I've seen the ad in question quite a few times, and have seen people of both sexes quite offended and annoyed by the contest. It asks for women to pose for the contest in a Playboy type shoot, and there isn't any element that requires gaming at all. Basically, to win the contest, you have to be a woman and be pretty...that's it. What do you think? Is Eidos completely dropping the ball and sponsoring a very inane and ridiculous contest?

From the article:

Not to mention the damaging imagery and expectations that this teaches girls. What should be focused on are gamer cred, artistic abilities, and writing skills. While the game industry lags behind others in employment for women, a treatment like this is unconscionable. Young women need to see encouragement about being interested in science and computers, not to take off their tops and answer a cattle call.

When major players like IGN (a gaming website that kids and families use) have it so wrong, the difficulty with the problem becomes how far the rabbit hole goes. Ignorant stunts like this take down IGN’s credibility as a gamer’s website yet another notch. One can only expect a non gamer website like Myspace to just go right along, because female gamers are not being represented properly even from within the industry. IGN is becoming nominally a game review site, as their conflicts of interest with advertising dollars increases scrutiny on its reviews.

One female game developer writes “IMHO any woman who participates in such a competition is doing a great injustice to both herself and the entire female populous. If we just sit by and let this kind of stuff continue then it will just happen over and over again and the people that orchestrate this will think it totally acceptable to continue to depict women in that manner - a sexual exploit.”

Read the full article over at womengamers.com