Female Armor Bingo – A Year in Review
It’s been an exciting year for the Female Armor Bingo, over a hundred cards filled in and displayed on BABD. We’ve learned a lot, and we hope the industry has too.
We hope creators, publishers and fandoms have learned (but I kind have my doubts that they have across their respective industries at least):
- Sex doesn’t sell, honestly, it just doesn’t.
- Bikini Armor hasn’t been creative since before Disco died.
- To stop sexualizing children and child-like characters.
- And please stop trying to make corpses sexy too.
- Leave Athena alone! Just stop it! STOP NOW!
- If you create something bingo worthy, and your boss asks you to fix it due to backlash – don’t be that guy!
- Nobody believes “It suits her fighting style” as an excuse.
We learned:
- Sometimes outfits are even worse than they appear at first examination.
- Some things not even double sided tape can explain.
- Evil women all shop in the same clothing / lingerie store.
- When Blizzard says they’re going to do better, they mean they’re going to do the same thing as before.
- Creativity is dead.
- Under no circumstances will ever be able to criticize any outfit without a certain demographic running to defend it in a predictable manner.
- Camel toe is actually pretty rare in game design (and we are GENUINELY AND SINCERELY HAPPY ABOUT THAT!)
- Some outfits are so absurd in their sexualization that they break the game and score no bingos.
- No matter how bad the outfit is and how much the designers attempted to sex it up, not a single one scores 100% of the bingo squares.
Certainly not for the lack of trying, though…
It’s been an amazing first year and we’re looking for to the next year and the adventures (and tears) that will come as we continue to analyze just how terrible female armor designs in mainstream media really are!
~Ozzie
-wincenworks
How to design a sci-fi heroine right
Morrigan submitted:
Thought it’d be interesting to show the design process by the artist at Zeboyd Games when he designed the heroine for their upcoming sci-fi RPG, Cosmic Star Heroine:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Gaming4Gamers/comments/2u7gt8/ama_with_zeboyd_games_indie_game_studio_behind/co5vaz6
Note here how he really put some thought into her outfit and how it fits the setting and story. And the result is fantastic, practical yet stylish and not “boring” at all:
What’s this? No gratuitous boob window in the outfit, no skin-tight latex that makes her look almost naked, no boobs-and-butt pose? Well, I’m shocked. 🙂 Thank you, Bill @ Zeboyd, for making Alyssa awesome without cheapening her with gratuitous sexification. <3
I love that based off the answer, Bill could probably talk all day about his character design decisions without ever needing to go into discussion of their sex appeal. Probably one of the reasons why the alpha of the game shows so much promise.
– wincenworks
