Kotaku
Surprisingly lengthy article for something I didn't think anyone put much thought into. Anyone here bothered by these messages? Never found them that bad but the lewd humour got kind of derivative and bland after the legacy of Sticky White Stuff in Demon's so I basically stopped reading most messages since they were either this or just "praise the sun" with 900 thumbs up.
The occasional "Like A Dream..........." messages in front of views are still good though.
When Demon's Souls came out, it had several interesting ideas about how to utilize online interactivity. One of these was its messaging system. Any player could choose from a small bank of words and phrases to construct sentences, represented visually as a strip of glowing runes on the ground. The game was largely played solo, but messages made by one player could be seen by others, who had the option to rate a given message and give its author a health boost.
Humans being humans, a bit of crudeness crept in, aided by some of Demon's Souls linguistic ambiguities, such as the unassuming noun of "Head." Give people a blank wall and spraypaint and someone will eventually draw genitalia. Crucial to this metaphor is the fact that such anatomical graffiti, at least in openly public spaces, is nearly always of a penis. In one sense, it is a juvenile joke; in another and more serious sense, it is a territorial, gendered assertion of power. Such has been the evolutionary trend of the grosser Soulsborne messages, with an important distinction: their targets.
It got worse. Perhaps it didn't help that the post-Demon's Souls titles' promotional material and press coverage emphasized the trial and error design. The subtitle for Dark Souls' PC release was Prepare to Die Edition. A cover of Edge magazine read, "How the creators of Demon's Souls are making the most hardcore game of 2011." This was influenced by, but also fed into, the commentary of many players themselves until there was a perfect loop of word-of-mouth and branding. During Dark Souls 2's development, co-director Tomohiro Shibuya talked about making the game more "accessible," and this invoked an outrage only warily quelled when it was clarified that such accessibility involved quality of life adjustments.
All of this recalled videogames' earlier advertorial and critical periods that stressed difficulty and presented the medium as an exclusive club, where entry was dependent upon performative abilities. Implicitly and explicitly, this was a boys' club. Since this gatekeeping has come under threat as the medium's reach has expanded, we've witnessed escalating hysterics by men to protect their space and consumerist identities. It's not such a leap to hypothesize that this tough-as-nails branding of the Soulsborne games drew in a portion of the "git gud" contingent: anxious, angry, and arrogant men who derive entertainment from surrounding fictional women with ghostly perimeters of misogyny.
When Dark Souls 2 hit,any factors mitigating the presence of toxic gamers seemed to evaporate, creating an open season for female characters. They, and the Emerald Herald most of all, were so aggressively targeted by player messages— "weakness: hole therefore man required ahead", "try plunging attack, rear…", "try two-handing and then destroy", etc.—that I have, to date, never loaded a file in Majula and not found a swamp of textual harassment. Its range extended all the way to the world's near-deepest parts, where sheltered, mysterious women sang lonely songs.
Anyone who has played these games will know that the majority of players' messages don't fit into the discussed paradigm. They mostly preempt hurdles, proclaim victories, encourage curiosity, and craft humorous, mimetic mini-narratives. Yet the sexist messages' exceptional nature arguably heightens their presence. Once you can guess what a bunch of messages around a woman are bound to be, it colors your perception of that space. Coming back to a hub after some spelunking is not just a return to relative security, but can be a reminder of the cultural toxicity bubbling beneath the games' surfaces. YouTube user Jameserton's video, "HAPPY SOULS", has accrued nearly 17 million views since 2016, and, as good-natured as it is, even it contextualizes the sight of the Emerald Herald encompassed by "Try thrusting" and "ambush behind."
The general response has been to either tolerate or embrace these messages as a dependable cultural signifier, like a thing that just came with the territory. In one Reddit thread about celebrating player messages, a rare dissenter who clumsily says they've tired of the sleaze is called a "salty kid who needs to git gud" and is told to "lighten the fuck up." In another thread elsewhere, a person who specifically voices their disgust for the sexist messages is replied to with, "You've always been able to play offline." But just because you've averted your eyes doesn't mean the thing has disappeared. Willful ignorance is not a solution.
Surprisingly lengthy article for something I didn't think anyone put much thought into. Anyone here bothered by these messages? Never found them that bad but the lewd humour got kind of derivative and bland after the legacy of Sticky White Stuff in Demon's so I basically stopped reading most messages since they were either this or just "praise the sun" with 900 thumbs up.
The occasional "Like A Dream..........." messages in front of views are still good though.
