I don’t think anyone will be shocked if I say that the world of video games and gamers is full of people you wouldn’t want to have dinner with if you can avoid it. Good people win, yes, but those who haven’t touched a bit of grass in years shout too much. And, of course, they have been able to even ruin the good intentions of a small indie publisher who wanted to ask for their audience’s opinion.
Are you getting it?
Introducing Crytivo, a small video game studio that is creating ‘Farm Folks’, which, as the name suggests, is a farmer simulator. So far, so good. The problem is that in a couple of days they gained 29,000 followers on Twitter, and that usually only happens for two reasons: either you’re the best, or you’ve messed up big time.
In this case, it was the latter, of course. More specifically, Crytivo tweeted (and deleted shortly after) asking for opinions on a topic that is, to say the least, controversial: “Alright, folks, it’s time for our next serious talk about game development! We’re tweaking the character physics in ‘Farm Folks’. Let’s open up a can of worms: Which version has the perfect breast physics?“. In the image, a video showed the breast movement at 30, 50, and 90%. You can imagine the rest, but I can already tell you that they answered themselves with a “Do you want to see how it looks at 150%?”.
It may seem like an innocuous tweet, but the truth is that it started a cultural war, like basically everything right now: the responses were predominantly negative and in the Discord of the game they directly asked why they were posting misogynistic things. The game director tried to pour water on the fire: “Our goal is not to oversexualize our characters, it’s the opposite. We want to achieve realistic physics (…) It feels natural to have movement in the character’s breasts that is not obscene”.
The post was deleted, the director stated that the team had crossed a line and that’s when the other side of the Internet came to say that it should not have been deleted and that they still had a chance of success if they re-uploaded the post about breasts. Álex Koshlekov, the director in question, has ended up saying what is obvious: he had no interest in creating controversy and the apology still stands. “We don’t want to attract disgusting people, we don’t want them. We will have some limits, but I want the player to choose how their character looks”. Fights over character customization. 2024 is coming strong.