Conan Exiles: Bigger Blacker Bits… and castration.
In my last article on Conan: Exiles I questioned the developers’ choice to include slavery, sexual exploitation and religious intolerance as game mechanics. In the time since I wrote it, the game has launched on Steam and has been topping the Steam charts. At the moment there are over ten thousand servers running, and in the first week there were more than 320 thousand downloads of the game. At $30 a copy that’s at least 9 million dollars. FunCom’s previous game The Secret World, despite being a fantastic game in many regards, underperformed. The company needed a hit, and it looks like they got one. So that’s good, a game company finding some financial stability and seeing their hard work pay off.
Since it became available on early access I have taken a bit of time to play and I can say that Conan: Exiles has the makings of a solid game. But I, and other players, have noticed something… as you can see in the images above, all things are not created equal. Now the inclusion of nudity in the game makes a lot of sense. In a survival game of this type, starting out naked generates a greater sense of vulnerability and then makes you value the very clothes you wear. But the decision to assign different default penis lengths by skin color doesn’t make any game design sense to me. I can’t think of a good reason for it. Each race has a different length penis, but by far the longest is the race from ‘The Black Kingdoms’. I don’t attribute any intentional or malevolent racism to the developer, but given the development time that must have been devoted to the character creator and the game’s “penis physics,” the decision to assign default lengths to the penises was clearly a conscious one, and echoing the ‘well hung black man’ trope is racist. I thought that perhaps the lengths were reflections of real statistics of some type, or at least considered the possibility, but as you can see from the below meta-analysis, they are not reflective of anything but the developers decision to sensationalize the bodies of their game avatars.
As a side note, in a recent interview the developers indicate the possible inclusion of castration as a game mechanic. Whether it will ever be implemented is unclear, as is what that kind of a mechanic would mean.
On the other hand I got to have a look at the opening cinematic for the game. In it, Conan himself cuts a female exile down from her cross. (She is not nude by the way.) They are then caught in a sandstorm infested by dangerous beasts. Conan gives her a weapon, and in the ensuing fight he is injured and she saves his life twice and emerges unscathed. He gives her a nod of respect and the game pans back and time passes showing her growing into a leader in the wasteland. It’s a pretty great cinematic and much more in keeping with the kind of character depiction I would expect from a FunCom game.
What conclusions do I draw from my first few hours of play? I think that there are competing visions for the game, that the effort to appeal to the target audience of the survival genera has been guided by a number of opinions about that audience, that the desire to make the game gritty and dark and intense has pushed the development of a game that incorporates gameplay mechanics and esthetics that I find distasteful at best. I think that trivializing slavery by making it a mandatory mechanic robs the players of moral choice and normalizes ideas about the relative value of human life in a way that I find uncomfortable. I don’t think that seeing things in games ‘makes’ anyone do anything. But building a world where players have no choice but to act out the role of slave masters, and where the fine details of the world, like penis length, are colored by racist tropes, does say something about the developers. And the 320 thousand downloads and nine million dollars spent by players in the first week says something about the rest of us. (e.g. 1:00 into this NSFW gameplay video)
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