"We call that a ‘living hostage.’ So she’ll react to explosions and things like that.
“We’re trying to define next-gen with the hostage," said Couture. In order to herd this, the NPCs will have a 'personality'. However, Ubisoft has taken the hostage mechanic a bit further, because it wants players to care about the hostage no matter the sex of the victim. It was a gameplay mechanic and with this mechanic, if the hostage dies, the team loses. Would the result have been different if a male hostage was used instead? Did people who viewed the demo even feel empathy at all for the hostage in the first place? I know I didn't. Mini-rant aside, Ubisoft relied on educing empathy by showing a scared woman. A horrible death is horrible in any medium, no matter your age or gender. Granted, it happens in movies and television shows quite a bit now, which means times have changed considerably.
Had this not been changed, movie goers in 1983 would have been outraged. The film version was very different in this respect, and ended with the little boy living. In the Stephen King novel Cujo, the little boy Tad dies of dehydration while trapped in his mother's car by a rabid St. On occasion when films showed children getting harmed, the audience was shocked. There's an old trope in movies: viewers do not want to see children in danger/get hurt/die. Usually they are a better bargaining chip anyway.īut who knows how that would have played out for Ubisoft. Maybe it would have been better if the demo showed children being held hostage instead. I don't see an issue in this case, personally. We don't know any of this, and considering how women are portrayed in games ( or lacking entirely) is a hot topic right now, it's not surprising Couture was asked why Ubisoft showed a woman being taken hostage instead of a male. Are the kids behind the door? Are they at their grandmother's house? Is the woman in the demo divorced? If not, where is the husband? Is he in a position of power? Did the terrorists storm the house and take her hostage as a negotiation tool and plan on making demands of said husband?
If you watch the demo above, you will hear that the 'kids room' is being boarded up. There is probably a valid reason why a woman was being held hostage instead of a male. That’s part of the plan.”Ĭonsidering it was just a game demo, the viewer is unaware of the entire story behind the hostage scene taking place at the home. "But we’re also gonna have male hostages. If the hostage gets killed a team loses the game, so we wanted players to care about the hostage so that’s the design we chose. "We wanted people to want to protect her. I mean, when we did that design we felt a lot of empathy with the hostage," he told the site. "I know some people asked about the hostage in the demo. Speaking with RPS, technical artist Oliver Couture said a few people had about the demo and while he didn't mention specifics, I'm assuming he was asked why Ubisoft chose the 'woman in need of rescue' trope instead of showing a male NPC being liberated from his tormentors. To see this content please enable targeting cookies. However, in order to evoke empathy from viewers of the E3 2014 demo, the firm showed a rescue scene involving a woman.