|
Metal Gear Solid 4 is not a fighting game. It is Tactical Espionage Action.
However, the final boss fight is a fistfight which introduces a set of controls not previously used or encountered throughout the game.
This would be irritating enough were it not also that these controls are incredibly mushy. The correspondence between buttons used and actions taken by the character seems weak. The results I get from a certain set of actions seem inconsistent.
I am currently losing my sixth attempt at this fight on this run through on the second-easiest difficulty setting; I beat this fight first try on my last run through, which was on a harder setting.
I know that hand-to-hand combat can be done well, because I was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum recently, and the feel of the fighting in that is exact - if I lose the fight, it doesn't feel like it's because the controls just don't work, it feels like I got it wrong.
Otherwise I really enjoy this game, but at the moment, it's just annoying me.
|
|
So, recently I read about two people.
The first is Mary Kingsley, author of Travels in West Africa. Mary Kingsley is remarkable among European explorers in that she believed, and argued passionately, that the idea that black people were inferior to white people was flat wrong.
She was not some radical progressive, by the way - she was entirely against the women's suffrage movement. She was extremely conservative. She just wasn't a racist, and was a distinct anti-colonialist.
Another person who hated colonialism was the utterly brilliant Alexander von Humboldt. von Humboldt's travels to colonial territory were in South America, where he covered amazing amounts of ground and did phenomenal research, more-or-less single-handedly inventing the concept of ecology - the idea of the interconnectedness of ecosystems.
During his lifetime he was hugely and tremendously famous. Sadly, later on everyone started paying too much attention to Darwin and not enough to von Humboldt.
Sadly doesn't really cover it enough, to be honest. Darwin's ideas (well, as much as they were his at all, but that's another matter) are all well and good, but have been used to justify some pretty horrible things, while not necessarily doing even a tenth as much good as it would have done the world at large, in a very literal sense, had people paid more attention to ecology and the environment from the 19th century onwards.
Alas, Darwinism can be used to justify colonial pillage of anyone you can outgun, while von Humboldt's notions require you to be respectful of nature and the environment and to be careful about messing with the food chain and the delicate balance of ecosystems, and that's much less fun.
|
|
So, I have recently found myself disagreeing with someone in the comments to someone else's locked post (hence no link). The point with which I have been taking issue is the assertion that people in a position of privilege can/will be better-placed to fight -isms because they "can see the problem more clearly" and are "better attuned" to cultural boundaries than in-group members will be.
I feel my latest comment is a tad incoherent in places and would welcome some constructive criticism on how I'm presenting my central thesis, here:
Oddly, I just found a partial explanation for what I think you're missing in something I wrote about RaceFail in March:
... at the end of the 18th century, radical movements for social and political change changed from being the hobbyhorse of a few wealthy intellectuals (yes, I'm guilty of gross reductionism, shh) to the product of widespread working-class involvement, thought, activism, argument. The lower orders, as they were known, began speaking up, demanding representation, demanding rights.
This was a problem, and was met with repression, where the previous advocates of universal suffrage and suchlike had been tolerated calmly. The old advocates were eccentric aristocrats. The new radicals were workers. Lower-class, absent all the privileges held by the wealthy and titled.
The lower orders talking about politics, reading "The Rights of Man" and trying to claim they deserved respect and all that stuff? Arrogant presumption.
I think there's still something like that today, with some people's reactions to minorities advocating for themselves; while people might think they believe that disabled people should be accommodated equally with he abled, that homosexuals deserve the same rights in their loves as heterosexuals, that people who aren't white should be placed on an equal footing with people who are (including recognising that centuries of oppression have left their mark, and merely removing active barriers is not enough to put them, as a population, on that equal footing, because someone born in poverty to illiterate, alcoholic parents is not in a position of equality to someone born in better circumstances, and while it is not a firm rule for individuals of any race where they will fall on the socio-economic spectrum, on balance of population majorities, some groups are currently at a disadvantage that needs to be remedied)...
Pause here because that sentence got away from me a little, and I have a lot of reading to do and haven't time to edit it properly.
Yes. While they think they believe all that stuff, and probably sincerely do, some people seem to find it something of an affront when members of that minority group express their own opinions, voice their own experiences, insist on the respect which in theory most of us agree they deserve but only some of us notice they don't get. The idea being that "we" know whats best for "them"; it's probably an intellectual (as grouping) bias, in that intellectuals tend towards believing that We're Right.
And it can feel like a terrible shock, I guess, when you think you're being ever so kind and wonderful, and discover that actually, no, the person doesn't want your help, exactly, they want independent equality.
The thing is that that attitude is condescending. Like a wealthy landowner condescending to talk to his gardener; it's understood that it is an act of kindness and charity for the master merely to acknowledge that the servant is human, with experiences beyond his role as The Gardener. For the gardener to initiate the conversation would be presumption.
The unprivileged demanding equal status with the privilege is presumption almost by definition; it is denying that the unprivileged person should just "know their place", demanding that their place be moved, presuming equality to be their right.
It is not possible for the oppressed to be liberated without one of two things:
1) The consent of their oppressors
2) Bloody, violent revolution
Now, being that most minority groups are not in fact aiming for a bloody, violent revolution, it is necessary for the ending of systemic -ism that the privileged consent to end oppression. This is what activism does - attempt to establish that the -ism is a Bad Thing and that therefore if you embrace it you are a Bad Person. No-one wants to be a Bad Person so they try not to do the thing.
So privileged people are the ones who need to change. They will feel like they should be a part of this. All of this is fine.
However, the idea that they should be encouraged or even permitted to take a directing, decision-making, authoritative role in the breakdown of their own privilege is untenable, because it inherently reinforces the privilege. If you say that white people should have a strong role in breaking down racism in a way that gives them authority in the struggle itself, then you're doing it wrong, because that's reinforcing their position in a hierarchy that should not exist.
This is why the privileged need to be allies. Because it's the first step in establishing that sometimes, they're not in charge.
|
|
|
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}