things that don’t break white male gamer’s immersion: dragons, magic, made up metals, impossibly large weapons, eating 50 potatoes while in combat, riding a horse up a 90 degree cliff

things that break white male gamer’s immersion: realistic armor for women, black people

Funcom’s “Mankini-Gate” double standard

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

pkudude99 submitted:

An interesting article over at Massively about the recent “Mankini” April Fool’s joke that Funcom put in, but then their upper management pulled:  http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/04/10/chaos-theory-funcom-flubbed-it-with-the-secret-worlds-mankinig/

I think it was stupid of their management to do it, as does the article author.  Why is this allowed for a woman:

 image

But not this for a man:

image

There actually is a male version of that Egyptian outfit that shows quite a bit of skin too, but nothing like it does for the female version,but there are plenty of female-only outfits that are very scanty too.  The worst of the lot is this one:

image

That’s why the April Fool’s joke worked so well — Funcom was poking fun at their own propensity for the double-standard.  And that’s why I’m so upset with their management’s decision to pull the mankini outfit.

For grins, here’s a shot a blogger friend of mine took before they got yanked: 

image

You’ll note the 3rd male in the shot is wearing a traditional speedo, and that’s been left in the game.  I don’t see that it exposes any less skin than the mankini.  I just don’t get it.

Well I suppose it was too much to hope that every executive in gaming would be as cool as Mark Long.

But really, after people have laughed and supported the joke is not the time to shut it down and try to pretend that it never happened.

Especially since the whole point of a mankini is that you can never unsee it.

– wincenworks

Apparently fans speculated it to be a copyright issue (but it’s highly unlikely)… Maybe Funcom wanted to be safe than sorry for not asking 20th Century Fox about official Borat licensing or something? ;P

~Ozzie

Bringing this back as a reminder of what happens when mainstream media actually sexualizes male characters.

– wincenworks

Funcom’s “Mankini-Gate” double standard

bikiniarmorbattledamage:

pkudude99 submitted:

An interesting article over at Massively about the recent “Mankini” April Fool’s joke that Funcom put in, but then their upper management pulled:  http://massively.joystiq.com/2014/04/10/chaos-theory-funcom-flubbed-it-with-the-secret-worlds-mankinig/

I think it was stupid of their management to do it, as does the article author.  Why is this allowed for a woman:

 

image

But not this for a man:

image

There actually is a male version of that Egyptian outfit that shows quite a bit of skin too, but nothing like it does for the female version,but there are plenty of female-only outfits that are very scanty too.  The worst of the lot is this one:

image

That’s why the April Fool’s joke worked so well — Funcom was poking fun at their own propensity for the double-standard.  And that’s why I’m so upset with their management’s decision to pull the mankini outfit.

For grins, here’s a shot a blogger friend of mine took before they got yanked: 

image

You’ll note the 3rd male in the shot is wearing a traditional speedo, and that’s been left in the game.  I don’t see that it exposes any less skin than the mankini.  I just don’t get it.

Well I suppose it was too much to hope that every executive in gaming would be as cool as Mark Long.

But really, after people have laughed and supported the joke is not the time to shut it down and try to pretend that it never happened.

Especially since the whole point of a mankini is that you can never unsee it.

– wincenworks

Apparently fans speculated it to be a copyright issue (but it’s highly unlikely)… Maybe Funcom wanted to be safe than sorry for not asking 20th Century Fox about official Borat licensing or something? ;P

~Ozzie

Bringing this back as a reminder of what happens when mainstream media actually sexualizes male characters.

– wincenworks

micdotcom:

15 female video game protagonists that aren’t objectified or tokenized 

Unfortunately this list is not completely accurate.  A few of the characters within it are sadly objectified by the creators:

So yeah, while there are more heroines we could add to this list – it’s kind of a shame that 20% of those on the list have exceptions.

– wincenworks

* We should stress, the issue here is not Go-Go Dancing itself, but rather that this was awkwardly shoehorned into the for no reason other than they wanted to have a conventionally attractive woman in a fetish outfit dancing. Seriously – this is not a reasonable way to obtain a cat-burglary costume with security countermeasures inbuilt.