Greg Miller, Mental Disorders, Empathy and Liability
Maybe I'm an asshole (which is a strong possiblity), but I didn't really get offended by what he said. I don't agree with it, and it sounds pretty juvenile (and yes, I can see where people would be pissed about saying Sarah 'isn't normal'). By the way, try and read this to the end, because it gets better.
An article I found on IGN linked to this blog http://lillycaul.tumblr.com/post/94359921967/on-telltale-games-ableist-treatment-of-sarah I can barely read it there are so many words I've never heard of like 'ableism' (which I can guess) and 'neurodivergent' (which I'm assuming is a politically correct term for having a mental disorder). I think this is a good example of people going way over board on the other end and a) putting words in his mouth, and b) making a mountain out of a molehill.
And I will say, about being a liability, sorry, but it's true, and no neologisms, euphemisms, or political correctness is going to change that. You can say that despite that you should do what you can to help her (which I did), but that doesn't mean that she didn't pose a risk. The term 'ableism' implies discrimination on the basis of disability, which means quite specifically not being able to do something most people can. It's not to say they're morally inferior, or like I said above, that shouldn't do what you can to help them. But if you're trying to run through the forest with somebody in a wheelchair, yes, it will be harder.
Now that I've pissed everybody off, I'll backtrack a little bit here. Looking the forums, and the topic of autism came up here and there, especially where people say Sarah as having a mental disorder. A lot of people with autism are saying it helped them connect with her character a lot more. To be completely honest, Sarah kind of annoyed me, at least the first two episodes (not that I particularly wanted her to get killed). But this makes me think as well:
One of the characters I connected with a bit more was Nick, probably because of his depression and suicidal impulses, but he certainly got the ire of a lot of the other characters (the forums were admittedly far more sympathetic - I'd have been interested to see if that would change if we saw more of him). I sort of feel like Nick in a lot of ways, where people will constantly say that I need to stop complaining, that I'm just pitying myself, and to suck it up etc. And while we're talking about liability here, let's not forget: "Luke, he's becoming a danger to the group."
People would naturally connect to characters that remind them of themselves, and I think the way that other characters react to a character or the way that the players react to that character can also be revelatory of the way that people treat people with those conditions, especially in the case of mental conditions or things which are not apparently visible. To return to issue of Greg Miller and what he said, while he may have been a jerk in multiple ways but I think it might be useful to think about the way we think on the whole about other people - I think there a lot of people who would claim to be completely supportive of people with mental issues, or homosexuals, or transgendered people but at the same time would feel awkard around them and have difficulty befriending them. (Homosexuality and transgenderism are not mental issues; what I'm saying is there are a lot of cases were people who think themselves open-minded say, in practice, "yes, do you own thing, you should be who you are - over there").
I'll also add an addendum in the case of mental issues - it actually sort of bothers me the way that people are quick to divide certain mentalities into pathological disorders or otherwise. As though how we should react to Sarah acting the way she does depends on if she has a diagnosis. I'm referring most specifically to depression in this case, where you can take the same person, and at first you'll think 'oh he needs to suck it up,' but if he has a diagnosis all of a sudden it's 'a disease.' (I really get annoyed when people refer to depression as a disease - perhaps in extreme cases, but oftentimes it's a question of cognitive patterns and the such - but a lot of the psychology of personality is like that). People put them in a category in order to explain (or rather 'to justify' or 'to excuse' - oh, he's just acting like that because he has ____ ) their behavior. That's not to say people don't suffer from these things, but I'm talking about problems versus disorder.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I'm sure it is going to be met with a slew of TL:DR and men dancing with friend chicken, but I figured I'd say it and see what people thought.
Comments
Don't see what the big deal is. Just tumblr girls with too much time.
Just kidding, i had to...
I think it was really bad, because when your in the media, or have a audience to large group, people listen to you, so your words matter. I think what he said was terribly insensitive to anyone with a disability and he should lose his job to be honest. Its like that one guy on ESPN who said something really stupid, how women shouldn't antagonize men into hitting them.
I don't care for IGN to be honest, i don't trust their reviewers, they have been paid in the past, so anything that comes out of that site is subject. My question would be, why would telltale do a interview for IGN, one of the most hated game news things. Instead of doing a Q/A for your fanbase here.
This. They're throwing their usual crap on this, which only serves to obfuscate the real problem. Does Telltale hate disabled people? Eh, probably, but most players don't really care about that- what we do care about is that Telltale screwed over a character most of us at least somewhat liked. Of course she was an autist, we knew she had fucking autism the moment we met her! And to many players, this was an advantage- we knew she wasn't capable of the same kind of organized deception as the rest of the cabin group. We could even teach her how to shoot a gun, so we thought that might go somewhere. But it turns out that Telltale themselves hated the character we wanted to protect. It's this total disconnect between developer and player that's the problem here, not some made-up crap from Tumblr. Of course people with disabilities are going to be fucked over in an apocalypse. That's what being disabled means. But there's this little thing called "player agency" that overrides that in better games.
Take a different retard in a different apocalypse- like, say, Tom in Stephen King's The Stand. Since this was from back when Stephen King knew how to write, he was expertly described as being a few cards short of a full deck- and the problem was, they were such low cards. If King had treated Tom like Telltale treated Sarah, he would have probably been lynched in the fucking street- or, at the very least, assigned to the discount rack. This is even worse in an interactive context, where Trolltale can pull shit like "YOU WANT SAVE HER? TOO BAD! HERE DECK COLLAPSE! FUCK U!"
To me Playing Dead is now just about Greg's adventures. Telltale should instead do interviews here with the fanbase like you said. They should converse with EVERYONE about the choices and how they feel. It's more important to communicate with a community than some guy. The interviews are not even good in the show. Now the old Playing Dead... THAT was the thang back then.