@viciousbearmauling said:
I dunno. All of this complaining about gender representation is kinda confusing to me. We're all human, why should gender even matter? If creators think one gender is the correct gender for their character design/story, who are we to call him names because of his/her creative vision? As for Ubisoft? I don't think they're discriminating intentionally, but every customer is different, and every customer has a right to be upset and offended at anything.
Whatever, I'll give a dumb answer. Ubisoft is VERY sexist for having a female hostage in that R6:Siege trailer.
Because positive representation is important, and people are beginning to notice the lack of it. Saying things like "we're all human so why should it even matter?" is just attempting to shoo the problem away by pretending like it doesn't exist, which is super easy to do when you're part of the dominant power group. It matters because people like women are seen as women before they are seen as human beings, and THE EVIL PATRIARCHY likes to pretend like women are equal in every respect when nooohohohoooo they are not. It matters because African American people are seen as a skin color before they are seen as human beings, and this is the result of representation; either the lack of, or the negative.
When you say things like "We wanted to add girls, but it was just too much work :( deadlines guyssss" what you're really saying is "We didn't plan to have them from the start, and when we considered it, decided the extra effort wasn't worth it because pbbbbt girls arent in video games anyway who is gonna notice" When you say "We just didn't have time to do all of those animations :(" what you're really saying is "We wanted to continue the awful trend of making women run on their tiptoes with their elbows tucked in and have most of their animations involve sticking their butt out in some way but then we decided why not just play guys because girls are difficult to animate or something"
They did this with TWO games that I'm aware of: Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4. They said that they had the ability to select a female character to play as in Far Cry 4, but ducked out of it because "voices and animations you guys :(" Women are an afterthought. Really, anything that isn't an 18-35 non denominational, mentally sound, physically fit and healthy white male is an afterthought. If they're included, it's always an "option" but guess what the thing on the front of the box is...
I was talking to a friend of mine last night about it, and while I have unfortunately lost the Steam conversation, we went through a couple of years in video games to see how many video games offered the option to play as either male or female, and what games only had male PCs and what games had a female PC.
In 2013, every 8.8 games had the ability to play a female character, and we didn't even bother studying which ones were actually POSITIVE depictions of women...
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