E3 2005 Booth Babe Hall of Shame

DanAckerman writes "GameGal.com offers some of the out-of-control examples of Booth Babe excess seen every year (five years running) at E3 in their annual Hall of Shame gallery." From the article: "They're smiling on the outside, but three days of snapping Poloroids with sweaty game geeks leads these girls to swear off Guild Wars forever."

Comments

America the Puritanical

[witchman]

Once again, we Americans are showing our puritanical roots, with the old credo, "Violence is ok, but anything to do with sex or sexuality is very shameful and bad!" So the companies use good looking women to attract attention to their products, wow, such crimes against humanity should not be allowed to persist in our "enlightened" society. Oh, by the way, pass me another beer while I watch a bunch of foreigners get blown up by our precision guided 500 pound bombs on CNN.

Sorry, but I think there are a lot of things to be upset about in this country of ours and booth babes are waaaaaaaaaaay down at the bottom of the list.

Where else can you find boothbabes?

[MMaestro]

The issue isn't about making women into sex objects this way, the issue is WHY here in video gaming? This isn't the movie industry where the females are always the 'damsel in distress', no this is the video game industry where the women can sometimes kick ass better than the males (Samus from Metroid? MMO games? Garnet/Dagger from FFIX who runs away from home/gets 'kidnapped'?)

If this was a car show I could see booth babes being around, but video games? Wtf? If this is the kind of perception gaming developers and producers have of gamers its no wonder Nintendo is constantly cranking out award winning games and capturing a loyal audience. Kids don't care about booth babes. Casual gamers don't care about booth babes. Hardcore gamers may stare for a little bit but even they know that it all comes down to gameplay. What kind of jobless losers are these developers try to attract with booth babes?

Re:Where else can you find boothbabes?

[witchman]

I understand your question; "why here?" but I think you're missing the point. Booth babes are just a small part of the larger phenomenon in American advertising, which is, "sex sells". You can see that in everything and everywhere, ads, TV shows, clothing, food, etc. I also happen to agree that it's a waste of advertising dollars, or maybe even development dollars, to spend money on the sex sells advertising campaign, but as long as Americans are "sex starved", I mean you can't even see any nudity on TV here, but you can see people getting killed (how wrong is that?), then you'll continue to see a glut of sex-based advertising.

What I dislike about the article, if you can actually call it that, is that it (too me at least) implies that there is something wrong with enjoying the sight of scantily clad women, which I don't happen to think that there is, whatever the reason.