They Ceded Beauty To The Right: Fable, Concord, And The Science
Toasty Gaming
35,340 views
One side of gaming has started defending ugliness as a political position, and somehow convinced itself that handing beauty to the opposition is a winning strategy.
This video starts with the Fable redesign discourse around Gamescom, but the argument is broader than one character. I look at GamingBible’s claim that Playground had been cycling through protagonists from the beginning, the reaction to Amelie in Knight’s Path, the infamous Concord Steam thread, Guerrilla’s direction with Horizon Hunters Gathering, and the wider pattern behind all of it.
Then we get to the part that actually matters: the idea that facial beauty is simply a cultural construct does not survive contact with the research. Studies going back to the 1980s found attractiveness preferences in infants, then in newborns, and even across non-human faces.
So this is not really a video about whether one Fable character is attractive. It is about what happens when a cultural faction cannot defend its aesthetic preferences on merit and instead tries to shame people out of noticing what they can plainly see.
Timestamps:
0:00 — Defending ugliness
0:30 — Fable and the media response
2:15 — The argument they could have made
4:41 — No standard at all
6:11 — Knight’s Path and Concord
9:10 — Guerrilla and Horizon
10:35 — The beauty framework falls apart
13:20 — Ife and the colonialism argument
Sources
Fable / GamingBible
GamingBible: coverage of the Fable protagonist redesign debate.
https://archive.is/ZXw4w
Horizon Hunters Gathering
Bloomberg / Jason Schreier: reporting on poor playtest feedback and the project being reworked.
https://archive.is/MxHHC
Concord
Steam Community: “Racist bigotry won again” discussion thread.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/244372...
Studies
Infants prefer attractive faces.
Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., Casey, R. J., Ritter, J. M., Rieser-Danner, L. A., & Jenkins, V. Y. (1987). “Infant Preferences for Attractive Faces: Rudiments of a Stereotype?” Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 363–369.
Newborns prefer attractive faces.
Slater, A., von der Schulenburg, C., Brown, E., Badenoch, M., Butterworth, G., Parsons, S., & Samuels, C. (1998). “Newborn Infants Prefer Attractive Faces.” Infant Behavior and Development, 21(2), 345–354.
Preference also extends to cats and tigers.
Quinn, P. C., Kelly, D. J., Lee, K., Pascalis, O., & Slater, A. M. (2008). “Preference for Attractive Faces in Human Infants Extends Beyond Conspecifics.” Developmental Science, 11(1), 76–83.
review of attractiveness preferences.
Damon, F., Mottier, H., Méary, D., & Pascalis, O. (2017). “A Review of Attractiveness Preferences in Infancy: From Faces to Objects.” Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 3, 321–336.
20 Comments
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The most egregious example of uglification in recent years is MJ in Spiderman 2 - they had a perfectly pleasant looking Mary Jane but chose to spend the money scanning one of the writers, a writer who has a face like a melted Stormtrooper helmet.
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Real life is often ugly, at least let us have some beauty in our escapist fantasies. We are the paying customers, after all.
Those same people show distain towards the conventually attractive (with caveats). Praising ugliness behind the guise of "realism".
There's this meme to dunk on the chuds that goes around. "You made it political". To laugh at those "seeing things". But the reality is, the enforcement and normalise of standardized ugliness is a political statement to those same people. And you will see a great many of them ready to harrass any developer or person that doesn't subscribe to their ideology.
Attractive characters will be picked apart till their nothing but bone. But ugly ones will be praised. Look at what happened to Knights Path. They showed off an attractive female model and this was apparently contentious for a few days.
But what I do find interesting is that nobody plays or buys games with these ugly characters. You notice for all the virtue signaling and "fixed" artwork. Nobody is claiming character like say Venture from overwatch - Second least played character in the game with the worst skins - who looks straight from Tumblr.
Instead their claiming conveniently attractive characters like Bridget from Guilty gear. When the mob likes something it will move to "Claim it" were it will suddenly become non problematic media. Stuff like this is where the term safe horny derives from.
At the end of the day, no matter how much they try to deny it. Conveniently attractive exists for a reason. You can't just train someone into liking the antithesis by forcing it on them. And those who defend it can at best only pretend to like it.
1. They hate men getting what they want/being happy.
2. They hate women characters showing conventional attraction towards man characters.
I remember a friend in a proper art school looking through a sketchbook of mine years ago when I was starting out, and she told me that you had to learn to create "perfect" idealized characters first, because it showed mastery of the craft of design and high levels of skill in line control. It's EXTREMELY easy to make things ugly, because it demonstrates that you haven't mastered anything.
They embrace ugliness because it's literally easier to do so. This is all a sign of these being talentless hacks more than anything.
They Ceded Beauty To The Right: Fable, Concord, And The Science
Toasty Gaming
35,340 views
One side of gaming has started defending ugliness as a political position, and somehow convinced itself that handing beauty to the opposition is a winning strategy.
This video starts with the Fable redesign discourse around Gamescom, but the argument is broader than one character. I look at GamingBible’s claim that Playground had been cycling through protagonists from the beginning, the reaction to Amelie in Knight’s Path, the infamous Concord Steam thread, Guerrilla’s direction with Horizon Hunters Gathering, and the wider pattern behind all of it.
Then we get to the part that actually matters: the idea that facial beauty is simply a cultural construct does not survive contact with the research. Studies going back to the 1980s found attractiveness preferences in infants, then in newborns, and even across non-human faces.
So this is not really a video about whether one Fable character is attractive. It is about what happens when a cultural faction cannot defend its aesthetic preferences on merit and instead tries to shame people out of noticing what they can plainly see.
Timestamps:
0:00 — Defending ugliness
0:30 — Fable and the media response
2:15 — The argument they could have made
4:41 — No standard at all
6:11 — Knight’s Path and Concord
9:10 — Guerrilla and Horizon
10:35 — The beauty framework falls apart
13:20 — Ife and the colonialism argument
Sources
Fable / GamingBible
GamingBible: coverage of the Fable protagonist redesign debate.
https://archive.is/ZXw4w
Horizon Hunters Gathering
Bloomberg / Jason Schreier: reporting on poor playtest feedback and the project being reworked.
https://archive.is/MxHHC
Concord
Steam Community: “Racist bigotry won again” discussion thread.
https://steamcommunity.com/app/244372...
Studies
Infants prefer attractive faces.
Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A., Casey, R. J., Ritter, J. M., Rieser-Danner, L. A., & Jenkins, V. Y. (1987). “Infant Preferences for Attractive Faces: Rudiments of a Stereotype?” Developmental Psychology, 23(3), 363–369.
Newborns prefer attractive faces.
Slater, A., von der Schulenburg, C., Brown, E., Badenoch, M., Butterworth, G., Parsons, S., & Samuels, C. (1998). “Newborn Infants Prefer Attractive Faces.” Infant Behavior and Development, 21(2), 345–354.
Preference also extends to cats and tigers.
Quinn, P. C., Kelly, D. J., Lee, K., Pascalis, O., & Slater, A. M. (2008). “Preference for Attractive Faces in Human Infants Extends Beyond Conspecifics.” Developmental Science, 11(1), 76–83.
review of attractiveness preferences.
Damon, F., Mottier, H., Méary, D., & Pascalis, O. (2017). “A Review of Attractiveness Preferences in Infancy: From Faces to Objects.” Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 3, 321–336.
"Stop complaining, this game isn't for you."
"Okay, then I won't buy it."
"Why didn't anyone buy the game!?"
"You told us it wasn't for us."
"Well now the devs are getting laid off and it's your fault."
"How is not buying a product I was told isn't for me my fault?"
They keep expecting this magical army of... I don't even know who they expect to buy the game. Those millions of buyers for ugliness didn't exist last year, or the year before, what makes them think those people will just spring out of the woodwork if they try again?