Yes, but as all arrogant empiricists will argue, soft sciences are not often science. They notoriously bad at proving causation, and have a hige deficit of concrete proofs in general.
And at one point in time they said the same thing about this guy who said that the earth wasn't flat after all, but was in fact a ball that rotated around the sun. Who knew?
No, humans are not like nstural animals in terms of behaviour;
Actually, humans are a LOT like animals. In fact, humans ARE animals. We dress up a LOT and call it society, but base instincts to eat, sleep, defecate and procreate are all pretty much 100% animal instincts. Fight or flight is also an animal response. And if you put a human under enough pressure, they will respond in EXTREMELY predictable ways, the same exact ways that animals do.
However, I wish not to debate this, nor do I want to get into a whole long back and forth with people claiming superior knowledge or requesting studies and proofs and the like. Let's agree to disagree.
Erm, you'd be wrong many times over. There are many, many cats around here, including many that only trust me.
We have one queen that brings back live chipmunks for her kittens, ie ones that fit in one hand still. Mind you, we had a tom that killed a rabbit as heavy as he was without making any noise. yes, thats pretty scary.
Are they wild/feral/semi-feral? I suspect they have a lot less time for being eccentric than our urban house-cats if they have to catch their own supper! I don't know about catching chipmunks and rabbits, Herbie is frightened of the guinea pigs (but he does chase dogs).
When I was a kid My cat killed a hare and dragged it back to the house (it was bigger than her.)
These days I have three cats that don't go outside and would run away from anything bigger than a spider, and one of them is huge (maine coon)
Don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not sure you understood my statement you decided to quote seperately. You are aware soft sciences (ie psych, socio, even my beloved economics) are called 'soft' because they do not deal in anything you can prove or disprove in a scientific manner? Its not like biology, physics and chemistry, which all can be either proven concretely by repeatable experimentation (with strict controls!), or preferably can be proven abstractly via math. Maths are empiricaly valid, especially if you can prove the premise; hence, engineering is hard science.
Soft science deals in theoretical frameworks, science deals in theories. The biggest flaw in all soft science observstion/experimentation is the lack of control on variabled, and the fact it can't be verified by biology, because if it could be, it wouldn't be psychology anymore, it would be biology. Psychology to biology is alchemy to chemistry.
An empiricist is someone who doesn't accept intangibles, and an arrogant one (ie me in this conversation) will have a dim view of soft sciences. Also, cool fact you clearly didn't know: it was proven via math eons ago that the world was round, only people bad at math or ignorant thought it was flat. Math is hard science, especially geometry, ie your example is misleading BS.
...wow, you managed to miss the key modifiying word, and basis to my argument! I never said humans aren't animals, I said they weren't NATURALLY BEHAVING humans. Humans and other trained animals all regularly disregard needs to satisfy wants, according to training. A wolf won't sacrifice itself to protect another pack member from obvious death, but trained dogs will not even hesitste to throw away their lives. Same with people, there are many people who will risk their survival for someone not even of their immediate family, something that by definition would be bred out in natural selection, guaranteed. Altruism to knowingly take risks to protect non-family is rare among among animals for this very reason.
Nope, thats pure 100% BS beyond question. Everyone reacts st leadt slightly differently, and only knowledge of the actual individual really allows prediction. Obvious extreme example, punch a trained boxer and then punch an confirmed pacifist. I wonder if Tyson would react fifferently from Gandhi? You're going to waste my time like this? Shameful.
Here's an idea: if you don't want a debate, don't have one. If you HONESTLY want to take an honourable exit, you should try just saying 'you know what, I'm not interested in discussing this further.' and then you do not proceed to offer a rebuttal, or precede with one. Thats incredibly petty of you, and your passive aggressive personal attacks no better. That said, I'll not carry on if you don't. I'm satisfied with my position anyways.
Actually, you are wrong. Wolves WILL sacrifice themselves for other pack members. Chimps do too.
It is natural human behaviour to try and put a distance between themselves and other animals, because otherwise their empathy, evolved to help them function in human societies, interferes with their ability to consume animals as food.
@DreadKhan Please remember that even if you disagree, or even if you think the other person's argument is flawed, you still must follow the site rules and be respectful.
@DreadKhan Please remember that even if you disagree, or even if you think the other person's argument is flawed, you still must follow the site rules and be respectful.
@Dee don't call me alone out when the other discusser chose to make personal attacks. I get compared to a flat earther, and thats A-okay? I do agree I got a bit heated, but I stayed on topic at least. It is not appropriate to single me out in this.
@Fardragon I will DEFINATELY require at least some coroborating sources for that claim. The only and pretty rsre examples of risking one's survival was for immediate family, ie a mother grizzly... thsts misleading though, because no local animals can kill a grizzly in their enviroment. Black Bears COULD be killed by wolves, or a very big cougar maybe, and note they will abandon their young when threatened.
The most altruistic critters are colony insects, and thats because they are geneticly uniform and or sterile. Pack animals have a tendency to protect the pack, but not from an overly lethal threat; they'd flee.
Also, I completely disagree with your 2nd point... empathy with nature points out that eating animals is pretty normal; it also has a positive of encouraging better treatment of livestock. Lots of animals are predators, and there is nothing unnatural about that. I am overly fond of animals (should overly large men baby-talk to kittens?), but I think occasional consumption of animal products is ethically defensible. We have arisen from vegetarian apes, but animal products (probably seafood) eventually became pretty important. That said, meat is easy to overconsume, so much so that with considerable effort, a fairly strict vegetarian diet is probably healthier. I was much more svelt as a vegetarian, probably around my ideal weight medically. You do need to eat an inane amount of food if you are a bigger guy and vegetarian, dense protein is gonna mean serious bean/pea consumption. 500 calories of pure legume is hard to eat, and if you need well over 2k calories and ~150 grams of protein, vegetarian becomes less feasible. However, you can supplement mostly vegetarian diets with eggs/dairy. Both offer lots of protein.
@DreadKhan - Just a point of order. Even the so called "Hard Sciences" do not ever provide anything that can be proven. Why do you think the Theory of Relativity is just that; a Theory? String Theory, Quantum theory, Schroedinger's cat, etc... are all merely Theories? Why do you think that physicists are 'Theoretical' physicists or researchers? Because they (we) can not (by current human capabilities) prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even maths have been proven to be merely theories, and not hard and immutable facts. ANY science (from our flawed and human perspective) can NOT be proven, only dis-proven.
Therefore, any comfort that you derive from your so called certainties of the Hard sciences are not based on facts, but on theories. People want to believe in certainty and so they cling to the belief that what they know is fact. There was a point in time where people "KNEW" that the Earth was flat. They were wrong.
You ask any true scientist or physicist or mathematician and they will tell you that we (humans) don't "Know" anything. The search for knowledge is ever ongoing. That is why THEY have jobs, because they are true researchers and understand the very first fundamental rule of science. We can't prove anything, only dis-prove it. That's Rule #1.
So who is to say that the "Soft" sciences are any less valid than the "Hard" ones?
As for the rest, you threw in "Naturalized" in (apparently) an attempt to ignore MY point. I merely reverted back to my original point, that humans are animals. And Humans ACT like Animals at their base levels. Why do you think there is a whole field of research into animal behavior? We don't (really) care why goats and pigs act a certain way; we are much more interested in why WE act as we do. And it has been shown that we can learn quite a LOT about ourselves from how animals react. I'll say it again, we dress ourselves up in society but at the end of the day, we are animals. That is why there is a whole lot of people who get paid a lot of money to study animal behavioral sciences.
But there's already far too much ugliness in this thread and I do not wish to create another point leading that direction. You personally don't follow/support/believe in (seemingly) psychology and sociology and animal behavior sciences. Point taken. I personally believe that there is "More in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." I respectfully suggest that we agree to disagree and leave it at that.
@DreadKhan Please remember that even if you disagree, or even if you think the other person's argument is flawed, you still must follow the site rules and be respectful.
@Dee don't call me alone out when the other discusser chose to make personal attacks. I get compared to a flat earther, and thats A-okay? I do agree I got a bit heated, but I stayed on topic at least. It is not appropriate to single me out in this.
Okay, two things.
First, @the_spyder did not make any personal attacks. The analogy to people claiming the earth was flat was an analogy, and perhaps an invalid one (considering that historically the people claiming the earth was flat were going against what had already been discovered centuries before by mathematicians), but in no way was it directed at you; instead it was directed at your argument.
This is different from your post, which was calling out the other person specifically. There is a marked difference between "This argument is dumb" and "You are dumb". One is a disagreement; the other is an insult.
Second, if you know that you tend to get heated in these discussions, the best advice I can give you is to not participate in these discussions. That doesn't mean issuing a parting shot as you leave the conversation (because that's disrespectful to the other people in that discussion); just quietly leave it be. Or find a way to contribute to the discussion without getting heated.
Either one of those two ways is fine. Continuing to participate and letting yourself get heated to the point where a site administrator has to step in to calm you down is not the solution.
Also, as a rule, there are two things you can do on a forum that are guaranteed to put you on a moderator's bad side: one is back-seat moderating (i.e. trying to resolve conflicts yourself by calling people out publicly instead of taking the issue to a moderator); the other is responding to a moderator's intervention by pointing your finger at someone else. "They started it" wasn't an acceptable behavior in grade school, and it's not an acceptable behavior here either.
@dreadkhan there's some evidence of altruism in meerkats that extends beyond immediate family. You might have heard of members of communities sacrificing themselves by calling a predator (hawk maybe) to them. They often have little chance for survival as they don't go straight down the burrow even if they can. It's often the elders that have passed on their genes that act this way. Worth a look if you're interested.
I also looked into altruism in apes but more on the side of what led to our own altruism. Can't think of any strong evidence off the top of my head but there's many instances of adoption of different animals and species, in the wild even. its up to you whether you think that's altruism or not. I'm not an authority.
As far as it goes, there are more examples of humans acting like animals than acting altruistic. In fact, there are very few examples of humans acting altruistic at all in my view. Everyone has an angle and is trying to get SOMETHING.
Mob mentality or pack mentality, they are pretty much the same thing. Fighting over territory or food happens in both kingdoms. The fact that women (on the whole) are more monogamous and men are more promiscuous (generally speaking and in broad terms) is right down to nature. Aggression factors are comparable between humans and animals. The mating rituals observed by many, many species are similar to the mating rituals of humans. Fight or flight response exist in all living things. Dominance and hierarchies exist in the animal kingdom as well as the human one. And the list goes on.
While I will agree there are a (very) few out-lier instances where humans have learned some form of civilization, humans are a lot more like animals than they are different. Despite millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of 'Civilization', we are still basically animals.
What's further, there is strong evidence that if humanity hadn't developed there are several other animal species that might very well have developed into a 'Civilized' society of sorts. There are all manner of alternate evolutionary theories which are supported by changes in the evolution of a given species strongly suggesting that they might one day supplant us, or might have had we not developed thumbs and a larger than average cranial cavity full of grey matter.
Heck, in some alternate universe, maybe Cat women play video games the same way that cat men do.
What's further, there is strong evidence that if humanity hadn't developed there are several other animal species that might very well have developed into a 'Civilized' society of sorts. There are all manner of alternate evolutionary theories which are supported by changes in the evolution of a given species strongly suggesting that they might one day supplant us, or might have had we not developed thumbs and a larger than average cranial cavity full of grey matter.
Good point spyder. I actually argued against pure altruism after my research. It's very complicated but there's almost always some gain, a good argument for it and a link to things other species do. there are questions of how you interpret altruism, consciousness and the like and it's definitely an interesting and complicated question imo.
My own opinion is that sophistication, subconscious and operation in larger civilised societies are more different than actual nature of mankind amongst the animal kingdom. Sorry if that is a mess but I'd rather sum it up than get into it.
@Jwantstoplay - My personal view is that although humans and civilization do provide some additional options, these are also available to animals that, as for example, get domesticated. So using the argument that "Naturalized" animals such as pets act as humans do more or less supports what I was saying rather than countering it. Yes, humans have learned a thing or two. Domesticated pets learn similar things and in similar manners. The reasons WHY we (and they) do these 'Civilized' things are no different than our animal cousins.
The underlying basic instinct of humanity still remains animalistic at heart. We want to eat and excrete. We want to procreate and defend our territory and feel safe. These are NO different than an animal. And most of the ways we go about achieving those goals haven't changed significantly since we scraped our knuckles on the ground. There are parallels in the animal kingdom for just about action or core motivation that humans undertake once you scrape away technology and learned behaviors.
It is nice to believe that we are so superior to animals, but the truth is very far from that. Take a look at all of the crimes of passion that happen. Look at how we treat our fellow man. Look at how we are slaves to our libidos (yes, even as adults). Look at how obesity has taken root (at least here in the US) as a result of over-abundance of food. The fact that we can learn to modify or curb our base desires is exactly the same thing that a domesticated animal learns. If animals can be domesticated, how are they different from humans?
I am not saying that there aren't moments in most people's lives where they do things for others selflessly. However, I've seen animals do the same. The altruism was really a red herring in the discussion after all.
I see videogames like Baldur's Gate or Warcraft like chess...with plot. Anyone with enough interest and ability can play chess and move paws, but in the case of BG and IWD the paws may be (more or less) developed characters and not anonymous soldiers or knights. I get the feeling that the settings and characters are more appreciated by boys (and targeted more toward boys) because of the fights,the weapons,the tactics etc. while most women prefers other things. And it's fine!
I see videogames like Baldur's Gate or Warcraft like chess...with plot. Anyone with enough interest and ability can play chess and move paws, but in the case of BG and IWD the paws may be (more or less) developed characters and not anonymous soldiers or knights.
I get the feeling that the settings and characters are more appreciated by boys (and targeted more toward boys) because of the fights,the weapons,the tactics etc. while most women prefers other things. And it's fine!
I still enjoy it nonetheless.
I rather suspect that this is a perceived difference in preference rather than an ACTUAL difference in preference. I know some women who are all about the violence and weapons.
I rather suspect that this is a perceived difference in preference rather than an ACTUAL difference in preference. I know some women who are all about the violence and weapons.
I mean, imagine a kick-ass woman who dresses like that *because* it makes men underestimate her. She's an assassin and when a man thinks "Oh, prostitute," or whatever, and takes his attention off her, she kills him without mercy.
I was reading through the countless posts throughout this thread when I read this part, it brought this to my mind which suits it perfectly. Even if I'm late to respond to it and currently off-topic.
Christie in Dead or Alive is such a ruthless Assassin (in another video she is seen using a sniper rifle) and a perfect example of the above.
That's Dead or Alive though. Hottie ladies fighting each other in sexy clothes has been its Thing since its first incarnation. She's not exactly a remarkable example in the context of that world.
That's Dead or Alive though. Hottie ladies fighting each other in sexy clothes has been its Thing since its first incarnation. She's not exactly a remarkable example in the context of that world.
(And I avoid the series for that very reason.)
Well, extreme brutal and unrealistic violence and gore was the Thing of Mortal Kombat since it's first incarnation. Sexualization (in both men and women) shouldn't be considered a "worse" thing than violence and gore, in my opinion. Nevermind that Mortal Kombat also had plenty of women in revealing clothing.
DoA's shtick is it's eyecandy and MK's shtick is unrealistic gore and violence. Those don't make one inferior or superior to the other, on their own. Just different.
My comment wasn't about the game in general, just that what @LadyRhian described brought that particular video in my mind. A femme fatale that uses her sexuality and pretending to be a stripper to kill. None of the other characters do, despite the eyecandy.
My ex gf/now best friend's favorite characters are sexy assassin women. She adored the idea of being sexy and luring people in with said sexiness before murdering them with knives. She'd be like a Bard Assassin thing RP-wise. Femme Fatales are super cool imo.
That's Dead or Alive though. Hottie ladies fighting each other in sexy clothes has been its Thing since its first incarnation. She's not exactly a remarkable example in the context of that world.
(And I avoid the series for that very reason.)
Well, extreme brutal and unrealistic violence and gore was the Thing of Mortal Kombat since it's first incarnation. Sexualization (in both men and women) shouldn't be considered a "worse" thing than violence and gore, in my opinion. Nevermind that Mortal Kombat also had plenty of women in revealing clothing.
DoA's shtick is it's eyecandy and MK's shtick is unrealistic gore and violence. Those don't make one inferior or superior to the other, on their own. Just different.
My comment wasn't about the game in general, just that what @LadyRhian described brought that particular video in my mind. A femme fatale that uses her sexuality and pretending to be a stripper to kill. None of the other characters do, despite the eyecandy.
I'm sorry, but when was Mortal Kombat a part of this discussion?
And when did I ever say that gratuitous violence was superior to over-sexualization?
Comments
However, I wish not to debate this, nor do I want to get into a whole long back and forth with people claiming superior knowledge or requesting studies and proofs and the like. Let's agree to disagree.
These days I have three cats that don't go outside and would run away from anything bigger than a spider, and one of them is huge (maine coon)
Soft science deals in theoretical frameworks, science deals in theories. The biggest flaw in all soft science observstion/experimentation is the lack of control on variabled, and the fact it can't be verified by biology, because if it could be, it wouldn't be psychology anymore, it would be biology. Psychology to biology is alchemy to chemistry.
An empiricist is someone who doesn't accept intangibles, and an arrogant one (ie me in this conversation) will have a dim view of soft sciences. Also, cool fact you clearly didn't know: it was proven via math eons ago that the world was round, only people bad at math or ignorant thought it was flat. Math is hard science, especially geometry, ie your example is misleading BS.
...wow, you managed to miss the key modifiying word, and basis to my argument! I never said humans aren't animals, I said they weren't NATURALLY BEHAVING humans. Humans and other trained animals all regularly disregard needs to satisfy wants, according to training. A wolf won't sacrifice itself to protect another pack member from obvious death, but trained dogs will not even hesitste to throw away their lives. Same with people, there are many people who will risk their survival for someone not even of their immediate family, something that by definition would be bred out in natural selection, guaranteed. Altruism to knowingly take risks to protect non-family is rare among among animals for this very reason.
Nope, thats pure 100% BS beyond question. Everyone reacts st leadt slightly differently, and only knowledge of the actual individual really allows prediction. Obvious extreme example, punch a trained boxer and then punch an confirmed pacifist. I wonder if Tyson would react fifferently from Gandhi? You're going to waste my time like this? Shameful.
Here's an idea: if you don't want a debate, don't have one. If you HONESTLY want to take an honourable exit, you should try just saying 'you know what, I'm not interested in discussing this further.' and then you do not proceed to offer a rebuttal, or precede with one. Thats incredibly petty of you, and your passive aggressive personal attacks no better. That said, I'll not carry on if you don't. I'm satisfied with my position anyways.
It is natural human behaviour to try and put a distance between themselves and other animals, because otherwise their empathy, evolved to help them function in human societies, interferes with their ability to consume animals as food.
@Fardragon I will DEFINATELY require at least some coroborating sources for that claim. The only and pretty rsre examples of risking one's survival was for immediate family, ie a mother grizzly... thsts misleading though, because no local animals can kill a grizzly in their enviroment. Black Bears COULD be killed by wolves, or a very big cougar maybe, and note they will abandon their young when threatened.
The most altruistic critters are colony insects, and thats because they are geneticly uniform and or sterile. Pack animals have a tendency to protect the pack, but not from an overly lethal threat; they'd flee.
Also, I completely disagree with your 2nd point... empathy with nature points out that eating animals is pretty normal; it also has a positive of encouraging better treatment of livestock. Lots of animals are predators, and there is nothing unnatural about that. I am overly fond of animals (should overly large men baby-talk to kittens?), but I think occasional consumption of animal products is ethically defensible. We have arisen from vegetarian apes, but animal products (probably seafood) eventually became pretty important. That said, meat is easy to overconsume, so much so that with considerable effort, a fairly strict vegetarian diet is probably healthier. I was much more svelt as a vegetarian, probably around my ideal weight medically. You do need to eat an inane amount of food if you are a bigger guy and vegetarian, dense protein is gonna mean serious bean/pea consumption. 500 calories of pure legume is hard to eat, and if you need well over 2k calories and ~150 grams of protein, vegetarian becomes less feasible. However, you can supplement mostly vegetarian diets with eggs/dairy. Both offer lots of protein.
Therefore, any comfort that you derive from your so called certainties of the Hard sciences are not based on facts, but on theories. People want to believe in certainty and so they cling to the belief that what they know is fact. There was a point in time where people "KNEW" that the Earth was flat. They were wrong.
You ask any true scientist or physicist or mathematician and they will tell you that we (humans) don't "Know" anything. The search for knowledge is ever ongoing. That is why THEY have jobs, because they are true researchers and understand the very first fundamental rule of science. We can't prove anything, only dis-prove it. That's Rule #1.
So who is to say that the "Soft" sciences are any less valid than the "Hard" ones?
As for the rest, you threw in "Naturalized" in (apparently) an attempt to ignore MY point. I merely reverted back to my original point, that humans are animals. And Humans ACT like Animals at their base levels. Why do you think there is a whole field of research into animal behavior? We don't (really) care why goats and pigs act a certain way; we are much more interested in why WE act as we do. And it has been shown that we can learn quite a LOT about ourselves from how animals react. I'll say it again, we dress ourselves up in society but at the end of the day, we are animals. That is why there is a whole lot of people who get paid a lot of money to study animal behavioral sciences.
But there's already far too much ugliness in this thread and I do not wish to create another point leading that direction. You personally don't follow/support/believe in (seemingly) psychology and sociology and animal behavior sciences. Point taken. I personally believe that there is "More in heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy." I respectfully suggest that we agree to disagree and leave it at that.
Edited to correct quote.
First, @the_spyder did not make any personal attacks. The analogy to people claiming the earth was flat was an analogy, and perhaps an invalid one (considering that historically the people claiming the earth was flat were going against what had already been discovered centuries before by mathematicians), but in no way was it directed at you; instead it was directed at your argument.
This is different from your post, which was calling out the other person specifically. There is a marked difference between "This argument is dumb" and "You are dumb". One is a disagreement; the other is an insult.
Second, if you know that you tend to get heated in these discussions, the best advice I can give you is to not participate in these discussions. That doesn't mean issuing a parting shot as you leave the conversation (because that's disrespectful to the other people in that discussion); just quietly leave it be. Or find a way to contribute to the discussion without getting heated.
Either one of those two ways is fine. Continuing to participate and letting yourself get heated to the point where a site administrator has to step in to calm you down is not the solution.
Also, as a rule, there are two things you can do on a forum that are guaranteed to put you on a moderator's bad side: one is back-seat moderating (i.e. trying to resolve conflicts yourself by calling people out publicly instead of taking the issue to a moderator); the other is responding to a moderator's intervention by pointing your finger at someone else. "They started it" wasn't an acceptable behavior in grade school, and it's not an acceptable behavior here either.
I also looked into altruism in apes but more on the side of what led to our own altruism. Can't think of any strong evidence off the top of my head but there's many instances of adoption of different animals and species, in the wild even. its up to you whether you think that's altruism or not. I'm not an authority.
Mob mentality or pack mentality, they are pretty much the same thing. Fighting over territory or food happens in both kingdoms. The fact that women (on the whole) are more monogamous and men are more promiscuous (generally speaking and in broad terms) is right down to nature. Aggression factors are comparable between humans and animals. The mating rituals observed by many, many species are similar to the mating rituals of humans. Fight or flight response exist in all living things. Dominance and hierarchies exist in the animal kingdom as well as the human one. And the list goes on.
While I will agree there are a (very) few out-lier instances where humans have learned some form of civilization, humans are a lot more like animals than they are different. Despite millions of years of evolution and tens of thousands of years of 'Civilization', we are still basically animals.
What's further, there is strong evidence that if humanity hadn't developed there are several other animal species that might very well have developed into a 'Civilized' society of sorts. There are all manner of alternate evolutionary theories which are supported by changes in the evolution of a given species strongly suggesting that they might one day supplant us, or might have had we not developed thumbs and a larger than average cranial cavity full of grey matter.
Heck, in some alternate universe, maybe Cat women play video games the same way that cat men do.
My own opinion is that sophistication, subconscious and operation in larger civilised societies are more different than actual nature of mankind amongst the animal kingdom. Sorry if that is a mess but I'd rather sum it up than get into it.
The underlying basic instinct of humanity still remains animalistic at heart. We want to eat and excrete. We want to procreate and defend our territory and feel safe. These are NO different than an animal. And most of the ways we go about achieving those goals haven't changed significantly since we scraped our knuckles on the ground. There are parallels in the animal kingdom for just about action or core motivation that humans undertake once you scrape away technology and learned behaviors.
It is nice to believe that we are so superior to animals, but the truth is very far from that. Take a look at all of the crimes of passion that happen. Look at how we treat our fellow man. Look at how we are slaves to our libidos (yes, even as adults). Look at how obesity has taken root (at least here in the US) as a result of over-abundance of food. The fact that we can learn to modify or curb our base desires is exactly the same thing that a domesticated animal learns. If animals can be domesticated, how are they different from humans?
I am not saying that there aren't moments in most people's lives where they do things for others selflessly. However, I've seen animals do the same. The altruism was really a red herring in the discussion after all.
I see videogames like Baldur's Gate or Warcraft like chess...with plot.
Anyone with enough interest and ability can play chess and move paws, but in the case of BG and IWD the paws may be (more or less) developed characters and not anonymous soldiers or knights.
I get the feeling that the settings and characters are more appreciated by boys (and targeted more toward boys) because of the fights,the weapons,the tactics etc. while most women prefers other things.
And it's fine!
I still enjoy it nonetheless.
There's a reason I prefer Dorn.
...
Even if I'm late to respond to it and currently off-topic.
Christie in Dead or Alive is such a ruthless Assassin (in another video she is seen using a sniper rifle) and a perfect example of the above.
(And I avoid the series for that very reason.)
I think they play it because of Korgan's dreamy dwarf beard personally.
Resist......
Juvenile...................
Bearded crustacean joke.
Sexualization (in both men and women) shouldn't be considered a "worse" thing than violence and gore, in my opinion.
Nevermind that Mortal Kombat also had plenty of women in revealing clothing.
DoA's shtick is it's eyecandy and MK's shtick is unrealistic gore and violence.
Those don't make one inferior or superior to the other, on their own. Just different.
My comment wasn't about the game in general, just that what @LadyRhian described brought that particular video in my mind.
A femme fatale that uses her sexuality and pretending to be a stripper to kill. None of the other characters do, despite the eyecandy.
And when did I ever say that gratuitous violence was superior to over-sexualization?