Presenting: Female Armor Bingo VER. 1.1!
Since the Female Armor Bingo premiered on March the 1st 2014, it actually got to be tested on dozens upon dozens of “armors”, which taught me where improvements might be needed. Hence today, on its first anniversary, I present the REVISED Female Armor Bingo!
Some squares have been reworded to better describe more female warrior outfits, while “Cameltoe”, which thankfully turned out to be less popular than expected, got replaced with “How does it attach?!” square. Some lettering also got resized a bit for reading convenience.
No square placement is different (as in, I didn’t rig the game so more bingos can be won on average), because, as we noted before, the scores are not a conclusive measuring device for costume design quality.
The game is not about the score (which is subjective, anyway), but about pointing out recurring sexist character design tropes and encouraging critique of them.
Also, leaving the squares as they are means there will be less confusion between the cards crossed in the past and the newer ones. Hence it’s version 1.1, not 2.0.
Version 1.0 is still available here in deviantArt scraps
~Ozzie
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
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
Dynamite comics has got to their #100th issue of Red Sonja… and apparently feel the best way to celebrate this is with multiple covers.
- Two of which depict Sonja being undressed against her will, with one looking so disturbingly suggestive it warranted us to put a trigger warning tag on this post
- One shows her battling something indistinct with fluff text to suggest she’s badass
- One with a boringly generic pose and awkwardly-placed list of the creators of the stories from the issue
- One shows her looking cartoonishly child-like
Dynamite Comics totally respects the character guys! It’s just keeping this ridiculous outfit for branding and nostalgia! Honest!
– wincenworks
It shouldn’t be surprising how the cutesy cover is the least terrible of them all. It’s by far the best drawn of the bunch and the only one where “can I fap to this?” clearly wasn’t a design consideration.
~Ozzie
More on Red Sonja
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