I guess this comes with a disclaimer:
I like Metal Gear Solid V, i can accept that it has faults, and i'm not really one who wants to bash Polygon for being Polygon as some others do. I probably would've been as confused and somewhat angry if someone else including GB made this article.
Also i'm sorry if you consider the title a spoiler, i don't really think it is and couldn't find a way to talk around this, so i'm open for constructive
So i stumbled upon the link to "Metal Gear Solid 5's best secret: You can play the campaign as a woman" and a subline that promised me "this is important".
Knowing about that being technically a feature, i was utterly confused how much this feature is praised by Brianna Wu, its author.
Choice Quotes:
Much has been written about the juvenile design of Quiet, the improbably naked sidekick in the Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. But, for all the justifiable anger about her character, almost nothing has been written about the secret new female protagonist in Metal Gear.
I’m calling her FemSnake.
FemSnake is awesome. She’s on the title screen. Soldiers stop dead in their tracks and sharply salute her. "Thanks for saving those kids, Boss," they say.
[...]
Everything about her demands to be treated like a professional and not a sex object. Accompanying her is a sexist train wreck of a design, a woman designed to be ogled while never speaking a word. Quiet is a capable soldier who looks like anything but.
[...]
Let’s look at some of the design decisions in Metal Gear Solid V that are meant to make most gamers feel like they’re Snake — including gamers that are not white.
[...]
In fact, Snake himself barely even matters in this version of Metal Gear. That’s why the game teases you with changing Snake’s character’s race and face in the opening, a feature that delighted my Asian husband. As the online component comes next month, players will represent themselves as their custom avatar. The technical term for this in gamedev parlance is "player agency," giving you control over your game world.
FemSnake is a design compromise to allow female players to play as a woman. And make no mistake, including her was a feature that took quite a bit of development resources from the Metal Gear team. They had to alter the game’s armor implementation to work with her different body proportions. They had to bring in a voice actress. They had to code scenes so Sutherland’s line reads would appear as captions and not voiceover in many scenes. What they did to make this happen across so much content was neither quick nor easy. Someone cared about this feature.
[...]
That’s how I feel playing this latest Metal Gear. I’m both elated and troubled. In researching this piece, I saw hundreds of articles critiquing Quiet’s design. But I didn’t see a single article praising Konami for including an inclusive design compromise that boosts my own enjoyment of the game. You can play through almost the entirety of the game as a woman hero! Or a person of color! This is great news, and needs to be celebrated.
Credit: http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/8/9275393/metal-gear-woman-lead-character-secret
So, yeah, look:
I am all for being more inclusive and having more female protagonists in games. And i've also often argued in the past that trying to stir controversy about (percieved or obvious) sexism in games seems MUCH less effective to me than praising the few positives the game industry has to offer in this regard.
However, what i didn't mean by that is that one should go out of its way and heap praise upon what when described comes across as a table scrap that has fallen off the dinner table.
Again, i like MGS V, very much so. And i don't have anything against the feature to play as other characters, thats neat.
But this is not "important", and suggesting that MGS V makes a step forward in inclusiveness because of that seems to be somewhat embarrassing. And by "somewhat" i mean absolutely.
We are talking about something that is almost accidential here. Sure, as Wu points out, there had to be quite some work done to fit the different armor/camo types onto a feminine body and account for logic in game. Still, this is a cool detail, like "In GTA V Flip Flops actually flip-flop", not a progressive feature.
And it seems especially painful that someone like Brianna Wu seems so easily content here, going out of her way to lay down the maybe-sexist-definitely-immature things about Quiet and other MGS-isms in favor of heaping praise upon this somewhat inconsequential extra which im pretty sure but not 100% certain was already featured in Peace Walker. This kinda reeks of "trying to justify how a game is great because i like it".
I'm not saying MGS V needs to be burned on the stake for the problems it has regarding diversity. And i'm not really saying "that is not enough" and demand that MGS V should've let you play as EVA or somesuch.
But it is just embarrassing to think about all what happened in the game industry and all the talking and trading of ideas and yes, even advances that have been made regarding gender and diversity in games and gaming...
...and then having an (accidential) spokesperson on that topic advertising an absolutely minor feature as "important" and "progressive" in a game that otherwise is rather traditionally japanese-hopefully-accidential-immature-creepyness.
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