The Frag Dolls are an Ubisoft-sponsored clan of gaming ladies who sometimes hold their own against their more hirsute peers in multiplayer first person shooters. Ubisoft is now looking to recruit another member of the Frag Doll team after the doll named "Eekers" left for a job somewhere in the games industry.
On the surface, Ubisoft's goals are noble. They're trying to open the notoriously testosterone-fueled FPS genre to a demographic (women!) that has typically shied away from it. So far so good, except the sneaking feeling that the Frag Dolls are (in their own words) often taken for "nothing more than an insidious stealth marketing ploy" at best, and slightly more clothed booth babes hired to look pretty while using Ubisoft products at worst.
The group's website doesn't do much to dispell these (mis)conceptions about the group. It's full of posed glam photos and impossibly-proportioned cartoon caricatures that accentuate those timeless T&A assets that have been used to shill products for centuries.
In short, the site just screams, "Look into my décolletage. Your thoughts are growing muddled. You find yourself wanting to buy Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory."
The "selection process" for the replacement Frag Doll does little to dispel the bimbo stereotype the group claims to abhor. Prospective Dolls are to submit a "gaming resume" along with color photos and a one-minute videotaped response to the question, "Why should you be a member of the Frag Dolls?" Ooh, that's a toughie. Where's the bikini contest? For that matter, where's the play test to determine if the skills are as pretty as the faces?
[Via XboxSolution.com]
