There’s nothing like the internet to make you feel stupid
There’s nothing like the internet to make you feel like an ass. I posted the Gender in Gaming- Equality or Special Treatment thread a couple of days ago. I also posted this on my blog.
The women here posted a letter asking for a number of changes in the gaming industry. I took issue with a part of the letter that suggested that the current trend of advertising was putting women in danger at conventions and other gaming venues.
This sounded ludicrous to me. I couldn’t imagine the cover of an RPG driving men into a sexual frenzy, and I was right. The thing is that’s not the type of advertising they were talking about.
What they were talking about are things like this:
This is the single most tasteless piece of advertising I have ever seen. In a nutshell its asking men to run around and get as many pictures of sexual acts such as kissing and groping as they can. Then they twitter these to prove that they did it.
Now any sane person wouldn’t expect this to cause a lot of issues, and I know I didn’t. I was wrong. This ad very much placed women in danger, as one man came forward to post on my site told me. David tells a frightening tale.
While at a con a man ran up and grabbed his female friend’s breast. The bastard doing the sexual harassment had his friend take a picture of this, per the advertisement you see above. So in a nutshell EA’s advertising caused at least one woman to be brutally groped at a convention. This poor woman is probably scared for life, and may never come near another event like this.
This does incalculable damage to our hobby and it makes all of us look bad. So I came back to say I was wrong. Very wrong. Adverstising can and does hurt women, and really this sort of shit needs to be stopped.
I apologize for my earlier post. I have definitely changed my opinion.
I’m glad that you changed your mind about that issue, but I am saddened that it took a horrific and traumatizing anecdote from a guy who’s friend experienced sexual harrassment as a direct result of that competition, to raise that kind of awareness. Convention sexual harassment is, unfortunately, a widespread phenomenon, and this Sin to Win contest just enabled behaviour that is common at conventions. I wrote about it in a post here.
Another interesting thing you might want to note to yourself about advertising and the exclusion of women: this type of promotion basically says “We only think men are playing this game.” As a woman, I had an enormous amount of interest in Dante’s Inferno despite its typical “damsel in distress” storyline that we women find so irritating. Now with this promotion, I’m seriously rethinking my willingness to spend money on this franchise. When women see a woman’s body being used to advertise, the knee-jerk reaction is “Oh, that’s not meant for me” just like they would an issue of Maxim. It doesn’t stop all women from playing games, but it does act as a deterrent and contributes to the “only men game” image, which can be a turn off on a subconscious or conscious level.