Community Highlight: A Rant on Juvenile Visual Videogame Design

to busy looking at the picture at the top to read the article, but because of the picture, i assume its a great one. so good job Rhineville

That last picture is bothering the hell out of me. That tiny waist...I just wanna fix it....

I agree with Rhineville on this. David brought up a similar topic last night during his broadcast of Metroid Prime. It seems that the roles of video game heroines are limited to overly emotional confused person, overly sexualized person, and completely devoid of any emotions slightly tomboyish person and of course the visuals reflect this in most cases. I'm an artist myself so I'm not one to say what a concept artist should and shouldn't do but when stuff like this gets through approval. I don't think the design is bad, but as Rhineville stated there is something clearly missing and I believe there was some sort of laziness going on (with either the concept artist or the art director).

I'm under the belief that this stuff gets accepted because its easier to create in all aspects of the game art pipeline. Easy to draw, easy to paint, easy to model, and easy to animate (yay jiggle physics). I don't think creating these types of characters is what is specifically keeping game art from being a truly excepted artform, its the lack of imagination that goes into it. Frank Frazetta was famous for creating well endowed women in battle scenes and such and his artwork is really well received and excepted. Not for the content but because you can really see that he took time and wasn't lazy with his creations.

Its unfortunate but humans will, for the most part, take the path of least resistance.

PS: Also there could have been a lot of issues with budget. Not just monetary but with time and disk space as well. If there wasn't enough time allocated to creating character art and other art assets then this is what can happen. Simple designs and simple execution. The same applies for disk space as well. I'm not sure how much space breasts take up on a disk but I would assume creating and animating several pieces of armor could take up much more space than they were allowed. However the more likely reality is that someone said "Oh that's hot" and approved large breasted females with little armor. I don't think this will effect anyone's enjoyment of the game though and at the end of the day that's all that really matters right?

I totally agree with all points here. As a female gamer, images and representations of women such as this have always frustrated me. I have no problems with the inherent idea of making female game characters sexy. Rather, I have a problem with how narrow that definition of "sexy" has become. Most "sexy" women are lumped into two main categories: the intimidating, borderline dominatrixesque femme fatale or the helpless McGuffin waiting for someone to rescue her. Either way, they will have impossibly huge boobs and tiny waists and run around in stiletto heels for not reason.

These characters are often empty shells, devoid of any true depth and meaning, serving only shallow purposes. Such extreme sexual aesthetic only serves to remove any sort of grounding and truth that is necessary to making characters relatable and believable. No one would wear such revealing armor or wear heels into battle or combat. So the ONLY purpose for that design is to sexualize these characters. And once these characters become sexualized in this trivial way they will always be sexual objects first and warrior second. Who they are as characters, if they are even anything (but that’s another argument), will never be as important as what they look like and if they are sexually appealing.

I think that as a community, we need to not only move away from poor aesthetic character design, but also redefine how we look at women media and what makes them appealing. We need to push for game developers to create strong female characters, created as an actual people and not merely an object for male players to reflect their fantasies onto. A well developed female character that is strong and capable shouldn’t need to relay on these cheap tricks to make her appealing to all audiences. And by crafting such unrealistic and shallow characters, game developers are only showing just how uncreative and incapable they are.

I’d like to add that this is of course not applicable to every single female character ever created, but it is to quite a few. And a lot of these arguments could be applied to aesthetic and characters design of male characters just by replacing sex appeal with forced machismo.

Sorry this was kind of long.

I ultimately agree that it can be a bit too much sometimes [movies are equally guilty of sex-sells, however].. but it starts with the company. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people who work on these games and direct them are male, and they tend to write and draw and program what they like - big breasts [with jiggle physics!!] on badass women. More women need to be hired into the system, but unfortunately, machismo has rooted itself pretty thoroughly into gaming culture.

I think you have several good points, but one thing I wanted to point out is that in Mass Effect 2, Miranda's appearance is actually an important aspect of who she is. It's a topic that is mentioned several times in the game, albeit these moments are rather brief. Nonetheless, everything about her, including her appearance, was "designed to give [her] an edge."

Isn't Miranda from Mass Effects appearence exactly the same as the voice actor portraying her? I mean, i suppose they could have given her some kind of mech suit, but you can't blame em for trying to be authentic in their recreation.

Oneechanbara is where it looses it though @,@

There's always a fine line between being adult and being adolescent, not just in videogames of course.

Certainly, for example, I've been pretty dismayed as a previous favourite of mine in Soul Blade (then Calibur) has gradually turned the female fighters more and more into bustier and less-dressed versions of themselves in each installment. I don't care if Taki was the best ninja in the world, pulling out a triple forward flip with those ridiculous zepplins attached to her chest would result in nothing but a faceplant and a couple black eyes.

The problem sometimes is not even the breasts alone, it's the dimensions; torsos are shortened, waists shrunk and legs lengthened. When everything is out of whack like that it just makes the character look like a cartoon character. If you want to give a female character big boobs then just make sure you're not giving her an 18" waist to go with them.

It's a lazy stereotype just as much as the fondess for male heroes with chests roughly 4 metres wide and so many muscles they look like a badly-stuffed sausage.

There are times when that exaggerated reality can work. But that's not all the time, really not even the majority of the time. And usually when it's not really appropriate for the game and setting, the only real reason is the age-old one that sex sells.

@Frieden - that's a good point (and I did love the one asari's comment about waiting for her to get dressed) it's just that her character overall is the least interesting out of the females and her suit (especially in the rear) follows a little too close to her body to look like it's comfortable or to even look like it's material at all. It's weird that I would probably not have a problem with her design if her ass looked like it was being covered by regular spandex rather than... well nothing :)

Yes! Thank you Joseph for pointing out something that I've been thinking of for years. The portrayal of females in video games is just idiotic these days. Ninja Gaiden, Metal Gear, Mass Effect, DA:O, Kingdom Under Fire 2, Nier, it's absolutely ridiculous. Even top quality video games are dragged down by immature design choices. I had a hard time taking MGS4 entirely seriously when Naomi would show up in her bra-less, massive cleavage lab suit. And the biggest thing that dragged MGS3 down was the fact that your partner was a CIA hooker who would parade around with her tits hanging out of her jumpsuit like it was nothing at all. In mass effect 2 it was hard to take Miranda seriously in her incredibly skimpy outfit, and Samara, who I though was a rather interesting character, was unnecessarily dragged down with her skintight, strait out of a comic book outfit that had an unnecessary amount of cleavage. I really hope for the sake of video games being taken seriously that game developers STOP with the juvenile attitude towards women, and kudos Joseph for bringing this up.

Not sure i recognize the difference between bayonettas skin tight outfit that she strips out of every time she does a special attack, and any big breasted girl in any other game.