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Mighty No. 9

BrandX+ said:

Restsupurae does a funny video on this whole situation.

A+ for the ending.
I also appreciate this video explaining the situation to me so quickly since I was too lazy to look it up myself.
 
A lot of what he said wasn't the problem people had with this, it was exaggerated for comedic effect.
That fanart is still hideous though.
 
Punchline was glorious.
Still, way to oversimplify the subject. Maybe some folks just got startled to see someone who didn't play the MM games or, and this is what truly matters, doesn't show to have any knowledge of their "aesthetical feel" land a spot in the art team. Becky is pretty much the first robotic thing she might have drawn if the rest of the work she has to show off is of any reference (mostly your run-of-the-mill DA dryad boobies).
Sure, overreactions and some fallacious criticisms but by Jubileus! that drawing would only feel at home in Silent Hill. o_0

Anyway, I'm now wondering what is happening in the parallel universe where a masculinist got accepted into WayForward's team as a Art Director/Community Manager and his first interaction with the fans is saying that Shantae should switch genders.
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Disclosure: Mantae, very unlike Becky, is awesome. At least this artist did more than just draw a five o'clock shadow on Shantae. :3
 
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Balder said:
Punchline was glorious.
Still, way to oversimplify the subject. Maybe some folks just got startled to see someone who didn't play the MM games or, and this is what truly matters, doesn't show to have any knowledge of their "aesthetical feel" land a spot in the art team. Becky is pretty much the first robotic thing she might have drawn if the rest of the work she has to show off is of any reference (mostly your run-of-the-mill DA dryad boobies).
But she didn't land a spot on the art team.
She has some sort of vague input on the art that her friend(s) on the art team do.
We don't even know what she's done or how she's contributing, but it would defy every piece of evidence we've got if her influence is anything but negligible. That would be like some guy who's pretty good friends with a senator saying that he writes laws.
 
Horseman said:
But she didn't land a spot on the art team.
She has some sort of vague input on the art that her friend(s) on the art team do.
We don't even know what she's done or how she's contributing, but it would defy every piece of evidence we've got if her influence is anything but negligible. That would be like some guy who's pretty good friends with a senator saying that he writes laws.

Nope.

She had a deleted tweet saying she was "designing robots." Not giving opinions on her boyfriend's work. Though now she also says "BF" meant best friend, which I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on, because it isn't really important or material to anything.

Now she says she's just the community manager but "when asked to, I also contribute ideas and sketches to our amazing artists here (Komaki-san, KimoKimo-san, etc). But I am by no means a senior artist, and everything goes through them and their judgement and filter."

So yeah, she's doing some art work for the game. For whatever reason. Thankfully in an apparently low-level capacity, but still, weird.
 
BrandX+ said:
...

Restsupurae does a funny video on this whole situation.
I had this running in another tab and was kind of surprised that it just ended. I was waiting for it to get funny.
 
SunnyRei said:
Nope.

She had a deleted tweet saying she was "designing robots." Not giving opinions on her boyfriend's work. Though now she also says "BF" meant best friend, which I'll give her the benefit of the doubt on, because it isn't really important or material to anything.

Now she says she's just the community manager but "when asked to, I also contribute ideas and sketches to our amazing artists here (Komaki-san, KimoKimo-san, etc). But I am by no means a senior artist, and everything goes through them and their judgement and filter."

So yeah, she's doing some art work for the game. For whatever reason. Thankfully in an apparently low-level capacity, but still, weird.
But she's not on the art team. There's a big difference between being an actual member of the art team and a friend of some people on the art team who sometimes helps out.
Either way, there's absolutely no way the poor girl's going to get any of her art in the final game now. Even if she managed to make something actually good there's just too many people that would get angry at them for it, and that's multiplied by the fact that she's not all that great at art to begin with.
 
I actually wouldn't mind having the option of having an alternate female equivalent to Beck if the character design is good. Worked great for the Mega Man Zx games.

That or just make Call playable.
 
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Squire Grooktook said:
I actually wouldn't mind having the option of having an alternate female equivalent to Beck if the character design is good. Worked great for the Mega Man Zx games.

That or just make Call playable.

Call is playable. We're just not sure in what capacity.
 
I remember back when Megaman X first came out, and I thought for sure that Zero was a girl. She was such a badass, coaching X on how to man-up, and flashing those green orbs around without a care. Then I learned that she had a robo-penis, and it made me sad. There was a lot of fanart I had to tuck behind my bookshelf that day.

I had trouble warming up to Man Zero at first, but I think we got along better once he showed off that big long sabre of his.
 
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Crayolan said:
Call is playable. We're just not sure in what capacity.
It would be rather silly if you couldn't play as her in single player. I mean they have to fully animate her for the co-op anyway. It would take like 10 minutes.
 
Crayolan said:
Call is playable. We're just not sure in what capacity.
Call is being given a single player level and boss as per the stretch goal on the kickstarter page.

The thing about Dina's original post about wanting to make beck a female character is that it happened literally 24 hours after the kickstarter went up. At that time their were a number of fans, male and female, who wanted call to be playable. The community voiced it's opinion and Comcept met the demand. Call will be playable for online coop and she gets her own unique level and boss encounter.

This whole situation has been over-inflated because gamers are (rightfully) worried every time someone with the potential to have sway in the community is revealed to be associated with some activist group. You also have a lack of information in the beginning as Dina did not really clarify what she was actually doing for the game on her twitter, and the MN9 community wasn't really told what her position was until a little while afterwords.

This whole event reeks and the sooner we push it behind us the better. The gaming community already has enough problems without baiting in the white knight and feminist crowds intentionally into a confrontation. I say let Dina keep the job and judge her on how well she can do it.
 
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"The gaming community already has enough problems without baiting in the white knight and feminist crowds"


hahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha
 
ragnorok64 said:
The only points of reference for commmunity managers I have is guys like Seth Killian, Filthie Rich, and Combofiend. They're all people that represent to communities they were managing. I can see how making someone whose only visible community contribution is gender swapping the main character the community manager would he disconcerting.
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Can we please get back to discussing the game?
 
Some of us have been talking about voice acting in the game on the boards and a rather wily concept that should be reworked. A few things I think could be of interesting discussion:

-Yay or Nay to fully voiced game? (Or go with classic text beeps only ala MMX4)
-What should Beck sound like anyway? Young kid, or a bit like a teen?
-Also Call-D is awesome and should totally be remade into an enemy or something.
 
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Shockdingo said:
Some of us have been talking about voice acting in the game on the boards and a rather wily concept that should be reworked. A few things I think could be of interesting discussion:

-Yay or Nay to fully voiced game? (Or go with classic text beeps only ala MMX4)
-What should Beck sound like anyway? Young kid, or a bit like a teen?
-Also Call-D is awesome and should totally be remade into an enemy or something.
-Yay all the way. I can't believe that some people would actually veto that assuming they can bring in a good team of voice actors. The good scientist should be voiced by Tom Kenny.
-With Beck, I'm leaning towards a more childish voice.
-Call C is the one that should be reused, that unicorn weapon. She was my second choice entirely because she would be a blast to play as in co-op.
 
Shockdingo said:
Some of us have been talking about voice acting in the game on the boards and a rather wily concept that should be reworked. A few things I think could be of interesting discussion:

-Yay or Nay to fully voiced game? (Or go with classic text beeps only ala MMX4)
-What should Beck sound like anyway? Young kid, or a bit like a teen?
-Also Call-D is awesome and should totally be remade into an enemy or something.
-Yay. I think that classic sounds would be fine, but since I don't think the game will be too voice heavy having then couldn't hurt.
- I think a teenage voice would fit him.
- She does have a certain Wiley appeal to her.
Kristoph said:
"The gaming community already has enough problems without baiting in the white knight and feminist crowds"


hahahahahhahahahahahahahahahhahahahahaha
Care to elaborate?
 
Not really? The idea that the 'gaming community' shouldn't want feminism is just sort of an embarrassing, laughable thing, i think.
 
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Kristoph said:
Not really? The idea that the 'gaming community' shouldn't want feminism is just sort of an embarrassing, laughable thing, i think.
I agree, but how something is done is EXTREMELY important, especially as a community manager whose supposed to be a direct liason between the fans and game creators. As a 'fan' she's free to express herself, but as a community manager she shoud at least try to be as unbiased as possible when communicating with the fan and designers, other wise she's just communicating her ideas.

That being said, the other beckers blew things waaay out of proportion and I'm truly disappointed in them. While it is true that there are probably more qualified people to fill her position, calling her method of getting the job nepotism is kinda pointless. It's pretty much a mean way to say networking (i.e. she knew someone who helped her get her foot in the door). And many of their responses were just rude, going as far as calling her a feminazi. There's nothing wrong with wanting female robots. (See exhibit A)

Now I personally dont agree with Beck being a girl because he wasn't presented to the world as a girl and I'm not a fan of changing publicly established things just for the sake of changing things. If Beck was Becky from the get go, I'd be annoyed if people tried to make her a Beck. It's like trying to turn Princess Peach into Prince Peach Fuzz. I'm just like... why?

Imo that's the only legit reason to not want Becki. If they do a sequel with a female robot, I'd be down for it. Heck I have a megaman side-story alt-universe headcannon that involves a female robot, but I wouldnt dare change the original MM.
 
Kristoph said:
Not really? The idea that the 'gaming community' shouldn't want feminism is just sort of an embarrassing, laughable thing, i think.
Depends on what you mean by feminism. A lot of people seem to have differing definitions of feminism these days. Also there's a difference between simply believing in equal rights/etc. and an activist group intruding on someone elses design process.

I'm not for or against anything on this issue, as I don't have enough information and it really doesn't seem like a big enough deal to worry about. I'm just trying to be empathetic to both sides since I don't like to see people smeared as "sexist" or "feminazi" when they may have entirely different motives at heart for what they say (and may fail to communicate them properly).

Covenant said:
Now I personally dont agree with Beck being a girl because he wasn't presented to the world as a girl and I'm not a fan of changing publicly established things just for the sake of changing things. If Beck was Becky from the get go, I'd be annoyed if people tried to make her a Beck. It's like trying to turn Princess Peach into Prince Peach Fuzz. I'm just like... why?

For me it's just that Beck already has a really good character design and it would be a shame to throw it in the trash. An alternate rule 63 version that you could have the option of playing as would be fine by me as long as the character design had the same style and quality as the original.
 
Kristoph said:
Not really? The idea that the 'gaming community' shouldn't want feminism is just sort of an embarrassing, laughable thing, i think.
The problem with wanting to introduce the current wave of feminism into the gaming community is that it's a social movement that's too divided in it's message and representatives. If the current figureheads of feminism in gaming are any indication, gender representation is going to go hand in hand with a sort of iconoclastic movement. I'm all for gender equality in gaming and introducing a more diverse spectrum of characters within gaming, but I don't think that result is going to stick if it's achieved through bullying and shaming tactics. MN9 had a strong character design and a lot of history behind it framing Beck as the spiritual return of Megaman. Wanting to make Call a playable character was a great move and like I said, the community voted and paid to have that introduced into the game. But trying to frame gender representation as some sort of social obligation on behalf of the developers is a road I don't want to see gaming go down.
 
I agree, but how something is done is EXTREMELY important, especially as a community manager whose supposed to be a direct liason between the fans and game creators.
Yeah, but this isn't about that. Maybe that's really what it's about for you, but I think as a member of the Skullgirls community you might have a little more tolerance for a community manager who doesn't always get things right. But of course we know the reality, which is that the vast majority of the Skullgirls community heavily defended Ravidrath when he put his foot in his mouth with the sexism thing, heavily defended him when he made the Smash community mad, and all of this without any indication that Ravidrath had anything fucking at all to do with 2d fighters ever in his past. So yeah, I mean sorry, but I think people need to explain how this isn't very much because she is a woman and a feminist.

an activist group intruding on someone elses design process.
Who is intruding? She made a suggestion about a thing, right? What about that is intruding to you?

I don't think that result is going to stick if it's achieved through bullying and shaming tactics.
Who is bullying people here?

trying to frame gender representation as some sort of social obligation on behalf of the developers is a road I don't want to see gaming go down.
gender representation in art as a whole is a social obligation. not every developer for every project has to abide by that, so if beck isn't a woman, that's not some horrible contemptible thing. but it's self-evidently obvious that cultural expression as a whole should be less monopolized by one particular subset of human culture than it currently is. it's pretty important that we take steps towards that not being the case. the only 'intrusion' here is that people are suggesting that hey, maybe beck becoming a woman could represent one of those steps.
 
Kristoph said:
Who is intruding? She made a suggestion about a thing, right? What about that is intruding to you?

I wasn't saying she did. I said the fear of activist groups (or anyone in general) intruding on a design process is what probably causes people to freak out and start panicking when there's nothing really to fear, which is what seems to have happened here. TBH this whole thing seems like a big misunderstanding that came about from people not really knowing what was going on.
 
yeah it's a misunderstanding. a consistent, harmful one that needs to end
 
Yeah, it certainly shouldn't have been worth 3 pages of discussion. Doesn't really seem like a big deal.
 
As long as Beck don't end up as Becky, it's all good.
 
Squire Grooktook said:
Yeah, it certainly shouldn't have been worth 3 pages of discussion. Doesn't really seem like a big deal.
No, see, it actually is a big deal, which is what i'm saying lol. I'm saying it's very much worth lots of pages of discussion, because people keep not getting it. it's not like it's some resolved thing. as you can see:
As long as Beck don't end up as Becky, it's all good.
 
Kristoph said:
No, see, it actually is a big deal, which is what i'm saying lol. I'm saying it's very much worth lots of pages of discussion, because people keep not getting it. it's not like it's some resolved thing. as you can see:

What I meant was that what she said wasn't a big deal and people only freaked out because they didn't have all the information.

I do agree that Beck shouldn't be genderswapped at all, but from an artistic standpoint because his character design is already really good and shouldn't be changed or thrown in the trash. Now on the other hand, having an optional female counterpart who is basically the same protagonist in all but name (see: Vent and Aile in Mega Man Zx), than I'd be fine with that. In fact I agree it would be cool if more games who's protagonist's gender doesn't play a major story role would include an option like this. Of course that's more time and money designing an extra character and animating etc.

Or alternatively just having a female protagonist in the next game would be fine. Like I said, let's not throw away good character designs for reasons other than their merit as character designs.

Ps: One other thing. If they wanted to make a female protagonist for Mighty No.9, it would be better to just design one from the ground up instead of "making Beck a woman". Taking an existing finalized character design and just swapping the gender with barely any other changes is not an ideal way of going about designing a new character, and is more the stuff of bad fan art than a professional artist.
 
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Covenant said:
I agree, but how something is done is EXTREMELY important, especially as a community manager whose supposed to be a direct liason between the fans and game creators. As a 'fan' she's free to express herself, but as a community manager she shoud at least try to be as unbiased as possible when communicating with the fan and designers, other wise she's just communicating her ideas.
I still don't quite get this. She wasn't communicating with the fans, those were just random things from her personal twitter. As far as I've seen, she barely got the chance to introduce herself before she was bombarded with twitter posts she made. And really she -should- be able to voice her opinion on this stuff in public, but a lot of people apparently can't handle that.
Unless we're back on the MMX is better than MM statement again. Please don't let that be it.

Covenant said:
Imo that's the only legit reason to not want Becki. If they do a sequel with a female robot, I'd be down for it. Heck I have a megaman side-story alt-universe headcannon that involves a female robot, but I wouldnt dare change the original MM.
What the fuck are you talking about? Female megaman already exists, she's called Rokko Chan, and she's great.
Play through all of this and then come back and say that people shouldn't change the original megaman.

The only big problem I have with becky (again, disregarding the poor character design) is that they already raised 4 million dollars with the game while beck was the protagonist. Heavily editing beck's design at this point would feel a little bit like a bait and switch to a lot of people, and it's not hard to see why. I agree with Squire Grooktook that if they wanted a female version of beck, at this point the only way to do it would be to add it as an option, and not the only choice.

Squire Grooktook said:
I wasn't saying she did. I said the fear of activist groups (or anyone in general) intruding on a design process is what probably causes people to freak out and start panicking when there's nothing really to fear, which is what seems to have happened here. TBH this whole thing seems like a big misunderstanding that came about from people not really knowing what was going on.
Even if it is a misunderstanding on their parts if they assumed she had any real influence over the project, it's disgusting that they would hold her in such contempt because she's both strongly feminist and working on a video game they wanted to play.
There's also the ridiculous idea of inserting "political agendas" into this game. Creating a piece of art with a political agenda is called propaganda, and somehow I don't think making the main character female is quite on that level. Or most any accusations of making a game "with an agenda" for that matter, such as Gone Home. Yes it has a strong feminist slant. But it's a game, you can use it to voice your opinion, that doesn't mean that the creator is an evil politician who's trying to warp your mind.
 
Horseman said:
Even if it is a misunderstanding on their parts if they assumed she had any real influence over the project, it's disgusting that they would hold her in such contempt because she's both strongly feminist and working on a video game they wanted to play.
Well you know, this is the internet. The same place where people regularly throw around the word "autism" as an insult.
 
Horseman said:
I still don't quite get this. She wasn't communicating with the fans, those were just random things from her personal twitter. As far as I've seen, she barely got the chance to introduce herself before she was bombarded with twitter posts she made. And really she -should- be able to voice her opinion on this stuff in public, but a lot of people apparently can't handle that.
Unless we're back on the MMX is better than MM statement again. Please don't let that be it.


What the fuck are you talking about? Female megaman already exists, she's called Rokko Chan, and she's great.
Play through all of this and then come back and say that people shouldn't change the original megaman.

The only big problem I have with becky (again, disregarding the poor character design) is that they already raised 4 million dollars with the game while beck was the protagonist. Heavily editing beck's design at this point would feel a little bit like a bait and switch to a lot of people, and it's not hard to see why. I agree with Squire Grooktook that if they wanted a female version of beck, at this point the only way to do it would be to add it as an option, and not the only choice.
I'll tackle that in order.

1. She is a community manager and actually posts on the M no. 9 forums. She voiced her opinion there. And again, it's HOW she did it that was bad. Some things need to be handled differently when you're a public figure. There's a reason politicians do their best to be politically correct and make formal apologies when they fail instead of just saying "go **** yourself" like many would do. In the words of Spielburg: "there's a time to be a human being and have an opinion, and there's a time to sell cars." She is no longer just speaking for herself; she is now the face of the company she works for.

2. Aside from the Rokko chan thing (couldnt get into it and I'm not a fan of the design, but I may watch a play through just because), that is almost the same as what I said.
You :"[we] raised 4 million dollars with the game while beck was the protagonist. Heavily editing beck's design at this point would feel a little bit like a bait and switch to a lot of people, and it's not hard to see why."

ME: "I personally dont agree with Beck being a girl because he wasn't presented to the world as a girl"
 
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Kristoph said:
Who is intruding? She made a suggestion about a thing, right? What about that is intruding to you?

I literally stated that there had nothing was wrong with what Dina in particular had to say regarding making Call a playable character. The community put out $2.75 million dollars in support of that idea. If you take the current reactions to this controversy at face value you're going to miss what really happened. My whole point was that the MN9 community was exaggerating the situation beyond what it needed to be and attracted a crowd of people who won't make the situation better.

Unrelated to the current situation, what is intruding is when an activist group tries to force their ideology into the broad spectrum of a community and enforce themselves as somehow necessary. Yes we need more gender equality, I cannot state that enough, but my own observations with feminism in gaming tells me that the end result is going to turn out like Jack Thompson's crusade against violence in video games. The thing is, over the last decade the gaming community has been correcting its problem areas regarding how certain people get represented. Character customization is becoming a big part of social driven games, and more choice driven single player experiences. We have seen publishers who didn't want to publish female characters for really terrible reasons get lampooned. The gaming community is maturing. Is the process perfect? Not at all. However, the problem isn't so black and white that you can say one group is necessary for perpetuating any lasting change.

gender representation in art as a whole is a social obligation. not every developer for every project has to abide by that, so if beck isn't a woman, that's not some horrible contemptible thing. but it's self-evidently obvious that cultural expression as a whole should be less monopolized by one particular subset of human culture than it currently is. it's pretty important that we take steps towards that not being the case. the only 'intrusion' here is that people are suggesting that hey, maybe beck becoming a woman could represent one of those steps.

This is where we disagree. Gender representation in art is a form of cultural expression first. It's derived from the cultures, economies, and climate in which the art (in this case games) arises from. Social obligation is an overlapping area but the two can be mutually exclusive.

What do you mean by subset of human culture? I'm not sure whether you are referring to the gaming culture or a particular part of it.
 
PaperBag_Sniper said:
The gaming community is maturing. Is the process perfect? Not at all. However, the problem isn't so black and white that you can say one group is necessary for perpetuating any lasting change.

Yeah. I think what a lot of people forget is that their are a lot of different subsets of gaming communities who have different...sensibilities, and games are marketed differently to these demographics. You have us, you have the bro gamers who only play cod, you have the idiots on 4chan trying to be "edgy" by throwing out all sorts of slurs everywhere...Anytime someone attempts to say that gamers are terribly sexist/not sexist, you're going to have 3 million anecdotal stories in response about all the male players who don't mind playing female characters or all the basement dwelling dorks leaving hate mail on someones twitter for identifying as feminist.

I do think things are getting better though over all, and will only continue to do so.
 
there is a reason that the public narrative surrounding video game culture is maturing. the reason is that there are activist groups "forcing their ideologies" on people. who else do you think is responsible for that, lol

(of course by "forcing their ideologies i mean "expressing their opinions." not sure why you continue to choose to frame it as an "intrusion")
 
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Kristoph said:
there is a reason that the public narrative surrounding video game culture is maturing. the reason is that there are activist groups "forcing their ideologies" on people. who else do you think is responsible for that, lol

(of course by "forcing their ideologies i mean "expressing their opinions." not sure why you continue to choose to frame it as an "intrusion")

I'm not sure that's all there is or if that's even the biggest factor. I think it honestly has more to do with video games becoming more wide spread, becoming a larger industry, trying to reach a wider audience, and in general moving more in the direction of more involved story telling and aesthetics since the days of super nes's and arcades. Ripping off fairy tales and having a knight rescue a princess might work just fine for your 16 bit platformer, but maybe not so much for a 100 hour adventure game with branching narrative paths.

I think you don't need an activist group to create a good female character. You just need a good writer. And it hasn't been until just the past decade (or less) since "video game writer" even barely started to become a thing. I'm not saying that activists haven't helped anything by spreading their opinion, but it's a disservice to all the writers/artists who have created cool female characters to imply that the only reason they did it was because they had someone standing over their shoulder poking them to do it.

Calypsx said:
Wouldn't Beck being female still be Beck while looking exactly the same? There would be no visual differences at all if done correctly. No need to give Beck obvious "feminine" features or change his design/personality just because he is changed to a female robot.

They'd have to redo his costume methinks. It's too bulky to really tell anything about shape and there's too little facial detail in the art style to tell just by that. Given the art style he'd probably be a reverse trap if they didn't change the costume.
 
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Calypsx said:
A little off topic but sort of on topic at the same time...

I had a friend that was for some reason disturbed by the thought of Beck being female. He was scared they would change his design if he was female.

Wouldn't Beck being female still be Beck while looking exactly the same? There would be no visual differences at all if done correctly. No need to give Beck obvious "feminine" features or change his design/personality just because he is changed to a female robot.

I don't really care what gender Beck is. Though I do agree more representation is a step in the right direction.
What would even be the point of the change if they didn't change the design? Also considering the Megaman legacy, female robots/reploids look decidedly female.
 
Calypsx said:
It's a robot and girls can be bulky too. No need to make it feminine just because it's a girl. Beck looks cool regardless, that's the main goal here.

I'm fully aware of that. I'm just saying that given the art style that this game has, it would be very difficult to actually tell he was a girl given the characteristically cartoony small amount of facial detail.
 
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