So I had preordered the physical version of Shovel Knight from GameStop, ahead of its October 2015 release date. Shovel Knight is one of the best games to come out in recent years, in my opinion, so I wanted to support the developer even though I already purchased the digital edition as a Kickstarter backer.
The original preorder price was $19.99, which I think is fair. But I just got an email saying, "the price has gone up to $24.99, sorry for the inconvenience, hope you don't cancel but you can if you want."
I cancelled immediately... after all, I was paying for shipping on top of the now $24.99 price of the game, and Amazon still has it available for preorder at $19.99 with free 2-day shipping for Prime members. And Amazon guarantees the prices it posts for preorder items.
All this is basically to say that GameStop has truly become irrelevant. If they didn't have retailer exclusives (which I don't even care about) there would literally never be any reason for anyone to go to them for anything ever again. I only preordered Shovel Knight from them because they were the only ones offering a preorder at the time.
Fuck GameStop.
Thursday, August 27, 2015
Friday, August 14, 2015
An ancient sprite comic, resurrected.
Many solar orbits ago, I tried my hand at the sadly-not-lost art of pixel comics. I only remember the joke in one of them, and here's a new version of that one. Click on it to see a larger version.
Originally the strip used a slime from the Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior series. It complained that the player always just ran away instead of killing it. Several friends pointed out that it's much easier to just mash the A button to kill any slimes you encounter than it is to select the "run" option from the menu. They were right--I don't remember ever actually running from a slime myself.
I may or may not make some more of these as ideas occur to me. If ideas occur to me.
CED, a.k.a. VideoDisc, a.k.a. SelectaVision, a.k.a...
I've mentioned the CED video format in two posts so far, but I didn't really elaborate much on what it is. Essentially, it's a 12" vinyl record containing both video and audio information, rather than just audio like a conventional LP.
RCA's CED technology enabled them to write data to a disc at a density two orders of magnitude higher than that of a phonograph record. It's read by a stylus, much like a phonograph record, although of course the needle has to be much more of a precision instrument in this case. The disc is also spun at a higher speed--instead of the standard 33 1/3 RPM or 45 RPM for phonograph records, CEDs spin at 450 RPM for NTSC and 500 RPM for PAL. Each side of a disc holds up to one hour of video.
Since the discs are very sensitive to dirt, dust and smudges, they're kept in protective plastic caddies that are not intended to be opened by hand. The entire caddy is inserted into the player, which then extracts the disc. After the now-empty caddy is removed, the disc begins to spin and the stylus is advanced to read the disc. After playback of that side is completed, the caddy is reinserted and the player puts the disc back into it for storage.
So what does all of this get you? As it turns out, not a whole lot. Video quality is about on par with VHS; the discs are bulky and heavy by comparison even with LaserDisc (due to the protective caddy); discs and styli wear out over time; and there's virtually no content available on CED that wasn't released on other, more accessible formats. Most of the exclusive material is CED promotional stuff.
Working players tend to be fairly expensive nowadays, and they're a bit fragile to ship. If shipping locks aren't properly installed before mailing a unit, it probably won't work when you get it. Additionally, the belts used to drive the turntable and other functions will almost certainly have degraded into a thick black sludge, so they'll need to be replaced. It's also likely that the stylus will need to be cleaned and/or rebuilt, which only one company on the planet (CEDatum) is still qualified to do. You absolutely must be comfortable popping off the cover and monkeying around inside the player if you want to watch CEDs.
To top it all off, CEDs were only manufactured between and 1981 and 1986, so anything released after that year is unavailable. Due to the limited lifespan of the technology, a whole bunch of stuff released before then didn't get released on CED either.
Why on Earth would anybody want to collect this format then? Well, unless they just think the technology is cool, they probably won't. Seriously. There's almost no reason to own CEDs these days. And this is coming from someone who does have a CED collection. I think it's neat, and that's literally the only justification I can give.
RCA's CED technology enabled them to write data to a disc at a density two orders of magnitude higher than that of a phonograph record. It's read by a stylus, much like a phonograph record, although of course the needle has to be much more of a precision instrument in this case. The disc is also spun at a higher speed--instead of the standard 33 1/3 RPM or 45 RPM for phonograph records, CEDs spin at 450 RPM for NTSC and 500 RPM for PAL. Each side of a disc holds up to one hour of video.
Since the discs are very sensitive to dirt, dust and smudges, they're kept in protective plastic caddies that are not intended to be opened by hand. The entire caddy is inserted into the player, which then extracts the disc. After the now-empty caddy is removed, the disc begins to spin and the stylus is advanced to read the disc. After playback of that side is completed, the caddy is reinserted and the player puts the disc back into it for storage.
So what does all of this get you? As it turns out, not a whole lot. Video quality is about on par with VHS; the discs are bulky and heavy by comparison even with LaserDisc (due to the protective caddy); discs and styli wear out over time; and there's virtually no content available on CED that wasn't released on other, more accessible formats. Most of the exclusive material is CED promotional stuff.
Working players tend to be fairly expensive nowadays, and they're a bit fragile to ship. If shipping locks aren't properly installed before mailing a unit, it probably won't work when you get it. Additionally, the belts used to drive the turntable and other functions will almost certainly have degraded into a thick black sludge, so they'll need to be replaced. It's also likely that the stylus will need to be cleaned and/or rebuilt, which only one company on the planet (CEDatum) is still qualified to do. You absolutely must be comfortable popping off the cover and monkeying around inside the player if you want to watch CEDs.
To top it all off, CEDs were only manufactured between and 1981 and 1986, so anything released after that year is unavailable. Due to the limited lifespan of the technology, a whole bunch of stuff released before then didn't get released on CED either.
Why on Earth would anybody want to collect this format then? Well, unless they just think the technology is cool, they probably won't. Seriously. There's almost no reason to own CEDs these days. And this is coming from someone who does have a CED collection. I think it's neat, and that's literally the only justification I can give.
Tuesday, August 4, 2015
VHS and why it's still cool.
VHS was the first home video format to really take off.
Its main competitors were Beta, LaserDisc and CED. Beta and LaserDisc were both far more expensive than VHS, while CED was bulky and had some quality-control issues that scared off many consumers. LaserDisc and CED were non-recordable media, and while blank Beta tapes could be purchased for recording programming from TV, it suffered from a major drawback that affected all three of the VHS competitors: storage capacity.
CED discs could hold 60 minutes of video per side. If you were watching a movie that was more than an hour long (which is to say, pretty much any movie), you would have to get up and manually flip over the record to watch the rest. If it was more than 2 hours long, it was sold on multiple discs, each of which came in a heavy, bulky plastic caddy for protection.
LaserDisc initially came in the high-quality CAV format, which only held 30 minutes of programming per side. People quickly got tired of flipping the disc after half an hour and then swapping to an entirely new disc after another half hour, so the longer-playing but technically inferior CLV standard was developed. These discs could hold up to an hour of video on each side, much like a CED. Some high-end players eventually flipped the disc for you, so if you had a single-disc movie in CLV format and an expensive player, you didn't have to get up and flip the disc at all... but you did have to wait for the player to start reading the other side. And again, if the movie was over 2 hours long, it was on multiple discs.
Originally, Beta could hold no more than an hour on a tape. Eventually players were released that could record at half tape speed, increasing the capacity to two hours. This enabled an entire movie to be played continuously, as long as it was under two hours long. Longer movies still had to be released on multiple tapes.
VHS tapes could hold up to 4 hours of video in Standard Play mode, and up to 12 hours in Super Long Play.
That's all well and good, but why would anyone be interested in VHS today? It's a good question.
Since VHS was the dominant format for home video for such a long time, and since it was the first, the market was saturated with players. When production costs dropped over time, authoring a program on VHS became financially viable for even small-time producers and publishers. Once DVD hit the market and started to pick up steam, it became even cheaper to put stuff out on VHS because there was a huge amount of tape stock that was in lower demand. This had a wonderful end result:
There is some seriously weird shit out there on VHS.
Weird NJ, the excellent semiannual magazine chronicling... well, weird stuff in New Jersey, put out a VHS tape in 1999. Some of the locations and people featured are the Lawn of 1,023 Milk Bottles, the Gates of Hell, and The King of the Road Ed Geil, an Elvis impersonator who performed by the side of the road just for the hell of it. The production quality is laughable and the features are super weird, and it's one of the coolest tapes in my collection.
Remember that music video that played all the time on MTV in the 90's? The claymation one telling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the form of a metal song? That was produced by Green Jellö (later spelled Green Jellÿ for legal reasons, but pronounced the same) for their 1992 video-only album Cereal Killer. Yeah, they wrote and recorded an album, made a music video for each song, and then released it only as a VHS videotape. Okay, later on they put out a CD, called "Cereal Killer Soundtrack," but originally the plan was for the band itself to be video-only. A weird idea from a weird band with ties to GWAR and Maynard James Keenan of Tool. It's one of the prized items in my collection.
Educational, religious and children's videos tend to be some of the stranger items that can be found on VHS, and recently I managed to find one that looks promising. It's called "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" and is intended to teach you how to successfully run your own puppet-based Christian ministry. It's 103 minutes of what I can only assume are extremely creepy and amusing lessons. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to soon, after which it will probably be sent off to Red Letter Media if it's good enough.
You haven't heard of Red Letter Media? Well, they're a bunch of really funny folks who do short films, feature-length films, movie and video game reviews, and other assorted jackassery. I'm a fan of their strange sense of humor and I especially love a show they occasionally put out called Best of the Worst. Each episode they watch three obscure movies, most of which were only put out on VHS, and then discuss them at length and ultimately choose the titular best of the worst.
From time to time they do a Wheel of the Worst episode, where they've got a number of non-movie tapes pinned to a rotating wheel, and spinning the wheel decides which ones they'll have to watch. "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" seems like prime fodder for that. I highly recommend you check it out--it might even get you interested in what other bizarre crap you can find on VHS!
Its main competitors were Beta, LaserDisc and CED. Beta and LaserDisc were both far more expensive than VHS, while CED was bulky and had some quality-control issues that scared off many consumers. LaserDisc and CED were non-recordable media, and while blank Beta tapes could be purchased for recording programming from TV, it suffered from a major drawback that affected all three of the VHS competitors: storage capacity.
CED discs could hold 60 minutes of video per side. If you were watching a movie that was more than an hour long (which is to say, pretty much any movie), you would have to get up and manually flip over the record to watch the rest. If it was more than 2 hours long, it was sold on multiple discs, each of which came in a heavy, bulky plastic caddy for protection.
LaserDisc initially came in the high-quality CAV format, which only held 30 minutes of programming per side. People quickly got tired of flipping the disc after half an hour and then swapping to an entirely new disc after another half hour, so the longer-playing but technically inferior CLV standard was developed. These discs could hold up to an hour of video on each side, much like a CED. Some high-end players eventually flipped the disc for you, so if you had a single-disc movie in CLV format and an expensive player, you didn't have to get up and flip the disc at all... but you did have to wait for the player to start reading the other side. And again, if the movie was over 2 hours long, it was on multiple discs.
Originally, Beta could hold no more than an hour on a tape. Eventually players were released that could record at half tape speed, increasing the capacity to two hours. This enabled an entire movie to be played continuously, as long as it was under two hours long. Longer movies still had to be released on multiple tapes.
VHS tapes could hold up to 4 hours of video in Standard Play mode, and up to 12 hours in Super Long Play.
That's all well and good, but why would anyone be interested in VHS today? It's a good question.
Since VHS was the dominant format for home video for such a long time, and since it was the first, the market was saturated with players. When production costs dropped over time, authoring a program on VHS became financially viable for even small-time producers and publishers. Once DVD hit the market and started to pick up steam, it became even cheaper to put stuff out on VHS because there was a huge amount of tape stock that was in lower demand. This had a wonderful end result:
There is some seriously weird shit out there on VHS.
Weird NJ, the excellent semiannual magazine chronicling... well, weird stuff in New Jersey, put out a VHS tape in 1999. Some of the locations and people featured are the Lawn of 1,023 Milk Bottles, the Gates of Hell, and The King of the Road Ed Geil, an Elvis impersonator who performed by the side of the road just for the hell of it. The production quality is laughable and the features are super weird, and it's one of the coolest tapes in my collection.
Remember that music video that played all the time on MTV in the 90's? The claymation one telling the story of the Three Little Pigs in the form of a metal song? That was produced by Green Jellö (later spelled Green Jellÿ for legal reasons, but pronounced the same) for their 1992 video-only album Cereal Killer. Yeah, they wrote and recorded an album, made a music video for each song, and then released it only as a VHS videotape. Okay, later on they put out a CD, called "Cereal Killer Soundtrack," but originally the plan was for the band itself to be video-only. A weird idea from a weird band with ties to GWAR and Maynard James Keenan of Tool. It's one of the prized items in my collection.
Educational, religious and children's videos tend to be some of the stranger items that can be found on VHS, and recently I managed to find one that looks promising. It's called "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" and is intended to teach you how to successfully run your own puppet-based Christian ministry. It's 103 minutes of what I can only assume are extremely creepy and amusing lessons. I haven't watched it yet, but I plan to soon, after which it will probably be sent off to Red Letter Media if it's good enough.
You haven't heard of Red Letter Media? Well, they're a bunch of really funny folks who do short films, feature-length films, movie and video game reviews, and other assorted jackassery. I'm a fan of their strange sense of humor and I especially love a show they occasionally put out called Best of the Worst. Each episode they watch three obscure movies, most of which were only put out on VHS, and then discuss them at length and ultimately choose the titular best of the worst.
From time to time they do a Wheel of the Worst episode, where they've got a number of non-movie tapes pinned to a rotating wheel, and spinning the wheel decides which ones they'll have to watch. "Reaching & Teaching with Puppets" seems like prime fodder for that. I highly recommend you check it out--it might even get you interested in what other bizarre crap you can find on VHS!
On Anita Sarkeesian
I consider myself a feminist. I mean, first and foremost I consider myself a skeptic, followed closely by humanist. And if you're a humanist without being a feminist, you're doing humanism wrong. Women should be treated equally with respect to the rest of the population, just as any other group should. Having conversations about areas where inequality exists is a good thing.
I also own an embarrassing number of video game consoles, from Pong to PS4 including all the major machines in between (and quite a few of the more obscure ones), and my Steam library boasts over 300 titles--and I'm proud of that collection. I like video games, is what I'm getting at.
So when someone does a video series dicussing the portrayal of women in video games--long considered to be a heavily male-dominated industry--my ears perk up. That happened back in 2012, when Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign for her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series.
She was asking for $6,000 to fund production of five videos. $1,200 apiece seemed a little bit steep for 10-to-20-minute-long videos that would consist largely of gameplay footage and Anita talking in front of a green screen, but if she was going to do a lot of research she would need to take a lot of time to do it, and there are expenses involved in any kind of video production. I wasn't surprised that she surpassed her $6,000 goal within 24 hours.
By the time I heard about the campaign it had already hit its goal, and Anita had posted a set of stretch goals. These goals were a little more iffy, since each additional video was going to cost backers another $1,500. The startup expenses should have been covered by the original $6,000 ask, so why was each of these going to cost even more? Regardless, these stretch goals were all also achieved. Cool, six more videos to enjoy.
The next stretch goal was to "bump up the production quality" of her videos, and it was set at an additional $5,000. Anita listed buying a beefy new computer with large hard drive capacity, upgraded studio lighting, a wireless lav mic, and Adobe After Effects as the upgrades in question. That stuff is expensive, and $5,000 should just about cover it, but... I had assumed that some of this was going to be purchased from the initial $6,000. After Effects alone would account for more than $1,000 of the upgrades, but by this point Adobe CC was available as a service, drastically reducing the cost to a relatively small monthly payment. But maybe she was going to be doing this as her full-time job until the series was completed and just needed the money to pay her bills. That'd be cool, she gets to spend some time working on a project she's passionate about while not having to worry about another job at the same time, and we get the videos more quickly. Win-win!
The third set of stretch goals included the development of a Creative Commons-licensed set of mini lesson plans for use in education and another video. The curriculum would cost $4,000 and this 12th and final video was $2,000. Wait, what? Why do they keep getting more expensive? All of the expenses--including the hardware and software upgrades--have already been taken care of! Eh, it's only 500 bucks more than the original set of videos, not worth quibbling over when the total ask is $26,000. In my neck of the woods, that's approaching the average person's yearly wages.
Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian became the focus of a huge amount of harassment. I want to be clear: this harassment, while not unexpected, was absolutely sickening. The only silver lining is that in the end it served to bring much more exposure to the campaign. By the time the Kickstarter closed on June 16, 2012, she had gotten $158,922 in pledges from 6,968 backers.
Whoa. This series was going to be awesome. Some folks might even want to pick it up on DVD, which was actually a reward option on the Kickstarter!
...For the low, low price of only $250. $500 would get you a DVD collection of all of the videos from her Feminist Frequency project. Now, I'm not saying that the DVDs should have gone for bargain basement prices, but last I checked, even at the highest possible video quality, a DVD can still hold an hour of video. Assuming Anita Sarkeesian would settle for nothing but the highest resolution (but was nonetheless inexplicably unwilling to do a Blu-Ray release) the series would need to be spread across four DVDs. This is assuming 12 videos at the greater length of 20 minutes each: 240 minutes (4 hours). $62.50 per DVD, each containing a mere 3 episodes of content that would be available on YouTube for free, seems just a tad steep.
In total, 51 backers opted for one or the other of these DVD reward tiers, accounting for $16,000 of the raised funds--about 10%. The estimated delivery date for the DVD tiers was understandably a bit later than the others: December 2012.
So Anita expected to complete this project--including time for DVD authoring and distribution--within 6 months. How'd that go? Well, it's August 2015, and of the 12 promised videos we've gotten eight. Okay, so it's like three years late, but at least she's almost done, right?
Not really. Each of the 12 videos she promised in the Kickstarter campaign covered a different subject. She spent three videos covering the first subject, two covering the fifth, and two so far covering the 11th. The series has only addressed four of the 12 promised subjects, and while the multi-part videos are longer than expected, it's still a far cry from fulfilling her obligations. Oh, and that 11th subject? That's "Positive Female Characters," which she has announced is a whole new series. Huh?
So, nearly 7,000 people paid her nearly $160,000 three years ago to make some YouTube videos (which, presumably, are also monetized) and they're still waiting. 51 of those backers paid a ludicrous sum to also get the videos on DVD... and they're still waiting. Surely there must be a good reason for the extreme delay?
Of course there is. Anita Sarkeesian has been concentrating on her increased commitments to public speaking engagements. For which she receives about $10,000 each.
I'm willing to grant that she probably uses that money to fund her 501(c)3 organization rather than pocketing it directly, but Kickstarter's policies require her to fulfill her pledge rewards. And since she hasn't completed the series that was supposed to serve as the bulk of those rewards, she can't possibly have done that. If someone pays you $160,000 to do a job, you don't just get to put it off while you do other jobs--especially when you're the one who proposed doing the job and came up with the time frame in which to complete it. Even if the Kickstarter policies aren't legally binding (which they very well may be, actually), she still made a promise to the people who gave her money and then didn't fulfill it.
Okay, putting all that aside, the videos she's done so far are well-researched and thought-provoking arguments against sexism in video games, yes? Well, no, not so much. In fact, she often seems to be drumming up controversy where there really isn't any.
For example, she cites a mission in the game WATCH_DOGS--in which women are being sold as sex slaves--as an example of women being used as background decoration. After all, you don't get to interact with them in any meaningful way; they're just chained up naked on a stage, under spotlights, being auctioned off. What Anita misses, though, is that this is an extremely negative depiction of human trafficking, is unequivocally cast in the game as the worst kind of human rights violation, and your mission in this scenario is to shut down the trafficking ring and free the women. Women needing to be saved by a bunch of men is also a red flag for her, since her first series of videos was on the "Damsel in Distress" trope, but this is a portrayal of a scenario that actually happens in the real world, and yes, THE VICTIMS NEED HELP. Somehow Anita Sarkeesian managed to look at someone busting up a sex slavery ring and conclude that it was sexist.
Another example she uses comes from the game Hitman: Absolution. It is entirely possible for the player to find some strippers, knock them out or kill them, and drag their bodies around and hide them. The game does actually allow you to do this. Anita cites this as blatant objectification of women as sex objects and the fulfillment of a desire to punish these women for depicting female sexuality.
It's been discussed to death that this was a very minor portion of the game, and that killing innocent characters in Hitman games nets you a penalty. But the real point is that you can also do all of the same things to any character in the game. It would have been extremely jarring to suddenly take away the player's autonomy just because the current venue contained depictions of women who earn their living by being sexually objectified. And again, this is a depiction of a scenario that actually happens in the real world. When the player encounters these strippers, they're having a casual conversation with each other. They're depicted as real people living their lives, not just exposed flesh.
Art often imitates life; sometimes it does it in a subversive way, and that's often the kind of art that gets the best critical response. But sometimes it merely imitates, and that's okay too.
These would probably be great points to bring up in the comments section of her YouTube videos. They (and many others) probably would have been if Sarkeesian were interested in a dialogue, but sadly, comments are disabled on all of her videos. She's also disabled ratings. This is ostensibly due to the volume of harassment she receives, but it also serves to censor any legitimate criticism in the forum where it's most likely to be seen.
I'm kinda glad I was strapped for cash back in the summer of 2012. Otherwise I might have given Anita Sarkeesian some money. As far as I can tell, she wasn't honest or realistic about what she could accomplish with the money people were giving her. I don't think the work she has done on this project is particularly worthy of so much funding. If somebody else took up a similar project and actually treated the subject honestly I might go for that instead.
I also own an embarrassing number of video game consoles, from Pong to PS4 including all the major machines in between (and quite a few of the more obscure ones), and my Steam library boasts over 300 titles--and I'm proud of that collection. I like video games, is what I'm getting at.
So when someone does a video series dicussing the portrayal of women in video games--long considered to be a heavily male-dominated industry--my ears perk up. That happened back in 2012, when Anita Sarkeesian launched a Kickstarter campaign for her "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games" series.
She was asking for $6,000 to fund production of five videos. $1,200 apiece seemed a little bit steep for 10-to-20-minute-long videos that would consist largely of gameplay footage and Anita talking in front of a green screen, but if she was going to do a lot of research she would need to take a lot of time to do it, and there are expenses involved in any kind of video production. I wasn't surprised that she surpassed her $6,000 goal within 24 hours.
By the time I heard about the campaign it had already hit its goal, and Anita had posted a set of stretch goals. These goals were a little more iffy, since each additional video was going to cost backers another $1,500. The startup expenses should have been covered by the original $6,000 ask, so why was each of these going to cost even more? Regardless, these stretch goals were all also achieved. Cool, six more videos to enjoy.
The next stretch goal was to "bump up the production quality" of her videos, and it was set at an additional $5,000. Anita listed buying a beefy new computer with large hard drive capacity, upgraded studio lighting, a wireless lav mic, and Adobe After Effects as the upgrades in question. That stuff is expensive, and $5,000 should just about cover it, but... I had assumed that some of this was going to be purchased from the initial $6,000. After Effects alone would account for more than $1,000 of the upgrades, but by this point Adobe CC was available as a service, drastically reducing the cost to a relatively small monthly payment. But maybe she was going to be doing this as her full-time job until the series was completed and just needed the money to pay her bills. That'd be cool, she gets to spend some time working on a project she's passionate about while not having to worry about another job at the same time, and we get the videos more quickly. Win-win!
The third set of stretch goals included the development of a Creative Commons-licensed set of mini lesson plans for use in education and another video. The curriculum would cost $4,000 and this 12th and final video was $2,000. Wait, what? Why do they keep getting more expensive? All of the expenses--including the hardware and software upgrades--have already been taken care of! Eh, it's only 500 bucks more than the original set of videos, not worth quibbling over when the total ask is $26,000. In my neck of the woods, that's approaching the average person's yearly wages.
Meanwhile, Anita Sarkeesian became the focus of a huge amount of harassment. I want to be clear: this harassment, while not unexpected, was absolutely sickening. The only silver lining is that in the end it served to bring much more exposure to the campaign. By the time the Kickstarter closed on June 16, 2012, she had gotten $158,922 in pledges from 6,968 backers.
Whoa. This series was going to be awesome. Some folks might even want to pick it up on DVD, which was actually a reward option on the Kickstarter!
...For the low, low price of only $250. $500 would get you a DVD collection of all of the videos from her Feminist Frequency project. Now, I'm not saying that the DVDs should have gone for bargain basement prices, but last I checked, even at the highest possible video quality, a DVD can still hold an hour of video. Assuming Anita Sarkeesian would settle for nothing but the highest resolution (but was nonetheless inexplicably unwilling to do a Blu-Ray release) the series would need to be spread across four DVDs. This is assuming 12 videos at the greater length of 20 minutes each: 240 minutes (4 hours). $62.50 per DVD, each containing a mere 3 episodes of content that would be available on YouTube for free, seems just a tad steep.
In total, 51 backers opted for one or the other of these DVD reward tiers, accounting for $16,000 of the raised funds--about 10%. The estimated delivery date for the DVD tiers was understandably a bit later than the others: December 2012.
So Anita expected to complete this project--including time for DVD authoring and distribution--within 6 months. How'd that go? Well, it's August 2015, and of the 12 promised videos we've gotten eight. Okay, so it's like three years late, but at least she's almost done, right?
Not really. Each of the 12 videos she promised in the Kickstarter campaign covered a different subject. She spent three videos covering the first subject, two covering the fifth, and two so far covering the 11th. The series has only addressed four of the 12 promised subjects, and while the multi-part videos are longer than expected, it's still a far cry from fulfilling her obligations. Oh, and that 11th subject? That's "Positive Female Characters," which she has announced is a whole new series. Huh?
So, nearly 7,000 people paid her nearly $160,000 three years ago to make some YouTube videos (which, presumably, are also monetized) and they're still waiting. 51 of those backers paid a ludicrous sum to also get the videos on DVD... and they're still waiting. Surely there must be a good reason for the extreme delay?
Of course there is. Anita Sarkeesian has been concentrating on her increased commitments to public speaking engagements. For which she receives about $10,000 each.
I'm willing to grant that she probably uses that money to fund her 501(c)3 organization rather than pocketing it directly, but Kickstarter's policies require her to fulfill her pledge rewards. And since she hasn't completed the series that was supposed to serve as the bulk of those rewards, she can't possibly have done that. If someone pays you $160,000 to do a job, you don't just get to put it off while you do other jobs--especially when you're the one who proposed doing the job and came up with the time frame in which to complete it. Even if the Kickstarter policies aren't legally binding (which they very well may be, actually), she still made a promise to the people who gave her money and then didn't fulfill it.
Okay, putting all that aside, the videos she's done so far are well-researched and thought-provoking arguments against sexism in video games, yes? Well, no, not so much. In fact, she often seems to be drumming up controversy where there really isn't any.
For example, she cites a mission in the game WATCH_DOGS--in which women are being sold as sex slaves--as an example of women being used as background decoration. After all, you don't get to interact with them in any meaningful way; they're just chained up naked on a stage, under spotlights, being auctioned off. What Anita misses, though, is that this is an extremely negative depiction of human trafficking, is unequivocally cast in the game as the worst kind of human rights violation, and your mission in this scenario is to shut down the trafficking ring and free the women. Women needing to be saved by a bunch of men is also a red flag for her, since her first series of videos was on the "Damsel in Distress" trope, but this is a portrayal of a scenario that actually happens in the real world, and yes, THE VICTIMS NEED HELP. Somehow Anita Sarkeesian managed to look at someone busting up a sex slavery ring and conclude that it was sexist.
Another example she uses comes from the game Hitman: Absolution. It is entirely possible for the player to find some strippers, knock them out or kill them, and drag their bodies around and hide them. The game does actually allow you to do this. Anita cites this as blatant objectification of women as sex objects and the fulfillment of a desire to punish these women for depicting female sexuality.
It's been discussed to death that this was a very minor portion of the game, and that killing innocent characters in Hitman games nets you a penalty. But the real point is that you can also do all of the same things to any character in the game. It would have been extremely jarring to suddenly take away the player's autonomy just because the current venue contained depictions of women who earn their living by being sexually objectified. And again, this is a depiction of a scenario that actually happens in the real world. When the player encounters these strippers, they're having a casual conversation with each other. They're depicted as real people living their lives, not just exposed flesh.
Art often imitates life; sometimes it does it in a subversive way, and that's often the kind of art that gets the best critical response. But sometimes it merely imitates, and that's okay too.
These would probably be great points to bring up in the comments section of her YouTube videos. They (and many others) probably would have been if Sarkeesian were interested in a dialogue, but sadly, comments are disabled on all of her videos. She's also disabled ratings. This is ostensibly due to the volume of harassment she receives, but it also serves to censor any legitimate criticism in the forum where it's most likely to be seen.
I'm kinda glad I was strapped for cash back in the summer of 2012. Otherwise I might have given Anita Sarkeesian some money. As far as I can tell, she wasn't honest or realistic about what she could accomplish with the money people were giving her. I don't think the work she has done on this project is particularly worthy of so much funding. If somebody else took up a similar project and actually treated the subject honestly I might go for that instead.
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