Women, Men, Stupid
I should read Heroine Sheik’s Preview of Fallout 3 and feel mostly my normal righteous rage at the whole overt sexism nonsense, but I have had a scream welling up inside my chest after reading this:
“Fallout 3 is, yeah, just that. Bioshock achieved stunning visuals and environments by juxtaposing desolation and destruction with a campy, retro aesthetic in its posters, radio broadcasts, and items around the city of Rapture. Fallout 3… Well have you seen vault boy?”
AHHHHHHHHHHHHH.
::takes deep breath::
AHHHHHHHh!h!!!!!
I’m taking this out on you because I don’t think my housemates would appreciate it.
(My own current opinion about Fallout 3? I fucking love Interplay, and I have never really found myself enjoying any of the games Bethesda puts out, and I have this horrible sinking feeling, well..more than a feeling, that Fallout 3 is going to be just ANOTHER FUCKING FIRST PERSON SHOOTER which = futile NOT PLAYING IT)
OK, so this was a mindnumbingly stupid thing to say. But people, we DO know that stupidity is caused by humanity, not sex, right?
HOWEVER, I really think that my reaction (and the reaction of the people in the comments) is one of the reasons that “gaming” is so hard to get into in the first place. Fallout 1 and 2 are old fucking games, man. I was seriously too young to get into them, but I played Baldur’s Gate II, and it just went downhill from there. I am assuming that she is fairly new to the video gaming scene, so it’s really hard to understand the history behind things. And there is this strange tendency to discuss games regarding whether they are “ripping off” some other ideas (I think I have a quote by Neil Gaiman somewhere in this blog). I mean, does anyone really know where timed button sequences come from? Everyone calls them “God of War-esque”, but where did they come from, really? If the predecessor had been an ancient gaming classic would the gaming community respond to the labelling as an affront to the gaming community at large?
What does it say about me that someone calling Vault Boy a symbol invented in Bioshock throws me into a rage?
And honestly, aren’t the environments from Fallout and Bioshock taken from archetypal ideas in science fiction? Why am I not quoting a classic science fiction novel or movie to prove that Fallout games were “ripping off” something else?
I don’t know, man, it’s all bullshit anyway.
Edit: I just wanted to make sure to say that when I got Bioshock and my (totally not video game-playing) friends asked me what it was about, I said, “Like the movie Brazil”, which I think had much more of the feeling of Bioshock than necessarily Fallout (what with all the plastic surgery).
