The First Rule of Fight Club
Regarding the recent blowup over EA’s idiotic marketing campaign for their God of War clone:
In a reply to Chrysoula’s post on the topic, I describe what EA did as ‘breaking the first rule of Fight Club.’ I thought I’d expand on that a little.
The truth is, regardless of the details of EA’s promotion, booth babes exist to be objects of lust. That’s why they’re employed, that’s why they’re dressed in those costumes, that’s why they’re supposed to smile and pretend they don’t mind you giving them a creepy once-over.
The claim is that ’sex sells’, but by and large sex isn’t being used to sell these games — at least not in the traditional sense of using sex to sell. You put an attractive woman in a car ad to imply that if you buy the car, you will get to have sex with the attractive woman. You put a cute girl in a beer ad to imply that if you drink that beer, she’ll drink with you and you’ll get to have drunk sex with her later. There’s generally a connection between the use of the product and the sex you’re being told you’ll get.
By contrast, booth babes often have no relation to the product being advertised. When SquareEnix had catgirls hanging around their booth to advertise a new FFXI expansion, that was a plausible case of ’sex sells’ — they were dressed up as actual characters from the game, and the implication is that you’ll get to have sex with those characters if you play the game. But I also saw first person shooters where the only boobs present in the game were the absurd man-boobs of the steroid-enhanced protagonists… with girls in skimpy fatigues on-hand to entice you to the booth. There is no reasonable connection between those girls and the game — the girls don’t appear in the game, and there’s no implication that playing the FPS will get those girls to have sex with you.
In other words, much like the Evony ad campaign, the notion of sex as a sales tool has become, in the world of the booth babe marketing strategy, completely divorced from the actual product being sold.
What this means is that the booth babes themselves are the sex objects. In the case of the military FPS I mentioned, the only boobs associated with the game were attached to the models they’d hired to stand around their booth.
That makes them targets for nerd lust, pure and simple. There’s no pretense of salesmanship, no product being (however unpleasantly) marketed. There’s just ‘come here, we have boobs.’
When those girls are then asked to cage-dance, or pole-dance (yes, I’ve seen both from booth babes), the connection between the girl and the product becomes even more tenuous. Unless you’re selling Duke Nukem, it is unlikely a pole-dancing girl in skimpy fatigues is at all representative of the game you’re selling.
My contention, then, is that EA’s crime is not that they objectified women. Our whole fucking industry did that a long time ago. It’s that they made it so obvious and so indefensible. EA’s campaign opened the door and showed the world the seedy bullshit happening in the back room, with no pretense and no hand-waving marketing bullshit about ’sex sells’. They asked participants to do exactly what they were going to do anyway: harass the models whose sole marketing purpose was to be harassed.
I don’t blame EA. What they did is about the same level as the person who loudly announces that someone farted: we all knew it, but nobody was saying it, and EA didn’t cut the fart, anyway.
I blame our industry. I blame the person who put the giant fucking titties on the box art for my game. I blame the people who hire desperate models (and if there is any other kind in Los Angeles, I’ve never met them) and ask them to be, effectively, whores for a day. I blame the attitudes towards women that have consistently reinforced our industry’s status as a boys’ club, while all the while we wring our hands and fret about how to bring more women into our games. I blame the people who harassed Jade Raymond in abusive and intolerable ways because she had the gall to be an attractive woman as well as the producer for a successful console title.
EA didn’t do this. All they did was put it out in the open, and made it so we could no longer pretend it wasn’t fucking everywhere in our industry.