Are Women Too Hard To Animate? Tropes vs Women in Video Games

At the 2014 Electronic Entertainment Expo,

the game development company Ubisoft

debuted a trailer showcasing the cooperative mode

in their upcoming game Assassin’s Creed Unity.

One thing viewers quickly noticed

about the trailer was that all the assassins in it were male.

When questioned about why female characters

weren’t an option in this mode,

the game’s creative director said that

although there were originally plans to allow for female assassins,

the development team couldn’t add them

because it would require “double the animations,

double the voices, and double the visual assets.”

Meanwhile, a level designer on the game

stated that including female assassins would have meant

recreating 8000 animations on a new skeleton.

These comments led to an explosion of controversy

and criticism on Twitter, with many people using

the sarcastic hashtag “women are too hard to animate.”

A number of experienced game developers

joined the chorus of voices

calling out the absurdity of Ubisoft’s claims.

Animator Jonathan Cooper,

who had previously worked on Assassin’s Creed III

for Ubisoft, tweeted,

“I would estimate this to be a day or two’s work.

Not a replacement of 8000 animations.”

And Manveer Heir of Bioware summed up

what Ubisoft was actually saying:

“We don’t really care to put the effort in to make a woman assassin.”

Ubisoft’s disregard for female character options

didn’t stop with Unity.

Also at E3 2014, the director of Far Cry 4

admitted to a similar issue with that game’s online co-op mode,

saying, “We were inches away from having you be able

to select a girl or a guy as your co-op buddy.”

Again, the excuse for why this option wasn’t available

was that it would just be too much work.

And yet again, what they were really saying

was that they just couldn’t be bothered to do the work

it would have taken to provide that option.

Though it’s worth pointing out that in the two years

since this controversy, Ubisoft has made clear efforts

to improve the representation of women

in the core Assassin’s Creed games,

with the most recent entry, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate,

giving the option to play as Evie Frye

through much of the campaign.

Of course, Ubisoft weren’t and aren’t the only ones

with this apathetic attitude toward female inclusion.

In fact, not doing the necessary work to include women

has long been the norm in the video game industry.

The FIFA soccer game series, which had its first entry

in 1993, took over 20 years

before finally introducing female teams in FIFA 16.

“I’m in the game.”

And it took ten years for Call of Duty to introduce

female soldiers into its competitive multiplayer

with 2013’s Call of Duty: Ghosts.

The long-running Battlefield franchise,

on the other hand, has still never allowed

for playable female characters in its multiplayer modes.

There’s an important conversation to be had

about the ways in which military shooters

work to glorify violence,

but as long as we’re going to have such games,

it’s actually better when they include female combatants in them.

Now you might be asking yourself,

“Doesn’t having female enemies in a game

perpetuate violence against women?”

And that’s a good, fair question.

When we refer to depictions

of violence against women,

we’re generally discussing situations in which

women are being attacked or victimized

specifically because they are women,

reinforcing a perception of women as victims.

Such scenarios are very different from those in which

women are presented as active participants.

In the Street Fighter games, for instance,

when Chun-Li and Ryu fight each other,

this isn’t considered violence against women,

because the two characters are presented as being on

more or less equal footing,

and because Chun-Li is an active participant

who isn’t being targeted or attacked

specifically because she’s a woman.

Similarly, the waves of male attackers players face

in so many games are typically not passive victims.

They are active participants in the conflict,

and importantly, the violence against them isn’t gendered.

Players fight with them because they’re on the opposing side,

not specifically because they are men.

Unfortunately, when female combatants do appear in games,

they are often presented in sexualized ways

which inevitably lend the player’s attacks

an air of gendered violence.

In Saints Row The Third’s so-called

“Whored Mode,” for instance,

players must defeat waves of sexualized women,

sometimes beating them to death

with a large purple dildo.

In the 2009 game Wolfenstein,

the Elite Guard are a special all-female enemy unit

whose absurd uniforms sexualize not only

the female characters themselves

but also player’s acts of violence against them.

Similarly, in 2012’s Hitman Absolution,

the Saints are a special unit of female assassins

who wear latex fetish gear underneath nun’s habits.

It’s a ludicrous design choice that is

transparently intended to sexualize these enemies.

And in Metal Gear Solid 4,

the Beauty & the Beast unit is an enemy group

made up of five female soldiers

that players fight over the course of the game.

At a certain point during these encounters,

each boss sheds her armor and appears

as a woman in form-fitting attire.

“It’s all so funny.”

If players then avoid the Beauty’s deadly embrace

for several minutes without killing or neutralizing her,

the game transports them to a white room

where equipping the camera results

in the character making sultry poses.

Funny how that doesn’t happen

with the male bosses in the game.

Whenever female combatants are dressed

in sexualizing attire, it sets them noticeably apart

from other enemy units.

It’s intended to make the player’s

encounters with them sexually titillating

and that’s particularly troubling considering

that those encounters often involve fighting

and killing those characters.

Violence against female characters

should never be presented as “sexy”.

The way for games to handle female combatants

is not to present them as sexualized treats

for the player.

Rather, it’s to present them simply as combatants

who happen to be women fighting alongside

their male counterparts on equal footing.

For all of its many, many problems

one thing Bioshock Infinite did right was to include

non-sexualized female officers on Columbia’s police force.

And in Assassin’s Creed Syndicate,

both the player’s gang and the enemy gang

have rank-and-file female members

who fight alongside the men.

Despite the presence of female combatants

in games like these, there is still a tendency

for game studios to treat female representation

as some kind of extravagant goal,

rather than simply treating it as standard

in the same way they handle male representation.

The excuse that I hear most often for the absence

of female combatants in games is that players wouldn’t believe it.

But games, even ones that draw on historical locations

or events like the Assassin’s Creed series,

create their own worlds and set the tone

for what we will or won’t believe.

To participate in the worlds games create,

we happily accept time travel, superpowers,

ancient alien civilizations,

the ability to carry infinite items,

the idea that eating a hot dog can instantly

heal your wounds, and a million other fictions.

It’s certainly not too much to ask that these

fictional worlds give us believable female combatants too.

The media we engage with has a powerful impact

on our ideas of what’s believable and what’s not.

Games like Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

demonstrate that when the existence of female combatants

is presented as straightforward, normal and believable,

players have no problem believing it.

And they shouldn’t, since,

unlike those magical healing hot dogs I mentioned,

female combatants actually exist.