Magical Skin

Here's something that makes my favorite hobby sometimes annoying: For the last 10-15 years, there have been hundreds of magazine articles, newsgroup posts, letters to the editor, and blog posts about how women who game are turned off by the way female characters are generally modeled, animated, and dressed. And yet there's been little to no change in this... and, in fact, in some ways, it's gotten worse. Better graphics and better physics brought us jiggle physics, which naturally were applied immediately to breasts. And it brought us more realistics body modeling, which led to increased breast focus and scoliosis swayed backs that emphasize the ass.

In fact, it's point 4 in cracked.com's A Gamer's Manifesto. I note that this was written by a guy, and he's as sick of it as I am. (His other points on gaming are also mostly ones I agree soundly with, btw; it's a good article overall.)

It's particularly bad when it comes to warrior classes. Women do not have magical skin. It will not turn blows. Heavy armor should not be all-covering on men and then turn around and barely cover boobs and pubes on women.

But even in the "soft armor" classes, the differences between male and female armor can get pretty ridiculous. Men are covered head to toe, but women wear short skirts and have enough cleavage that they could hide provisions for a week in it. The exact same armor between genders should never have a huge variance in how much it covers. Period.

Also, breasts come in a variety of sizes. For instance, there's two whole letters before C when it comes to cup size. I promise, the alphabet is not mystically different when it comes to tits. Breasts are also not spherical. And large-breasted women generally have something to support their breasts, particularly if they're going to be running around and swinging weapons at people.

Some games are better than others. City of Heroes, for instance, actually has an adjuster for breast size, although the low end doesn't go down enough and the high end is ridiculous. It also is unusual in that there are plenty of covering (and sometimes even body-obscuring) choices for clothing and the heavier armor is nearly identical between genders... and men can have as much skin showing as women in some cases. Aion offers an extremely variable character creator that lets you pick a wide range of body types, and while the armor has more differences between genders than I prefer, the heavy armor is generally closer to reasonable than "chainmail bikini". Guild Wars is hit or miss. The professions with heavier armors tend to be much more reasonable (even if the boob jiggle for bow firing irritates me), and even some of the soft-armor professions have decent coverage and reasonable breast size. Unless you're an Elementalist in non-elite armor, at least. (On the other hand, Guild Wars has some of the worst cases of swayback I've ever seen. Seriously, guys; spines aren't shaped that way and shoulders just do not go that far back.)

Now, the thing is, I don't really mind options including cleavage-enhancing, midriff-baring, ridiculously-short-skirt armors in a game if that's not all there is. I mean, a couple of my City of Heroes characters actually are both moderately-large-breasted and scantily clad because I felt it fit the character. What I want is for that to not be the default, to not have to go out of my way to get something that doesn't make me groan when I watch the character move or take a screenshot of her. I want my female warriors to have armor on that would actually stop a blade. I want to compare the male and female variants of armor and not smack my head because the male variant covers nearly every inch of the body but the female variant might as well come with a sign saying "Ask me about my rates for lap dances!" I can live with the fanservice as long as I have options.

But getting that through to designers seems to be very hard, even in games that have a fairly high population of women playing. Hell, Free Realms, allegedly a kids' game and with a very large and vocal female playerbase, suffers from this problem to some extent. The human women have huge asses and moderately large breasts, and so much of the clothing bares the midriff it's a wonder they don't all freeze in the snowy areas. Granted, the actual armor on the combat jobs is pretty gender-inspecific, but that just makes the non-combat stuff stand out even more. And if a casual game aimed towards parents and kids can't manage to avoid the problem... well, it's not promising, that's all.

I'm not giving up, though. More and more often, game companies not only invite player feedback but actually interact with their players, especially for online games. And I will keep bringing this up until I see some real change across the board.