Ethics of Beauty and Body Image in Video Games
I’m in the concept phase of designing my game’s female main character, Kō. Of course, when designing characters the goal is to make them distinctive and memorable, which means a distinctive silhouette among other things.
Let’s be perfectly clear here: most games solve this problem for women by giving them inflated boobs and tiny waists. It may have worked for Lara Croft, but in a field rife with bodacious tahtahs, exaggerated sexual anatomy doesn’t make a distinctive character anymore.
Aside from that good aesthetic reason for avoiding the cliche, there is also the ethical dimension. When we endow our female characters with anatomically impossible cleavage or hips you could serve a three course dinner on, you instantly discredit them; it’s as though they don’t have the personality or importance to make them genuinely interesting, so they rely on sex appeal to create interest. In fact, that’s often exactly the case. You knock the narrative wind out of them, as it were. They are now visual objects.
In a way, defaulting to exaggerated figures discredits all women; instead of thinking about what hair color they might have, the first question as a game artist becomes: how generous are her mammaries?
That leaves us with cardboard barbie dolls in place of real characters, and creates unrealistic expectations in people whose little ape brains, evolved out on the plains and canopies of Africa, are not equipped to filter this constant, life-long barrage of visual fiction.
Is this right of us? I don’t know.
What I do know is that it’s boring. We need new visual memes, and different methods of story telling that lift our female characters to a higher level of believability and emotional connection.
So here’s my question for you: what is attractive in a girl that’s not sexualized? What features can be accentuated that would tend to give credibility to our characters instead of take it away? How do we create characters who are not dolls, who are not physically perfect, perhaps not even attractive, yet are compelling and believable and magnetic?
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About Pete
Plucky polymath, software engineer by day, dreamer of dreams by night. Longing to behold and beget beauty and love, Kōtiro is an expression of my passion for the magic of the world in which we find ourselves.
Female characters I like and trust, but who aren’t sexualized, tend to have some or all of the following features:
big eyes=someone who cares
big head=big brain
lots of hair=vitality, flow
very old (think Yoda) = wisdom
clear skin/clean clothes: indicates they take care of themselves
adequate clothing: skimpy, tobacco paper-sized bras indicate to me that the character is more interested in finding a mate than solving a quest. So adequate (or culturally acceptable) clothing is a must.
You might be interested in checking out the My Commander Shepard series on Border House Blog. It’s a series of posts where people talk about their Commander Shepards from Mass Effect. I think all the featured ones are women.
The recent post Do Game Designers Have a Social Obligation touches on some of the same points you do.
I think you can display beauty in the attitude of the character. For example, if the character was more physically “uglier” than the traditional hot looking female characters, but yet walked the same way the other characters did, had the same facial expressions, talked the same way, and the other characters in the game reacted to her like she was hot, well people playing the game might be taken in by this and believe this new look is hot, because of all the suggestions of it being hot.
That’s a great idea. That’s the direction I’m going in with Aroha, Kō’s girlfriend. We’ll see how it works in practice.
Far out, that sounds primo! What a cool conversation. What Emily says makes sense to me, cause heaps of guy actors are ugly, but they get made out to be hot. What about a woman who is solidly built. If a main form of transport was by canoe, she’d have strong arms & shoulders. Ah, just a thought. Heck, I don’t even play. Have fun, peop’s!