.jpg?q=49&fit=crop&w=120&h=80&dpr=2)
Before Diablo 4, the previous Diablo game came out in 2012, and it seems like some of the marketing is stuck there. In one trailer doing the rounds on social media, Megan Fox stands before us in her underwear, telling us in a sultry, slightly disaffected tone that Diablo 4 has buckets of blood. She also encourages players to send in their best deaths for her to eulogise, where she'll decide if you went out like a champion... or a chump. It's a pretty classic case of hiring a hot girl to promote a video game with an on the nose obliviousness we haven't seen since the days of the booth babes. But in the modern world, it makes for an interesting case study.Obviously, there's no need to intellectualise your horniness here. Megan Fox has been hired because she is a recognisable hot girl, not just in that she is clearly physically attractive, but for the late 20s to early 30s audience she is the quintessential hot girl they had on posters in their bedrooms. It's not rocket science. It comes from the same school of thought as the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Nude Raider urban legend, the stickers of near-naked ladies you used to get with gaming magazines, and the aforementioned booth babes. Megan Fox is there to be a hot girl for men to look at and desire.Given how much more inclusive gaming has become, not just as a generic buzzword but as a tangible demographic - it's not just men playing video ga♚mes anymore, and when you target only men, you are ignoring a significant portion of your player base. Of course, some men will tell you things have already gone too far, that games are too woke, that there are no games for men anymore, but looking at the most well known developers in the world (almost all men), the major studio heads (almost all men), and the protagonists of the biggest games released (fewer men than the other two, but still predominantly men), we can see that's not reaꦺlly true.
It's easy to say that Diablo's advert is sexist and dated - and given Blizzard is in th🐻e midst of several sexual harassment scandals, it's also not a particularly wise promotion or indicative of the studio changing its culture. The people criticising it aren't wrong. But it's interesting to see an advert so dated in its presentation these d🥀ays, when just a small tweak could have made it a hit.
Imagine the advert plays out the exact same way, but instead of Megan Fox, it's Lilith, the game's antagonist. Lilith has an hourglass figure, and foreboding frame, has her femininity heightened even with her fearsome physical power, and her words drip sensuously. The same sex appeal, the same strategy, the same story. A new character. Everything would be fixed. Even Fox dressed as Lilith would change the context. Many of those voices dismissing the portrayal of Fox as sexist were all aboard the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dimitrescu express. I imagine it was Lady D's virality which led to Blizzard's promotion taking this direction, but it made one fatal error: 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the charac🐓t♔er has to be along for the ride.
Whether it be Lady Dimitrescu, who lures men to their death, or Lilith, who fuels your basest desire to corrupt you, both of these characters use their sexuality to dominate others. Fox, on the other hand, has been hired to look pretty. She is objectified and her character, this fictional and sexual version of herself, is powerless in this situation, a trophy of fantasy to be looked at and lusted over with no say in the matter. It has been an unfortunate theme throughout Fox's career, her roles often reduced to brainless bimbos - 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Transformers, where the entire point of her character that (like the titular robots) she was more than meets the eye and a whip-smart mechanic, was rewritten and edited to have her serve as eye candy, which the sequels doubled down on before removing her completely. Typecast and then thrown out, Fox was rarely treated as anything more than Blizzard see🏅s her as - a hot gi༺rl who will get the attention of men.
And there is a world where Blizzard could have used Megan Fox to hit each demographic - she's openly bisexual and raises her children without gender norms, and is therefore a popular figure amongst progressives. Sꦏhow her playing the game and laughing, maybe teasing the camera a little bit, and you get the sex appeal of Fox along with more personality. Having her stand there in her underwear and delivering lines like a findom doesn't have the same impact.෴ Blizzard's advert is sexist and dated, but there are a million little changes that could have saved it.