I’m generally pro-boobplate. I mean, I’m not going to go and slap a pair of DD knockers on a Pokemon or anything, but as my friend Scott once pointed out, “I just think it’s hilarious that you’ve been labelled a Social Justice Warrior when you pretty much are the staunch defender of the right of the male gamer to have funny thoughts while playing Bayonetta.” And that’s not to say that I insist on boobplate: I’m equally a fan of Batgirl’s new look. In fact, I freakin’ love it. I like a variety of characters, both male and female in my entertainment, and love great character design anywhere up and down the sexy spectrum. But still, I have no problems agreeing with a lot of Anita’s points, and yet still defending boobplate.

My logic is as follows:

The point of armor on a female character is not to be realistic or protect the wearer. It is simply to create a marketable character design that is evocative, memorable, easily identifiable and unique. If it’s a playable character, you want someone the player can identify with. If it’s an NPC, you want a character the player can love – or hate. Of course, if your game is about capturing realism, you may be more inclined to make your armor protective, but most games that are about realism end up missing the mark anyway. Note: if people can’t tell what game your art is from by looking at it, you’re doing it wrong, so don’t just copy someone else’s character design. Still, say what you will about the boob window, but Power Girl is INSTANTLY identifiable and marketable.

The female presence needs to be visible and audible, or your efforts at diversity won’t be noticed. I’m really not a big fan of when studios dress the females to be so much like the males you can’t even tell the difference. Having more female presence in games is good, especially if they are in roles that are roles of action and power, but if you can’t tell that they’re a woman from your game’s standard gun range, all that subtlety is lost and the feminine presence isn’t felt. It’s completely possible to feminize a character and still not make her less badass. Accentuating the curves and showing skin is one way to do that.

I find the matter to be one of choice. If possible, one should give the player to choose to go full-slave girl Leia, or full diplomat Leia. People should not feel uncomfortable playing a video game. However, I think some critics underestimate how much many women WANT to feel sexy – some feel like a sexuallized object in a bikini, while others see playing Bayonetta as inherently empowering, since she is effectively a femme fatale in complete control of herself and her effect on men. I’m not going to pretend to tell a woman how she SHOULD feel – that’s doomed to fail. Still, the fact that some women enjoy feeling sexy can be seen in the popularity of Cosmo, and the number of sexy vs. non-sexy cosplayer women you see at Comiccon.

I consider myself personally very sex-positive, and have no problems with men and women who are sex-positive finding this stuff in their entertainment. Which is to say, I like bewbs. This may bias me.

So I have my point of view. Still, I know that a lot of people that have differing opinions – and I respect that. A lot of women don’t want to look like whores, and a lot of parents don’t want their little girls to do so either. One of my huge victories on the SWTOR team was fighting for the ability to ‘mod’ almost any piece of gear, so that men and women could dress up however they wanted without worrying about statistical impact, and made ’em work a little bit to get the sexy stuff – you aren’t going to accidentally look like a harem girl. I think that giving players the choice to make this highly personal decision of how supercharged the sexuality of the character they are playing is really important. Even moreso in social games like MMOs. I fought hard to get both bikinis into SWTOR for the ladies, and then speedos in for the men – after there was a huge outcry for it. (much larger an outcry, I note, than outrage over Leia bikinis being everywhere).

But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what I think. It also doesn’t matter what Anita thinks. It matters what the players think. If they don’t like the game, they don’t shell out their hard earned dollars. Some audiences love teh sexy. Some really don’t. And a whole lot don’t really give a crap one way or the other.

All of this is merely a preamble meant to point out that I’m not being either a puritan or a prude when I point out this piece “Save the Boob-Plate!” by Orogion. This piece was pointed out to me as a counterargument to my piece “My Artistic Freedom is Fine, Thank You.” But it’s not a very good counterargument. It is, in fact, a very silly piece.

Our kickstarter campaign for Divinity: Original Sin has gotten quite some criticism on its original poster art. Apparently it was deemed to be sexistic and women unfriendly by the way the female protagonist was portrayed: with a bare belly. A bare belly was for some enough a trigger to send our company enough hate and threatening mails to persuade my boss to ask me to change the cover. I did, but did so reluctantly. Disagreeing wholeheartedly with the claim of the artwork being sexistic, the better half of me decided to meet “offended-by-design” people somewhere in the middle.

So here’s why I cry bullshit.

1) He’s just talking about the cover art. Seriously, I bought the game -despite the fact that it has no boobplate! I was sad because I like boobplate! But it turns out my gnashing of teeth was for naught. Because there, right there in character creation, was teh boobplate! Clearly, this horrible censorship only extended to the web art. You know, the bullshit marketing material game devs use in order to get the ACTUAL art into player’s hands.

2) You know who told him to change the art? His boss. If I had a dollar for every time my boss told me to do something stupid (including, I might add, more than once making breasts BIGGER or outfits SKIMPIER) — well, I wouldn’t need a boss anymore. But here’s the thing: I’m not building my vision. I’m building HIS vision. And ultimately, the boss’ job is to know the whole product and own and defend that vision, including not just art but also things like business realities (see below), license pressures, publisher demands, CEO pressures, technical limitations, and where you want the studio to be positioned in the future. Plenty of bosses ignore that pressure, and say ‘fuck it! Let’s go watermelon-sized!’. In this case, the game was being kickstarted, which means the boss had to care very much about delivering a game that people were willing to kick money into prelaunch.

Incidentally, young people hoping to break into the industry should note that this could definitely be read as calling your boss out as a pussy for caving and making a stupid decision based on an angry mob. This is trending close to ‘career limiting’ territory. Just saying.

3. And the boss wasn’t reacting to the media. He was reacting to his market.

I tried googling every combination I could think of of ‘divinity’, ‘kickstarter’, ‘announcement’, ‘sexist’ and ‘women’. The number of JOURNALISTS I found who mentioned this: zero. Hey, maybe I missed one. What struck me more was how few sites announced the game at all. Which goes to the point I made last weekend: the real problem with the games press is how much it sucks to be one of the small guys. And here’s the secret: it really doesn’t matter if the press says it, because even if the press notices it, a new shiny object will come along the next day and they’ll report that. It only really matters if the player base objects.

And I *DID* find a fair amount of player discussion about it. Not a lot, just comments here and there about how the original art made them feel uncomfortable, or how they appreciated the new art based on factors like realism. I didn’t really see any ‘hate’ — well, except from the people who were angry they changed. Now granted, I can’t see the ‘hate mail’ described by Orogion, but sheesh, I can’t even begin to tell you how much free game design advice I’ve gotten from fans, some quite angry, in my time working on Shadowbane and SWTOR. Much of the time it’s very contradictory. We have a lot of people who want more same sex romance in SWTOR, and we have a lot of people who don’t any of that stuff they consider icky in their games at all, for example. It’s up to the team leadership what core artistic vision and values to embrace, and which fan feedback to toss the curb – sometimes ignored, and sometimes with a nice note on the boards.

4. A lot of times, decisions like this are just corrections of myopia.

One of the things I don’t think most people realize just how often bad game design decisions just sneak through, just because we’re too close to the problem. We don’t SEE that we’ve made a mistake. One example is that, when we shipped SWTOR, we accidentally forgot to make the ‘Darth’ title achievable by the Sith Warrior player class. An incredibly stupid oversight caused by a junior designer and a writer who didn’t understand how much this would seem like it was obviously missing.

The value of Anita’s videos is often in showing how unconscious, reactive decisions can have bigger ramifications than designers intend. Here’s an article about how Wonder Forge recently shipped a DC based game and simply forgot to include any women heroes or villians – including Wonder Woman! Wonder Forge responded admirably.

First off, let me just say that we screwed up, and everyone here knows it. It’s an internal regret for our team that we did not include female super heroes in the game. And it’s a personal regret because so many of us are parents of daughters, who understand firsthand the importance of developing playthings that are inclusive and convey to girls a sense that they can do or be anything. I myself am a mom of 3- and 4-year-old girls and I share your views 100%.

Which is to say, it’s FINE if you want to make a sausage factory for a game. But as a designer, it’s sure embarrassing to realize you did it by accident. And if the decision bugs fans, but doesn’t hurt the core integrity of the artistic vision, who gives a shit?

5. The article talks nothing about the LOADS of feedback we get going the other way.

Yep, we get that too. From people wanting a few more clothing options and bigger jugs, to people whose fantasies about their companion characters are a little more… let’s just say ‘rape-y’. Needless to say, a lot of these get discarded as not matching up with our core vision. But it’s not just press our players!

The more pernicious people are the guys who sign the checks. The Last of Us had to fight in order to keep Ellie on the cover. Sony pushed for it. They refused. Because of artistic integrity. In FAVOR of more diversity and inclusion. I hear the Last of Us still did okay.

Look, not every game should embrace full jiggle technology. If you’re making Maxim Online, then sure. If you’re making a Nora the Explorer game, not so much. And if you’re making something in the middle, there’s going to be a constant struggle trying to find the right path between your artistic vision, and ensuring that you meet the demands of a market. And the more expensive games get to make, the more frequently The Powers That Be will need to ensure that these games in the middle have boobplate levels that, at least, don’t alienate more customers than they bring in.

That’s not censorship. That’s capitalism.