I had a “say what?” moment recently when reading some of Randy Pitchford’s further comments about the character of Duke Nukem. And how Tony Stark slaps around women.
“In this case, Duke is like a Tony Stark style character,” begins Pitchford. “You just played the Capture the Babe mode – you know there are very few journalists who have played that mode and, when that story broke about Duke, there was only one journalist in the world who had played it.
“The problem was that all the people who wrote stories on it hadn’t actually played what they were writing about. As a consequence it got kind of convoluted from this Tony Stark style character to suggesting he was some kind of Chris Brown character. “
“You know, Chris Brown,” continues Pitchford, “he’s a piece of shit, and I think Duke would kick that guy’s ass. There’s a big difference between being a Tony Stark style character and being into violence against women.”
It would have been nice if, since the Kotaku “games journalist” has allegedly played the Capture the Babe mode, they’d felt the urge to say something about that mode – what it was or wasn’t, for instance – but he was obvious distracted by beer and strippers.
When Pitchford says that Duke Nukem is a Tony Stark-style character, he doesn’t mean that the character has had a moral epiphany about their place in the world and is sacrificing himself to improve the world – no, he’s referring to Stark as the hedonistic millionaire playboy who gets all the babes, which suggests Pitchfork may have only watched “Iron Man” for the first 15 minutes or so.
My biggest facepalm arose from the link between Chris Brown and Tony Stark, because it:
I obviously missed the scene where Stark slapped Pepper Potts on the butt a few times, before telling her, "Quiet now, the men are talking."
- Suggests that from time to time Stark might give a female a slap or two, just to settle her down, but only because she needed it;
- Suggests that it’s okay slapping the woman you’re abducting to make it easier to carry her, but “real” violence against women is wrong… which is a bit of a mixed message;
- Possibly is libel against Chris Brown, given that I can’t remember him ever saying how he was “into” hitting women. There’s a history there, but I don’t think he’s taken the pro side publicly; and
- Gets horribly, horribly mixed up between reality and fantasy. Yeah, I’m sure if a muscle-bound action alien-killing machine and a techno-suited genius teamed up to take on an R&B singer, the singer wouldn’t do so well.
A lot of controversy around the Capture the Babe multiplayer mode could be cleared up (or generated, take your pick) if Gearbox released footage of it. However, this issue is already free publicity for DNF, so perhaps they’ll hold off on that for a bit longer. No point in giving the game away too early before release.
In the meanwhile, Pitchford will continue to promote the game using beer-and-strippers at events and a whole heap of convoluted logic elsewhere.
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