I’m a big fan of dancing in many forms. I also really like Harmonix games, so info about the Dance Central line tends to catch my eye. This Kotaku article is titled “On Playing Dance Central 2 While Male”. Now, I expected a bit of ridiculous gender role stereotyping about how silly guys look playing the game, but here’s the first half of the article:
Recently my friend, who for this article we’ll call “Dan,” was over at my apartment for beers and video games. We’d gone through most of the big fall releases—I showed him some craziness from Saints Row: The Third, got across the gist of Catherine, and played some (shockingly fun) split-screen Modern Warfare 3 spec-ops. The Kinect had gotten a go as well, and we’d laughed our way through several levels of Gunstringer and gotten our asses kicked by the surprisingly difficult Child of Eden.
“You know, I’ve got Dance Central 2 here, let’s play that!” I said, pointing to the shiny, colorful box of Harmonix’s Kinect-only dancing game.
“Sure,” Dan said, though in retrospect he was doubtless entirely unsure what he was getting himself into. And so we played Dance Central 2, two dorky bros in the mid-afternoon, standing in front of the TV and swinging our hips to “Toxic” and “Bad Romance.” It was funny, it was dumb; it was uniquely uncomfortable.
After we played for a little while, we took a break to have a beer and Dan remarked to me, “Man, that game is kind of uncomfortable for straight guys!” (I’m paraphrasing—he said it much more thoughtfully than that.)
I agreed, because I knew what he meant—I mean, one plays Dance Central by dancing. It requires an entirely different sort of physical interaction than most other video games. It was as though Dan and I had been sitting around pondering what to do and one of us had said, “You know what? Let’s go dancing together, just you and me!” Suffice to say, that is not something either of us would likely ever suggest. We’re fairly boring.
This was not about being male. This was about being gay. The game made them uncomfortable because as straight men, they shouldn’t be dancing, especially not dancing in the presence of other men.
He goes on to lift quotes from a Gamasutra article (and a very good one, talking about the unique connection the game brings to your sense of identity and self-expression), but never ties it in with the issues of his sexuality that made him uncomfortable in the first place. If he wasn’t shooting something from a car window or doing something else undoubtedly male, he got unsettled because then it was kind of gay. The article is just littered with terminology that supports his straight identity - the games he lists at the beginning (Saint’s Row, MW3, the extremely hetero Catherine), the break after playing Dance Central to have some beers…
Later, he says that he feels uncomfortable about it because he’s “straight-laced” and isn’t prone to expressing himself through dance. And that’s a cool thing that the Gamasutra article hits on. But almost everything in his article that’s not just reviewing his source is instead giving off the impression that dancing is gay.
Read the Gamasutra article, and I think you will see that Kirk Hamilton either missed the point or expressed it really poorly.
I don’t hate Kirk Hamilton - in fact, I don’t hate anyone, despite what you may think - but if he were to fall down the stairs breaking his arms and legs in the process I’d have a tough time feeling sorry for him.
NAS’ response is right on the nose. I wish I’d written it. Nicely done.
The best part about that “Kotaku Commenters Do Not Suck” article? They emailed it to their newsletter subscribers. Wow. Talk about insecure.
It is absolutely hilarious watching them post shit like this. It’s like watching a Republican Presidential candidate trying to maintain their integrity, or listening to Nickelback talk about how great their new album is.
Is Special K falling apart without Crecente? Has the madness finally taken them all? It sure as fuck seems that way.
I’m glad Kotaku have taken to reviewing snacks. I’ve always wanted to know what a $1 box of Milk Duds is like.
It looks like there are a lot of conflicted reactions [regarding the Batman: Arkham City spoiler] here. I’d hazard a guess that if the developers decided that this was something that they wanted reporters to see and write about, they didn’t view it as a major plot point.
Of course some of you don’t want to know anything about a game before you play it, which makes these sorts of things troubling.
We do discuss these sorts of issues before running a story and in this case we decided that it makes the most sense to treat the news of the event as the news.
[…]
I’ve always felt that spoilers were things not used in the marketing of a game. If a developer is marketing the game with information, that information isn’t a spoiler in their mind, one would think.
This was an event created to market the game. So we reported on it.
—Brian Crecente’s response to criticism of Kirk Hamilton’s Arkham City spoiler.
Let me tell you a little something about how other parts of the entertainment industry handle this sort of thing, Brian. Let me tell you how other publications deal with this sort of thing.
In March or April of almost every year since 2006, the BBC has held huge screenings for the series premiere Doctor Who. Tons of people attend this thing - celebrities, the cast, the crew and, yes, journalists. For many journalists in the UK, this is their first look at the series premiere of one of the biggest shows on British telly. Of course they’re going to attend.
Y’know what they do next? They write an article covering the event. They talk about the people who attended, they talk broadly about the episode itself, and they ramp up anticipation for the coming series.
Y’know what they don’t do? Write an article that spoils the fucking episode. Y’know why they don’t do this? Because they’re fucking professionals.
Of course, there are some outlets that will post spoilers - usually blogs like Bleeding Cool or the rather single-minded Blogtor Who - but they at least have the decency to actually hide the damn things below the fold, or tag them as spoilers. They give people fair warning. Because, and this is crucial, they don’t want to fuck things up for people who, for some inexplicable reason, want their first experience of the game to actually be their first experience of the game.
Maybe this stuff doesn’t matter to you. Maybe you’re surrounded by game spoilers all the time. I mean, you’re bound to be - it part of the job, surely - but maybe you should stop, and think, and remember that there are people to whom this stuff actually matters. It may just be a job to you, but to us it’s entertainment. It’s a narrative we’re actively interested in following.
Maybe you should think about that the next time you’re given the opportunity to shit all over a game.
In Kirk Cameron’s Kirk Hamilton’s coverage of Batman: Arkham City he opted to go with a headline, a giant image and an opening paragraph all declaring something incredibly spoilery. I won’t repost the spoiler here for fear of ruining everybody else’s day, but suffice to day say we’re talking “Cliffhanger of ‘Aliens of London’ being immediately ruined by the ‘Next Time…’ trail for ‘World War Three’” levels of spoilerdom.
(If you’re not a Doctor Who fan, just imagine someone writing a preview of Serenity in 2005 that opens with the line, “Oh, wow! Wash dies near the end! Bloody Hell! Wow. Anyway, let’s talk about the cameras they used…”. If you’re not a Firefly/Serenity fan, Glod help you.)
Kirk then throws out some other, minor spoilers, then talks about what actually playing the game is like.He even starts one paragraph with, “I should talk for a second about Detective Mode…” - yes, Kirk, maybe you should. In fact, maybe you should have opened with something like that instead of shitting on people’s experience.
I mean, fuck. Some people actually care about the plot to the games they play, Kirk. Alright, yes, games may well be universally terribly-written, with stilted dialog and characters so wafer-thin that Mr Creosote could eat them without exploding immediately afterwards, but Gloddamn it, they matter.
Edit: Y’know that thing I made fun of 1UP’s Chris Pereira for doing earlier in the week? Well I did it in this article. Whoops! Anyway, I’ve corrected the mistake. Transparency!
I’m so glad Kotaku did this. I don’t know how else I would have come across Jason Schreier’s superb Quake joke.
