I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it’s more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn’t hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

My personal bet is that until the bechdel pass rate goes up into ~90%, your point won’t really fly and the reverse will be passed all of the time … still interesting to find out.

In the era of “just asking questions”, I certainly understand any implicit assumptions that I’m oh-so-cleverly concealing some ill-conceived “point” about feminism. Certainly a case can be raised that by presenting a possible chink in the supporting evidence of your post is an inherently disruptive and destructive act; clearly your broader point about closet bigotry affecting fan biases is both correct and worth emphasizing. I’d far rather strengthen your argument than tear it down. I hope that’s ultimately what I’m doing here.

Given the numbers and the low bar of the Bechdel, some quick sampling could probably be done to get a picture. Select 10 episodes that pass the Bechdel test and 10 that fail, maybe some from TNG ans some from voyager, and we here collectively try to see if they pass/fail the reverse bechdel test in a group effort?

I don’t think I would trust the results of this, unfortunately, as there’s probably a reverse correlation between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel tests; in a sample this small that would pollute the results. For example, take any episode where two characters of the same sex are stuck together in some sort of trouble. That episode will surely pass one of the tests (Bechdel for two women, reverse for two men) but has an increased chance of failing the other because much of the dialogue for the rest of the characters is likely to revolve around the plight of the imperiled pair.

…which isn’t to say that what you suggest isn’t worth the attempt. Certainly raising an issue and then shooting down a proposed solution to it isn’t very helpful. Episode transcripts are out there; maybe there’s a software solution here? Automatic identification of conversations between two characters would be imperfect but manageable, running that dialogue up against a list of names of male/female characters and then manually checking up on the episodes that missed to avoid false negatives would probably be the most technically efficient way about this?

Circling back on your actual point, though… You are absolutely and unambiguously correct that TOS did a horrible job with gender representation, much worse than TNG did (or could have been expected to by fans when it was about to air). It’s also clear that Voyager did much better than it’s contemporaries, and ENT was a pretty harsh step backwards. You don’t need to know the base rate to establish if one number is bigger than the other, only to draw more nebulous, general conclusions about how well shows are doing with gender representation.

For level setting, I would like to see the results of the “reverse Bechdel” test: a scene where two named male characters talk about something other than a woman.

The numbers will surely be higher than for the standard Bechdel, but I doubt they are 100%: for example, any episode primarily about heterosexual romance will risk failing both tests. TOS seems like it should hit that mark pretty reliably, but the prevalence of episodes where Kirk gets stuck on an alien world and spends most of his time chatting up a lady cut into the odds. (Likewise if we were to take literally Kirk’s absurd characterization of the Enterprise as a woman, but… no). DS9 and TNG will run into problems with their volume of mixed-gender conversations, and for TNG especially the prevalence of significant female guest stars who male characters are likely to be discussing will cause some failures. Etc, etc.

To be clear, we know damn well that Star Trek has had problems with sexism, with instances both subtle and gross (Qpid and clay pots, anyone?). The Bechdel test also seems to be accepted as both a ludicrously low bar and an unreliable measure, but I have yet to see it put in appropriate context against the reverse test. What does it tell us if 98% of Trek episodes pass the reverse Bechdel? or if “only” 75% do? Does Voyager’s 86.9% standard score exceed or fall flat relative to their reverse Bechdel? Etc, etc. I would posit that the relationship between the Bechdel and reverse Bechdel should tell a pretty strong story about the level of subtle sexism in how the show is written, while an aggregation of the two scores is mostly just a measure of how (in)frequently the characters are chatting about their coworkers.