Indie Game TowerFall Bases Character On Anita Sarkeesian

Let’s petition to make hoop earrings a growing trend in character design, because they are pretty awesome.

Developed by Matt Thorson for the Ouya back in 2013 and now available for Steam and the PS4, TowerFall is a local multiplayer game where players run around on a small pixelated screen full of booby traps and shoot at each other with arrows until the person with the most kills wins. While working on alternate versions of the default characters for their latest Dark World expansion, the team decided to have a little fun with a character inspired by the Feminist Frequency host. As they say on their Tumblr blog:

Next up is the alternate blue archer. If you keep up on gaming news she may seem familiar – her appearance is loosely based on feminist games critic Anita Sarkeesian. Anita’s work has been an inspiration to the TowerFall team. Her “Tropes vs Women in Games” video series gave us a valuable new lens through which to assess our character designs. TowerFall is about bringing people together, so it’s vitally important that the cast of playable characters makes everyone feel invited to join in. Simply put, this wouldn’t have occurred to me if not for Anita, and feedback from players has reinforced how important it really is. We’re very excited to immortalize Anita in a small way, as the alternate Last of the Order.

Admittedly she’s not that much different than the very first Last of the Order character (pictured below) save for her updated wardrobe and awesome earrings. Topless Robot also notes that including Anita in a game where the goal is to kill your opponents might raise some eyebrows, considering her past history with death threats. However, the game’s developers sought out Anita’s permission before creating the character, and she has also publicly expressed her approval of the project on Twitter, so no worries there. If you’re still sort of weirded out by the violence, take heart in the fact that it’s pretty cartoonish and not all that upsetting; players immediately re-spawn in the next round and even get extra boosts from the game mechanics to help them when they’re falling behind, which keeps things exciting for less skilled players.

The original Blue Archer, who keeps her hood up most of the time during gameplay

And, of course, it’s also really cool to see that Thorson, graphics designer MiniBoss, and the rest of the TowerFall team are taking her critiques of gaming to heart in the way that they design their own characters. You can tell just looking at the rest of their designs for Dark World and Ascension that they’re thinking about portraying a much wider range of skin tones, body types, age ranges, and cultures for both their male and female characters, of which there’s a pretty equal number. The game would still be pretty fun without these elements, but with them, it makes TowerFall that much more engaging.

“A huge part of TowerFall is how welcoming it is to new players, and this extends all the way to the inclusive character designs,” Thorson told a fan on Reddit who expressed discomfort with Anita’s inclusion in the game. “Many people may not notice, but to others it makes a world of difference and signals that the game is welcoming them to play. I know this because countless players have told me. We included the small nod to Anita because her work made TowerFall a better game, and allowed it to connect with many more people […] It is a simple alternate costume for the existing character, and I think it looks cool even if you have no idea the meaning behind it.”

(via Topless Robot)

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