Nathanael Peacock – 07/14
A lot of new information and excitement came out of this years E3. But few things have sparked as much controversy as the Ubisoft conference. Ubi haven’t had the best track record in communicating with their consumers in recent years, with DRM and game issues with their pc ports, to the historical shoe-horn that was Assassins Creed 3. But this years press conference relit an old flame that has been burning beneath the gaming industry for some time now.
Female characters.
Ubi’s biggest blunders from this conference have all come in the form of community interaction. Their presentation would have gone fine, players were excited for the innovations in AC: Unity and the prospect of playing co-op. But some player just happened to notice the lack of female assassins in the game. Ubisoft had a few options when faced with this question, they could have said that they didn’t believe female assassins would work in the new setting, or I believe they should have held to the fact that they have a male protagonist and that was the reason. Instead they took a holier than thou approach and told players that the cost and effort to add feminine counterparts would be too great on the production. This leaves players with two possible views, either Ubisoft thinks its players are too simple to understand the true cost of adding female characters (not to mention that there have been female assassins since AC: Brotherhood, and a female lead in Liberation. Don’t tell me they aren’t reusing some animations or rigging from Connor or Edward.) Or their development is so mismanaged that recreating female characters would cripple their production. Either way, other developers have since stood up and said that Ubisoft is back-peddling, Jonathan Cooper (AC3 Animation Director) said on twitter that creating those characters would take a matter of days, and be relatively simple. Avid fans have since taken to Twitter to call out Ubisoft with #womenaretoohardtoanimate.
However, the Freudian slips did not stop there. Ubisoft’s director of Farcry 3 said that they were inches away from adding female characters as co-op partners. But pulled back because of the effort. And in speaking with Rock, Paper, Shotgun Technical Artist Oliver Couture said that they used a female hostage in the demo for Rainbow Six: Siege because they wanted the player to feel empathy for the woman and feel that “they wanted to protect her”. How astonishingly patriarchal.
But this is not the first instance of female characters and female gamers being relegated to the background. Ubisoft isn’t the only perpetrator here. Why just last year the cover for Bioshock: Infinite was released to raucous disappointment from fans. From a game with a stunningly deep female character, intriguing subplots and a floating city, the cover is another generic, grizzled white guy with a gun. Ken Levine stated that he wanted “The uninformed… to pick up the box and say Oh this looks cool” so we’re at the point where we’re designing games for non-gamers? What is worse is that they relegated Elizabeth to the back cover and put her in a position of needing to be saved.
Just another princess in another castle.
The issue is simple, the issue is clear. Game developers and publishers are still aiming games at the dark ages.
According to the 2014 Essential Facts of the Video Game Industry, collated by the Entertainment Software association; The average age of gamers is now 31. But more interesting than that is that the split is an almost even 48% female, 52%male. But still we get games and art geared towards the underage adrenaline junkies, the 12 year old male gamers who just want to blow stuff up.
So I am calling for support from readers and gamers alike, we need more honesty from our developers, more strong female characters, more depth in our leads. More Sarah Connors and less Princess Peach, more Ripley and less helpless little girls needing a knight in shining armour. I understand that those stories and those tropes have their place, but they should not stand in the way of our growing industry. I for one will not support the alienation of the growing culture of female gamers. I urge you to do the same.
Nathanael Peacock 