Entertainment
War Between Knights Becomes A Battle Over Whether Women Should Be Attractive
By Jennifer Asencio
| Published
Two RPGs set in the medieval era were recently announced. However, the games couldn’t be more different from each other: one is a classic story about knights, and the other is about a lesbian “knight.” Fans and even the social media teams of both games have been debating whether and why women in video games should be attractive, a debate that began over a decade ago with the Gamergate incident.
A Knight’s Path is advertised as the classic story of a young man’s quest to become a knight. The game is set to focus on combat styles, with emphasis on weapons and armor. However, it is also an RPG, which means establishing different types of relationships with various in-world characters. Along the way, the playable character can meet romanceable NPCs, one of whom is Amelie, a conventionally attractive young woman.
When the X account for A Knight’s Path posted a screenshot of Amelie, a user expressed a “hope” about “LGBQT representation” within the game’s 16th-century chivalric setting. The Knight’s Path account answered, “We care about gaming and fun, not modern agendas.”
Representing the modern agenda is 1348: Ex Voto. Their game is about a lesbian knight, Aeta, with a monk’s bowl-shaped haircut, on a quest to rescue her “closest one,” a girlfriend named Bianca. Other than fairly average graphics, all that’s really been talked about with relation to this game is the lesbian romance at the heart of its 14th-century-inspired setting. In response to A Knight’s Path, the social media account for Ex Voto asked that players put the release date for the game on their “modern agendas.”
Fans of modern agendas immediately went into an uproar, falsely accusing A Knight’s Path of using AI and being homophobic. Two camps emerged from detractors of A Knight’s Path.
It’s A Visual Medium, The Battle Over Attractive Characters
One camp has been spending a lot of time retconning history to justify the gratuitous inclusion of presentist characters. This includes all the usual lines we’ve been hearing since Gamergate about inclusion in video games and how people want to see themselves “represented” among their characters. These protests borrow the Gamergate tactic of dismissing all defense of the game as mere bigotry to be ignored.
The other is wondering about the motives of people who want to see attractive characters in video games. The prevailing logic with this group is that gamers only want to see attractive characters so they can be sexually aroused. This is also a direct result of Gamergate, which slammed gamers who wanted attractive characters as incels and misogynists, ignoring the fact that female gamers like to look at pretty things, too.
The idea that sex is a motivator for video game players also ignores decades of strong female characters like Tifa, Lara Croft, Jill Valentine, Commander Shepard, and Samus. The same people crying “misogyny” about A Knight’s Path are projecting the qualities of these strong females onto Ex Voto, but somehow think that Aeta’s deliberate ugliness makes her better because she’s not there to be a sex symbol.
Neither were the others. What made them alluring was their capabilities. That they were fun to look at was also important, though, because video games are a visual medium. It’s right there in the name.
Gamers Run Away From Ugly Inclusivity
Ever since Gamergate, there has been an activist push to make video games “more inclusive.” What this has actually meant is that any time an American video game is released that dares to tell a traditional story, it gets decried as bigoted: homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic, colonialist, or white supremacist. Games with artificial inclusion, like 1348: Ex Voto get uplifted as kinder and “more realistic.”
But even Aeta’s ugliness is not within the realm of realism, medieval lesbianism aside. Her appearance bears more resemblance to a monk of the early Italian Renaissance, not a knight or squire. This detail points to yet another deliberate attempt to subvert beauty standards that have existed for thousands of years because some people are offended that beauty exists.
Gamers seem to agree. In just a few short weeks since the games were released on Steam, A Knight’s Path has overwhelmed Ex Voto for interest and activity, with three times as many followers.
The game’s social media account even asked its followers what types of female characters they liked to look at. Would you believe that “bombshell” only garnered 14 percent of the votes? Most voters (in an admittedly small pool of 540) chose attractive or average characters. People don’t want porn stars in their video games, but they don’t want deliberately ugly characters, either. To reiterate: it’s a visual medium. Even ugly characters must be nice to look at to sell a game.
There’s Room For Everyone, But Activists Won’t Allow It
There’s nothing wrong with inclusion in games. Ex Voto could wind up being really great gameplay. It is obviously appealing to some portion of the gaming audience. Fans of unattractive lesbians in a fantasy medieval setting should be able to have games for them. There’s nothing wrong with that.
However, what the artificial inclusion endorsed by activist gamers means is that games like A Knight’s Path shouldn’t exist. Their protests include accusations of -isms and -phobias that associate people who prefer games like A Knight’s Path with hate speech and sexual violence. This goes beyond merely panning a game because you don’t like its characters; it’s an attack on the core fanbase of video gaming, which is still predominantly young white males. This audience deserves video games, too, even if the demographic isn’t particularly popular among the activist class.
In a world that was truly inclusive, A Knight’s Path and Ex Voto could exist side by side, and everyone’s inclusivity needs would be satisfied. However, fans of each game live in two different worlds: one that recognizes its core audience and creates games for it, and one that panders to activism and thinks the core audience is literally evil. The gaming market favors the core audience, though, so if Ex Voto doesn’t live up to the hype, prepare for more bashing of gamers as hateful people who caused its failure rather than acknowledgement that the game was made by and for a niche audience.
Both games are available for preorder on Steam and can be added to whatever agenda you prefer.