Women in video games has been a hot-button topic over the past few months. With Anita Sarkeesian’s Damsels in Distress series, the heated reactions to Sarkeesian, panels about the topic at major conventions, and not to mention a few horrifying infographics about the industry, there has already been a lot of attention. Now, the European gaming magazine Gamereactor has added fuel to the fire by removing Ellie, the female lead of The Last of Us, from the poster art.
Hey Gamereactor, appreciate the coverage, but is there a reason why you removed Ellie from the cover we provided? http://t.co/jG3vsX6BG4
— Neil Druckmann (@Neil_Druckmann) June 18, 2013
Lead Designer of The Last of Us (and Uncharted 2), Neil Druckmann, tweeted this pointed remark last night in response to some very suspicious photoshopping. Here’s the original art:
Compare this to the picture of the front page of the issue (at the top of this page). Pretty remarkable, isn’t it? According to James Stevenson, the Community Director and Marketing Lead for Insomniac Games, magazines altering covers is nothing new.
@neil_druckmann cause they are Europe. Hell, once Official PS Mag in the US removed two of our characters from a cover we sent them
— James Stevenson (@JamesStevenson) June 18, 2013
I looked into this matter, but I couldn’t dig up which game Stevenson was referring too. I have a suspicion that it was the game FUSE, which had received flak for this Charlie’s Angels-esq poster back when it was still called OverStrike.
Gamereactor has yet to issue a formal response about the photoshopped cover, but some readers claim the magazine offered several variations of The Last of Us artwork to vote on. This still does not explain why she was removed in the first place. The photoshopped cover features only the male protagonist and the lack of Ellie removes a sense of tension and urgency from the art. The original art is what we call a full composition: the characters, scene, props, situation, everything, is combined by the artists in a very particular way to create one single powerful image.
A picture is worth a thousand words and the original artwork speaks volumes.
Every character is sacred
Even if you aren’t pissed off about the gender issue, you can at least realize how insulting this is to the artists on the creative team.
Ellie is not just a female any female video game character, she happens to be about 50% of the game. This is the equivalent of removing Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite or Cortana from Halo.
Scrubbing away the female audience with photoshop
Whether or not this is simply a contest from Gamereactor, the act still stands as it is. With the current climate of opinions regarding women and gaming, this is a silly thing to do and will provoke an offended response.
I am shocked that so many people fail to realize how large of a presence women have in the gaming world. Just look at GameSkinny, for example, and how many of our top writers are female. At almost every gaming journalism website, there is a large number of female writers.
At PAX East the Marketing Directors for The Elder Scrolls held a panel and answered a few questions about how they marketed Skyrim. The questions eventually acknowledged the fact Skyrim has a surprisingly large female player-base. I forget who exactly on the panel said this, but I do remember these words clearly:
“We didn’t market the game to men or to women, we just marketed it to gamers. It doesn’t matter your gender, if you like fighting dragons you’re gunna want to play our game.”
