Editorial: The Fragtastic FragDolls – Danielle “Sachant” Vanderlip (11-01-04)
To clear this up, you need to think of things like EnVogue, the Monkeys or even the kids from American Idol (the children’s version) that put together talented individuals into one conglomeration and then market them out. Now, these companies that did it were marketing a product. In their case the product was the singer themselves. In the case of the FragDolls, UbiSoft is marketing their games. Then there are the sports heroes that get paid money to wear the logo of a company thus hopefully inspiring others to use those same products. Enter in the FragDolls, the Ubi titled Mia Hamm’s of the fragging scene.
Back in June of 2004, UbiSoft ran an ad, in Craigs List no less, asking for female gamers to come out of the woodwork to apply to be a part of an elite team of gamers to promote their games and make occasional public appearances. It sounds alright so far doesn’t it? Now, they would pay these gamers to sit at home, play against whoever decided to challenge them and on occasion, shuttle them out to some gaming event or contest here and there to show them off a bit and build up a bit of recognition and hype. It still doesn’t really sound too bad. In fact, it didn’t sound bad to me either so I was one of the many that applied.
When I had my phone interview we discussed my gaming past etc, I explained I was originally an FPSer before taking on MMORPGs and that to me the job sounded like a great way to promote female gamers as well as make some at home cash so I could continue to take care of my daughters and work from home. I’m sure this was my first red flag as to why they wouldn’t want to hire me. I’m married with two children… who during the interview decided to pipe up and cry. Ooh ouch. Of course, I can understand the hesitation since there would be voicecom as a part of the job via Xbox Live or PC etc.
Strike two was I had been asked if I had a personal website… Well I do. It’s not much to look at and mostly I have pictures up for my family’s viewing only. I’ve also just been through my second pregnancy so all my pictures over the past year and a half are either during pregnancy or just after in need of losing a bit of extra weight. I am quite sure that this was another red flag. After all, you don’t want someone out there with kids AND in the midst of losing weight after a pregnancy right?
Third red flag was I was in the middle of a contract for Brady Games working on the World of Warcraft Guide. Time would have been an issue.
Perhaps there were a couple other things they considered as well. I made it clear that I wanted the project to be a positive role model for other girls and women in gaming and not glorified booth-babes put on the chopping block. I also made it clear that I’d have no problem telling 15-year-old boys to back off should they get too pushy. I would have done it with a smile too, but it seems that probably wasn’t a good enough answer. 😉
All in all, Ubi did me a favor not hiring just on the time factor alone. The rest of their possible reasoning is suspect. Lord knows you wouldn’t want someone that was a real gamer and a wife and mother. What would the drooling masses have to drool over? Certainly it wouldn’t be a young attractive SINGLE female that they might think they had a chance with right?
Alright, so that’s really still not an issue. You want to sell a product, you use what you can and it’s better to use attractive available seeming women to sell something than women that are ‘has beens’ right? Eg
So, back to my concerns… I was worried that they would create a group of women that would be used as a step up from Booth-Babes. It seems from all the comments I’ve heard that this is how they are being viewed. Part of this is due to UbiSoft not making it very clear their relationship with these girls or how they were formed. In order for Ubi to make the FragDolls legitimate at all, they need to come clean and outright state their purpose in clear terms. When you go to UbiSoft’s site and click on the ‘Community’ option it takes you to their leaderboards and at the top is a little nothing blurb linking to the FragDolls site.
The Frag Dolls are an all-female gaming team who is out to show the world that gaming isn’t just for the boys. Check out the Frag Dolls website for more details.
Well, that doesn’t exactly say much about it does it? Even when you go to the site, there isn’t much about how they were formed, how they came together or anything else a ‘normal’ female clan is about.
The short of it is, the FragDolls are in fact talented and attractive ladies brought together for the purpose of promoting UbiSoft products and getting people excited about them. They were brought together by an ad hiring female gamers to come out of the woodwork with the promise of working from home by gaming and on occasion going out into the world to wave their controllers around and say ‘hi’ to the masses. Unfortunately, the way it’s being done is under the table as if there is some sort of stigma of shame attached to it. It’s also done nothing to promote the ‘real’ girls in games. I’m by no means saying these girls aren’t real. I’m not even saying they are atypical. I am saying that they do not represent the full scope of gaming women out there.
You see, if Ubi was to do it right and do the FragDolls right they would have come out with a press release for starters stating the intentions. I’d think it would go a little something like this:
“We at UbiSoft would like to announce our all new all girl team. These women can be found online and at events around the nation (globe even?) testing their mettle against the boys and showing just how it’s done.”
If you dig however you can find this:
Rainbow Six 3
Tuesday 09.07.04
Ubisoft’s FragDolls at PAX
In addition to Black Arrow, one of the biggest hits at the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX), was the unveiling of Ubisoft’s all-girl gaming force, the FragDolls.
The FragDolls came out in force to show that they weren’t just another group of booth babes, but in fact an elite group of gamers who happen to be female. They did this by going undefeated and capturing the crown in the 32-team Black Arrow tournament. Though there were some very talented teams and players, none could defeat the combined skills of the FragDolls, not even in “free play” in the exhibition hall.
To read all about the FragDolls and their endeavors, check out their web blogs at FragDolls.blogspot.com You can also check out pictures and read about how to find the FragDolls online to test your mettle against them at Black Arrow.
Alright, so we’ve established the following: UbiSoft ran an ad for female gamers, UbiSoft hired female gamers, a new site was put up and they were named the FragDolls, and the name itself trademarked?
Could we take a moment to look at the site and what the girls are wearing as their ‘uniform’? Am I the only one going WTH? What would have been wrong with simple jeans and a babydoll T with the ‘clan’ name on it? Why the cheesy gloves you see in some pictures? Why the lame ‘muscle’ type shirt? We already know the girls are being used for their ‘sex appeal’ but did you have to take that extra step Ubi? They’ve been made up to look like they are just models being contracted to run around smile and wave. Thankfully however the girls ARE in fact putting the ‘smack down’ as they were put together to do.
Here are a couple of the more notable comments gleaned from place to place from events such as PAX:
Most of the stuff went pretty smoothly, although UbiSoft did fuck up my nicely arranged room. I’ll forgive them because they were pretty nice about it. I’ll also forgive them because the FragDolls kicked ass! These girls fucking pwn’t every challenger. It was crazy. Most companies grab chicks that are hot to promote games whereas the FragDolls had skills & they were hot, 2 for 2 baby.
UbiSoft was showing off Myst 4, Ghost Recon 2, Brothers in Arms, Splinter Cell 3, and Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow. Helping them to do so were the FragDolls, a group of good-looking girls who are really good at games. In fact, for RS6:BA, they held a tournament and anyone who could beat the dolls could win a free game, and no free games were given away. Well, they ended up giving games to the two guys that came in second or else no one would have gotten prizes.
So… That’s all well and good but there are a lot of the usual comments surrounding them. “They are just good looking girls, I doubt they can play.” Yes, because we all know only ugly girls can play games right? Or perhaps “I’d hit it.” There are lots of great comments coming from the male population and I have to put part of the blame on Ubi. Take a look at the blogsite they have the girls doing if you don’t believe me. They’ve created catchy hip female cartoon characters that scream ‘Kim Possible’ with sex appeal. The girls even talk about things such as buying shoes and shopping and practically gush about the latest games all neatly wrapped up in a very ‘girlie’ site. They also have staged and posed pictures of themselves from pouting to serious to flirty fun. Yeah! There’s no edge there. There’s no real ability to freely express themselves either (understandably so, they are representing Ubi after all.) The rest of the blame falls on the male population for being pretty blind to the continuing trends of females in gaming and even females in FPS gaming especially and allowing Ubi to take advantage of their thirst to find the ‘ultimate’ female gaming partner.
There’s another gaming group out there that is making waves, they are a Swedish team called Les Seules that take their gaming also to the extreme. Unlike the FragDolls, these girls were friends that came together for a gaming purpose.
Unfortunately, with FragDolls and Les Seules both, they find that sex appeal is the key seller for them. Gameplay and ability take second billing and will continue to take second billing as long as sex appeal is played up to show ‘good looking girls play too’. It’s like we’re still trying to make excuses to being outside the ‘norm’ for what girls should be and do and like. If we’re good looking enough and still geeky, we can aspire to elite geekness and not be shunned by our sunlight impaired counterparts right?
For those that are missing out on some really good clan history and believe these two girl groups are IT for female clans, let me help you out a bit…
I was a part of one of the first female clans named PMS aka Psycho Men Slayers. Sadly Clan PMS seems to be no more in it’s original incarnation, they have become something else. Here’s a comment about the site that once stood for female equality in gaming and a bit of the humorous edge the girls used.
“It may be pink and it may be pretty, but looks can be very deceiving. You are at the website of Clan PMS. If you think your ego can handle your ass getting kicked by a couple girls, then c’mon… challenge us.”
The clan mocks the stereotypical “female traits” by using pink text, script fonts and flowers galore. Amongst the pages of pink you find their well-known slogan “Under every floral print dress lies a lady wearing black garters… carrying a big f*cking gun!”
Aurora formerly of Clan PMS now runs Gamegirlz in which real news for women is put out and real discussions on gaming topics are held. They include reviews and interviews on topics female gamers just may want to be clued into.
I was just a pledge with clan PMS for a bit since I still didn’t quite have my FPS gaming edge as of yet. We also associated with many other female clans on occasion… One of which was known as the Crackwhores. The girls even went as far as to have created their own skins and had male counterparts dubbed as ‘towel boys’ complete with uniform skin. Clan PMS started in 1996. The Crackwhores had their own erm… style and I’m sure if you search for their site you’ll see what I mean. The game was Quake and QII back then among anything else and there were few female skins. If you do a search, I’m sure you’ll find more than one or two all female Clans out there these days.
To end this longer than normal article, UbiSoft isn’t doing anything wrong if you want to take the approach that they are aiming at a demographic and utilizing the skills of paid talent to get their attention.. They aren’t exactly doing it all right either. They obviously have their sights on the 15-25 age male market. I have a friend among those girls and I’d hate to see her exploited but thank goodness she’s gleaning a paycheck from it as well right? Whether they are employees of UbiSoft or not is to be debated. My past with Ubi would say they are contractors that are in fact paid for their time and given ‘sponsorship’ via their site and other considerations that make them capable of being a part of a ‘soft’marketing campaign.
Female gamers deserve a little better than being treated like cattle to be herded from place to place like some sideshow at the local carnival. They deserve to be acknowledged as a part of UbiSoft’s marketing. They deserve to be allowed to show a bit of their personality without it being candy coated. They deserve to show young girls and other female gamers that there is a growing trend of acceptance among their male counterparts rather than being the brunt of insecure jokes. They also will deserve their spot in history when they last outside of UbiSoft’s influence and they become a real clan driven to excel and show the world just how far female gamers have come. That onus is on the girls though, not Ubi or anyone else.
Of course, all the hype, the wondering and the questioning and even articles like this one just bring the FragDolls to the forefront and help promote the attention Ubi wants. That’s fine. But hopefully they are reading too and take a bit of advice about carefully handling the credibility of these ladies. They would have been better off not going for the Fragtastic 7 that wear size 3s on their ‘bloated’ days and had expanded their search to all kinds of women to show the variety that has blossomed in the once men only club. That is not the fault of the girls for being who they are, nor should they feel it’s a slight against them. Shame on Ubi for perpetuating a stereotype that the few and far between of female gamers are beautiful and thin fragqueens and the rest are best left indoors behind heavy curtains to be tossed a crust of bread now and then for their feats of acrobatics with a sniper rifle.
Discuss: But they are FRAG DOLLS!!
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