What's up with calling Ubisoft sexist/racist this year?

It's a hot topic that is sure to gather some page views. I have no doubt that's why some websites are covering it.

It started though because Ubisoft just made one really stupid statement that fueled the fires and genuinely offended some people (and it was a really stupid statement).

@davidmerrick said:

Regardless of gender it's not like I have a ton of respect for people in their position anyway. I save that and admiration for good teachers, cops, doctors, and other jobs that actually matter. Not where they're simply critiquing something someone else created. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not like they're curing cancer either. They're not doing anything where they deserve a lot of admiration, at least not IMO. So women on gaming sites are just coincidentally hot 90% of the time and just so happen to only feel comfortable in tank-tops?

Do you think Spanish news channels and Fox News hire hot female anchors coincidentally too? If so, that's naive. Wearing that to work, even with it being in California where they don't care about clothes and in the gaming industry seems a bit inappropriate to me. I'm not sure how me saying they should dress a bit more appropriate to work is devaluing their opinion. I agree with them in general, but AC is the wrong series to pick on, since it's the move diverse AAA series in gaming and Ubisoft doesn't owe them a female character.

I'm curious: do you have respect for Jeff and others at this site, given the work they do?

Respect is earned not given.

I have the same level respect for them I do for actors or comedians who entertain me, which is way lower than people who actually help/change lives like the professions I mentioned before (good teachers, doctors, nurses, etc).

Alright, better question: what have Tracey and Megan done or not done that isn't worthy of your respect?

I never said I didn't respect them. My point was, them wearing more clothes would be nice; particularly the one with the tiny black tank-top on. Even if they weren't talking about sexism I think that's an inappropriate shirt for work. I'm not sure how saying female critics don't have to be hot nor wear tank-top all the time makes me the bad guy here in your opinion lol.

Video games journalism isn't exactly a business casual industry... why am I doing this.

Here's how this is panning out:

1. Tracey and Megan have a discussion about the inclusion and representation of women in video games.

2. One of your sticking points is that Tracey's clothes are somewhat revealing.

3. This has nothing to do with how women choose to clothe themselves and somewhat to do with how male artists clothe female characters.

You're passively-aggressively slut-shaming them. Don't be that guy.

The Farcry 4 "controversy" left me a little confused as well. The character was obviously the villain, and I'm perfectly okay with a racist villain. The AC...thing seems more sensationalist then anything else. I think having more good female protagonists would be a good thing, but I don't want a character someone originally envisioned as male suddenly turned into a female character just to have a female protagonist.

Honestly it's best to ignore some of these and only pay attention to the issues of gender equality that are legitimate, of which there are many.

There's history of it no doubt, but you don't see people react in the same way in other mediums to villains. In a movie you can show very heinous things done by villains and I don't personally see any public outcry, vs Far Cry 4 where the cover has already been changed. I don't like it. I suppose it may lead to growth but right now it is just censorship.

It's an idiotic line of thinking to apply to fiction. Writing something in your work does not equal endorsement.

@davidmerrick: We'll have to agree to disagree. I never called them sluts, I just thought it was tacky. To me, it's almost like a black person doing a video about racism while wearing a Mad Max Mel Gibson shirt without them realizing how that's ironic.

I don't necessarily think the words racism or sexism should be thrown around here, maybe words like "ill-informed" or a "little dumb" on Ubisofts part. However, I do think their reasoning is crap, and simply they just didn't think about making x, y, or z characters female.

I thought it was interesting when Bioware revealed that only 18% of players played as femshep. We keep seeing the stats that about 50% of gamers are women, thats pretty inclusive.I think the problem is game sites cover for the "hard core audience", games about shooting guys in the face and shit. They rarely cover casual games, or MMOs, or the Sims, which have large women demographics. They seem suprised a lot less women play the game where you stab guys in the face. I'm not saying that women cant like these games, but we have to be honest that men and women have diffrent tastes and thats ok. Now, companies making different types of games is a diffrent topic.

Ah yes, the day sweaty neckbeards complain for racial and gender equality in a video game industry gone all-in on multicultural representation is the day Hitler gets to smile again.

Right?

It's called entitlement. Some people want a female and if it's not there it's sexist. They don't want females for other roles and if they're there, it's sexist.

Just a bunch of sad people who feel that you should have the same opinion as they do. If you don't, you're a shitty human being. Fuck them. Just let them be pathetic and don't pay attention to it. It'll go away eventually.

Exactly, you must be a mind reader or something. You interpreted my comment masterfully, even managing to bring in Hitler AND mention neckbeards at the SAME time. Pretty damn impressive.

"Creative vision", sure. The eras of bald space marines and Sonic knockoffs were brought upon us by creativity, and not a bunch of cold executives looking at graphs and pie charts.

Hooray for video game culture.

Good. I'm glad masterclass gaming journalism was accomplished on this day. Time to sit back and reap in the page views and new follower notifications.

It's not just Ubisoft. Everyone is calling everyone sexist and racist.

I think it's counter productive and they're creating a new form of hate and intolerance based on not being intolerant. Being intolerant against intolerance just changes and transforms the hate you're trying to stop. Instead of condemning Ubisoft for not including whatever the fuck you think they left out you should be giving them positive reinforcement for the things they are doing right. Culturally I think a lot of these crusaders are missing the point they're attempting to fight for.

They don't want the kind of hate that they're uncomfortable with but they'll gladly hate it right back. The only thing they're changing is the target.

Well Ubisoft brought this on themselves, they made a poor design decision for unknown reasons, got called out on it, and then dug themselves a deep hole by giving a super disingenuous answer that implied all sorts of things I'm going to guess they probably didn't mean. So people naturally could tell they were lieing and made the simple conclusions that racism/sexism was the real reason (eventhough it may not be).

Moral of the story: Don't lie to people. It's better in the long run

Reading threads like these just make me cringe.

Yeah, you're really sticking up for equality by defending white men.

I understood where you were going with that. It's absolutely not a coincidence that the female media presence (in gaming and otherwise) is mostly attractive women. Still, I truly despise this oversexualization of women. It seems like every internet thumbnail has some pretty woman on it to try to drive clicks and every ad is some "is this bikini too small" crap, and that's sickening. I'd like to think we're better than that, but we clearly aren't. However, you have to consider the female willingness to participate in this stuff as well. For example, it was no accident that the Marketing classes I took in Business school were filled with hot girls. Why? The answer is because we're a beauty culture, and there are sadly careers to be had largely out of simply being pretty.

It's a two-way street. I greatly lament that women are judged on their appearance more than anything else, as well as how this has led to the proliferation of "sex sells" marketing being pretty much everywhere these days. On the one hand, you've got companies basically whoring out women, and that's deplorable. On the other hand, you've got women knowingly signing up for it, and that's also deplorable. Essentially, if a woman willfully 1) chooses a field where appearance is a large portion of it and 2) wears tight/skimpy clothing on camera in said field, any outcry against sexism rings pretty damn hollow. I'm not saying they can't wear that stuff or that they aren't entitled to an opinion, but if they're going to pretty much play a bimbo role to some degree, complaints about sexism fall a bit flat.

For the record, I truly feel for women in media. I can't imagine how much of a beating it is for the women who simply want to do their job and have the focus be on their work, only to have the response be a constant barrage of pervy stuff if they're attractive (or hateful stuff if they aren't). That flat-out sucks. However, there is also an entirely different faction of women who are more than happy to do little more than read off a cue card and be ogled. I don't pay enough attention to Polygon to make any kind of judgment as to where the girls in the OP fall on this spectrum (probably somewhere in the middle), but I certainly get where @deathstriker was coming from.

Additionally, I take issue with that for a supposed issue regarding female characters, we've got two females covering it. I mean, obviously a female perspective is valuable here, but if that's all we get, it makes it seem a bit self-serving. Let's hear multiple perspectives. Make it a conversation, not an editorial. Should a female or females be included in that conversation? Absolutely. Should they be the only ones who get to have an opinion on the matter? No. Just gather some folks from the office and have an honest conversation about it. If this topic arises on an organizational level of "here, women, you cover this women stuff", or the flipside of that on a personal level with "I am woman, hear me roar about this women stuff", it's upsetting either way, IMO.

I digress. Overall, I think this "-ism" stuff is wildly overblown, and I'd contend the motivations behind it are typically less than pure. These motives seem to fall in one of three categories (or combination thereof): 1) Media outlet invents/piles on perceived slight because controversial stuff gets clicks, 2) egotistical writer wants to put him/herself on a pedestal as a moral crusader whose progressiveness everyone should aspire to and admire, and/or 3) writer from supposedly slighted demographic who only gives a shit because it's their demographic. I think this stuff hurts us on the whole. It reduces people to being defined by what they are instead of who they are. I'm not on board with that.

I could not agree more. The college debating club crusaders are doing more harm than good at this point. If you accuse everything of being sexist all the time then it ends up being meaningless when you do actually need to call someone out.

Polygon is poison.

This this this this this. The fact that they made all the female assassins "disappear" when they are an established part of previous games is what pisses me off. It's insulting. I'm not asking for a second female protagonist, I'm asking for the female representation that was already THERE in previous games.

Video game journalism must be really boring if they have to make up their own bullshit "news" and "articles."

Yeah, Ubisoft games are totally the products of creativity and not extensive focus testing.

Man, these threads never seem to amount to anything. It just gives me the opportunity to kind of lean back in wide-eyed amazement as a bunch of guys speak for women en mass, shake my head, and then go about my day.

With how any semblance of discussion and empathy inevitably turns into arguments, I'm kind of shocked this hasn't been locked already.

I think it's super telling how the two most predominant posts from the female perspective (from @artelinarose and @jadegl) have had their comments entirely ignored. You all should go back and read what they wrote and take it to heart.

@spraynardtatum Responding to you since you're the most recent; I have to address this "hate breeds more hate" nonsense. What you're doing here is shifting the burden of guilt from the oppressors to the oppressed. You're saying, "It is your fault, woman-who-complains-about-sexism, that sexism exists. If only you complained about sexism less..." That is not how it works. It's a form of victim-blaming, and it further insists that women (and any other minority) remain silent and complicit, lest they risk stirring up more trouble. We've gotten as far as we have as a society because people have insisted on not remaining silent.

And c'mon, guys. I thought the Giant Bomb community, of all the gaming communities, would be above this anti-social justice nonsense.

This is one of them times when I wish the video game community would go fuck itself.

Yup. Don't go there. Problem solved

If this isn't the most outrage I've ever seen over a non issue it's pretty damn close.

If Polygon has such a huge problem with the way Ubisoft makes games then maybe they should go out and make some games. Seriously, how can anybody possibly care about the gender/ethnicity/whatever of a bunch of neck stabbing ciphers?

@deathstriker:

You stated examples for why people are upset. So you know 'what's up'. Right?

Everything, all of the time, is not sexist/racist. These are insane witch hunts.

I'm sick of seeing these little fights every other day.

AC is an incredibly diverse franchise. The antagonist in Far Cry seems to be a completely insane bastard... If we neuter the bad guys in anything then we devalue the hero because if he's fighting someone who does nothing evil because a company is too afraid of offending someone then all we have are boring experiences.

Let companies create whatever vision they may have.

I don't find this thread inflammatory at all, BTW. It has featured mostly respectful, rational, and varied discussion, which can't be said for the vast majority of the "articles" that precipitated the thread. I find the overzealous "that's sexist!" or "that's racist!" attitudes to be far more inflammatory than questioning said attitudes, especially when it comes to "slights" that are pretty much in the eye of the beholder, such as whining about how there are no female assassins in this AC game.

A small minority which also happens to be very vocal want to handicap Ubisoft's ability to tell a story and make a profit so that they cater to them instead of the larger audience which happens to be the market that makes Ubisoft it's money.

The same people find racism and sexism in absolutely everything

@fattony12000: :^)

This perfectly summed it up.

I guess so. That's definitely not something I'm trying to say. I'm not trying to say they should be silent. I think we should be attempting to rise above it and put all of it behind us. Hate does breed hate. Love conquers all.

I just wanted to say how right you are and highlight your post again.

Seriously disappointed by the reaction of some Giant Bomb members. If people complain about sexism in so many games (movies, books, plays, songs...) than that's because Western society is, by and large, still sexist. Sure, it has gotten much, much better, but it's still a long way off from where it ought to be.

It also seems to me that the vast majority of people complaining about Ubisoft's handling of this issue are not frothing at the mouth angry at them or condemn the company as a whole. It's not like they are calling for a boycott of all Ubisoft products or anything. They are just disappointed and understandably so.

I really hope this thread isn't closed. Firstly, I think a good proportion of the thread is constructive discourse. More importantly, I think snap closing discussions which you don't totally agree with can only engender a sense of grievance, and further separates the two sides of the argument. For what it's worth, while I strongly agree with many of the feminist points, I find much of the reporting overly sensationalist, opportunist and aggressive.

I don't know. My thing is that needing a female playable character in AC is dumb to complain about, it's just their bullahit excuse of doubling their workload that bothers me. Other than that I think the whole controversy is unnecessary.

Ugh, you're getting all your polygon in my Giantbomb.

When does that stop becoming 'a problem' then? Must every game have a female lead, regardless of the story? I think the only time I can see myself agreeing with this is when the characters are user created and for some perplexing reason they've excluded the option to play as a woman.

Otherwise, the only people who I think can decide the protagonist are the ones involved creatively, so the problem is probably the amount of men involved in those decisions rather than the amount of women represented in leading roles currently

Rayman. Raywoman... Think about it. Follow the money

@benpicko: That is exactly right. The solution is getting a more diverse group in creative and decision making places. It is certainly not easy, these games are play-tested and market-tested a ton and given that this is an issue beyond just games, it does not shock me these big budget mass market games reflect the other media around it.

To be honest if you're in this thread, not bitching about Polygon, not being sarcastic, or dismissive, or funny and having a discussion supporting either side, you're awesome. I really appreciate it.