1093: ‘Problematic’ is This Year’s ‘Entitled’

Remember last year when everyone was busily calling each other “entitled” for complaining about stuff like the Mass Effect 3 ending and Capcom’s absurd DLC-on-disc policies? Ah, good times. They were fun, weren’t they? Particularly when members of the press who should really know better starting insulting their audience. But let’s leave that aside for now, because now it’s 2013, and we have bigger fish to fry.

Now, you see, the fashionable thing to do is to declare something “problematic”. I can’t quite work out what irks me so about this word — in all likelihood it’s simply its overuse — but it really does bug me.

The declaration of something as “problematic” usually ties in with the growing trend of guilt-ridden white straight cis men to want to champion the poor downtrodden parts of society — the women, the transsexuals, the homosexuals, the people of non-white ethnic backgrounds — and show themselves to be enlightened enough to stand up to the privileged of the world. Trouble is, a white straight cis man standing up for these groups only helps to reinforce that perceived “weakness” in many ways — and in worst-case scenarios, it starts to look a bit like bandwagon-jumping.

Such is the case with many of these things that have been declared “problematic” in recent months. A while back we had that beyond-stupid Hitman: Absolution trailer, more recently we had CD Projekt Red’s actually quite excellent Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, and today we had the announcement of Dead Island Riptide’s ridiculous “Zombie Bait” special edition. Leaving aside Cyberpunk 2077 for a moment, which is something of a different issue, both Hitman: Absolution and Dead Island Riptide are obviously incredibly stupid marketing ploys designed for shock value, little more. I find it honestly hard to believe that either Square Enix or Deep Silver genuinely want to condone violence against women or misogyny in general, but that is what they’re being accused of with these “problematic” marketing materials — in the case of Dead Island, within minutes of the images hitting the Interwebs.

The thing is, all the shouting about how “problematic” these things are actually just plays right into the marketers’ hands. For every table-thumping opinion piece that decries these things as the most awful thing ever dreamed up by a game’s marketing team, there will be at least a few readers who will think “well hang on, actually I’m quite interested in that now,” whether or not they actually admit to it in public. The amount of “OMG THIS IS AWFUL” stuff floating around about Dead Island Riptide’s bloody torso is only really serving to make people more aware of the game’s striking, gross (and Europe/Australia-exclusive) special edition; the hoo-hah over the Hitman: Absolution trailer likely helped raise awareness of the game in the run-up to its release to a considerable degree, and it had been all but forgotten by most people by the time the game actually came out.

In short, they’re stupid and in poor taste, but all they are are marketing ploys, little more. And they’re doing their job admirably — both games now have considerably higher visibility than they once had. As they say, all publicity is good publicity. If you really want to punish them, don’t provide them with any coverage whatsoever.

The Cyberpunk 2077 trailer is a little more complex to discuss. Taken out of context, it could be seen as a representation of brutality against a sex worker — until it pans out and she reveals her MASSIVE FUCKING ROBOT SCYTHE BLADES, that is — but taken in the context of the original Cyberpunk 2077 source material from the ’80s, it is, to my knowledge anyway, entirely in keeping with the aesthetic and atmosphere of that which it is based on. I observed some lengthy discussions about this on both Facebook and Google+ recently, and now that I know the context, it’s clear that this trailer is entirely appropriate for the setting. One may argue that the use of a scantily-clad woman is somewhat unnecessary, and you might be right about that, but that doesn’t mean that this is suddenly a huge violence against women issue. It’s a stylistic choice; little more — a subversion of audience expectations. “A woman being abused by the police… oh wait, no, she’s actually some sort of hideous mechanical monster with very little humanity remaining.” (Spoilers.)

You could also argue that the requirement to be familiar with the source material before being able to recognise the trailer for what it is is something of a failing of the marketing, but then Cyberpunk 2077 was always likely to appeal to a very specific, niche audience — those who remembered the original tabletop RPG — anyway, so is there really anything wrong in catering to that specific, niche audience rather than attempting to make something bland, unremarkable and mainstream?

My point, essentially, is that by shouting and screaming about how “problematic” these things are, you’re fuelling the fire. You’re helping the things that you hate. You’re making people aware of them, and not in the way you probably intend. It’s a catch-22, really. If you say nothing, you might feel as if you’re tacitly condoning things that you don’t agree with; if you say something, you actually end up bringing it to a much wider audience, many of whom may become defensive when confronted with your viewpoints that counter their feelings.

The key thing, I think, is moderation. The trouble with the number of things that have been declared “problematic” recently is that it’s losing its impact. We’re apparently supposed to find so much stuff “offensive” these days that it’s getting difficult to keep track — and who are the people who get to say what is and isn’t offensive, anyway? Following the release of the Dead Island Riptide pictures today, for example, I saw a variety of comments from female gamers (as in, gamers who just happen to be female, not girls who make a big deal out of the fact they play games or specifically identify as “girl gamers”) along the lines that it really didn’t bother them and that they just found this sort of thing rather childish and amusing.

That, to me, is a more healthy attitude to take. All of the outrage I’ve seen today has been from men — always the same men, too, so much so that any time something like this comes up it’s incredibly predictable who will be the first to jump on their virtual soapbox. It’s easy to play the “champion of feminism” from behind a computer keyboard, but I have to question how many of these self-appointed arbiters of taste and decency have actually done anything beyond pen an angry blog post (yes, just like this one, I know) to help make life better for these groups they’re supposedly standing up for.

Dead Island’s bloody tits are a horrid thing you probably wouldn’t want on your mantlepiece. Hitman: Absolution‘s nuns trailer was an exercise in how ridiculous a trailer they could get away with. I’m not defending either of them, because they’re both shit, let’s not beat around the bush. But I really don’t believe they’re symptomatic of anything more than marketing departments that are highly adept at taking advantage of “shock value”. And attempting to make these into anything more than that will achieve little more than starting arguments that have little value to the real concerns, which are a much more complex set of sociological issues.

I like women and have never, ever thought of a woman as someone “inferior” to me. The thought of perpetrating violence against a woman in reality is, to me, abhorrent, but then the thought of perpetrating violence against a man is also, to me, abhorrent. But then I liked the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, too. Does that make me an awful, hideous misogynist?

No, of course it doesn’t. But what do I know? I like Hyperdimension Neptunia.