Oddities: The Guy Game

Welcome to Oddities, a weekly feature in which we plunge head-first into the bargain bin of gaming history to extract a single game that you’ve either never heard of, or probably wished you hadn’t. This series follows some of the strangest, most obscure and most incredibly awful games that have ever appeared since the invention of Spacewar!. They won’t all be bad games, but we’ll make it our mission to find the really, really weird stuff. We’ve been missing for quite a while, but Oddities is back up and running and will be for the foreseeable future! It’s all a little awkward this week, as we look back on the more shameful segments of gaming’s past.

Look, stereotypes exist for a reason. As, erm, ‘serious gamers’ we’re well aware that games are played by women, they’re certainly not just for children and they’re not all shooty shooty bang bang things (although we’re also aware that most of them are). Yet, when it comes to the mass market, gaming has some appearance issues which are only very slowly starting to drop off. The Guy Game is a key example of why these stereotypes exist, because apparently the ideal ‘Guy Game’, that is, a title made specifically for male gamers to enjoy, is all about boobs. 

 

The Guy Game was released in 2004 for PS2, Xbox, and PC in North America only. It is, quite literally, a quiz game that rewards correct answers with bare skin, and not the Amish kind (although ankles are generally on display as well, just to warn you). The whole game revolved around a collection of pre-recorded videos in which bikini-clad women answered questions of their own. More than just a weird hybrid of Mastermind and the Playboy Channel, players are tasked with guessing whether the girls will answer the questions correctly, the better you guess, the more boob you get to see.

If that all sounds a little tacky, then you haven’t heard anything yet. The standard game mode is based on a ‘Flash-O-Meter’ system that basically further exposes the women’s breasts the more correct answers the players give. While the videos begin with a huge ‘Guy Game logo’ covering the naughty bits, this is gradually degraded to a digital blur as more questions are answered correctly. Get enough right and the images come through totally uncensored. The whole thing is also wrapped up in a cheesy MTV-esque package complete with an annoying presenter, juxtaposed commentators and an innuendo-loaded female voiceover. Plus mini games that always feature the word ‘Ballz’ in the title, because apparently the word ‘Ballz’ is hilarious. 

Of course, there’s a risk of taking something like this too seriously and one must recognise that this was a game undoubtedly aimed specifically at drunk groups of men. The Guy Game can be played single player, but other than one-handed gaming sessions there aren’t a whole lot of reasons to play this mode. The meat of the game is a party mode in which guys (the game consistently assumes that the players are indeed male) battle for points, with the winner being able to see their personal choice of ‘cheerleader’ undress at the end of the game.

As a tool for a bunch of drunk guys to have a laugh it’s probably fairly functional, but as a videogame in its own right, it’s pretty reprehensible. Games like this are the reason the entire medium gets bad press and a stern condescending look from many non-regular gamers. Obviously there’s a whole argument to be had that movies and the like feature the same pitiful excuses for porn, but these types of games will do nothing but hinder the public perception of gaming as it continues to grow as a medium and a culture.

What’s more, the whole game has a rather acute tone of pure unadulterated sexism. The whole boob thing is an obvious snag, but one that can probably be attributed to half the games on the market at the time (and a fair few today). But it’s the game’s obvious link between female ‘attractiveness’ and stupidity that’s most difficult to ignore. The later game modes see every girl get the answers wrong, the challenge comes from guessing which of the wrong answers they will actually pick. Apparently all of these buxom women are also mentally challenged. That’s a common stereotype, sure, but we’ve never seen it flaunted so openly.

The Guy Game is all the more seedy due to a lawsuit that came against the game and publishers Gathering of Developers. It emerged a few months after release that the game featured a model (who obviously appeared in the nude) that was 17 at the time of shooting. 18 is the minimum legal age for a woman to appear nude in American media. The game was removed from shelves and was only made available again once all instances in which this particular model appeared were removed. It’s a shameful mistake that sums up the game on the whole, really.

There’s a possibility that one could look over this game and pass it off as a relic of time and happenstance, but while a lot has changed in the game industry over the last 10 years, female representation is still a topic of hot conversation. Now more than ever, in fact. So take The Guy Game as an example of how not to handle female representation and great example of how to give gaming a bad name. Fingers of shame, start your pointing.

Just a quick note, Oddities will be a fortnightly feature from now on as opposed to weekly! Sorry, but we just can’t handle all of these silly games.