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| Here are my vital organs, please stab one! |
The
two reasons I count myself as a feminist:
Reason
one: I am, or believe myself to be, a decent human being and so want
to treat the other human beings in a decent fashion. As I believe
that gender should not be a barrier to this behaviour I classify
myself as a feminist.
Reason
two: I am a geek and what's more a geek who is mostly straight.
Therefore the perception, both inside and outside the geek
demographic, that some of our interests are for “men only” kind
of pisses me off. It is an exclusionary mindset that does nothing
more than create self-fulfilling prophecies:
“Women
don't buy comics!” Yes, they do, but they're turned away in droves
by the big companies ignoring female talent and marketing their
female characters as fetish objects.
“Women
don't play wargames!” Yes, they do, and there would be more of them
doing so if the community at large didn't treat them as outsiders or
as personifications of the “nerdy girl” fantasy, if they just
treated them as (God help us) gamers.
“Geeks
don't get girls!” Yes, they do, in droves by just being decent
human beings around the lady folk. However, if you're going to repeat
this bloody stupid sentiment you will look like an entitled dick who
thinks a woman should get in bed with you just to show social
conscience rather than as a considered and consenting action based on
things like attraction, friendship, mutual respect or some other
interaction of your actual personalities.
“Women
don't play computer games!” Again, they do, but when the most
iconic female protagonists are marketed purely on their sexual
characteristics (Lara Croft, Bayonetta) you are losing more potential
female customers than you gain.
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It is a well known fact that nothing says "medieval
fantasy setting" quite like a latex bikini |
And
so we end up, finally, at Wartune: a free browser game whose adverts
turn up on any games-based forum you care to name. The image at the
top of this post is actually the most restrained one I could find
with some simple Google-slinging. Yes, the woman is impractically
dressed and you don't need my Red Cross training to notice the sheer
number of vital organs and arteries her armour exposes.
Example
number two gets “better”, completely dumping any sense of the
game's ostensible fantasy setting to have a woman in a bikini (and
anyone who thinks it's a Dead Or Alive character is probably right)
and a strapline containing one of the worst erection gags I have ever
heard and I have seen every episode of Up Pompeii.
So
how does this all relate back to my point about the exclusionary
aspects of fandom? Example number three:
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| She's Korean, on her artist's side |
Here
we have the full panoply of the problem: The character art, as with
the last example (and doubtless the first, though I can't identify
that one) is plagiarised. This is, I am told, a character from a
Korean MMO called Forsaken World. This one says “Adult Gamers Only”
twice but some versions of the ad have “Male Gamers Only”. One of
the ads even has the strapline “You deserve an orgy.”.
What
may not be plain from all this is that the game is not pornographic.
Clicking on the link will not take you to dark, sybaritic pleasures
of the binary code. Wartune is a Real Time Strategy Role Playing
Game. There is some turn-based combat and even, I shit you not, a
farming sim mechanic. What is consciously lacking in the player
experience are titties of any kind (okay, there may be cow-milking, I
didn't go too far in researching this particular aspect).
What
this amounts to is a company creating an Age Of Empires-style RTS
with some basic JRPG combat mechanics and marketing it through images
of scantily clad women. And even worse they don't even go to the
trouble of commissioning art of their own scantily clad women but
steal them from all over the place. This company has made a conscious
decision to lie about its product because expecting of men to follow
a link promising them boobies is a surer bet than coming out and
announcing a free to play RTS/RPG.
As
a man, I am insulted by the idea that quality is unimportant to my
consumer experience so long as some primitive sexual reflex is
stimulated. Not even satisfied, just stimulated, this company
literally thinks it can lead me by the cock towards its substandard
product. As a straight(ish) man with quite a few female friends I am
embarrassed that this is how the larger culture sees my relationship
with them. As a geek whose female friends are by and large also geeks
I am enraged that they should be consciously excluded and their
custom tacitly declared worthless in favour of mine.
And
what pisses me off the most? It bloody works for them! There is no
worse aspect than that. These corporate behaviours continue and are
repeated throughout the culture only because they produce positive
results. That's how capitalism works in practice. If a large enough
section of the gaming population looked at those ads and thought
“Well, that's a load of sexist shite!” they would disappear but
enough people have clicked on them, stayed to play this Age Of
Empires knock-off and handed over money for the higher level benefits
(and these don't include titties, either, before anyone thinks any
element of honesty went into this marketing strategy).
So,
yeah, a company has made enough money to maintain a free to play
RTS/RPG by betting on male gamers being sexist and easy to please.
Fuck.
