Disclaimer: I’m about to tread into some territory I probably shouldn’t.

There’s a great interview with Jane Pinckard at the MTV Multiplayer blog (found via Kotaku). As an aside, I keep finding great links to this blog, but I keep withholding putting it in my daily reads, I think, because it is MTV).  It’s part of a series.

Working in a studio that produces mainly sports games, we are stuck with a double “No Girlz Allowed” sign. As hard as it is to bring females into the gaming industry in general, imagine how hard it is to get them to work on football games all day long. So we try to get women to work here, I assume, but it is a hard sell. I recently saw a rough cut of a recruiting video for the studio where the vast majority of the people interviewed as to how they like the studio were attractive women. Is that to get more women or more men? I don’t know. But I’ve heard my fair share of events that would make me feel quite uncomfortable if I was in their shoes. The immaturity of my gender sometimes leaves me dumbstruck. I was told by one female coworker that they feel odd here because people don’t make eye contact when they pass in the halls. Not that they are checking her out, that they look away at walls or ceilings to look like they aren’t looking. Maybe we should still carry around clubs and drag women back to our caves by the hair? It would be more honest, at least.

So the fawning over Jade Raymond bugs me as much as it does Pinckard, because while she represents the game well, Ubisoft has essentially thrown her to the wolves. They realized that the videos with her were getting more hits than the ones with other people, so they treated her like an object. When your target demo is pubescent boys and you thrust an attractive girl at them over and over again, what exactly do you think would happen? Can you really be upset when they objectify her after you objectified her?

Which leads us to the question of what should we do? We can’t just shelter any attractive women that by a series of wrong turns ends up in the industry. And we certainly can’t expect people to grow the fuck up. One solution I read is that once there are more women speaking for the industry that the problem will solve itself. I find that extremely hard to believe. You can’t underestimate the maturity of gamers. It is akin to dividing by zero.

So I don’t know what the answer is. Luckily, it isn’t really my job to know the answer. One suggestion I have is shame. Shame Destructoid for fawning over her. Shame the goons at Something Awful for putting up with the cartoon of Raymond. Shame Team Ninja for… everything. But this brings us back full circle in a quite unfortunate way. Why is Jane Pinckard getting interviewed? Well, for one, she is very intelligent and erudite on the subject. But no one would know who she was if she didn’t stick a Rez Trance Vibrator against her genitals and put pictures of it online.

Is that what it comes to? A women has to be sexualized and fawned over before she can get the cred to be an important commentator? I wonder where she would be, what position she would have in the discourse, if she never bought an import copy of Rez? I’ll be honest and say that it speaks volumes that the three women MTV picked to interview were Raymond (who wouldn’t comply), a Maxim girl and Pinckard - all three who gained notoriety by being sexualized. Was that because that was what MTV wanted to talk about or because it’s much harder to find women that haven’t been?