What do you do with a game like Duke Nukem? So over the top in every way, is there any real point to criticizing something that considers itself satire? Try to pin it down and it’ll just twist out of the way, spiraling its troll arms all over the place.
So we’ve been avoiding it except where it gets unusually weird and knotted (even for Duke Nukem) and just waiting for the long gestating Duke fanboy wave to crest over. But I guess my own personal threshold for when things stop being ignorable is when you put in a minigame where slapping women is encouraged.
From Eurogamer:
Apparently in Capture the Babe – DNF’s Capture the Flag mode – when you grab the other team’s babe, she sometimes “freaks out”. The solution? Give her a gentle smack.
I’m not really sure what else to say about this. That the idea of women as inherently irrational and impossible to reason with is too subtly mired in our culture to make jokes about that don’t make me uncomfortable? Using a woman as flags in capture the flag and being physically abusive towards them is comparatively clear in it’s wrongness. Satire ain’t carte blanche to do whatever without expecting criticism, but then Duke Nukem has never made any attempts to be serious.
Anyway, if this doesn’t offend you, I’m not sure I can convince you to be offended with rational argument, and if it does offend you, you already know why.
(via Joystiq.)
