And get off the internet, man. You’ve got a headache!

KG

*There’s several interviewers that have asked me about it, at least. And a load of people in person.

First off the bat, as Dracko pointed out, “offing the little shit” isn’t sadism, it’s murder. You can’t be sadistic to a corpse. So… perhaps it isn’t me that needs to reassess BDSM relationships?

Secondly, the analogy falls down by the fact that some people are extremely adept at extremely punishing games. An Alien Soldier superplay, for example, would be the kinked equivilent of a submissive busting out of their binds and pegging the mistress senseless while calling her a dirty fucking whore. Complete role reversal. The role between chastised and chastee is simply too fluid. Admittedly, most high level games like this are either bullet hell shooters or vs fighters, which completely throws the analogy slightly out of whack. But very, very few games these days are that tough.

The other thing to consider – what’s in it for the developers? Do they want to fuck with you, accomidate you, or just construct their own elaborate systems of things? How do they observe the player being whipped by digitals?

Consider Gears of War: is the designer seeking to punish me, or let me roleplay my more base machinegun fantasies?

This is neblous stuff, of course. But I’d say that the flow of game design could be better understood as the relationship between architect and inhabitant, stage director and audience – even, perhaps, between someone writing a proper banging synth build for a trance track.

As for the last bit – it’s always struck me that Phonogram takes the base of Hellblazer, gives John Constantine your face and replaces the magic with your taste in music. Take that how you will, I just think it’s fairly similar to how MJO takes bombjack and transplants a lot of the developer’s sense of self to it (and a bit because I find self-insertion in fiction fascinating* and I’ve never seen anyone say “hang on – Dave Khol looks exactly like the author!” while discussing it)

*from Gonterman to Grant Morrison

I haven’t said anything in the comments I didn’t said in the original post. You, however, are changing yours every time you have your knowledge of S&M and whatever corrected. Last time, you said there was no way to substantiate it. This time, you fall back to noting the a strand of modern games don’t work in the axis I described in the original post. In other words, even you admit I’m right for a big chunk of gaming history. But you just don’t say it.

The emoticon attached to the Phonogram dig doesn’t actually do anything to take it as final confirmation of my initial take on you – that you’re trolling, which I pretty much assumed when you asked me to argue back. In other words, you’re just trying to annoy.

Well done, man. It’s worked.

KG

[b]James: Side-stepping Pong and the first sports games, the original single player games* were nothing other than game designers telling you what to do to win. Why are you doing this task? Fundamentally, because i) you enjoy it ii) they’ve, through their design, told you to do it.[/b]

And this, fundimentally, is quite different from slavery. Master/slave relationships tend to involve emotional abuse, removal of self-determination, etc. Videogames are absolutely a matter of choice. Someone who orders soup of the day in a cafe is not a slave to the soup chief. They chose to eat soup. Someone who watches a movie isn’t a slave to watching the movie. The movie is usually a choice.

Slavery involves domination, and genuine slavery involves misery – it sounds very fancy to say that going through predetermined levels is akin to enslavement but honestly, it’s a consenting relationship. Remember that kid who could play Asteroids for hours by abusing the fuck out of the engine? He’s no slave (he’s a bit too in love with tedium for his own good, but that’s a side issue). The player is not being forced to work plantations. Later 80s stuff is bound by the restrictions of the hardware, but it’s usually still got room for a player to be expressive or fuck about a bit.

With the move into sandbox games like GTA, or even micro-sandboxes like Psi-Ops, you’re starting to see games that actually let the player explore and interact with sets of rules on their own terms – self-expression. That’s extremely conter-Master/Slave (that said, GTA IV pushes the slave to tedium angle a bit too far).

I don’t think Mighty Jill Off is setting out to make much of a point at all – it’s a bit of author-insertion self-fic retrofitted around an extant concept from the 1980s – you know, a bit like Phonogram :)

Lots of other fun things you can do in games have been built on top of that, but it’s central and its absolutely undeniable. For all the things you mention, unless you’ve never completed a single level in a videogame, it’s true of you. It was especially true of mid-eighties videogames.

That’s relationship of the points that Mighty Jill Off makes in its cute and funny manner. Which is what I wrote in the article, and your problems seem to be based on trying to push the metaphor further than it was meant to go, as well as dragging om many of your preconceptions of what “S&M” means. You are mainly arguing with stuff inside your own head rather than stuff anyone had said.

Which is less polite than I was last time, but you’re being increasingly foot-stompy and should chill, man.

KG

*I actually used to argue – I don’t any more – that videogames as a cultural form were only interesting with the development of true single player. Multiplayer games are just traditional games via new technology. Single player games, fundamentally, were something entirely new to the late 20th century. The leap in a SP game between what was possible before and after the microchip is the difference between a limmerick and a novel.

I don’t argue that as hard anymore – I’m more interested in games as a long line stretching back and the permutations thereof, but I still think there’s a point there.

If you’re not fucking for orgasms I’m not sure what you’d fuck for (unless you were a semen farmer? I dunno).

Gilloid:

“”triving to complete something for no other reason than your master has told you to do is deeply ingrained in gaming’s core genes”

This, frankly, is absolute bollocks, and I’d dare you to substantiate it one tiny bit. The earliest games were sports – do you play football because your master demands it, or because you like playing football? Vidcons are extercises in masturbation, sometimes mutual, sometimes alone, but there’s an undeniable and sometimes even transferable skillset being developed, and there’s a motivation beyond pain and duty (except the time I beat Shadow The Hedgehog, Sega’s own version of mortification of the flesh). We play games because they’re fun and they provide pleasure – who hasn’t got shits and giggles out of totally epic virtual suicides, or blowing all the little dudes in Defender II: Stargate? RPG fans are the obvious exception, but their poor taste disqualifies them from anything, ever.

nope, i mean you COULD but orgasms dont really have to have anything to do with it

2) BDSM sex involves touching a naked person, or being touched by a naked person.

are you talking about BDSM or are you talking about sex?

It’s just a quick Mighty Bombjack clone (nobody ever play that on the NES?) wrapped in the theme of a sweet (am I the only one who went ‘Awww’ at the ending?… anyone?) yet very non-standard relationship – one that I gather is much like the one the developer is currently in.

Of all the things on the internet that could bring out the Angry Internet Men, this really doesn’t seem fit to earn any of their ire. It’s just too damn cute, and pretty fun.

They’re not the same thing.

KG