We should be happy Disney got Lucas Films

Disney recently acquired Star Wars. There has been a lot of hubbub around the internet and, as I was surprised to find out, real life. People still care about Star Wars? I mean, I know that nerds cared, but normal people? I was kind of surprised.

Anyway, being the king of nerds within my social circle, everyone wanted to know what my opinion was. I hadn’t given it much thought so after considering for a couple seconds my initial reaction was that this was good, though I couldn’t really nail down why beyond the fact that Lucas was getting kicked upstairs to creative consultant. Now that I have had some time to think about this, I feel that I can give a much better explanation of why this is a strictly good thing for the IP.

Star Wars is a deeply damaged IP. Star Wars has been bad for at least 10 years, and nothing truly great has come from the IP since the conclusion of the original trilogy. There have been a few decent books and videogames, but by and large nothing worthy of the Star Wars name. 95% of all things Star Wars related are terrible, and the sequels were especially awful. It has gotten so bad that I actively avoid anything even related to Star Wars. Anytime I break this rule I regret it. No one should be wasting their time with Star Wars.

However, get Lucas out of the picture, bring in new creative talent, and focus on the core of what made Star Wars great all those years ago and you might just be able to overcome all the baggage of the last 13 years.

Disney cannot ruin Star Wars. The only question is if Disney can fix Star Wars. At worst we are going to get more stuff we should just ignore, so there is no downside to this. In fact, we might even win if this is bad for Star Wars. Maybe people will finally realize that Star Wars is dead and move on.

Women in video games: Bad solutions don't fix problems.

The video game industry has recently been getting a lot of flak for having too many overtly sexual female characters.  I have seen several people say that a potential solution to the problem would be to include unattractive women in games. When given examples of unattractive women in games, these people inevitably respond in one of two ways, and often both at once:

1. Those characters are the exception, not the rule.
2. That character doesn't count because they are bizarre or outlandish.

These responses are ridiculous. This is why.

Video games are not movies or books, they do not need a good story to be good. They can stand on their gameplay alone. Street Fighter, for example, does not need a good story and I would even go so far as to say it would be worse if they had tried to shoehorn a deep story into the game. Not every game needs a deep story, not every game should have a deep story.

What every game does need are interesting characters. But if you are not going to have a deep story, there is no point to having deep characters. There is no payoff and that characterization becomes time wasted that detracts from the game.

Because of this, developers are often tasked with creating interesting but shallow characters. This is accomplished by making the character outlandish, especially on a visual level. They need to stick in the mind from the moment they are seen. This basically means they need to be notably strange, ugly, or attractive. Notably ugly is generally not used because no one wants to look at an exceptionally ugly character for any length of time. This leaves us with notably strange and notably attractive. Visually uninteresting characters (average looking) only work when they can be fleshed out by deep story and engaging dialog, which is often not possible

Even when a good story and engaging dialog are possible, average looking characters will always be in the minority because they are boring. The only time it is good to have such a character is when their lack of exceptional features contributes to their character, such as Lucca in Chrono Trigger (setting her apart as the only average looking person in a group of freaks,) or the setting, such as Alyx Vance. Otherwise the developer is passing up on an opportunity to put something interesting in the game for no reason and the game is worse for it.

In summary, average looking or ugly characters will always be rare because it is a really bad idea, with a few exceptions. This is not the solution to the overt sexuality problem. Stop suggesting it.