Cerise Magazine

Virtue of Reality

Once upon a crunch time, my team was ranged in a bleary-eyed semi-circle around a Playstation for the purpose of “research”. Our N64 fighting game, though fun (we thought so, anyway)in the four-person mode that we were so heavily touting, still seemed shallow in the regular two-person, so we were playing Dead or Alive for comparison. Either that or we were so tired of making our own damn game that we just needed to play someone else’s for awhile.

John, our “soft body dynamics” programmer was ostensibly doing a little research of his own. As the female fighters circled each other in their battle-kinis*, breasts reverberating around their torsos as if at any moment they might shotput off into the atmosphere, he whooped, “Now that’s what we need.” Alan, the artist who was playing, chuckled.

Enter me, the wet blanket. “You know, the reason why the sports bra was invented is because it hurts like hell to have your boobs jiggling around like that. Also, you have a gigantic breast moving around that much and you’re going to end up accidentally punching it.”

Alan grinned at me, as his Amazon cycloned and felled his boobalicious opponent. “Clearly, on so many levels, this game is not about reality,” he said.

And so it is. Isn’t that what we really want from the games that we play: freedom from reality?
Even the attempts to make games more “realistic” in their physics, collisions, AI, etc. is not to somehow emulate actual life. It’s meant to emulate a life you could never have, one full of gun battles, car chases, secret military missions, and, yes, getting to smash-up some enormously-breasted martial arts babe, while you are, in fact, yourself an enormously-breasted martial arts babe.

When I was a kid, I loved Chun-Li from Street Fighter II. I thought she had huge thighs, exactly the kind of thighs that a woman who spends her days kicking the hell out of guys much bulkier than herself would have. She was breasty too, but those thighs were her trademark and I loved that, thinking that the game-makers who had been nice enough to finally drop a female character into the mix had also tried to give her real, athletic thighs. I still love Chun-Li even now (I like to spout “Yatta!” when I win at just about anything) but I am little less naïve about the reason she was so spectacular in the hip and butt region.

When I was a game programmer, the guys I worked with were hasty to emphasize they never bought games purely for their sex quotient. I believe them. A crappy game is a crappy game and no amount of breasts will save it. Look at BMX XXX , a game the marketers at my former employer Acclaim were so eager to advertise for its naughty nude content, but whose dull gameplay mostly caused a giant yawn among gamers when it was released, hastening Acclaim’s already rapid decline. The truth is you can see naked breasts for free on the internet pretty much any time you like. Why pay fifty-plus dollars for a game that has only virtual breasts? Those Dead or Alive girls eventually got their own calendar, but I personally don’t know any gamers who owned it. Men should be as embarrassed to ogle too much simulated flesh as they would be to have a blow-up doll for a girlfriend. A warning to men: too much fake sex in your life renders you a weirdo.

So why, then, are scantily-dressed women still so very prevalent in video games? It’s easy to scoff and get angry about the depiction of women in most games. Even the ass-kickers, the protagonists, the Lara Crofts and the Samus Arans all seem to have their bikini moments. Ms. Pac Man is probably the only game chick in existence without one, though you could reasonably argue she’s not wearing any clothes at all.

In spending too much time on the question, though, we’ve committed a very common male fallacy: inability to see beyond the big bahoobas. If you look around at the remaining game content, it becomes clear that the men aren’t faring any better. Oh, maybe they fare better in terms of sheer amount of clothing worn, but this is about unrealistic physical depictions of your average person. If the jumping jugs of the Dead or Alive girls are an insult to normal-breasted women everywhere, what about the barrel-chests and big, uh, guns of most videogame heroes? I’ve been around a lot of male gamers in my life, and not a one of them has looked even a little bit like Ryu. And hey, what’s that game guy driving? That’s no Toyota Camry!

And the unrealistic complaint list grows: nobody can shoot fireballs, or uses mushrooms to “level up”, or has a talking rat-like-thing for a best friend, or, as far as we know, actually battled alien invaders. In fact, only The Sims has managed to turn the very ordinariness and tedium of real life into some sort of (arguably) interesting game. Is there really a virtue of reality in Virtual Reality? I can’t actually scale crumbling buildings in ancient Iran with my bare hands or turn back time to undo a freefall. Those aren’t complaints against Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia series–they’re part of the reason why I played them.

Games are a form of escape and we escape into them, like any other media where we might grumble about the impossibly pretty people on screen but have to admit that they sure are easy on the eyes. A science fiction editor friend of mine once said, “If you want your book published, at very least make your protagonist somebody we could put on the cover.”

And while wanting to see overly-proportioned women in tiny bathing suits is uniquely a guy problem, they aren’t the only sex to stack their entertainment with unrealistic sexual fantasies, as any bookstore romance novel section makes plain.

Big boobs, round thighs, and the battle-kini are probably here to stay, so long as the game industry is primarily made by men for the consumption of other men. I think the casual gaming movement, though, is finally breaching the befuddlement of game industry executives as to what women–real, ordinary women, not just grrrrl gamers like me–might like to play. Still, as much as the gravity-defying perkiness of most videogame heroines makes me roll my eyes, I have more important things to worry about. I just strap on my goggles and my ten-year-old boy self has transported into someone else’s brain. It’s really weird in here.

*[Note: Battle-kini: Any outfit worn by a female videogame character in a fighting scenario that manages to cover the important “bikini” areas, but exposes the rest of her--and her vital organs by extension--to attack.]

Rebuttal to “Virtue of Reality”

In her article “Virtue of Reality,” Poulsen on one hand evinces distaste for female characters clad in attire intended to titillate male gamers, yet also acts as an apologist for the practice. She believes that, in spending a lot of time questioning why women are portrayed the way they are in games, we lose sight of the big picture – namely that games are not reality. She argues that games are “meant to emulate a life you could never have” and that they are an escape from reality, not a mirror. Apologists for the status quo use this argument to defend how women are portrayed in video games. However in failing to examine the underlying extant issues, absolutely no progress is made towards understanding Poulsen’s question of why “scantily-dressed women [are] still so very prevalent in video games.”

The status quo is clearly uncomfortable for Poulsen and others, otherwise they would not write about their dissatisfaction. Oftentimes when people criticize games for portraying women in a certain way, they are accused of spoiling the mood, an experience which Poulsen is all too familiar with. They question the way things are, but refuse to examine the situation because too many questions threaten to leech the enjoyment from their hobby. Without questioning one cannot come to understanding, and without gaining insight one cannot hope to change opinions. Even if one does not create games, discussing and sharing ideas creates ripples that may well reverberate beyond one’s immediate social circle. Without asking questions, how can any gamer hope to have the pastime, the art, and the science of games grow beyond its current limitations into a popularly accepted, artistically-regarded, and culturally significant medium?

Poulsen then argues that the unrealistic portrayal of men in video games is just as bad as the unrealistic portrayal of women in video games. To her, the key issue is whether games mirror reality in absolute terms, and these terms are equal when we look at male and female video game characters. Pouslen holds that there is no virtue in games being a mirror of reality, because games are meant as an escape, a break from our real lives. Male characters in video games generally bear little resemblance to real-life men and female characters in video games generally bear little resemblance to real-life women. Of course, there is no question that men and women are portrayed unrealistically in video games. This is not the issue which we are dealing with, however. Again the “games are not meant to mirror reality” argument completely misses the underlying issues in the debate about the portrayal of women in games. The issue is not whether or not men and women are portrayed realistically in games; the issue is how they are portrayed and what are the differences in the way that they are portrayed.

The manner in which men and women are portrayed in video games is vastly different. The important difference in how the sexes are portrayed in games is this: women are objectified and men are idealized. At the root of these issues is the assumption that video games are primarily made by and for heterosexual men. Furthermore, one assumes that heterosexual men who create media for heterosexual men know what heterosexual men like and want.

When people complain about the objectification of women in video games, one of the most common criticisms to this anti-objectification perspective is that people who complain about objectification want all women in games to be ugly. However, an attractive female character is not necessarily objectified, but an objectified female character is almost always attractive.

‘Objectification’ comes from the word ‘object’. To objectify something is to regard it as an object. Objects are passive things that require an active party to put it to use. An object cannot act on its own. To objectify a person is to regard that person as a passive entity which has things done to them, but which cannot act on their own. For the purpose of this discussion, we will put aside the argument that all video game characters exist to be manipulated by the player and take a look at how characters are portrayed. Many female characters in video games – it may even be safe to say that most female characters – are presented in an objectifying way. That is, they are there as “eye candy” for the male audience and there is little regard for the female characters’ thoughts, feelings, goals, and ideas. They are not active subjects, but passive objects. Female video game characters exist for male players to take pleasure in viewing their bodies or as plot devices to develop the male characters (see every single video game which requires you to save a princess). Objectification is reduction and dehumanization.

In general, male characters in video games are idealized. Idealization is not the same thing as objectification. Male video game characters do not solely exist for the mostly-male audience to take pleasure in viewing their bodies. To be sure, most male video game characters tend to be attractive; however as a whole they tend not to be objectified. Indeed, if you even suggested that male characters were created to be ogled by male audiences, you would probably get backlash from a typical young male gamer because you have just unknowingly insinuated that he derives pleasure from looking at attractive men and, because of that, he is quite possibly homosexual. Whilst the standards set by male video game characters tend to be unrealistic, the qualities they embody do not reduce them to passive objects to be used and manipulated by active agents. Male video game characters are active agents. They are not plot devices. They work towards goals and have ambitions and ideas. Their qualities are presented to the audience as goals to strive towards and embody. Idealization is aspiration and presupposes an active human subject.

Whilst Poulsen’s argument that male and female video game characters are portrayed unrealistically does hold water, her assertion that they are treated equally within the realm of unrealistic standards does not.

At this point, one can probably start listing characters which are exceptions to the objectification/idealization arguments presented here. Obviously there are exceptions, but as Poulsen’s article was taking larger scale, general view, this response has adopted the same point of reference.

Questioning why women are presented in a certain way in games is only the first part of understanding. It is important to examine these issues in video games, even if the practice threatens to kill the mood. Without critically examining video games, we cannot hope to see them develop – culturally, thematically, and socially – beyond what they are today.

Author’s Response: The Real Revolution

In my article “Virtue of Reality,” I argued that games are meant to be an escape and so the unrealistic portrayal of women in them is not some pernicious plot to minimize women, but simply an outgrowth of this being a fantasy industry. Regina Buenaobra’s article in response to mine argued that the portrayal of men and women are vastly different and that if we fail to recognize this, we cannot possibly change the industry.

First off, I agree with Buenaobra–the purpose of the “unreality”, as it were, is different for female and male characters. As Buenaobra points out, most games with the boobalicious females and the brawny males are made for heterosexual men. The males represent ideals gamers would like to be, while the females represent ideals they would like to be with. The anger that women, including myself, feel at this portrayal is less about the ridiculous proportions of the women than the fact that this is a preference of heterosexual males and we feel they ought to reflect other preferences as well, namely women who are less on the breasts and more on the brains. We’ve been having this argument with men for centuries. The fact that we are still having it this deep into history, and many, many years after our bra-burning days, means that the cry of sexism is not having the desired effect. We must do more than cry sexism to change the game industry.

Case in point, I started work on a fighting game at my first job about six months into my tenure there. My company was a third-party developer, meaning they proposed and accepted game development projects from different game publishers. It also meant that the publisher had almost god-like control over the content that went into our games. Initially, our artists were given wide latitude to design a character set for this fighting game and their efforts did not include a single battle-kini-clad babe. In fact, one character, a female knight in full, shining armor, was so impressive that her artist admitted she was his favorite creation. She was mine, too. They created these characters with no pressure from any of the female staff. In fact, the artists regarded their creations as more innovative and showing off greater artistic skill than the standard blank-eyed, big-breasted Chun-Li knock-off.

The characters were sent off to the publisher for approval. They responded, “Not sexy enough.” In essence, the women were wearing too much clothing. The artists were furious. Our leads and the publisher went back and forth over it, but the publishers had the final say. The original female characters were junked and replaced with the standard battle-kini-clad babes, and the game development cycle went on. But I couldn’t let it go. First, I railed against the artists for caving. The artists were apologetic, but then they were defensive. What could they do? I went on railing, this time to our programming director. I said I couldn’t work on the game anymore. I threatened to quit. He told me there was a children’s game opening up from a different publisher and, after some soul-searching, I decided to stay on and join that team instead.

I am an apologist, I suppose, because I know how little control game developers really have over their own content. Like almost all entertainment, marketers trump artists when it comes to product development and marketers want maximum sale from minimal effort. The cries of sexism from the small wings of female gamers, both in and outside the industry, barely reach their ears because they see us as hardly a drip in their market share. The unrealistic portrayal of women is a misguided attempt to appeal to their core market, the heterosexual male gamer. Not surprisingly, publishers often get even lazier and throw games out there where sex, and sexy women, ends up replacing gameplay entirely. I contend these games usually fail–the previously mentioned BMX XXX was a huge flop and helped bring down what had once been a giant of company.

If the portrayal of women in video games is pernicious and sexist, then so too are the portrayals of men in so-called women’s entertainment (Lifetime, anyone?), who are often made out to be small-brained, abusive jerks. Stereotypes abound in the entertainment industries because of this marketing laziness–the need to churn out a hit based on all the hits that have come before. It is a crapshoot, and the constant reintroduction of bouncing breasts and battle-kinis goes on because marketers are pulling from the limited set of gimmicks that they know to sell their product.

I think overly-proportioned women in video games are probably here to stay as long as heterosexual men buy games–which is probably for the next, oh, forever–and that, as a fantasy, it’s less pernicious than simply foolish: marketers are limiting their audience unwittingly, because they don’t know how to expand it. At the same time, progress is already being made. For years it was simply assumed that women didn’t like games–except for a few of the tomboyish sort. Only recently have marketers discovered that no, wait, women do like games, just not the kind we were making. Shocking!

I also think the cries of sexism are not only ineffective, they often have the opposite result: to create an air of controversy that generates interest in games that might otherwise go unnoticed, and to label the criers prudes and worse. I think the real revolution will come from only two things: 1) throwing our dollars behind games that portray women the way we want to be portrayed and 2) infiltrating the industry at the level where game content is approved so that when that impressive character set arrives from your lowly developer and there is not a single overly-enhanced breast in sight, you will cheer its innovation and send it back stamped with a big, fat happy face.

Also, a large royalty check. Made out to M…a…