Native Jovian

Zircon, part of the problem is that I'm not actually sure what you're arguing for. Is sexism a problem in the gaming industry? Yes. Should something be done about it? Absolutely. Will developers need to be involved in that? Of course. But what actually are you suggesting should happen? Your line of reasoning seems to be that game developers make "intensively male-targeted games" (with "things like DDD boobs with jiggle physics"), which makes gaming feel like a boys' club, which makes the gaming industry hostile to women, which means women don't enter the gaming industry, which means game developers make male-focused games. What I thought you were saying was that developers should make less male-focused games, which will making gaming less of a boys' club, which will make the industry less hostile to women, which means more women will join the industry, which means developers will make less male-focused games. But that's not, apparently, what you're saying. So now I'm confused, both about your goal (less male-focused games? making gaming feel less like a boys' club? making the gaming industry less hostile to women? all of the above?) and what you're suggesting we do to achieve that. Personally, of those problems, I think the most important issue is gaming as a boys' club. That's an extremely tame way to put it, but as long as places like Xbox Live and random servers for [insert your favorite PC shooter here] have a reputation for rampant misogyny (not to mention similar problems in professional gaming), then gaming as a whole is going to suffer for it. The best way I can come up with for dealing with that kind of nonsense is simply to take it seriously. Make reporting such things on Xbox Live easy, and institute (and enforce) a zero-tolerance policy. Not necessarily bans for a first offense, but something like a 24-hour suspension will certainly get someone's attention. Force pro gamers who make that sorts of comments to forfeit a match. You won't be able to do anything about individual, privately-run servers, but you can at least make the corporate interests in the community stand up and take notice.

I'm sort of ambivalent on positive discrimination, but that's not really what I meant. I wasn't suggesting that they favor women over men in their hiring, simply that they made a deliberate point to include women in their recruiting. I think that women are certainly equally qualified and capable of working in the video game industry, so just making your company a welcoming environment for women employees (so you retain the ones you hire) and making sure you're not focusing your recruitment efforts exclusively on men (so you hire women in the first place), and you'll end up with more female employees than the industry average naturally, without having to do any sort of affirmative action style positive discrimination. Of course, given how few women are in the industry in the first place, that still won't be anything like parity between male and female employees -- but it's still a step in the right direction. That is a risk, yeah -- especially since new companies in an industry as competitive as game development can and do fail through no real fault of the quality of their product. No idea, it was just the only thing I could think of that would affect this issue in a positive way. Just being able to point at an example and say "look at this company, they do it right with regards to women in the gaming industry, others should be more like them" would be valuable.

This is where you sorta lose me. Ignoring the question of what constitutes a female-friendly game (is it just a lack of male-targeted aspects like huge musclebound male protagonists and shallow eye candy female supporting characters? is it the inclusion of female-oriented features? what sort of things would those be?), I think you're putting the cart before the horse. Women are already gamers. They might not be precisely half, but they're a sizable chunk of the community, so I don't think you can make a good argument that games themselves are driving away women. If there's a problem in the industry, then, it must be from the developer's end. (I'm not sure that there is a problem in the game industry specifically, as opposed to the tech industry in general, but they're certainly related topics in any case.) If you want to increase female presence in game development, I think the best way to go about it would be to form a game studio and aggressively recruit women and make sure you crack down on the kind of toxic behavior you mention in earlier posts. (I'd also try to minimize crunch culture, where a "normal" week is 60 hours and it only gets worse from there, but that's not directly related to the topic.) Nothing impresses like success, and having (and actually implementing/enforcing) a strict anti-discrimination policy, you can go a long way to prove that such a thing is beneficial to companies that use it. Of course, one company can't change an entire industry, but it's a start. Female developers will still likely get harassed at conferences and expos. But even just creating an attitude of "well, those guys are assholes, but I know my company would never put up with that kind of bullshit" would be a huge improvement over "goddamnit, the whole goddamn game industry does this sort of shit".

1) Amaterasu (Okami) 2) Dart Feld (Legend of Dragoon) 3) Kaim Argonar (Lost Odyssey)

On a general note, the conversation about booth babes and such keeps making me think of this (nothing explicit, but probably NSFW): http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/comics/critical-miss/10271-On-Dongles As far as the conversation between DJP and Zircon, I think you're really driving at two different points. DJP seems to be saying that while games that don't rely on objectification of women, damsels in distress, etc are good things, it doesn't necessarily follow that games that do rely on those are bad things -- or at least, any attempt to stifle the use of those things is inevitably going to be worse than the use of those things already is. I can see where he's going with that -- if you want to take gaming seriously as an art form, then attempting to censor it (not in any official capacity, but just trying to get people to buy into the attitude that "games that do this are bad, no game should do this") is almost certainly the wrong way to go about it. I'd much rather see people encouraging game developers to do good things than discouraging them from doing bad things. Zircon, on the other hand, seems to be saying that most of the problems of objectivizing, etc come from a lack of women in the game industry. This may or may not be true, but Zircon presents it as a sort of vicious circle. Men create male-oriented games (meaning damsels in distress, etc), which turn away women, so the male-dominated game development industry remains male-dominated. There are two real problems with this. One, it appears to assume that men make things that alienate women simply by being men, and the only solution to this problem is to add women into the process in order to dilute male influence. I don't think this is true, both because I don't think men create things that alienate women simply as a result of being men and because I don't think that adding women to development teams is the only way to "fix" the issue of alienating women in the first place. Two, the issue of game development being an overwhelmingly-male industry is a small part of a much, much broader trend about the tech sector in general. I think that the fact that most game programmers are male is primarily a result of the fact that most programmers period are male, so you can't really pin the blame for it on the gaming industry's attitude on things like booth babes. The thing is, though, is that both of you really seem to be on the same page, in the long run. Both of you agree that more women in the game industry would be a desirable thing, even if you approach it from different directions. So the question becomes -- how do you encourage this? Is there anything that you can do from a consumer level to help the industry in that direction?

The video spends its time dissecting the specific examples of Zelda and Peach rather than addressing the topic in general. Even if you successfully argue that neither Peach nor Zelda are sexist, you haven't really touched on the greater Damsel in Distress trope as a whole. Anita herself admitted that not every use of the damsel in distress is necessarily sexist (even if she did so in a sort of cursory way, in the last 30 seconds of a 20 minute video). Honestly, I'm not sure how you respond to Anita's video, seeing as she didn't seem to be putting forward an argument of any kind beyond "the use of the damsel in distress trope in video games is sometimes sexist", which I'm not really sure you can argue against. She doesn't try to use this to say that video games a a whole are sexist, or that game developers are sexist, or anything like that. She also never suggests anything that can or should be done about this, which I find sort of annoying, but it's not my video. It very clearly starts from the position of "sexism in video games exists and is bad" (or at least "existed and was bad", given that she doesn't cover anything modern in her first video). No arguments on either count, but I don't really consider that informative or useful. She doesn't make much of an argument that would convince anyone skeptical of her position, and she doesn't really do any sort of analysis on the subject of sexism has changed over the early years of video gaming or how we got to this point in the first place. Honestly, the whole video boils down to "here's a bunch of examples of damsels in distress from video games, which you can see as sexist if you want to". (Not arguing that they aren't sexist, but she doesn't do much arguing that they are, either.) Anyway, that's what people mean when they say she's biased. Instead of starting from a neutral position and presenting evidence to support a particular conclusion, she starts from a specific position and the video proceeds on the assumption that people already accept that position.

Dear Capcom, SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY. Love, NJ

Riding a motorcycle in those shorts seems like a really terrible idea.

That's sort of like saying "how can something be dangerous, when there's no intent to cause harm?" The intent and the effect are two separate things. You can do something dangerous without realizing that it's dangerous (say, walking across a slick surface that you didn't notice was wet). You can do something dangerous without meaning to put anyone in danger (say, washing a slick floor without putting up one of those CAUTION signs). The intent of your action (to walk across a hallway, or to clean the floor) is different from your effect of your action (creating a situation where it's likely someone will slip and fall). The same thing applies to sexism. Sexism is simply treating someone differently because of their gender. Holding a door for a woman (when you would have held it for a man, too) isn't sexism -- but doing something like automatically carrying something heavy for a women (when you wouldn't have for a man) is sexist, even if you didn't realize it was or didn't mean it to be. It's not exactly a cardinal sin, and it doesn't make you a "pig" (though it could make you sort of a jerk, if someone points out that kind of behavior and asks you to stop and you keep doing it anyway) -- but it's still an example (if a small one) of sexism. I would like to note that i find this entire exchange hilariously ironic. That is all.

The quote you use is incredibly dense and sort of lacks a conclusion, so I had to actually go to the article to figure out what you were getting at. As far as I can tell, this is the actual argument being made: Here's the thing: that's not what we're suggesting. It's certainly possible to be sexist unconsciously, by accident, or without realizing it. You don't have to make a conscious decision to be sexist in order to be sexist -- indeed, I would argue that the vast majority of sexism is not conscious or deliberate. What we're saying is that something isn't sexist unless it's sexist. It seems stupid when you put it that way, but that's what it boils down to. The video makes a very good argument that the use of tropes like the damsel in distress may be sexist. I agree, it may be. But that doesn't mean the use of tropes like the damsel in distress is always sexist. Even the video itself says this (albeit as a bit of a disclaimer, in the last 30 seconds of a 20 minute video). This is what I was getting at earlier about using a single blatant example first. If you want to talk about sexism, it'd be smart to start with something that everyone can look at and go "yep, that's sexist, no question". That's why we've fallen into talking about specific examples of whether or not Mario and/or Zelda are sexist, instead of talking about the larger issue of sexism in video games as a general topic. But let's try to move things along to a more productive line of discussion: what should game developers do to reduce the presence of sexism in video games? Is it possible to retool classic franchises like Mario and Zelda to eliminate possibly-sexist themes (like the damsel in distress) without pissing off fans? Because, let's face it -- a company isn't going to make changes that will cause it to lose money. Having the next Zelda game star Zelda instead of Link, for example, will alienate a lot of fans. Not because those fans are unconscious sexists who don't want to play as a female character, but because Link has always been the playable character of every Zelda game, and changing that formula is going to annoy a lot of folks. I think one answer is something we've already briefly discussed in this thread: get rid of lazy writing. Instead of having Zelda kidnapped yet again and need Link to go save her, have them both go off to accomplish separate-but-complimentary goals. (For example, in Ocarina of Time, instead of having Zelda captured and held in Ganon's castle, have Link assault the front gates to provide a distraction while Zelda uses her Shiek ninja skills to sneak in unnoticed and sabotage his defenses.) Even something as simple as making Peach a playable character in a Mario game (why did New Super Mario Bros Wii use two Toads instead of Toad and Peach?) would do a lot to -- if nothing else -- placate critics. Again, I don't necessarily think that something like the lack of Peach as a playable character is necessarily sexist, but if they can avoid even the appearance of sexism (and improve their writing at the same time), then why not do it?

True, and I'm not saying that the subtler points shouldn't be discussed ever. My point is that if you're kicking off a series of videos on the subject of sexism in the context of video games and speaking to a wide audience (as opposed to, say, self-identified feminists) then your first job should be to convince people that sexism is a serious problem in video games. Sarkeesian started by pointing out a mildly sexist but extremely widespread trope used by video games. I think a better way to convince skeptics would be to start with a single, extremely blatant example of sexism (say, Duke Nukem or something similar) and then go out from there to show more subtle but more widespread examples. If she's started from the point of view that everyone already agrees with her that sexism is a widespread, serious problem in the video game industry, then the starting place she chose is a reasonable one. Of course, the response she got on her comments seem to indicate that everyone doesn't already agree with her that sexism is a widespread, serious problem in video games. In any case, I wasn't criticizing her message, just her delivery. I wasn't criticizing her for having a huge amount of evidence, just what she choose to highlight first. I don't think that the damsel in distress is a great example of sexism in video games, because (as we've spent pages discussing) I don't think it's necessarily sexist, so "a lot of video games use damsels in distress" isn't a particularly compelling argument for "a lot of video games are sexist". Yes, but the subject was sexism in video games. I'm certainly not arguing that sexism doesn't exist, or even that sexism doesn't exist in video games -- I'm just saying that I don't think Sarkeesian made a very good case for it by starting with a widespread but subtle example instead of a specific but blatant example.

That was me, back here. Agreed; this is what I was trying to get at, from the other direction (ie, "even if the pattern is harmful, instances of the damsel in distress trope taken individually can be harmless"). I wasn't saying that people shouldn't discuss what works are sexist and which aren't. I was saying that if you completely flip your shit over every instance of a maybe-kinda-could be sexist element in a work (like the damsel in distress trope), which aren't individually a big problem, then people are going to tune you out because you're making a big deal over small issues. Put another way: save your effort for the big issues. People have a limited attention span and most of them don't take well to being preached at, so if you actually want to reach a wide audience, you have to concentrate your effort. Instead of saying "everything's a little bit sexist", start with something that's blatantly sexist -- which makes it hard for people to dismiss it as "eh, that's no big deal" like they can with small examples -- and then pull out to show how this is indicative of the wider industry, and how even games that don't seem nearly as bad at first can still have problems. Really, the video seemed less like "sexism is a problem in the gaming industry and here's why you should care" and more like "a brief history of institutional sexism in the gaming industry". It approaches the topic as if its viewers already agreed that sexism was a big problem in video games and simply wanted to learn more about the issue's history. That's a no-good way to convince people that it is an issue in the first place. Of course, it's possible that that's exactly how she's approaching the series -- "you already know that sexism is a problem, so here are some details". There's nothing wrong with that, it's just not going to convince many people that don't believe in the problem to begin with that there is a problem at all. Definitely. No disagreement there. That's where we disagree. Certainly tropes like the damsel in distress has the potential to be misogynist, and a writer using the trope should guard against that, but suggesting that no one should use the trope because it's inevitably sexist seems overly simplistic to me.

If that's what you're saying (the fact that the majority of damsel in distress plots have a man saving a woman is indicative of the existence of sexism in the wider culture), then I don't disagree. What I was arguing against was comments like these: ...which I took to mean that each, individual use of the trope made the work that used it sexist. You seemed to be saying that the trope itself is inherently sexist, regardless of anything else. As in, any work that used that trope automatically became sexist, even if the same work had other, anti-sexist elements (like strong, independent female characters). If that's not what you meant, then I apologize for misunderstanding you. No, that's not what I've been saying at all. I'm saying if one negatively-portrayed black character existed in the same work as a bunch of positively-portrayed black characters, you'd be silly to call the entire work racist. In other words, it's possible to have a negatively portrayed member of a group without it being a negative reflection on that group as a whole -- whether you're talking about gender, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or whatever. I'm saying that looking at trends can reveal the existence of sexism on a large scale, but when talking about individual works you have to look more closely. Having a male hero rescue a female damsel in distress isn't inherently sexist -- there's nothing wrong with wanting to tell a story about a male hero with a female love interest that he must protect, especially if other female characters are stronger, more positive portrayals. But if the vast majority of stories being told are about male heroes with female love interests that they must protect, you have to ask why no one seems to want to right about female heroes, or male heroes with capable, independent love interests, or anything besides male heroes with disempowered female love interests. The answer to that question may well be sexism. In other words, it's a lot easier to say that "this trend is indicative of sexism" than it is to say "this specific work that contributes to that trend is sexist".

I don't think it's sexist to say something like "men are, on average, physically larger and stronger than women". That's simply a biological fact. Where it crosses into sexism is when you move from talking about groups to talking about individuals. "Men tend to be stronger than women" isn't sexist, but "you're weak because you're a woman" is.

And I'm certainly not arguing against the idea that sexism is a thing that actually happens or that video games could use some more balanced characterization in terms of gender. What I'm saying is that the use of the Damsel in Distress trope is not indicative of sexism, and that calling something sexist purely because it uses that trope -- particularly if it has other, anti-sexist elements -- is damaging to the message being delivered (that sexism is real, is bad, and should be avoided when at all possible) because labeling something with an overall positive message with regards to gender equality sexist due to one element taken in isolation is shooting yourself in the foot. Edit -- I'm also not suggesting that the video was saying "Damsel in Distress == sexist", either. At the very end, she points out that simply having a Damsel in Distress in a game doesn't make the game sexist. I sort of wish that she'd mentioned that a little sooner and gone into it a bit deeper rather than saying "oh, by the way, after talking about Damsels in Distress and sexism for 20 minutes, I should point out that they're not always sexist", but I understand that she didn't want to lose the larger point of the video. I was mostly just reacting to MC Final Sigma's blanket attitude that any use of the trope is sexism, forever, period.

I did read it (and actually started typing up a reply on it before I noticed the thread was moving on). It does sound like an awesome twist to the same old trope, but what I'm trying to argue here isn't that the damsel in distress trope can be tweaked to be non-sexist, it's that the damsel in distress trope, even if played completely straight, isn't inherently sexist in the first place. Begging the question isn't a good way to argue your point. Which ignores the point I was making about all of the other, nondisempowered female characters in the same games that have damsels in distress. If one game has most or all of its female characters disempowered, then I'd agree that it's sexist. If a game has one disempowered female character amid a bunch of nondisempowered female characters, then I don't see how you can call that sexist, since it has a lot of strong, positive female characters on one hand, and a single disempowered female character on the other. You can't just ignore all the good parts and point at one supposedly bad part as evidence that the whole thing is bad. That's true, but it's not an analogous situation. You're saying that because damsels in distress are overwhelmingly women, all examples of a female damsel in distress is sexist. I'm arguing that the trope, by itself, is not sexist. For your racial analogy to fit your sexism argument, you'd have to get rid of the part about "a single instance of a white guy getting hired over a black guy isn't necessarily racist". Except that when the same game has plenty of counterexamples to "most female characters in video games are disempowered" and just one example of a female character being disempowered, I don't see how you can paint the whole thing as sexist. When you add together a bunch of things that are definitely not sexist with one thing that may be sexist, the end result isn't sexist. Right, but I'm talking about individual examples. Say that I'm a writer and I'm writing a story. I don't have any control over what anyone else writes. So when is it okay for me, individually, to use a damsel in distress? Do I have to wait until the entirety of the writing world has evened itself out to 50/50 male and female damsels? I'm not skimming and I'm not deliberately ignoring you. If I'm not responding to something you feel you've already explained, it's because either I didn't understand your response or you didn't understand my question. Telling me to go back and reread isn't helpful to anyone. That's not what I said, at all. I'm not even defending the fact that 90% of the time it's male heroes rescuing female damsels. I'm just saying that a male hero rescuing a female damsel is not, in and of itself, sexist. Having a male hero rescue a female damsel does not make a story sexist. Having 90% of the stories being written feature male heroes and female damsels is an argument that sexism exists on the cultural level, yes -- but you can't point at a specific story that's otherwise not sexist and say "it's got a male hero rescuing a female damsel! That makes it sexist!" -- especially if that story contains other elements (like strong, independent, empowered female characters) that are the opposite of sexist.

Then talk about them, specifically, instead of painting the entire medium of video games with the same brush. Because I'm not saying that disempowerment of women is a little thing -- I'm saying that disempowerment of a single character who happens to be female amidst a whole host of strong, positive female characters doesn't constitute disempowerment of women as a whole. It's treating "disempowerment of a single character" as if it were "disempowerment of an entire class of people" that's turning a small thing into a big thing. Which part? To save time, I'll just respond to both: So, it's only okay to write a story with a damsel in distress as long as I get together with (at least) one other writer and make sure they're working on a story that doesn't have a damsel in distress? Or if I write at least one non-DiD story for every DiD story I write? That's silly. If something is bad, it's bad regardless of how often it's said. Yelling out "women are weak and powerless!" is bad even if I (or someone else) immediately follows up with "women can be strong and independent!". Of course, that doesn't actually address my argument, which is that having a damsel in distress doesn't automatically translate to "women are weak and powerless" in the first place. So, what's the alternative? Men can never save women? Men can only save other men, but women can save both men and women? How is that any better? The message "women don't need men's help, ever" is just as bad as the message "women always needs men's help for everything". There's nothing wrong with needing help from someone (regardless of your gender, or the helper's). Sexism is when you make judgments of someone based on their gender, rather than as an individual. Saying that men somehow aren't allowed to help women because it's disempowering for women to be helped by men is just as sexist as saying that women always need men to help them because women are incapable of helping themselves. Sexism is an attitude, not an event. If you have a cast full of strong, positive female characters, and one of them is rescued by a man one time, that's not sexist, and saying that "they used the Damsel in Distress trope, therefore that entire work filled with strong positive female characters is sexist!" is ridiculous. If everything were precisely equal, then men would still be rescuing women 25% of the time (it would be split evenly between man rescues woman, man rescues man, women rescues man, and woman rescues woman). Of course, it's not precisely equal -- largely because it's "hero rescues love interest", which (for most people) is going to be the opposite gender. Of course, it's still "man rescues woman" more often than any of the others, because men are the hero more often than women -- which is a problem and I absolutely think there should be more female heroes. But that doesn't mean that having a male hero, or even having a male hero rescue a female love interest, is inherently in-and-of-itself sexist.

My point is that you're the one saying that, not the story. Using Skyward Sword as an example again, the story is saying "Zelda needs to be protected because the dark forces of ultimate evil are after her and she's not a trained fighter like other characters are", not "Link needs to protect Zelda because he's a strong, powerful male and she's a weak, frail female". Other characters in the game who are both female and fighters kick significantly more ass than Link does. Impa actually berates Link when she has to step in and save Zelda, because that's supposed to be his job (as "the chosen hero of the Goddess", not as "a man"). Both Impa and Faron (separately) fight Ghirahim to a standstill at a time when Ghirahim could easily kill Link (but doesn't, because he prefers to toy with him instead). There are background characters (like the female Knight Academy student) that show women in strong positions, as well, and it's never remarked that this is unusual or anything like that. If you have one element of the story that may be construed as sexist if you look at it a certain way, versus a variety of definitely non-sexist elements (showing women as strong, positive characters), then calling the work as a whole sexist is ridiculous. It does more harm than good, because if you cry "sexism!" at every little thing, then people will tune you out -- so when you try to discuss a major issue, people will still ignore you. And let me ask again: when, if ever, is it acceptable to have a portrayal of a "weak" female character? Must all females in fictional works be presented as exactly equal in every way with males? Where do you draw the line between what's acceptable storytelling and what's sexist?

Yeah, implying that feminism is only a thing because women are jealous of fictional characters that are hotter than them is... pretty shitty. I wasn't saying that sexism isn't real or that feminism isn't a worthy cause, just that not everything that can be read as sexist (eg, damsel in distress) is actually sexist in all cases. If you get up in arms about relatively harmless things (like Mario saving Peach or Link saving Zelda), you can actually do damage to the overall message -- that some media is sexist and we shouldn't put up with that kind of shit -- by overreacting to every single example of something that isn't exactly gender neutral. tldr, don't cry wolf. If you want to discuss the topic of sexism in games, find examples where it's blatant (or at least consistent throughout the work). If you have to work to convince your audience that yes, this example is actually sexist, then they're going to think that you're making mountains out of molehills. Bringing up things like Mario and Zelda, while useful because they get lots of name recognition, is ultimately unproductive because they're not actually particularly good examples of sexism.

Pretty much this. To have a character that the player cares about kidnapped by the villain is a cheap emotional trick that isn't particularly good writing -- but that's true regardless of the gender of the kidnapper, kidnapee, and rescuer. I feel like a lot of people complaining about this sort of thing want writers to go out of their way to make things gender neutral. When is it acceptable to just tell a story about a guy rescuing a girl he cares about? Is it ever okay, or is it always sexist? Does everything anyone ever writes always have to be an allegory for human society and civilization as a whole, or can it just be a story about individual, fictional characters? To me, it's important to look at groups of characters as opposed to individual characters. If every female in a Zelda game where helpless and always had to be rescued, then you'd have a point in calling Zelda sexist. But that's not the case -- taking Skyward Sword as an example, Impa is quite badass, there are female students in the Knight Academy in Skyloft, one of the three dragons is female, etc. Though Zelda as an individual might be seen as physically unable to defend herself and in need of protecting, females as a group certainly are not. The fact that Zelda isn't personally a fighter doesn't somehow imply that all women are weak and need to keep men around to protect them any more than the existence of, say, Groose implies that all men are pompous, ignorant jackasses who need to be taken down a peg or five.

This. Plus there was the character in Dany's story that looked like it was going to turn out fairly interesting only to turn out completely pointless (you know which one I mean if you've read it). Plus there seemed to be a ton of fake cliffhangers, where a chapter ended on a note that made it seem like that character was in serious danger, only for their next chapter to reveal that nope, it was no big deal, moving right along. I wouldn't say that Dance with Dragons was bad, but I definitely didn't enjoy it as much as the previous books in the series.

I'd prefer to keep them on, even though (since I mostly play jarate sniper anyway) they hurt me more than help. They're actually a pretty big part of the game balance (for example, melee crits are significantly more likely than ranged crits, so whacking someone a few times while they shoot you and hoping for a lucky crit is a viable tactic with random crits on and a fancy way to commit suicide when they're off), and a little randomness helps make the game more fluid by making things less predictable. Plus the fact that getting pubbies on the server is never a bad thing, and leaving crits on will help a lot with that. Ditto for damage and bullet spread.

Holy shit. I thought this was a joke, but Clefairy actually sent me a strange huntsman. I have a new best friend and I've decided to nominate Clefairy for sainthood. In related news, anyone have a Headshot Kills strange part they're willing to trade?

I'll take a strange huntsman. Thanks!

Which is why it's awesome. Planescape and Spelljammer are the best D&D settings.