After reading responses to his article on a female Assassin being introduced to Assassin’s Creed as an after measure to quell gamer backlash against gender bias in the franchise, Jay Borenstein has had another chance to think about the issues surrounding gender bias in gaming as it continues to make headlines across the internet:
Final Fantasy XV has been shaping up to be a quintessential road trip game about a gang of gentlemen who drive around questing for adventure. Ever since the game was showcased at TGS 2014, criticisms have been whirling around the internet regarding the party’s lack of a playable female character. Controversies surrounding gender bias in gaming are becoming more and more frequent, and just yesterday Ubisoft announced they were creating a DLC for Assassin’s Creed: Unity which allows you to play as a female Assassin after they experienced backlash for not including a playable female Assassin in the main game.
An IGN article published today stated that while Final Fantasy XV director Hajime Tabata defends former Final Fantasy XV director Tetsuya Nomura’s vision of a formative road trip between a group of young men, he admits that “it’s not healthy to have a bias in genders:”
“The party members being all men was something that [former director] Tetsuya Nomura had kept as a very important element of this journey. He wanted to depict a story in which a group of men, a group of friends, journey throughout the world. So that’s something that I kept in Final Fantasy XV.”
He reassured those concerned about the dynamics of the party that “there will be prominent women who make an appearance in the game.”
The main cast of Final Fantasy XV
What’s particularly interesting about Tabata’s comment about gender bias is that, while he clearly meant it in the sense that the party in Final Fantasy XV reflects a bias towards machismo, the “unhealthy nature of gender bias” could also apply to those who are overly preoccupied with the representation of gender in video games in the first place. Final Fantasy is a series that is well known for its strong female characters (Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII being one example), but in truth just because Tetsuya Nomura wanted to take a different direction with this game doesn’t mean it will become the new status quo for Final Fantasy.
So is all this uproar about lack of female representation in gaming necessary? As we mentioned, Final Fantasy has a great track record of including strong female characters (ignoring the blatant sexualization of its heroines in Final Fantasy X-2), whereas the Assassin’s Creed franchise up to this point has mostly missed out on the opportunity to include strong female leads in the franchise (we were reminded yesterday of Aveline from AC: Liberation). Ultimately, if the story of the male Assassins are the stories Ubisoft wants to focus on, then that’s the story they should tell. However, that should not stop those who feel unrepresented in video games from speaking up in a respectful manner as we well know that change can not occur without an issue being given a voice. What is a shame is when it turns into an all-out internet flame war.
Clearly there are people who are upset by gender representation in the industry, and while game developers certainly shouldn’t bow to pressure from those who shape their beliefs into an attack to alter their creative visions, the issue has become louder than ever, and game developers will certainly be taking notice. What’s nice about Tabata’s comment is that it reflects a calm, even judgement about the issue, that reminds us that sometimes our focus is a little too narrow. There is room for so many different types of stories in this world, and we need to be careful not to needlessly criticize people who give us entertainment purely because it doesn’t match our vision of what it ought to be.
[show_avatar email=2379 align=center show_name=true show_biography=true]