In a new interview with the YouTube channel Rivals Assembled, the Marvel Rivals team was forced to address labels by gamers that the game is explicitly a “gooner” or “sexually-focused” game, evidenced by its revealing character skins and hyper-sexualized outfits. The conflation that Marvel Rivals is a gooner game is a common online allegation that is levied against the team-based superhero shooter. In the new interview, the Marvel Rivals developer provided a convenient explanation — or excuse — for the influx of eye-candy skins, attributing them to designs already existing in the comics.
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Marvel Rivals Creative Director, known to the player base by the nickname Guangguang, gave a wide-ranging sit-down interview at the recent Marvel Rivals Mid-Season Ignite tournament in China. Towards the end of the discussion, Rivals Assembled directly asked Guanguang to respond to accusations that Marvel Rivals is a “gooner game.”
“Because of our design, as mentioned earlier, is inspired by classic comic themes, including some very outstanding skins,” said Guangugang in Chinese. “These all come from classic comic designs. We take those classic comic designs and create some more fashionable designs based on them, to gain players’ appreciation.”
Guanguang asserted that the game’s cosmetics have broad support across their player base and also tie into “real-world themes” and the “season’s storyline.” While players sometimes refer to the game as a “gooner game” in jest, there were players concerned with the latest batch of summer skins, which they felt were unnecessarily more revealing than they needed to be, and made it harder to enjoy the game in a kid-friendly environment.
“I get to the summer Psylocke skin and [my friend] says that that is inappropriate and NetEase is weird for adding a skin like that,” wrote Reddit User ScholarBoring7743. “I ask why, and he says that little kids play the game.”
Marvel Rivals is rated “Teen” by the ESRB, meaning kids as young as 13 are allowed to play. Some players argue that creating a “gooner” culture around the game can cause potential problems and isn’t worth the risk to minors already navigating a dangerous modern online space.
Other players report being personally uncomfortable with the overt sexualization of the characters, feeling like the recent summer skins go further than other games are willing to go: “The over sexualization in Marvel rivals makes me so uncomfortable, like it’s so extreme,” wrote Reddit user ManaMagic_.
While Guangguang side-stepped the issue of whether Marvel Rivals is a “gooner” game or not, players who like the skins often don’t mind admitting that the sexualization is something they enjoy about the game.
Often at issue in gooner game discussions is an alleged “unequal sexualization,” where female characters are seen as getting more sexualized than male ones. However, making that case will depend on personal taste, as the game has revealing skins offered for both male and female characters. This online discussion continues to rage between the different sides of the debate, each seeking more arguments to support their opinion as more skins are released.
At the heart of the disagreement, which Guangguang touches on in his answer, is the idea of what qualifies as justification, and whether leaning into the comic sources qualifies. Opponents of the sexualized skins would argue that a source material justification doesn’t change the issues that come with increasingly revealing character outfits, making Guanguang’s response likely unsatisfying.
While Guangugang’s answer is unlikely to settle the Gooner game debate anytime soon, it is nice to get a direct response from the developers on a persistent topic that has followed the game since its launch, if at least for the fact that it is confirmed that the developers now know what the word gooner means.
Marvel Rivals is available on console and PC.
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Image courtesy of Netflix
