Ubisoft CEO Says Company Will Work to Extend Diversity
- Thread starter roseofbattle
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Announcing a desire to please everybody is nothing to celebrate. That's creative death.roseofbattle said:
I haven't played to the conclusion of Watch Dogs, yet, but I also have to take a bit of issue with "fridging". Yes, female characters shouldn't be routinely killed off just to give male characters motivation towards action. But it very much feels like there's a pool of commentators who simply aren't comfortable with violence being directed at female characters at all- in games where violence is a primary or major source of action, conflict, and tension. That's not okay; it pushes game creators into a corner where "Make your own games, then!" becomes a perfectly legitimate response, not because the game makers don't want to use their own resources, but because they're not at all certain that the game the critics are describing is possible.
You don't give someone directions by telling them where not to go, and by saying "don't do this, this, or this, and we're certain to have some more 'constructive' criticism when we see your next effort" critics all but insure that safe male characters remain the status quo.
Shifting to a more diverse cast of characters in video games is going to require more than a change of thinking in game studios. It's going to require a more constructive and less antagonistic mindset from critics. And if they're not willing to make that shift, they're going to need to get used to either a much more glacial shift or a simple maintenance of the status quo- the price of refusing to believe they have any part in it.
I suppose it would be considering one of the most famous assassinations during the French Revolution was done by a woman.spartandude said:
I'll believe it when I see it, Ubisoft.
If they wanted to, they frikking well would have with AC Unity, and Far Cry 4. This is just like Nintendo saying they'll try to be more accommodating of LGBT in the next Tomodachi Life. I guess the difference here is Ubisoft's next game in general is gunna be expected to not be a frikking sausage fest as opposed to some sequel.
If they wanted to, they frikking well would have with AC Unity, and Far Cry 4. This is just like Nintendo saying they'll try to be more accommodating of LGBT in the next Tomodachi Life. I guess the difference here is Ubisoft's next game in general is gunna be expected to not be a frikking sausage fest as opposed to some sequel.
Now by saying they'll try to do it, does that mean they'll actually make playable female characters, then decide to disable the option to play them? Then someone else will have to go into the files and find where Ubi buried the option to play the female characters and switch the ability to play them back on?
Well, at least they... sorta... admitted they messed up. Not many companies... sorta... do that.
Y'know, I wonder if the userbase of this message board was significantly less than 70% male [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.852520-Poll-Gender-Identity], there'd be significantly less claims and patting each other's backs about their views that every person that asks for diversity is some caricature of a coffee shop blogger halfway between a martyr and a tyrant.
Well, we can play it that way. Here's a list of summarized beliefs I've seen actually typed by people over the course of this discussion across the internet, with the spots filled in as to simulate the types of things that could possibly serve as proof:
"Hey, they made this one game character on the Vita a girl and you can pick them in some multiplayer modes in a few other games! Sexism is over!"
"If they make one female character, the workload on the entire game would be doubled, because they would have to create an entire female population next to the already existing male population! And if their workload was doubled, they couldn't afford to make this game that they are producing across more than three studios and will do so up to twice a year while selling enough copies to continue doing this."
"All these not bystander NPCs in various Assassin's Creed games are female. That makes what, like eight of them out of the rest of the characters? That should be enough right? They don't need lines or anything, just being there assures me that they exist."
"Most of history's greatest figures were men anyway, so trying to include women would be shoehorning in unimportant people. It's not like women made up a significant portion of the population back then. Who's even heard of important women? Certainly not the important men who wrote all the history books, and I trust their judgment."
"Making female characters would automatically ruin the game or character because most of the good games have male leads, and it'd be forcing the game to be worse because games with female leads have been pretty mixed results. This has nothing to do with the game industry employees being mostly comprised of men, and even more of the majority taking key spots in leadership."
"Playing as a female would ruin my immersion, because I'm not female, or having a female character exist in any context other than shopping for shoes or cooking would shatter my suspension of disbelief."
"Including a female character, even as a faceless co-op skin that doesn't talk and is never seen as the main character from any of the player's viewpoints, would force them to have to rewrite the entire game because the lead is a male and they didn't account for things like malls and tampons."
"Game development is hard, so we should take everything they say at face value, regardless of how many times that company has lied before, and is even lying now, in an article next to the one we are commenting on, as long as we adamantly agree with this viewpoint without any actual evidence."
"Look, the guy says he works with lots of women. Binders of them, even. They must agree with him."
"Anybody that claims that we need more diversity in games is not actually a real person. We will prove that all their complaints are just loud shouting and gain undue representation in the media, by filling message boards with disagreement and creating entire websites, videos, and even flash games just to demonstrate how underrepresented our viewpoint is. We have a third of our task force targeting one Youtube channel."
"They're just making the games that the majority of their players who just happen to be male want to play, so they make games that happen to have mostly male leads. Why should they listen to people we believe are fake?"
"They shouldn't have to pander to the mass market (and by that I mean people who aren't me or agree with me, which are certainly the persecuted minority) just because they think something's wrong with their games. If they did that, their games would surely be lowered in quality as a result. Why should they have to change? They're perfect as they are now!"
"Women animations work differently from men animations. Think of how they would have to make their legs bend in the opposite direction, or how many rigs they'd have to build of stripper pole interactions alone. That would also decrease the frame rate. I can tell the difference right off the bat while viewing the character from behind in all of the games made recently that have women, which are enough to make this distinction."
"All of the women hitboxes would have to be smaller, and that would give them an unfair advantage compared to the heavily built men featured regularly in Assassin's Creed. Maybe we can just make their hips and chest larger to compensate."
"If the main character was a woman, the entire game would have to be different because women don't start out with their own self agency like men do. We would have to spend the entire game pointing out all the differences between this character and our male characters, and nobody likes to play through the parts where we explicitly show past discrimination, which doesn't happen today, because it's boring. Guys like Master Chief are automatically awesome and capable of doing anything and nobody questions his ability, unlike women, who can still be rendered helpless regardless of where they are in their personal development, if that happens at all before somebody beats them up and/or removes their clothes and they need to get revenge to regain their innocence. Also, they have feelings and squishy parts and that makes everything weird. Nobody likes female characters."
"Most women play games in the segments that we don't consider to actually be games, so therefore no women will ever play the games we do consider to be games and their opinions will not matter."
"Making a character a woman more than once in ten years would cheapen everything else that was ever made, like when an artist decides to use a different color one day and art instantly becomes trite and useless simply because that color would be the only color in the painting and we would be forced to look at every one of them for hours. Soon all art would be this new color and we would never have art done with the old color ever again."
"Just because most of their characters are men doesn't mean that all of them are really similar to each other, because underneath the nearly identical outfits and animations, some of them are different colors, if you squint hard at the face concealed by a hood. This also isn't extremely boring and repetitive. Which putting women in games would be, because we can tell underneath that outfit."
"Realistically, not many women have been assassins, or could be assassins, because they're women, and I think the really large breasts that most women have would just get in the way. Oh, that one lady who was a famous assassin during the French Revolution? She just stabbed some guy in a bathtub and the rest of it was played up by the newspapers. That would be boring if they actually put that in the game. It's not like Ubisoft could spice it up because that would be lying or something. Just look at the previous Assassin's Creed, that was pretty realistic (like the entire series) and they didn't need women to do that."
"Also, there weren't that many women in the French Revolution in general."
"I am threatened by the suggestion that anything I think could ever be wrong, and my friends agree so it must be true that I am not wrong."
"Most of the people who disagree with us are just white knight social justice brony bloggers who are doing this in the hopes that they will have the moral high ground by saying these things, which totally doesn't work compared to when I speak the whole truth that everything is fine concerning equality, which makes me much better than you. I didn't even think this was worth discussing, but since you're so wrong, I decided to post on this thread for an entire day just to prove how pointless this is."
"When I ask my many, many female friends about the situation, they didn't care when I positioned the question out of context and downplayed anything that might make me look wrong."
"Why do these people keep attacking me and my friends, and I do mean specifically me and my friends because that is what the conversation is clearly about, when I, and by extension everybody I agree with, have never done anything to them based on my total world experience which must match everybody elses? They are just blaming all of us for the actions of a very small few number of people in the history of humanity, and most of those were probably women lying about it."
"Everybody that disagrees with us must hate us as far as we can tell, which also makes them wrong. That is why we hate them."
Well, we can play it that way. Here's a list of summarized beliefs I've seen actually typed by people over the course of this discussion across the internet, with the spots filled in as to simulate the types of things that could possibly serve as proof:
"Hey, they made this one game character on the Vita a girl and you can pick them in some multiplayer modes in a few other games! Sexism is over!"
"If they make one female character, the workload on the entire game would be doubled, because they would have to create an entire female population next to the already existing male population! And if their workload was doubled, they couldn't afford to make this game that they are producing across more than three studios and will do so up to twice a year while selling enough copies to continue doing this."
"All these not bystander NPCs in various Assassin's Creed games are female. That makes what, like eight of them out of the rest of the characters? That should be enough right? They don't need lines or anything, just being there assures me that they exist."
"Most of history's greatest figures were men anyway, so trying to include women would be shoehorning in unimportant people. It's not like women made up a significant portion of the population back then. Who's even heard of important women? Certainly not the important men who wrote all the history books, and I trust their judgment."
"Making female characters would automatically ruin the game or character because most of the good games have male leads, and it'd be forcing the game to be worse because games with female leads have been pretty mixed results. This has nothing to do with the game industry employees being mostly comprised of men, and even more of the majority taking key spots in leadership."
"Playing as a female would ruin my immersion, because I'm not female, or having a female character exist in any context other than shopping for shoes or cooking would shatter my suspension of disbelief."
"Including a female character, even as a faceless co-op skin that doesn't talk and is never seen as the main character from any of the player's viewpoints, would force them to have to rewrite the entire game because the lead is a male and they didn't account for things like malls and tampons."
"Game development is hard, so we should take everything they say at face value, regardless of how many times that company has lied before, and is even lying now, in an article next to the one we are commenting on, as long as we adamantly agree with this viewpoint without any actual evidence."
"Look, the guy says he works with lots of women. Binders of them, even. They must agree with him."
"Anybody that claims that we need more diversity in games is not actually a real person. We will prove that all their complaints are just loud shouting and gain undue representation in the media, by filling message boards with disagreement and creating entire websites, videos, and even flash games just to demonstrate how underrepresented our viewpoint is. We have a third of our task force targeting one Youtube channel."
"They're just making the games that the majority of their players who just happen to be male want to play, so they make games that happen to have mostly male leads. Why should they listen to people we believe are fake?"
"They shouldn't have to pander to the mass market (and by that I mean people who aren't me or agree with me, which are certainly the persecuted minority) just because they think something's wrong with their games. If they did that, their games would surely be lowered in quality as a result. Why should they have to change? They're perfect as they are now!"
"Women animations work differently from men animations. Think of how they would have to make their legs bend in the opposite direction, or how many rigs they'd have to build of stripper pole interactions alone. That would also decrease the frame rate. I can tell the difference right off the bat while viewing the character from behind in all of the games made recently that have women, which are enough to make this distinction."
"All of the women hitboxes would have to be smaller, and that would give them an unfair advantage compared to the heavily built men featured regularly in Assassin's Creed. Maybe we can just make their hips and chest larger to compensate."
"If the main character was a woman, the entire game would have to be different because women don't start out with their own self agency like men do. We would have to spend the entire game pointing out all the differences between this character and our male characters, and nobody likes to play through the parts where we explicitly show past discrimination, which doesn't happen today, because it's boring. Guys like Master Chief are automatically awesome and capable of doing anything and nobody questions his ability, unlike women, who can still be rendered helpless regardless of where they are in their personal development, if that happens at all before somebody beats them up and/or removes their clothes and they need to get revenge to regain their innocence. Also, they have feelings and squishy parts and that makes everything weird. Nobody likes female characters."
"Most women play games in the segments that we don't consider to actually be games, so therefore no women will ever play the games we do consider to be games and their opinions will not matter."
"Making a character a woman more than once in ten years would cheapen everything else that was ever made, like when an artist decides to use a different color one day and art instantly becomes trite and useless simply because that color would be the only color in the painting and we would be forced to look at every one of them for hours. Soon all art would be this new color and we would never have art done with the old color ever again."
"Just because most of their characters are men doesn't mean that all of them are really similar to each other, because underneath the nearly identical outfits and animations, some of them are different colors, if you squint hard at the face concealed by a hood. This also isn't extremely boring and repetitive. Which putting women in games would be, because we can tell underneath that outfit."
"Realistically, not many women have been assassins, or could be assassins, because they're women, and I think the really large breasts that most women have would just get in the way. Oh, that one lady who was a famous assassin during the French Revolution? She just stabbed some guy in a bathtub and the rest of it was played up by the newspapers. That would be boring if they actually put that in the game. It's not like Ubisoft could spice it up because that would be lying or something. Just look at the previous Assassin's Creed, that was pretty realistic (like the entire series) and they didn't need women to do that."
"Also, there weren't that many women in the French Revolution in general."
"I am threatened by the suggestion that anything I think could ever be wrong, and my friends agree so it must be true that I am not wrong."
"Most of the people who disagree with us are just white knight social justice brony bloggers who are doing this in the hopes that they will have the moral high ground by saying these things, which totally doesn't work compared to when I speak the whole truth that everything is fine concerning equality, which makes me much better than you. I didn't even think this was worth discussing, but since you're so wrong, I decided to post on this thread for an entire day just to prove how pointless this is."
"When I ask my many, many female friends about the situation, they didn't care when I positioned the question out of context and downplayed anything that might make me look wrong."
"Why do these people keep attacking me and my friends, and I do mean specifically me and my friends because that is what the conversation is clearly about, when I, and by extension everybody I agree with, have never done anything to them based on my total world experience which must match everybody elses? They are just blaming all of us for the actions of a very small few number of people in the history of humanity, and most of those were probably women lying about it."
"Everybody that disagrees with us must hate us as far as we can tell, which also makes them wrong. That is why we hate them."
Frankly I just have a hard time swallowing that creativity was ever alive at Ubisoft. When they flat out say that they only want to make games that they can make franchises out of (You know, instead of just making a game that's good and then making a franchise out of it if there proves to be a viable market) then it's pretty clear that creativity took a far distant backseat to making money.Callate said:
Don't know why so many people protect creativity in the AAA industry when it's not really there.
Increasing diversity in games is great and i'd be glad to see it happen but im really not that worked up about it.
I just want to play as someone other than the same grizzled white dude in every single AAA game released. The French revolution is the perfect time for a female main character, I was excited to see who we might play as but who do we get?
Connor/Edward/Henry/James/Generic white male name 0432 who is fighting for freedom/motivated by revenge.
I've played the same character too much, he was never that interesting or good to begin with. I want to try play as an interesting character for once.
If a game isn't going to offer me anything interesting then im not going to pay £40-50 for their game. That isn't an act of protest against the patriarchy or anything. That's just me not spending money on something that won't interest me as much as other games.
I just want to play as someone other than the same grizzled white dude in every single AAA game released. The French revolution is the perfect time for a female main character, I was excited to see who we might play as but who do we get?
Connor/Edward/Henry/James/Generic white male name 0432 who is fighting for freedom/motivated by revenge.
I've played the same character too much, he was never that interesting or good to begin with. I want to try play as an interesting character for once.
If a game isn't going to offer me anything interesting then im not going to pay £40-50 for their game. That isn't an act of protest against the patriarchy or anything. That's just me not spending money on something that won't interest me as much as other games.
More divinity in characters is good, more diversity in the world of a game the story and the game play is also good. LEts hope this happens as at the moment the AAA industry is getting more and more homogenized to the point where you cannot tell the protagonists apart, or the world , or the mechanics.
Lets hope you stay true to your word ubisoft for our sake and for yours.
Lets hope you stay true to your word ubisoft for our sake and for yours.
I didn't know that. Considering the hype machine they had for 2, 3 and 4, I still say they weren't giving Liberation nearly as much attention.RicoADF said:
I think it's funny how diversity seems to mostly boil down to "make a woman protagonist". I don't want a female protagonist for the sake of her being female, while still playing just like any other protagonist.
I want different protagonists that play in new and fun ways. If that protagonist is a white guy, asian girl, black man, straight, gay, bi or some crazy child raised by pigeons and dressed in a chicken suit doesn't matter. I just want diverse gameplay, and the protagonist is an important part of that. Gruff white guy's aren't the only ones that can be fun to play.
And seriously a female assassin has the potential for new gameplay elements, for changing how you play the game (instead of countering yourself through armies of lobotomized guards). As does any character with a totally different background, personality and way of dealing with the gameplay challenges in the game. That's the kind of diversity I want. Not just some gender swap, but changes to how the game plays depending on who you're playing as.
Liberation took some baby steps towards this, actually, but the execution left much to be desired and the "counter and murder everything" approach was just as valid in that game as the others.
I want different protagonists that play in new and fun ways. If that protagonist is a white guy, asian girl, black man, straight, gay, bi or some crazy child raised by pigeons and dressed in a chicken suit doesn't matter. I just want diverse gameplay, and the protagonist is an important part of that. Gruff white guy's aren't the only ones that can be fun to play.
And seriously a female assassin has the potential for new gameplay elements, for changing how you play the game (instead of countering yourself through armies of lobotomized guards). As does any character with a totally different background, personality and way of dealing with the gameplay challenges in the game. That's the kind of diversity I want. Not just some gender swap, but changes to how the game plays depending on who you're playing as.
Liberation took some baby steps towards this, actually, but the execution left much to be desired and the "counter and murder everything" approach was just as valid in that game as the others.
Even if I believed him -I don't- for fuck sake: you're Ubisoft, not some little two-man indie start-up company.
Shit like 'we don't have the resources' is a lot harder to swallow when you have hundreds of people on staff, and 'we'll learn for next time' isn't acceptable for a company who have been in the business for well over twenty years, now.
They should be leading the way, not asking for fucking directions.
Shit like 'we don't have the resources' is a lot harder to swallow when you have hundreds of people on staff, and 'we'll learn for next time' isn't acceptable for a company who have been in the business for well over twenty years, now.
They should be leading the way, not asking for fucking directions.
Without Ubisoft, I probably never would have played a game that took place entirely in Sub-Saharan Africa, nor would I have seen a game entirely in rhyming couplet (however mixed the results), or a game with a bonus stage accompanied by a mariachi version of Eye of the Tiger (partly on kazoo.)erttheking said:
I wouldn't have enjoyed a game with hacking mechanics like Watch Dogs, and I couldn't look forward to a cartoon adventure game set during the under-represented period of World War I.
As legitimate as some of the frustration towards Unity not featuring a female PC avatar may be, the echoing of the sentiment seems to be creating a disproportionate sense of just how wrong-headed or creatively bankrupt Ubisoft might be. In a year where the other notable AAA studios seem largely content with the umpteenth iteration of FPS franchises, sports games, and movie tie-ins, even Ubisoft's franchises went to the French Revolution and the Himalayas.
I understand the cynicism towards the AAA market; I've predicted that they're in a death spiral before, and I suspect that's still the case. But trying to "please everybody" isn't the cure for the disease; it's a symptom.
You know, just because a company does do some good things doesn't mean that they are incapable are doing bad. As interesting as Assassin's Creed and Watch Dogs can be, there are still very limiting corporate factors at play, like the fact that Assassin's Creed is churning out sequel after sequel every year, with things getting rather repetitive as a result and it feels like it's more about making money than anything else. Yeah, it CAN be creative but I still feel like the creative team has a lot of pressure put on it by executives. As much as I like Ezio, I think him getting three games is a bit overdoing it, but then again when he left we got Conor...ugh. And Watch Dogs is showing signs that it's going down the same path, with Ubisoft saying that it needed it to be a franchise game. Really, I do enjoy a lot of Ubisoft games, but they do get a wee bit samey. I'm not quite sure what their fetish with making people climb towers are. Also remember the fact that they use U Play and apparently give shit PC ports. (Though frankly I'm more getting on their ass for Assassin's Creed more than anything, when it comes to me loving and hating gaming companies, Ubisoft is stuck right in the middle, because I haven't played Watch Dogs and Far Cry 3 was fun as Hell and their revelation about the main character in Far Cry 4 has me glued to my computer screen for more information, but Assassin's Creed has just been going on for so long that it's starting to taste really stale. And frankly, Unity seems like a massive step backwards for the franchise. No sailing, no multiplayer, instead we get co-op, which is going to make an already easy franchise laughable)Callate said:
See here's the thing, when companies say "please everyone" and "appeal to a wider audience" they mean "We want COD fans." And really, I'm not quite sure how to take that statement, trying to please everyone is a symptom? Are you saying it's impossible for a game to appeal to both men and women?
I agree with most of what you say regarding Ubi; I just think it's too easy for one company to become a lightning rod for everything wrong with the industry on the crest of an issue like this, and honestly, I think Ubisoft has done better than most, especially on the creative front. I really despise the current face of EA right now, by way of example, but that doesn't mean I've forgotten that they once published Bard's Tale and Wasteland and a number of other really good games. I still hope that the AAA companies might turn it around, even as I note that the economic realities and the tactics they've chosen to use to grapple with them may make that unlikely.erttheking said:
I don't think it's impossible for a game to appeal to both men and women; the number of women who feel strongly about Unity makes a pretty good case that the series has more than its share of female fans, even if I wonder if the particular way this issue is being handled by the press doesn't risk doing as much harm as good.
You mention "wanting COD fans", and in some ways, that's a good part of what I'm afraid of- not the COD fans themselves, but decisions made on high by market researchers and management rather than in the trenches by writers and character designers and the people who actually work with the mechanics. I worry that decisions made on that level- the "hit as many bases as possible, offend no one" level- are where we get "slap a woman/minority character" into this spot, possibly at the last possible moment, rather than "how would such a character fit into this setting" decisions that are made at a creative, rather than a marketing or financial level. Or we continue getting white males because they're relatively safe, they're far less likely to get anyone grousing about tropes and stereotypes, and the relevant parties have far more experience both creating them and creating for an audience consisting (to whatever real or imagined degree) of them.
When Guillemot talks about a desire to "please everybody", I don't hear an appeal that's being registered in diversity or creativity; I hear one that's resounding with the risk/reward assessment that gets us beige franchises in the first place.