I
LOVE
THIS
And it does make a little sting on how general we are as far as accepting what females should look like in VG. If only there was a game company that has a game that provides astonishing customizations that could be tweaked for to match this level of range. Just saying
Then, you like propaganda in favor of the uglification of women in videogames.
Diversity, sais the guy? They all have something in common: they’re flat. Many are manly.
How many pictures of absolutely stunning, curvy athletes do you want?
He uses the excuse of diversity to exclude traditional archetypes of beauty. Dishonest.
It’s a sad trend. I can’t believe you fall for it.
I’ll keep my beautifully feminine women heroes, thank you.
I’m all for customization… but if you’ll notice games since the start of much of the metoo movement, they’ve drastically changed the looks of female characters to reflect what they feel the player base wants to see. In reality, you’re left with a bunch of mediocre to bleh, to outright hideous looking characters in games, particularly in western games (Asia-based devs seem to forgo this much of the time due to differences in culture). I’ve seen many fans, even women—yes women—cry out that a game is lacking because they don’t like the playable character’s design. You know what the number one most requested Lara outfit for the newer trilogy was? Her OG outfit… yet Crystal Dybamics would never do it (polygonal skin doesn’t count).
Once in a while, it’s fine, it is what it is, but the point of games is the fantasy element and the escape of reality. You know how many women purposely choose a girl in a fighting game because she looks sexy? Or create a character in a custom creation mode and sl*t her out because they wanna make her look sexy? Western game developers have forgotten who they’re making games for. A girl can be attractive and still be strong, without being overly sexualized. Anita Sarkesian and people like her don’t play games. They make money on starting drama. People that actually play games should dictate what they wanna see in games, not the people that wanna criticize but never actually play them.
Agreed.
The point here people is not to remove the “sexy”, it is to include variety which is much more diverse and realistic.
I’m sorry but my skinny ass in Conan with only the ability to change my face, skin color, hair, boob size and height is not it.
Here where? I can’t read @erjoh 's mind, but that video is propaganda.
Under the guise of “diversity”, it pushes masculine women. There’s a reason why they are all flat. If diversity was the goal, you would also have curvy feminine women in the video. There’s no shortage of such athletes.
We’re all for having customization options. Or did you ever see a gamer saying customuzation is a bad thing? It’s a non problem. So no, don’t be naive.
Bullshit, @erjoh .
Everyone likes more customization options. That’s not what this is about.
Few prefer having ugly women replacing beautiful heroes. That’s what’s been relentlessly happening with western studios. Funny thing… when it hapoens with male heroes, the same people complain. That’s rich…
Are you a man?
No. I’ve just been disguising as one all my life! 
What’s the relevance of it for the discussion, @Kikigirl ?
It’s very relevant.
Considering that if you are, it has direct correlation to issues with “beauty”.
There’s no such thing as “propaganda” to make women ugly.
I could really get into the ins and outs here but suffice it to say that I am woman who appreciates everyone, regardless if they fit what is “socially acceptable”.
And as such there’s more to women than a cute face, hair, boobs and ass.
Not even close. It pushes that action game heroines should be physically fit to do all of that. Look no one questions the he-man physiques of males character and it’s every single one of them. No one defends the inclusion of dainty men and even the male dancers are ripped. We take that as because it’s a harsh game world. Yet when presenting this for females, we get this idea that its mascalating females?
I’m sorry but I don’t view fitness as a male trait and as the short shows, fitness has various forms in itself.
I said it stings because we have a very ugly double standard as far as male and female forms in action films and games even if we have “evolved” to think women can be protagonists…as long as they are thin and tender creatures whose 4 inch diameter arms can swing a full 2H battle axe with the same ease as Bulko, the male character. You can’t have someone with muscles and femininity. It’s just unheard of in Conan stuff (COUGH Grace Jones COUGH) .
What I’m pointing out is that we aren’t so evolved. Not even close. We equate female beauty within the box of dainty. Real women surviving the harshness of the Exiled Lands would have muscle mass and that is something gamers don’t like.
I actually say there is in an indirect way and the reason I posted this. There is definitely propaganda out there in what women beauty is and because there is that, if also defines ugliness which is just the opposite of what it defined as beauty.
This game needs a butt slider. I’m all for diversity in games, provided it fits seamlessly into the game setting. It’s why I cringe at anime mods for Skyrim or players wanting high fantasy stuff like Elves and Fireball and frigging Battlecat for Conan
Adding on to this the idea of “sexy” is not universal either.
We see European and Western “sexy” as a pre-packaged, mostly misogynistic ideal pushed by marketing companies that has created unrealistic ideals in people.
Even as evidenced here. Shunning physically fit women and not seeing their beauty unless they are in that pre-packaged cellophane.
Too true. But the option isn’t there to make a female character that is more realistically buff over dainty. I’m not downing the ability to make a stereotypical fantasy warrior maiden. I’m more about putting it out there that we need to put out the option for body types that would be equally fit as the male he-men. Also put out the dainty male figure.
The issue here is that yes this game, specifically, has went full hog on the fantasy body stereotypes and sexualization of both towards their gender extremes but the question is what would it hurt for a player (either sex), who has suffered significant body shaming throughout their lives , to find their body shape as a playable character that can be the hero or star of the game? what does it tell them if their body type isn’t available?
Zeeeeeeeeeb, where are you girl?
C’mon, we miss you here…
About the topic, i don’t know!
When i was young i was a track and field athlete. I was throwing discus. Surely lots of girls from this field could be Lara Croft, but it was Angelina Jolie who took the role.
I wouldn’t mind if we had more sliders in the character customization!
In fact, both game templates - both female and male - are far from the classical proportions of the male and female figure.
This will be clear if we take the statues of Venus de Milo and David and compare them with game templates.
Our woman is a catwalk model, exhausted on a diet, with handles like matchsticks, who is simply not able to lift a two-handed sword. And the squat guy-trasher on the other side.
There are mods that allow you to change the physique of both the character and the thrall in detail, for example Tot! Custom.
I don’t see the need to bother with all my thralls. But to change your character - why not?
To me she’s sexy af. She’s tall, imposing, terrifying. She’s athletic, fit and brawny. Also doesn’t have unrealistically humongous boobs. This is more realistic and what I’d envision for a Conan character.
Even Briggite Neilson and Sandahl Bergman were pretty imposing given their height. But they could have realistically held a greatsword and wielded it since they weren’t waifs with gigantic boobs.
These are the women I aspired to growing up.
Hoo boy. I’ll try to reply as nicely as I can, and keep my criticism as gentle as possible. Hopefully, it will be taken in kind and maybe not fall on deaf ears.
“Propaganda” is an interesting choice of words when defending your own biases.
You say these things as if the argument was to remove the choice of having “beautifully feminine heroes”, for your definition of “beautifully feminine”.
Anyone who actually pays attention to the video @erjoh linked – which shouldn’t be so hard, given that it’s only one minute long – will understand that the argument is not to remove choices, but to add new choices that are simply not present in the vast majority of video games.
You know what’s really, really sad? So many people don’t understand the point of diversity and inclusion.
And by “sad”, I don’t mean it in an insulting way, as in “you’re a sad person”, but rather that it genuinely makes me feel sad. It makes me sad, because I’ve lived through some stuff and I’ve seen some other stuff, and this kind of thing actually touches my feelings.
Let me tell you from my own personal experience: the point of being inclusive is to feel represented. It’s an implicit validation of who you are in a world that often makes you feel bad for who you are.
Let’s dive into some examples.
When I was a kid, I was really, really nerdy. I’m still a nerd, but when I was a kid, that was a bad thing to be. A lot of kids made fun of nerds. People with interests like mine were outcasts.
On top of that, I was – and still am – an “aspie”, i.e. someone with an Asperger’s syndrome. I’ve gotten a lot better over the years, but back then I had a really hard time recognizing sarcasm and certain other forms of humor. When I was really engaged in a topic and someone said something as a joke, I would often fail to understand and respond earnestly, which would end up in people making fun of me.
And then I finished my first 8 years of school and went to a high school that specialized in maths and natural sciences. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who were like me.
I was finally in a place where it was okay to be like me. Not just okay, but good. I was accepted and even valued.
It was heaven.
Slight change of topic, to something related: if you’ve never seen a show called “Penn & Teller: Fool Us”, I highly recommend it. Seeing magicians perform tricks is a lot of fun, and the variety of magic on that show is incredible.
If you binge-watch it on YouTube, you’ll start noticing something after a while: many of the magicians appearing on the show talk about role models and inspiration and representation. It’s not all about women in magic, either. People talk about seeing magicians from their own country, or old magicians, or young magicians. The first magician from India to appear on “Fool Us” later got a whole bunch of people contacting him on social media to say how happy and proud they were to see someone from their country on that show.
Let’s change the subject again, to a different point of view on the same topic. Let me tell you about something that completely blew my mind when I moved to Chile.
One day I was sitting down in the food court of the shopping mall close to my office, eating my burger, when I saw something I had never seen before. There was a person tidying up tables, picking up plastic trays that people left, cleaning up, and so on. And that person quite visibly and obviously had the Down syndrome.
A lot of people might read this and go “so what?” But to me, that was absolutely unbelievable. You see, where I come from, they used to call those people “rеtarded” or “mongoloids”. They used to put kids with Down syndrome – and autism and other similar conditions – in a different class, separated from everyone else. From an early age, they were separated from the rest of the society and they remained separate for the rest of their lives.
For the first time in my life, I was seeing a person like that living a normal life and taking part in the society. And they were happy.
I bring these things up because they all share the same powerful notion: acceptance of oneself.
People who have a knee-jerk reaction to diversity and inclusion are people who either never felt excluded, or they somehow got convinced it’s okay to feel excluded. The latter, I think, is much worse.
It’s not okay to be excluded just because you’re different in a harmless way.
Which brings me to quotes like this one:
How many of those women want to look “sexy” in a very specific way that you defend, because they’ve been taught all their life that this is how they should aspire to look and that it’s a kind of failure to not look like that? How many of those women want their character to look “slutty” because if they actually dressed “sluttily” in real life they would be criticized, or downright ostracized, or even assaulted by men who take a certain kind of look as an invitation to behave in certain ways?
And if that wasn’t enough, every time someone makes a conscious effort to help change the way things are and to make women of all shapes and sizes feel it’s okay to be the way they are, there’s a bunch of men who never had to deal with a tiny bit of shіt these women – hell, all women – have to deal with on a day-to-day basis, popping up and yelling about “propaganda”.
On the contrary, they’re breaking the tradition and that’s what bothers you. Western game developers used to make games primarily for adolescent men and the design used to reflect that.
I’m sorry, this is going to be harsh, but there’s no nicer or gentler way to respond to this: your argument is, essentially, the same as “all lives matter”.
Let me offer a rebuttal:
A push towards diversity often involves putting more focus on those who are underrepresented. It shouldn’t take a lot of empathy to understand that.
Reminds me of something from the north of my birth country. In Vojvodina, they would describe desirable women as “lepa, bela i debela”, meaning “pretty, white, and fat”, because a portly woman was considered beautiful.
Using “fat” to describe beauty is something completely alien to what we see in most video games. Because “fat is ugly”, just like “flat is ugly” or “blondes are the most beautiful”. That last stereotype might not have as many proponents as it used to, but you don’t have to go too far back. Read Agatha Cristie’s “The Mysterious Mr. Quin”, for example. The very first story features a blonde woman dyeing her hair dark, and the main character wondering why, because the reverse is what is usually done.
I’ll end this post by saying that when I play a female character in a game, I absolutely prefer to make it generously busty, with a sizable bottom, and a flat tummy. I love playing a character that fits the stereotypical Western ideal of sexy women.
That’s my choice. I’m not ashamed of it.
But I also understand it’s a shameful, childish behavior to kick and scream because I want my choice to be the only one people can make.
I hope that after reading this maybe – just maybe – some of you might come to understand how calling that video “propaganda in favor of the uglification of women in videogames” is a way of telling every flat-chested woman that she’s ugly and should feel bad about that, and how that can be hurtful.
