Tag: video games

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I think it’s been long enough but if you find yourself getting ready to type up a comment related to Mass Effect: Andromeda’s animations please consider watching this educational video from Extra Credits and not commenting here instead.  This post is going to be a clarification of what we mean when we say Creepy Marketing Guy, and since the first post on this topic featured Samara, it’s only fair that Cora be the star of the clarification.

First, let’s start with what we do not mean when we refer to Creepy Marketing Guy.  It does not refer to:

What we instead refer to is a product where you can see the development team’s intentions are to create something where every element is involved in telling a specific story – and then someone (usually marketing) steps in and makes the change specific parts of them with the assumption that the cishet male demographic needs the sexual availability of at least one female character broadcast to them in order to be interested in the unrelated aspects.

In this case, they pick Cora Harper, who is an ultra-professional soldier (one of the most battle hardened in the team), introduced as being calm in a crisis, the second in command on the mission, and seems to use “male” set of animations for her running, etc (instead of the elbows-in butt wiggle run generally assigned to female characters, including fem!Ryder).

Then you see in the outfit in the top of the post before launching into the tutorial mission, during which she appears in cut scenes like this:

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Pretty much every other female character in the establishing chapters of the game has pragmatic, non-gendered attire on and off the battlefield. But, since Cora is a romance option for bro!Ryder, she apparently needs to wear a fetish outfit sculpted around her boobs and butt, while on the battlefield. The other female member of the away team who is a romance option also similarly needs to broadcast she’s got a sexy side (she also only owns one set of clothes).

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All other traits other than romance option to bro!Ryder are considered secondary – to the extent now Cora looks not just contradictory to her character but out of place in the game about exploring a new galaxy, finding wondrous alien technology and shaping humanity’s future. 

(This does not seem to apply to the male romance options, examples 1 & 2)

Ironically this now means she is so out of place cannot be included in marketing material without making the game look a ridiculous parody of a dramatic adventure exploring alien worlds in a new galaxy. It’s almost like they should have just given her one of the dozens of pragmatic outfits I am sure the concept artists designed for Cora before being told to sex it up.

– wincenworks

What is it with the “above boobs and under boobs belts” design feature that’s become so popular lately? Also, I thought Ashley’s outfit in Mass Effect 3 was insulting; the new BioWare studio really took it up a notch, though. … Good job?

I’ve read none of the promotional material for ME:A before it came out, so when I watched part of a Let’s Play of it out of curiosity, I couldn’t believe that Cora was this battle-hardened badass soldier type; I thought she was just another human on the ship. Her design makes me think of EDI before anything else. Those really sad attempts at actual armor pieces (like the baby plates on her shoulders) somehow make it worse, like Creepy Marketing Guy begrudgingly allowed it.

Also, send help, that butt window is staring into my soul.

-Icy

Cora Harper Official Character Sheet 

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

lookatthisfuckingoppressor:

You have men yelling: “yay! Boobs in games! Bigger boobs! More boob! Naked boob!”for decades. When female gamers finally got enough of a voice to say: “hey, I kind of wish there were women in video games who weren’t 80% boob by body weight”: those same men utterly flipped their shit.

This whole “why complain? You can’t tell designers what to do!” only seems to come up any time anyone but straight, white men dares make their opinion heard.

Sadly accurate.

Note how whenever cishet white audience members demand changes, those demands are met, or at the very least acknowledged.
Whenever anyone else does that, it’s gonna be called “whining” or “entilement”.

Emphasis mine.

~Ozzie

Video game has a single gay male character who flirts you? Riot against the developers.  Protagonist options do not include a white male? Riot against the developers. Age of Conan reduces bust sizes on female characters? Riot against the developers.  Didn’t get the ending you wanted? Riot against the developers.

Women who have been gaming for years point out obvious problems?

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– wincenworks

It still baffles me that wanting women in games to be designed appropriately for their job/setting is a controversial opinion to have, apparently. 

-Icy

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Thought I’d revisit this pinnacle of creativity from Soul of the Ultimate Nation with a bingo. Man, was it close to clear out the whole card!

~Ozzie

What greets you when you go to their website:

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(Kill me)

Look at the design variety! So many lingerie options!

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The strategic cutouts from the dress fabric are just hilarious. How does she walk? These are Carnival outfits, not armors.

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The most empowered man I’ve found in the labeled promotional material is the following guy on the left, though his image is completely ruined by monster-truck-wearing scowly man on the right.

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And even he’s not reaching anywhere near the levels of empowerment of the ladies in this post. 

We have to stand up to this reverse sexism! This particular MMO is apparently undergoing a relaunch, so now is our chance to let the developers know what we gamers really want.

-Icy

Edit: there have been a few comments about the potential child in one of the pictures, to which I reacted with a “(kill me)” and you are correct! That does appear to be a child. Here’s a better picture, for better or worse.

-Icy

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bikiniarmorbattledamage:

This is why we find it difficult to celebrate Blizzard’s baby steps towards progress – they are already so self-congratulatory about it that they basically gave up before they started.

Okay, yes, baby steps, Blizzard has got a long history of being terrible and a lot unlearning to do.  But they could at least try to show some self-awareness of this.

Dirty Bomb, a game which I feel we have actually tragically under-represented in our positive examples, has managed to incorporate diversity and gear equality without making it a novelty item.  How? By making diversity a genuine priority – that’s why their line up looks more like this:

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– wincenworks

And it’s not only body diversity which seems to be a challenge for female Overwatch characters, so is their AGE!

D.Va is actually the youngest in the whole ensemble (19). Female characters don’t get older than 34 (Mercy), while male ones range from 20 (if you count Zenyatta, a robot) or 25 (Junkrat) all the way up to 61 (Reinhardt).

The overall design of D.Va is perplexing on so many levels, too. What new is she supposed to contribute? Yet another young, thin, conventionally pretty woman in a catsuit… something the game (and the industry as a whole) so totally lacked before! Even her silly pseudonym rubs in that she’s a diva. 
The idea of a Korean professional gamer-turned-mecha pilot is very cool (even if the backstory rips off Evangelion/Pacific Rim), but why make her look so generic… and paint her mech pink? 

My most optimistic guess: one of many Blizzard’s Creepy Marketing Guys saw Zarya and said “So, we’re doing female tanks now? Okay, but next one is gonna be the SEXY tank! And make her more PINK!”

~Ozzie

more on Overwatch | more on Blizzard

Remember when Blizzard was doing female characters better in Overwatch?

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Yeah, me neither.

We will be doing a full post about the new Widowmaker skin, but until then, we just wanted to throwback to this post about all the effort Blizzard is putting into their diversity.
It still doesn’t make sense for Widow to wear those clothes because, 

  • a) she is a sniper and that top just screams nip slip; and 
  • b) she’s a sniper, who’s she going to be ‘distracting’ exactly from 2 miles away?

It also just looks really ugly? It really looks like someone designed a practical suit for her, and then Creepy Marketing Guy walked in and told them to cut a third of it off, so they just did, without any design adjustment.

-Icy

edit: Since a lot of replies ignore that the original post is almost 1,5 years old and mentioning newer characters is beside the point Icy is making about Widowmaker, let’s quickly address this: We do acknowledge how Ana Amari is a cool non-sexualized old lady (even if squarely within OW’s established beauty standards) and Orisa is a cool female robot.
That said, there are still problems with how old characters continue to be depicted and adding new heroes doesn’t change that.

~Ozzie

PS: Mercy is 37, not 34 – my bad. She looks neither age, regardless.

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Thanks joabobs for for the tip about Legacy of Discord. I was having fun with this bingo (picked out of several different options that were equally generic and lingerie-y) but then I found this image and I died a little more inside:

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I mean, besides the hilariously obvious double standard, that… whatever it is she’s wearing is so uninspired, and the messy rendering makes me think they spent an entire 25 minutes on it because Creepy Marketing Guy wanted a Hot Chick™ on the advertisement. Her giant hat is the coolest thing about her design, but even that isn’t done well. Compare her to the guy on the right, who has what looks like a literal bear trap on his armor. I want one of those! (Also the shape language on him is just a lot clearer.)

I got distracted from the original point of this post, but do I really need to say more about Ms. Furious Wings up there besides Kerrigan Lingerie Victoria’s Secret Angel?

-Icy

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Not a very impressive bingo, considering this “armor” seems to be mostly covering and even includes pants (such a rare feat!), but there are a couple things making up for it:

  • How absurdly overdesigned it is, to the point that it’s hard to make out what is what. Especially with all the random elements and blue light effects floating everywhere.
  • The description: “The master of Frost, holy and sexy, dominate the battlefield with powerful magical mirror!”

HOLY AND SEXY, you guys! Whoever is Legacy of Discord’s copy writer, they should get a raise just for that spurt of “creativity”.

~Ozzie

Maybe their shaders glitched out as they were taking these screenshots. She looks more like the master of Headaches.

-Icy