Neoriceisgood
Member
Is this the thread to ask questions that the video outright answers?
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Are Women Too Hard To Animate? Tropes vs Women in Video Games
- Thread starter lightskintwin
- Start date
It's an Anita Sarkeesian thread, so it's basically tradition at this point.
It's like a non-ironic version of a PBF comic thread.
Neoriceisgood
Member
I'm offended by Anita implying magical hotdogs not being real.
They arent harder to animate, but if you dont want them to just share the male animations, it doubles the amount of work. If you think about a series like AC, the animation is tied to the gameplay in such a direct way, and the animation system is one of the most complex in recent years, I can see how after a while their animation system becomes like a house of cards, and the idea of adding anything to it would be enough to make even the most seasoned TD cry.(I'm an animator too 
)
I've always wondered if it was something that was just lost in translation, an animation director hears the idea, and laughs thinking "We dont have the time for that no way, its way too hard" and Marketing hears that as "Its way too hard" next thing you know you have an international incident on your hands.
Just my 2 cents
)I've always wondered if it was something that was just lost in translation, an animation director hears the idea, and laughs thinking "We dont have the time for that no way, its way too hard" and Marketing hears that as "Its way too hard" next thing you know you have an international incident on your hands.
Just my 2 cents
I think Anita might hate Metal Gear. Just a feeling.
As always, pretty good video and agreed on everything. I find it ridiculous that someone used "women are not believeable in games" as a reason.
Ubisoft loves to make jokes. Just like the "30FPS is more cinematic" joke.
No, but seriously, that photograph section where the females will pose for you. SMH...
As always, pretty good video and agreed on everything. I find it ridiculous that someone used "women are not believeable in games" as a reason.
Ubisoft loves to make jokes. Just like the "30FPS is more cinematic" joke.
Orochinagis
Member
^But Ubi already do that in Brotherhood with the female assassins you recruit first as a normal female npc and later sharing the male assasion moveset and MP the females have the same moveset as the males
If I remember correctly tho, they only run in from off screen and stab a guy and fight then run away. If they were doing actual parkour it would probably look odd. They could probably get away with sharing animation, but I can see why they wouldnt want to
Maybe it's just me. But I think my point is not clear.
Let be more understanding.
Let's take two similar bodies (Fit).
Women usually have longer hair than men.
If you're going to animate both of then, then the girl will be more difficult because of her hair.
Once again, 'two similar bodie.' Like you two said, it all depends on what you're making.
If both have the same hair length, then its the same. But keeping in mind that women overall have longer and bigger chest, then it makes the task a bit more difficult, even if it's 15 minutes more of work. It's not a BIG margin. Just slightly.
But in my experience, if you take two similar bodies, usually the girl is a bit more difficult because of what I mentioned before.
But it also depends on the person too I believe. I'm very perfectionist when it comes to this little details.
What was her response to this? Is she ok with this?
SlimySnake
Flashless at the Golden Globes
lol those are some really good examples. wtf game developers. you perverts.
molnizzle
Member
She explains how having generic female enemies alongside generic male enemies is completely different than targeting specific female enemies just because they are female. She's okay with former but obviously not the latter. She gives examples of games that did it well (AC Syndicate and BioShock Infinite) and games that did it poorly. She thinks it's a good thing when done correctly.
A fair answer.
The devs never said that, though. What they said is they don't have resources (Essentially time and money) to implement a female playable character, which is entirely reasonable. There's no character selection, at any point, in AC: Unity. From Wikipedia:
Asking for there to be a female character option in Unity is no different from asking for a gender option in Uncharted. It would literally mean doing all the animations, gear and cutscenes twice. It could also mean script changes, as some characters might react differently to the protagonist based on gender. At least, they would have to record all dialogue with gendered pronouns twice.
The mundane realities of budget-constrained game dev don't make for sexy hashtags, though.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
Is it really that hard to watch a 7 min video, video which is the subject of this thread, before posting?
This is the most even-handed video Feminist Frequency have made. It's really fantastic. They actually mention positive examples and shoot down facetious fake-feminist arguments.
It's still clear Anita is just reading an autocue though and I still don't think she understands much of what she's talking about. Just based on the terrible arguments in her first videos and the monotonous tone she uses when riffing off examples.
She clearly legit gets the stuff about feminist theory though. She gets a bit more animated and her tone of voice picks up when she's talking about the philosophy.
Lol @ dat natural stance
Um
It's still clear Anita is just reading an autocue though and I still don't think she understands much of what she's talking about. Just based on the terrible arguments in her first videos and the monotonous tone she uses when riffing off examples.
She clearly legit gets the stuff about feminist theory though. She gets a bit more animated and her tone of voice picks up when she's talking about the philosophy.
I know the game turned out rather poorly but that didn't lesson my disappointed when I loaded up Brink on my PS3 for the first time and found the character creator only had a male option. At first I thought, ok, they didn't have the budget for multiple animations of the player character and then I see that the character creator had 3 different body type options.
So they had no problem with going in and animating multiple body type animations but only for men.
Also I REALLY dislike when a game has a female soldier or mercenary type and her animation is more buxom beauty and coquettish than someone who looks hard and strong (yes it's fine to have both but women are not given the strong variety very often)
See also: Femshep's unnecessary toothpick arms. Like please don't shy away from giving female soldier or merc type characters some muscles.
I have faith they will do a lot better with Mass Effect: Andromeda but I still disliked this image they released last year. I believe it's supposed to be a design of the male and female Ryder and well the female soldier's armour looks legit and awesome like the male's, I was annoyed they had her in this stance.
Why can't women stand strong like the men are allowed to do in games. Why does she have to have her hip cocked out and butt at an angle so her curves are drawn to be in full view, accentuating her femininity. Because god forbid a game is made with a female soldier where her femininity isn't accentuated
Lol @ dat natural stance
Um
WTF
Tropes are patterns in culture, or patterns in meaning. 'Women are too hard to animate' was a sentiment harped by at least two developers which spun into a large-scale hashtag echoed and propagated by thousands of people.
Hence: A pattern in meaning. Hence: A trope.
(For the record I actually disagree with some of what Anita says about this: in AC Unity every character is Arno, who had tens upon tens of hi-res weapons and items - adding another character would have meant an insane boost in workload, whether that character was female or not. The devs answered the challenge really badly and caused the whole debacle.)
It's a referential title of an observational video, not the title of an academic paper laying out the precise theme in objective terms.
I think I disagree somewhat with her last point. There are games where having large numbers of female enemies would be inappropriate to the setting - largely the ones that deal with historical or current regular militaries. And when you deal with more sci-fi and fantasy it seems like enemy female combatants are increasingly routine.
If it is, then you can always read the transcript https://feministfrequency.com/2016/07/27/are-women-too-hard-to-animate-female-combatants/#more-37820
If it is, then you can always read the transcript https://feministfrequency.com/2016/07/27/are-women-too-hard-to-animate-female-combatants/#more-37820
I know the game turned out rather poorly but that didn't lesson my disappointed when I loaded up Brink on my PS3 for the first time and found the character creator only had a male option. At first I thought, ok, they didn't have the budget for multiple animations of the player character and then I see that the character creator had 3 different body type options.
So they had no problem with going in and animating multiple body type animations but only for men.
Also I REALLY dislike when a game has a female soldier or mercenary type and her animation is more buxom beauty and coquettish than someone who looks hard and strong (yes it's fine to have both but women are not given the strong variety very often)
See also: Femshep's unnecessary toothpick arms. Like please don't shy away from giving female soldier or merc type characters some muscles.
I have faith they will do a lot better with Mass Effect: Andromeda but I still disliked this image they released last year. I believe it's supposed to be a design of the male and female Ryder and well the female soldier's armour looks legit and awesome like the male's, I was annoyed they had her in this stance.
Why can't women stand strong like the men are allowed to do in games. Why does she have to have her hip cocked out and butt at an angle so her curves are drawn to be in full view, accentuating her femininity. Because god forbid a game is made with a female soldier where her femininity isn't accentuated
What? You don't check your watch like this:
I do this all the time, especially in public or when I'm on an exploratory mission in a new galaxy
molnizzle
Member
What? You don't check your watch like this:
I do this all the time, especially in public or when I'm on an exploratory mission in a new galaxy
Can confirm, my wife is commander of an intergalactic military cruiser and this is exactly how she checks the time.
Yeah but this is a basic issue with any sort of game dev. You make choices.
Hair is a complete bitch to get right in computer graphics. Hence we got a bunch of bald space marines. But you can give women close-cropped hairstyles too.
I don't see how you can argue that it's innately more difficult to model women than men, because the pipeline is the exact same. Now, in most situations to make it look good it probably does mean more work. I can see the argument that having multiple genders for certain enemies, et al is extraneous and should be cut when it comes to actually shipping a game. But then the response is, "well, we didn't think it was a good use of our time." You'll probably get some people angry at you, but it's at least an honest answer instead of "it's soo hard!"
Orochinagis
Member
Eh, still the female looks defenseless compared to the male.
And less armor , the male looks like a tank with that extra chest piece, knee pads and proper armor shoulders
How so? Both sexes can wear the same armors (they don't even do that weird thing of changing the same armors slightly depending on the sex), and both have the same movesets and actions/attacks/evasions. They stand the same way, too. Walking is the only real difference (and voice).
In a game like Dark Souls, animations changing mechanics depending on gender would be a problem, the mechanics gotta be set in stone across the board in the game for pvp.
If resources are being spent in a way that reinforces shitty stereotypes then it isn't entirely reasonable and publishers should rightly be called out on it. This is like whining that you spent a ton of money animating racist caricatures in pre-civil rights era cartoons but people are complaining about them now.
Why should people tolerate these mistakes just because they claim it's expensive to fix them? These companies are charging $60 +$40 for a season pass and whining about animation budgets.
Alex_Mexico
Member
Wow this was really good, I remember watching one of these videos and being a bit put off by some of the broad strokes which they painted and reaches on examples that they were using, this however seem very fair and balanced and if anything could have used more examples.
It's strange that i didn't even remember there being female guards on Bioshock infinite I guess that's a testament to equality?
It's strange that i didn't even remember there being female guards on Bioshock infinite I guess that's a testament to equality?
Trigonometrize.
Member
The only thing the video seems to argue that I disagree with is the realism point. Sure, a lot of the time it's ridiculous that there's so many unrealistic qualities to a specific game but then when women turn up suddenly it's super important to stay grounded. However, this I don't think it should be a rule that one instance of something unrealistic in a game automatically makes every other instance of attempts at realism void. Like, having an inventory that holds infinite items does not clash with not fighting against female combatants in an American Civil War game let's say. Those are very different elements of the game that don't necessarily need to be on the same page in terms of realism at all times. Like I said though, I'm not sure if this is exactly what the video was arguing since not a whole ton of time was spent.
Everything else was on point, except for pronunciation of you-bisoft, heh.
Everything else was on point, except for pronunciation of you-bisoft, heh.
I dont remember which dev said it but it was something along the lines of:
"The outrage about no female grunt enemies is less than the outrage about killing female grunts, so we dont include female grunts."
Even if Anita is fine with shooting female grunts without an agenda (equal opportunity genderwise), still many people are up in arms about it.
"The outrage about no female grunt enemies is less than the outrage about killing female grunts, so we dont include female grunts."
Even if Anita is fine with shooting female grunts without an agenda (equal opportunity genderwise), still many people are up in arms about it.
chillybright
Banned
So from what I gathered the quote "women are too hard to animate" was maybe mentioned only once in the video game industry (AC dev) a few years ago, and some say they didn't even said that.
I wonder is that what we call "trope" now?
If we take a step back and say the AC dev actually gave this BS quote, is it really the case in this day and age, or even in any point of video game history (or industry that require animation in general)? Because in my memory even in the 90s both genders were fantastically animated in a lot of genres of games, in both 2d sprites and 3d models.
I wonder is that what we call "trope" now?
If we take a step back and say the AC dev actually gave this BS quote, is it really the case in this day and age, or even in any point of video game history (or industry that require animation in general)? Because in my memory even in the 90s both genders were fantastically animated in a lot of genres of games, in both 2d sprites and 3d models.
Great video!
Nothing to add really it stands on its own really well.
Ubi excuses for Unity was BS especially considering that they were providing a shitload of different assassins male and female before in multi and apparently it didn't cost them to much to do that before.
The issue could be that the the coop means that story parts need to take into account male/female choice and whatever but that just means the game was badly designed.
Who makes an assassin story set in the French Revolution and utterly forgets that there was awesome female killers.
And they're a French company to boot, utter disgrace.
And if you want to talk shit about how the quote is out of context or whatever do your research.
this took me 5 seconds on Google :
http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/11/5801330/far-cry-4-women-ubisoft
Nothing to add really it stands on its own really well.
Ubi excuses for Unity was BS especially considering that they were providing a shitload of different assassins male and female before in multi and apparently it didn't cost them to much to do that before.
The issue could be that the the coop means that story parts need to take into account male/female choice and whatever but that just means the game was badly designed.
Who makes an assassin story set in the French Revolution and utterly forgets that there was awesome female killers.
And they're a French company to boot, utter disgrace.
And if you want to talk shit about how the quote is out of context or whatever do your research.
this took me 5 seconds on Google :
http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/11/5801330/far-cry-4-women-ubisoft
I am all for Fem Freq and this stuff in general, but just hearing people talk about "How hard it is to animate a woman" usually ticks me off.. Game development is a varied place, rarely are two games made in the same way. Of course you *could* set up your game to have males and females on the same rig and share animations, but not everything is that simple, in a worst case, adding females to your game can cause over double the amount of time making assets.
Having a male protagonist is not a mistake, nor does it reinforce any stereotypes by itself. It's a creative choice developers are free to make. Your comparison to racist cartoons is absurd.
Just so that everyone knows what they're talking about the hashtag was correct about Ubi's position :
You can claim whatever you want but this is what someone at Ubisoft in a leadership position said.
Alex Amancio at Ubisoft claimed that it was too much work to retrofit female assassins in the game because the animation and the designs, voices would have to be double of what they are.
You can claim whatever you want but this is what someone at Ubisoft in a leadership position said.
D
Deleted member 126221
Unconfirmed Member
You don't have a source on your quote, and that dev probably didn't have a source for his "outrage" claim either. Instead constantly bringing up this vague "but some undescribed people will get upset!" boogeyman, how about supporting it with facts?
Why not just use the male animations?
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
No, and no. Dark Souls and Bloodborne are probably the most egalitarian games ever, lol
Or even reuse/improve the work done at Ubi Annecy?
It's not like they didn't reuse stuffs from Anvil Next to that 2.0 version they had running for Unity.
John Kowalski
Banned
About to watch the video but man goddamn that description is like the most nondescript you can be about an FF video.
Female center of gravity is slightly different from a male's. Also different joint limitations
meltingparappa
Member
From the first page: (different game, but you get the idea)
It could have potentially looked terrible, if not planned ahead of time.
It IS a considerable amount of work and money to try and retrofit assets onto a new mesh, but the bigger point is when the a new Assassin's Creed is being initially mapped out, a huge amount of time and money gets allotted into developing something along the lines of another arbitrary stupid minigame rather than something as basic as the existence of basic female characters.
They are free to make these choices and we are free to call them out. And it absolutely reinforces stereotypes when a 4 player co-op game in a series that claims to represent historical periods completely sidelines the presence of women in active roles (since, you know, women existed in history and did things). That has nothing to do with "creative choice" but simply an ingrained ignorance of female representation that has been too common in the industry.
Morrigan Stark
Arrogant Smirk
To be fair, that's a really awful male animation too, lol.From the first page: (different game, but you get the idea)
Yeah, but re targeting the animations to the skeleton of a female model would still work fine. Despite the slight differences men and women move very alike and it is unlikely to look odd. and if it does then perhaps devs should strive to make their animations a bit more gender neutral.
From the first page: (different game, but you get the idea)
It could have potentially looked terrible, if not planned ahead of time.
It IS a considerable amount of work and money to try and retrofit assets onto a new mesh, but the bigger point is when the a new Assassin's Creed is being initially mapped out, a huge amount of time and money gets allotted into developing something along the lines of another arbitrary stupid minigame rather than something as basic as the existence of basic female characters.
i echo the sentiment that that specific animation looks odd on any character model
But actually if they skin the skeleton that the animations use to a different mesh then most animations should just work (all their humanoid models will likely share the same skeleton anyway). But I agree its best to do it from scratch with both models in mind. and developers should really make it a lock in from day 0.