Rigidly defined gender roles.
Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
21–30 of 131 posts
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#22I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…
hah :) so software is like interactive literature.
It can be, with some games (Zork, GTA4, Bioshock) a lot more than others (Pong, Tetris, Tic-tac-toe, Chess). At the extreme end of games-as-literature is the Interactive Fiction world, which has been dealing with how the 'literature' and the 'game' aspects interact for decades now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_fiction
Read this essay for an introduction to the concepts:
http://www.ifarchive.org/if-archive/info/Craft.Of.Adventure....
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#23I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…
> We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the published version.
It's also _considerably_ easier.
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#24I will harp on about the importance of code literacy and open source / free software till the cows come home but this is the best example I know: We would never vote up a article where "father writes bedtime story for daughter, Sleeping Prince rescued by Princess". Because it is commonplace because literacy is commonplace, as are pens and paper commonplace and as are the legal frameworks to be allowed to alter the pu…
Why do people insist on foisting "software literacy" on the general populace? In terms of skills, financial planning, cooking, interpersonal skills are all more essential than reading and writing code.
The writing analogy is off anyways: not everyone can write very well. People would upvote -and buy- a children's story by, say, neil gaiman. This is not the equivalent of a throwaway story made up on the spot.
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#25Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy: -- > This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality? You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differenc…
If you'll take his word at face value, the father didn't really have any motives aside from making his daughter happy. "My three year old daughter and I play a lot of old games. Her favorite is Donkey Kong. Two days ago, she asked if she could play as the girl and save Mario. She's played as Peach in Super Mario Bros. 2 and naturally assumed she could do the same in Donkey Kong. I told her we couldn't in that particu…
> If you'll take his word at face value, the father didn't really have any motives aside from making his daughter happy.
But the author is dead, so we're bound to analyze this in terms of Theory and come to actual conclusions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_the_Author
(Whether I'm being sarcastic is entirely up to you.)
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sometimes one gets tired of the same old stories, lazily retold by deep-pocketed corporations as an easy gimmick to make money. The deep-pocketed corporations always win in the end, but in the cracks, something different can flourish.
Donkey Kong was written by Shigeru Miyamoto, a junior developer who came from a product design background. How's that for deep-pocketed corporation? :-)
Miyamoto certainly wrote the story behind the game, but he had help with the rest...
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134790/the_secret_hist...
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure what you're taking exception to: I said it was one of the first examples (wasn't sure if it was the first, so thanks for clarifying that). While in the video Sarkeesian goes through its overuse in general as mturmon mentioned, Nintendo did go on to overuse it themselves, with Donkey Kong being the first of many times Nintendo went to that well. The linked video goes through several examples.
It's kind of hard to overuse something the first time you do it... That said, I think that the "overuse" and the reasons for it in this case is in the mind of the beholder. Are we just calling this into question because it's now hip to call anything and everything to question on the grounds of some percieved slight to gender "equality"? Or are we having a larger conversation about the overuse of specific tropes in ge…
I didn't say Nintendo, at the time Donkey Kong was created, had already overused the "damsel in distress" trope. What I said was of the set of games Nintendo has developed or published in the past 30-odd years that ostensibly demonstrate their overuse of the "damsel in distress" trope, Donkey Kong was the first.
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's kind of hard to overuse something the first time you do it... That said, I think that the "overuse" and the reasons for it in this case is in the mind of the beholder. Are we just calling this into question because it's now hip to call anything and everything to question on the grounds of some percieved slight to gender "equality"? Or are we having a larger conversation about the overuse of specific tropes in ge…
I didn't say Nintendo, at the time Donkey Kong was created, had already overused the "damsel in distress" trope. What I said was of the set of games Nintendo has developed or published in the past 30-odd years that ostensibly demonstrate their overuse of the "damsel in distress" trope, Donkey Kong was the first.
Ah, gotcha. I just misread the first sentence.
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't say Nintendo, at the time Donkey Kong was created, had already overused the "damsel in distress" trope. What I said was of the set of games Nintendo has developed or published in the past 30-odd years that ostensibly demonstrate their overuse of the "damsel in distress" trope, Donkey Kong was the first.
Ah, gotcha. I just misread the first sentence.
Ah, I can see how it could be misread. I adjusted the wording from "Nintendo overusing" to "Nintendo's overuse of" to clarify that.
Re: Dad hacks Donkey Kong for his daughter; Pauline now saves Mario
#30Reposting and responding to a dead comment by lexarchy: -- > This is a clever hack, but I question the motives of both the father and Ars Technica. Must we erase—or invert—all aspects of yin and yang, simply to appease the gods of equality? You may have heard the French phrase vive la différence, which translates as "long live the difference", but do you know what it refers to? It means "let's celebrate the differenc…
Between any two people there is such an enormous difference that I'm not very sympathetic to this argument.
Let's just celebrate the real differences, and not lazily use gender/sex as a shorthand for particular social roles.