Talk:Duke Nukem 3D/Archive 1

2004/2005

Criticism

I don't like this part of the article:

"However, such critiques appear to selectively use facts, invent them, or take them out of context to further political agendas. For instance, in the example above, while the Duke does visit the "Red Light District", this is only a single level out of almost thirty (most of which take place in more traditional settings such as space stations, underwater cities and deserts)."

-First, it is subjectively attacking the previous criticism. "Appear" is inherently an opinion - it should only use facts to counter the argument. For example, pointing out the invention of facts with examples is fine. Vaguely stating that they only selectively used facts smacks of bias. -Second, it uses sarcasm: "... in more traditional settings such as space stations, underwater cities and deserts"

Hi, I think I'm responsible for the offending text (though it's been a long time, so I might not be).

To address your points, "appear" is used because the criticism that is reproduced in the article may be a truncated (or selectively quoted) version of the critics full views. I don't know, so I softened the line with "appear" - it's not an attempt to introduce opinion. For all I know, maybe the critic went on to clarify their remarks, or has had clarifying remarks removed when quoted. So, by all means remove the offending "appear". I do agree that it could be read as "opinion".

As regards sarcasm, this is absolutely not the intent. The article is about a "sci-fi" computer game, and such games traditionally take place in the sorts of locations mentioned. "Tradition", as applied to settings, need not be about quaint Victorian or pastoral scenes. Context is everything.

Anyway, please feel free to edit as you see fit. I hope the above clarifies. --Plumbago 10:08, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Here is an astonishingly negative review:

The Duke Nukem series (Duke Nukem, Duke Nukem 3D, and Duke Nukem Forever), like Marathon, Descent, Doom, Unreal and Quake are wildly popular games called "shooters." Players move through the world behind a weapon learning to kill and destroy people, monsters, tanks, or aircraft without themselves getting killed. Duke Nukem 3D moves the "shooter" through pornography stores, where Duke can use XXX sex posters for target practice. Duke throws cash at a prostituted woman telling her to "Shake it, Baby" his gun ever ready. In Duke Nukem bonus points are awarded for the murder of these mostly prostituted and partially nude women. Duke blows up stained glass windows in an empty church or goes to strip clubs where Japanese women lower their kimonos exposing their breasts. Duke is encouraged to kill defenseless, often bound women. After Duke kills off some aliens he's ready for sex or maybe he'll defecate on his pile of freshly killed aliens. With real warfare style Duke says, "No man steals our chicks and wins." On one level naked women are tied to columns pleading, "Kill me," "Kill me." George Broussard, the president of 3D Realms, claims fans want the nudity and adult themes. Duke Nukem 3D is available at all Toys R Us, Target and others. This game can be downloaded from the internet, and is available on a variety of platforms. It is rated Mature, which to some parents means 12-years-old or younger. Duke action figures can by ordered online. Action figures are geared for boys under 8-years-old. [1]

Are we sure we need that kind of crap? Was such "criticism" common and well-known enough to deserve a mention? Paranoid 20:40, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)

I remember seeing this game mentioned on GMTV, a British early morning show. The presenterwas practically gnashing her teeth and frothing at the mouth as she made comments similar to the ones quoted above, including the claim that Duke was encouraged to shoot prostitutes, even though t'was not true. This isn't really worth a mention in the article but nonetheless there certainly were more than a few idiots thought Duke Nukem would corrupt the kiddies and bring an end to civilization. Robert Mercer 18:37, 15 Apr 2005 (UTC)

The criticism section is in need of a rewrite.

• Duke 3D does in fact keep a score in the form of monsters killed, secrets found, time needed etc. However, strippers do not count towards the monster "score." This can be verified by turning off the monsters in level 1/02 ("DNMONSTERS"); the strippers will remain. If you kill them, your monster-count in the level summary will still be zero. (PBA that finishing the level in god-mode ("DNKROZ") instead may render imprecise results; "squished" monsters still count toward your score.)
• "such criticism" seems to imply that all criticism concerning the portrayal of women in the game is unfounded (or, as the article put it, "invented"); a few lines down it is then stated that "the game's treatment of women [is] extreme even by the standards of video games." This seems inconsistent. It also strengthens the impression that the first half is setting up a strawman.
• The critique referenced is no longer available on the external server.
• Arguing that there is but a single "red light district" level seems to miss the point. As an example of how the "porn" theme pervades more than just one level, consider 1/01, Hollywood Holocaust: the movie theatre that provides the bulk of the level arguably is a porn cinema (turn on the projection, your guess as good as mine), one of the secret rooms above the cinema (right behind the palm tree when standing outside) has a TV showing a scantily-clad dancer etc.
• "the bound women that Duke encounters are infected with alien parasites, a direct homage to the movie Aliens, not an allusion to BDSM": I'm not sure it can't be both? That aside, it might be worth noting that unlike in the Alien franchise, we never see infected men. Furthermore, it is the rebuke that introduces the term BDSM; the critique uses the factual "bound." The phrasing is unfortunate as it seems to imply that critics are wrong to "mistake good clean killing of innocents for dirty perverted consensual kink." : )

On a more personal note, I'm surprised at the uproar the MediaWatch-critique has caused on this talk-page. Sure, they didn't mention the laser trip-bombs, the shrink-ray, the freezer; they didn't acknowledge the great level-design, the multi-player game-play, the interaction with the environment, nor unforgettable moments like blowing up the building, diving in a flooded city, or crawling through the airvents (or whatever else non-pornographic feature one may have loved). In what they did choose to focus on however they seem mostly right (whether or not strippers count towards the enemy body-count doesn't really change the portrayal of women on the whole); the potrayal of women in the game was indeed pretty exploitative. --Azundris 13:41, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

I tend to agree Azundris. On the whole the criticisms MediaWatch make are legitimate. There are one or two errors in exactly what they say, but their central concerns are pretty solid. I'll try to edit myself, but by all means go ahead yourself. --Plumbago 15:49, 24 October 2005 (UTC)

That seems to resolve it, really - thank you, Plumbago! --Azundris

Good, but feel free to keep editing. Although I'm appalled by the gender politics going on in Duke Nukem, I have to admit that I really rather enjoyed the game (and have worked quite a bit on the article). So it's likely that I'm a bit biased in my edits. Anyway, thanks for your comments. --Plumbago 12:37, 25 October 2005 (UTC)

I will if something occurs to me, but I don't think our POVs are really that far apart. That's what I tried to express in the above "personal note" - I played Doom, then I played some Duke, then I played Quake, and I think I recognized most of the things that made Duke special (aside from the juvenile humour, I mean : ).

Half of the time, gamers seem to be up against people who want to condemn their games in their entirety, and the sentiment amongst fans often seems to be, "What's the point, there's no pleasing these people anyway, if we fix the porn content, they'll still complain about the church scene, if we fix the church, they'll complain about the violence, et cetera ad nauseam, until we're left with Carebears, the video game, that they can park their children in front of."

Aside from the factual fixes in the actual article, I was hoping to show on the talk page that yes, female gamers exist, and no, we don't want to take your fun away per se, it's just that rather than being the butt of the joke, we'd like a sporting chance to get in on the action. : )

If my memory serves me well, Ultimate Mortal Kombat was popular around the same time and makes for a good example of equal opportunity butt-kicking - it offered female avatars for women to identify with, and other than that, it largely ignored the whole gender thing. (Unless you wish to count the fact that the line to my knowledge never had female sub-bosses or bosses.) That, I can work with. Similar for Quake Arena (although of course the character that looks most like me is the porn actress, grrr : ). So I don't think that's in the area of unreasonable expections, and it's specifically *because* I could see all the ways in which Duke was groundbreaking that I was so disappointed about That Women Thing. It seemed to exclude us from a game that clearly was a milestone in many ways.

Exclusion may be in the eye of the beholder to a degree; while a lot of these games seem white-only (where of course fighting games often have Asian people, and MK had a token Jax), I'll note that on a personal level, playing a character with a different "racial" background doesn't bother me, while playing one with a different sex does. On a more objective level, though, there still seems to be a major difference between excluding a group from being acknowledged in a work of art, and including them in a way that's likely to offend. Doom for instance didn't acknowledge women, Duke included them in a way that many found offensive.

Gee lookie, I wrote a bloody novel. So anyway, we're out here, and we really don't want much more than a sporting chance and some basic respect, same as you guys do. :-) --Azundris

Fair points all round. If you think the article is still peddling a bit soft on DN3D, it's probably better to put something in the article rather than the talk page. It's what people read first, and I've found that only fellow axe-grinders read the talk pages.  :) As regards equality in games, there's definitely an article to be written about that. I had a look but couldn't find anything obvious, so you might like to think about that. It's certainly something that's occurred to me frequently. Players only rarely take on the role of a female character (No One Lives Forever being a good example), let alone an unstereotyped non-white role. Anyway, I'll get off my soapbox now. But please edit DN3D at will. Cheers, --Plumbago 08:53, 27 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think the Hollywood Holocaust cinema is a porn theatre at all. I recall the lobby signs say something to the effect of "Blonde bimbos from outer space", which sounds much more like Russ Meyer or Roger Corman exploitation than honest-to-God hydraulics. The porn store, on the other hand is a different animal altogether, haha. Anyway, until recently the article said that all women in-game are either prisoners, strippers, cheerleaders or prostitutes. Which wasn't true, there was that weird tribal chick in the cave at the end of the first episode (The Abyss level, I guess) and all. --194.89.2.218 20:15, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Hmmmm. Well as there's a bit of a fine line between porn and Russ Meyer, I don't think it's unreasonable to label it as a porn cinema. The film that's being shown in the cinema also crops up in the little porn booths later on as I recall (might be wrong). As for the "all women" note, well, you've got a point there, I remember that tribal woman too, but I'm going to change that to "virtually all" since "most" does not do it justice. Hell, I loved Duke Nukem 3D, but there's no getting away from the fact that it's pretty outrageously sexist. And, as I wrote in the article, that's even in the context of a pretty sexist industry. --Plumbago 22:23, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

The sentence "As a result of a gunman's rampage through a movie theatre in Brazil, Duke Nukem 3D was banned in that country along with Quake and Doom and several other violent first-person shooters, due to Duke Nukem 3D's opening level "Hollywood Holocaust" (Episode 1, Mission 1) where Duke inevitably gets into a firefight with aliens inside a cinema." has both "As a result" and "due to" so it is hard to see what the sentence is saying and it is also redundant. Also, is the cinema in Brazil or in Hollywood? --216.135.224.177 22:56, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

Vfd-note

There was a sepearate page, Monsters from Duke Nukem 3D which listed all sort of monsters. I did not understand most of it, but anyway: That page was listed for deletion, the debate is at Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Monsters from Duke Nukem 3D. The result was merge with this article. It is now done. Sjakkalle 14:10, 4 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Oops. This is why one should always read the discussion page first. I'm afraid I've just gone and created a page for Duke Nukem 3D monsters. I did so because the list was beginning to dominate this article (it started short and grew and grew). Anyway, apologies for not spotting this vfd vote before. I think (obviously) that the new article should remain separate (much the same way as the multi-player one), but please feel free to disagree (and edit!). --Plumbago 12:45, 14 July 2005 (UTC)

Star Wars/Star Trek

I don't know of a cameo appearance of Star Wars in the game but one of Star Trek (a hidden room which looks like the bridge of Enterprise), so I replaced Star Wars with Star Trek. 193.171.121.30 18:45, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

One of the levels is apparently a giant model of the Enterprise when viewed from a sufficiently large distance.Sockatume 21:45, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

No idea about Star Trek - though several of the space levels seem vaguely Trekkie. I think (but can't prove) that the Star Wars reference is some sort of Stormtrooper figure that you encounter. Dead I think, just like the Doomed Space Marine and Indy Jones. Can't remember where I saw this, but I've only got the original edition, so it must be somewhere in the first three campaigns. Incidentally, an obvious cinematic reference is the monolith from '2001' - will add this to the main document. --Plumbago 22:18, 2 May 2005 (UTC)

The Star Wars ref is in a secret room in one of the Moon levels (episode 2), it's Luke wearing a Storm Trooper uniform, impaled on a stake (a common theme for the refs in the game...)

Comments about Take-Two and 3D Realms

The sentence goes "More controversy in a similar vein would later show up with Take-Two Interactive (who teamed up with 3D Realms as a distributor) and their Grand Theft Auto series."

The first time I read it I got the impression that Take-Two and 3D Realms had teamed up to distribute GTA, which I'm pretty sure is not true. The sentence needs to be clarified and either moved to its own paragraph or removed altogether. Comments? Qutezuce 17:48, July 26, 2005 (UTC)

Fair point. I've edited the sentence since someone else put it in, but I don't know anything about it (though I'm sure you're correct re: 3D Realms not distributing GTA). So edit away I reckon. --Plumbago 21:49, 26 July 2005 (UTC)

Bruce Campbell

I wasn't about to add it in myself, but I thought it was interesting to note that Bruce Campbell dislikes the Duke Nukem games for blatantly copying popular culture references of the era.--Vercalos 23:37, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

Like you I am not sure something about this should be added. If you ask me Campbell was simply somewhat misinformed about the subject. I remember reading he was angry because Duke Nukem was only quoting the Evil Dead films, but that isn't true. Some of his quotes (quoting being something you can do freely) were from the film, but only a few. I suspect that if he knew that, he wouldn't even have commented on the games. (Also he was advertising a game he did the voice for in one fell swoop, so maybe that's why he said it the way he did at the time.) Retodon8 01:02, 10 November 2005 (UTC)