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The long and the short of this piece is really pretty brief, because it's something we all know, and have known for years. This post in the series exists because it has to, because I can't overlook something so egregious that we all know it internally:
Our female characters are nearly all overly sexualized. And even when they might not be so bad in the context of a game itself, they're beyond awful in the marketing materials.
Rather than re-hashing several years' and decades' worth of discussion and argument here myself, I'm going to spare myself the pain of wheel-reinvention and link you all to someone who does have the data: Go Make Me a Sandwich.
The post that first brought me to that blog was an excellent breakdown of sexualized depicion in WoW galleries, by gender. Hint: it's all T&A for the laydeez. She also addresses the kinds of poses that seem to be de rigeur for the men in the room.
So really we know this happens. This leaves us with two real questions:
1.) Why? Why why why?
2.) Aren't there other good ways to sell and market a game?
Over and over, we hear "sex sells." We hear that a bronze chestplate -- plate armor -- that covers the whole torso on a male avatar but only the breasts on a female avatar (or plate greaves, that cover the entirety of the legs on a male avatar but wears like a thong on a female avatar) does so because the men and boys who play the game just want to look at the bare girl skin.
Really? I mean, really? Do we think so little of gamers that not only do we assume that they're all straight men, but also that they all have the proclivities of an uncontrollable 13-year-old?
Everyone -- I mean, everyone -- in gaming has been discussing this for years. We're smarter than this. Valve has just recently knocked it out of the park on marketing a game with a female protagonist and a female antagonist.
So I'll leave you with just a sample of what some others have written on the topic:
- TVTropes entry on the Chainmail Bikini (examples galore)
- The Border House on the Platemail Bikini, especially in WoW
- Wikipedia's "Portrayals of Women in Video Games" entry
- A UVA Undergrad on feminist media theory & video game characters
- Aleah Tierny's "What Women Want," via PBS
- University of Arizona: "The Effects of the Sexualization of Female Video Game Characters..."
And ten minutes or less on Google will bring you to at least a hundred articles, rants, and blog posts on the theme. Some are better than others. (I skipped the ones that referred to our protaginists as "sluts," for example.)
So in short: this happens. It shouldn't. And I don't even have the energy to do the comparisons between, say, Lara Croft and Nathan Drake. To developers' credit, 2011-era Lara Croft is meant to be different from 1999-era Lara Croft. But when heroes in similar games are Boobarella and Charming Schlub, I think the point is made.
Next segment: first-person vs. third-person and voiced vs. unvoiced characterizations, and the difference these make to the player in terms of gender and identification.
About the only fantasy subgenre I'm aware of to even approach equality in depiction is barbarian fiction ... and the unfortunate "solution" there is to constantly parade next-to-naked male barbarians around, so the women aren't underdressed by comparison.
ReplyDeleteHe-Man wears even less than She-Ra and Teela, for example, while Conan and Thundarr images could go straight into Playgirl retrospectives.
Horror depictions can also approach parity, but often by either making the baddies completely terrifying and non-sexual or going for a barbarian-esque parity where all gendered villains are hideous while the heroes are universally hot.
Placeholder second try ... (disqus ate the first attempt)
ReplyDeleteFixt. ;) saw your first comment come in, didn't realize it was flagged as spam. Approved now!
ReplyDeleteTo be fair to it, Dragon Age's female armour MOSTLY avoided this (though that didn't make up for using the same ludicrously hourglass/unrealistic model for all female characters from the neck down). Not really the main point but I'm kind of an armour geek.
ReplyDeleteI should grab some EQ2 screenshots sometime -- one of the things that hooked me immediately when I first started, back in early 2005, was that when I looted an armor piece and equipped it on my female toon, it remained an armor piece. And man that Assassin looked good in an Ebon Chain set.
ReplyDeleteIt really does look better. It's really not on topic for the gender/objectification angle but I do think that scantily clad female characters are one thing that keeps games from getting more respect -- if you dress your characters for the titillation of teenage boys, people will assume your games are for teenage boys.
ReplyDeleteIt's definitely true, though -- there's a list of areas in gaming where I just want to shake people and say, "Hey, if you want this thing taken seriously maybe we really need to look at [X]." Writing and character design are two of those areas and there's a lot of overlap there with problematic portrayals of women (also of other minority types -- race issues, gay issues, etc) in gaming.
ReplyDeleteI should grab some EQ2 screenshots sometime -- one of the things that hooked me immediately when I first started, back in early 2005, was that when I looted an armor piece and equipped it on my female toon, it remained an armor piece. And man that Assassin looked good in an Ebon Chain set.
ReplyDelete