I'm sure many women on here are familiar with the sexism currently present in the gaming community. I'm many of you, myself included, have been on the recieving end of sexism being both a gamer an female; everything from people assuming you are less apt and not a "ture gamer" to downright objectification and harrassment.
At this years Comic-Con, EA decided to up the ante, to bring sexism to a whole new level, by offering booth babes up as prizes in a competition. The competition , titled "Sin-To-Win", asks congoers to take a photograph of themselves performing an "act of lust" with a booth babe, to win a sinful night with two of the women.
And it isn't just their booth babes who are being offered. The competition applies to any booth babes from any vendor. Not only is EA encouraging people to sexually harrass their employees, their encouraging people to sexually harrass other company's employees.
They have since apologised , and said that it was meant to be a fun little competition, all tongue-in-cheek. Now, if the competition was just "have your photo taken with a booth babe" I would be fine with it, but their wording is appalling. It is also very heteronormative, and, yes, sexist.
A booth babe, "iola" has weighed in on the whole affair here , but beware reading that thread. There is a lot of victim-blaming going on.
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Oh EA. You never cease to amaze. -_- And here I thought they were getting somewhere after hearing about that talk or something about homophobia in games and game chats. I guess I got ahead of myself.
Me too. Sexism in gaming is something that needs to be addressed just as much as homophobia!
Oh dear God yes. I worked at a Gamestop for about two years and it was amazing to me how often I was disregarded and past over for my male coworkers when a customer had a question. Or how often I was ogled. I was hit on several times. I didn't always mind, I had fun talking with people and getting the "Holy shit this chick knows something about games? With guns? And killing?" look from guys when they were forced to ask me questions about games because my male coworkers weren't there or when I would just randomly start up conversations with them. But some days it wasn't that funny. And when the district manager continually passed me up for promotions and actually made fun of me to other managers at other stores USING MY NAME it was too much to handle. Sexism in actual games is one thing, but the fact that the games create a sexist environment, in which "booth babes" can become the target of lust and girl gamers are constantly having to "prove" themselves to be considered gamers at all, is just unforgivable. I hope some day someone in the gaming industry takes on this problem. Hell, even addressing it in such a way that the guys in the industry take it seriously and just take notice would be something. I hope the comments about this booth babe campaign can start that.
And EA better give some sort of formal apology that actually sounds like a freakin' apology. I will be sad if I have to boycott them, there are few decent games coming out as it is, but I will boycott them.
I'm usually pretty blind to sexism in gaming, because it's not something I've ever really encountered, and this still got my hackles up. 'Act of lust'? Giving girls away as prizes? How tacky is that? Not to mention the whole 'find other booth babes' aspect, which brings the tackiness to a whole new level. Fortunately EA isn't a company that blips my radar much anyways, and when it does it's usually because of something stupid like this.
And here I thought the industry's idea of 'girl games' was sad...
I didn't read the whole four pages of comments on the original article, but in what I did read, I didn't notice any objections to the characterization of male comic fans as unwashed social lepers - a perception exploited quite neatly by the contest, as well. EA's flying leap over the line regarding their female employees is pretty obvious, but perhaps it's time for some of their customers to point out that they're not all the kind of gibbering, lust-crazed morons on whom this type of thing works. (And maybe this "Ben" could take note of that, too.)
Anyway, I'd wager that any self-respecting "sweaty geek" would completely ignore the booth babes in favor of fawning over a famed game developer...
There were some people complaining about that stereotype, but it isn't the issue at hand. I don't think this competition was implying that geeks are sweaty losers who don't have girlfriends. It was implying that gamers are all straight men, though, and it was encouraging sexual harrassment.
No, the stab at geeks is certainly not the main issue. I don't think there could be much doubt about that. I'm just saying it might help to address that along with the issues of sexual harassment and sexual orientation, which speak up loud and clear already. Implying that gamers are exclusively straight men is bad enough, but implying that they're either shallow, lonely, or hopeless enough to have to resort to ridiculous and blatantly sexist contests to get (in this case) female attention doesn't help matters.
I suppose this is off-topic, but I'll ask here since this was something I wanted to post but couldn't...
If I go to "Write a post", then, y'know, write a post and submit it, the Movable Type thing says my session is expired. Doesn't matter if I just logged into it or not. I tried e-mailing the "contact@" address, but no response.
Anybody else go through this who knows how to fix it? I cleared all the browser history, cache, etc. already, but I'm pretty much a hardware nerd. This stuff goes over my head quick.