Jimquisition: Diversity? LIEversity!

[Zontar]

This is more or less the first time I'm seeing the issue with the new Assassins Creed brought up, and it seems pretty obvious to me. It was a board room/marketing research decision that white male characters sold best, and they left it up to some middle man to find an excuse to appease the 'social justice warriors' on the internet. The first group doesn't seem to take the SJW's that seriously obviously, and I don't know they may be right not to be worried.

If the numbers are anything to go buy, it's probably the case. Say what you will about the movement (whose history is actually quite fascinating in that it may be the most extreme case of a political shift, in this case from far right to far left) but it's a vocal one which happens to be a lot smaller then people think.

Numbers don't lie, and given sales numbers, they most likely believed it to be something with too much diminished returns (lets face it, no one who wasn't going to buy this game without a female playable character would have done so if it had one, that's just not how people shop). Is a 5% increase in production costs going to net a 5% increase in revenue? For this, not likely.

People like to say more women are playing video games, but the problem is women have always been playing video games. That 43% statistic has remained consistent sine 2000, so how it is interpreted as some sort of shift each year is odd to say the least.

 

[CrazyBlaze]

Except there is not four main characters. There is one. The rest are other people's variations of that character. Think GTA where everyone can choose their clothes to wear or their hair or tattoos. Its the same with ACU just also with weapons. Hence why everyone looks similar. It is because they are the same. You aren't going to a screen to pick a new avatar. You are using the same one you have in SP in CooP

True, true ... it is mainly about that one assassin during the French Revolution.

If they added co-op with 4 people however, I do wish that they made the assassins different instead of having just a color to tell them apart. Despite that i'm a white male, I would of preferred a character to play as that stood out. Otherwise, it's not... thrilling to say the least. Imagine if Borderlands 2 had focused on making the characters look the same but having different colors.

Say you picked the Siren. Instead of having the option to change her hairstyle, style of the suit, the weapons... all that, she looked the same except you could change her color only. Now if someone else picked a siren and had everything but the same color... it'd be boring to look at. This is how I feel about the new Assassins Creed co-op. Least give us options to change the clothing, the colors, and whatever. Least make them somewhat different. But Ubisoft didn't so it's a real shame in the end.

Except that they do. Those clothes are each person's outfits that they are wearing in SP. Yes the clothes are similar but we don't know the full list of wearable items yet. I would think that if they were going to add a high level of customization in than they would at least give a decent amount of options.

 

[Delance]

"GUYS, we need 4 exactly same looking dudes who are as interesting as sliced bread! THE SCRIPT DEMANDS IT!"

It's not four guys. There's only one guy. The game doesn't have four identical player characters, but just a single player character.

 

[KDR_11k]

I like the VA excuse. Because a second set of voices would be absolutely prohibitive to record. Meanwhile Saints Row 2-4 had 6-7 voice packs for the main character, a character who spoke a lot in every cutscene, scripted sequence and just general gameplay. I kinda doubt that SR is so much more expensive than Assassin's Creed.

 

[Lightknight]

Usually if the protagonist speaks in games you only have one type of character. Games like Borderlands don't really have interactive dialogue that requires all the things that go along with it even if they add a female character model in game. Additionally, there can be anything from a writing perspective to the desire to have a strong stable character for marketing. For example, what does Mass Effects Shepard look like? Don't know and without the N7 armor I would never be able to pick him/her out of a lineup.

For games with strong writing and stable characters, it should be enough that the writers wrote the character as male.

What's more is that a growing female target market doesn't necessarily translate into a growing AC market. We've already pointed out multiple times that ESA's numbers are for iOS now and for anyone who's ever accidentally opened up solitaire or watched someone play it. But in 2010 we know that 80% of the females who owned consoles owned a Wii, not the consoles that AAA games were typically released on. So we see Nintendo being very girl friendly but the other consoles are sticking to their main demographic.

At which point I'd say this. They probably don't think it's worth the effort and unless you're standing around with a God's eye view of a developer's target market then who are you to say whether it is or isn't?

 

[Karadalis]

This should be the perfect oportunity for some modders to show what they are capable of.

Also the tripple A industry will change its attitude as soon as females become a major demographic in the tripple A industry. Shouting for diversety at a company when there are no numbers suggesting that diversety would make them more money is a futile undertaking.

Fact is that there allready is a multi million dollar industry with the casual gaming/hidden object/ facebook gaming industries that almost exclusively cater to female gamers.

Yet for the sake of political correctness everything nowadays needs to be diversified.

However i do agree its nigh time for a female assasin protagonist, however not for the sake of diversety but for the sake of story and gameplay.. especialy since females have allways been the more capable and more importantly more interesting assasins throughout history.

 

[Jennacide]

The sad thing to consider is that the one time Ubisoft had a female lead in AC, Aveline, she was very well recieved. The major knocks against Liberation were it started as a Vita title when the Vita was not selling well yet, and that AC:Liberation's overall plot felt weak and forced. But of course, part of the reason Aveline even happened is AC:Liberation wasn't made by Ubisoft Montreal, it was done by the smaller Milan and Sofia studios, and given the difference in size between these teams, it's amazing how good Liberation still was. If the main team was allowed to include a female protagonist in a main game entry, I doubt anyone would even notice a difference in sales.

 

[Zontar]

I'm right in assuming, then, that you also support heavy-handed DRM, extensive microtransactions, season passes and day one DLC? After all it's only fair to pull out the "Hey, they're doing it to make money, so it's OK! *thumbsup*" argument in response to any and all criticisms of games, if you're going to pull it out for this one.

Now that's just putting words in my mouth and you know it. So instead of answering a stupid question, I'll just say this: strawmen are not something I enjoy.

Also, on behalf of all gamers everywhere, I would just like to thank you for speaking for all of us and saying that none of us would ever be swayed into buying a game just because it had playable female characters. I'm glad that we have someone with your level of authority to clear these matters up.

Well, if I met someone who would buy a game they otherwise wouldn't only because of the fact that there was a female playable character, they would be the first. It isn't my speaking on behalf of all gamers, it's a statement of fact based on psychology and economics. Having a female playable character is all well and good, but let's not lie and say that it's only because of a game having one that copies will sell.

 

[Spyre2k]

The Libertarian argument of "let the market decide" is basically saying that the companies will continue to do whatever they want and competing companies that do offer diversity will sell more if that's what the audience wants. And eventually the offending company will either cave to market pressure or go under, like THQ did, because of their unsustainable practices.


The problem with this argument though it that it doesn't really apply here. The "Let the market Decide" motto of the Libertarians though is one of Less Government and More Economic Freedom. So that government doesn't pass laws mandating curtain things and instead letting consumers decide if they what those items. The reason that doesn't apply is because the government is never going to step in and make a Law requiring more Diversity in games.


But given the context of the statement I think most people who do make the argument "let the market decide" are basically saying either they don't really care that much about the issue or they think it's pointless to talk about because close minded studios, such as Ubisoft, will continue to do what they want and if it is really a problem people will stop buying their games eventually as they find more inclusive IPs.


I will admit I am mostly in the latter side of that argument. Players have been complaining about these types of things for years and many big name studios continue to ignore public opinion because the money keeps flowing in. It's like the always on DRM and other DRM BS companies have done and are doing. Sure some people ***** and moan but at the end of the day as long as the game turns a profit they will continue to do what their doing.

Though sadly if the game doesn't turn a profit companies often don't get the correct message. Like they may assume the game genre it is in is dead so they need to make it more like other popular genres, such as FPS or action genres. Kind of like what happen to most horror games which were action games and horror in name only. It wasn't until recently when we started getting some true horror games again but only mostly only from indie developers. And even when a big studio does a proper horror game, Deadspace, it slowly gets transitioned over to action as the sequels go on.

 

[Grimh]

I agree with you Jim, developers shouldn't think they can say anything expecting us to just eat it up and not even check up on the validity of such a claim. I also don't think the entire collective game's press should go apeshit over what one developer, out of a team of say about a thousand, says without maybe checking with one or two more to see if he knows what he's talking about. Yes they did send him there to talk about it and he should know better but people screw up and sometime words come out not right.

As for the excuse itself, it is rather strange considering how the coop is implemented. That being that all four players are individually playing as Arno the main character while seeing their buddies as generic mooks. Everyone basically playing through Arno's story from their individual perspective. This isn't coop in the same vein as Borderlands.

The only way I can think of his excuse making sense is that at the very start of development they knew they wanted coop but hadn't yet nailed down how it was gonna work so at that time they wanted to include female characters into that somehow. However as the coop started to take form in the way described above, perhaps pretty late in development, they realized they couldn't just have the player play as a different avatar since they were always the main character.
Meaning they would have to rework the whole game to accomodate a kind of character choice thing at the start of the game in a series which is always about specific characters. Also again, perhaps already being at a late stage in development. With all that entails mechanics-, story- and timewise.

I don't know I could be wrong, and he still should just have said that everyone is playing through the story as the main character on their invividual screen even in coop so picking an avatar for coop sessions wouldn't really work.
I guess he just wanted to somehow tell the world that it wasn't like they didn't want to be inclusive and never even considered female avatars, he just said it in a terrible way.
Sometimes you talk about something while knowing the full picture while not necessarily remembering that the person you're talking to doesn't. It's especially easy to forget that when you've spent every day for the last year talking to people who do know the full picture.

Now as for comparing AC to Saint's Row, I kind of think it isn't very fair. Yes Saint's Row is awesome for basically letting you play whatever. But I don't think every game should have a character creation system in them.
Don't get me wrong, I love that shit and spend way too long getting the settings just right for that stuff and I almost exclusively pick female characters when I have a choice even in multiplayer stuff, one reason being I'm just so tired of male avatars basically being the status quo which really does suck.
Sometimes however I just want my The Last of Us' or Uncharted's or Tomb Raider's telling a very specific story about specific characters while I also want my Saint's Row's or Mass Effect's or other games that let me create my own character which usually tell the story in a bit of a different way. I also want more of my The Last of Us' or Uncharted's or Tomb Raider's of the world to be about more female main characters, one of those does, but right now, as I said earlier, the status quo is very much lopsided and I really would like to see more diversity. But I just don't want character creation or choice in every single game.

Basically I want everything. Give me everything.

Right now.

 

[weirdee]

a small aside: whenever i hear anybody (and not just libertarians) say "let the market decide" or "let the people decide" or "state's rights", they're usually arguing for something that's actually pretty bad for everybody but is entrenched in some kind of cultural status quo, and are confident that people will agree with them on things because they're relying on perceived popular prejudices to carry them through (while ignoring all evidence to the contrary anyway), so i rarely pay further attention to such sentiment

 

[Zontar]

Dude... that's not a strawman (do you actually know what that word means?) it's a legitimate question. You're using the "oh, they're just doing it to make the most amount of money" excuse here, so I'm asking whether that's your response to any criticism of game studios or whether you only reserve it for when people are encouraging a more diverse range of playable characters. I'm curious as to why you're being so evasive. Do you or do you not support day one DLC, season passes, microtransactions and DRM? It's a simple question. Answer it, please.

Oh, sorry about that, your tone seemed more the a little condensing, so it read like you thought I supported all those wholeheartedly when I never even said I supported what Ubi has done here. The answers are, in order: yes because I understand the mechanisms for why it exists, no, only for F2P games, and no.

Well holy shit, that's that settled. You haven't personally met anyone who would be swayed by the presence of female playable characters (I assume that you ask this question of every single person you meet, just to be certain), so that logically means that no such person exists.

So you're saying that there is a person out there who would actually buy a game they otherwise wouldn't only because it has a female protagonist? If a person like that actually exists, I pity them because of the mountains of games that have no human protagonist they are missing out on. Then again the whole attitude would be one which, if it where real (siltation needed) would in all likelihood be one held by too few people to make the returns on investment worth the costs.

I personally have never met anyone from Austria, therefore I am firmly convinced that Austria is just a fake country made up by Europeans who want to make their continent look more diverse.

Now THAT'S what I call false equivalence.

 

[Abnaxis]

I agree with you Jim, developers shouldn't think they can say anything expecting us to just eat it up and not even check up on the validity of such a claim. I also don't think the entire collective game's press should go apeshit over what one developer, out of a team of say about a thousand, says without maybe checking with one or two more to see if he knows what he's talking about. Yes they did send him there to talk about it and he should know better but people screw up and sometime words come out not right.

As for the excuse itself, it is rather strange considering how the coop is implemented. That being that all four players are individually playing as Arno the main character while seeing their buddies as generic mooks. Everyone basically playing through Arno's story from their individual perspective. This isn't coop in the same vein as Borderlands.

The only way I can think of his excuse making sense is that at the very start of development they knew they wanted coop but hadn't yet nailed down how it was gonna work so at that time they wanted to include female characters into that somehow. However as the coop started to take form in the way described above, perhaps pretty late in development, they realized they couldn't just have the player play as a different avatar since they were always the main character.
Meaning they would have to rework the whole game to accomodate a kind of character choice thing at the start of the game in a series which is always about specific characters. Also again, perhaps already being at a late stage in development. With all that entails mechanics-, story- and timewise.

I don't know I could be wrong, and he still should just have said that everyone is playing through the story as the main character on their invividual screen even in coop so picking an avatar for coop sessions wouldn't really work.
I guess he just wanted to somehow tell the world that it wasn't like they didn't want to be inclusive and never even considered female avatars, he just said it in a terrible way.
Sometimes you talk about something while knowing the full picture while not necessarily remembering that the person you're talking to doesn't. It's especially easy to forget that when you've spent every day for the last year talking to people who do know the full picture.

Now as for comparing AC to Saint's Row, I kind of think it isn't very fair. Yes Saint's Row is awesome for basically letting you play whatever. But I don't think every game should have a character creation system in them.
Don't get me wrong, I love that shit and spend way too long getting the settings just right for that stuff and I almost exclusively pick female characters when I have a choice even in multiplayer stuff, one reason being I'm just so tired of male avatars basically being the status quo which really does suck.
Sometimes however I just want my The Last of Us' or Uncharted's or Tomb Raider's telling a very specific story about specific characters while I also want my Saint's Row's or Mass Effect's or other games that let me create my own character which usually tell the story in a bit of a different way. I also want more of my The Last of Us' or Uncharted's or Tomb Raider's of the world to be about more female main characters, one of those does, but right now, as I said earlier, the status quo is very much lopsided and I really would like to see more diversity. But I just don't want character creation or choice in every single game.

Basically I want everything. Give me everything.

Right now.

This. This right here is everything I was trying to type, but they just got in and ninja'd me

 

[Thanatos2k]

I forget, did we get this whole controversy when Zelda: Four Swords Adventures came out?

4 player co-op, all white males, no controllable females. Where was the outrage?

 

[Abnaxis]

So you're saying that there is a person out there who would actually buy a game they otherwise wouldn't only because it has a female protagonist? If a person like that actually exists, I pity them because of the mountains of games that have no human protagonist they are missing out on. Then again the whole attitude would be one which, if it where real (siltation needed) would in all likelihood be one held by too few people to make the returns on investment worth the costs.

*Raises hand.* I actually picked BG&E, out of the dozen or so platformers at the time, because I heard the story was good and it had a good female protagonist. So...it didn't completely sell the game, but it gave an edge over the competitors.

Unless you can explain why we need more diversity we don't need it. I doubt that women are going to switch from Candy Crush to Assassin's Creed if Assassin's Creed adds a female character.

Diversity is unilaterally beneficial in any voluntary association (like, say, gaming advocacy). The more diverse the gamer landscape is, the more power we as consumers can wield any time a publisher decides to take a shit on us or a conservative pundit decides that legislating control on video games is the best way to stop mass shootings. Different sub-groups have access to networks and resources that white male 20-somethings don't, and if they have a vested interest in gaming, they can help us defend and improve upon it.

So no, we don't "need" diversity, but it helps. It helps us shape our society to our benefit, and it helps us exert our power for better quality, more free (as in "Free Speech," not "Free Beer") games.

 

[Stefan Strelnieks]

I forget, did we get this whole controversy when Zelda: Four Swords Adventures came out?

4 player co-op, all white males, no controllable females. Where was the outrage?

There was not any because Nintendo did not lie to our face about why there were not female protagonists.

I'm a bit sick of devs/publishers being so fucking stupid when handling such matters. Responding at ALL is always their first mistake, and then they respond in a stupid manner that's guaranteed to piss people off. Why would a publisher/dev shoot themselves in the foot like this when it can EASILY be avoided by simply not responding, or at least being careful with words?

This initially broke because of an interview done with a single dev at E3 by Videogamer. It's not uncommon for people to respond to questions they have not been briefed on poorly. Even Reggie gave a terribly damaging answer to a question about the possibility of Wii-u twitch integration when he wasn't expecting it.

 

[PainInTheAssInternet]

Let's ask the question: is having female protagonists bad for sales?

Honestly, I doubt it. I don't think it would even affect those who say it would change their minds on a game. Compelling characters and a compelling story trump all else, unless there are some that really are hung up on anything that isn't burly white dudes, which I fiercely doubt.

Speaking of, the point of many stories is to challenge our perception of the world. What better way to do that than put us in the shoes of someone different (speaking to white dudes here)? What's so bad about having other people enjoy the medium and seeing themselves as an inclusion rather than a begrudging incident?

 

[Zontar]

EDIT: Oh, and lest we forget, any developer who has ever included a playable female character in their game was a freakin' IDIOT and doesn't know what they're doing. If only Zontar had been around at the time to tell them that they were wasting their time.

I was going to make a thought out, clear explanation for my position, then I saw this part of your post.

Good day to you sir or madam, I have no interest in continuing our discourse.

 

[CloudAtlas]

I totally believe Ubisoft that they didn't have enough money to implement a female character. After all, they don't even have enough money to hire decent PR people either - which sparked (the bulk of) this controversy in the first place.

 

[Stefan Strelnieks]

In Ubisofts' defence, women and men do move completely differently. If I recall, it's something as small as 7 MoCap points that are needed to recognise the motion of a human walking, and even with so few you can tell if the model was male or female, even if it's presented upside down. Considering how different the motion is between genders, I can imagine there is a cost involved in programming a female character to move realistically, which would make Ubisofts' statement valid.


...Except they ALREADY HAVE FEMALE CHARACTERS IN THE GAME! They have playable female characters in the older games, they've already done the lion's share of the work! Dunces.

Just one problem, the female NPCs have far fewer animations than playable characters because they don't need to sneak around or fight. So you'd still need to do a lot of work to add a playable female character.

They had a female playable character in liberation though. I think it's reasonable to expect that nearly all the needed animations could just be lifted from her. Obviously you would need to do new animations for any new weapon types between the two games but it's absurd to think the cost would be significant at that point.