One of the few meager joys I manage to squeeze, blood like, from the arid stone that is my life, is watching the Games Industry adjust to radical market shifts (exiting I know). It reminds me of that old show, Harry and the Hendersons. You know… the one where the average American family (stupid husband, homely wife and sarcastic kids) ends up living with bigfoot. I knew when I was watching the show, that Harry just wants to make the Hendersons happy, but I also knew that no matter what he tries to do, be it vacuuming the carpet or making us a nice cake, he’s going to find an incredibly destructive way to fuck it all up.
The games industry is Harry.
“Hey Harry! When is Duke Nukem Forever coming out? Also, the new Diablo game is way too bright. Sort that shit out!”
One such market shift came just after a small Derby based developer discovered (or rediscovered) that adding a pair of triangles to a cuboid made not only one of the crudest representations of a pair of tits to grace our culture since we stopped painting on cave walls in Woolly Mammoth blood, but also a huge fuck-off pile of money. Gold watches all round!
Although I was too young to appreciate it at the time, having just mastered the art of turning on the telly without jamming my slimy fingers into the plug sockets, the industry’s response to Tomb Raider and it’s polygonally busty heroine, Lara Croft was nothing short of downright hilarious… providing you happened to be male.
Seeing Croft’s bizarrely angled head adorning the front page of then popular fashion-cum-smut-rag ‘The Face’ was amusing enough, especially considering that the technical restraints of the time meant that even a full blown pre-rendered image of the buxom grave robber looked more like the Master Control Program from Tron than the sultry acrobat the art team had in mind. But it was the industry’s reaction to the big pile of money Tomb Raider brought in (which was somewhere between a fat marketer screaming “KACHING” in a crowded church and Golum leaping into the volcano after the ring in Lord of the Rings) that really tickled, and continues to tickle, my funny bone.
“I heard if you complete the game without saving you get to see her naked”
Now I’m certainly not blaming Tomb Raider for the likes of Ninja Gaiden, Heavenly Sword or even the more direct demeaning rip offs of the time (Deathtrap dungeon anybody?). In fact I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a programmer present at the unveiling of the world’s first game Tennis for Two who didn’t immediately think “You know what would be awesome? If this had tits in it” but it was Tomb Raider that tried to sell us the idea that no matter how much of a improbable sex object your character is, you can get away with it as long as she (ugh) “Kicks enough but”.
“Good show old chap! Quite the Marvel! But if I might make one small suggestion? A pair of mammaries. Yes, perhaps two pairs… right there… in front of the net”
This is where the Industry goes all Harry on us. After the rip roaring success of Tomb Raider, Harry tried desperately to give us a similar experience without really understanding what was drawing us (or at least some of us) to the game in the first place. That’s Harry’s biggest flaw. He always wants to give us what he thinks we want. He just wanted to give us a nice cake, but instead he took a great big steaming sasquatch shit on the carpet.
A swarm of marketers chase Gabe Newell in an attempt to make him put more breasts in Portal 2.
Now we’ve entered another age of gaming. An age where your girlfriend has a level 70 druid in World of Warcraft and your mom spends her time playing animal Crossing on her DS. There’s been another market shift and it’s safe to say new gamers, like your mom for example, don’t really want to play Deathtrap Dungeon.
“So is the type of game you like to play Grey?”
“No Mom I-”
“It’s no wonder you don’t have a girlfriend. Tsk tsk”
The industry’s reaction so far has been typically Harry like. They’re too terrified of releasing their King Kong grip on the male gamer market to make major games towards both sexes, despite the fact developers like Valve have shown that games that don’t show women as base sexual objects can be just as successful as those that do, and they’re equally scared that this new market, as lucrative a market as it is, is eventually going to dry up, so the money they sink into female friendly game development is just enough to churn out steaming piles of condescending shit.
What Harry has failed to realize is that it’s his desperation to please the lowest common denominator for fear of not being able to find a new market that’s driving away female gamers in the first place.
Thankfully the girls haven’t taken this lying down (hoho). So while the male gamer population seems content to let their wallets and bitchy forum posts speak for them female gamers seem more intent on speaking directly for themselves, usually in very loud voices to shell shocked developers who really don’t know what misogyny actually means but they sure as hell don’t want their company associated with it.
“I… I… Oh god Dave. I met a real one… what? What? No they’re nothing like Aeris. Nothing at all.”
It isn’t limited to the gender revolution either. Want another example of Harry fucking things up? Look at his reaction to casual games. What does he do when he realises there’s a market for accessable, easy to understand but fun games? Does he start working on new ways to make games more accessible while still providing the same amount of depth? No. He just shovels a big pile of shit right on top of us.
So what’s the moral of this drawn out story? Simple. Things are going to change, eventually for the better, but before that can happen we have to face up to our own role in this farce. If the games industry is Harry then we’re the Hendersons. And it’s about time we showed that hairy bastard who’s boss.
