I was always kind of slightly uneasy with the way nikasaur was put on display in riot’s early days, but the stuff they’re getting up to now is even weirder. They dont even have to use a real human woman anymore. They can just animate a doll that they will never have to worry will age, ask for a promotion, object to anything, stand up for itself, or quit.
This person’s claim that the character was based on them is disputed by riot, but it wouldnt be the first time theyve gotten in trouble for doing this kind of thing.
https://www.thegamer.com/seraphine-league-of-legends-likeness-copy/
I find this “virtual influencer” stuff to be pretty concerning, for a few reasons!
Especially with what weve learned over the last few years about how women are treated internally at Riot.
https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2019-12-02/riot-games-gender-discrimination-settlement
It is somewhat of a chicken-egg problem of this kind of advertising perpetuating a gross culture and then those people grow up and move into the industry and continue to perpetuate it. “use sex to sell things to young males” is like a “no duh” proposition, but the onus has to fall on the companies to stop perpetuating this. At some point videogames started specificly targeting young males, and their adolescent sex drives was an easy button to push. But at the agegroup playing games has matured, and games themselves have matured, they have not grown out of this behavior.
But that trend is no doubt more than a small reason for why videogames continues to have a gender diversity problem (though things are getting better, we still have a long way to go).
EDIT: I forgot about this thing that happened earlier this year about XBOX brazil firing a host because she received too much harassment.
https://www.fanbyte.com/news/xbox-brazil-fires-host-because-she-received-too-much-harassment/