GUEST POST BY Devon S.
During the launch of Assassin’s Creed Unity in November of 2014 the guys at Ubisoft seemed to have one bad stroke of luck after another. While the game was reportedly plagued with bugs, it seemed the big issue on the general gaming media’s mind wasn’t how many frames Unity was running, but how many female co-op characters were running around. And the answer to those was as follows:
“We recognize the valid concern around diversity in video game narrative. Assassin’s Creed is developed by a multicultural team of various faiths and beliefs and we hope this attention to diversity is reflected in the settings of our games and our characters.
Assassin’s Creed Unity is focused on the story of the lead character, Arno. Whether playing by yourself or with the co-op Shared Experiences, you the gamer will always be playing as Arno, complete with his broad range of gear and skill sets that will make you feel unique.
With regard to diversity in our playable Assassins, we’ve featured Aveline, Connor, Adewale and Altair in Assassin’s Creed games and we continue to look at showcasing diverse characters. We look forward to introducing you to some of the strong female characters in Assassin’s Creed Unity.”
This didn’t seem to please the Anita’s or the Stephen Totilo’s of the gaming industry. It went on to be an issue that may have led to Unity receiving harsher criticism than other games that had similarly shaky launches, such as Halo: The Master Chief Collection. Now the year is 2015, and Ubisoft has again come under fire from the same people that attacked them last November. This time, however, it has come under fire for INCLUDING female playable characters in its new title Assassin’s Creed Syndicate.
The International Business Times, the same news site that condemned Ubisoft last November for Unity’s Lack of female Co-Op characters and protagonists, has now condemned Ubisoft for “Exploiting Feminism For Easy PR.” The article itself was the type of drivel written by someone who watches too much Feminist Frequency, as evidenced by this quote:
“Historically, games have respected women about the same as you might respect a banana peel, or a used tissue. Women have been sexualized, objectified, belittled, discriminated against and misrepresented at every juncture.”
But in the past couple of years, more and more games have started to feature women characters not as damsels in distress, or jiggle-physics-enabled arm candy, but protagonists.”
He goes on to complain about how female characters shouldn’t be part of a press release, how it’s just a cynical kind of marketing tactic that’s deployed to whip up online chatter between GamerGate and their opponent, while making everyone else feel warm and fuzzy. Yeah, because all the men AND women in GamerGate are all sexist. Because women don’t like hot chicks and jiggle physics. He continues on with this nonsensical bullshit:
There’s a “you want it? Here then, have it!” kind of tone to these announcements – if the developers and writers actually thought or cared about women, they wouldn’t shout about it this way.
This isn’t what the process of creating gender equality in games looks like. More helpful – more powerful – would be to simply HAVE female characters in games, for them to simply BE THERE, not for developers to point out and proclaim it like it’s some noteworthy oddity. Admittedly, it is noteworthy.
How to make yourself look like a complete fucking moron by the IBT’s Edward Smith:
Say something isn’t noteworthy and then say that same thing is noteworthy. So the long and the short of what this asshole is saying is that you should put female characters in games for “gender equality” but you shouldn’t advertise them so people still have a reason to vindicate you later on for not advertising it. Brilliant shit. Looking at his other articles you can see he’s been drinking the SJW Kool-Aid for far too long.
Anyway guys hope this has been informative and I wanna thank Ralph for having me on as a guest writer. This is Devon with Gaming In Progress, and I’ll see ya later.
