Pretty Pictures, the other side March 7, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
I meant to post this a lot closer to the first, but c’est la vie. This is the part where I try to elaborate the virtues I see in the “oh, you are all just taking these pictures way too seriously” response. My loyalties lie more in the serious camp, but I think there is an implicit point in the opposite response that sets a healthy limit on that seriousness.
When my wife looked at some of the discussion, she was concerned with how certain positions of the female body were so quickly coded as sexual. She does fine art drawing, has a definite preference for naked ladies. In her mind, some of those positions seen as sexual were just technically interesting. Others, less interesting technically, were still not immediately sexual but simply suggested strength and power.
What often happens is that two camps erupt at this point: those who argue that there is something essentially sexual in the social context of the images, regardless of viewers like my wife who don’t see it, and those who argue that the ’social context’ is really just in the head of a few neurotic sorts who make a big deal of it. I think we have another option. It’s going to take some unpacking, though.
It’s a truism to say we are meaning-making animals. We make meaning, though, by establishing associations between ideas, images, sensations, and so on. There are all kinds of associations that we can make. There is a temptation to say that some associations are better than others, but I think all such claims only make sense in some serious context.
What happens in most debates, though, is that we preference a very rigid, logical, if-then, sort of association. This is *either* objectification or it isn’t, it’s *either* sexual or it isn’t. In truth, though, social interactions depend upon a more flexible system of making associations.
In part, this is because there is so much history behind any term or image that is contradictory from the perspective of ’strict’ logic (yeah, I’m just not going to detail what that means, it would take forever). Its meaning can literally go both ways. Its meaning actually rests on its capacity to go both ways, it’s what gives it scope and force. Scope in that the flexibility allows it to be re-used, force because the trail of associations and its tensions means it ‘registers’ more vividly for those who share them.
Here’s an example: imagine an image of a naked woman, kneeling with her legs folded under her, thighs open, hands palm-up on her knees. Heck, have her looking up, smiling. Now, some people will jump right on board and attack how this sexualizes female submission, etc., etc. But what if the image were being used by a woman trying to explore meditation, if the submission she were emulating was not sexual but spiritual?
The cynics will say they are the same thing, that the spiritual is just displaced sex. However, that doesn’t do the image justice. The sexual connotations are there, to be sure, but that doesn’t mean the spiritual ones aren’t as well. The two enter into an uneasy communion through that image, each garnering force from the other.
The sexual dimension gets intensified by the spiritual, and the spiritual by the sexual. To miss either dimension is to experience only part of the image’s force. It also shuts down some of the image’s ability to open up communication. When it operates in multiple registers, it allows someone operating in one register to access the other, to move toward the structures entailed therein.
None of this, of course, undoes the critical things said about many images. It does, however, point out an alternative avenue to simply not using images like the ones in question. It raises a challenge: find new ways of presenting the images alongside other images, alongside text, that foregrounds their multiple associations.
Sexuality, Pretty Pictures, Objectification February 23, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Cool Links, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
Okay, so there is this neat discussion going on over here at Yud’s Dice. It’s spread out all over the place, though, so I wanted to come back over here and think things through a little more coherently in my own space.
This is in part a response to what is happening over there and in part a response to a conversation with my darling wife in regards to what is happening over there (hey Kim;). For that reason, I’m just going to try and break this down into ideas rather than responses to individuals.
What I like most about the post is the emphasis on the volume of examples of objectification. It isn’t deeply problematic for an occasional bit of objectification to appear and may even be ‘honest’ in the sense that, like it or not, we are bodies and sometimes it’s nice to just have that pointed out.
However, for that to become common indicates something problematic. Like Nietzsche, we ought to find something unhealthy in any thing that seems to be repeated over and over. I also want to expand a little more on what is problematic about the forms of objectification going on.
Rather than look at the Conan covers, though, I want to look at those Exalted covers, the shift from 1e to 2e. To zoom in on the Jade Exalted Brand has already highlighted is revealing. Both versions display attractive, pleasing bodies. Both even present what look to be idealized and attractive bodies.
2e, though, reinterprets that body in a profoundly sexual manner. Her clothing, her curves, all are exaggerated to emphasize sexiness pure and simple. The sidebar images just drive that home, you see things like sexy elf lady. Moreover, their bodies are positioned so that their most sexualized features dominate the composition.
Medium and message talk is pretty important here. These are roleplaying games, and these are all supposed to be exemplars for the sorts of roles players could take. That the dominant female characters are displayed with hyper-sexualized bodies therefore sends out a certain message about the sort of female characters in the game. That they are the sexy first and foremost.
The slippage that occurs between 1e and 2e is telling. Both images are aimed at a viewer, are objects for a viewer. They are objects, quite literally, meant for visual appreciation. Both are of attractive and sexy women. However, in the 2e cover, her appearance is all about her sexuality, whereas in the 1e, her sexuality is a side-effect of her overall idealized body, not her maxed out T&A action.
The 1e version is also holding out her bow in a manner that suggests she is about to *do* something with it, that she is active and capable. This is very much in keeping with traditional representations of men in the genre. To the extent that they are objectified positively, it is as active and capable.
This is a good point to drive home. Male figures are exaggerated and objectified in the genre, but so as to emphasize what they are capable of. Rogues are willowy, suggestive of their grace and sneakiness. Soldiers are huge or armored or well-armed, suggesting their toughness and power. Wizards have white beards to show they are old and knowledgeable.
What does it say when the female character who is supposed to be their equal is exaggerated primarily in a sexual fashion? Well, if you apply the same tools you applied to the male figures, then it says the female character is really about her sexiness, really about what she has to offer as an object of desire.
It isn’t even a question of whether her body is being offered up to us or not for our fantasied consumption. It is simply a question of the values that are being instantiated in the presentation of these women. Why have we zoomed in on these very narrow, sexual elements to define these female characters?
They aren’t the only beautiful bodies out there, so it can’t be because we just want to appreciate the female form. Nor is that hyper-clingy clothing the only way to accentuate a beautiful body. Sure, nothing wrong with some pictures that playfully exaggerate sexy bits, but why so few exaggerating other beautiful parts of the body? Moreover, why so little variety on the covers, which are the ‘face’ the book presents to its audience?
Of Turtles and Feedback February 8, 2007
Posted by Ian in Actual Play, Applied, Game Design, Long but coherent, Theory.add a comment
This started over there, in response to Brand’s blog, but started to get going a little bit on a tangent that seemed better to carry over here. This is my gaming as a skinner box post;)
First, terminological clarification:
Positive feedback: feedback that results in an increase of the behavior to which the response is being made. You eat a cookie, it makes you feel happy, you eat another cookie.
Negative feedback: feedback that results in a decrease in the behavior to which the response is being made. You have another cookie, you start to feel a little uncomfortably full, you stop eating cookies.
Reward: something which is offered to an individual to encourage a behavior.
Punishment: something inflicted upon an individual in order to cause them discomfort, to cause them to desist in a behavior.
Most good punishment works best when it follows what we like to call a pattern of negative reinforcement: as soon as the offending behavior stops, so does the punishment, resulting in the ‘reward’ being the cessation of discomfort.
Most punishment does not follow this pattern, instead happening after the offending behavior, which results in the generalized suppression of behavior. Victims of abuse show this to an extreme degree: they are terribly gun shy about any attention for fear that it will bring punishment.
Now, what is nifty, is that you don’t necessarily need punishment to get a negative feedback loop going. You can, in fact, do just fine by providing alternative positive feedback. So, if you are trying to discourage someone chewing their nails, give them something fun to do with their hands that keeps them away from their mouth.
The games that we dirty hippy types like to whine about the most tend to have a pretty simple positive feedback system driving them. In D&D, you get positive feedback (rewards like xp and phat lewtz) for overcoming monsters. The more you do, the more you get, hence the linear structure and ever-increasing ceiling.
What we don’t always zoom in on, though, is that it is the over-reliance on positive feedback which causes these problems. We may talk about rewarding different behaviors, but we don’t always grasp how what we need to be able to do to make some games work well is reward differently, reward so that one sort of behavior leads to different sorts of behavior.
This has the added benefit of working against the over-stuffed cookie-eater problem. We tend to get tired of the same thing over and over, even if we like it, wanting some change of pace. A system which uses rewards to maintain a negative feedback system can keep us from getting tired of the same old thing.
It also means we can start talking a little about punishment, although that always strikes me as something one ought to use very, very moderately in game design. After all, we come to play and have fun. Moreover, though, it is very easy to get mechanical about punishment, overlooking how well it is actually being applied. When it is applied unevenly, those on the receiving end turn into turtles, avoiding any engagement because they don’t want to get smacked.
I think this is going to need another post…
