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Female Characters - Empowering or Endangering Equity?
deacon_jay writes "There's an interesting article from the NY Times (registration required) about what the depiction of female protagonists in video games is doing for female empowerment. Obviously, there are opposing views put forward, such as: 'Women as hypersexualized killers distracts attention from their unequal status' or 'I do not think playing these games encourages women to be victims'. I'm tending to the latter argument, but the article raises some interesting questions." For example, Lara Croft - icon for the power of the female, or created for gamers to goggle at? This is even an academically discussed question.
It looks like things are changind. Did you read the NYT article? Quote: When a new Tomb Raider game subtitled The Angel of Darkness is released for Playstation 2 and the PC, expect a refashioned Lara Croft who engages in hand-to-hand combat with evildoers. (In previous games she either ran or shot them with her handguns.) Her infamous bust line, which prompted some women to complain that the character was gratuitously sexualized, will be reduced to more lifelike proportions.
The alternative is Samus from Metroid. Do ya think anyone noticed (that 'it' was female)? Or maybe Dora the Explorer (Dear god why do I know that?) Female characters with ridiculous figures are the only ones that are noticed. There are lots of characters that are not. Samus, Dora, the woman from Zelda, the princess from Mario -- all don't have stylized figures. Hey guess what? Lara Croft was made for the women, like fark's boobies links are for women. (Anyways, I blame Anime, a really, really cool genre with some serious testosterone issues, IMO)
-Sean
As a game developer, I see a key reason that female characters are hyper-sexualized that has been missed. It's not really that people want huge breasts (though some people argue for that in design meetings, they are usually ignored); the real issue is that we want the characters to be attractive, and modeling a pretty face is damn hard, but a slim waist and large breasts are easy. If it was easy to make a female (or male) character attractive without exagerating their physical characteristics, many would do that instead, but there are several technical issues preventing that. Poly limits and texture resolution create a large problem here, and are compounded by having to present all this on an NTSC screen, which is 640x480 and blurry as hell. Often a face, regardless of the detail you put in, comes out on the screen as a 64x64 pink blob with dark spots for eyes. Also, what makes a face "pretty" is very subjective, while large breasts are (largely) universal.
Sure, the fact that most developers are guys has an impact, but when deadlines are tight and the publisher keeps telling you that the lead isn't pretty enough, the temptation to forgo all the hard work of reworking her face again and just stretch some "torso verts" becomes overwhelming.