There have been a good deal of games that have caused many people to become querulous due to the content contained within, such as intense violence, strong language, or the abusing of digital prostitutes. Today we can add a new offender to this lengthy list of questionable video game content: obese royalty.

The issue has settled around the PSN downloadable game Fat Princess, which is being developed by Darkstar Industries and will be published under the SCEA label. The core of the game involves each team starting out with another team’s princess; the object of the game is to get your own princess back while holding onto the one you have. As a barrier against the other team swooping in and snatching their princess back, you can fatten her up by stuffing her full of cakes and sweets, therefore making it more difficult for the enemy team to carry her away. It’s rather a goofy setup, but it’s no laughing matter for the feminist community, as it has severely roused their ire. They seem to feel this game is projecting a negative opinion about the obese.

Melissa McEwan over at Shakesville took a very aggressive stance to the game when she stated that it would lead to the creation of a “ new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes,” and in a complicated critique of Sony, said that a “cutting-edge tech company” like themselves creating such a game was a case of “splendiferous retrofuck jackholery.”

Feminist Gamers’s Mighty Ponytail, on the other hand, has taken more of a moderate view, writing that it’s not the way the game looks or the concept behind it -- that your enemy has something you have to retrieve -- but that it’s the object, which in this case is a rotund royal person. She therefore suggests a change of gameplay that would make, in her words, the game “the best thing since… well, Team Fortress 2.”

How does she suggests this is to be achieved?

“Instead of running out into the forest to find cake to fatten up the princess with, why not go out and find gold (which is a lot heavier than cake) to stuff into a treasure chest? The more gold in the chest, the heavier it would be, and the harder it would be to carry.”

This is indeed a reasonable suggestion that would not overly compromise the game mechanics, but she also thinks that the game would need to be spiced up, as treasure chests full of gold are “not as ’cute’ as cake and fat chicks.” Mighty Ponytail suggests that the game could also involve throwing multitudinous weighty objects on top of the chest such as animals, trees, boulders and the like, so that people can still have fun while not promoting “nasty stereotypes about women and the obese.”

It’s clear that the feminist community, or at least these two members of it, are not pleased with the way Fat Princess has been created, but this feeling is not universal. A counter argument has been made by blogger Abby McVay over at SlashGear, who stated that while she has “always had a lot of respect for most feminists,” the comments of McEwan and Mighty Ponytail are examples of why she finds herself in the position of “having to defend feminists” as being portrayed as “pissed off irrational women out to get any man that looks their way.” She went onto add that she believed the claims made against Fat Princess at Shakesville and Feminist Gamers were nothing more then a case of “just looking for the latest and greatest thing to bitch about.”

So, we have angry denouncements of the gaming and an angry denouncement of those denouncing the game. Frankly, I don’t see how feeding a princess cake to keep her from being easily carried away is a “nasty stereotype,” as it is what indeed will happen if you eat too much cake, and it can happen just as easily to men as to women. It’s just a game and, in all honesty, nowhere have I read anything in the game saying that all women are fat or that you should hate them for being fat if they happen to be so. I also don’t see how princesses are being stereotyped: in addition to not being continually fed cake by cartoon characters to stop them being carried off, princesses aren’t usually locked in towers by people who want to make money off their hair or put into a timeless sleep by witches either.

Whoops. I think I just stereotyped witches.