Assassin’s Sexism?
Why the controversy over Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s male-only avatars is unfair, uninformed and ridiculous.
Controversy for the sake of controversy. It’s everywhere. Social media, entertainment, consumer products and most Fortune 500 companies. Whenever there’s a bright red hot-button to press about a sensationalized something or other, it’s only a matter of time before someone runs over to it to button-mash until the world takes notice.
And with the week of E3 2014 in the rearview, the superfluous need to button-mash a not-so controversial issue has once again taken hold of the gaming industry.
You probably heard that Ubisoft unveiled their long-awaited (okay, maybe not so long) successor to last year’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag at gaming’s preeminent expo. That game was Assassin’s Creed: Unity, and that game had a spectacular showing. True next-generation visuals, impressive technical feats involving 5,000 NPCs on-screen at once, unprecedented fluidity of player motion and to top it all off, a new four-player co-op mode. Everything went off without a hitch… until some of gaming’s major media outlets started channeling their inner NeoGAF thread to make an otherwise harmless design decision into an unconscionable crime.
The issue at hand, or so they say, is that Assassin’s Creed: Unity doesn’t allow players to use female avatars in these co-op romps due to the design workload that would tack onto an already ambitious and expansive experience. Sure, it’s not the most satisfying reason in the world, but Ubisoft’s follow-up response should have been more than enough to clarify the ordeal and put the issue to rest for good.
“Assassin’s Creed: Unity is focused on the story of the lead character, Arno. Whether playing by yourself or with the co-op Shared Experiences, you the gamer will always be playing as Arno.”
So for all intents and purposes, we are always the main character… who happens to be a man. Thus, pulling of the illusion of a playing alongside a female character (who is actually another Arno in the eyes the your co-op partner) would involve an unnecessary amount of new animations, recaptures and voice acting that wouldn’t quite fit the premise of everyone getting to play as the lead.
That’s what we call a design decision, people. And if you have a bone to pick with that, you probably have a bone to pick with just about every other game that was on the E3 2014 show-floor and don’t even know it.
Not every game wants to be the next Mass Effect to give players the option to create a male or female commander; and until we hear a studio step forward and say that they don’t make female lead protagonists because they think poorly of women, we need to think twice about highlighting a hot-button issue that isn’t there — especially when the franchise at the heart of this unwarranted controversy dedicated an entire game to a female protagonist before. So yes, this whole issue seems a bit bizarre.
Lets keep it real here. In the world of Assassins Creed, women have been represented quite well. As I mentioned before, we got the chance to play as a strong female lead in Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. However, it’s not like that was the first time women have been tastefully utilized in the series. In fact, not only have the games’ Assassins guilds been chock full of females, but females have also been central figures in the franchise’s present-day story arc for years now.
Look, I’m not oblivious to the fact that sexism still exists in the annals of gaming and throughout the world, but turning a real-life problem into click-bait to boost video game website traffic is a different matter entirely. If sexism was as prominent of an issue about Assassin’s Creed as certain journalists are making it out to be, Ubisoft would’ve shown those true colors a long, long time ago.
Watching these publications spark something out of nothing is nothing short of shameful, and the rising belief (based on those articles) within the community that Assassin’s Creed: Unity really is ‘pro-bro’ is even more disappointing. We’ve seen countless other video games objectify or flat-out exclude women within this medium of entertainment, but using an innocent game with an honest design decision as the punching bag isn’t the way we solve that problem. It’s pathetic, is what it is.
Written by: Pablo Laboy — Reviewer & Columnist for Rendr.us
