Getting the Girl

1up.com has a great article up entitled Getting The Girl. Zoe Flower discusses female gaming stereotypes, the role of women in gaming, and the mythical "girl formula" for gaming success. From the article: "Lara Croft continues to personify an ongoing culture clash over gender, sexuality, empowerment, and objectification. It was while standing in my first-ever ladies' room line at E3 2004 as I pondered the Playboy bunnies, the return of Leisure Suit Larry, and the slew of buxom virtual ladies headlining each booth that I questioned whether the industry had evolved at all."

Comments

Target Audience

[eln]

The biggest market for video games are males aged 12-25. Big breasted women helps sell games to this demographic. That is all.

Re:Target Audience

[Anonymous Coward]

And let's not forget about all of those big hunky male characters in video games like:

The Doom Guy
Serious Sam
Duke Nukem ...

I've never heard another male video gamer complain `Duke's arms are too muscular!` or `Look at those pecs, they're unnatural!`.

They're charactures. It's like complaining that cartoon characters don't look like real people.

Re:Target Audience

[Psmylie]

If that's true, then isn't having slender-waisted, large breasted women characters also marketing towards a femal fantasy?
Hmmm...

Re:Target Audience

[Marvelicious]

THANK YOU!

I'm sick of hearing about how MEN are responsible for the sexual stereotyping. What about Cosmo and all the other mags dedicated to helping women look as much like the sterotype as possibe?

Re:Target Audience

[Miss_Saturnine]

It's not necessarily the size of the breasts that bother me. I have large breasts (and shock horror! I'm blonde!), and I don't consider myself particularly empty-headed.

What bother me, is the lack of proportion between the breasts and the hips. If my hips were a size 0 with the chest that I have now, I'd fall over!

Small breasts, large breast. I don't care. Just make the bodies a little more real.

buxom virtual ladies

[drgonzo59]

If having a slew of "buxom virtual ladies" is wrong then I don't want to be right.

What about the studly men!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes women will say to me "Look at those scantily clad women with their tits hanging out on the box! That's sexist!"

To which I have to say "Do you see any short bald dudes with a big pot belly on any of these boxes either? No, it's all he-man looking dudes busting at the seams with muscles".

These games aren't any different than music videos or movies. Do you see any ugly people in music videos or movies aimed at 18-25 audience? Of course not. No one attacks the music industry for using half-naked chicks and musclemen with abs-o-steele to get teenagers to watch their videos...

Re:What about the studly men!?

[kaiidth]

Well, both sexes are regularly 'objectified' (if anybody's a believer in "objectification is just a politically correct excuse to whine", see this site for a bit of not-too-crap research and discussion on the matter, such as it is), although it's a relatively recent phenomenon for men - there's a vaguely interesting article on the subject here.

One suggestion in this article is that the increasingly frequent appearance of these idealised images of men are causing similar effects to those often seen in women, blamed on objectification by feminists, and laughed away by the rest of the world :-) And I quote:

The bodies in advertisements come to represent an ideal that individuals seek to achieve, and hence provide the foundation for a masochistic or punitive relationship with one's own body. It becomes possible to think about one s body as if it were this thing which followed one about and attached itself unevenly to the ideal outline which lingers beneath (Coward, 1992, p. 416). The dislike for the body becomes pathological and has very real consequences such as low self-esteem, distorted self-image, eating disorders, and even changing the body through painful plastic surgery (Coward, 1992; Kilbourne, 1999;Wolf, 1991).

Increasingly, these consequences are manifesting in men, who are responding to a consumer culture that is less and less forgiving of those who are not sufficiently young, thin, and attractive. In response to these images of the perfect male, men are getting manicures and facials, dyeing their hair, concealing blemishes, and spending millions on plastic surgery.

In 1992, men spent $88 million on liposuction, facelifts, nose-reshaping, and eyelid surgery. This number increased to almost $130 million in 1997. In 1996, men spent $12 million on penile implants, and silicone calf and pectoral implants are rapidly increasing in popularity (Fraser, 1999). In addition, men now account for almost 10% of individuals suffering with eating disorders (Fraser, 1999). In short, men are increasingly dissatisfied with their bodies, go to great lengths to achieve a more youthful and hard-bodied appearance, and are suffering the psychological consequences that are a side effect of consumer culture.

So there we are. Finally, equality of the sexes; we all get to have bad self-image thrust upon us! The bonus side is I suppose that one day it might well equal out; when we're all totally freaked out, bulimic gym zombies, maybe there'll be an advertising revolution of some kind.

And the cynical part of me also wants to add: what goes around, comes around...

Re:What about the studly men!?

[be-fan]

Yes. Because, fundementally, objectification is distillation and simplification, something that humans do every day, are programmed to do by instinct, and must do to retain their sanity.

Do you have a gardener? We have a pretty big lawn, so we had to get a gardener. Our's is pretty good, I'll give you a number if you're interested.

Notice I didn't say "person who tends your lawn". I said "gardener". Just as I would say, "do you have a lawn mower?". I treated the person as an object, and object whose sole purpose was to care for my lawn. Of course, if I hadn't read into that statement, you'd never have given it a second thought, because it's a completely normal process. There is no malice in it, it's just a matter of reducing the amount of information we have to consider.

Except for the ones we know most closely, we consider everyone to be objects, various lumps of matter whose lives are inconsequential to us beyond the singular role they play in our own. The fact that we do so in entertainment and advertising is not only not shocking, it is to be expected, and perfectly natural.

Re:What about the studly men!?

[identity0]

Jesus, this topic is filled with so many misconceptions of what women find attractive that I feel the need to interject. (disclaimer: I am a guy, but I tend to pay attention to what women want more than to the latest kernel release, unlike most slashdoters)

You know what videogame character I've heard women I know be attracted to the most? It's goddamn Link, from the Zelda series. Not some steroid-abusing freak from Serious Sam or Duke Nukem, but the cute little dude with elf ears. The Final Fantasy guys are popular with girls, too.

The muscle-bound tough guy is more of an asperation for guys than an attraction for girls, though girls like that to a certain extent. Girls tend to like the more realistic, cuter guys who have an personality than one-liners about kicking ass.

Simple question: have you ever seen Arnie or Stallone on the poster for some chick flick? No, it's always some relatively wimpy-looking guy like Cusack or Cruise. So stop pretending that Nukem & pals are trying to attract women - they're clearly not.

As a side note, Nintendo seems to be doing a much better job of attracting women than other companies. The girls that I knew in high school who played lots of video games always seemed to be talking about Nintendo games like Pokemon, Mario, Donkey Kong, Kirby, etc.

Department...

[dylan_-]

from the pink-boxes-not-needed dept.

Hmm...so, either:

1: "Box" isn't used as a slang term in the USA

or

2: Slashdot is even geekier than I thought...or perhaps less geeky...I'm not sure now...

Sheesh

[stratjakt]

Give the feminazi shit a rest for awhile.

If Lara Croft was a fat bull-dyke noone would buy or play the game.

BTW, before you start crying "sexism", you might want to note that male characters are invariably the 6'4 rugged Dirty-Harry type.

I've never seen an FPS where you play a myopic, balding, fat kernel hacker.

Half Life was as non-stereotype a lead character as I've seen, and that's only because Gordon wears glasses.

Re:Sheesh

[cgranade]

RTFA. This article challenges the perception that women are the only ones stereotyped against, as well as that the portrayal of women in games must be inherently anti-feminist. Playboy: Mansion's lead designer is a woman. Moreover, she is pregnant with twins.

Re:How quaint

[Staos]

That's her real name. Her parents were hippies.

I'm being completely serious here. She used to write a collumn for OPM, and she wrote about her name once.

I bet "girl games" would have girls on them too

[Anonymous Coward]

If you go to the magazine section and see all the silly men's magazines, they have pretty girls on them (occasionally men).

When you look at the women's trashy magazines, they have pretty girls on them (occasionally men). You know, the ones that tell you how to make your butt smaller, charge your cell phone, run a fortune 500 company, and get that cute guy, all before lunch?

No mention of HL2?

[neolith]

I thought Alyx was a pretty well realized female character. Tough, feminine, sexy without being a slutty, smart as hell, and she even possessed a figure without Laura-Croftian... embellishments. I think it says positive things that the top game of the year has a female character that can stand up with the men in the game, and possibly has a future in her own game. I'd *love* to see an Alyx and DOG game, or just Alyx for that matter.

Sure, you can find stereotypes in trashy games like BloodRayne and various fighters, but there are plenty of male stereotypes to be found over there as well.

Why should it evolve?

[raehl]

What makes Ms. Flower's opinion about what characters in video games should look like, "more" valid than anyone else's?

Nothing. Unfortunately, there are many more video game customers who would like their female characters to have cartoonishly large breasts than there are video game customers who would like their female characters to have folds and beards.

The difference is that guys don't get their panties in a bunch because all of the male video game characters have cartoonishly large muscles.

Ms. Flower is trying to manufacture a double standard where none exists - male and female characters are treated the same; they're made to look perfect.

As for video game themes, Ms. Flower is simply outvoted. Our culture uses sex to sell. We sell stuff using attractive people, choosing gender based on audience. Complaining that video game conferences have booth babes is like complaining that there are no fat guys in soap operas.

Evolved?

[el-spectre]

Men/boys (your main game demographics historically) like to look at attractive women. There is nothing wrong with this, it is a natural response.

Men do not have to stop acting like men just because a few women (I say "few" because I most women I know are OK with guys looking at girls, as long as it's not overt and rude) take offense. I say, let 'em make games w/beefy guys as the characters, if the female market will bear it.

Suppressing biological drives is tough... attempting to suppress the most important drive is a futile exercise.