Cosplayers make fun of idea women are harder to animate

Cosplayers who attended the GaymerX2 conference this weekend poked fun at Ubisoft's decision to not include playable female characters in Assassin's Creed Unity — through costume.

The convention, which celebrates queerness, inclusiveness and diversity in the video game community, was held at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco from June 11-13. While at the convention, Feminist Frequency creator Anita Sarkeesian snapped a photo (above) of two GaymerX2 attendees dressed in cardboard boxes with the words "BOOBS?" and "2 HARD 2 RENDER" written across the front, an allusion to a statement publisher Ubisoft made back at E3 about why it decided to not have playable female characters in Assassin's Creed Unity.

Ubisoft creative director Alex Amancia told Polygon at E3 that the game's four-player co-operative mode will not allow players to play as female assassins because of the amount of production work that would have to go into animating female characters.

"It's double the animations, it's double the voices, all that stuff and double the visual assets," Amancio said. "Especially because we have customizable assassins. It was really a lot of extra production work."

This statement sparked debate within the game industry and gaming community, with some developers questioning whether it would have taken that much more work, and whether it was a good excuse, given the lack of diverse character representations in video games. Developers like Naughty Dog animator Jonathan Cooper told Polygon that including playable female characters wouldn't have taken that much more work, and Ubisoft's developers could "just replace a handful of animations."

As much work as it may have taken to animate playable female characters, these GaymerX2 attendees showed it isn't too much work to cosplay them.