E3 Conference Thoughts

Hey, what if it's Tingle? Aonuma did say that he wants to make him more likable.

 

FEMALE.
LINK.

 

You do interact with the world through a female perspective. The very fact Ellie was playable was to show that different perspective from the predominantly male one you play as. They effectively played the same, but their interactions, characters and so on were unique, and for Ellie, very female oreintated. It allows us as the observers to see her in a new light. She is one of the best female teen characters in general media in a long while, well rounded, well developed and generally just good.

I'm even sure what your point is. You say that you have no side on the Ubi stuff, but you're saying it's their artistic right to do this and defending their choice?
I just didn't see why complaining about a step back isn't a reasonable thing. I complained that Mass Effect 2 was wrong for reducing the ability for players to explore planets' surfaces. Still enjoyed the game, but it's a bad thing for a game like that to go back on seeing as the story has always been about the whole galaxy yet you could only go to some of it. Assassin's Creed has always been about these historical freedom fighters who have always sought the oppression of control, looking for equal rights between all people and their ability to choose. Yet you can't choose to look like a woman if you can customise your appearance? Can you choose skin or hair colour? Just seems mental to give you a partial choice for little to no reason, even an artistic reason that's not even here.

 

I personally think this whole AC unity controversy is ridiculous, but that original Ubi comment was pretty dumb (just another reason why anyone at these shows needs media training). Ubisoft really needs to be clearer when it comes to this sort of stuff. They had that issue with Farcry 4 where they had boxart which could have been taken the wrong way and gave us no context (at the time) and now they show off the 4 player co-op and not make it clear that they are technically 4 versions of the same character. That could have avoided this whole situation, they should have lead with who the main character is and how it's his story and not an avatar. All the misinformation and lack of focus just means that people start to form their own stories and opinions that may or may not be true.

But people really need to pick their battles better, if anything the Assassins Creed series has one of the most diverse set of main characters in gaming, we have an Arab, Italian, British/Native American, French/African woman, Welsh man. How many games have that sort variety? Not many, yet people ***** and moan because one game in the series didn't let you play as a female and call it sexist? If this sort of thing keeps going sexism in gaming is going to become a joke, and honestly I don't want that to happen. It's starting to become a boy who cried wolf situation where once a really bad issue comes up no-one is going to take it seriously because people just expect the "social justice warriors" to moan and people will just laugh it off.

 

I don't' see it as sexist, I see it as unneeded restrictions on the player. Why put in place a system that can't do what the past has done? Ubisoft and its teams clearly have the capability to do it, yet it's brushed off as an impossibility because men and women walk differently, so nothing can be done without oodles of effort or time? Bollocks. Why are they really doing it? The thing is, Aveline and Adewale were both characters separate from the main series, one in a spin off, another as a DLC mission guy. In terms of included in main games, Connor is the furthest we've got from the stereotypical rough white looking guy. It's almost like they're trying to avoid using actually diverse characters.

Just having a black character does not make it representative of black people. It's not about simple inclusion. Having a black gangster doesn't mean it's not racist, The amount of stereotypes in games is atrocious. Assassin's Creed itself has women as prostitutes, slaves, wives of men and just generally victims. Few stand out as strong, and the ones who do, like Caterina Sforza, are strong because history paints them as such. You get to the actual few original characters more often than not they represented as tools to men's desires. Zio is one of the few I can remember. They all just need better representation when included.

Seriously guys, Manveer Heir's GDC talk. Watch it. Pretty much shows how badly games are at representation and why all games need to buck up ideas.

 

And, you know, assassins, villains, action girls, faction members and leaders, and in one of the recent games a protagonist.
there are plenty of slaves of both genders, so I don't see why that's a standout, and... wives of men? What are they supposed to be, husbands?

 

The one example of a good female is Aveline in terms of representation, most others have had little to no character development. Liberations was generally just better at characters and representation because of the subject matter. Even her surrogate mother came close but she was too secondary and hidden to get any real bearing until the end, and she turned into a cliché, though not a female specific one.
I can't see any other female character justified as being particularly well developed and at the same time, not in a stereotypical role. For a game about freedom fighters and their struggle for individuals choice and autonomy in society, you have a lot of barmaids, courtesans, brothel madams, wives of important characters and not much else.
Aye, wives of men. Added the men because their roles as the husband generally introduce the wife character, who is obedient and stereotypical. Bartolommeo's wife is introduced as purely a comedic piece, because he loves his sword more than her, but still she follows him. Seems badly representative.

 

So you say with one hand you dismiss female characters who have a role for a lack of character development, and then name generic background characters as examples of poorly representing women?
Well if I can't name any non major characters, then all that really leaves is Aveline, but take a look beyond that, and you'll, for example, see a bunch of women with varying roles and personalities in Connor's homestead, a large number of female assassins in AC4, one of the more important side characters in AC4 also turns out to be female. Most of the women Ezio gets serious with have at least one cool moment, Altair's wife was a Templar and skilled in combat and the like. The brothel madam thing isn't a particularly strong argument either, since the owner of that brothel is probably one of the most self empowered characters in the series. The barmaid thing I'm not even sure about, since I recall seeing a lot more barmen, but whatever.
There's a reason a lot of cliches show up though... because cliches come from somewhere. Sure, the game is about freedom and stuff, but that doesn't mean they suddenly go rewriting history where suddenly tonnes of women had equal opportunities to men and had lots of job opportunities or whatever. Quite frankly I'd say doing that would be worse.
And as you move closer and closer to our time period things get more and more equal just like... real life. You go from courtesans to gypsys to dancers, when you get to the modern era there's nothing like this, men and women are just NPCs, treated more or less equally. The ones we do get to meet during modern times are varied in terms of dominance and whatever abritrary method we're judging a 'good' female character by today

 

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I'm not naming background characters, I'm naming the roles of prominent characters.
In AC2,Brotherhood and ACIV: Freedom's Cry, we have about 5 named prostitute characters, and plenty unnamed. They also include Brothel Madams, all sexualised as seducers for men. They're not powerful simply because they own a brothel and can seduce men, and even if it was, they're still stereotyped characters, Brothel Madams are cliched. In all AC games you see housewives, few named. The homestead had Miriam as the only non-stereotypical character, a hunter, but then you had a seamstress, her daughter, the wife of the innkeeper, the housewives of the lumber guys. In ACIV, Anne Bonny is a barmaid who turns into your figure head navigator post-game. She's initially seen as a sex object by the pirates, then when she's accused of piracy, she's beaten to the point of having an induced abortion.

One Aveline doesn't mean we can ignore the rest of the female cast. It's worse things are going backwards in the series having come so far in III and Liberations.

But ancient god beings who genetically engineered humanity into homo sapiens and Pieces of Eden that influenced the flow of history and famous historical battles, with an ancient secret war between Assassins and Templars, that's not rewriting things? That's a hollow excuse given to all historical fiction. These aren't documentaries, they're adventures in time periods which can be made into something different. It's genre definition is historical fiction, yet the defence is always focused on the history and not the fiction, which is biggest opportunity to do whatever you want with your game, but nope tropes and clichés still dominate.

Seriously, please watch this, it explains better than I can:
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1020420/Misogyny-Racism-and-Homophobia-Where

 

Just FYI, one of the biggest assassins of the French Revolution was a woman.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotte_Corday

 

I hate when people use the logic that AC has revisionist history that they can and should just rewrite history to remove any potentially mean stuff from it. The point of AC, from the start, has been that history is just like what we thought it was... but there was a secret conspiracy going on in the background the whole time. It's a fictional world, but it's a fictional world that has insane levels of research put into it to keep things more or less accurate

Which means we'll probably see a lot of her, because AC can't resist making their characters best buds with any historically significant character from the time period they choose for each game

 

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And that's why it's turned into a broken and fairly boring historical fiction. It depicts assassinations that never actually occurred in the manners played out in, and yet that's fine, but give the ability to play as a key character in the assassinations who was a woman, a racial minority or whatever, and that's 'not accurate of the time'. Like Manveer Heir states more or less 'history is written by the victor and the victor has always been male, so women's roles in history have been suppressed'. How do we know what happened at the time? We don't and that's why historical fiction is a great way to fill in that need to know, to make it more exciting and palatable for an audience. Bones of the Hills is the third book in the Conqueror series by Conn Iggulden, which depicts the life of Genghis Khan and his Mongol armies until the time of his grandson, Kublai. Genghis is famous for allegedly dying by falling off his horse in Mongolia and buried in an unmarked grave. In Bones of the Hills, Genghis is instead killed by one of the wives he takes from a Chinese kingdom he almost conquered, but were spared in exchange for, among other things, another wife. She stabs him as they lay together in their yurt, before slitting her own throat. She had always planned to kill him when she was offered up, and her story tells of her internal conflict on whether to kill him on her fathers orders or whether to let this amazing man who treats her well, to live in. He dies due to a woman killing him. It's not accurate, not even to the legends, but the build up and impact is so far reaching that it added to the plot more than simply Genghis dying from a horse riding accident. That's good historical fiction, that entwines the changes in a way that lends to the whole experience because it rewrites history in a way that benefits the reader.
Assassin's Creed and a lot of historical fiction get free passes for their lack of creativity in the fiction department. Like The Order 1889 or whatever it's called. steampunk, monster hunter in the 1800 alternate history of London, and all the characters are white. Why? Because it's London in the 1800s, that's who would've been there. Disregarding the black and Asian communities in London at the time, as well as the whole werewolves thing. Seems a bit stupid to be creative till you hit a problemand it's oce.

 

There's plenty of ethnic diversity in AC main characters though, Itallian, Welsh, native American, I'm not sure if Altair's exact ethnicity is stated, I never beat AC1, and a french, black, slave woman. The stuff that happens in the background of AC is the exact sort of history distorting stuff you want. Women weren't prostitutes, they were actually just using that to help a secret brotherhood achieve justice! You're complaining about the world being stereotypical of that actual time period it takes place in, while AC is trying its absolute hardest to promote equality when in actual history it's not the case. In history women were not generally treated very well, they're still not in a lot of cases, that's why this argument is even happening, so saying that AC needs to go back and make it so throughout history women were actually treated and acted completely different just seems silly to me

 

I think they should make a Viking AC. Viking women were allowed to divorce their husbands and cut off the d*cks of any idiot stupid enough to attempt to sexualy assault them.

I'm not really paying attention to the conversation, but just know that you guys are both dudes. You do not know how women women work. Therefore, please be careful with what you say and how you say it. <3

 

Ooh, viking would be an awesome setting. Norse mythology would be cool to draw on to.

... us being men shouldn't mean we have to tiptoe around what we say about the opposite sex, any more than you making comments about us both being dudes in the first place.
There's no magic sweet spot that says how women work, or men. We're all individuals. We should be careful about we say about other human beings, not other genders

 

This is objective fact