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[BlackFlyme]

Found out that a guy I know is in an extremely abusive relationship, and is not doing anything to get away from it.

Emotions can be incredibly stupid things.

He'll get over it one day, hopefully.

I hope that it's soon though. As it is, I'm surprised he hasn't had to go to the hospital yet. Or at least, I'm hoping he hasn't had to go there yet.

I don't really know him that well though.

[Neonivek]

I was thinking of a gender test for videogames, because Bechdel test really doesn't work for the medium, and I thought of an interesting one...

Games with at least 4 or more characters (selectable or otherwise) where there is only one selectable female character.

Most RPGs tend to have 1 or 3 female party members oddly enough.

[hops]

God damn.  People in my workplace do not like to use OpenOffice, much rather preferring Microsoft Office.  The 'free trials' have expired and they are asking me to give Microsoft money now.

Maybe I'm being a capitalist pig here but I think using open source software in office is really unprofessional unless said office is the IT.

[Flying Dice]

Why wouldn't the Bechdel test work? A player character isn't substantially different from any other sort of protagonist that the audience is expected to sympathize with, barring the potential to make some of their decisions for them. Other than that it's the same as any sort of fiction, provided the game has something which at the very least could be generously interpreted as a plot. The only difference is in games which allow you to select from a limited list of playable characters (a la Borderlands) rather than designing your own or filling a specific set of shoes.

Granted, you're going to see a lot of irrelevant results, some byes due to attempted accuracy-of-setting, and a boatload of outliers (How do you deal with something like Tetris? Is Doom a sexist travesty because 100% of the humans in it are male? Is Touhou the unstoppable force that will shatter the vidya glass ceiling? Is this traveling towards an abyss of pretentiousness faster than Sonic can run? The answer to all of those things and more is a resounding YENOMAYBE.). It isn't like having a strange dataset automatically invalidates the test, though.

[hops]

Doom is kind of sexist in many ways, yes.

[Neonivek]

Why wouldn't the Bechdel test work?

It is just the medium.

In a movie the idea of no one speaking to anyone but the main character is extremely uncommon and usually suggests an exception in the medium... but in videogames not only is this very common, but having no conversations isn't unknown either.

The Bechdel test is hurt simply because the videogame medium comes up with too many exceptions.

[Flying Dice]

Doom is kind of sexist in many ways, yes.

I'm actually interested to see how this is argued. Unless it's just going to go the route of pointing at the unrealistically gritty action hero running around killing hordes of monsters (some of which may vaguely resemble genitalia if you squint hard enough in bad light) with vaguely phallic weapons and saying, "That's an unrealistic depiction which I'm going to interpret as an explicitly male power fantasy which is only enjoyed by men who want to feel like dominant alpha-males."

I mean, shit, I could actually easily buy something like arguing that Ms. Pacman is sexist because they gave her a bow and made the stages brighter (even though that was all an excuse to sell more machines for the same damn game--incidentally, Ms. Pacman is awesome because you can actually see the walls because they aren't a shade of blue so DEEP THAT IT'S ALMOST FUCKING INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM THE BACKGROUND RAEEEG), but Doom is pretty simple. You're a guy (and if having a male protagonist is now 'sexist' I'm just going to off myself now to avoid having to read literary criticism twenty years down the road), you need to collect the macguffins and shoot every inhuman monster in your way. Period. End of sentence. That's the entire game. So unless I'm misremembering and there was backstory talking about how the portal to hell only opened because the base commander was a softhearted fool who shut down crucial equipment during an experiment because she was menstruating and just didn't understand math, I don't know about that. :|

Why wouldn't the Bechdel test work?

It is just the medium.

In a movie the idea of no one speaking to anyone but the main character is extremely uncommon and usually suggests an exception in the medium... but in videogames not only is this very common, but having no conversations isn't unknown either.

The Bechdel test is hurt simply because the videogame medium comes up with too many exceptions.

Again, I don't really agree with that--most of the exceptions are exceptions because gender is irrelevant; either there is only one character of note, or characters as such don't really exist. Other than that, it's fairly easy to apply to anything in which it's remotely applicable. That is to say, RPGs and the nebulous action-adventure-RP games that float around in the ether of confused classification, alongside any other games that have characters alongside the gameplay, even if the latter isn't relevant to the context of conversation and gender balance.

That's sort of like suggesting that the Bechdel test shouldn't be considered for application to poetry because not everything is an epic poem, except that the useful applications aren't a relatively small minority of works.

[Neonivek]

You could try to apply it to poetry... but all you will get is pointless results

Movies and Books work because the results actually matter.

What do you prove with the Bechdel test on poems and videogames? "Yep, sure is another medium"

[i2amroy]

I think the problem is that the Bechdel test was originally designed to apply to wide-scale fiction as a whole. Within the video game realm, however, it only applies to a specific, small subset of games (those those that either have a very developed cast of NPC's present or have a large enough PC cast to make something like that feasible). The result is that people try to apply it to the genre as a whole similar to they would for things like movies and the sheer number of erroneous results (like with Doom) makes any sort of conclusion they have fairly worthless.

It would probably be more like developing a check for books, then noting that it applied to epic poems (because they have enough characterization and other book-like aspects to make it work) and because of that attempting to apply it to poetry as a whole. The number of times it would fail make it essentially worthless for that, so you might be better off just trying to find something that was simply aimed at poetry and functioned for all of them, rather than having a test for books+epic poetry and another for non-epic poetry.

[Frumple]

Maybe I'm being a capitalist pig here but I think using open source software in office is really unprofessional unless said office is the IT.

Unprofessional is wasting money when you could not be. A company probably should have one computer with microsoft office products on it, just to ensure compatibility in the face of MS's horrifically toxic business practices (.docx bullshit, the upcoming compatibility breaking extension change, etc.), but considering how functional LO is these days going with it is the business minded individual's choice.

If there were a notable functionality difference -- and speaking as someone that has been working back and forth pretty intensively with both LO and MS office the last year or so, there isn't -- then there'd be reason to go with MS over open source stuff. As is, the only unprofessional act would be complaining about minor interface differences and the occasional compatibility hiccup in the face of saving the company hundreds -- quite possibly thousands -- of dollars in software costs.

There's plenty of people that hold that something is better (more professional, in this case) just because it's paid for, even if it's functionally identically -- and, in some cases worse -- than something that's free. We call those people goddamn idiots. Professionalism is a methodology, not a price tag, and it's a methodology that, in the business world, strongly includes efficiency in regards to composition. If FOSS can do the job, you use bloody FOSS and stop wasting the company dollar.

[Powder Miner]

It is. They have knicker vending machines. Used ones go for a higher price.

i feel an urge to clarify
these A: were only ever found in sexshops, not the streets or malls or anything
and B: happen to be way illegal

sources: the internet or something i dunno guys

[i2amroy]

Edit: Redacted due to missing the middle of the discussion.

[Descan]

i2amroy, you have a whole lot of reading fail going there.

First off, majority of people were saying that Libre Office was the prefered one, and more to the point, so was Frumple, the one saying they were comparable. Open Office was not the one he was comparing.

Second, "free trial". Meaning that the people were using MS Word, on a trial basis, and now it's over, so they want him to get the paid version. Presumably he'd mentioned Open Office in the past and they turned it down. Not that they were yelling at him for using Open Office.

[Tawa]

On the topic of what appears to be videogame sexism:

What bugs me is how when there's a female character in an RPG, they tend to be that kind of masculine woman whose character class is best described as "warrior" with a slowly emerging feminine soft spot or the very wimpy kind of character who tends to be the healer, instead of a normal person.

On the topic of Microsoft Word/OpenOffice:

I hate how schools nowadays have Windows and Microsoft Word instead of the free and comparable Linux and Open/LibreOffice. Think of how much money they could save!

[FearfulJesuit]

The bravery in this post has reached John Galt level.