6 Video Games That Didn’t Realise They Were Being Offensive

3. Fat Princess

Fat Princess is a cutesy top-down cooperative strategy game in which players assume various combat roles in an effort to save their team's princess from the opposing team's stronghold, while working simultaneously to keep the other team's princess in their captivity. It's essentially capture-the-flag, except teams can feed the princesses in their captivity some cake, thus making them morbidly obese harder for the opposing team to carry.

Something of a controversy erupted across the internet when Fat Princess burst onto the scene back in 2009. On one side of the debate there were some feminists that claimed the game reinforced fat-bashing and objectified women, on the other side there were a lot of angry gamers who were rather keen to point out that it's just a game.

The issue really has very little to do with gender; if the game had been called Fat Prince it would still have been equally as unpalatable. The issue is with the presentation of weight gain, eating disorders and obesity in general €“ and it's largely unintentional. In Fat Princess we're shown characters that are so unable to control their eating habits that they're actively imprisoning themselves, and it's that game mechanic which fuels the joke at the centre of Fat Princess; essentially obesity is funny. It really isn't.