Leaderboard

We're not disregarding it, we're more or less saying "make a better argument before we join you". Burden of proof falls on the people making the claim; if someone is making a claim, and they can't substantiate it, that doesn't make the claim wrong, no, but just because the claim has the potential to be right doesn't mean we should go ahead and validate it without the proper thought. Is women's portrayal in games a problem? Abso-fucking-lutely. Even if you argue that there's nothing wrong with objectification, there are people who feel attacked by this kind of stuff, and their voices need to be heard. Pretty much anyone besides white males has the potential for having a problem with their representation in media, and that's fine, because it's okay to want a fair equal society. But that's not the issue we're attacking here. Anita is making a claim that we can't validate, which is that the stuff we see in games is translating to sexist thought processes and solidifying the poor treating of women in society. Is this an outlandish claim? Absolutely fucking not, it's absolutely plausible to believe that could be a thing, knowing what we know about human society and how much media can affect us on a deeper level. It's also an incredibly strong claim with profound implications, so it needs to be treated as such and scrutinized as such. So don't spread it around if it hasn't actually been proven and mask it as if it has been proven. That's stupid. Because even if you get the dregs of Tumblr following your shitty logic, you won't get people who know how to think twice to follow you. I'm not a fucking asshole, and if it needs to be said, if there was evidence (that Anita mentions but never shows) for her claims, I would say "yeah, that's kinda messed up. I'm on your side." Instead I don't really take her seriously because while her intentions are good, I can't really have a peace of mind that the specific details of what she's doing are in any way valid or helpful. I don't really right now personally think that fixing game representation is in any way going to have any impact on commonplace social misogyny in real life, so I don't really care about fixing games. Because ultimately, it will do nothing, because my understanding of art/history serves me the idea that art is symptomatic of cultural problems (absolutely the opposite of being one of the roots, if not the root). It could be a feedback loop (between art feeding culture and culture feeding art back) in some circumstances, but again... the claim that big boobed characters somehow connects to passive breeding of real life misogyny seems like something that needs some serious review. She disagrees, but is offering nothing I can latch onto for her to persuade me. The "we don't need you anyway" argument is laughable. If you're trying to do good, and you need to build a cause, you need all you can get. So that's a bad thing if she's right all along. Because damaging her credibility damages her cause. I think she has her causation backwards, and I think she has her cause backwards. I think to fix game representation, we need to focus on methods to fix misogyny in society. Things like improving education for kids and whatnot, both in clinical/health areas and better social conditioning. The art will naturally improve by consequence.

Thanks for your response; cleared a lot up, for me. I legitimately find your taking equal offense to behavior-based slurs & identity-based slurs very interesting... I don't think most people think this way, but it might be better if more did, I don't know... Another confounding factor to consider re: catharsis... in at least one study, economists noticed that violent crime decreased on the release dates of violent movies. They didn't attribute this to any sort of cathartic effect, however - their explanation was simpler: violent people tend to enjoy violent films more when violent films are released, violent people go see them, and are thus "removed from circulation" and are not out committing violent acts. So it's not a measurement of the influence at ALL, but rather a straight-up measurement of how time is spent - pragmatic, and almost completely ignored (i.e. not considered) by most experiments that focus on short-term psychological effects. It doesn't have to be a cathartic effect, it can simply be a "time as a finite resource" effect, in other words...

I will actually PayPal you $10 if you can show me a specific quote that shows "actions" =/= "behavior" (something I never talked about, ever). Otherwise you're doing what you usually do in discussions on OCR, which is derail them by taking sarcastic, unsubstantiated shots and strawmans at everyone you disagree with.

OK, I understand that perspective. I think perhaps "bleeding-heart commie" would have been a better example of a political slur and opposite of "fascist", which yes, I do think people who use those terms have turned their brains off. And yes, I personally feel like slurs against perceived behavior are just as powerful as slurs against what you call "identity." First, because once you put a label on someone's position, you stop listening to them. You may have even put them in a box that doesn't really describe them accurately (e.g. "fascist" or "commie" are unlikely to be strictly true). In addition to being denigrating and dismissive to the person themselves, it dismisses their very thoughts and not just their biology. I think that's at least as powerful. Second, political identity is extremely important these days. People identify very strongly with their political orientation. For instance, here is an article about discrimination against identified conservatives. I've seen many similar articles lately, but this is the one I recall specifically offhand. I think it's fair to say that many people consider being liberal or conservative just as important to their own identity as their race or sex, and it seems that many people think other people's political leanings to be one of the most important things in defining their potential relationship. I thought that was basically what you were talking about, Norway being a classic example of a sexually liberal country. I seem to have missed your point then. Note that I said "compelling reason to focus on objectification and not mere presence." I think we're in complete agreement here: Porn (and sexualized representations of women in general) in and of itself is probably not harmful. Where we disagree is whether certain types of porn, heavy on the objectification, is harmful. I believe it is, but that's an opinion and not a demonstrated fact, which could stand to be researched further. This study was specifically among ADHD participants, and without the full text, I'm not sure what they mean bu a "very slight cathartic effect." At the time I was in college, catharsis being an incorrect theory was almost universally supported (lots and lots of studies; there are a few in the Wikipedia article), but it does seem like there are a few more current articles in its favor. Very true, and yeah, that's a good article. Context and culture are vitally important and hard to understand. It's not as simple as "X causes Y." Anyone claiming it is is seriously out of touch with reality. There's circular reinforcement, there are tons of mediating and moderating relationships, there's our horrible polarizing two-party system, and that's just the beginning. An isolated decree such as censorship won't solve a darn thing (hello, Prohibition).

YES! ANOTHER WBG MIX! Always happy when I see anything by worldsbestgrandpa. And this mix does not disappoint. Live acoustic folk arrangements done right!

Just checking in. Remixes are done, artwork is like, 95%(?) done, nothing else really outstanding (as in needs to be done, not as in quality or work). So... yeah.

Holy hot damn. How come I didn't find this until now. This is an unbelievable piano performance, and the fact that it's a remix, from one of the best Castlevania games no less, takes it to a whole 'nother level in my book. It's quite amazing to see game remixes get such a virtuosic treatment. Don't miss this one where VGM meets the technical purity&complexity of true classical music.

Sup guys! Just wanted to give y'all an update - We're now 5 days away from the end of the Kickstarter campaign, and we've raised over $2,600 for this project!! The extra money will go to a mixing/mastering engineer, as well as some live instrumental overdubs to increase the quality of the release. Thanks SO MUCH to everyone who's backed our project, and I appreciate all the shares/likes/retweets as well!

Dear OC ReMix, I love your site and all the activity on it. The quality of the “remixes” is often very high and they’re really enjoyable beyond just being cool to recognize the tunes. Wanting to contribute to the site I started working on a remix of my own, from one of the games that inspired me to be a musician (I’m now a music teacher and director and compose all kinds of music). Contact Information MisterTheMan (I just signed up) Real name: Tim de Man timdeman.com (Dutch), soundcloud.com/timdeman userid: 54175 Submission Information from Final Fantasy VIII new title: An oath fulfilled original: The oath (Nobuo Uematsu) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr4eB0WOwN0 About the mix I’ve been interested in orchestral music for quite a while (ever since I played Heroes of Might and Magic III actually!) and have dabbled in it for quite a while. I’m now in the process of learning the skill of orchestration properly by listening to a lot of classical music and (mostly [orchestrated] game) soundtracks and reading literature on the subject. There is a populair orchestration of this particular tune on the net, but in my eyes it's a bit overly sentimental. I wanted to add more tension to the tune and make it tell more of a story. The original composer didn’t have the luxury of a song that could develop in the same way because the tracks in the game are looped so I had a chance to make the titulair oath “pay off” in the end which, I think, is a very satisfying moment =) . It was made in Logic X using exclusively sample libraries from East West. I hope you like it! Kind regards, MisterTheMan / Tim https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr4eB0WOwN0

I wanted to panel this one because I remember Nyx had this marked as Mod Review but never got any staff feedback, and some of the artist's comments in Workshop thread came across defensive to me, so I felt it appropriate to send this here to give some more feedback. To me, this feels highly conservative and doesn't introduce very much original writing or ideas to the melody, though the few harmonic variations and the overall mashup of the two sources does have some merit by OCR standards. Using the drum loop and the "birdcussion" as a sample is cool, though I feel like you mixed the metallic percussion kind of loud during the transitions - for example, the fill at :38 is startling and out of place, to me. The metallic loop sounds really nice when it's mixed lower and more in the background. The delay effects are well-used and help give the track more texture and movement, I like how you utilized that. Production-wise, the samples and synth design are not very exciting and introduce very little texture to the mix. Experiment with some more interesting synth sound and fills and effects - Skrypnyk and Timaeus gave some really good feedback in the Workshop thread. The arrangement sticks very close to the structure/feel of the original, and there are some sections where you have a lot of countermelodies playing but no lead where it just feels aimless. Sorry to say, this track just isn't working for me on a lot of levels My guess is that, by this point, you've moved onto other projects and I already know you've improved your craft with more recent remixes, but I wanted to make sure you received more validation on the feedback you received in the Workshop thread because I feel like they were very good critiques that still apply to the final submitted version. I'm excited to see what you submit to us in the future NO

Whoa. How about that video game music, huh?