Advertising Standards Authority acts on sexist mobile phone ads
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has found several mobile phone game adverts likely to cause “serious or widespread offence” due to harmful gender stereotypes.
An advert for one game, Refantasia: Charm and Conquer, is described as having featured an “anime-style image of a young woman in a cage” in shackles and with torn clothing, which was singled out for particular criticism.
Captions referenced “my master” and were accompanied by text which described the person as a “little girl”. The ASA judged the character as being someone under 18 represented in a sexual manner.
In response, Refantasia’s developer Oasis Games said it was a Chinese company which published games internationally, and had conducted an investigation which “revealed a disconnect between their marketing team and their localisation team” which it had now “taken action to address”.
The company apologised for the advert, which appeared on Twitter. As for Twitter, it said it had been unable to locate the advert as it was a self-promoted tweet which was subsequently removed, and did not comment further.
Another ad, this time for a game titled “King’s Throne: Game of Conquest”, featured two women in lingerie acting as quiz show hosts, stood next to words with missing letters such as “D_CK”.
A third, for “Airline Commander: Flight Game”, featured a video of the porn actress Mia Malkova in a “revealing cowboy outfit” encouraging users to download the game and play.
In all cases, the ASA ruled that the adverts could not appear again, with developers of said games warned not to feature sexist stereotypes which objectified and sexualised women.
“Today’s ASA rulings include several decisions on game studios using sexualised ads to attract new users,” Harbottle & Lewis games lawyer Kostyantyn Lobov told Eurogamer today. “The ASA has recently criticised mobile game companies for using ads of this sort (or allowing them to appear within their games), which objectify women and perpetuate harmful tropes.
