Welcome to another Wednesday! Brenda is traveling, so I’m still your substitute. Curious about the world of games? I have the answers for you.
We here at Women Write About Comics, Games Edition know that women are gamers. In fact, just as many gamers are women as men. However, Ubisoft, creator of the successful franchises Assassin’s Creed, Just Dance, Rayman and so much more, apparently did not get the memo. Perhaps this is unsurprising as the Assassin’s Creed developers are the ones who claimed that their games didn’t include women because they are “too difficult to animate.” And, as Gizmodo reports, “The company’s been embroiled in sexism rows in the past, with Alex Hutchinson once explaining that female characters were left out of Far Cry 4’s co-op multiplayer mode because of ‘a workload issue.‘” Now they have thrown salt in the wounds with their recent “Gamer Survey.”
The first question of their survey, available to gamers of all kinds, asks for your gender. If “female” (and the only options are female or male) is selected, you are disqualified from the rest of the survey. Not only does Ubisoft want to exclude female characters, they don’t care to hear from their female fans (or fans of other genders) at all. They have since claimed that this was an error, and not an intentional exclusion, but in the context of their history with women this is not something to be brushed under the rug.
Onto other, less sexist, news:
The Portable Gaming System (PGS) is taking a risk when other handheld devices are beginning to drown in the wake of mobile phone gaming success. Currently this indie entry into the gaming hardware world that claims to be able to play PC games is planned for March 2017 and has raised almost twice the requested amount on Kickstarter.
Speaking of handheld devices, Minecraft gamers are at some ingenious work again. Youtuber Reqaug built a functioning Game Boy Advance inside the world-building game, and it can actually play Pokemon FireRed. Well, mostly.
While the PGS is doing well on Kickstarter, board games are enjoying far more success than digital games on the crowd-funding platform:
“Digital games are, all things considered, a small slice of the game funding pie on Kickstarter. Though they generated $41.3m in funding on the platform last year, table top games generated $84.6m.”
Players of the MMO PlanetSide watched as their digital world ended, in a shower of meteors. You too can experience the apocalypse in this fan video (some “fan” language makes this less than safe for work):
Next month, Cologne will host the Third Annual European Innovative Games Showcase at GDC Europe. They announced on the 1st of July just what you can expect from this portion of the Independent Games Summit and Gamasutra has the details for you.
I’ll leave you on a positive note: XBox avatar wheelchair users are headed your way soon!
Until next week, happy gaming!
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