Ubisoft may sue me over this....

Once again something has gotten the internets in a stir, and Something Awful is in the middle of it. To bring you up to speed, Ubisoft has long been promoting Assassin's Creed with the clever use of Jade Raymond to draw the male gaze to their game. Frankly, you couldn't see anything about Assassin's Creed with out her out in front. It's rather unfair, because the game itself is quite a draw on it's own and they didn't really need to have her tarted around. Also Jade seems to be quite a decent person and doesn't deserve to be treated like eye candy to promote the game. The idea of female role models in the game developer world is good and all, but that wasn't the intention of Ubisoft. It was blatant pandering of a person's looks under the guise of women empowerment.

So on the Something Awful boards, a vulgar comic was made in parody of the way that Ubisoft have been using Jade's looks to sell the game. It was vulgar and insulting, but it's the internet, this sort of thing happens. So Ubisoft decides the best thing to do is to bring legal action against Ubisoft.

My question is who is at blame here? Is Something Awful to blame for being the host site? Is the comic artist to blame for making a comic? Or is Ubisoft to blame for treating their own employee like a piece of meat to sell their game. Sierra never treated Roberta Williams this way, makers of gender conscience games like Leisure Suit Larry.

This "gamer girl" phenomenon is strange. When Morgan Webb was the G4 "gamer girl" people automatically called her a fake. The very concept that women would like games challenged the hegemonic idea of the "true gamer". Surely, girls can't possibly like games, if they do, they only like tetris, or they're doing it only to impress their boyfriend. Somehow it was more believable for girls to like other girls than for them to play through Chrono Trigger or circle-strife. Once the public finally got used to the idea the there are girls that genuinely like playing games, they became a national treasure. If someone "found" a girl that liked playing games, it was like finding buried treasure. The industry was no different, soon things like the "pimping" women out to promote games was on the main stage and not just as a part of "booth babes" at seedy gaming conventions. Women were front and center and filled out the "stereotypical" male fantasies of that perfect gamer girl they want to meet. There is nothing "empowering" about having women paraded like this. It is in fact detracting from the long history involvement that women have always had in the gaming world. This is merely treating women like objects to be desired in a new and underhanded way.