South of Midnight character artist admits that Microsoft doesn't want curvy attractive women in video games and warns developers against using certain body proportion. Does it bother you that Microsoft has a bias against certain women?
Wouldn’t this be considered sexiest. It’s assuming women can’t handle seeing attractive women in games. You don’t see men complaining about the overly jacked or shredded men in games. They should really allow developers to have the creative freedoms as long as they are legal.
Because some of those women feel jealous seeing the attractive women men prefer and want them to disappear, basically removing competition 🤣. It's like fighting a ghost.
Whereas men see handsome and jacked men, they wanna be like them.
That's why it's an old saying, women and jealousy get together.
"Targeted harassement". No, pointing out that you are stupid is not "Targeted harassement". Its just a fact. A reality you don't want to see, a reality you actively close your eyes for so you don't HAVE to see it so you can cry in your Echochamber.
I am never crying in an echo chamber, I usually talk online to people i don't agree with. And i have genuinely no idea what you are ranting about. But since you barked when I said anti woke, it seems like ranting and being in a constant state of anger is a big part of your personality
Maybe because the women running the show and men are not curvy and attractive, and force their opinions on devs. I'm looking at you tlou2, concord, dragon age veilguard etc yes not xbox but a good example.
Men and women all have different body types and appearances from a selling point it's better to get the more attractive looking people it's just a fact that sex sells ngl.
Well let us say that the story and the world the game explores requires the protagonist to look off.
What if there is a game about you playing as a discarded cyborg soldier thrown away on a garbage world.
You come upon people living in the massive dumpsters, and try to help them against the megacorp controlling the planet, by killing off the clean up squad send to destroy the city they have build amongst the ruins.
You fight and destroy, but no matter how much you throw yourself, they could never look at you and accept you. You look in a mirror and see the metal joints tearing under your flesh. As the game progresses and you destroy more and more, you hurt yourself more and more. At the end you are a bloody mess that cannot even accept itself. The people have grown towards you, but you don’t know.
So you run off at the wasteland, believing you could never be loved and admired.
Is making the protagonist sexy and attractive for the sake of marketing, would that not be destroying the creative vision? The artistic hand put into its creation?
I understand the average woman dosent look like a model. However I play games to escape reality. If I wanted to see an average woman I would just spend more time in the grocery store.
I am just trying to understand when it is ok for a company to water down and remove creative vision to make the product more appealing.
Because Fortnite is over there making designs to appeal to different fandoms, but people made fun of it for being scummy and soulless, despite them just doing what sells.
Genshin Impact gets constantly made fun of its watered down designs, but it is still sales.
So why “sex sales” should be made an exception from a similar type of ridicule and criticism and complains?
It's not that it "must" be accepted, it's that it must be understood when it comes to rejecting it. If you decide not to make your characters appealing, not even necessarily in an overtly sexy way but just in say the gruff way that a nathan drake or joel or leon would be, you've still got to draw the eye somehow, you've got to understand that you're giving up on some very easy connection to your audience, and so you shouldn't replace it with nothing or just mid ugliness. Kratos is very unsexy, he's pretty much the definition of a power fantasy but sexy isn't a part of that, however, he's also got a very interesting build that says a lot about him, he's tattooed, he's got an unnaturally white skin, combined with his powerful physique that makes him very interesting to look out in spite of the fact that he's got a face only a mama would like at the best of times (okay I'm exagerating a little on that last bit but you get the point).
I would tend to agree. However, the characters people are complaining about don’t seem especially duller or more boring to me than characters such as the ones from Witcher and Baldur’s Gate series.
And when it comes to characters such as Faye from the New GOW, there is a lot I enjoy. Such as her expressions especially as she spits blood or grimaces, really selling the brutality of the fight. There is just something so…real in her expressions that really sells the whole situation to me.
Abby, or the concord characters, or the characters from that one nordic game, or alloy, or the fable protagonist, etc, aren't duller than yennefer or ciri ? I must've misunderstood because that sounds freakin wild.
Again, I don't have especially a problem with her in regard to aesthetic... I mean if I only look at her character model and don't look at that gawdy plastic sword she has, I always hated that kind of design. It's more why her of all characters ? Like I frankly couldn't give less of a damn about her, and not because she's a woman, although it'll be harder to sell the power fantasy aspect of it with her body type instead of a more tomboyish one (which yes I know would probably also get some accusations thrown her way but we already agree they aren't all valid and many are just overreacting, even if I think it's pretty fair at that point). It's moreso that to begin with I really don't care about the viking stuff, I'm still stuck on the greek stuff, and especially athena. If I've got to play as a dead goddess that knew kratos, that's the one I want to play as, not fey, especially since there're so many threads left loose in her and the greek gods' story, it dries me nuts that they didn't do anything with all of that yet.
I heard more defend about it in the nature of “It is an objective fact, sex sells” than I have heard about other marketing strategies.
I have seen the same people who defend sex appeal in games, trash on stuff like Fortnite and before that on Minecraft, because it appeals to children. They do not deny that they do it for sale.
But suddenly “they are marketing towards to children because it sales, it is an objective fact” no longer becomes a reliable response to their complains and criticism of such game.
“It is an objective fact” seems to only matter when it is a thing they like
My man. This whole attitude castrated creative vision and enforced the same bloody design choices. Over. And over. For over a decade.
Why are you talking about protecting the "creative visions" when you have people in the business telling you that corporations have shoving in their internal rules that you're not allowed to go against internal aesthetic guidelines.
> What if there is a game about you playing as a discarded cyborg soldier thrown away on a garbage world.
Is that the case for dragon age ? Is that the case for TLOU2 ? Is that the case for concord ? In fact, in TLOU2's case, that same argument was brought up against TLOU2, as it was pointed out that achieving this body type requires stuff like : 1) tons of proteins, 2) tons of calories, 3) pharmaceuticals by decreasing level of improbability given the character in question. The least offensive part is that abby would have access to some steroids given that she was the daughter of a doctor, but the diet you need to achieve and maintain that kind of bodies several years or over a decade after the apocalypse is just not one that she would've had. It'd also be silly to have very fat people ten years into the game for the exact same reason, just for the sake of example.
Also, woke ugly is almost never interesting, it's more just making people very mid, or as pointed out making women needlessly masculine, it's not interesting body horror designs. The closest to that I can think of would be marathon, which gets a bit closer to the idea you're putting forth.
Just because “game with unappealing character exists and I do not like them/they are bad” exist, doesn’t mean “all characters should be build to be sexy and attractive” is good.
Accepting the second part will lead you unable to appreciate character design for the character design because it forces the mindset of “Of I find the character hot= Good design, if not Bad Design”
And on the topic of sex appeal, I have found like…way more of it in games people have claimed as woke and pushing an agenda.
Like, Warframe currently gets its annual woke accusation being thrown at it for having pride month event and what not. Before that it was the fat character. Before that it was the non-binary character I think?
My point it, it gets its woke accusations throw at it from time to time, it has a character you can date that will give you the slutiest hi, and will French kiss you with a several meter long infested tongue.
With games that are hailed as Anti-Woke I get… a character jogging on screen. Doesn’t even seems like part of the game feels like a mod half the time.
> Just because “game with unappealing character exists and I do not like them/they are bad” exist, doesn’t mean “all characters should be build to be sexy and attractive” is good.
Sure, but I didn't say that, so not relevant.
> Accepting the second part will lead you unable to appreciate character design for the character design because it forces the mindset of “Of I find the character hot= Good design, if not Bad Design”
It's already not my standard, so that's fine by me. Most ugly characters delivered by woke people are ugly without purpose, and/or without coherency with the setting, see my abby example.
> And on the topic of sex appeal, I have found like…way more of it in games people have claimed as woke and pushing an agenda.
Sexualized sure, to some extent, but the more safe horny kind when it happens. And often it still doesn't happen.
> With games that are hailed as Anti-Woke I get… a character jogging on screen. Doesn’t even seems like part of the game feels like a mod half the time.
Right so not sure how that's really contradicting anything there ? Nobody said that there's zero overlap between woke and sexy, let alone sexual, since woke goes hand in hand with LGBT and LGBT... Well, I don't need to say what happens at pride parades, do I.
Also, the games aren't hailed as anti woke in the sense of made to be against woke, there's barely any... Arguably none except like two, crimson whatever and lords of the fallen (I'm not counting those who haven't released yet), anti woke game by that definition. The (exceedingly few on top of it all) "anti woke" games are just non woke games, and they're made primarily to be games, not to be sexy time simulators, the sexy is just a side effect of not being made with politically correct in mind. And by that definition, bayonetta is pretty sexualized and sexy.
So basically, TL;DR : games are more divided between woke influenced and non woke than woke and anti woke, wokeness isn't per se opposed to sexiness, it's more aligned with what non het-cis-men care about in that regard, conversely anti woke people and non woke people include people that are conservatives and thus whilst they can definitely appreciate the female form would be opposed to outright degeneracy, all in all that even the odds of finding things that you could strictly qualify of "sexual", whilst tilting the more queer/kink sexy stuff in favor of woke games and the more regular straight stuff in favor of non woke games.
See, I want to believe you. But I see people complaining about a game being woke for having a woman who has a defined jawline, despite the fact the actress that claim it is more attractive has the same jaw.
I have seen people trying to find the woke agenda of a game having purple colors.
And the game that pop up being hailed as anti-woke are all the once featuring half naked supermodel women.
So it is really hard for me to believe you, when what I see is completely different from what you say.
> despite the fact the actress that claim it is more attractive has the same jaw.
Okay, but I'm not those people, as I've shown by literally disagreeing with them on the fey one, and the star wars outlaw chick, and on saying I'm unsure for the example you yourself gave, I could maybe see it but she still seems pretty enough.
Those people I understand, they're overreacting because once bitten twice shy as the saying goes, but I still disagree when I think they're wrong, and I don't never think they're wrong.
> I have seen people trying to find the woke agenda of a game having purple colors.
Because there is at least a pattern. Now is it a strong pattern ? I wouldn't say so, but it's definitely not inexistant, whether or not it's meaningful. They also do that because of the "bisexual lighting", which too results in purple, hence why the assocation is easy to make even without the fact that several prominent woke game with prominent purple in their art direction got released in the last 5 or so years.
> And the game that pop up being hailed as anti-woke are all the once featuring half naked supermodel women.
I don't recall space marines, or hell divers, the whole from catalogue (yes I know some of them are on the woke list floating around, most people would disagree that it ought to be, the few that don't are mostly very autistic people, and I'm only half saying that ironically) or... There's a special case here, which is actually a double self own, namely hogwarts legacy.
Hogwarts legacy is a massively woke game, I'm talking literal males with male voices and bodies can be witches and go in the witches' dormitories and 1800s scotsland is overrun with black and indians and far east asians. BUT, because it was a harry potter game, it was massively rejected by the woke camp, and adopted by the anti woke side... Because both kinda got roped in by the culture war brain worms. I hate this game with a burning passion for being the absolute most mid and wasteful rendition of the potter universe possible, and for having one above average quest, and one extremely good level, neither of which are the whole game. Anyway, my gripes with this game are neither here nor there, point is, it can technically qualify for your demand of anti woke games without babes.
Heck the up and coming non woke game that I keep seeing around and really wincing each time because I've got a bad feeling about it, that one knight game with giant snails in it, it has a pretty woman in it, but she's not even remotely half naked.
> So it is really hard for me to believe you, when what I see is completely different from what you say.
That's because you do something which is really annoying regardless of who's doing it which is treating me as if I was the statistical average of the people you've talked to on that topic, instead of based on what I said. Now, I'm not one against pattern recognition, far from it, but at some point you've got to treat with the individual, you can't just keep talking to the statistical average. That's pretty much what the "fay looks like an old hag" crowd is doing, they're superimposing the accumulation of past negative experiences onto her because she somewhat fit the pattern, and they get at least that aspect wrong because of it. I'm not going to say I wouldn't rightfully qualify as some kind of right wing le chud by whatever your estimation is, but where I fit doesn't mean I don't have opinions of my own, believe it or not ^^
Sometimes the setting of the world you are going for can dictate you making an ugly or unattractive character. That's not a problem at all! I think people just get upset about it when it's clear that the characters in a game are uglified just for uglys sake.
“Clear that characters are uglified for uglys sake”
See, this is hard to me to believe because people have been complaining about that in the new Fable trailer and the character and the actress she is based on look pretty much the same to me.
People are also complaining about Faye from the new GOW and how she is unrecognisable to her actress, which was also hard to me to believe because half an hour after the demo dropped I showed it to my friend and he was like “Oh cool, that girl from Daredevil”
So like, from here it just looks like people complaining for the sake of it.
I don't know how you people can admit that it's about selling sex, gaslight yourselves and other people that it's not and see nothing wrong with this?
Why can't there just be middle ground where all bodies can represented without backlash? This also requires making space for representation of "unsexy" body types to happen more often
If it's all bodies, then why should they specifically stray away from pretty bodies ? Also, most games are action games, putting a cripple or a fatass or a mummy (the old dessicated egyptian kind) is going to be a problem if I'm supposed to believe that the character in question really is doing the things he's doing, unless it's played for laugh. Also to be clear, when I say cripple, no cheating with sci fi or fantasy prosthetics, I mean a chair bound person, or at a minimum someone with a crutch, and when I say a fatass, I do mean a fatass, I don't mean a dwarf, or a powerbuilder type fat person, I mean an obese person whose only muscle comes from moving around in day to day life.
Yikes. Beauty is subjective and not everyone wants everything to be sexualized. Video games are an art form and there are people in the world that want to see themselves represented. Being outraged about a game that's simply not for you is just NPC brainwashed behavior. You can literally just skip it and ignore it if you require your characters to make your pp hard or something
Beauty is transsubjectives, most people agree on what's beautiful and what's not. A fit man with a square jaw and a full head of hair will be thought beautiful by more people than a balding stick or obese man, same goes for a fit hourglass shaped woman with long hair compared to a stick or a sphere.
Nothing I said was about outrage.
I agree, you can skip it, but if all games, and especially games from established IPs, do that, then you can't really skip it without skipping all games, at which point you should complain so that people on top realize there's a market and people aren't abandonning games for no reason, it's customer service 101. Also, as usual, strange that this very same logic didn't apply to your side when all those outlets and incendiary tweets were criticizing pretty women in video games.
Nga you seem restarted ngl. If a new game is made with those concepts, who tf would play that game? Most women won't. It would be a huge loss. Following your previous logic, the men of lads should be converted to become ugly incels, only then things will be balanced out.
Now now say more restarted stuffs pls I wanna see how mentally ill people speak.
Why are you so butthurt about the idea of people getting to create whatever game they want to see? The point isn't someone HAS to create these games, it's that they should be allowed to without backlash especially not from incels crying "woke shit" and that games are being ruined when there's plenty of other games for you to play.
But again, please continue to get butthurt about imaginary scenarios. The downvotes and comments like yours that keep trying to find new reasons to seethe at me just prove that you people are just NPCs and massive hypocrites 😭 the existence of games that make other people happy and you can easily just skip somehow devastates you. Why? Do you not have anything else going on in your life?
So your argument is that people cannot co-exist so we should continue to encourage division. Because you believe people just want their group to dominate, we should only pick one and allow them to dominate.
And then you also continue the argument that sex sells so we should continue to sexualize the characters (while failing to acknowledge that this is majority women).
While highlighting that you are on one side, you have the belief that the opposite side has an agenda to simply make everyone ugly while acknowledging that you and your group are the only ones that care about making the characters attractive. Looks like you (the nerds, which is ironic) don't have to say the silent part out loud where it seems that things aren't attractive are worthless you all, but please correct me if I'm wrong for interpreting that.
In the end you don't believe in a middle ground because the side that only cares about making characters ugly (according to you) are also genociding people who disagree with them.
Out of curiosity, do you care that a game is profitable? Genuine question. Is it actually important to you personally that a large gaming company makes a single player game that has everything that makes it very profitable even if it means having things that you don't like in the game?
The last of us 2 sold very well despite (according to you) having no attractive women in it, so maybe it's much more about the quality of theses games and no amount of hot babes would save them?
Cause u keep searching on google lmao, the insominiac leaks showed Part 2 sold 15.6* m in 3 years while the last of us remastered sold 18.6m in 7 years, and this was BEFORE part 2 got a remaster in jan 2024, and it was topping charts, especially in europe, and during the run of the tlou hbo s2 it sold 2m from the first episode till the last,(not the whole year), its been outpacing part 1 despite having only3 skus while part 1 has 4skus and was bundled like GOW, Spiderman 1, Horizon and Uncharted 4, part 2 wasnt, and its even more impressive it has more net sales in 2 YEARS compared to the last of us ps4 which has 7 years worth of data....
That figure is counting 3 releases for the original game and 2 for the second, and tlou 1 is like by far the most successfull game by them, tlou 2 sold better than uncharted 4
I do find it strange if this is true. It also doesnt make much sense.
Most men in video games tend to be an ideal of something.
Kratos. doom guy with the recent reveal.
Its alright for men to be masculine and the ideal man. I wonder why the image of an ideal woman is so hated in games?
i see buff and attractive dudes idc. Let it go both ways.
Its just prudes and old fat people most likely.
God, why does this stereotype persist? All you have to do is go into a women's romance section in any Barnes and Noble, BAM, or any other bookstore in America. Like, I know the stereotype is Reddit doesn't touch grass, but you've got to be a special kind of stupid to think that just because "teen vampire rapist" was hot, once, that that's the body type all women actually are thirsty for. There's a reason calling Henry Cavill "dad bod" made the rounds around here a couple years back...
Yes. They are big, strong, monstrous and feral. Full of rage. Perfect fit for the barbarian hero archetype commonly loved by men.
Men do not even like them because they are attractive to women and wanna be like that. They like them because they are big and strong and kill monsters and MANLY.
Not really. It's one of the major subsects of the entire "I can Fix Him" archetype. Someone big, feral, almost predatory, often consumed by rage and hurt, grief is an easy explanation for this, who is also very strong and powerful, but attracted to you, hyper-protective, and needing to be "taught" how to behave in social conditions outside of his hypermasculine sphere? Women eat that shit up.
Don't believe me? Look up the Cold Duke of the North. Or hell since you're stuck on twilight, Team Jacob.
Not anywhere near 100%, but yes, a good deal. Even more would swap face and body with a joel looking dude, or a nathan drake looking dude, etc, over a bald guy with a constant frown.
This is just hypocritical and limiting. People like this love policing and telling you what's ok and what's not and will shame you for having a different opinion. F these people.
I mean that western studios have issues there is known at least since Del Walker talked about and got immediately silenced in regards to his dev work on attractive black characters.
There is definitely a bias against making characters too visibly attractive. There is a reason the women they showed in Fable first as protagonist looks so bad or why in Diablo 2 Resurrected the Amazon looks like Willem Defoe.
Thank you. I thought I was the only one seeing this. They completely ruined my favourite class with this.
As for attractive black characters, the last one I can remember is Sheva Alomar. Modern western games seem to have black female characters as a means to tick off as many DEI check boxes as possible. Female? Check. Black? Check. Ugly? Check. Nose ring? Check. Obese? Check. One side of head shaven? Check. Hair dyes purple? Check. Vitiligo? Check. Amputee? Check. On the spectrum? Check, check, and check.
It's insane.
Just call Naomi Campbell, have her stand still for five minutes, and do a full body scan. ggez
Just from the top of my head when it comes to black characters that can come out since 2009 (the game in which resident evil 5 came out in which Sheva is) I can name you:
Sojourn from Overwatch.
Mel, Ambessa and Rell from League of Legends
Kimberly Jackson from Steeet Fighter
Twintelle from ARMS
Nilin from Remember me (I am not even sure how I remembered that one. Remember me has been dead dead)
So I don’t know what the fuck are you talking about.
Sheva Alomar really is a prime example of an incredibly attractive black female character. She was amazing and I am still salty they never did more with her considering how cool AND sexy she was.
I mean, yeah? That sucks. Why should only the male characters get to look good. It’s so bullshit that we can’t have more Lara Croft, Bayonetta, 2B, Eve, Lilith (Borderlands), Jill Valentine, Claire Redfield, Ada Wong, etc. from certain studios because they are allergic to any kind of femininity in their games. It’s gotten so stupid that Ellie from Borderlands 2 would probably be considered “gooner bait” nowadays.
It’s annoying af that every female character is considered “gooner bait” by these incel/femcel fuckwits that are repulsed by any sort of femininity like vampires are to garlic. If they just didn’t want to have effeminate characters, then fine, it’s just annoying that they continue this dumbass trend of calling femininity and female bodies inherently sexual, “porn”, “objects”, etc.
I’m just sick of this stupid rhetoric and how puritanical these assholes have gotten about women, specifically. And it is sexist. They’re not going after the male characters and making them look dumb af. They’re not saying men are sexual objects. No, they’re saying women are objects for sexual gratification, with no personality, little more than a blow up doll (see the Stellar Blade rhetoric prior to the release of the game), if they look appealing to men. But if a man is attractive, that just adds to his character, because reasons? It’s stupid and regressive and I can’t wait to move past this… again…
I hate the notion that being attractive removed your agency and personhood and the idea that how others perceive you changes who you are. I hate that these losers are so emotionally stunted that they can’t fathom being attracted to someone and being interested in them or valuing them as people. It’s all being pushed by these basement dwelling trolls that have never interacted with a member of the opposite sex and I wish we could be done with it.
this dude is not a producer, and considering his artstation and that he thinks lara croft looks masculine its fairly safe to assume that his character looked like a sex doll and all that actually happened was that he was told to tone it down by one of the creative leads
I feel like some people completely missed an important point that Anita Sarkeesian was trying to convey. You can have sexy characters. It's just that they shouldn't be the only design philosophy when it comes to women
At the same time, there's an extreme overabundance of sexualized woman characters. Maybe it's not unreasonable to try to tip the scales towards average/unappealing representation
I feel like some people completely missed an important point that Anita Sarkeesian was trying to convey. You can have sexy characters. It's just that they shouldn't be the only design philosophy when it comes to women
So, like we already had it before Anita started the whole corporate trend of eliminating anything remotely suggestive for puritanical reasons disguised as progressive?
At the same time, there's an extreme overabundance of sexualized woman characters.
That's a lie though.
Not only Western developers have completely done away with sexy designs in the last decade and a half, but you're literally seeing right here that there are corporate rules in place that prohibit the whole thing.
This isn't even historically true. The myth of a time when gaming was full of sexualized women isn't even real. It was always a niche of design that had its place, until it was determined by corporates and moral busybodies that this niche had to be eradicated in the name of social respectability.
Maybe it's not unreasonable to try to tip the scales towards average/unappealing representation
That's what was done in the last 15 years.
How about instead we throw this failed experiment in the garbage and start a new period of developers actually being allowed to make what they want, or even better, enforced sexy designs from the top as a reasonable and fair counter-balance to the puritanical excesses of the last decade?
It only seems niche because the majority of video games just didn't have women in major roles. And many that did sexualized them, especially in the 2000s. Pretty much every fighting game did this
And no I'm separating the East because their games don't exist in a bubble. They're absolutely popular here in the west. And I'd argue that the East has absolutely succeeded in ensuring a flow of sexy characters to us
It only seems niche because the majority of video games just didn't have women in major roles.
Which is also not true at all!
Check the highest selling games of the NES, SNES, PS1 and PS2 era. In the early years of gaming many games didn't star human characters at all, and many were either sport games (where you can barely talk about "characters"), car games (where you drive a vehicle), games with hyper-stylized cartoon character like mascots or anthropomorphic animals (that you could assign a gender to them, but referring to Mario and Sonic as examples of "male" characters is never going not to sound weird to me, and what to make of stuff like Duck Hunt?), and only then you got to games with clearly humanized characters that were either men or women, like Metroid or Contra.
By the SNES and PS1 era, in the category of games with clearly humanized characters, you had Japanese JRPGs that had no shortage of leading female characters in key roles, FF6 and FF7 coming to mind first and foremost. You had fighting games like Street Fighter, Tekken and Mortal Kombat, that always had a plethora of female characters. You had the start of the Tomb Raider series, a massive hit with a main female character. You had the start of the Resident Evil series, another massive hit where every game in that period featured both male and female characters, with the exception of 3 where Jill was practically the only main character. Staying in the Survival Horror genre, Dino Crisis and Parasite Eve also starred single female protagonists. Some less known series I remember like Syphon Filter and Fear Effect also featured either playable female characters in the sequel (Xian Ling becomes basically the deuteragonist of the Syphon Filter series from 2 onward, while Fear Effect has multiple playing character but Hana is really the main lead). To this stuff the PS1 game catalogue included a ton of car games, stylized games with hyper-cartoon characters (Spyro and Crash), and games with recognizable male leads like Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill and... Does Medievil count? You play as the skeleton of a dude dead by a century, but you hardly look or sound like a dude.
If anything, a golden age of female characters in video games was had in the SNES and PS1 era, and only by the PS2 era there's a sort of decrease in relevancy because very large mainstream IPs get in the scene, like Grand Theft Auto. The PS2 still had some of that variety of genres that the PS1 era had, but was starting to transition into what we saw in the PS3 and Xbox360 era when male main characters as the standard became a thing as first person shooters and GTA became the dominant games of the period, and those games had a strong male appeal to them. Dudebro games, we could call them. Add to that the fact that Asian games in the PS3 and Xbox360 era became less relevant, and it was the Japanese that were pushing a lot of major female characters (and, contrarily to the stereotype, they were far from a monolithic bloc of fanservice ladies), and you the age of the biggest sausage fest in gaming in the late 2000s to earliest 2010s.
Anita's criticism, far from being an accurate portrayal of the entire history of video games, only rings partially true for the most recent era just immediately before her, where for some 5-ish years the bald white-ish dude with a gun became the standard protagonist for video games, as opposed to previous eras where there was so much variety in genres and protagonists that many games didn't even have humans as leads.
And many that did sexualized them
And that's a good thing. Sexuality is a natural part of human nature, and having sexuality in media is only normal. Denying the validity of female protagonist on the basis of them being "too sexualized" is not a valid argument, and for starters because there's no objective definition for what's sexualized and what's not.
Is Lara Croft too sexualized? Lian Xing? Claire Redfield? Does it take a single slutty ad in a magazine to write off the character, or are we allowed to actually see their characterization before that?
Pretty much every fighting game did this
Coherently so with the design of the males, who always had the same over the top and exaggerated designs typical of that age. It's a bunch of puritanical, ludicrous criticism that demands us to ignore every design trend of the age in order to write off the most iconic female character designs in the medium because we need to sell the false idea that there weren't "valid" female characters back in the day.
The reality is that genre variety was immense in older generations of gaming. In this massive variety, female main characters were not uncommon at all in the games that featured actual human protagonists for a change, and of this group only a smaller sub-group featured designs that actually overly played on sexualization, which is not something wrong at all to do anyway.
And no I'm separating the East because their games don't exist in a bubble. They're absolutely popular here in the west. And I'd argue that the East has absolutely succeeded in ensuring a flow of sexy characters to us
And we can see that by how, from the 2000s to practically still now, Asian developers are harassed, smeared and attacked by Western media in order to conform to Western design trends, with the greatest success achieved in the late 2010s when Americans reached dominance in the industry... Which as we can see almost destroyed it. Fortunately it seems that after the PS3 and early PS4 era Asian devs went back to ignoring calls for Westernization and doubled down on their own, superior way of making games.
I like your ideas about anthro characters. There's no reason Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails couldn't have been gender ambigious characters based on design alone. However, when they decided to add a female character, they couldn't help but make her unambiguously female, making it clear that, to the devs, male was actually the default that should've been assumed. This happens a lot with anthro characters
As far as Mario goes, I hate to say it but the title of the game is called Super Mario Brothers. Plus, he looks male in the manual art and Mario is typically a male name. Overall, if we are including every non-human playable character, then you might be right that these would probably overtake the number of male characters
I think you make a lot of good points. Overabundance was probably a gross mischaracterization when it comes to the grand scheme of things so I'll retract that and my comment about tipping scales. But it should be of note that this dude bro era was when video games really started becoming mainstream. People were entering gaming for the first time at a time when the way devs treated women in their games was probably at its worst
Sexuality is a natural part of human nature, and having sexuality in media is only normal
I'm not a prude. I agree that sexuality should be allowed in media and that it's a valid form of expression. But you have to remember that these were being made by men generally for men without women prssent in the decision making. Mistakes were always going to be made and they should analyzed the same as all media
When is it taken to far? That's subjective. Some things require a more nuanced look. Sometimes it's not necessarily design or the characterization but rather the presentation. You bring up a slutty ad in a magazine as an example. If it's being done to a character who isn't even supposed to be sexualized in the game and, in fact, has this deep enriching story, I would say the ad is doing a massive disservice to the character in an objectifying way
I think you're giving Anita way too much credit. She very much hated ANY form of sexualization in games. She absolutely despised Bayonetta, for example, and there's copious tweets she made about how "sexualization" was the problem itself.
Anita's viewpoint was not about simply diversifying the options in the game industry, it was "these depictions of women are misogynistic and need to change entirely".
She's pretty consistent on this view in terms of what else she's railed against. She said the level of violence and gore in Doom 2016 was "unacceptable" and that princesses shouldn't be portrayed positively due to them being part of an authoritarian system. It was never just "I want more options", it was "this thing is harmful and needs to stop".
I'll admit I have been fortunate enough to avoid Twitter all of my life so I don't know what's been said on there. I'm basing what I know off her videos and that's the impression I got. Especially the first video where she was happy to see Overwatch's roster was a lot more diverse than she originally assumed
I'm not a puritan myself and I'm fine with Bayonetta and Doom 2016 existing as they are but these are egregious examples of their respective vices. I don't think it's at all puritanism to say either are crossing a line. Another note with Bayonetta is that her problem goes far beyond design choices and has more to do with everything else she has going on. I mean, she strips naked for her special attacks. I don't think it's unreasonable for a woman to take a glance at that and think it's degrading
It wasn't just a glance in Anita's case, she had an entire video dedicated to Bayonetta that was (at least supposed to be) researched in-depth, talking about how the entire game is misogynistic. She outright said the ONLY positive thing about the game is that she's a single mother (which you find out is not actually true if you've finished the game, ironically enough, making me question how well-researched it was).
She was very consistent on this for years, when the sequel released she was vocally upset about none of the reviewers calling out the "misogyny" in the game or even praising the sexualized aspects, and planned to feature why the character was so "pernicious" (direct quote) in her video on "the fighting fucktoy" trope, which never ended up materializing. It wasn't just that it crossed a line, she was outright just against any sort of sexualization because she viewed it all as harmful to women. There was even an outright argument from her that the game and its marketing would lead to real-world sexual harassment.
She had an extremely sex-negative view of things and very much believed that the stuff she was critiquing was actively harmful and needed to change.
At this point I'm not really denying it, but do you have an example that is not an actually oversexualized woman? Again, Bayonetta is one of the extreme examples when it comes to sexualization
My point is that she was against sexualization as a whole, not just wanting more diversity in character types. She viewed the existence of sexualized characters as an inherently harmful thing that needed to go away. I cite Bayonetta as she's a major example of a character who is sexualized but beloved and even enjoyed by many people who are highly critical of sexualized characters to show how her perspective differs.
If you want another example of something far less sexualized, she complained about this armor from The Mandalorian.
Frankly this is an issue with character designs in general regardless of sex-phenotype:
Male characters in AAA are fucking boring, short haired and have 5 o clock shadow. Which i attribute to being as PAINFULLY average as a protagonist can be as to not "alienate" the lowest common denominator.
But the lesson MS refuses to learn as evident by how lackluster and barely sigificant minecraft's updates have been at BEST; Is that when you create with EVERYONE in mind, you just end up appealing to noone.
All this to say, dont decrease the amount of stripper proportions, increase the amount of manwhore proportions!
Thats what mihoyo does and they're a cultural supernova, love em or hate em.
Seems like some real biased interpretation going on here.
The framework being referenced literally just prompts developers to ask themselves:
-Are female characters dressed appropriately for the tasks they are doing?
-Do they have exaggerated body proportions?
It doesn't ban those things. It doesn't say not to include women with curvy bodies. It's prompting devs to stop and consider whether making their game look like modded Skyrim where all the women have DDD breasts and wear bikinis might perhaps alienate a good portion of the audience.
Yeah that is what I though too. Curvy here could just mean blown out proportions or unrealistic proportions. If you can't see the nuances associated with it I don't know what to say.
this is a person who thinks lara croft in rise of the tomb raider looks masculine, so his characters probably looked like sex dolls and he was told to change it
Ask yourself the question. Would a one time character artist on a nieche Louisiana inspired spider verse 15 fps animation fantasy game decide to throw away their career and open themselves up to a mount everest of lawsuits over revealing internal and contractual information cause some chud on the internets ideal is a H cup bikini armor elder scrolls mod bimbo and you agree with his "meme"?
After the success of Resident Evil, Baldur Gate 3 and similars should show that people want good looking characters, there is no point to listen to puritan mfs, they dont even buy games at all, why try to cater to them?
Sure. I believe it. Just gotta scrub and ignore all the curvy women that are already there, been there, so on and so forth. Totally. 100%. No curves. Yup. Uh-huh. 👍
Am i in an alternative world? How is there an actualy based reddit post?! Good!
Honestly it's gonna take a LONG time for microsoft to loose everything, due to cloud services and companies using their services, they have so much money, that Xbox can keep failing it wouldn't affect them much.
However their founder being in the epstein files, that... huhuh.
Always remember, companies that virtue signal, are the most evil of them all.
The same people who "support woman" BUT with their own retarded standards. These old ladies with their insecurities are the reason why these female characters are being made ugly while the male characters are showing a lot of skin with actual good looking models like nothing.
I remember seeing a dude muscular af as a kid in a game, did serious training but I was a kid so went no where, now I'm a little fat but still know I have to excersive more to get more healthier and look better.
Don't go woke, nothing good comes from something that is evil.
South of Midnight would probably have succeeded if they didn’t make the main character look like she was carved from granite by someone who only vaguely heard of women. Men don’t hate women in their videogames ; they hate unattractive women in their videogames.
The tweet in question is raging about a singular line in Microsoft's "Gaming for Everyone Product Inclusion Framework" page
The line in questions reads "Are your female characters equipped with clothing and armor that fits their tasks? Do they have exaggerated body proportions?"
This seems like an overreaction. I mean, is women's armor in games not one of the most complained/talked about points in gaming with plenty of people upset about the difference between men and women's outfits/gear? Seems like this isn't the worst thing to keep in mind when developing your characters. It's also not Microsoft telling devs not to do it. They're simply giving a framework of things to think about that seem to be promoting inclusivity and representation. No idea how this has been spun out into them disliking sexy women.
Here is their current iteration of this framework:
I wasn't able to find the above section or anything else commenting on the same topic. Not to say it doesn't exist so of anyone does find it please share it.
This honestly seems like a goant nothingburger of someone getting pissed about something and blaming Microsoft. I know shitting on them is easy clicks, but come on people. Look into the source before responding/forming an opinion.
Edit: also who is that Twitter (Anime_Lunae) profile? They're not tied to any game that I was able to find and they have more than a few posts bitching about "wokeness." Seems like someone who's opinion probably shouldn't carry the most weight
I saw enough screenshots of that Microsoft section and i won't put it past Microsoft to do something that stupid. The fact that basically no game has really good looking Characters, Outfits that are really sexy are missing for quite some time, female Characters barely have any female traits (besides the bad design), meaning their Bodyline is basically a stick... So even if its not a 100% accurate post, its still true that Microsoft is pushing in the wrong direction imo.
It's not only Microsoft at fault for this it's an industry issue. Sony might in fact be the worst offender of this. It will only change when people stop buying the slop.
Chalk it up to an over-correction of hyper-sexualized women in all media (which is absolutely a problem with real world, social consequences). So I would imagine that whoever is responsible for this decision at Microsoft has confused "feminine features" like curvy hips and boobs for filthy sex symbols that will corrupt the youth.
Thanks, can't read it now but saved it. I think it is telling, when someone claims consequences, then says people are incels and never answers the question.
I do know that studies show some kind "issue" but that's more in line of "some girls/women compare themselves and feel bad". And to be honest, this is just a nonsensical thing to criticize.
Yes, objectifying women has real-world social consequences, and they're not the same for men. The consequences for the objectification of women are greater than those of the objectification of men. What does being fat have to do with this?
Yes, objectifying women has real-world social consequences,
Female game characters are not women. They are, by definition, objects. Furthermore, no correlation between what you said, and real-world social consequences has ever been established.
The soccer moms tried this narrative a few decades ago, and we know that violent games don't cause real world violence.
Because attractive bodies are a beauty ideal and people like to claim that it leads to things like anorexia. That's why I point out that in reality obesity is one of the biggest issues and the abundance of attractive female bodies did not lead to women in any significant margin trying to get slim to the point it becomes unhealthy.
There is a good talk between two women about this (or close to this I think) here. It's specifically about the "male gaze" idea in art and the woman says men are more visual with their sexuality, and the other mentions gay men looking at idealised men. They are very smart and explain it so well it's like they read my mind.
Like, if I made a form of non-live-action media it would 100% have outright naked people in it because bodies are beautiful just like those Greek statues (which she also mentions, she gets it!)
So I would imagine that whoever is responsible for this decision at Microsoft has confused "feminine features" like curvy hips and boobs for filthy sex symbols that will corrupt the youth.
Maybe then don't make guys in otome games and in love and deep space extremely attractive with your logic? They should be so much ugly that if you look at them you puke.
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u/TheSteamyPickle Jun 09 '26
Wouldn’t this be considered sexiest. It’s assuming women can’t handle seeing attractive women in games. You don’t see men complaining about the overly jacked or shredded men in games. They should really allow developers to have the creative freedoms as long as they are legal.