvel at round every corner.

I’ve finished texturing the outer walls, although I still have tweaking to do, mainly darkening and increasing the contrast of the ambient occlusion. I merged the remaining old slate roofing onto the new model, just for layout purposes. The finished roofing will be made of lead not slate (worth mentioning the roof style on the gatehouse turrets will also be completely different).

As you can hopefully tell, the Red tower (the tallest, external tower on the left) and the inner tower are part of the old model, I just thought I’d import it all to get a look of how the whole thing will come together.

Lead roof modelling (still needs a little adjusting):

Shop A made it clear to me during my interview, watching the training DVD’s, and from working and talking to the staff, that helping customers is always your number one priority. You might have other tasks, but if a customer approaches you for whatever reason, you’ll stop what you are doing and assist them in any way you can. Approach browsing customers to ask if they’re OK. Smile. Complement on their choice of clothing. Make polite conversation. It’s all very common sense to me. I don’t know a lot about clothes, but I know how good it makes me feel buying nice clothes and being on the receiving end of just a smile or a complement.

Shop B is truly the opposite. The manager insisted that she found smiling, helpful employees absolutely essential to the customers experience, however from day one this has clearly never been the priority. Staff work on strict deadlines for every single task – unpacking delivery, moving items to stock rooms, scanning away, etc. Every time I come back from one of these tasks I have been reminded that it’s extremely important I do this quickly. Not that I do it well, but quickly. Not that I tidy up the clusterfuck stock rooms as I go, not to pick up clothes off the floor, and also to hand customers over to another member of staff, just so I can work quickly. I may be new, but I’m not surprised to find that after a check up on this store, management came under fire for the messy, jam-packed stockrooms. What irks me is that the mess isn’t really the fault of any particular staff. They have been instilled with an ‘every man for himself’ attitude about their tasks, because they’re under pressure to do them so quickly. There’s a frantic vibe that means for a new member of staff such as myself, many current staff are very reluctant to help me. I’d brought down a rail of children’s clothes which I was told for the shop floor. After wondering around with almost every garment and being unable to find a single one, I told a member of staff that I didn’t think this stock was out yet. She told me to “keep looking, it’s there”. I kept looking. It wasn’t there. It was only when I found the floor manager that she said, yes, that is new stock, not for the shelves. To be fair to the first member of staff, she was probably very busy with some other task that had to be done quickly, that doesn’t involve getting distracted by customers or new members of staff.

Towards the end of my latest shift at Shop B, I was asked to sweep the women’s stock room. (Please note I am certain this is only because the state of their stockrooms had got them into trouble – it is not routine to clean up as you go). I filled a bag with clumps of dust, and a rail with clothes I picked up off the floor, and made a pile of old cards, security tags, pins and clothes dividers that were just left/dropped everywhere. Because time spent cleaning doesn’t move new stock somewhere, OMG IT WILL KILL US.

What irks me is that unless management can change the JUST DO IT FAST system, it’s going to continue to fester and grow into a muck house no matter what. There’s no incentive for staff to put stock away in the stock rooms correctly, to add new dividers for new lines of clothes, to put stock on the shop floor in the right place, to correct mistakes as they come across them, to move clothes along to different rails when you run out of space. You’ve got to just “shove it in somewhere”. While scanning some excess tights to put away in the children’s accessories stock rooms, I saw the same pair of tights had been thrown in about 5 different boxes. So I picked all the ones up I could see and scanned them into one box together. But working like this is not good, because by the time I come back to a senior member of staff, they will tell me to do it faster. The only way I can do it faster is to do it shitter.

I get a far superior staff discount at Shop A. They understand how important it is to dress to impress, and how much difference it can make for customers to see staff wearing the new range of clothes – thus, specific items in new ranges of clothes are discounted for staff even further. The discount at Shop B is so tiny that I won’t be bothering to purchase anything. All the clothes I wear to work at Shop B are from Shop A. You know what else I’ve got to add to that? The customers at Shop A are more pleasant than the ones at Shop B, because they’re never fobbed off to someone else, or surrounded by a tornado of hurrying staff that have no time to help or smile.

Shop B would work much more efficiently if it had no customers getting in the way of their priorities.

While I was cleaning one of the stockrooms (presumably for the first time in a long time), the manager from Shop B asked me what Shop A‘s stockroom was like. I said there was only one stockroom, with only a few extra items of clothing in it – and it’s clean. I said Shop A have almost all their stock on the shop floor. I didn’t tell her that I think work ethic needs to change if she wants to run a tidier store – I’m a new, minimum wage grunt, and I don’t think it’s my place to say until I’m invited to comment.

There’s one more thing that soured my opinion of Shop B before I started work. One of the training DVD’s talks extensively about theft. Not theft by customers, but internal theft by staff. It creeped me out. It made me feel like they expect every new employee will have a go at stealing form them. It brags about how great they are at catching staff out who have stolen clothes or money, and how they have sued the living daylights out of anyone involved, and completely destroyed their lives. They sound proud of it.

So instead of telling my manager, I decided to write it on my blog instead, on the off-chance it’ll get read by someone who knows what I’m talking about, and I won’t get fired or sued.

After much moaning, I’ve finally got work. Two works! At last I can start digging my way out of my overdraft.

This means I have had much less free time, that’s less time writing nonsense, working on projects and less time playing games. Unfortunately I am working with clothes, which means I’ve already been spending money I don’t have on clothes I don’t need. I also have recurring nightmares about being invited to interviews with specific game developers, but I turn up and they instantly decide they don’t want me. I finally tried Grand Ages: Rome on Ultra though…

I also want to offer some musings on Stronghold 3. If you have been following the saga so far, the game on release (and at the time of writing) is very buggy. There are some very obvious problems – having a city consisting almost entirely of farms and food production, but never being able to meet food requirements, the invincible wolves, wood cutters cutting wood once then sitting in your stockpile in a little circle, it goes on. Firefly Studios have written an honest apology which has been met with a range of responses that can be labelled from ‘truly absurd’ to ‘I’m an absolute fuckwit’.

The highlight for me is probably the hollow “I’m going to sue you” threat. Yes, similarly with every bad film I’ve spent money watching, I have sued the companies involved because I didn’t enjoy myself. At Assyria every time someone didn’t enjoy one of our games or found a bug, we got sued. Except none of this ever happened.

Obviously I don’t know why Stronghold 3 was released when it was, because it clearly wasn’t ready. Unfortunately Firefly Studios can’t really win – had they kept delaying the game any statement as to why would have been met with a similar barrage of immature comments from angry gamers. Now they are working on patching the game up as quickly as possible.

You must realise – even if you turn a console on to play a game, and sit for 20 minutes waiting for an update which can be a ball ache at times, that video game players are extremely lucky. You pay a specific amount of money for a video game, and in many cases, the developers will continue to tweak and improve it, at absolutely no cost to you. No-one will go back to Sucker Punch and make it in any way watchable, and they certainly won’t do it for free. New and improved iterations of films and books cost you more money. Updates to fix a game cost you nothing, just a tiny amount of patience. I want Stronghold 3 to work, yes, and I am perfectly happy to wait while Firefly Studios get things fixed. The general reaction to the games release was sad and also completely embarrassing. I love games but sometimes I cannot stand gamers.

“Marco was flamboyant on and off the track. When someone dies, everyone always says they loved life. But he had a very vibrant personality. He already had a huge fanbase around the world, partly down to aggressive riding – but also because he was just a cool guy. He didn’t take himself too seriously and would have been a big star for next year.”

Matt Roberts – BBC MotoGP presenter

“She’s called Kim i Sim.
Miss Kim I Sim lives in Pyongyang 평양. She is dressed in uniform but she is not a soldier. She is the french speaking guide the “Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum”. It is a huge war museum. The museum is dedicated to the DPRK’s struggle against the Japanese and the Americans. It has over 80 halls exhibitions. It is not heated up because they have energetical problems. It is very cold in winter. All the lights are off to save energy. The rooms are lighted one after another once the visit is over.
In the museum, you find a lot of weapons. You can see military equipment. During the visit, someone will explain to you the North Korean War. It is not the same explanation as the american’s one. North Korean who meet the rare tourists are severly controlled.
The museum is visited all day long by kids and soldiers. It is propaganda. Like every official site, the museum is visited by the people several times in their life.
Miss Kim has met only 25 tourists in 2009.”

Image from Eric Lafforgue’s amazing Flickr set on North Korea

I posted about North Korea briefly, some time ago. Recently I watched Newsnight’s harrowing documentary again. I also watched one that was new to me – perhaps even more eerie and disturbing than the last – “Welcome to North Korea”, where guards direct traffic in a city that has virtually none, enormous hotels have just three guests, (in this case, the film crew), where children are brought up to believe that their leader is great, as he lives in luxury far and above North Korean citizens who are starving, dying, and being taken to political prison camps where they are treated disturbingly inhumanely, where a convenient new history is painted, reflecting all other countries as the enemy, in particular the United States, despite providing essential food aid. It’s baffling.

It is apparent that all footage and imagery is only scratching the surface. Apparently conditions in the countryside of North Korea are by far the worst, and they are almost completely hidden from the rest of the world. The country does not produce enough food to sustain itself, and with aid lessening, it appears primarily to go to the government and higher classes of North Korea, while the lower classes are, apparently, largely being left to starve and die, resorting to cannibalism. Apparently it is not uncommon to find inflated corpses of North Korean’s washing up on the shores of China.

The food situation is dire for many reasons – severe drought, flooding, North Korea’s lack of investment in these areas (it instead has priority for the military), the fact that so little of the land itself is actually capable of producing food, that the government is unwilling to allow trade of food from other countries, and that working citizens can barely afford rice from the government with their entire wages.

Above is Ryugyong Hotel, in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang. When I last wrote, the hotel was an abandoned, failed project, that had cost the struggling country dearly. It may be gleaming glass today, but this is just a glossy shell. From NGO Life Funds for North Korean Refugees: (as a warning, there are some extremely distressing true stories on this web site)

“Pyongyang is the capital of North Korea. Foreigners visit there and foreign legations and mass communication media facilities are concentrated in the city. Pyongyang is the face of North Korea.

There are extreme restrictions in North Korea on the people’s freedom of movement and on travel. Without a special permit specifically indicating the necessity for a visit, ordinary citizens of North Korea are prohibited from access to Pyongyang.

They long ago expelled every physically handicapped person from Pyongyang, calling them disgraceful. This is highly aberrant, especially in view of today’s international trend in which symbiosis between physically/mentally handicapped persons and physically unimpaired persons is accepted as a barometer of social welfare.

Even in Pyongyang, however, the people recently have grown increasingly vocal about food supplies being in such short supply.”

What can we do, though? You can donate money, which may go towards food rations and supplies such as clothing and blankets, but once inside this secretive, totalitarian dictatorship, how do we know it will go to those who need it most? How do we know we are doing the right thing when the people there are not allowed a voice?

And what about the bigger picture? North Korea should not be sustained by continuous aid. The government only appears to care for itself. The people will still suffer brutally as long as the country is run in this manner.

I have thought for a while, that when I find a job, the first thing I will do is treat myself to a new pair of trainers. In light of all the viewing and reading today, which has planted itself permanently in my mind, when I find work, I will endeavor to find the most reliable way I can help with what extra disposable income I will have.

I think what I have found most shocking is the complete lack of action towards finding ways not to just help the people of North Korea temporarily, but to find a permanent solution to their plight. The only thing I can do right now is point it out and hope more people observe it, and feel moved enough to do something.

“I am wimp king, king of wimps, and I’m incredibly bad at horror games. Not just horror games – any games that leave me in the dark, where things jump out, where I die suddenly, where noises are sudden, where music is creepy, where things kill me, where I have no weapons… all of these things scare me.”

In a follow up to the original, Jim and I have continued to play Amnesia. I nearly had a heart attack at the end of this one so I hope you enjoy it!