Feminists upset over "Fat Princess" video game
- Thread starter Aragorn
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I think you should, your a doctor, you know women always want the rich doctor.
Oh, I thought you were talking a bodyguard.
This is proof that people over there only read headlines and not the actual blog stories. Which is fine, because I hardly ever read their stories either... but I'm not paid to be a "responsible journalist" (game journalism, HAH!).
At FeministGamers, the writer basically suggested that the "flag" could be a chest and that the defending team could have filled the chest with rocks or whatever to make the chest heavier.
While I don't necessarily agree with their premise, I find the misogyny surrounding the story and the authors fairly disappointing. But then again, the fact that "fag" and "nigger" are basically common epithets in the gaming community... I probably shouldn't be surprised.
Thespeckledkiwi
Vice Admiral
I do agree that the name should be changed to something else. Hopefully that is the working title (like in movies?).
They could call this game "Mr Coaster is a fat old bastard" and I wouldn't give a crap in the least. Everybody's so easily offended by everything. I probably wouldn't have given this game a second thought before, but now I'm going to play it incessantly and talk about how silly fat princesses are.
That's a ridiculously huge leap of logic there. And since it was in fact the Feminist Gamer article that brought up the point about "cuteness" in the first place (and of course in reality making the game about a generic chest makes the game, well, generic) and the fact that the thing I linked to on Kotaku was actually written by a female and the artist who did all the concept work on the game is a female I really have no idea where you pulled out the accusation of misogyny from. Or maybe you need to actually read the articles before you accuse the people who wrote them of not reading the source material
The point on Kotaku is totally and completely valid. There has never been any outcry about a game where you rescue a a princess that conforms to society's idea of beauty. Peach, Zelda, etc etc etc. But all of a sudden the princess in question is overweight and it's misogyny? Please. Games should not have to be afraid of having characters in them that are not the ideal vision of beauty constructed by our scoiety and that's what the outcry is about... not that she's a princess but that she's an overweight princess. To make your accusation even more unfounded, in the game you can customize your player character to be either male or female.
Also part of the gaming mechanic is that if you don't feed her on a regular basis, she becomes thin and vunerable to being taken again. Generally chests don't get lighter if you stop putting things in them.
The amount of attention it's getting over this bizarre issue has pretty much guaranteed it's gonna be a hit with, well, everyone.
And rightly so. It looks great.
Pretty much, whatever you say about the name, it definitely stands out, and as far as the concept goes, it's pretty unique. Additionally, from what I hear it's a pretty solid game as well.
Is there anything "wrong" with the concept? That's subjective, but then you have to consider most games have you blowing people away half the time.
The age of the average male gamer these days is 33 years old. Fat Princess will also most likely carry with it an "M" rating, for Mature, which is the videogame equivalent of a "R" rating. Videogames aren't just for kids anymore, and the industry has been reflecting this.
Videogames as a medium also have as much right as film and literature to explore whatever topics the creators desire in whatever fashion the creators desire as long as they don't violate any laws.
That's a ridiculously huge leap of logic there. And since it was in fact the Feminist Gamer article that brought up the point about "cuteness" in the first place (and of course in reality making the game about a generic chest makes the game, well, generic) and the fact that the thing I linked to on Kotaku was actually written by a female and the artist who did all the concept work on the game is a female I really have no idea where you pulled out the accusation of misogyny from. Or maybe you need to actually read the articles before you accuse the people who wrote them of not reading the source material
The point on Kotaku is totally and completely valid. There has never been any outcry about a game where you rescue a a princess that conforms to society's idea of beauty. Peach, Zelda, etc etc etc. But all of a sudden the princess in question is overweight and it's misogyny? Please. Games should not have to be afraid of having characters in them that are not the ideal vision of beauty constructed by our scoiety and that's what the outcry is about... not that she's a princess but that she's an overweight princess. To make your accusation even more unfounded, in the game you can customize your player character to be either male or female.
Also part of the gaming mechanic is that if you don't feed her on a regular basis, she becomes thin and vunerable to being taken again. Generally chests don't get lighter if you stop putting things in them.
I wasn't talking about Kotaku, I was talking about the commenters.
FeministGamers had to shut down comments because of trolls, from what I understand.
Look at the shit N'Gai Croal got when he said "black people didn't work on [Resident Evil 5]" (it was funny to see Capcom point out that there are black people who work there). He basically got called, to censor myself, an oversensitive black man by the throbbing gaming masses.
Like I said, I'm not arguing the point because - first of all, I don't really care either way. But as the writer at FeministGamers says, "We're gamers too". And people seem to lose sight of that when they resort to delightfully witty comments as "stupid fat bitch".
God, I remember at 1up when Jane Pinckard called out Guitar Hero 3 for tarting up the female characters. Then people called her various names because she talked about using the trance vibrator from Rez as a masturabation tool, suggesting that she was being hypocritical for exploiting herself while calling out the Neversoft guys for exploiting the female body for their game.
It's just kind of depressing to see, is all. But again, this is the Internet and I'm not all that surprised.
Fatties need to get a life and STFU. It is their fault that they are fatties in the first place. They just want others to feel guilty about it.
My mistake then. So I'll simply say that those comments aren't representative of any sort of normative behavior of the gaming population... as you say, it's the internet and some people just enjoy being loudmouth trolls and the sane people tend to make up the silent majority.
Probably. I mean, message board denizens are always a small, non-representative sample when it comes to the real world population. But the level of discourse is, in general, framed within that white straight male demographic.
I find it sad that message boards have to ban certain words because people can't stop themselves from using them. And even when the boards do, they go out of their way to type out "f49" to avoid the censor.
I find it sad that message boards have to ban certain words because people can't stop themselves from using them. And even when the boards do, they go out of their way to type out "f49" to avoid the censor.
I think these so called feminists should actually look for a more worthwhile cause to fight for - there are still many injustices against women that are far far worse than this game.
I don't see anyone getting pissed off except the feminists in the original article and a few people who are WAY too sensitive, all of whom really need to pull the trees out of their asses.
As a member of the beer-belly community, my self-esteem won't be irreparably damaged if someone calls me fat.
Hmmm, I wonder where exactly these supposed female gamers are.
Because I don't think I've even seen a female pick up a videogame controller let alone have the distinction of being a "gamer".
Are they counting solitaire or something?
On the flip side, nearly all of my male friends have a video game system of some type.
Most of us are. We can't do it twenty-four hours a day, though, and in our down time, some of us like to play video games. Some of us like to blog. Some of us do both. And some of us, when we are checking out upcoming video games and see something stupid like this, blog about it. And then we go to bed, and wake up the next day and go back to tackling the important shit again.
You act as if a human being can only ever do one thing ever.
That might say more about you than it does about women gamers.