Bitch, please.
No really, bitch, please. Tell me this is a publicity stunt garnered to net attention. If so, I can accept that. I mean, I’ve long since advocated for affiliate marketing as a more appropriate and laser-targeted approach to advertising. But this? You know, I should probably not mention histrionic personality disorder anymore than I should allude to avoidance disorder, but they are a match made in heaven the more you think about it. Wanna have my mutants?
Also, unless you’re one to literally proclaim “Jesus is Lord”, take the rainbow off your profile. The joke is over. The search for a conclusion to our weighty debates may never end, because these people live and die fighting to live in a bubble where no such thing exists. They just feel the need to get in there and be the heroes of their own stupid stories and write them up like anybody will read them. The only reason I haven’t penned one myself is because I don’t want to look anywhere near as vain and bitter as you.
Welcome to real life.
If you want a better reason why your brand of toxic dismissals will not fly with the general public, let alone the buying public, allow me to crawl back to Anecdote-Ville.
Diversity & Inclusion Case Study: A Cartoony Hop-and-Bop
I remember back in the day, I was into Nintendo platformers. I was never good at them since my brothers hogged the system and I could never practice them; strategic adventures became my thing out of necessity. Whenever I tried new things, I played “sequels” to games. Considering no real standards or tropes had yet congealed in the game development racket unlike modern day’s tug-o-war between oversized studios, eternally doubling memory capacities and so-called retro notions that look like current year trash, the late 1980s’ arcade and console developers mulled about with sequels that differed greatly from their initial outings.
Super Mario Bros. 2, the US incarnation seen on the 8-bit system in North America, is one such game. The other two are Simon’s Quest and The Goonies II, mostly because I at least got the opportunity to play those since nobody else wanted to. Super Mario Bros. 2 was the main article for Nintendo Power magazine’s first issue. Its characters like Birdo and Shy-Guys have remained in the spotlight to this very day. It solidified and codified a tradition of trying something new with a flagship title’s sequel.
You might know this already, assuming you’ve at least entertained some history lessons about the industry and hobby at large, so let me explain my memories of first playing the game. It wasn’t at a friend’s house–it was at a school function that inspired a later event years down the road. This was a time when bulky CRTs were wheeled around on decent-sized carts. They fit a few with Nintendo consoles and allowed one kid the chance to play one game out of the many games they had.
I chose SMB2 because I did not play it yet.
I first played as Toad, I’ll admit, thinking he was a cool character from the Super Show seen on UHF channels’ late afternoon programming blocks, but the first foray was a total disaster. Not that it’s any skin off my nose seeing it was a school event and I was playing under loads of distractions from a crowd, but it is what it is. However, the first time staring down the character selection screen, I was transfixed and unable to pick someone; Toad was a novelty, so I defaulted to him. I felt pressured to make a choice and not hold anyone else up, though.
I already played as the other two guys and… the chick? What would people (like my mother, who was hovering beside me) think? I’m not immune to bias even now, though I was about seven or eight at the time. From my position, I didn’t know what to expect and chose the one opportunity I had to test out a game I didn’t own… yet. I sucked, of course–couldn’t get past the first level and all–but I was figuring out how to play. Later, upon getting regular access, I had Toad toss enemies around because he made it fun.
And to wit, each character’s mobility affected the player’s approach to the platforming and fighting. Each one had a perk. Toad’s jump was short compared to the rest, but his lifting and apparent overall speed while carrying were top-notch. Luigi’s jump, ported from the Japanese version of Mario 2, brought him to “S-Tier”. Peach’s jump had her hover horizontally for a moment, which was unique, while all-rounder Mario had nothing that made him stand out.
Maybe that explains the ASD and inferiority complex.
Let me sink in the two points: you could not only pick Princess Toadstool (a.k.a. Peach), but you had reasons to pick anybody over the other, landscape and layout notwithstanding. This game stuck in my mind better than the third game, where Mario and Luigi were almost identical (instead of actually fraternal) twins and no amount of diverse power-ups can forgive brutal level design and excessive scenario length. Sure, I beat 3 and never got through the first one fully, but 2 stuck out for being consciously different.
Thus, the first Mario game I cared about was the one where Princess Toadstool was a playable option and the man servant retainer mushroom guy had better lifting strength than everyone in the room. That was in 1988 out of a game from Japan based on the 1001 Arabian Nights that they merely repurposed due to religious connotations. And to add a wrinkle to your argument that requires a little heat, pressure, and water to straighten out, Nintendo cornered the market on psychological diversity with Mario himself.
I repeat: Creeper.
Why Caricature? Why Not Caricature?
If you want another way of looking at this weighty problem, then ask someone outside your immediate bubble how they approach stereotypes. The first real foray into turning the practice of caricaturing into a game mechanic is none other than fighting games. And I don’t just mean the endless plethora of Street Fighter sequels and remakes and alternate versions, either. Almost all of them hinge on getting the point behind a character as quickly as possible.
Look at Punch Out. Not just the two console versions with Mike Tyson and Mr. Dream respectively, but the arcade version and the Wii remake. Good Lord, racial sensitivity is at an all-time low. We got Indian guys wearing turbans and Filipino Pacific Islanders who are really fat and goofy looking. We got Frenchmen who die in the first fight in the first round and then pointy-mustached Germans named Kaiser. Even the faces evoke the common features of a given ethnicity without skipping a beat.
That’s just to ensure the player knows he’s fighting someone from a specific ethnic group. Look at how many they actually cover in the NES Punch-Out game! A few are silly, while even the most hardened heavy-hitters like Mr. Sandman look stupidly ugly. It’s all fun and games, however, because caricaturing isn’t intended to offend people. To wit, the game posits the player’s avatar, one Little Mac, as a really short dude, someone in over his head. It’s intentional and evocative. So, even the player gets caricatured.
Even Computers are somehow bigoted. Look what they did to Vodka Drunkinski for the love of God!
Now, having said all that, we should examine the evolution of this so-called problem. When it came time to afford players the luxury of selecting characters, each with perks, you needed to convey as much information as possible about each character. This is not a priority but it is a necessity. Street Fighter featured Ryu and Ken, first and second player respectively, and a control scheme that required a specialty arcade joystick that I am sure was pressure-sensitive (hence, no sensible, respectable console or computer port of Street Fighter exists).
The sequel was a massive culture shock in that Capcom combined Punch Out with Street Fighter; players may now choose from the caricatures! Some look downright mythical, so each character reflects a culture before reflecting a physical stereotype. In the technically third game, EX-whatever, there’s a robot in a trench coat and fedora. This in 1998, predating the sophomoric, sycophantic “Hello M’Lady Squad” whose embarrassing preoccupation with lolicons and logical fallacies justifies the hyper-liberal media’s obsession with tearing down straight white males in a ludicrous misconception and grotesque exaggeration.
Exaggerations that stem from caricaturing–or, trying to process a whole lot of mixed, contradictory signals all at once. As for the proclivity of one-on-one fighting games, which are essentially professional wrestling matches without scripts or an understanding of body types and technical limits, to caricature their characters, this is out of necessity. The second (literal) Street Fighter game kick-started this trend. Mortal Kombat did. So didn’t Time Killers, Shadow: War of Succession, Eternal Champions, etc.
Doing away with the initial batch of opposition save for a Mike Tyson ripoff and a guy named Sagat, besides Ryu and Ken, you got the owner of a sauna and sumo wrestler, Edmond “Eddie” (E.) Honda, from Japan; a Mexican Amerindian literally named T. Hawk (Thunderbird, as it were); Dhalsim, an acetic Kapalika contortionist from India who breathes fire and stretches his limbs to untold lengths; a beefy Russian bear wrestler named Zangief, aka “Red Cyclone”, who embodies the spirit of his Motherland, more or less; a dude named Blanka from the Brazilian jungle (don’t ask me where they were going with that guy).
Those were the guys, mind you. Putting in a woman somewhere in there was tantamount to blasphemy considering it was about four decades ago when Prometheus was still teaching us knuckle-draggers how to hold a lighter. In the spirit of this “Progressive McDonalds Commercial” epoch, the guys who were fully straight got their chance to grow stiff while juggling a joystick in one hand and a bunch of buttons on the other (i.e. they did away with the pressure-sensitive garbage that made the first edition’s coin-op versions impossible after a string of offended players’ fighting against increasing imprecision).
Where was I? Oh yes, how could I forget? I’m referring to a Chinese Interpol agent named Chun-Li, self-styled protagonist of the game and chief opposition to the Vega/M. Bison-led Shadaloo organization. With jaw-dropping (breaking?) thighs that would make Andrea Rosu and Tina Turner blush with envy.
Uhhh…?
Whoops! (Didn’t know she was a gamer, actually!) Hold on.
Note: This is how kids today view diversity. No joke.
Yeah, and by the way: they’re not really ageist either, courtesy of said long-running franchises.
“‘Be a Family Man‘, Huh?”
So, sex appeal is something extreme queer snobs had yet to compromise. Even if they tried, reducing the amount of noticeable skin from a costume doesn’t quite change the fact that the characters’ suits are still skintight and on impressively athletic models of human potential. The outfits are also functional, as Liana Kerzner attests, considering you don’t want anything pulled at during a match. Chun-Li’s hair is very long, but she puts it all in a bun for the same reason UFC gals corn-row their hair, a culture-spanning trend wherever there’s a deep “warrior race” undercurrent. Which includes all of them.
Can we maintain sex appeal amid an otherwise athletic display without devolving into restricting women to being cheerleaders and gymnasts? Of course we can; Tim Pool invites guests that he knows will foment controversy. No, we don’t want to restrict people of any kind from playing a video game regardless of its content. That’s not an effective marketing strategy, now is it? Constantly doing otherwise while lamenting how the “system is fixed” is just a pathetic admission that you got indoctrinated by revilers.
The only exception is exposing children to pornographic content one way or another. This caveat can include gory violence, but guns and knives are featured in wish list catalogs alongside video games. Probably for the fact that both are often under lock-and-key at stores; even these days, I see Atari console games alongside decorative handle knives in glass displays at flea markets. That’s only if you think they’ll be abused. Children are more prone to doing so unless, of course, you teach them the ins and outs.
Even James Rolfe worries about selling the real ones.
Sexual appeal isn’t something you tell people to run away from unless you want to prevent people from A) having fun and B) having children. That said, if we can’t quite justify its exclusion, how then do we justify its inclusion? Well, it’s a case of having it serve a purpose beyond prurient interest or market appeal, that’s how. So, you have to make it into a mechanic and have its justification approximate reality without burying everything within reality. Chun-Li uses footwork because her regular fists can’t quite cut it, but she leans on her limbs so much that they’re God-tier and wonderful to behold. It’s fantastic and fits her situation.
Awesome.
Eye of the Beholder, Beholder of the Sight
The silk dress Ada Wong wears in Resident Evil 4 is touchier–or rather, far harder to justify. The remake’s form-fitting turtleneck version might approximate “reality” better, but discount neither the original nor the new one. If you’re like me, you’d theorize the discrepancy stems from Leon S. Kennedy’s parasite-driven hallucinations that idealized Ada’s appearance with said flowing dress. If you played (or at least seen the original game in action–again, two older brothers), you already know this.
Leon was injected with parasites and left to twist in the wind as part of having him forcibly join the Las Plagas cult. A major plot point is treating the affliction before its adverse effects become irreversibly permanent. It makes sense that Leon’s otherwise stoic composure would devolve into stereotypical action movie aspirations laced with kid-friendly one-liners and obscene body counts. That’s his liberal arts education’s comfort food. It’s his head fighting to stay sane like in my favorite Star Trek TNG episode, ever.
On meeting in-person with Ada, Leon’s head was already crawling with bugs, enough that his sense of space (hence, the resulting scope of the game) just sort of spiraled out of control. Just look at those churches and even the merchant’s arcade shooting range from out of nowhere. Ada was probably wearing the classic spy suit attire all along, instead of a ridiculously out-of-place slit silk dress. Not like Ada wouldn’t indulge in sex appeal, either; it’s not only part of her profession, but her feelings around Leon are just as complicated. Ditto Ashley’s short skirt, even though Leon would eventually be gunning for his own handler, Ingrid Hunnigan.
(As he should! She’s down-to-earth, not salt-the-earth.)
Fuck you, I like these kinds of jokes!
Expecting Reality, Realistic Expectations
There’s a lot to be said out of the phrase “Perception Creates Reality”, although “Reality Assumes Perception” is around the corner. In the case of games where your options for archetypes are so players can readily decide without getting caught up in details, it’s understandable. Another aspect is that writers and designers are predisposed to insert a bit of oneself into the proceedings, some less subtly than others if the recent mugshots of the writer and recent Spider-Man game’s version of Mary Jane Watson is to be believed.
Let’s Just Discuss the Classics, Okay?
This might result in technically unbalanced play. If done well, it can maintain player interest far longer than a game’s purported commercial shelf life, even if the end result is somehow unbalanced. Luigi and Toad are good cases in point, particularly in a game that has since been revealed to be exceedingly broken (see above). What if the game let you engineer your own character from scratch, like every computerized strategic adventure on PC? Why, that would be a tabletop role-playing game, wouldn’t it? Can you lean against caricatures or competently exude progressive savvy by breaking away from and dodging such assertions? What if they were incorporated and you had to work your way through them?
In dice-rolling, throwing three six-sided dice generates a bell curve where 10 and 11 are frequent while 3 and 18 are unheard of. The 1d20 is a series of 5%’s. Sometimes, I look at the D% (throw two ten-sided dice, one for ones, the other for tens) charts for generating adventure ideas and wonder if they couldn’t be rewritten where everything’s a 5% and replicable on a bland 1d20 throw for convenience’s sake. Refs are even encouraged to roll D%’s to generate treasure gleaned from encounters before sessions. I understand the logic behind that. Diablo is an excellent game to play… on a personal computer.
If “Let the Mechanics Tell the Story” is to be followed, the conceit of not entertaining noticeable statistical differences between the sexes as seen in these computerized strategic adventure games would have been extinguished long ago by somebody else far more discerning and experienced than I. Not to go full-on Spawn of Fashan on everyone but, if it were me, I’d use my razor-sharp awareness of online culture war pundits’ talking points and troll players with my home brew tabletop game’s rules.
Enter “Sexy Dice” (working title…)!
I’d have the guys roll 1d20’s and the ladies 3d6’s. No, not players–their characters. As in, let’s not mince words that a STR 18 male and STR 18 female, regardless of raw potential, aren’t necessarily going to generate the same results at the same frequency or at all. Guys have a 5% shot at Natural 20 and 1 respectively, while the gals get a different Critical rate set (either 15 or 16 to 18) and a 1/216 chance at a 3, which is a Natural “1”. The ladies cannot roll a 20, but that isn’t the issue. The gents are either super-geniuses or complete ‘tards, while ladies are consistently average.
You read right: male players playing female characters roll 3d6’s; female players playing males roll 1d20’s. This isn’t supposed to be the dreaded Blue Shell of the Mario Kart games which foment aggressive hatred of non-meritocratic mechanics, but people will say it is. Until they threw each dice set 1,000 times apiece and tallied the results. I insist you do, with actual live dice. It sounds like a chick can never get an 18 and a guy gets the privilege of 19 and 20 at a frequent rate, but she almost never gets a natural failure (in case of “Mishaps” for getting two three’s in a row) and infrequent 18’s isn’t a big loss when 10’s and 11’s should suffice.
Behold, the guy I heard this idea from.
Yes, this guy.
This is according to intellectual quotient testing–guys tend toward extremes and women are centered for whatever reason. I don’t know–it’s just what got on the books. And no, Tim didn’t pen any of them–he just quoted them. Why doesn’t anyone address this in games? Are they afraid they’ll offend someone? Does it require one-quarter of a police action? Can’t say this is an irrelevant subject, considering we instituted separate sports divisions by sex. It sounds bigoted to propose one or two more for transsexual men and women, separate from those “comfortable-in-sin bio-phyghs of either caste”, but we’ve seen the results when everyone mingles and it not only does not help the validity of my blog’s mission statement (i.e. why encourage reentry to society when everyone in society recidivates on one another?), but looks more and more like an argument towards fairness.
If you are in that world, you must see it as monstrous and seek any solution to win, playing the game far differently. Thus, female characters must go the “Chun-Li’s Thighs” route and specialize in Skills and pick max Ranks by Level. In 3.X games, they should either fight the urge to multi-class (if casting spells since spell lists and slots do not transfer over to the core eleven character classes in the base books) or do so only if their Base Attack Bonus isn’t going to deteriorate. Girls deliver consistently blasé successes while guys can fail real hard. That’s why guys are oftentimes underlings or big bosses while gals congregate into middle management.
Some Dice Checks have different kinds of results depending on how far your results were from the Difficulty Class number. Exceeding 5 in a DC in either direction is even less likely for ladies than gents. The result is one sex having a grittier experience, landing far more singles than men ever succeed at all, what with equal parts foul balls and occasional grand slams. The tempo and level of excitement change when using 3d6 exclusively and it goes bonkers when both are used by different player characters.
Do you even know how hard it is to find the right link with YouTube’s search function?
Hang on, I’m still looking….
Going further (without making it the hardened mess that was Spawn of Fashan’s literal cleaving of a woman’s physical stats), I offer perks for choosing a sex at character creation. Male characters get a +3 (no, not a +3 to the Modifier, 3 points) in one physical stat–Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution–and treat one Skill that uses said Stat’s Modifier as a Class Skill (that means guys can get Concentrate, a Constitution-based Skill and one used to cast spells defensively in a melee full of hostiles, and that is no accident).
Ladies get +1 in all the mental stats–Intelligence, Wisdom, & Charisma–and pick three Skills, one from each stat, to be made into Class Skills at all times. It makes sense that their being the brains of an operation should keep them off the court as much as possible, but this doesn’t preclude them from being trained to pack heat while back at base. If this seems concerning, know that it doesn’t carve away from a player’s stats after dice-rolling, but complements it. The Mid to High-Level D&D session becomes more or less a strategic venture where conflicts use different kinds of in-game mechanics, which the sexes approach in different ways.
Each player must decide on whether to accept and adopt this setup or just make one roll or the next the standard. You could even make it endemic of certain stat scores, like hunks getting a 1d20 for Strength or ladies having 1d20 for Charisma, or have someone with different neurology get a 3d6 for Intelligence, 1d20 for Wisdom, and 2d8 for Charisma. Whatever. My biggest rule is to let Refs and players fight it out as these are not quite set in stone, thanks to the endless fight between diversity and realism.
There we go. Oh wait, this isn’t about IQ tests, either–stupid me.
Might be relevant for something, though….
Oh, you don’t like this idea at all? Then, what do you want? Equality of Outcomes like everyone has a boring 1d20? If you insist on kicking the back of the driver’s seat over this, I will park this train of thought into the breakdown lane, take away all your dice and give you the two eight-sided dice (2d8). That’s for the ADHD’s and Druids. Do you want to play as someone with ADHD or what? See, everyone will feel like they’re being cheated by the system unless, of course and at long last, they learn to do math like every other self-respecting game player. Honestly, why are people who like to play dice games so adverse to actually doing the math?
My house rule is going to address this too, right?
Blame It on the Bossa Nova
Then, you have situations where real life writes the plot and, frankly, it’s for the best. Like one stunt from the Mad Max series, unplanned and potentially fatal, underscored the severity of the post-apocalyptic lifestyle precisely because the miraculously uninjured stuntman picked himself up and did other stunts without skipping a beat.
If something did happen to him, the film crew would have done another take and we might not have seen a guy fly off his ride at random. The incident instilled some always-needed verisimilitude to the film. In fact, if she had a ridiculous shaving accident and nicked a chunk of her scalp, then Tina Turner’s character in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome might have shaved her head and enter the ring of Thunderdome herself, knowing full well at the very least her hair couldn’t be pulled.
And speaking of someone named Tina….
You want a “Man-Free” Game? Play X-Treme Beach Volleyball, natch.
Now, you have this situation, which is why I brought up Japanese-produced games first. I’ve long wondered, just why are Guile from Street Fighter 2 and Terry Bogart of the King of Fighters series, two red-blooded American men, depicted as blonde-haired and blue-eyed as though they’re the direct descendants of William Joseph Blaskowicz? Well, it has to do with how Japanese people stereotype Americans. I think it has to do with exposure, so you can’t quite fault Japan exclusively for this phenomenon. It’s just a matter of envisioning people through a noumenon, that’s all–purely cerebral, full of academic, tertiary insights.
If you think that lofty, progressive-minded dolts make tons of blatantly bigoted remarks, you’re right to think this way, but it’s not from malice as you naturally assume. It stems from a lack of exposure to a given subject. They’re on the outside looking in, very much unaware of what’s behind them or who or what has their back. They’re not spatially inclined. Consider Socrates’ chained-to-rock-marionette-show-with-backstage-exit-unto-enlightenment analogy. But, this can be said of anyone, particularly recluses. Without much interaction, we make assumptions, ruminate on non-existent notions and lash out for fear of our personal space being invaded. This is why wingnuts are rightfully detested, but while they get no love, recluses get no respect.
What?
Are you kidding me?
When did this happen?
I thought this guy was pro-feminist!
Why did I write three paragraphs decrying this guy after he resumed speaking truth to power?
Tatsuya Ichida, cartoonist behind the web-based strip comic, Sinfest, is a case in point. Readers lament its slide to progressive talking points endemic of the West Coast, but have you considered just maybe this results not from inbred inclination but a morbid fear of what others in the author’s immediate vicinity might say if he dared go down the route that his comic had originally taken–the one we otherwise found endearing enough to discuss decades hence? The guy is surrounded by feminist warheads and milquetoast fence-sitters with nary a hot-headed Forever-Trumper to provide an encouraging counterpoint.
When readers began nagging him on discarding the previous ethos by adopting an aggressive taking-of-sides that wasn’t in the strips until the election that got Obama into office, the artist’s self-insert cartoonist character received some papers from one of the middle management-suited devil girls ordering him to fix the comic by acceding to said disgruntled readers’ demands. Next strip later, the character crumpled and tossed the papers into the garbage without skipping a beat. It sounds like Ichida did not cave into reader pressure and achieved a personal win for one’s art, or perhaps he caved to judgmental non-readers well in advance and he is since been in denial, his comic forever tainted with one side’s political depravity.
Closer to my assessment.
So, being a recluse afraid to exert oneself makes you do stupid things. My mission statement remains in effect. (Wow, I can’t believe I wrote an aside about a web comic to a topic that features Tina Armstrong! Where’s my editor when I need him?)
Anyway, Japan acquired their impressions of the states through surface-level examination of our own goofball antics in media–almost like a quaternary reference. Hollywood in particular has a lot of being mum to say about the trend as they gravitate towards blonde bombshells with glorious racks and winning smiles ala Norma Jean (Marilyn Monroe). After chasing off everyone with countervailing positions from even middle management, Hollywood’s creative output became less “white bread” and more “partially hydrogenated”.
In the greatest of ironies, Japan, who fought alongside the Axis up until Truman knocked on Nagasaki’s door, started depicting the traditional American male as blonde-haired and blue-eyed, almost like someone’s idealism rubbed off. Or, it was Hollywood’s own biases at the forefront. So, we have Tina Armstrong. From what I understand, she’s a Deep Southern belle and cowgirl, daughter of a a famous, successful professional wrestler who’s skeptical of Hollywood fame, which she craves. Tina dyed her hair brunette during the first game because the arcade coin-op’s color processing hardware refused to go along with stereotyping Americans.
Now, let me get this out of the way: I prefer the second Soul Calibur in terms of fighting mechanics (guess which console version I own), and all I know about Dead or Alive, a series I have never played, other than the constant assault by the gaze, is that it saved a game company from the throes of financial death back in the 1990s. That’s exemplary. The secret behind their success has to do with a brass-tacks-back-to-square-one-roots-of-all-marketing approach that leverages recent developments in polygon processing to create “jiggle physics”. That’s right: Team Ninja saved the studio behind the Ninja Gaiden series by basing beautiful brawlers on celluloid spectacle. And it worked!
This is what happens after everyone just stops ruling one another:
a Paradise of Pleasure and Procreation.
Appeals to the Sacred Feminine: Results
Watching Tina flow on the battlefield made me realize that Japan stereotypes Americans as busty, boisterous, mesomorphic pro-wrestlers, because that’s exactly the kind of dame Hollywood shoves in front of their cameras. Next, media either fails to do research further or only understand media on the surface due to translation issues (see Wizardry in Japan). If the proclivities of one political camp nestles in major points of communication and bleats out one side’s drivel, it’s no wonder people end up beholding far-out caricatures (and that the eastern approach to role-playing receives so many diehard detractors).
All while making it difficult for people, especially developers themselves, to take seriously even a lauded intellectual license when a specific group of self-important, high/like-minded busybodies consult with people who are trying real hard to be creative and also faithful, and then mandate things like bear sex scenes when there are innumerable, insurmountable waist-high fences to push kangaroos through, and yet still writing online screeds blaming lifelong fans for their righteous case of financial self-immolation!
My mission statement remains in effect.
“YOU STUPID BITCH, THAT’S NOT HOW THE GAME WAS DESIGNED!”
“$90 Million Net Profit, huh.”
Seriously, just shut your X/Twitter down permanently and concentrate on not being so hideously paranoid about your co-workers or buyers that actually have a “Y” behind their actions. Don’t tell me your brand of thought wasn’t already featured in video games back in the day–on a Nintendo system, no less–or that you somehow have a better panacea from which to treat this week’s latest nonexistent problem.
You must have some kinds of skills–you got into the industry somehow, after all. Good hunting! If you need someone to holler and warn us about the seven ogres rushing in to use the number two, give us a call. Until then, the only reindeer game you should be playing is the one starring Ben Affleck.
ATARI!