Cyberpunk 2077

[Jesus_Phish]

So there's an interesting(?) topic going on the front page of the article where some people think this trailer is hateful towards women because of the content in it and lazy because it doesn't show very much and leaves it to you to use your imagination as to what's going on.

Anyone here care to share their views on it?

Personally I don't see it as being hateful towards women and I've a few ideas as to what might have happened for her to find herself in that situation. As someone rightfully pointed out in the clip, the trailer is showing a flash back and that flash back is not in real time, if it was it'd probably be about a second long. People are suggesting that she just sits there and does nothing while being shot at for "over a minute" when in reality it's a single volley of rounds being shot at her while the guy behind her is probably using cybernetics to move super fast to get up to her. His gun is most likely capable of knocking out androids/cyber humans or whatever she counts as.

*EDIT*
Someone linked this as an argument they agree with. Personally I disagree and I think the person who wrote it did so as a knee jerk reaction.

[DaftPunk]

Dear god some people are uptight,we are not in 16 century anymore,move on. Its same with black people,they feel offended by every freaking shit.

[gwathdring]

it just felt out of place next to them somehow.

Ok. I can totally see that part. I didn't experience it at the time, but I understand were it comes from. I should probably disclose that I'm absolutely obsessed with linguistics, neuroscience and psychology, and an utter fantasy-a-holic in addition to being a huge fan of things like myth-centric works Sandman and American Gods (there are other authors who have touched a similar nerve, but Gaiman's on the brain at the moment since I've been reading Sandman today). So the interplay of sci-fi and fantasy combined with the use of pulpy neuroscience over the top of some legitimately interesting neurological and philosophical concepts all while harkening back to ancient language and mythology would have made me completely giddy whether or not it had actually belonged in the book or been well crafted.

As a physicist of sorts (grad school physics, but angling for engineering at the end of it all) with a decent background in Astronomy, I can say that I'm not especially bothered by FTL stuff. I supposed I'm much more bothered when books try to explain things wrong than when they leave it a mystery, but at the same time something that's really sound hard sci-fi one day can be really crap hard sci-fi in 10 years. So I guess I tend not to mind. I don't really prefer hard or soft sci-fi, I just like it to be consistent. If the book tries to hold to the hard, cold facts of science and then throws in one random element of fancy ... the author has to be damn good for me not to cry fowl. Similarly, I'll accept a lot of bullshit in the musical 1776 that wouldn't fly in a serious bio-drama about John Adams.

Also i'd love to see a game with a setting like "The Diamond Age" as that was a fantastic book, keeping the enclave idea going of course.

Oh good. I'm excited. :) It's on my shelf back where I'm doing school work but I'm visiting home during a multi-week break. I had only just started it and I meant to read it on the plane but I left the damn thing. It has some absolutely delicious lines and atmosphere so far. "But they did know that ecosystems were especially tiresome when they got fubared, so they protected the environment with the same implacable, plodding, green-visored mentality that they reserved for designing overpasses and culverts." Or something like that.

[Sketch]

Daft, you really should be more careful what you say.

I do think CD Projekt do like their bewbs, and it can sometimes lessen the tone of the game because it sometimes feels like they're thinking "wait we haven't seen boobs in a while, quick show some!" but on the other hand, they are reasonably good when it comes to also showing women as quite powerful (Triss was sexualised but also quite a strong character as were some of the other sorceresses. As for this trailer, I think it probably could be construed as a bit sexist, but I think it's just unfortunate as the girl in the video is probably going to be quite a powerful character as opposed to the sitting on the floor damsel in distress type figure we see. It's certainly not hateful, because I think that implies malice on CD Projekt's part.

[Jesus_Phish]

But what do you think happened before this scene?

There's obviously a reason she's being targeted. She's hardly a damsel in distress when she has scythes dripping in blood coming out of her arms. She's obviously killed someone, possibly several people.

[Jockie]

It's explained in the press release - She went 'Psycho' which is where people with too many implants go crazy and start killing people and start referring to people as meatbags (which is awfully specific, why would everyone single person who this phenomenon occurs to suddenly agree on a new argot!?).

[b0rsuk]

Looks awfully pretentious. I turned off audio very quickly. That's enough for me to avoid this game.

[Sketch]

But what do you think happened before this scene?

There's obviously a reason she's being targeted. She's hardly a damsel in distress when she has scythes dripping in blood coming out of her arms. She's obviously killed someone, possibly several people.

If that's aimed at me, then yeah I know she's obviously not a damsel in distress, I was just saying it's...unfortunate that they showed her in this way. I personally have no real problem with it, and don't think there is really much to it, but I can sort of see where people are getting upset.

[b0rsuk]

She's targeted, so what ? Apparently she still has the upper hand. Rounds are shattering when they hit her, she's so 1337. Being pretty by conventional standards doesn't make her less of a bitch, why should someone pity her unless you assume the police is corrupt ?

[Kadayi]

The literary critic in me agrees with you. But I had so much fun with the later that, holistically speaking, they're close for me.

The ideas were interesting, but the execution was what let things down. Stephenson's characters are pretty flat and he falls to much into this need to overly explain everything Vs leting you the reader put the pieces together.

[Jesus_Phish]

It's explained in the press release - She went 'Psycho' which is where people with too many implants go crazy and start killing people and start referring to people as meatbags (which is awfully specific, why would everyone single person who this phenomenon occurs to suddenly agree on a new argot!?).

Aye I've seen it in the press release. It seems most people didn't read that. It was one of my ideas as to what happened. But it's interesting that people are seeing this as being violent to women.
Does it have to be a woman in the trailer? No and of course we wouldn't be having this conversation if she wasn't.

Does she have to be beautiful? No, but in a cyberpunk world it's justified as it's common in that genre that people change their appearance with general ease and changing yourself to be beautiful is common. Look at the officer behind her and his perfect jawline and look at the advertisements in the background. Look at everyone whose dead on the ground, they all look young and stylish (apart from the blood and dead part).

Is it as bad as the Hitman Nuns teaser? God no, there's more context to this one, and context that actually makes sense.

[Zephro]

Dear god some people are uptight,we are not in 16 century anymore,move on. Its same with black people,they feel offended by every freaking shit.

Wow. It turns out all the problems of racism and sexism in the world were already solved. Nothing to see here lads!

As for my own opinion on the trailer. I don't think there's enough information in the trailer itself to justify the state of dress as integral to the plot or for making a point. So really you have to take it in terms of what it contains, ie a trailer with a half naked woman in it for no "apparent" reason you have to think they're doing it because skin sells. Would the implied story of her going "psycho" be any different if she were fully clothed? Or if she were a man? I don't think it would so I feel the need to question the decision to present her as such.

[gwathdring]

lazy because it doesn't show very much and leaves it to you to use your imagination as to what's going on.

In some cases, that's better storytelling. In a teaser trailer of all things, I'd say we're working with one of those cases.

As for the gender issue, I'll base my response off my interpretation of the scene.

I don't think we have anything to worry about with this little context, except that she's wearing a lot less clothes than everyone else and we don't have a good contextual reason as to why. I'm not concerned, but I understand why a reasonable person might be; on the other hand, it's not as though the "I killed a bunch of people while wearing my boxes and/or pajamas and then woke up not sure exactly what happened" trope is unheard of in non-gendered contexts. It's not particularly over-used either, as amnesia/body-awareness tropes go so that's a plus. The trouble is that anytime you encounter unclothed, hollywood-attractive females in media, there's potentially an extra layer to it. Whether or not complaining and even caring does anything helpful, perceiving that extra layer of social information isn't in itself problematic and claiming that it can simply be willed out of existence is missing the realities of our society.

I'm not going to criticize anyone for it, but most white Americans of both genders implicitly associate women and minorities with negative words more often than men in a statistically significant way. IATs don't tell us a lot about social dynamics and they don't tell us anything about a person's conscious state or public behavior ... but they give us some insight into the psychological roots of prejudice and the persistence of prejudice in small thoughts, actions and associations. This is a lot of song and dance to restate my earlier claim: anytime our medium portrays women in an overtly sexual manner unaccompanied by a significant large-scale shift in how often it portrays women in less sexual manners and how often if portrays men in a similar manner people have a right to question whether or not it's part of a large implicit system of prejudicial treatment. It's not about the severity of the one instance and I don't think there's anything wrong with the video in isolation. It's the whole package--the way women are portrayed in games (and non-white people, in some case since someone mentioned race), the negative sides to the femme fatal stereotypes, the failure of privileged classes to recognize that discriminatory policies, practices and behaviors against classes with different amounts of privileged are fundamentally different (i.e. the existence of serious Men's Rights Activists (not to be confused with Father's Rights Activists, though that is certainly related to the statement before this double-parentetical)...

I'd add that there's nothing I find personally offensive in the video and that I wouldn't have felt it worth mentioning if you hadn't asked. This is just how I think about gender politics. I don't think attacking this video is part of the good fight, as it were, but there are certainly trailers I've seen here on RPS that I have attacked in such a way. My two cents. Or twelve or something.

P.S.

I do think CD Projekt do like their bewbs, and it can sometimes lessen the tone of the game because it sometimes feels like they're thinking "wait we haven't seen boobs in a while, quick show some!" but on the other hand, they are reasonably good when it comes to also showing women as quite powerful (Triss was sexualised but also quite a strong character as were some of the other sorceresses.

Well put. I agree.

It's all certainly complicated by the fact that non-sexist portrayals have to have room for sexuality and CD Projekt would have all the sexuality intact in their work even if there wasn't the slightest whiff of sexism in the world because that's just how they roll. And just as a coin must come up tails seven times in a row quite often in a truly random series of tosses, non-sexist media has to have room for individual works in which the women are more sexualized then the men. The trouble is deciding what to do with an individual work that isn't explicitly sexist when the broad pattern is clearly problematic.

[gwathdring]

The ideas were interesting, but the execution was what let things down. Stephenson's characters are pretty flat and he falls to much into this need to overly explain everything Vs leting you the reader put the pieces together.

Fair enough.

[Jesus_Phish]

I might be wrong, but I'd assumed that she's not actually in her underwear. It looks to me that she's wearing a very small tight dress and judging by the people dead around here was heading out to a club or party. They're mostly dressed in similar stylish fashion.

[Zephro]

The ideas were interesting, but the execution was what let things down. Stephenson's characters are pretty flat and he falls to much into this need to overly explain everything Vs leting you the reader put the pieces together.

Also directed at gwathdring.

I think this is the problem. I didn't get annoyed in "The Stars My Destination" (Alfred Bester, a brilliant precursor to cyberpunk if you've not read it) when he started violating Einstein all over the place. As he never bothered going into any detail, it's just presented as fact and isn't integral to the plot. The thing about the Sumerian stuff was that he did go into so much effort explaining it that it brought the critical part of me out.

This just reminded me of all the Futurama explanations of FTL travel like the "L Drive", the writers in the commentaries talk about this very subject and thought it was fun to just come up with a magic doohicky.

[b0rsuk]

Occam's Razor - she's scantily clotched because she walks like that all the time. It's part of the setting. This is not Clarke, Asimov or Lem. Not everything that looks futuristic is science fiction. Cyberpunk is made of cool and style, not of thought and scientific speculation. It's not trying to appeal to rational people, but to people who faced with science think "That's too smart for me anyway; but look ! Cool effects and explosions !". So it doesn't have to make sense, these people wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

[Zephro]

It's all certainly complicated by the fact that non-sexist portrayals have to have room for sexuality and CD Projekt would have all the sexuality intact in their work even if there wasn't the slightest whiff of sexism in the world because that's just how they roll. And just as a coin must come up tails seven times in a row quite often in a truly random series of tosses, non-sexist media has to have room for individual works in which the women are more sexualized then the men. The trouble is deciding what to do with an individual work that isn't explicitly sexist when the broad pattern is clearly problematic.

Oh I should have mentioned that CD Projekt did a great job with Triss in this regard, probably the best alongside Kate Archer.

Hence I'm giving them a break over this and think it's just a accidental mis step rather than a massive horrendous cock up like the Hitman Nun's Trailer.

[gwathdring]

Also directed at gwathdring.

I think this is the problem. I didn't get annoyed in "The Stars My Destination" (Alfred Bester, a brilliant precursor to cyberpunk if you've not read it) when he started violating Einstein all over the place. As he never bothered going into any detail, it's just presented as fact and isn't integral to the plot. The thing about the Sumerian stuff was that he did go into so much effort explaining it that it brought the critical part of me out.

This just reminded me of all the Futurama explanations of FTL travel like the "L Drive", the writers in the commentaries talk about this very subject and thought it was fun to just come up with a magic doohicky.

Heeheehee. Magic dohickys are awesome. It takes a really good writer to pull off detailed explanations that have elements of wrongness and still add rather than detract. It takes a really lucky bastard to pull off detailed explanations that don't have elements of wrongness.

You made me notice

Stephenson's characters are pretty flat

again in Kadayi's statement though. I think the flatness of the characters was part of the aesthetic in Snow Crash. There might have been other issues with the characters, but I thought they worked in a way similar to how almost every Dickens character that's any good works. They're pre-destined, two-dimensional, but colorful as hell and nicely linked up with the story around them.

Hmm. Thinking about it a second time, you probably wouldn't agree with that description of the characters. I'm honestly not sure exactly why I think that, but I have a hunch.

[c-Row]

So there's an interesting(?) topic going on the front page of the article where some people think this trailer is hateful towards women because of the content in it and lazy because it doesn't show very much and leaves it to you to use your imagination as to what's going on.

So cops shooting at men is ok but shooting at women is hateful towards them? Is that one of those "we want to be offended for the sake of it" discussions?