{"id":1031,"date":"2023-01-23T21:33:33","date_gmt":"2023-01-23T21:33:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/?p=1031"},"modified":"2023-04-14T22:56:56","modified_gmt":"2023-04-14T22:56:56","slug":"episode-64-monster-ethics-with-dom-ford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/?p=1031","title":{"rendered":"Episode 64 \u2013 Monster Ethics (with Dom Ford)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>[Release Date: March 14, 2023]&nbsp;The monsters we see in video games are usually antagonists that we destroy without remorse.&nbsp; But what is a monster and are there ethical questions that arise in relation to how they\u2019re represented?&nbsp; In what ways can monsters utilize racist and sexist tropes in harmful ways?&nbsp; Can we treat a type of monsters as a race of pure evil?&nbsp; And is there anything that monsters might do that is beyond the pale?&nbsp; We chat with Dom Ford about Monster Ethics!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<iframe style=\"border-radius:12px\" src=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/embed\/episode\/3A9p5Q5ZGVNfmyG8Pc9kIt?utm_source=generator&#038;theme=0\" width=\"100%\" height=\"152\" frameBorder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"\" allow=\"autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; fullscreen; picture-in-picture\" loading=\"lazy\"><\/iframe>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-center\">SHOW TRANSCRIPT<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>00:09:25.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:09:30.790<br>Shlomo Sher: all right. Welcome, everybody. We&#8217;re here with Josh Ford. Yeah. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>105<br>00:09:31.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:09:34.380<br>Shlomo Sher: then. Oh, wow, okay. So let me let me try that again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>106<br>00:09:36.420 &#8211;&gt; 00:10:02.729<br>Shlomo Sher: All right, Everybody we&#8217;re here with Don Ford. Dom Ford is a freshly minted Phd. From the it. University of Copenhagen, Denmark. His dissertation puts forward a method for understanding Games to Mythology Arguing the game worlds instantiate particular models for us, understanding the world which the player then inhabits. He also works with conceptions of history, nostalgia, and games and depictions of monsters, which is why we&#8217;re here to talk with him about monster ethics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>107<br>00:10:03.760 &#8211;&gt; 00:10:13.769<br>Shlomo Sher: I have to say, you know this is first of all, Dom, welcome to the show. Yay. Thank you very much. It&#8217;s thank you for inviting me. It&#8217;s really great to be here looking forward to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>108<br>00:10:14.400 &#8211;&gt; 00:10:28.200<br>Shlomo Sher: I can&#8217;t believe we&#8217;re talking about the mon, the monster ethics. But we&#8217;re not talking about the ethical decisions monsters need to make, though. That might be fun, for we&#8217;re we&#8217;re talking about. You know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>109<br>00:10:28.660 &#8211;&gt; 00:10:48.070<br>Shlomo Sher: how to depict our monsters right? Right so. And I I thought we&#8217;d start by asking you what is a monster for our conversation today, so it seems like a a large category of potential things that can humans be. Monsters are only certain kind of humans. Monsters. How would you describe what you&#8217;d think of as a monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>110<br>00:10:49.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:07.129<br>Dom Ford: So I mean it&#8217;s a great question, because you&#8217;re totally right to point out that there are a 1 million different things that we call monsters that you have like often like serial killers like, say, a Ted Bundy will be monster you then you have, like sort of classical, like a dragon, or or something like that. But you also might refer to like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>111<br>00:11:07.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:21.090<br>Dom Ford: some huge and hideous building as monstrous or as a monster building as a there&#8217;s one in Hong Kong. I believe that&#8217;s nicknamed the Monster, the Monster Building. So we we use this term monster to refer to so many different things, and that kind of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>112<br>00:11:21.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:22.949<br>Dom Ford: I think a lot of the time makes it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>113<br>00:11:23.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:25.510<br>Dom Ford: seem like it could be meaningless. But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>114<br>00:11:25.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:29.329<br>Dom Ford: i&#8217;m quite interested in what we&#8217;re we&#8217;re doing with that so? I I think of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>115<br>00:11:29.480 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:38.209<br>Dom Ford: the term monster as a discursive category. So monsters don&#8217;t exist as such they don&#8217;t exist prior to being labeled as a monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>116<br>00:11:38.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:52.920<br>Dom Ford: And this label then gets applied to. You know, humans, creatures, whatever, and it&#8217;s done for a certain purpose to represent certain things. We we&#8217;re making a claim about something when we call it a monster. Often that&#8217;s actually a moral claim, I would say, but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>117<br>00:11:52.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:11:55.469<br>Dom Ford: it doesn&#8217;t have to be. I I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>118<br>00:11:56.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:02.360<br>Dom Ford: the kind of 2 things that really crystallize monstrosity for me are the notion of excess.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>119<br>00:12:02.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:07.489<br>Dom Ford: and relatedly the notion of boundaries and category crisis. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>120<br>00:12:07.730 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:08.940<br>Dom Ford: typically<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>121<br>00:12:09.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:11.569<br>Dom Ford: the monster will represent<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>122<br>00:12:13.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:17.569<br>Dom Ford: some, maybe natural, or, you know, natural in inverted commas<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>123<br>00:12:17.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:27.570<br>Dom Ford: trait, but in excess. So you know, a a a dragon might be excessively greedy as well as being excessively large. And all these kinds of things<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>124<br>00:12:27.610 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:45.350<br>Dom Ford: you can even have, like otherwise good traits. So I&#8217;ve done a lot of work on giants, and often they are, You know they embodies for certain kinds of masculine ideals right where they&#8217;re big and they&#8217;re and they&#8217;re strong, and they&#8217;re powerful, and they&#8217;re sort of sexually very virulent in especially medieval literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>125<br>00:12:45.360 &#8211;&gt; 00:12:51.590<br>Shlomo Sher: did not know that about the sexual habits of giants, really they?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>126<br>00:12:52.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:02.889<br>Dom Ford: Oh, yeah, I I it gets you guys crazy. I mean, if if to be a little bit explicit here, there&#8217;s this I can&#8217;t remember which it is, but the I think it&#8217;s the giant of of on some Michelle, who.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>127<br>00:13:04.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:10.460<br>Dom Ford: essentially to not to mince my words. His penis is so big that he sort of splits people in half<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>128<br>00:13:10.540 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:19.789<br>Dom Ford: with it, all right. And so this is like a common thing that comes up right, the the the sexual variance. But you know the point is that all of these different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>129<br>00:13:21.950 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:24.349<br>Dom Ford: Things are in a much reduced<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>130<br>00:13:31.920 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:51.659<br>Dom Ford: used form in some context, even within that society, like so strong before it, becomes weird and like and and kind of grotesque. So it kind of all goes back to this idea of of of setting boundaries, and then the monster exceeds them in some way that that would be kind of where I would say the heart of monstrosity is when we&#8217;re thinking of it as like a discursive category.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>131<br>00:13:51.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:52.520<br>right? Because we<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>132<br>00:13:52.980 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:56.620<br>about like sports figures as being like. Oh, he&#8217;s a monster on the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>133<br>00:13:56.700 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:57.280<br>you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>134<br>00:13:57.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:58.290<br>right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>135<br>00:13:58.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:13:59.450<br>So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>136<br>00:14:00.730 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:02.039<br>as sort of like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>137<br>00:14:02.980 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:05.270<br>he&#8217;s really good at what he does. He&#8217;s a.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>138<br>00:14:05.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:08.130<br>Yeah, yeah, right right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>139<br>00:14:08.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:18.790<br>Shlomo Sher: But not just with a gross exaggeration of strength compared to to regular people. Right? Exactly. Because I think I think what it what they&#8217;re kind of doing<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>140<br>00:14:21.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:37.949<br>Dom Ford: the when you, when you label a a sports person, it&#8217;s like as like a monster. That was a what an absolute beast we might say in that kind of thing is your kind of, even if it&#8217;s in Chester, even if it&#8217;s positive or whatever you&#8217;re kind of saying, they are exceeding the boundaries of humanity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>141<br>00:14:37.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:39.270<br>Shlomo Sher: That&#8217;s right, right, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>142<br>00:14:41.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:43.720<br>So it&#8217;s kind of going on there. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>143<br>00:14:44.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:45.480<br>right. Some monsters are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>144<br>00:14:45.550 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:47.280<br>excessive, excessive people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>145<br>00:14:48.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:14:51.920<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I think so I think so, or or excessive anything really<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>146<br>00:14:52.480 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:04.179<br>Shlomo Sher: So what about the the moral judgment about monsters? Do we do? We always judge monsters as a as evil, or there, somewhere in the middle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>147<br>00:15:07.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:12.700<br>Dom Ford: You&#8217;ve always got to be careful with like an always right. I think what we very often do is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>148<br>00:15:14.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:23.519<br>Dom Ford: so you know you can. You can often see monster and hero kind of in a kind of parallel. In in this sense they often have excessive in certain qualities, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>149<br>00:15:24.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:28.290<br>Dom Ford: but kind of where, maybe, the differences is that monsters are. Then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>150<br>00:15:28.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:40.819<br>Dom Ford: erez agmoni, they&#8217;re mythologized in this way in a negative light. So it&#8217;s like something that we want to cast out of society. So this goes back to kind of the idea of of what&#8217;s the purpose of giving something the label monster, one<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>151<br>00:15:41.110 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:52.760<br>Dom Ford: usually, and you know you bring up a good counter example with like the the sports person, but, like in general, we would label something as a monster as a kind of pretext, or a or a kind of a grounding to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>152<br>00:15:52.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:15:57.209<br>Dom Ford: casting them out of society, removing them something along those lines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>153<br>00:15:57.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:03.049<br>Dom Ford: And so this often happens there&#8217;s you familiar with a Philip Cole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>154<br>00:16:03.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:07.799<br>Dom Ford: but the myth of evil. He&#8217;s written a book on that. So it&#8217;s like the philosophy of evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>155<br>00:16:07.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:15.929<br>Dom Ford: and he outlines. He kind of says, there&#8217;s like 4 ways in which a human can be evil. So there&#8217;s like the or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>156<br>00:16:16.230 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:21.470<br>Dom Ford: 4 ways that we can think about human evil. So there&#8217;s like the pure conception which will be like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>157<br>00:16:21.570 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:37.880<br>Dom Ford: humans, can just be evil for its own sake. They can do evil things just because they evil. You have the impure conception which is humans, cannot cannot be evil for the sake of evil, but they might commit evil things in pursuit of something else that they think is good. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>158<br>00:16:39.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:45.469<br>Dom Ford: Then there&#8217;s the psychological one where it&#8217;s Humans can&#8217;t be evil, but they can. If there&#8217;s something wrong with their brain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>159<br>00:16:45.610 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:51.749<br>Dom Ford: And then finally he kind of puts forward the the monstrous conception which is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>160<br>00:16:52.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:55.629<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s it&#8217;s it. It kind of it&#8217;s a torto logical.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>161<br>00:16:55.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:16:59.580<br>Dom Ford: discursive, labeling because it is like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>162<br>00:16:59.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:19.089<br>Dom Ford: the human can&#8217;t be evil, because if a human is being evil, then they are not actually a human, but they are a monster just who looks like a human, this kind of thing, right? Where part of so going back to like an example like Ted Bundy, right? The example the idea is, we call him a monster, because we&#8217;re not comfortable, accepting him as being like us, being<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>163<br>00:17:19.099 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:21.740<br>Shlomo Sher: well, we say he lost his humanity in some way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>164<br>00:17:22.230 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:35.150<br>Dom Ford: You might say he lost his humanity. You might say he never was. You can. You can think of it in all these different ways, but by calling him a monster. What we&#8217;re saying it is that he is not us. We are not like him. And then and then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>165<br>00:17:35.520 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:38.219<br>Dom Ford: when you do that, the the the kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>166<br>00:17:38.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:51.279<br>Dom Ford: the the really good trick about doing that is, then you don&#8217;t have to deal with anything within yourself or within your society. You just have to get rid of the monster, the monstrous element in society. It&#8217;s nothing about being human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>167<br>00:17:51.950 &#8211;&gt; 00:17:55.720<br>Dom Ford: I mean<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>168<br>00:17:57.000 &#8211;&gt; 00:18:06.039<br>Dom Ford: exactly, and that&#8217;s that&#8217;s where it can also get kind of problematic in in how you use the term, but kind of just sticking with this, for now I I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>169<br>00:18:06.060 &#8211;&gt; 00:18:17.689<br>Dom Ford: we very often, but I wouldn&#8217;t say, always use the term monster to kind of at least associate some kind of immorality or evil with the the the personal thing being labeled<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>170<br>00:18:18.420 &#8211;&gt; 00:18:33.309<br>Shlomo Sher: Okay. So now let&#8217;s move on to you know representation, right? Which is what we&#8217;re mostly gonna talk about. The first thing that comes to my mind. It really is any question of kind of representation of monsters is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>171<br>00:18:33.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:18:48.730<br>Shlomo Sher: any kind of question of a racism or discrimination of any kind right? Sometimes the way monsters look might be based on or influenced by, let&#8217;s say, racist caricatures, and I can think of a bunch of old ones where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>172<br>00:18:48.740 &#8211;&gt; 00:18:55.590<br>Shlomo Sher: you know racist caricatures of African Americans were used to display sort of monsters. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>173<br>00:18:55.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:03.300<br>Shlomo Sher: and if you do that, the the more question is is using the monster in the game contributing to the spread of racist caricatures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>174<br>00:19:04.300 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:10.810<br>Shlomo Sher: First of all, does that happen? Are there any examples that you might talk about? That? Would something like that? Is actually the case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>175<br>00:19:11.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:17.089<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I mean, I think we can probably all all think of these examples, and it and it kind of obviously depends.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>176<br>00:19:17.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:17.710<br>Dom Ford: Well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>177<br>00:19:20.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:30.640<br>Dom Ford: one means exactly. But I mean I. What came to my mind was something like the gurudo in in illusion of Zelda. Whether you know this kind of tribe of desert dwelling, scimitar. We all<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>178<br>00:19:30.650 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:42.619<br>Dom Ford: thieves, and they are all thieves, they all evil people. And then and then from them comes the great evil Gandhorf, right? So this kind of, and they they all kind of dark skinned as well. So you have all these kind of potentially racist stereotypes here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>179<br>00:19:42.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:45.569<br>Dom Ford: and they&#8217;re all associated with evil. They&#8217;re all associated with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>180<br>00:19:46.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:48.409<br>Dom Ford: the great, the great monster, I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>181<br>00:19:48.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:19:52.420<br>Dom Ford: another example was a resident evil 5. There was some of those.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>182<br>00:19:54.000 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:09.449<br>Dom Ford: a lot of controversy about that where you&#8217;re in I haven&#8217;t actually played the game. But you&#8217;re kind of in Africa, and there are these African tribe, stereotype people with masks and all all the rest of it, and they are all the zombies, and you&#8217;re just getting them down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>183<br>00:20:09.770 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:11.360<br>Dom Ford: So I think there&#8217;s kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>184<br>00:20:11.550 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:16.460<br>Dom Ford: I think it definitely does happen in in in plenty of places. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>185<br>00:20:16.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:18.940<br>A controversy and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>186<br>00:20:19.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:20.269<br>dungeons and dragons. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>187<br>00:20:20.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:21.710<br>okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>188<br>00:20:22.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:23.200<br>That it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>189<br>00:20:24.120 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:25.460<br>with the drow<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>190<br>00:20:25.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:26.210<br>the drought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>191<br>00:20:26.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:27.750<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>192<br>00:20:29.760 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:30.500<br>it&#8217;s a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>193<br>00:20:33.400 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:34.030<br>and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>194<br>00:20:34.280 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:35.260<br>dark skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>195<br>00:20:35.550 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:36.840<br>Shlomo Sher: That&#8217;s the way that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>196<br>00:20:37.120 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:37.760<br>depicted, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>197<br>00:20:39.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:40.530<br>that&#8217;s the way they&#8217;ve stayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>198<br>00:20:42.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:43.500<br>Don&#8217;t Look, Africa<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>199<br>00:20:43.950 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:45.030<br>and their skin color<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>200<br>00:20:48.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:49.019<br>the word charcoal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>201<br>00:20:49.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:50.610<br>But still<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>202<br>00:20:51.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:53.660<br>they are an an evil race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>203<br>00:20:53.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:54.629<br>When you see them<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>204<br>00:20:55.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:56.480<br>community<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>205<br>00:20:56.860 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:57.699<br>they will always<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>206<br>00:20:57.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:20:58.620<br>attack you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>207<br>00:20:59.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:00.500<br>and there is, of course, the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>208<br>00:21:02.050 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:03.869<br>the characters who break that rule. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>209<br>00:21:05.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:06.000<br>so we have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>210<br>00:21:07.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:07.770<br>famous series of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>211<br>00:21:07.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:08.490<br>about it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>212<br>00:21:09.400 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:10.060<br>Can&#8217;t quite remember<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>213<br>00:21:11.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:12.130<br>Salvator<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>214<br>00:21:13.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:13.950<br>all right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>215<br>00:21:14.480 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:17.310<br>who took one of these characters and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>216<br>00:21:17.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:18.220<br>the hero of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>217<br>00:21:18.660 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:19.290<br>his story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>218<br>00:21:19.730 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:20.570<br>And so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>219<br>00:21:21.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:22.410<br>you know, and it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>220<br>00:21:22.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:24.050<br>going against type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>221<br>00:21:24.410 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:27.219<br>But of course you have to have a type to go against type.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>222<br>00:21:27.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:33.740<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? Yeah, exactly. Have these yeah, sweeping, you know, rules D: and d a sense trying to break that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>223<br>00:21:34.820 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:36.560<br>Every race has good people in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>224<br>00:21:39.170 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:40.300<br>They have their own desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>225<br>00:21:40.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:41.890<br>needs and wants. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>226<br>00:21:42.300 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:42.860<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>227<br>00:21:45.650 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:47.459<br>but kind of up in arms about that. Because<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>228<br>00:21:47.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:48.940<br>this is the way it&#8217;s supposed to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>229<br>00:21:50.230 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:53.230<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean it&#8217;s ultimately kind of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>230<br>00:21:53.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:21:57.480<br>Dom Ford: As with all these things, it&#8217;s going to be what you do with it. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s always going to be a bit<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>231<br>00:21:57.540 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:03.779<br>Dom Ford: a bit weird to use any kind of stereotype or caricatures, right, especially racist ones. But it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>232<br>00:22:03.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:11.710<br>Dom Ford: it&#8217;s it&#8217;s essentially, I mean as we just talked about it&#8217;s, it&#8217;s associating whatever these caricatures or stereotypes are with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>233<br>00:22:12.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:14.840<br>Dom Ford: something that we want to cast out or destroy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>234<br>00:22:15.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:19.010<br>Dom Ford: and maybe something that we also think is kind of morally evil. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>235<br>00:22:19.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:21.969<br>Dom Ford: those 2 things kind of in combination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>236<br>00:22:22.110 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:23.320<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, it&#8217;s not great.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>237<br>00:22:23.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:29.430<br>Shlomo Sher: It&#8217;s interesting, though, with the example that Andy has, it&#8217;s simply the idea of a race itself being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>238<br>00:22:29.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:31.370<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>239<br>00:22:31.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:39.050<br>Shlomo Sher: race of monsters right that we are concerned about because they show any group of people as being inherently evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>240<br>00:22:39.270 &#8211;&gt; 00:22:41.809<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? That.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>241<br>00:22:41.820 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:01.640<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah. What do you think I mean? Is, is it wrong to have monsters that are inherently evil, or it&#8217;s interesting. What even inherently evil means here, Andy, because i&#8217;m thinking of months, you know, monsters that are a group of beings that simply want power, or simply want to feed in what we think is an indiscriminate and inhumane way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>242<br>00:23:01.840 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:03.310<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>243<br>00:23:03.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:07.680<br>Dom Ford: I think this this kind of question. Oh, sorry. Yeah, like vampires. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>244<br>00:23:08.150 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:26.520<br>Dom Ford: I think this kind of question comes up a lot. You see a lot with discussions on Tolkien right with the with the walks, for example, and I think that&#8217;s where the dark health thing came from, because dark health in in Tolkien are, you know, else you have not seen the light of of Valen, or rather than<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>245<br>00:23:26.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:29.290<br>Dom Ford: dark skinned, or anything like that right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>246<br>00:23:29.470 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:31.390<br>Dom Ford: But then you also have the Orcs right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>247<br>00:23:31.470 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:32.480<br>Dom Ford: and that&#8217;s kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>248<br>00:23:46.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:23:48.560<br>Shlomo Sher: wow. This is a long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>249<br>00:23:52.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:01.450<br>Dom Ford: Have a complicated one that I keep wrestling with, because it&#8217;s just it&#8217;s a race of kind of very deep law reasons for why Orcs are the way they are, and why<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>250<br>00:24:02.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:08.170<br>Dom Ford: that doesn&#8217;t then apply to element, or whatever. And you know I can&#8217;t remember this. All this reasons off the top of my head; but, like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>251<br>00:24:08.200 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:13.930<br>Dom Ford: you, can, it can be very well justified and richly justified in in the text, and can make<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>252<br>00:24:18.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:24.650<br>Dom Ford: very compelling case for why evil? And so I don&#8217;t. I I just don&#8217;t know what to do with that. I mean. I&#8217;m curious what you think about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>253<br>00:24:26.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:28.880<br>Well, in the case of D and d they<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>254<br>00:24:28.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:29.990<br>Dom Ford: they have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>255<br>00:24:30.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:31.129<br>from that they.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>256<br>00:24:31.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:32.340<br>you know, evil and good<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>257<br>00:24:32.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:34.719<br>were game mechanics in their system, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>258<br>00:24:35.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:37.060<br>they have. They have backed away from<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>259<br>00:24:38.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:40.319<br>It&#8217;s just a role-play decision that you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>260<br>00:24:41.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:42.780<br>Shlomo Sher: I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>261<br>00:24:42.980 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:45.769<br>Shlomo Sher: to to to me. It You know I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>262<br>00:24:46.890 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:52.580<br>Shlomo Sher: I think it really kind of depends how closely humanized they are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>263<br>00:24:52.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:56.430<br>Shlomo Sher: right. So, for example, you know, like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>264<br>00:24:56.540 &#8211;&gt; 00:24:58.930<br>Shlomo Sher: you take, you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>265<br>00:24:59.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:07.299<br>Shlomo Sher: the orcs. Let&#8217;s say, sure we can go. We can go with the or some token, or any equivalent, because there&#8217;s so many monsters like that right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>266<br>00:25:07.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:10.639<br>Shlomo Sher: You know the fact that they seen<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>267<br>00:25:10.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:14.480<br>Shlomo Sher: in that case in in that particular<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>268<br>00:25:14.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:17.319<br>Shlomo Sher: setting. Very, very inhuman<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>269<br>00:25:17.680 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:27.939<br>Shlomo Sher: to me makes makes it seem, though I mean they still have. You know they have jealousies. They have fears they, but they&#8217;re not showing in any kind of domestic setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>270<br>00:25:28.060 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:33.509<br>Shlomo Sher: though maybe that&#8217;s a problem, because maybe they do have a domestic setting. But I you know I I I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>271<br>00:25:33.680 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:42.989<br>Shlomo Sher: to to me it&#8217;s I. I think the the vector maybe we&#8217;re looking at is how close to being humans are a day being depicted. If it&#8217;s animal urges, it&#8217;s one thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>272<br>00:25:43.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:25:54.489<br>Shlomo Sher: If they have a culture, and if they, you know, like no culture is gonna be inherently bad. But you know part of that. I was thinking about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>273<br>00:25:54.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:01.860<br>Shlomo Sher: what they do. That&#8217;s close to humans might be things like cultures. There might be things like families.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>274<br>00:26:01.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:07.159<br>Shlomo Sher: but it also might be kind of also the way they&#8217;re depicted, you know, in terms of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>275<br>00:26:07.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:20.700<br>Shlomo Sher: again how close they look to real human beings. So I was thinking about racial characteristics that might be kind of put in there, like, you know, flattened or hooked nose or slanted eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>276<br>00:26:20.720 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:38.730<br>Shlomo Sher: You know where you seem to be referring to potentially now, not necessarily intentionally, but potentially, to groups of human beings. And the more you do things like that, the more it seems to be to be morally problematic. But, on the other hand, these are just kind of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>277<br>00:26:38.830 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:41.280<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, the way human beings look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>278<br>00:26:41.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:43.270<br>Shlomo Sher: And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>279<br>00:26:43.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:44.989<br>Shlomo Sher: you know<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>280<br>00:26:45.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:48.390<br>Shlomo Sher: why can&#8217;t you just grab a type of nose<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>281<br>00:26:48.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:26:55.229<br>Shlomo Sher: for for these monsters. Let&#8217;s say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>282<br>00:26:55.970 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:03.530<br>Dom Ford: I think in general, yeah, this this idea of how human, like the monster is, is a good one in particular. I think the face is probably really important here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>283<br>00:27:05.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:18.309<br>Dom Ford: like a very common way to on the flip side, a very common way to make something monstrous or to dehumanize it. Right is to obscure the face like even in even in like a call of duty where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>284<br>00:27:18.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:20.379<br>Dom Ford: they are humans. They&#8217;re not kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>285<br>00:27:20.680 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:33.599<br>Dom Ford: late discursivized as monsters as such, but they all kind of have obscured faces and masks on, while your teammates will have no helmets on, because they&#8217;re idiots, but you want you to see their face or something<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>286<br>00:27:33.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:36.950<br>Dom Ford: right, and I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>287<br>00:27:37.170 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:38.170<br>Dom Ford: so. Then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>288<br>00:27:38.300 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:44.299<br>Dom Ford: I think then, when a when a game kind of or when any kind of media right does show a face that&#8217;s kind of important<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>289<br>00:27:46.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:51.109<br>Dom Ford: and monstrous faces can again go back to that kind of category crisis where they can.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>290<br>00:27:51.300 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:56.480<br>Dom Ford: whether, if they seem too close to human face, then that can be really unsettling and really disturbing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>291<br>00:27:56.570 &#8211;&gt; 00:27:58.360<br>Dom Ford: And I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>292<br>00:27:58.730 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:01.199<br>Dom Ford: if you use racial stereotypes to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>293<br>00:28:01.280 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:06.530<br>Dom Ford: particularly in in a fantasy setting. So if you&#8217;re in a fantasy setting where you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>294<br>00:28:08.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:09.970<br>Dom Ford: ostensibly<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>295<br>00:28:10.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:16.569<br>Dom Ford: sort of hooked noses have no reason to exist right, maybe, or they they do exist. But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>296<br>00:28:17.170 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:22.240<br>Dom Ford: you know there, there&#8217;s no reason for a whole kind of a a group of people to have that this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>297<br>00:28:22.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:31.620<br>Dom Ford: and but then you do make that happen for one specific group, and that group is all evil or money grabbing, or something like that. Right? That&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>298<br>00:28:31.920 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:36.929<br>Dom Ford: that&#8217;s going to be quite problematic. This is where the where the physical attribute<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>299<br>00:28:36.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:38.989<br>aligns with some sort of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>300<br>00:28:39.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:40.530<br>trope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>301<br>00:28:41.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:43.149<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s just that these people in real<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>302<br>00:28:44.740 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:45.350<br>and I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>303<br>00:28:49.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:51.099<br>of these people right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>304<br>00:28:51.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:28:53.940<br>Shlomo Sher: So it&#8217;s an influence of these things right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>305<br>00:28:54.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:01.729<br>Shlomo Sher: and it makes perfect sense that when you get this kind of confluence that you would recognize that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>306<br>00:29:02.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:06.220<br>Shlomo Sher: or it should recognize that. Look, this is clearly problematic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>307<br>00:29:06.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:09.500<br>Shlomo Sher: right? It&#8217;s when it&#8217;s it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>308<br>00:29:09.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:15.230<br>Shlomo Sher: right, and and you&#8217;re just switch, and all you do to do is switch to another. Let&#8217;s say nose, type, or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>309<br>00:29:15.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:23.220<br>Shlomo Sher: you know other characteristics that are not associated with it and within offensive trope.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>310<br>00:29:32.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:34.129<br>Shlomo Sher: Then this is happening a lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>311<br>00:29:34.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:34.880<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>312<br>00:29:38.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:41.460<br>Shlomo Sher: you you take X group or within the world<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>313<br>00:29:41.510 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:43.329<br>if Hi: yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>314<br>00:29:43.890 &#8211;&gt; 00:29:53.119<br>Shlomo Sher: So so we&#8217;re getting a lot of a lot of lag just out of curios. So we keep. We keep getting you laggy out of curiosity, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>315<br>00:29:54.740 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:10.379<br>Shlomo Sher: i&#8217;m just curious if there&#8217;s anything you could do. For example, I switch from my home network to my 5G network when we when we start recording, do you have anything like that? Otherwise we&#8217;ll keep going. I mean, we&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll I mean I&#8217;m i&#8217;m on ethernet. So this is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>316<br>00:30:10.390 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:23.510<br>Shlomo Sher: stronger connection as I can get. I could try resetting the root of it. That&#8217;s that&#8217;s all I could do. I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>317<br>00:30:23.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:29.680<br>Shlomo Sher: so. Okay. So Don, let me let me with the next question. Then again, we&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll just we&#8217;ll just we&#8217;ll just keep going with this. Okay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>318<br>00:30:29.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:31.250<br>Dom Ford: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>319<br>00:30:31.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:33.170<br>Shlomo Sher: all right. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>320<br>00:30:33.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:38.789<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, I was also thinking about caricatures that you know Aren&#8217;t really about the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>321<br>00:30:38.840 &#8211;&gt; 00:30:52.880<br>Shlomo Sher: let&#8217;s say the the facial features or anything like that, but they&#8217;re more like symbols. Address activities that we relate to some culture. So you talked about like the let&#8217;s say the scimitars in the desert. I think that was that was a that was a good example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>322<br>00:30:54.230 &#8211;&gt; 00:31:02.150<br>Shlomo Sher: You know I was a I was at a Tiki party recently. Is there tick? Do you guys do tiki in in Denmark?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>323<br>00:31:02.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:31:21.879<br>Dom Ford: I don&#8217;t I mean No, I&#8217;ve never been to a Tiki party here. I I i&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s happened. But you know I I was. I was at a ticket party, and a friend of mine was complaining about the cultural appropriation that Ticky is, and whether Tiki is a really offensive, you know. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>324<br>00:31:21.890 &#8211;&gt; 00:31:33.219<br>Shlomo Sher: we we already have these things going on in in in real life, right? I mean, for those of you who don&#8217;t know Tiki is kind of like a Polynesian fantasy that was invented in La<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>325<br>00:31:33.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:31:37.930<br>Shlomo Sher: about the South Pacific, and you know they serve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>326<br>00:31:38.000 &#8211;&gt; 00:31:44.270<br>Shlomo Sher: You know, drinks that we associate now with the South Pacific, and to have a kind of a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>327<br>00:31:44.390 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:04.110<br>Shlomo Sher: pan South Pacific, Polynesian kind of feel to them. But you know, some Pacific islanders essentially claim that this is a form of cultural appropriation. That is a offensive. I i&#8217;m just kinda curious. Is there kind of monster oriented cultural appropriation. Or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>328<br>00:32:04.120 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:05.960<br>again, when you&#8217;re<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>329<br>00:32:06.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:12.619<br>Shlomo Sher: where you&#8217;re looking for those cultural symbols, and you&#8217;re using them somehow in monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>330<br>00:32:13.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:15.480<br>Dom Ford: I think what i&#8217;d say is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>331<br>00:32:17.400 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:30.429<br>Dom Ford: if in the construction of the the monster, right? So you want to take a group of humans or other creatures, and you want to make the monstrous cause you want to imply that evil, and and that they need to be destroyed, or something. If.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>332<br>00:32:30.770 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:34.030<br>Dom Ford: to make that construction work, you&#8217;re relying on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>333<br>00:32:34.080 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:35.580<br>Dom Ford: these already<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>334<br>00:32:35.800 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:38.859<br>Dom Ford: negatively associated images in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>335<br>00:32:39.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:56.239<br>Dom Ford: from the real world. Then I think that&#8217;s that&#8217;s gonna be problematic where it&#8217;s like. You rely on the player believing that scimitars have some kind of connection with Muslims with evil, something like along those lines. Right? So if if you have the chain of symbols like that which leads to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>336<br>00:32:56.780 &#8211;&gt; 00:32:58.930<br>Dom Ford: the construction of the monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>337<br>00:33:00.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:04.189<br>Dom Ford: Then I then I would kind of say, that&#8217;s where you need to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>338<br>00:33:05.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:10.039<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, that&#8217;s the that&#8217;s where it kind of gets pretty sketchy. I think Pretty Dicey, I think about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>339<br>00:33:10.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:12.659<br>Dom Ford: cultural appropriation in and of itself<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>340<br>00:33:13.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:21.579<br>Dom Ford: with the monster, I mean, you can think of plenty examples of when different symbols from different cultures are used in the construction of a monster.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>341<br>00:33:22.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:23.690<br>Dom Ford: I think it kind of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>342<br>00:33:24.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:28.650<br>Dom Ford: I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m not really one to be talking about this as like a white British guy. But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>343<br>00:33:29.210 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:37.119<br>Dom Ford: I think I I think it would be just back to that first point of if you&#8217;re using these already negative stereotypes in order to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>344<br>00:33:37.420 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:42.859<br>Dom Ford: make the monster monstrous. Not necessarily. If it&#8217;s like. Incidentally, so. Does that make sense?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>345<br>00:33:43.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:50.789<br>Shlomo Sher: Well, there&#8217;s there&#8217;s, let&#8217;s say the situation where you know under a situation where you&#8217;re being negligent about it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>346<br>00:33:50.820 &#8211;&gt; 00:33:58.009<br>Shlomo Sher: right and clearly the one where you know it&#8217;s offensive. But you use it anyway, or very problematic<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>347<br>00:33:58.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:03.240<br>Shlomo Sher: right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>348<br>00:34:03.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:22.599<br>Shlomo Sher: you know. Maybe you should know, and I put them, maybe because the question of negligence is, you might not have had any idea that this is actually representative of a particular culture or anything like that. But you know, in situations where you should have known, it seems that you will be held accountable, or you should be held accountable, you know, to some degree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>349<br>00:34:26.739 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:29.909<br>Dom Ford: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there&#8217;s this this whole economy of symbols, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>350<br>00:34:30.210 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:34.759<br>Dom Ford: you might not necessarily know where where you&#8217;ve got certain associations from right, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>351<br>00:34:35.110 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:36.000<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>352<br>00:34:36.210 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:39.400<br>Dom Ford: But that doesn&#8217;t mean you&#8217;re kind of off the hook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>353<br>00:34:39.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:56.720<br>Shlomo Sher: Okay, what about sex? So you know, sexist character, You know it&#8217;s easy to start with race and sex right because there are things that we often, you know. Mind you, I mean, there are things that often have been turned into monstrous things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>354<br>00:34:57.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:34:57.810<br>Shlomo Sher: and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>355<br>00:34:57.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:10.150<br>Shlomo Sher: there might be the easiest other ring that there is to do right. But can can you think of a sex as caricature as well. We have kind of a, you know. Sexism, you know, put into our monsters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>356<br>00:35:11.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:23.020<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, totally. There&#8217;s you should definitely read the work of Sarah Stang feel familiar with her. She her her her Phd. Dissertation was on the monstrous feminine in in games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>357<br>00:35:23.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:24.410<br>Dom Ford: So this is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>358<br>00:35:30.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:35.149<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s very much her back. But it&#8217;s a monstrous family in general which comes from film theory. It&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>359<br>00:35:35.200 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:48.580<br>Dom Ford: there are these: If you take the trio with my mother made in a crone. Right. These are 3 of the big stereotypes of these Sexist monster depictions where they are. I would describe them as kind of excessive in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>360<br>00:35:48.760 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:56.810<br>Dom Ford: some of the ways that women are viewed so excessive in their reproductive abilities, or inabilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>361<br>00:35:57.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:35:58.080<br>Dom Ford: or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>362<br>00:35:58.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:03.960<br>Dom Ford: excessive in their sexuality. Like the kind of suck you burst the seductress kind of thing on the siren.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>363<br>00:36:04.050 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:12.290<br>Dom Ford: or you have, like the the the hag, where the aging and the kind of grotesqueness of aging, or, you know, supposing Protestants of aging is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>364<br>00:36:12.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:24.300<br>Dom Ford: very much hammed up in for the moment, so I think, like some great examples, is like this. There&#8217;s a pretty direct one in in the which are 3, where you have the the 3, the 3 Crones, I think they&#8217;re called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>365<br>00:36:25.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:28.479<br>Dom Ford: and they kind of start as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>366<br>00:36:29.080 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:35.849<br>Dom Ford: you see them in a tapestry, talking to you as these kind of 3 beautiful naked young women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>367<br>00:36:35.970 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:40.479<br>Dom Ford: and then, when they kind of reveal their true forms, they are these, you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>368<br>00:36:40.550 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:45.450<br>Dom Ford: old, wrinkled, large, bulbous<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>369<br>00:36:45.510 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:48.339<br>Dom Ford: kind of creatures who who attack you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>370<br>00:36:49.300 &#8211;&gt; 00:36:54.230<br>Dom Ford: And so it&#8217;s it&#8217;s because Sorry cool<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>371<br>00:36:54.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:00.840<br>Shlomo Sher: all right, and i&#8217;m assuming that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the the monstrousness comes from there, disgusting, old and old. This<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>372<br>00:37:00.980 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:06.470<br>Dom Ford: exactly it it&#8217;s taking kind of what are already these fears and anxieties in society, right? These<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>373<br>00:37:06.500 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:12.660<br>Dom Ford: fears of women getting old, and therefore no longer to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>374<br>00:37:12.840 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:22.829<br>Dom Ford: Or all these fears of women using their sexual power to manipulate people and all those things, though those already existing anxieties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>375<br>00:37:23.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:28.050<br>Dom Ford: obviously not exactly well-founded. But those existing anxieties then get kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>376<br>00:37:28.130 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:33.080<br>Dom Ford: exaggerated and They find a depiction in the monsters that we make<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>377<br>00:37:33.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:34.090<br>Yeah, it&#8217;s interesting<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>378<br>00:37:35.700 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:37.289<br>of depictions of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>379<br>00:37:37.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:38.270<br>monstrously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>380<br>00:37:39.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:39.660<br>and I<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>381<br>00:37:40.700 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:42.609<br>it&#8217;s hard to find it&#8217;s hard to think of those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>382<br>00:37:43.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:44.029<br>I can think of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>383<br>00:37:44.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:45.069<br>of these<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>384<br>00:37:45.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:37:53.809<br>depictions of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>385<br>00:37:53.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:02.340<br>Dom Ford: They probably Yes, yeah. But I mean there, there&#8217;s something disturbing, or there&#8217;s something that society does not like about older women<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>386<br>00:38:02.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:04.060<br>Dom Ford: in that sense.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>387<br>00:38:04.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:09.529<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, you know, I actually you got me with the second one, the the mother part.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>388<br>00:38:09.740 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:14.349<br>Shlomo Sher: the so this is the birthing ability<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>389<br>00:38:14.510 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:16.759<br>Shlomo Sher: is used to become monstrous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>390<br>00:38:17.110 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:20.689<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I mean, if you think of examples where.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>391<br>00:38:22.570 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:44.670<br>Dom Ford: for some reason, i&#8217;m blanking on examples, the only one I can think of is from a a like a niche Danish. But basically if you think of these examples where there&#8217;s some mother figure, maybe even an like a normal quote, unquote looking mother. But who gives birth to some demon or to some, or you have like alien as well. That&#8217;s that&#8217; Be an example of that where it&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>392<br>00:38:44.760 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:48.380<br>Dom Ford: anxiety surrounding, or or rather<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>393<br>00:38:49.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:56.610<br>Dom Ford: monstrosity, takes root or takes its center or orbits around the idea of reproduction in the womb and stuff like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>394<br>00:38:56.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:38:58.129<br>Grindle&#8217;s Mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>395<br>00:38:58.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:00.870<br>Dom Ford: Yeah. Yeah. Good example. Yes, exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>396<br>00:39:02.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:03.669<br>There&#8217;s there&#8217;s also tons of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>397<br>00:39:03.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:04.429<br>video game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>398<br>00:39:04.660 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:05.410<br>mother<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>399<br>00:39:05.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:07.509<br>Dom Ford: monsters Who?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>400<br>00:39:07.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:10.529<br>Dom Ford: Yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>401<br>00:39:11.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:17.760<br>Shlomo Sher: yeah, that that&#8217;s why I was thinking the spawning of the monsters right and or desponding. And then the ultimate loyalty<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>402<br>00:39:17.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:20.600<br>Shlomo Sher: of the monster is is to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>403<br>00:39:21.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:27.040<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, yeah, I I think it&#8217;s that kind of caricature, or just anything that surrounds birthing. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>404<br>00:39:27.950 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:32.489<br>Shlomo Sher: I I I was also thinking with the sexist characters of the game. Katherine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>405<br>00:39:32.800 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:37.780<br>Shlomo Sher: if you guys<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>406<br>00:39:38.050 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:40.289<br>Shlomo Sher: 12 years ago, or something like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>407<br>00:39:40.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:39:46.340<br>Shlomo Sher: and they&#8217;re essentially, I think the guy&#8217;s girlfriend would attack him in his dreams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>408<br>00:39:46.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:00.680<br>Shlomo Sher: But you know i&#8217;m gonna i&#8217;m gonna skip it. I&#8217;ll cut this out so you guys don&#8217;t don&#8217;t remember that one or that one hit alright, so we got. We got some racist concerns. We got some sexist concerns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>409<br>00:40:01.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:19.799<br>Shlomo Sher: Is there anything a master can do? Let&#8217;s say an ability or practice. So now we&#8217;re this is less about maybe representation, but more about kind of abilities that we should consider beyond the pale even for a monster in a video game context, like something that is, and notice it doesn&#8217;t need to be<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>410<br>00:40:20.200 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:30.110<br>Shlomo Sher: to evil. Necessarily, this just needs to be something about an action or practice that itself would would be wrong for the monster to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>411<br>00:40:32.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:35.510<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I mean, i&#8217;m struggling on this because I don&#8217;t. Really.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>412<br>00:40:40.270 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:44.779<br>Dom Ford: I think it&#8217;s going to be the super boring answer of that it to so I mean, I think you could say<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>413<br>00:40:46.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:48.390<br>Dom Ford: I mean, I can&#8217;t even think of of an action that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>414<br>00:40:48.860 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:53.650<br>Dom Ford: that should just be straight up, prohibited to be depicted in games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>415<br>00:40:53.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:57.560<br>Dom Ford: But if there were such a thing, I don&#8217;t think it would matter<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>416<br>00:40:57.610 &#8211;&gt; 00:40:59.210<br>Dom Ford: whether it was a monster or not<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>417<br>00:41:00.820 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:03.750<br>Dom Ford: like, for example, if we were going to say like a Nazi salute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>418<br>00:41:04.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:07.220<br>Dom Ford: you know. Obviously you don&#8217;t do that in real life<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>419<br>00:41:07.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:09.470<br>Dom Ford: you probably.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>420<br>00:41:09.610 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:20.549<br>Dom Ford: But the thing is, you can think of examples where it happens in games, and it&#8217;s because you&#8217;re fighting against Nazis or something like that. And so I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s any action in itself that would be<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>421<br>00:41:20.720 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:23.959<br>Dom Ford: impermissible or or or immoral.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>422<br>00:41:24.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:29.419<br>Dom Ford: But I was kind of thinking about this idea of transgression. There&#8217;s a great book by<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>423<br>00:41:29.470 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:32.410<br>Dom Ford: Toro Mortensen and and Christine Johnson<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>424<br>00:41:32.610 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:41.669<br>Dom Ford: about yeah, just transgression in games and all the different angles of that. So games transgressing our boundaries, us translating games, boundaries, and and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>425<br>00:41:41.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:44.280<br>Dom Ford: and so it definitely does happen where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>426<br>00:41:44.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:48.330<br>Dom Ford: a game in general, but also monsters within them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>427<br>00:41:48.660 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:51.439<br>Dom Ford: you know, in some way transgress our boundaries. You could<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>428<br>00:41:51.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:41:56.060<br>Dom Ford: maybe most kind of obviously you could think of monsters which<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>429<br>00:41:56.110 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:10.719<br>Dom Ford: do something out of the out of the seeming bounds of the game. So when when a game starts editing your files or something like that, and that can that can feel like a bit of a transgression against you, yeah, there are some. I mean, there&#8217;s I think it&#8217;s becoming increasingly popular, because it&#8217;s it&#8217;s it&#8217;s a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>430<br>00:42:10.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:22.649<br>Dom Ford: especially the first time it happens to you. It&#8217;s a big shock. What you like about the game can just just go out into my computer and it it seems to like be exceeding the boundaries of the game right to to kind of dovetail that in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>431<br>00:42:24.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:29.179<br>Dom Ford: So I mean that that&#8217;s where that kind of led me. But i&#8217;m not sure<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>432<br>00:42:29.770 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:33.440<br>Dom Ford: that there would be any practice or ability as such. Right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>433<br>00:42:34.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:35.390<br>I I was thinking about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>434<br>00:42:40.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:41.160<br>We&#8217;re talking about what<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>435<br>00:42:41.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:46.850<br>and but monstrous monstrous men, this monstrously sexual myth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>436<br>00:42:48.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:49.600<br>and how that is depicted<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>437<br>00:42:49.740 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:50.719<br>it frequently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>438<br>00:42:50.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:53.229<br>whatever it is, into pornography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>439<br>00:42:53.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:42:57.879<br>Dom Ford: So we&#8217;re we can. It&#8217;s, and it&#8217;s sort of interesting that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>440<br>00:42:58.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:01.589<br>we seem to be able to create monstrously sexual women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>441<br>00:43:02.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:04.509<br>and have that in just like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>442<br>00:43:05.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:06.910<br>P. Z. 13.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>443<br>00:43:07.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:09.989<br>But as soon as men become monstrously sexual, then<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>444<br>00:43:11.350 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:13.289<br>that&#8217;s that&#8217;s out of bounds<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>445<br>00:43:13.900 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:19.270<br>Dom Ford: that&#8217;s interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>446<br>00:43:19.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:21.609<br>Dom Ford: reflected in the fact that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>447<br>00:43:22.130 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:29.579<br>Dom Ford: I mean, I don&#8217;t know for sure. But you you would get like a different age rating when you show breasts on TV compared to when you show a penis right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>448<br>00:43:29.770 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:30.479<br>Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>449<br>00:43:31.080 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:36.850<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah. And it&#8217;s interesting. My, My, my cat is assaulting me at the moment<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>450<br>00:43:37.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:41.240<br>Shlomo Sher: I I I I think there&#8217;s Also, the you know, with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>451<br>00:43:41.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:43:58.560<br>Shlomo Sher: hyper sexualized men, Sexual violence is something that you&#8217;re gonna get very quickly coming from, if you&#8217;re in the monster mode, and I think that&#8217;s going to be something that you&#8217;re rarely going to see from the hyper sexualized woman.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>452<br>00:43:58.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:14.719<br>Shlomo Sher: monster and and kind of these games. And maybe yeah, maybe that connotation. Those connotations lead more to to the the porn stuff. But yeah, that&#8217;s a that&#8217;s a really interesting point, Andy: yeah. In fact, it just occurred to me that the alien queen<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>453<br>00:44:14.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:15.569<br>Shlomo Sher: right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>454<br>00:44:16.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:18.449<br>She I mean, she basically goes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>455<br>00:44:19.130 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:20.060<br>people<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>456<br>00:44:20.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:25.400<br>Shlomo Sher: right. She is depicted as a queen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>457<br>00:44:27.280 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:31.259<br>Dom Ford: You would have a different tone if that was the alien king. Right? Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>458<br>00:44:31.540 &#8211;&gt; 00:44:46.329<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, that&#8217;s interesting. Yeah, she&#8217;s. Does she inseminate people? She uses she. She uses them as she plants eggs inside them, right. But yeah, I was actually thinking of things more like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>459<br>00:44:47.150 &#8211;&gt; 00:45:03.589<br>Shlomo Sher: things that monsters, let&#8217;s say, my alien look all right. So these these might be things that transgress the sort of things that generally we think maybe should not be in video games. So let&#8217;s say, you know the monster that eats kids<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>460<br>00:45:03.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:45:07.209<br>Shlomo Sher: in a in a grotesque way, you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>461<br>00:45:08.900 &#8211;&gt; 00:45:24.959<br>Shlomo Sher: or you know the monster that consistently, consistently let&#8217;s say I don&#8217;t know, has disgusting diarrhea. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a you know. So we go scatological here right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>462<br>00:45:25.170 &#8211;&gt; 00:45:38.329<br>Shlomo Sher: Or let&#8217;s say, you know monsters that like to eat humans in a particularly like you know where you hear them. Crunch the bones happily.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>463<br>00:45:38.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:45:53.980<br>Shlomo Sher: and you know, slurp up the you know. Slurp up the the limbs with with sauce. I I don&#8217;t know I&#8217;m i&#8217;m i&#8217;m putting anything anything I can out there. But you know, I mean, there&#8217;s it seems like there are a few things that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>464<br>00:45:54.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:09.020<br>Shlomo Sher: we don&#8217;t have in video games. Some of them are maybe go oriented. Some of them have to do with, You know. Children, obviously rape monsters are things that are going to, you know. You&#8217;re gonna have them in the Hentai games<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>465<br>00:46:09.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:16.589<br>Shlomo Sher: right. But hand tight games are their own questionable thing that we will get to in a few episodes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>466<br>00:46:16.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:20.330<br>Dom Ford: as we got the the fairy folk<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>467<br>00:46:20.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:21.139<br>so frequently<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>468<br>00:46:21.270 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:21.830<br>picked it as<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>469<br>00:46:22.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:23.399<br>beautiful and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>470<br>00:46:23.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:24.359<br>charming<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>471<br>00:46:24.750 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:26.209<br>magical. But then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>472<br>00:46:26.720 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:28.390<br>as as Shelmo was saying, they<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>473<br>00:46:28.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:29.390<br>they<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>474<br>00:46:29.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:31.429<br>catch you, and they will eat your children. And<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>475<br>00:46:32.240 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:33.809<br>Dom Ford: hmm, Hmm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>476<br>00:46:33.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:36.780<br>Dom Ford: I mean, I i&#8217;m wondering if that that then gets to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>477<br>00:46:37.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:42.699<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s going to depend on which ferry depiction you&#8217;re talking about, but that that gets to the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>478<br>00:46:42.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:47.059<br>Dom Ford: anxiety surrounding like young girls. For example, where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>479<br>00:46:47.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:46:57.799<br>Dom Ford: can also be seen, as you know, manipulative or deceptive, you know, using the the cute looks to to to get favors, or, you know, to get people to do things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>480<br>00:46:57.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:03.180<br>Dom Ford: And then that&#8217;s kind of yeah turned into this baby eating thing. Yeah, I i&#8217;m not sure that that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>481<br>00:47:03.210 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:04.409<br>Dom Ford: that&#8217;s a good example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>482<br>00:47:05.800 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:14.689<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, Andy, just in your history of games as been as there been a again where baby eating is part of the game just out of curiosity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>483<br>00:47:19.460 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:22.980<br>I possibly in fable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>484<br>00:47:23.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:28.299<br>because it tends to play with the the these these tables, these European fables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>485<br>00:47:28.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:31.510<br>and Toton kinder. You know the the woman who<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>486<br>00:47:31.940 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:33.230<br>the Gingerbread House<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>487<br>00:47:34.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:35.529<br>about that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>488<br>00:47:36.870 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:45.260<br>Dom Ford: I think there&#8217;s a kind of interesting on on those lines. There&#8217;s an interesting. It&#8217;s not eating them. But the it&#8217;s an interesting example in Dark Souls 3,<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>489<br>00:47:47.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:49.859<br>Dom Ford: the boss called.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>490<br>00:47:52.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:55.670<br>Dom Ford: I just need to check this name because I should know. This<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>491<br>00:47:55.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:47:58.740<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, the consumed king.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>492<br>00:47:59.000 &#8211;&gt; 00:48:05.219<br>Dom Ford: And this was like a a a rare kind of moment of, I guess censorship in in dark sales<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>493<br>00:48:06.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:48:11.999<br>Dom Ford: or not censorship self-censorship, or you know, basically the it&#8217;s kind of this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>494<br>00:48:12.450 &#8211;&gt; 00:48:24.639<br>Dom Ford: dragon like smooth skinned creature doesn&#8217;t matter that much. But this boss who who fights you and is kind of whaling this almost like pathetic, pitiable kind of screeching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>495<br>00:48:24.970 &#8211;&gt; 00:48:39.279<br>Dom Ford: and it&#8217;s kind of armies coiled such that he appears to be holding something. But there&#8217;s nothing there and then. So players kind of went digging around as they do, and data mining, and and found that the original model he was holding a baby<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>496<br>00:48:39.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:48:42.590<br>Dom Ford: as he for you, and then halfway through the fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>497<br>00:48:43.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:00.850<br>Dom Ford: What he does in in the game that that we that we&#8217;d play is he smashes his fists down onto the ground. But of course, in the original version that would have been smashing the baby and kind of crushing it, and then going into a frenzy into the into the second phase. And so it&#8217;s kind of really interesting that they they took that out because it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>498<br>00:49:01.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:10.259<br>Dom Ford: I mean the one, since it kind of still works, because then this is like this, this the consumed king. It&#8217;s like this this kind of crazy king who thinks he is a kid, but actually doesn&#8217;t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>499<br>00:49:10.290 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:13.759<br>Dom Ford: But it has this really transgressive<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>500<br>00:49:14.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:19.400<br>Dom Ford: yeah depiction in the in the original one, I think that that could be an interesting example.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>501<br>00:49:20.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:34.690<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, I was thinking of something like that, though now, as you were talking about, I was imagining him, and taking Byes out of the baby is needed to, you know, to follow up right. He didn&#8217;t didn&#8217;t do that. But that would have been that would have been transgressive for sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>502<br>00:49:35.090 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:38.739<br>And actually that. And this made me think of like the way that children<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>503<br>00:49:38.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:40.169<br>babies<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>504<br>00:49:40.460 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:42.589<br>like. Frequently we we. We have seen<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>505<br>00:49:42.760 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:44.389<br>baby monsters<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>506<br>00:49:44.460 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:45.490<br>quite free<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>507<br>00:49:47.200 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:49.339<br>in bio shock<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>508<br>00:49:49.600 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:50.270<br>or in<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>509<br>00:49:52.380 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:55.030<br>monster, but it&#8217;s definitely a strange creature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>510<br>00:49:55.060 &#8211;&gt; 00:49:56.020<br>and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>511<br>00:50:00.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:04.830<br>I&#8217;m going to mind Block the name. There was just a couple of years ago, big game where you spend your time with<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>512<br>00:50:05.790 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:08.290<br>the wilderness with this baby in a tank.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>513<br>00:50:09.150 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:12.000<br>Best friending<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>514<br>00:50:12.120 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:12.950<br>that&#8217;s stranding<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>515<br>00:50:14.280 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:17.229<br>Dom Ford: the baby monsters. What&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>516<br>00:50:17.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:18.060<br>there?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>517<br>00:50:19.550 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:21.550<br>Dom Ford: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>518<br>00:50:22.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:28.549<br>Shlomo Sher: I I mean isn&#8217;t that as a bunch of ankles. You could approach that from it. Sorry. Yeah, go, go go ahead. I mean, yeah, I was. I was<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>519<br>00:50:28.750 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:31.119<br>Shlomo Sher: sorry I said, Go ahead and i&#8217;m gonna start talking<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>520<br>00:50:31.560 &#8211;&gt; 00:50:50.039<br>Shlomo Sher: very nice. Sorry. There you go. I I was. I was thinking about how you know babies are strange to begin with, right? I mean they&#8217;re you know. They&#8217;re not quite us, you know they are to be us. You, you know. There&#8217;s some philosophers who believe that babies are still not people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>521<br>00:50:50.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:06.399<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, because they don&#8217;t have the cognitive capacities of people. They don&#8217;t have self awareness. You don&#8217;t get that till you&#8217;re like 18 months, or something like that, you know. So there&#8217;s something sort of still alien this about them, and if you give them power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>522<br>00:51:06.540 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:10.790<br>Shlomo Sher: you know you could see how you know they could become<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>523<br>00:51:11.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:16.330<br>Shlomo Sher: monsters that speak to some sort of, you know, primal fear inside us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>524<br>00:51:16.560 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:20.190<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I think that&#8217;s a great great example of like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>525<br>00:51:21.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:38.389<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s very easy to make monsters of things that we can&#8217;t understand, and we can&#8217;t think like. So I think. Yeah. But he&#8217;s a great example where we have no idea how a baby really experiences the world, even though we all this kind of this uncannyiness where we all were a baby. But we can&#8217;t remember being a baby, and then we see a baby, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>526<br>00:51:38.680 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:45.629<br>Dom Ford: it seems human, but doesn&#8217;t seem to understand the world in a way that we can recognize, and, you know, does everything differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>527<br>00:51:46.780 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:50.169<br>Dom Ford: And I think, yeah, I think you&#8217;re right. That that kind of gets to this. Some anxiety about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>528<br>00:51:50.440 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:55.740<br>Dom Ford: the baby is is to be human, but we can&#8217;t really can&#8217;t understand it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>529<br>00:51:56.420 &#8211;&gt; 00:51:59.229<br>Shlomo Sher: The there&#8217;s also the I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>530<br>00:51:59.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:01.080<br>Shlomo Sher: When you have a baby<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>531<br>00:52:01.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:08.179<br>Shlomo Sher: it&#8217;s like the thing you are concerned about the most, and maybe one of the things you could be concerned about is a transformation<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>532<br>00:52:08.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:14.370<br>Shlomo Sher: into something other. And but you know it&#8217;s really interesting. It&#8217;s like when you, when you think about the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>533<br>00:52:14.590 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:27.770<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, when we think about monsters sometimes, the easiest way to to think about them as the most foreign thing that we can think of. But sometimes I would think it would be kind of you take the things that are most sacred to us<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>534<br>00:52:27.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:38.310<br>Shlomo Sher: that we love the most that we care about the most, and you distort them right. You have them kind of turn bad from the inside that somehow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>535<br>00:52:38.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:41.809<br>Shlomo Sher: and that&#8217;s Stephen. That&#8217;s Stephen King&#8217;s motto<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>536<br>00:52:42.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:46.190<br>Dom Ford: for all of his horror stories is, he says, I take something that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>537<br>00:52:46.250 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:46.899<br>is otherwise<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>538<br>00:52:46.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:48.520<br>is perfectly safe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>539<br>00:52:48.850 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:50.600<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>540<br>00:52:51.340 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:52.570<br>And I make that scary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>541<br>00:52:53.840 &#8211;&gt; 00:52:59.109<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, yeah, it trades on your expectations, right? But also your fears. Yeah, exactly what you say Like your<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>542<br>00:52:59.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:05.029<br>Dom Ford: you&#8217;re worried about how the baby will turn out. You&#8217;re worried about the baby&#8217;s safety. It can&#8217;t take care of itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>543<br>00:53:05.160 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:13.489<br>Dom Ford: And all those kind of points of anxiety are are yeah points where you can kind of inject, some, some monstrosity, some fear, some terror. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>544<br>00:53:16.650 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:19.869<br>Shlomo Sher: Let&#8217;s okay. So let&#8217;s let&#8217;s let&#8217;s move on to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>545<br>00:53:20.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:24.020<br>Shlomo Sher: you know. Speaking about of babies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>546<br>00:53:24.310 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:30.099<br>Shlomo Sher: you know babies are kind of in some sense, in that, in between<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>547<br>00:53:30.460 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:32.069<br>Shlomo Sher: animal and human<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>548<br>00:53:32.400 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:36.910<br>Shlomo Sher: right. I mean, they&#8217;re human, but you know animals and and and and people<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>549<br>00:53:37.140 &#8211;&gt; 00:53:53.479<br>Shlomo Sher: in that right? They they don&#8217;t quite have our ability to communicate. Yet right there, there&#8217;s a lot of things I want to think about the the animals aspect of of monsters right? A lot of monsters are simply kind of exaggerated animals right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>550<br>00:53:53.490 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:01.009<br>Shlomo Sher: And then there&#8217;s monsters that are have animal features right to show that they are not like us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>551<br>00:54:02.180 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:09.490<br>Shlomo Sher: Do the Does any of this raise questions about the way we end up representing animals right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>552<br>00:54:09.670 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:11.940<br>Shlomo Sher: Othering animals in in general?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>553<br>00:54:12.890 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:17.240<br>Dom Ford: Hmm. I think I mean, what immediately came to mind<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>554<br>00:54:17.730 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:29.749<br>Dom Ford: was a jaws, and the damage that jaws has done to the reputation of sharks. Right? I think there&#8217;s this. Really. Yeah, I I think there&#8217;s this quite dangerous<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>555<br>00:54:29.960 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:36.939<br>Dom Ford: aspect to to representing yeah monsters as animals or animals, as monsters or with animal features, that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>556<br>00:54:37.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:41.509<br>Dom Ford: yeah, you associate the animal itself with with monstrosity, and that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>557<br>00:54:51.620 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:56.840<br>Shlomo Sher: every time you not like that, and they that can be pretty bad. Actually, I mean, sharks have really suffered from?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>558<br>00:54:58.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:54:59.779<br>I&#8217;m: Sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>559<br>00:55:00.150 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:01.649<br>Yeah. For sure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>560<br>00:55:01.970 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:02.970<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>561<br>00:55:03.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:05.349<br>trying to think of other other<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>562<br>00:55:05.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:07.540<br>that have suffered similarly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>563<br>00:55:08.710 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:09.680<br>Wolves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>564<br>00:55:10.330 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:11.450<br>Shlomo Sher: wolves<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>565<br>00:55:12.880 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:15.040<br>and then have been demonized. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>566<br>00:55:16.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:16.589<br>Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>567<br>00:55:17.510 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:19.099<br>we&#8217;re trying to bring them back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>568<br>00:55:21.020 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:29.400<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? Right? Yeah, that&#8217;s a that&#8217;s a good point. Can you think of any video game monsters? I&#8217;m: just kind of that are purely video game monsters<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>569<br>00:55:32.100 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:35.890<br>and video games. We just tend to trade in the same, the same sort of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>570<br>00:55:36.630 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:37.750<br>same sort of true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>571<br>00:55:41.130 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:41.839<br>Shlomo Sher: right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>572<br>00:55:47.190 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:47.990<br>Me?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>573<br>00:55:48.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:50.950<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I think that&#8217;s right. I think that&#8217;s right. We.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>574<br>00:55:51.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:55:51.990<br>yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>575<br>00:56:02.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:05.230<br>Dom Ford: you know, still operating in that same like economy as symbols. Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>576<br>00:56:07.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:07.799<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>577<br>00:56:08.000 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:14.379<br>Shlomo Sher: yeah, that that that that that that sounds really right, that but yeah, i&#8217;m thinking about. I&#8217;m also thinking about things like tusks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>578<br>00:56:15.350 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:17.219<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>579<br>00:56:18.270 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:20.399<br>creatures and monsters that have<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>580<br>00:56:22.010 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:28.099<br>Shlomo Sher: right. Right. So especially, let&#8217;s say, bore attributes are really common, right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>581<br>00:56:28.220 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:35.550<br>Shlomo Sher: And or let&#8217;s say orcs orcs might have these all right or insect insect like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>582<br>00:56:36.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:39.570<br>Dom Ford: right? Yeah, I mean it&#8217;s always. It&#8217;s always the features of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>583<br>00:56:39.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:45.409<br>Dom Ford: sorry. Yeah, it&#8217;s always the features of animals that we are already a bit scared of from<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>584<br>00:56:45.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:56:59.669<br>Dom Ford: There&#8217;s not like you don&#8217;t make a monster more scary by like putting kidneys on it, or something like that. Right? You, you! You take things that are already scary, like, you know. Yeah. Venom from from spiders or something or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>585<br>00:57:00.360 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:13.689<br>Dom Ford: yeah, or tusks like you say so I again, I think that that&#8217;s mostly about reflecting our anxieties. And and yeah, where it gets problematic is where that then reflects back on the animal itself. And it kind of is this<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>586<br>00:57:13.990 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:18.480<br>Dom Ford: self-fulfilling prophecy? Almost all this like, yeah, this feedback loop. Rather.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>587<br>00:57:18.910 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:27.100<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, You know, I&#8217;m thinking no one should. You know if you&#8217;re listening and you&#8217;re thinking about making monsters don&#8217;t make anything with these<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>588<br>00:57:27.130 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:32.740<br>Shlomo Sher: we really need these these days. So this is make more games where bees are the heroes<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>589<br>00:57:32.950 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:33.689<br>Shlomo Sher: right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>590<br>00:57:37.030 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:38.520<br>Shlomo Sher: All right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>591<br>00:57:39.040 &#8211;&gt; 00:57:55.470<br>Shlomo Sher: So okay, so let me move on I i&#8217;m. I&#8217;m impressed that we&#8217;re able to do this. I have a by the way, I have a I have a new potential program to try editing on, and i&#8217;m dying to try it on this episode, because I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t know if you know, there&#8217;s been very long periods where you&#8217;ve been lagging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>592<br>00:57:56.370 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:08.569<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s. And it&#8217;s kind of strange, because I can I? I can hear you the whole time. So I kind of don&#8217;t know what I&#8217;m coming at that, and it&#8217;s yeah, Sorry I I I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s my connection or what? But it happens, You know it&#8217;s annoying. Yeah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>593<br>00:58:08.580 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:23.270<br>Shlomo Sher: it will end up fine it will that it definitely will, May. Well, I sorry for the extra editing work. No, no worries, and I think we&#8217;re kind of. I think we&#8217;re close also at at this point. Right? Okay. So I only have 2 more questions for you, I mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>594<br>00:58:23.570 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:28.449<br>unless Andy, you end up having something, and then, just you know, slip it in, or<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>595<br>00:58:28.640 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:35.459<br>Shlomo Sher: all right. So in horror, games, muscles might be used specifically to create a sense of fear or anxiety in the player.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>596<br>00:58:35.530 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:47.950<br>Shlomo Sher: Can you think of any situation where that might be done in a way that might cross the moral boundaries such as cultural appropriation? Or you know, I talked about cultural appropriation early, really, but<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>597<br>00:58:48.320 &#8211;&gt; 00:58:52.010<br>Shlomo Sher: but maybe kind of focus on the sense of fear or anxiety.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>598<br>00:58:52.120 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:00.959<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? Are there some monsters that touch our fears or create anxiety in some ways that you think really kind of go beyond the pale.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>599<br>00:59:02.050 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:11.329<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, I don&#8217;t know about beyond the pale. But I mean all. All monsters, I I think, are manifestations of our already existing Anxiety and fears right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>600<br>00:59:11.570 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:13.499<br>Dom Ford: I think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>601<br>00:59:14.810 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:17.869<br>Dom Ford: when it can become beyond the pale. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s it&#8217;s always about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>602<br>00:59:17.930 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:19.299<br>Dom Ford: monsters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>603<br>00:59:19.360 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:21.599<br>Dom Ford: Oh, always come from somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>604<br>00:59:23.260 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:24.580<br>Dom Ford: So if you kind of<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>605<br>00:59:24.720 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:30.109<br>Dom Ford: remember what I mentioned earlier with like Philip Cole and the the kind of monstrous conception where it&#8217;s like, there&#8217;s a<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>606<br>00:59:30.430 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:36.379<br>Dom Ford: the monstrosity there kind of comes from from within. But you can also<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>607<br>00:59:36.460 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:42.489<br>Dom Ford: think about examples where monsters come from from without. So like this portal to hell. Kind of idea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>608<br>00:59:42.660 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:45.789<br>Dom Ford: I think you can have these kind of examples where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>609<br>00:59:46.500 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:49.550<br>Dom Ford: a monster is said to come from a certain<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>610<br>00:59:49.840 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:55.050<br>Dom Ford: place, or culture, or people, or something, and it&#8217;s said to be an outgrowth of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>611<br>00:59:55.070 &#8211;&gt; 00:59:56.990<br>Dom Ford: or there, specifically.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>612<br>00:59:58.820 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:05.719<br>Dom Ford: as some kind of manifestation of their evilness. Right? I think that&#8217;s where it maybe goes. Yeah, morally beyond<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>613<br>01:00:18.430 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:21.879<br>Dom Ford: the pale in that sense. But obviously it&#8217;s like<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>614<br>01:00:21.940 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:27.110<br>Dom Ford: Once, as I mentioned, it&#8217;s difficult to sit here and like put a limit on it. You know I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t know what you think.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>615<br>01:00:29.000 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:32.039<br>I think I think you said it sort of earlier that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>616<br>01:00:32.070 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:32.650<br>or when you were.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>617<br>01:00:33.330 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:34.870<br>And I think that that&#8217;s sort of a broader<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>618<br>01:00:35.670 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:36.299<br>about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>619<br>01:00:37.430 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:39.020<br>anything that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>620<br>01:00:39.360 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:49.319<br>that sort of makes these tropes, that these these things that we fear and reflects them back on some person or people<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>621<br>01:00:49.610 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:51.419<br>to make us hear them more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>622<br>01:00:52.370 &#8211;&gt; 01:00:55.759<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, you know it&#8217;s it&#8217;s interesting. I was thinking right now about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>623<br>01:00:56.060 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:10.389<br>Shlomo Sher: a game that focuses on with the monsters engage in something that might be like the immigration issues that both Europe and the United States are very concerned with right now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>624<br>01:01:10.510 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:13.950<br>Shlomo Sher: right where there is a quote, unquote invasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>625<br>01:01:14.220 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:21.180<br>Shlomo Sher: right, and the invasion is made in monstrous lights that can be connected<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>626<br>01:01:21.230 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:26.720<br>Shlomo Sher: to the current political situation. Right, you know. Notice that&#8217;s<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>627<br>01:01:26.730 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:55.060<br>Shlomo Sher: you know. That would often go with things like racial stereotyping, because a lot of times the other ring there come of immigration comes in in those terms, but it not might not be right. It might be more politically oriented or nationalistically oriented, and then ethically oriented, but it amounts to a very kind of similar thing. Right? You&#8217;re taking a group of people, and you&#8217;re using our anxieties about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>628<br>01:01:55.070 &#8211;&gt; 01:01:57.609<br>Shlomo Sher: them to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>629<br>01:01:57.670 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:11.109<br>Shlomo Sher: show us those people as monsters, and you know, potentially conflict the 2. Yeah, I was thinking of of of stuff like that, though I have a hard time, you know, picking out exact and analogs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>630<br>01:02:11.120 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:18.229<br>Dom Ford: I&#8217;ve got a I mean, I&#8217;ve got a good example for you on games. Oh, great! Okay. Let&#8217;s do. It is, Have you played a ghost of Sushima?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>631<br>01:02:18.530 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:19.819<br>Shlomo Sher: No, no.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>632<br>01:02:20.340 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:26.350<br>Dom Ford: I&#8217;m sorry. It&#8217;s about the the Mongol invasion of Japan in the the the late thirteenth century<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>633<br>01:02:26.390 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:31.659<br>Dom Ford: set on to which is like the island between Korea and Japan.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>634<br>01:02:33.120 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:46.540<br>Dom Ford: And yeah in it, as you&#8217;d expect the Mongols invade, and they kind of obliterate the initial samurai defense, and then occupy the island, and then you are one of the few remaining samurai, and you&#8217;ve got to kind of liberate the island.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>635<br>01:02:46.620 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:55.439<br>Dom Ford: and I&#8217;ve been working on a chapter on this, that on this example, actually with a colleague, you&#8217;re in bloom about<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>636<br>01:02:55.750 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:56.669<br>Dom Ford: how<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>637<br>01:02:56.980 &#8211;&gt; 01:02:59.470<br>Dom Ford: the Mongols are made monstrous<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>638<br>01:02:59.600 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:02.569<br>Dom Ford: as invaders. And so<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>639<br>01:03:02.600 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:18.439<br>Dom Ford: you start. You have this starting point, which is like a very real and pretty reasonable fear that you get invaded and occupied by this opposing political entity, and and the game doesn&#8217;t really say otherwise. Certainly not at the beginning. Right? It&#8217;s like, yeah, they&#8217;re an opposing political entity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>640<br>01:03:18.680 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:19.839<br>Dom Ford: They&#8217;re pretty mean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>641<br>01:03:20.020 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:32.039<br>Dom Ford: They primarily beat the samurai because they don&#8217;t care about their code of ethics. And so that&#8217;s kind of what that that&#8217;s kind of the first transgression, right? It&#8217;s like, oh, we&#8217;ll meet you honorably on the battlefield, and they&#8217;re like No, and just.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>642<br>01:03:32.290 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:37.559<br>Dom Ford: you know. Destroy them because of that. And so the you know the game is about this conflict between. How far can you<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>643<br>01:03:37.870 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:39.790<br>Dom Ford: keep those<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>644<br>01:03:39.950 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:45.739<br>Dom Ford: that code of honor while actually winning the the the the fight?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>645<br>01:03:45.800 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:46.419<br>Judgment right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>646<br>01:03:47.090 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:49.319<br>Dom Ford: Yes, exactly. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>647<br>01:03:49.370 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:50.209<br>But<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>648<br>01:03:50.280 &#8211;&gt; 01:03:54.640<br>Dom Ford: what it, what it does throughout the game, in in some more subtle ways is, make<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>649<br>01:03:55.000 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:13.510<br>Dom Ford: make the Mongols very monstrous. So for just as like in in in dexical symbols or in technical signs. The way that you find a Mongol camp is you. But is you follow a trail of rot and destruction and industry. So so you follow a path of corpses right littered, or, you know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>650<br>01:04:13.520 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:28.580<br>Dom Ford: just like left on the left on the side of the road, and then you&#8217;ll find a Mongol camp. If you follow like a a beautiful little bird, it will take you to some part of the island that&#8217;s very nice, and then give you a good item. So you have this dichotomy, where you have, like the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>651<br>01:04:29.080 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:34.240<br>Dom Ford: where the samurai are become associated with nature and the island itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>652<br>01:04:34.870 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:42.399<br>Dom Ford: while the Mongols become associated with the the destruction and the defilement, and the and the disrespect of that nature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>653<br>01:04:42.730 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:46.830<br>Dom Ford: So they&#8217;re not kind of explicitly made monstrous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>654<br>01:04:47.350 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:48.049<br>Dom Ford: Well<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>655<br>01:04:48.300 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:52.519<br>Dom Ford: that evil is shown to be kind of much deeper and much<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>656<br>01:04:52.650 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:55.390<br>Dom Ford: much more heinous than just<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>657<br>01:04:55.600 &#8211;&gt; 01:04:58.239<br>Dom Ford: a political, like an opposing political objective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>658<br>01:04:58.770 &#8211;&gt; 01:05:06.580<br>Shlomo Sher: Right? I i&#8217;m. I&#8217;m thinking about some Chinese games about World War 2 that do some like that with the Japanese<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>659<br>01:05:07.270 &#8211;&gt; 01:05:18.240<br>Shlomo Sher: right, where the Japanese are caricatures, as you know, as as ugly, as disgusting, as pure evil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>660<br>01:05:18.400 &#8211;&gt; 01:05:34.009<br>Shlomo Sher: And yeah, that&#8217;s essentially so. Again, they&#8217;re not monsters, but they&#8217;re monsters right in in that same kind of sense that is meant to be. I mean, I. You know those are sometimes called propaganda games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>661<br>01:05:34.060 &#8211;&gt; 01:05:43.620<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, that are are meant to get the Chinese player to feel a certain way about those evil Japanese, and of course we are talking about World War Ii, where<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>662<br>01:05:43.660 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:03.510<br>Shlomo Sher: you know, I mean, there are very, very serious asrosities going on, you know, from the Japanese, but it&#8217;s something very different. Taking those what you might say are monstrous acts by the Japanese military as a whole, and turning the Japanese quote unquote race<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>663<br>01:06:03.520 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:07.290<br>Shlomo Sher: into a race of monsters in in a video game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>664<br>01:06:07.510 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:11.219<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, Exactly. Exactly. I think it&#8217;s. It&#8217;s that there&#8217;s always<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>665<br>01:06:26.460 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:29.819<br>Dom Ford: It&#8217;s going to be like a spectrum like a a, a. A. Sl. A.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>666<br>01:06:33.820 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:44.689<br>Shlomo Sher: Okay, Dom is back. There was an answer there. Andy, there was. Yeah, there was. Yeah, it&#8217;s it&#8217;s in my local recording.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>667<br>01:06:44.790 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:48.089<br>and I think it was getting back to something you said very early on<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>668<br>01:06:49.000 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:50.560<br>it was that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>669<br>01:06:51.580 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:54.250<br>depicting these depicting people as monsters<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>670<br>01:06:54.810 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:56.040<br>not see them as people<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>671<br>01:06:56.680 &#8211;&gt; 01:06:59.179<br>to not see that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>672<br>01:06:59.240 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:03.330<br>Oh, in different situations this might be something that we would do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>673<br>01:07:04.360 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:05.600<br>Or would this be something that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>674<br>01:07:06.080 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:08.569<br>what should we should that should this something be something that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>675<br>01:07:08.920 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:09.660<br>we should ever<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>676<br>01:07:09.690 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:10.470<br>or even consider?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>677<br>01:07:11.780 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:24.740<br>Dom Ford: But we wouldn&#8217;t because we&#8217;re not monsters exactly, and it externalizes the problem. It&#8217;s it&#8217;s like the great analogy is like it like a doom kind of game. But there&#8217;s a portal to hell. Right. It&#8217;s like to deal with the monsters to do. You just have to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>678<br>01:07:24.840 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:44.739<br>Dom Ford: kill the monsters and close the portal. You don&#8217;t have to like change anything about the way your society works. The threat is completely external, and it&#8217;s the same in these kind of things. Where? Yeah, if we don&#8217;t have to consider that oh, maybe in different circumstances. We could have done what the Japanese did, or or you know we have treated other people in horrible ways, or anything like that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>679<br>01:07:44.980 &#8211;&gt; 01:07:50.670<br>Dom Ford: You just have to expel the monstrous invader. And then you&#8217;re good, you you&#8217;re done.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>680<br>01:07:50.930 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:01.820<br>Shlomo Sher: and and this is why you know i&#8217;m thinking about the you know the a use of zombies and all that right. The monsters that we could just kill monsters we don&#8217;t need to think about, but also the least interesting kind of monsters there are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>681<br>01:08:02.170 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:03.319<br>Shlomo Sher: right<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>682<br>01:08:03.450 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:04.460<br>is traditionally<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>683<br>01:08:05.550 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:07.120<br>the fear of zombies is that it<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>684<br>01:08:07.450 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:08.870<br>is us right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>685<br>01:08:09.180 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:12.190<br>Shlomo Sher: Oh, I see that it could. Yeah, it could be us<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>686<br>01:08:12.430 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:25.080<br>Dom Ford: right. Yeah, yeah, they kind of again. They&#8217;re on that boundary right between human and non-human, right? Right? Yeah. They they look human They kind of act human in some ways, but they don&#8217;t have our loved ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>687<br>01:08:25.439 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:28.600<br>Dom Ford: Yeah, yes, also that yeah, exactly. Exactly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>688<br>01:08:29.260 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:35.290<br>Shlomo Sher: All right. So i&#8217;m going to ask you our our last questions, and and we we&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll we&#8217;ll wrap this up<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>689<br>01:08:35.330 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:41.059<br>Shlomo Sher: all right. Dom: yeah. Super interesting. What? What do you want to live our listeners with?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>690<br>01:08:41.970 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:44.020<br>I think just the<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>691<br>01:08:44.160 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:47.029<br>Dom Ford: just. To sum all this up that we&#8217;ve been talking about is that<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>692<br>01:08:47.270 &#8211;&gt; 01:08:56.570<br>Dom Ford: monsters don&#8217;t exist essentially. There is no monster prior to to being labeled as a monster. It&#8217;s a completely discursive term, and<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>693<br>01:08:56.850 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:06.349<br>Dom Ford: when we kind of label things when we categorize things, we&#8217;re doing so for a reason, and it&#8217;s that that reason is what i&#8217;m interested in when I&#8217;m when i&#8217;m analyzing monsters. So<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>694<br>01:09:06.470 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:21.239<br>Dom Ford: you know we when we label someone a hero, we are making some kind of claim about their actions that they some way admirable or aspirational, or something right? And with monsters it&#8217;s exactly the same thing. It&#8217;s about establishing and policing boundaries. I think<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>695<br>01:09:21.340 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:29.019<br>Dom Ford: so. It&#8217;s the boundary between good and bad, between human and non-human, between one of us and one of them or whatever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>696<br>01:09:29.330 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:35.359<br>Dom Ford: So I think, by analyzing the monsters. You can tell a great deal about what the creators<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>697<br>01:09:35.420 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:39.410<br>Dom Ford: of a given wants to think about the world, what their understanding of the world is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>698<br>01:09:39.490 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:45.639<br>Dom Ford: what their society is understanding of the world is. You know what is considered abhorrent. How do they define human?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>699<br>01:09:45.910 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:47.120<br>Dom Ford: So monsters<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>700<br>01:09:47.210 &#8211;&gt; 01:09:59.289<br>Dom Ford: represent the anxieties that we have. When we try to put categories and labels on things, they they show us what we want to cast out of society, but are ultimately unable to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>701<br>01:10:00.260 &#8211;&gt; 01:10:01.570<br>Shlomo Sher: all right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>702<br>01:10:01.870 &#8211;&gt; 01:10:12.629<br>Shlomo Sher: Yeah, Well said, all right, Damn well, all right down. Thanks for being with us. Good podcast guys. Gp: Thank you. Thank you so much.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>703<br>01:10:12.990 &#8211;&gt; 01:10:19.270<br>Shlomo Sher: Play nice Everybody! Yeah, all right, and we are done great<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>[Release Date: March 14, 2023]&nbsp;The monsters we see in video games are usually antagonists that we destroy without remorse.&nbsp; But what is a monster and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1033,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[55,227,106,19],"class_list":["post-1031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-podcast","tag-game-design","tag-monsters","tag-video-games","tag-video-games-ethics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/64-1.png?fit=1200%2C628&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1031"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1075,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1031\/revisions\/1075"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1033"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ethicsandvideogames.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}