When I first saw Ana, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds publisher Krafton’s attempt to put a face on its artificial “virtual human” technology, I was disappointed to see that this supposed Web 3.0 innovation was really just another pretty, pale girl. She’s airbrushed, but still tangible. She’s biting her tongue, looking at you. And I fear she exists only to be looked at, and not much else.
Krafton released its first images of Ana on June 15. We got two tight close-ups of a vaguely East Asian woman with all of the expected egirl accoutrements, dyed hair and adventurous ear piercings. Ana, who was created with Unreal Engine, has a lightning bolt tattooed on her finger. It’s clearly visible when she puts her pinky up to her lips to stare at you with clear, amorous intent.
Krafton revealed its “virtual human” technology in February with a technical demonstration displaying “motion-capture-based vivid movements, pupil movements enabled by rigging technique, colorful facial expressions, and even the soft and baby hairs on the skin.” The publisher announced its intent to use carefully designed virtual humans not just in its games but in its Esports demonstrations, and in the hope of creating more virtual influencers and singers like “robot” Instagrammer Miquela.
That’s influencers and singers, plural, so Ana is likely only the start of what I can only imagine to be a circus troupe of PUBG robot babes. Robot babes are particularly trendy right now, because we haven’t grown at all since watching the movie Her in 2013. Before that, we got used to the idea of robots being malleable, unemotional women. In other words, “perfect” women.
Back in 2011, deferential, female-coded virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa started to live in our devices and corroborate the popular image of a loving, supportive electronic woman most recently informed by future-focused Y2K media—think Cortana in Halo in 2001, or the virtual popstar in Disney’s 2004 movie Pixel Perfect. In 2016, a man in Hong Kong spent $50,000 to build a robot that looked like Scarlett Johansson, who coincidentally voices the virtual assistant in the movie Her. We really haven’t learned anything from that movie.
We also haven’t learned much from real artificial intelligence experts, who, over the years, have emphasized that female-coded robots alienate human women tech users and reward harmful stereotypes about women being servile and dedicated through whatever abuse they suffer. In 2019, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) released a publication arguing that “Siri’s ‘female’ obsequiousness—and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women—provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.” But tech companies like Krafton continue to create within these gender biases, sewing them tighter and deeper into our societal fabric.
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Partially, that’s because of gaming’s conflicted but addicted relationship to sex, and the evil eye of the merciless, always appraising male gaze. Mainstream developers have, on occasion, attempted to move beyond the archetypal video game woman to embrace more realistic depictions (to Reddit’s great disappointment), but character designs of women in video games at large remain recursive: buxom and flexible. I love embracing my inner bimbo as much as anyone else, but when stiletto-heeled women with nipped waists are the only representation we have in video games, it reduces an entire gender into a repressive stereotype.
But even more than they are for pliant women, tech and video game companies are horny for the ill-defined terms “Web 3.0” and the “Metaverse.” Both are meant to invoke the idea of an empowered online individual but, in practice, are usually just …
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