The Hypocrisy Surrounding Bewbs
This is apparently not an encounter most people would enjoy.
There has been a lot of hubbub recently concerning the depiction of naked female boobage in the recently released MMO Age of Conan. U.S. gamers fought to keep the nipples in the game, but now it appears they don’t want to actually see them. What gives?
I recently received a copy of Age of Conan (thanks Zungre!) and immediately made a female character to check out what the big deal is. In respectable fashion, I named my avatar Bewbs. The character starts the game in essentially a swimsuit, and that’s just not my style so I took it off.
I ran through the little starter area topless, picking up loin cloths, weapons, gold teeth, and a few chest pieces which I refused to wear. That’s just not how Bewbs rolls. I finally make it to the first little multiplayer hub, the city of Tortage, and find myself assaulted by a good number of people who are apparently not happy to see Bewbs.
The first player to talk to me in the game called me a dumbass. I asked him why I was a dumbass and he said it was because I was topless. See the following screenshot for a brief snippet of our conversation:
I obviously blurred out the irrelevant “New Player” chat channel, and I thought about blurring out this dude’s name to protect the stupid, but you know what? Fuck that guy.
I asked him if he knew anything about the Conan universe and he didn’t respond. I asked him how old he was and he didn’t respond. I asked him why he was playing an M-rated game if he didn’t want to see boobs. He responded, finally, and said that he likes M-rated games for the violence, and he prefers this game over World of Warcraft because of the blood and dismemberment.
Here we go again… Why is it that people are okay with chopping off heads, but seeing some titties bothers them? Doesn’t that seem backwards? After the nerd outcry on the AoC forums at the thought of removing boobs from the U.S. version, we Freedom Fries-eating gamers got our way. After all of that, however, we are apparently not happy to see the nipples we fought so hard to keep.
After I thought about this, I began to wonder why this is occurring. Why do WoW gamers get upset when they see an elf dancing on a mailbox in her underwear? Why now do people yell at me for having my fun-bags out? To be honest, I have no answer to these questions.
It’s obvious that the women of AoC go topless quite often, or at the very least they don’t wear bras. You can see evidence of this in the lack of tanlines and the overall low-set positioning of their boobs. Those puppies are apparently not very often supported.
After running around the town for a little while, I noticed something else: I was the only female player character. I sat at the entrance to the town for a good 15 minutes, watching as people came in and left, waiting for another pair of boobs. I never saw them. Every other player character that I noticed during my playtime so far has been male.
So what’s the deal here? What is going on with this community of gamers? I read recently that the character animations for females supposedly take 25% longer, which means they attack 25% slower and do 25% less damage in the same amount of time compared to the men. This has yet to be officially confirmed, but FunCom is “looking into it”.
Could this be the reason there are no females, or is there something decidedly more sexist going on? Do people not want to roll a chick because they are “inferior”, because they don’t want people to ask to see their boobs, or is it because they want to roleplay as a man and get the chicks as opposed to playing as one?
My character doesn’t wear a top because I choose not to, not that it would do much good anyways since I’m a magic-user that can only equip cloth armor. I would much rather just distract my enemies with my awesome tits. This is an option, by design, that FunCom put in the game, so why does anyone care if I’m exposed, and why the fuck are these people playing a Conan game if they don’t want to see naked breasts!? Conan, by definition, means “topless”, both men and women. Conan without boobs is like Batman without a batsuit.
What do you think about Age of Conan’s boobs? What about sex in games in general? Do you think Microsoft will allow boobs in the Xbox 360 version of the game, and given this experience, do you think it even matters?
