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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • And originally created by a university design team with a female design lead, at that.

    Even as Portal 2 adds male characters, one is greedy and responsible for all the conflict in the franchise, acting as something of a caricature for masculine stereotypes, and the other’s only defining trait is that he’s an easily corrupted idiot.

    Portal is perhaps the best example of, and should be held up as the golden standard of, feminism in gaming.


  • Glide@lemmy.catoGaming@beehaw.orgThe Two Genders
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    6 days ago

    I think it has less to do with gender politics and more to do with delivery, though.

    The writing was just better. They make Joel to be a complicated, sympathetic character, and create a situation in which, even as Joel/the player murders relative innocents, you know he is doing a bad thing from a complicated and genuine love. Then, they take that character and reduce all his love to “he did a bad” and shoot him, make you chase his killer for half a game, and try to make you sympathize with his killer after the fact? And it’s all tied together through this tired, “cycle of violence” trope that another major post-apolcolyptic zombie survival media has already bastardized and beaten to death.

    The “fans” who defend Joel as the hero are insane, on that point I can’t agree more. But I think the dislike of Abby and the love of Joel is deeper than “guy good, girl bad.” I’ve seen far fewer complaints (though not zero complaints) about playing the notably more “woke” surrogate lesbian daughter than about playing as Abby.

    As an aside, I’ve been thinking recently about how the game would feel if you spend the first half of the game as Abby, chasing her father’s killer, only to have the rug pull later that the killer is Joel. Then, you spend the second half playing as Ellie, dealing with the consequences, while the player is trying to reconcile what just happened. Though it prob would have been harder to sell a game that doesn’t open with Eillie and Joel.


  • Glide@lemmy.catoGaming@beehaw.orgThe Two Genders
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    6 days ago

    No. They’re whining about Witcher 4 using Ciri as a protagonist because they think she was made ugly.

    Attractive women designed solely to be the object of male affection are allowed to be protagonists. When a woman stands on their own as a unique complex individual, they take issue.





  • Glide@lemmy.catoMemes@lemmy.mlJust the tip
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    11 days ago

    Hey, let’s not discredit the amazing work that Brian Thompson accomplished as CEO! Before his joining UnitedHealthCare in 2022, their denial rate was 8%. Then, only one short year later, he managed to successfully drive that denial rate up to almost 28%! As the UnitedHealthCare conglomerate served some 122 million Americans that year, you can easily discern that Brian Thompson was directly responsible for ensuring that ~24 million Americans had their claims denied. Imagine how much less UHC would have made for their investors if they had to pay an addition 24 million American’s health care claims!

    So before giving all the credit to the board members and share holders, let’s take a moment to understand exactly how hard Brian Thompson worked to ensure some ~24 million Americans went without doctor-approved medical support that they previously were entitled to.

    All this data is publically available on Wikipedia, by the way.









  • Denying and delaying health care is wrong. And while I think that murder shouldn’t be a desired solution to the problem as it is also wrong, at this point we have to accept that we’ve reached systematic self-defense.

    Something needs to change, and there are currently no motivating factors encouraging those with the power to make change. I don’t want the answer to be violence, but, genuinely, what other options do we have at this point? The courts, the Democratic process, the police and the economy all work together to protect the massive wealth of the few, and we live in a world run by that wealth. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but more than that, I don’t want anyone to be hurt. When the few in power choose to hurt the many without, tolerance for the gaps in power, wealth, and quality of life give way.


  • and I wouldn’t necessarily be against the state holding to account executives who have produced systems and policies that result in the harm or death of the state’s citizens

    Right, except if everything went exactly correctly as per the current justice system, the company would be found at fault, fined an absurd amount of money and closed. The wealthy executives who made the decisions that actually resulted in country-wide deaths would get sizable severance packages, take a short vacation, and 6 months to a year later open up the same business under a new name that imposes the same policies. It’ll be right back to throwing poors into a furnace to fuel their lamborgini’s until the next slap on the wrist.

    We have no system to hold people accountable for their decisions as part of a company. We blame the company and then trust the company to police their staff accordingly. I’d love a widespread rework of the justice system to actually target the people responsibly for a companies actions, but we won’t get one, so instead, someone has been shot.