The "Mary-Go-Round"

Here's something interesting. Apparently a feminist gamer group is protesting a new game released by Sony: Fat Princess. Yahoo! News debates reveals the inner conflict.

Debuting at last week's E3 expo, the colorful Fat Princess is a capture-the-flag game with a twist: you can thwart capture attempts by locking the once-thin princess in a dungeon and stuffing her full of cake, thereby increasing her girth and making her harder for your enemies to haul back to home base.

Feminist Gamer's "Mighty Ponygirl" rings in diplomatically, suggesting a new way to play the game altogether.

"Instead of running out into the forest to find cake to fatten up the princess with, why not go out and find gold (which is a lot heavier than cake) to stuff into a treasure chest. The more gold in the chest, the heavier it would be, and the harder it would be to carry," she said, before adding, "Oh, but that's not as "cute" as cake and fat chicks. Right."

Over at Shakesville, however, writer Melissa McEwan cuts to the chase, telling Sony she's "positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative ---holes."

I tend to agree with my gaming sisters (what else is new?), but for other reasons. The game tends to be offensive because it proposes that a woman is a flag, which brings to mind the point in history where women were legally possessions. If Sony finds it hard to understand why the game offends feminists, I challenge them to replace the rotund female with a burly black man carrying gardening tools.

However, in defense of Sony, they are merely following the formula for best selling games. There are other games that are wildly popular and make it their business to be as offensive as possible. "Grand Theft Auto", for example. It is impossibly for any video game to be polite and agreeable to society. Video games are offensive simply by being video games. "Mario" is offensive to some people because they see the numerous mushrooms as referring to a drug subculture, and believe that those games are influencing their children to buy drugs. Some people might find Sonic offensive because Sonic's main goal is to gather coins as quickly as possible, thereby pushing forth the sin of greed.

It's not how the game is offensive, it's in what way the game attempts to be offensive. Sony's "Fat Princess" is a disgrace to the very idea of video-games, not because of it's slightly off-color message, but because of lack of originality. If you're going to be offensive, do it properly.

For instance, what if the object of the game was not to drive the princess into obesity, but to cure the princess of anorexia and rescue her from enemies that are rapists and obsessed with Twiggy? As most of us know, the purpose of capturing any princess is to disgrace her kingdom and to take advantage of her. And most of us also know that the market Sony is pushing the game towards finds people who are overweight unattractive. So, in making Fat Princess obese, her rescuers could lose interest in her, and attempt shove her off on their enemies. So the enemies wouldn't want her either, and her rescuers would have to make her skinnier to make her desirable again. All of this "off-and-on" attention would give the princess a complex and cause her to regain her eating disorder. Also the amount of sugar she took in would make her diabetic, and you would have to try and get your enemies to take the fat princess back before her extremities fell off. In the bonus level you could have an endless supply of insulin to keep her healthy.

Now you've made a game worth being offended over.