Rock Paper Shotgun has always been a thoroughly awesome blog, but their latest piece on “booth babes” – the scantily clad women who populate E3, catering to hoards of salivating game journos, random buyers and the like – is one of the most hilarious things they’ve ever done.
Basically a photo essay that turns the camera on the guys who are way, WAY too excited to get their pictures taken with random babes (or are just creepily filming them from a distance, or trying too hard to get upskirt shots, etc.), it’s just utterly wonderful. Thanks for bringing the satire, gents!
Read on: E3 2011 Booth Babe Babes Bonanza!
F#@king brilliant. Nothing’s more pathetic than sad-sack, tubby men desperately trying to get a glimpse of female skin. Love their satire on it.
I see this kind of behavior when I go to Dragon Con every year…these desperate, camera-wielding men flocking around girls and women of any age or physical fitness, craning and competing to get a photo. Some girls eat this kind of salacious attention up, which is equally sad and pathetic. Others you can tell are embarassed, feel awkward and are slightly disgusted at having their picture taken as probable jerk-off material for creepy, sex-starved middle-aged men that likely have to shift their paunch to get at themselves. It’s a shame, because at these kinds of events women that feel comfortable wearing sexier attire or more revealing costumes are treated like meat in a sharktank.
Sure, at E3 these women are professional models and are paid to draw attention…but these guys are just so pitifully desperate it makes the whole “booth babe” thing look even worse and more pathetic than it actually is.
Hate, hate, hate the booth babe thing. Makes the game industry look so pathetic. Also shows how stuck the industry is in the “15-24 single males are 99% of our user base” mentality.
But this doesn’t just go on in the games industry. You could probably go to a bathroom fixtures industry show and there’d be booth babes. It has more to do with men getting away from their wives on a business trip and acting like complete f$#king louts than it does with games or a particular demographic.
It doesn’t make the games industry look bad…it makes MEN look bad.
Also, to extend my hatred, I hate the ‘omg hot girls’ sections of gaming sites. Back in the day Seanbaby had an article up just ripping into IGN for their section and their creepy comments (same vein as the RPS comments in the main link here). Was so funny.
I agree that it’s not isolated to the games industry, and yes it makes men look bad.
But for an industry struggling to move beyond base power fantasy stereotypes, where women are frequently objectified in the products they make as much (if not more than) how they market them, the whole booth babe thing is part of a culture that makes the games industry look sad. Same with the IGN’s (and others’) babes section or anything with the Dead or Alive prefix. Granted this article is focused on just booth babes, but it’s part of a larger issue in the industry that I do think may be larger than, say, the bathroom fixtures industry.