Cover Girl (working title), a game that explores the world of magazine and advertising airbrushing and photo manipulation – and ultimately, consumer self-esteem.Cover Girl is being created as part of Channel 4 Education's strategy to connect with its audience through their favourite digital mediums.
Cover Girl allows players to take on the role of a desk artist in a publishing house. Via challenging tasks and tests of skill, players will “enhance” the photographs that will adorn the publishing house’s fashion magazines. As the game progresses, the player will begin to understand the methods that magazines employ to sell units and the methods that advertisers employ to sell beauty products.
Andrew Crawshaw, Creative Director at Tuna, says:
"There is a wealth of opportunities out there for independent game developers to flex their creative muscles without working for traditional publishers. Working with Channel 4 gives us an excellent opportunity to innovate and create something daring like Cover Girl".
Alice Taylor, Commissioning Editor for Channel 4, says:
“Beauty is a terrible thing: an enormous industry, a fleeting thing to have (if we have it at all) and nowadays, mostly an unnatural product of digital manipulation. The daily visual barrage of sculpted abs, cow-length eyelashes, unnaturally long thighbones, skin without follicles: what is it doing to the nation’s self image, we ask ourselves?
COVER GIRL (working title) aims to help our teenagers understand that media and images are manipulated, designed, and very carefully. Armed with this knowledge, the next photograph of a wrinkle-free 44 year old might not seem quite so normal after all.
Channel 4 Education is very pleased to be working with Tuna Technologies, who have a reputation for both hard work and exciting creative techniques.”
COVER GIRL aims for a summer 2010 launch.