What if Doom 4 Guy is Doom 4 Girl?

[Annunakitty]

Considering that Doom 4 is a reboot, meaning not necessarily having anything to do with the prior games, I don't understand the crying about Doomguy being "iconic" and whatnot. The new marine being Doomgal wouldn't change the past, so it's basically irrelevant to even bring it up.

[The 1st Gamer]

Danarchy said:

Not sure if this was intentionally a troll thread of if you're just new to the Internet.

This was meant to be a legitimate Doom 4 thread and I'm not new to the internet. I was just expecting less anger and argument.

[Antroid]

BombChel said:

Considering that Doom 4 is a reboot, meaning not necessarily having anything to do with the prior games, I don't understand the crying about Doomguy being "iconic" and whatnot. The new marine being Doomgal wouldn't change the past, so it's basically irrelevant to even bring it up.

This. It's blowing my mind that people treat Doomguy as an important part of doom. Even if he was for doom 1 and doom 2, he was a separate character in doom 3, because that was a reboot. Doom 4 is a reboot as well. It's obviously not going to be the same goddamn character, what drug are you people even on? If someone seriously gets "alienated" by the character being a different archetype (since simply being "a different character" is already a given, because R-E-B-O-O-T), that's so petty I don't even have words to describe how fucking petty that is.

Besides, both doom 3 and doom 4 change things up from doom 1+2 in much more drastic ways than the protagonist's sex, and for some reason most people aren't alienated by that. Omg doom 2 didn't have a machine gun, or babies! Omg doom 1 wasn't set on mars itself! That's it, doom 3 is trash!!!11

Touchdown said:

By the way, we don't need more women in games.

I don't believe that's up to you to decide, now is it.

[Gez]

geo said:

Funny thing about equality and math.

1 == 1
"male" == "female"
"male" == "male"

I try that when programming, but no matter what programming language I use, somehow "male" == "female" is never allowed.

You're making three mistakes here. The first is confusing equality and identity. The second is believing that people are numbers.

Two different people are never going to be identical (even twins have differences) but they should still be equal. For numbers, their value is their identity (nature), so equality and identity (identicalness) are synonymous; for humans their identity is not their value.

When applied to humans, "equality" is a legal and moral notion, not a mathematical one. It's about equal rights and equal treatment, not about getting equal results when put in an equation.

Finally, the third mistake: "male" == "female" is totally allowed in most computer languages because the == operator performs a comparison and returns a boolean value. As long as the == operator is defined for strings it is valid code.

[hardcore_gamer]

BombChel said:

Considering that Doom 4 is a reboot, meaning not necessarily having anything to do with the prior games, I don't understand the crying about Doomguy being "iconic" and whatnot. The new marine being Doomgal wouldn't change the past, so it's basically irrelevant to even bring it up.

So if I made a reboot of spiderman where spiderman turns out to actually be an alien, this isn't relevant because it's just a reboot?

[Antroid]

It's kind of telling that to you changing a barely defined and generally unimportant character's sex to female is apparently comparable to changing a fully established character into an alien.

I hope you realize how useless your hypothetical example is, because the two situations are nothing alike.

[Mr. Freeze]

The best hope for more diverse protagonists isn't just women, it's Undead, Robots and other races. Fuck your totally original grizzled space marine, I want to play as an undead skeleton making bone puns and slaughtering foes.

[Touchdown]

Antroid said:

I don't believe that's up to you to decide, now is it.

Please don't take a part of what I said out of context, thank you.

In case that wasn't clear enough, let me reiterate. We need better written characters in games, not more of XYZ characters. You can bring as many female characters as you want but as long as they are nothing more than a checkbox on a politically correct feature list, it's not going to achieve anything.

Most characters in games are terrible. A 'strong female character' is not a good character because nowadays it basically translates into a paper thin 'ass-kicking lady that needs no help from men' and nothing more. It's a bad character and having hundreds of bad characters will not suddenly make any kind of positive change, just because they have boobs.

My point is it's not primarily a problem of not enough women in games. It's a problem of bad characters. Men are not written any better. You can shift the focus and instead of 'many badly written men and some badly written women' we can have 'some badly written men and many badly written women' and... it changes nothing. Having lots of women will not magically improve the writing. And in my opinion the level of writing is a much bigger problem than having 'more XYZ characters'. Because if the writing improves, it'll also improve all those other issues of diversity.

[esselfortium]

But it's possible to acknowledge one problem that needs fixing without ignoring that other problems also exist. "We don't need more female characters in games because we need better written games" is a complete non-sequitur. The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive, and waiting for the more complicated problem to be solved first is just needlessly postponing the problem with a simpler solution.

[Mr. Freeze]

esselfortium said:

But it's possible to acknowledge one problem that needs fixing without ignoring that other problems also exist. "We don't need more female characters in games because we need better written games" is a complete non-sequitur. The two ideas aren't mutually exclusive, and waiting for the more complicated problem to be solved first is just needlessly postponing the problem with a simpler solution.

And if there's no thought or effort put into female characters, it would probably be worse than having an all-male cast.

[hardcore_gamer]

Antroid said:

It's kind of telling that to you changing a barely defined and generally unimportant character's sex to female is apparently comparable to changing a fully established character into an alien.

Just why is it that people keep thinking the doom marine isn't a character?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStoic

Also keep in mind that characters can be developed without any actual dialog. That sadistic grin that the doom marine gets when he picks up a weapon? That's character. And then we also have the Doom comic, which has inspired much Doom related work. I'm sorry, but the idea that the doom marine isn't a character is just a myth.

[Mr. Freeze]

hardcore_gamer said:

Just why is it that people keep thinking the doom marine isn't a character?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheStoic

Also keep in mind that characters can be developed without any actual dialog. That sadistic grin that the doom marine gets when he picks up a weapon? That's character. And then we also have the Doom comic, which has inspired much Doom related work. I'm sorry, but the idea that the doom marine isn't a character is just a myth.

Stop equating "little to no character" to "literally isn't a character". Nobody is saying that DoomGuy ISN'T a character, we're saying that he is lacking characterization.

Also LMAO@ TvTropes. this is probably why you have piss-poor reasoning.

[Mithran Denizen]

That tvtropes page is about a character archetype, I really don't see how that establishes anything about the player avatar in Doom specifically. Doom isn't even mentioned on that page, and the traits from the comic, etc, kind of run contrary to that archetype anyway.

Plus, the guy from the comic doesn't even look like the Doom HUD face; I've always thought of him as a separate character entirely, much like Doom3Guy. Also, what Mr Freeze said.

In any case, the marine has never been a main focus in the games. They deliberately left him silent and generic so more people could project their own personality into the mix. I was just chatting with a friend who plays Doom with a female HUD mod she found on some old shovelware CD, precisely because she plays the game as a power fantasy, and likes seeing herself as the protagonist. She couldn't stop laughing when I told her about this discussion.

[geo]

Mirror's Edge should have a male protagonist.

[Antroid]

geo said:

Mirror's Edge should have a male protagonist.

In a bizarro world where most characters in fiction are female, this statement isn't completely stupid. Sadly in ours it kinda is.

[ArgentPotato]

Doom guy in DooM 4 is a guy, during the starting sequence when he's about to reach the elevator, a hologram of that crazy woman (Olivia Pearce?) Appears which utters these words "He must not be allowed to leave this place, he will ruin everything". There, pure evidence.

[ArgentPotato]

And also, if my opinion means anything, I'll rather have DooM Potato.

[[McD] James]

4 hours ago, ArgentPotato said:

Doom guy in DooM 4 is a guy, during the starting sequence when he's about to reach the elevator, a hologram of that crazy woman (Olivia Pearce?) Appears which utters these words "He must not be allowed to leave this place, he will ruin everything". There, pure evidence.

 

Thank you for this factoid that everyone here has already known since 2016. 

[Liberation]

WTF, really?