The Booth Babe

Booth babes have been a part of gaming conventions since sexuality has been an attraction factor. Conventions from Comic Con to E3 are loaded with beautiful women to indulge the gaming audience.

A booth babe’s job is to attract the games target audience, mostly men, to the booth of a particular hosted game. Once the babe has captured the attention of a person the babe leads them over to the booth. This is where the gamer can get an in detail look into the game or product that is featured at the booth. Attracting the audience to the game booth increases awareness and in small cases the likability of a game. 

Booth babes come in all shapes and sizes. They can be scantily dressed models to professional cosplayers in full life-like costume. Depending on the rating of the game, the image the company or the particular game is trying to maintain a hired booth babe can be conservatively covered or grotesquely underdressed. What the babes wear is carefully calculated to grasp the attention of the target audience.

An article from Digital Creativity states “The presence of highly sexualized women ensures for the male attendees that their heterosexual desire is firmly secured and on display: even more so, given that these women are ‘available’ to take pictures of/with. Their presence and the kinds of agency required of them, helps facilitate attendees’ spectatorial engagements with typically masculinized technologies in ways that affirm, rather than threaten, an ideological link between heteronormative masculinity and technological competence.”

From my experience as a booth babe I have learned many things. You must always smile, even if you really don’t want that sweaty person to hug you. You must always be nice, even if someone is getting a little too close for comfort. And most importantly you must be confident, even if the booth babe next to you is in a bikini and has triple D breast and a 22 inch waist. You are there to sell a product and represent the image of a company/game, so you must keep that in mind and remember to always have that particular company/games best interest at heart.

To many booth babes are a necessary evil to the gaming convention circuit, but there is no denying the boost in product awareness and sales these babes bring. 

Taylor,Nicholas, Jenson, Jen and de Castell, Suzanne(2009) ‘Cheerleaders/boothbases/Halo hoes: pro-gaming, gender and jobs for the boys’, Digital Creativity, 20:4, 239- 252  http://www.tarleton.edu/faculty/sword/video%20games%20and%20gender.pdf