Chris Plante, Harvest Moon and the Anita Sarkeesian school of reductionist criticism

Chris Plante is a writer for The Verge and Polygon, so its no surprise he's a complete hack. But even keeping that in mind, this is still dumb on a level that's difficult to comprehend.


The offending piece

The Anita Sarkeesian school of reductionist criticism

Anita Sarkeesian's series relied quite heavily on heavy handed analysis of game mechanics and story scenes. Rather than taking them at face value as the creators intended and as the average person would her criticism would take an incredibly reductive approach to emerge with a criticism of the portrayal as being in some way sexist. Anita spent quite a bit of time deconstructing  simple 8bit and 16bit story sequences suggest that the female character in the scene was objectified and lacked agency such as Bowser kidnapping the Princess or your girlfriend being kidnapped in Double Dragon.

Her method of criticism was well and truly exposed when she took the mechanic of being able to move bodies in Hitman Absolution. She then showed a single portion of a level in the game that has you passing through a strippers dressing room in a club and then implied that the game somehow intended you to assault the women and derive some sort of sexual pleasure from moving around their bodies.  Clearly that's not what the mechanic was there for. It was simply a common stealth mechanic to avoid raising alarm when you have to knock out guards.

Now to Chris and Harvest Moon. If you ever played the series growing up as I did, you would remember fondly the SNES version, inheriting the farm and spending the day tidying your fields, tending your crops and ramping up your farms operation. Then after working hard on the farm you could look forward to festivals on the calendar where you could let your hair down, get to know the towns people and potentially persue one of the women. You could do this by talking to them at the festivals and bringing them gifts. With persistence you would eventually win their hearts.

Enter goony beard man Chris Plante and his tale of being an apparently not particularly bright 12 year old who decided that the Harvest Moon romance mechanics were to be taken quite literally. Cue story of Chris randomly buying a gift with his pocket money for a girl who live in his culdesac who he'd never talked too.

Of course Chris blames this awkward incident on Harvest Moon teaching him the wrong lessons. That the games romance mechanics weren't dating sim enough. That real women aren't video game characters.

He then ends up talking about the overlap of pick up artists and the videogame community:

"Whenever I hear about overlap between pick-up artist community and video games, I think of that ring. I see how someone who loves video games reduces relationships to a series of checkboxes."

Yes it just compared Harvest Moon dating mechanics to PUA's. An entirely innocent mechanic that most people who aren't SJW sad sacks can relate to. Funny I never saw it as checkboxes. I saw it as  persuing and being attentive and thoughtful to my Harvest Moon waifu to be.

Chris then closes with an even more pathetic tale now that he's playing the HM clone Stardew , his in game character is a complete beta to match real life who avoids the ladies at the festivals and gives gifts to the shop keepers instead.