Foxtrot813 wrote...
Okay, I'm really trying hard to keep this reeled into the original topic, but it's becoming harder and harder and we may have to both step away from the keyboard on this one.EvanKester wrote...
Psst, thanks for writing all that, but explicit political affiliations might not be the best thing to bring into the forum. Hurts your signal to noise ratio, since you'll get people distracted by the election issues, which is really so far off topic for this thread. Dear everybody else: Please resist the temptation to jump onto an argument about presidential candidates etc.
On point: Women are severely underrepresented in media, and it's not a laughing matter. There are seriously hundreds of really good articles written about the issue every day. It's more pronounced in games, and let's face it, most of the women in games are aimed at satisfying an adolescent male sexual fantasy. Yes, especially the asari, as much as I like them. They were designed to be the "green space babes" of Mass Effect, and everything else about them came after, likely because the team at BioWare is actually intelligent and cares about these things.
I think BioWare's a decent job so far, and has been hampered more by the realities of game development than anythng else—But that's no reason not to ask them to maybe try a little harder, especially with the Mulitplayer.
It is a laughing matter, because it's completely trivial. Representation in media cannot be regulated because nearly all forms of media, games included, are art. Art is not subject to the censor or societal view. As long as you're not doing anything illegal, Bioware can exclude all they want. That's not to say they are. In fact, Bioware has actually been extremely inclusive. Why? Who knows.
My point is this: No form of media owes anybody anything. This kind of "we need more gay romances for male Shepard" and "we need more girls in MP" stuff does an incredible disservice to actual activism. Feminism is actually about equality for women as citizens. Unfortunately, its public face has been watered down to this kind of silly, unimportant schtick of "women in the media" and "women vs. tropes". It serves nobody. There is not a single sensible man or woman who cares THAT MUCH about the gender of their video game character. If they do, that's on them, not the developers. Bioware already does a LOT of catering. They're already extremely sensitive for reasons I'll never understand.
The mere act of focusing on this mentally for more than a nano-second is disappointing. Any Bioware dev browsing the forums should be ignoring nonsense like this and reading the bug report and feedback topics. Those are much more worth their time than trying to appease the unappeasable. There's always *something* and indulging this kind of mentality really isn't worth the effort.
Games aren't _just_ art, or there wouldn't be a business model associated with it. As well, there is such a thing as political art, so something being political and something being art aren't mutually exclusive. In this case, though, games are a product as much as (if not more than) they are art, and as such necessitates taking consumer expectations into consideration. And that includes female consumers who want better representation of themselves in said product.
It makes good business sense to cater to female gamers as well as male, because inclusivity just means more customers buying the product and shifting units, the more players buying BW points and DLC. _That_ is why it makes sense. Even if one doesn't agree with a feminist interpretation for the reasons for inclusivity, one can't deny the positive impact it has on the bottomline in what is fundamentally a business. Negative press will kill sales of an otherwise decent product, and likewise good press can spur sales of an otherwise mediocre one. ME is far from mediocre, so good press can only increase sales, and good press can be garnered by catering not only to fans, but creating new fans by appealing to them in ways that are cost-effective.
Alternate gender appearance options can be entirely neutral in terms of game impact and thus require far less testing and would not impact balance issues, and I can't see there being as many costs or upkeep associated with it as introducing new classes, weapons, enemies, etc. Other than ordering more character design and voice acting, which could be contracted out, once it's done, there's no need for further tweaking which is one less thing to for BW to worry about. Even token gestures have impact, and if it appeases those most vociferous for inclusivity while also appealing to more customers (such as new female fans of the franchise), it's a small thing to do compared to what you get back in terms of fan loyalty and increasing the fanbase.
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