Jimquisition: Booth Babes

[Zen Bard]

The problem with Booth Babes is that they demonstrate a severe disconnect between the Gaming Industry and the Gaming Community.

Sure, at one time, the core gaming audience consisted primarily of socially awkward teenage boys whose only chance at female interaction might just be talking to a Booth Babe (and I say that as someone who proudly belonged to that community).

But I, like the community, grew up and matured (well, for the most part, anyway). Unfortunately, the gaming industry still doesn't seem to get that.

Looks, you're bound to find Booth Babes in just about any convention or trade show that caters to a predominately heterosexual male demographic (car shows, boat shows, tool shows, etc...).

But, the demographic of the Gaming Community has expanded beyond that to include various ages, social groups and yes, even genders.

And as Mr. Sterling said (and I shall thank God for him, even if he did not), it's just plain lazy. Hell, I'd say using "Sex sells" as a core marketing strategy is about as lazy as one can get. It might be nice to see vendors and booth operators try something more creative to get our attention.

So I don't think Booth Babes really hurt...but they don't really help. But the practice does shed a pretty harsh spotlight on just how out of touch the Industry is with its customers.

 

[TheSteeleStrap]

Honestly Jim, for me, you have brought up an issue that I didn't realize was an issue, I must be in the minority there.

I love the booth baby ending, but it somehow feels empty without a "Thank God for Me" in there somewhere.

 

[Ishigami]

I say ban them.

And what about the jobs? - How about getting a real one?!

 

[Shiro No Uma]

Booth Boys? Bro's?

Why not? Last time I was in Vegas, many of the hotels (Luxor, Caesars Palace, Excalibur, Imperal Palace) had buff, half nekkid male eye candy at prominent locations. Sprinkle some "Booth Bros" in a convention, and I'm sure many of the people complaining about the exploitation of women wouldn't half much ammunition.

Good job Jim about pointng out the employment factor. It's something I would never have thought of.

I'm not sure where I fall on this. I've worked several E3's as both a booth person with a very particular skill, not break dancing, and someone networking to get more work. I have to say that the "sex sales" aspect that developers and publishers alike bring to the show does ramp up every year almost to a fault. I would agree that it didn't seem very professional when masses of half naked or sexually suggestive dressed people were at a booth to promote a game. Most of the time they didn't even know what they were promoting, but that's not there job.

Socially I don't think that it would be acceptable AT ALL if a male in a banana-hammock was at one of these shows promoting a game. I think people would actually find it offensive because there is a bias about what is sexually acceptable and the show runner would have them removed.

 

[Shiro No Uma]

I say ban them.

And what about the jobs? - How about getting a real one?!

I very interested, are you joking about getting a real job? If not, could you tell what a real job is? I very curious because as it happens I've worked many of these kinds of shows and I have to tell you, they are REAL PEOPLE who need REAL MONEY.

 

[Ishigami]

I say ban them.

And what about the jobs? - How about getting a real one?!

This comment is actually way more sexist than the skimpiest booth babe outfit could ever be.

Because I have no respect nor sympathy for someone being paid for staying around? - So be it.

I very interested, are you joking about getting a real job? If not, could you tell what a real job is?

Construction site worker.

I very curious because as it happens I've worked many of these kinds of shows and I have to tell you, they are REAL PEOPLE who need REAL MONEY.

Everyone needs money that does not mean you deserve it.

 

[Ishigami]

Just out of curiosity, may I ask which profession you are in?

Aviation maintenance technician.

Oh, so a job requiring MALE physical attributes is worthy of respect, while a job requiring FEMALE physical attributes is not.

Yeah, you should probably stay out of this discussion. I'm not saying this for myself, I just think that the people on "your" side of the argument would like to keep up their pretense of feminism and not have it completely shot full of holes by such manifest and rampant misognyny.

You are making this a gender issue!
There are female construction site workers, there are female aviation maintenance technicians and there are male models.
I have a problem with people not producing or contributing to the production or maintenance of goods earning money thru said products.

 

[sonofliber]

add guys in thonges and be done with it, this is the most stupid sexiest thing yet, the whole concept is: she is attractive and i dont like that, BAN IT.

 

[sonofliber]

Just out of curiosity, may I ask which profession you are in?

Aviation maintenance technician.

Oh, so a job requiring MALE physical attributes is worthy of respect, while a job requiring FEMALE physical attributes is not.

Yeah, you should probably stay out of this discussion. I'm not saying this for myself, I just think that the people on "your" side of the argument would like to keep up their pretense of feminism and not have it completely shot full of holes by such manifest and rampant misognyny.

You are making this a gender issue!
There are female construction site workers, there are female aviation maintenance technicians and there are male models.
I have a problem with people not producing or contributing to the production or maintenance of goods earning money thru said products.

its call marketing

 

[TheProfessor234]

Maybe they just need to have different conventions. As it was said, some conventions have out right banned booth babes while others still have them. Just designate which Cons can have them, which can not, and there. People can plan accordingly and they can't complain about them since they know if booth babes are going to be there or not.

I guess the problem there is that companies who want to use them to pull in customers will only participate in the allowing con.

 

[masticina]

I am not against nor defending booth babes. Oh sure they are cute but lets be fair they are nothing to do with the actual games. And those that they attract attention off probably are not the best fans of the games either.

Unless it is a DOA2: E player but lets be fair... not to be negative to those that like boothbabes. Just hoping for publishers that booth babes are not the only reasons some people go to these shows.

And as some publishers [thing guild wars 2 at pax] show.. content is king.

So less booth babes or maybe a bit more intelligence there..hell it would put more energy in actually having content to offer. game related content. Maybe a free shirt now that is nice.. and has more effect on the long term. It would give some players a new favourite shirt.. others would hang it on the wall. Some would just wear it and when picking it out of the pile see the games name again.

And sometimes a shirt would be even physical more sticking... [ewww]

 

[anthony87]

My problem with Booth Babes has nothing to do with feminism or discomfort for their presence.

I just don't like how immature it makes gamers look as a whole, especially at a time when we have to fight to get ourselves taken seriously.

"Fight to get ourselves taken seriously"?

Really?

Taken seriously by who?

 

[Do4600]

Booth babes alienate me in a completely different way. They just seem dishonest. Everybody at the show is there for video games except the models, who are dressed up like video game characters more often than not. So they seem to be the biggest poseurs on the face of the planet. I feel like it would be as if you met somebody on the street dressed up like a furry who was really enthusiastic about telling you how great furries were but then they go home and laugh about how crazy you are for taking what they just told you as fact and getting paid for it.

It strikes me that people working in coal mines probably feel the same way. If you're saying that what they do for a job makes the world worse, not better, then losing their job as a consequence to your criticism seems fair, doesn't it?

The question is: "are these comparable worse-s?" The point about "booth babes" is that while fighting for the apparent good of women you may be putting many women out of work. I feel a better comparison would be fighting to make coal miners healthier by getting them laid off from their jobs and telling them they'd be better for it.

 

[RobfromtheGulag]

'You can't win when you do this kind of thing'

Agreed. People have spun sexism so much that someone will be upset no matter what.

My (perhaps conservative) take is that asking people to cover up isn't a huge deal. You want to wear a buffalo hide thong, do it out in public, not in a decidedly weighted environment (this goes for both genders, naturally).

Putting booth babes out of work doesn't seem like a real deal breaker to me either, because a (valid, in my opinion) argument has been made by the feminists that people should be hired for their skills. Standing in front of a booth is not a skill. It's not exactly gender neutral either -- how many of these booths have chip'n'dale dancers in front of them? Ideally if someone can't be a booth babe then they get a job that doesn't normalize objectification for them.

 

[annoyinglizardvoice]

Booth Babes

The punditry of the videogame community have been chatting an awful lot about booth babes this past year or so.

Watch Video

Some very interesting and valid points there.

Personally I feel a little bit insulted that companies don't have enough respect for my attention span or their own product to assume that sex-appeal is needed to sell stuff to me.
I do however believe that booth-babes fulfil a very important function. The very presence of hot women drastically increases the chance that the ugly men at the convention will remember to wash, and I believe this alone justifies there presence.

 

[Ishigami]

You're damned right I am.

Then do it on your own. I will ignore everything related to that.

My father is a retired foreign service officer. I used to be in the armed forces, now I am in academia. My fiancée used to work at conventions as a translator. By your yardstick, my old man and I are completely useless (since neither civil nor military service, let alone the humanities, "produce" anything tangible), while my fiancée had actually the closest to what you would describe as a "real job", since she helped the manufacturing companies she worked for attract and communicate with customers.

Ah yea right be an inch-picker.
If you want deliberately misunderstand people for your arguments sake then be my guest I won't argue any more. You know what I mean or you do not deserve to, either way is fine by me.

My point is this. Booth babes are an "evolution", if you will, of the tried and true booth girls which exist at literally EVERY type of convention/expo/trade fair [...] - some are there purely as eye candy, some have actual skills, and most are a bit of both.

And rarely any of them are needed.

There is no expression dumber than "real job", because usually, people saying that have no idea what the others' jobs entail. There are douches in academia who think that all manual labour could be done by apes or robots; by the same token, there are people who think that only manufacturing jobs are "real", forgetting the fact that those goods need to be marketed somehow.

You don't say.

If they are gone nothing of value will be lost. If that means I have to die from an infection gained through an unclean telephone headset so be it. I'll take that risk, my choice.

 

[spiffleh]

Unrelated to booth babes or most of the video itself: I have boobs. I think they are great. And if someone wants to put jiggle physics into a game, I don't really have a problem with that. But but the love of god, Dead or Alive people.... BOOBS DON'T WORK THAT WAY.

 

[chronobreak]

I don't see the fact that this is some women's jobs as a big enough reason to keep booth babes around. Thing is, lots of jobs and the fields those jobs are in don't last forever. Being that it is such a niche career choice forthers the point it cannot be expected to last forever in any grand scale.

Really, the decision should lie solely with the people running the event as to what kind of atmosphere they want to put forth at their show.

 

[Mr F.]

Brilliant!

You take the argument out of context, add a bit of hyperbole and then add a tiny bit of Islamophobia just to make sure you sound like a calm rational human being!

That said...

Why exactly would removing eye candy from all of the above be bad? What does scantily clad woman have to do with UFC? What does it have to do with cars? Seriously?

Absolutely fucking nothing. The entire point is to pander to the majority male audience that watches UFC, attends car shows and turns up at Conventions. Whilst the argument saying "What would these poor women do without these jobs" is logical, I still think that the loss of the entire industry (As in, exploitative modelling industry) would not be a particularly bad thing.

I mean, when slavery was being abolished did anybody say "Oh, think of the poor slave traders and slave takers, what will they do to stay employed now!". Nope. We accepted that the entire industry was rather bad so we killed it.

And you accuse OTHERS of being hyperbolic? While comparing modelling gigs at conventions to bleedin' SLAVERY?

Right. Because the young woman getting paid a very nice salary to do a piss-easy job is the same as a slave. Absolutely. Let's arbitrarily decide that making money off the fact that men like looking at attractive women (by the way, the opposite is also true) is "exploitation" and close off career opportunities for women whose main marketable feature is their looks. I'm a graduate TA at a university; why is me getting paid a pittance for my intelligence (genetic trait) and erudition (acquired through hard work) ethically superior or less arbitrary than a woman getting paid SIGNIFICANTLY more money for her pretty face (good genes) and great measurements (usually the result of hard work)? Why is it that every time a woman turns her good looks into money, somebody's always screaming "exploitation"?

Right now, there is a commercial on the telly with Heidi Klum in a negligée selling candy gums or something. Poor slave woman, with her net worth of $80 million.

I was making no attempt to liken the two, merely pointing out that moral judgments have changed. No, I do not think that slavery and being a booth babe are similar in anything bar the whole "As time is passing this is beginning to be frowned upon" and I treat the argument of "What else will they do" to be the same as an argument defending the slave trade under that logic.

"What else will those poor traders do".

I think (And a few others, I guess) that Booth Babes, and any other form of exploitative industry, are not good. I think that as time passes they will eventually die down, at least, from mainstream events (Such as car shows, UFC bouts and game/tech shows) because they serve no purpose in those places. I do not remain convinced by the "Empowerment" argument (Yes, you will find people who like doing it as a job, people usually point to "Happy" prostitutes or "Happy" stippers, a lot (If not most) of those working in the sex trade, or associated trades, are far from happy).

So, like I said, I was using slavery as an example of changing moral values and an industry dying as a result. I think the Booth Babe industry (And the whole "Sex sells") industry is slowly going to die off and I will feel nothing but happiness at its passing.

So please, in future, read my post. You attacked one simple point, caused by a misunderstanding and nothing more, before going off on one about how you are an underpaid TA and how mean it is that in the big bad world you get paid more than a glorified stripper. Did you even read my slavery point? At all? Really? Or did you just see the word and go a little bit mental?

But you know what? I am going to bail out of this thread now. Sometimes it is worth having an argument (Sorry, "Debate") online and occasionally you can change peoples minds. But here? Well, it is too clear cut. Those of us who think that it is exploitative and has no place in the industry want it to go, those of us who think... Whatever it is you lot think, want it to stay.

Oh, and you think that if we abolish Booth Babes we will end up living in a society where the Abiya is normal attire and the world has collapsed at the seams. Cause that is rational.

EDIT: Sorry, I thought you were the original guy I quoted because of his Islamophobic comment.

But I have read up on a few things you have said...

You are aware that MOSTLY we are agreed, right? Cause the example you gave of your friend (Or was it fiances friend? I cba reading up) who liked being a booth babe cause she is a gamer, well, none of us are arguing against that kind of crap. I even made a defence of cosplay and whatnot.

I am just wholly against women being paid to stand around wearing almost nothing, purely to be fucking eye candy. If they have a skill they are bringing, and they are not eye candy, then it is a totally different argument. As for anything else? Go re-read my original post and when you come up with a real argument against what I have said, get back to me.

 

[Shiro No Uma]

I say ban them.

And what about the jobs? - How about getting a real one?!

This comment is actually way more sexist than the skimpiest booth babe outfit could ever be.

Because I have no respect nor sympathy for someone being paid for staying around? - So be it.

I very interested, are you joking about getting a real job? If not, could you tell what a real job is?

Construction site worker.

I very curious because as it happens I've worked many of these kinds of shows and I have to tell you, they are REAL PEOPLE who need REAL MONEY.

Everyone needs money that does not mean you deserve it.

Wow. So do you decide who deserves money? And how many construction sites and jobs are there in your area in a give day? Do you have to be a union worker to get these jobs? Also, do you have to be able to lift over 50lbs, because if so that limits how many real jobs are available for many people including people with disabilities. It also sounds like you might not have ever worked at one of these events. Do you know what goes into them for the actors, models and performs in a general 5 day event? Because if someone asked me to do performance advertising for a 12 hour+ day without making a dime, as you suggest that you don't deserve getting payed, that's a bad business model for anyone. If your argument is that models, actors and performers are not a productive part of this society then why are you on a gaming website complaining as all of these people contribute to the creation of video games, of which I'm assuming you enjoy.