Define "consistently". What about Jade from Beyond Good and Evil? Or Joanna Dark? Or numerous Bioware characters?
Consistently =/= EVERY GAME EBER. Consistently = this happens often enough to be a trend.
Exactly. It's not universal. I'll get back to that later.
Then pray tell, how exactly does it work?
Criticizing a design is not the same as criticizing a real person. The women from DoA, to have an example, aren't real. They aren't dressing sexily because they want to, like real-life women are, they're dressing sexily because they were designed as softcore porn.
Funny you should mention
Dead or Alive. See, most of the female characters are sexualized characters, but they're sexualized
characters, not
sexualized characters (DoAX notwithstanding). Some to a greater degree than others, to be sure, but none of them are nearly as bad as the cringeworthy depiction of women in
Ride to Hell: Retribution.
And that's why there's no point in crying misogyny when oversexualized female design is criticized.
Obviously, not all criticism of sexualized female characters is misogynistic. But this honestly strikes me as such. Comparing women with big breasts to blackface caricatures is dehumanizing.
Moreover, there are busty women who actually
want women with bigger breasts in games, because it makes them feel represented:
https://twitter.com/alison_prime/status/624419644804366336"Be quiet, honey. Men are talking about how oppressed you are."
Oh, I have no problem with female characters who are less sexualized. My problem comes from the implication that sexualized female characters are inherently sinful problematic and have to go.
Sure, but that's not exactly the point I was addressing.
Me neither, actually. Sexualized design can be done in a non-degrading way, Bayonetta's certainly really close to a good way to do a sexy female character. There's a difference between a sexy character design and a sexually objectifying character design.
Oh, I definitely agree. There are good ways to sexualize, and bad ways to sexualize.
Also, I'm tired of having people say "you have a problem with this oversexualized design? you're a prude who hates sex!". Again, doesn't work that way, and the oversimplification makes me want to break things.
I agree, that's not necessarily the case. There are some perfectly valid reasons to criticize oversexualized women in video games. The problem, however, comes from wanting them removed altogether, like this jackass. And he's not just some neckbeard with a Facebook account, he's the founder of the IGDA. This is
extremely disconcerting.
Speaking as just one lesbian, and a high percentage of lesbians are in fact gamers, I can say that overly sexualized female characters are amusing at best.
Don't get me wrong, it's perfectly valid, but you can't claim to speak for all female gamers, or even all lesbian gamers.
I'd rather look at a fit female with realistic skills. Model a Ronda Rousey morph as a female action game lead, and you're onto something that will have vastly greater appeal to more gamers, including the horny teenage boy trope that some game designers seem have solely in mind.
Totally with you on this one. I wouldn't mind seeing more body type diversity in gaming.
Maybe game designers with poor taste like having jiggly eye candy as playable characters because they have to look at them for thousands of hours during production? If it's marketing departments or senior producers who are keeping the status quo, then they apparently ignore half or more of the game buying public.
Here's my question, though: why doesn't the gaming press talk about female characters who fit their standards? Maybe I'm just not looking hard enough, but to me, it seems like these "culture critics" are always bitching and moaning about Tifa, or Lara, or somebody else. You'd think they would want to talk about games that "get it right", so to speak. Why don't we hear more about
Aegis Defenders? Or
Dark Storm? That's like if movie critics complained about the lack of explosions in romantic comedies, but never once mentioned films like
The Expendables. Either they're horribly ignorant, or they're deliberately avoiding mentioning games that don't fit their narrative.
