casualgamer submitted:

Hi! First I would like to say I really like your blog, I check it almost daily and it never fails to make me amazed/appalled with the design decisions of (unfortunately) a large number of people in the industry.

Now, I am not an avid gamer by any stretch of the imagination, and my favorite genres are point-and-click, hidden object games, that one could hope would be less subject to the kind of absurd armor design as, say, MMOs.

And then I came accross Tectonica the Warrioress. She is a secondary character with whom you interact, thankfully very briefly, in the bonus chapter of Lost Lands: The Four Horsemen. And the gap between the way she is introduced, i.e. “strong warrioress who will help you get a legendary weapon” and her appearance when you finally meet her is, well…suffice to say, it completely broke my immersion in the game. I actually had to stop playing for the day, I was that shocked.

Unfortunately (or is it actually better this way?), we only see the top half of her in game, so there are a few bingo squares I have greyed out, but she still checks out on a certain number of them. Also, as a friend I shared my disbelief with remarked: why the chains? Is it so she can make noise and not even be sneaky?

I guess it could be worse; she could actually have to fight in that outfit. But since she is basically just a quest-giver in a point-and-click game, she can still hope to survive.

Oh joy, now even the point-and-click games, the genre stereotypically aimed at women, can feature gratuitous bingo-worthy female “armor”.

Does this mean everyone can already stop pretending that “sexyness is the best way of marketing to men” is a viable excuse for putting random boobage in games?

[bolding mine]

~Ozzie