Here's another contest to boycott ladies. It is sexist, exploitative, and it has absolutely nothing with gamer skills. The game contest is designed for a male dominated target, and it has nothing to do with the Kane & Lynch game. Apparently there is no female role in the game at all.
Mail began to arrive immediately after this contest was announced. Female gamers as well as female game developers are sounding off on lists and in forums about the overall offensiveness and the whole premise of this particular contest and asked us at WG to bring this to the public. One writer says, “I honestly don't know what the hell Eidos/IGN were thinking when they set this up.”
Additionally the advertisement for the contest has a topless woman on it in a place where anyone can see it. She is topless and holding her ample assets in her hands. It's a softcore porno syle shot that you would expect on the cover of Playboy not on a game website. Images like that further engender the stereotypes that demean women to the next generation of boys. The next time people say ‘the industry does not objectify women’ we will point to that picture and this contest.
Not to mention the damaging imagery and expectations that this teaches girls. What should be focused on are gamer cred, artistic abilities, and writing skills. While the game industry lags behind others in employment for women, a treatment like this is unconscionable. Young women need to see encouragement about being interested in science and computers, not to take off their tops and answer a cattle call.
When major players like IGN (a gaming website that kids and families use) have it so wrong, the difficulty with the problem becomes how far the rabbit hole goes. Ignorant stunts like this take down IGN’s credibility as a gamer’s website yet another notch. One can only expect a non gamer website like Myspace to just go right along, because female gamers are not being represented properly even from within the industry. IGN is becoming nominally a game review site, as their conflicts of interest with advertising dollars increases scrutiny on its reviews.
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