The Chinese Room, the developers of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs, Dear Esther, and Everyone’s Gone To The Rapture displayed a wonderful amount of ignorance today when they delivered a harsh tweet to the Twitter page of GameSpot, which was showing a picture of a trailer set that would later be used in the debut trailer for CD Projekt Red’s new IP Cyberpunk 2077.
The tweet came in response to a picture posted on the GameSpot Twitter page that showed a young woman kneeling in a skimpy corset and apparently little else, which whoever runs The Chinese Room’s Twitter found objectionable after seeing that the tweet said that Cyberpunk would be more ambitious than anything CDPR’s done before.
“But just as sexist if that image is anything to go by…” The Chinese Room said.
The shot that was shown by Gamespot was an old photo used for the first trailer for Cyberpunk 2077, which showed the woman in question being attacked by a group of armored police, who were shooting at her. When this first showed back in 2013, it immediately got cries of sexism and misogyny from a number of bloggers and internet personalities, who didn’t pay attention to the circumstances: in this case, that the woman in question was a cyborg that had gone crazy and murdered over 20 people in a bloody rage.
CD Projekt Red has often received criticism due to the objectionable portrayal that women get in its Witcher series, where Geralt of Rivia, the main character, is able to have sex with many significant female characters, along with prostitutes and others. While witchers are sterile, and thus unable to impregnate women, their image was not helped by the fact that you get little trading cards with every encounter in the first Witcher game, though this was dropped in the next two.
Followers of The Chinese Room’s Twitter were not impressed by their white-knighting, and let the studio know it in no uncertain terms.
@ChineseRoom I regret paying for A Machine for Pigs, Dear Esther and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Shame I can’t refund them.-PlebianGames
@PlebeianGames same here. Screw this neo-puritan sex-negative noise.-OKULTRA
Cyberpunk 2077 is based off of the tabletop roleplaying game Cyberpunk 2020, which also had pictures of scantily-clad, beautiful women in its own rulebooks.
So, in short? Do your research next time, Chinese Room, and enjoy the taste of your foot in your mouth.
