On Breasts and Biceps


First of all, an arti­cle on IGN on a tra­di­tion­al prob­lem in video games crit­i­cism, here.

As a quick TL/DR sum­ma­ry: basi­cal­ly it’s anoth­er look at the oft-discussed fact that women are often treat­ed as sex­u­al objects in games.  Kolan men­tions a few exam­ples he thinks of as par­tic­u­lar­ly egre­gious, includ­ing Ivy from Soul Calibur IV (def­i­nite­ly) and Miranda Lawson from Mass Effect 2 (who, while cer­tain­ly sexy and maybe even over­sex­u­al­ized, is not, I think, as good an exam­ple as he might like).  He then con­cludes with a quick look at some female char­ac­ters he thinks are much less over­sex­u­al­ized and con­cludes with a ques­tion about why devel­op­ers insist on hav­ing female char­ac­ters wear not enough cloth­ing over their colos­sal endow­ments.

The Catalyst

This col­umn may be a lit­tle more ram­bling than I usu­al­ly am (if that’s pos­si­ble), but I think it’s worth dis­cussing.  The line that got me think­ing is one of the ones towards the end of Kolan’s arti­cle, and it’s a fair­ly com­mon thought when the over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women in video games is dis­cussed:

The female gamer, who pub­lish­ers are so vig­or­ous­ly court­ing, might be more like­ly to pick up a game if she does­n’t have to feel inad­e­quate next to the char­ac­ter she plays as.”

This line stems from the rea­son­able enough assump­tion that the aver­age woman does not, in fact, look like this:

Pictured: Trip from Enslaved.

It then assumes, how­ev­er, that since this aver­age woman is prob­a­bly not quite as attrac­tive as the aver­age video game char­ac­ter, our hypo­thet­i­cal female play­er will be unwill­ing to play games fea­tur­ing such attrac­tive and well-endowed women because said dig­i­tal women will make her feel self-conscious and “inad­e­quate.”  This bor­rows from the “all women must have self-esteem issues for­ev­er” clause that is such an impor­tant part of our social nar­ra­tive these days, and while pre­sum­ably intend­ing to be egal­i­tar­i­an and all that jazz, it actu­al­ly ends up sound­ing more than a lit­tle sex­ist.

Why?  Because you know what?  The aver­age man does not look much like this, either:

Pictured: Monkey from Enslaved.

And yet male gamers seem to play video games just fine.  And while it’s not as much a part of our social nar­ra­tive that men have crip­pling self-esteem issues as it is for women, I think the aver­age nerd would kill to look like Monkey.

This is an incred­i­bly broad topic and I could go a lot of places from here: I could go talk about how video games are far from unique in their over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women, I could talk about still-present sex­ism in arti­cles like the above, I could exam­ine the nature of a strong female char­ac­ter, or any num­ber of other pos­si­ble top­ics.  The over­sex­u­al­iza­tion of women in games (and movies and books and music and…) is a tremen­dous prob­lem and I don’t mean to down­play the fact that women are over­sex­u­al­ized in games.  This is a very big prob­lem with games as art.  But it’s also a prob­lem which is very often dis­cussed on the Internet, and there’s real­ly not much to be said about it that has­n’t already been said.

So, real quick: women are not just sex­u­al objects, games which por­tray them as such are misog­y­nist.  This is bad.

With that out of the way, what I want to instead dis­cuss is why, exact­ly, game char­ac­ters tend to have breasts or biceps the size of their heads, and talk about how the root of this prob­lem isn’t exact­ly sex­ism or a predilec­tion for unrea­son­able mus­cu­la­ture, but rather a love for what I will call “epit­o­miza­tion.”

Epitomization

Most peo­ple (right or wrong), will tell you that games are aimed at men, and, specif­i­cal­ly, young men, and as it is a pret­ty safe bet that the aver­age young (straight) man likes breasts and would love to be able to stran­gle a lion with his bare hands, game design­ers often build their char­ac­ters accord­ing­ly, let­ting them play out their fan­tasies in the game.

This is a process I am going to call “epit­o­miza­tion,” when a writer or game devel­op­er takes the fan­tasies of a given per­son or per­sons and designs char­ac­ters around those fan­tasies.  This is taken to its most extreme in some games where instead of char­ac­ters, we get liv­ing epit­o­miza­tions of a cer­tain kind of fan­ta­sy: in this case, the “male power fan­ta­sy” so often ascribed to the 15-year-old male.  Kratos, Marcus Fenix, and War aren’t char­ac­ters, they are gigan­tic incar­na­tions (dig­i­ti­za­tions? never mind) of an angry, sex-obsessed 15-year-old’s ide­al­ized pic­ture of mas­culin­i­ty.

(As a quick note, in this here arti­cle, when I use the word “fan­ta­sy,” I refer not to the genre that has swords and shields and magic and uni­corns and what­not, but the type of men­tal process that has some­one “fan­ta­siz­ing” about some­thing, like a day­dream.)

Now, not all games are remote­ly this ridicu­lous, but even games with well-realized char­ac­ters will often at least por­tray their char­ac­ters’ bod­ies in such a way as to appeal to this demo­graph­ic.  By all accounts (Matt’s among them– go read his first col­umn if you haven’t already), Enslaved does a very good job of char­ac­ter­iz­ing Trip and Monkey, and their rela­tion­ship is appar­ent­ly in many ways the best part of the game.  Appearance-wise, how­ev­er, they still fit right in with Kratos, GoW’s Aphrodite, and War.

So, it’s a pret­ty stan­dard truth in video games that women are attrac­tive (and usu­al­ly busty) and men are ripped.  Even in usu­al­ly classy games, this is almost always a truth  In Dragon Age: Origins, there is no option that does not leave your male char­ac­ter with a rip­pling six-pack of abs, no mat­ter what his strength score, and there are no options in Mass Effect for a female Shepard that don’t involve some aero­dy­nam­ic (if, at least, phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble) curves.

Some folks will say this sort of fan­ta­sy epit­o­miza­tion of at least phys­i­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics is bad because of the par­tic­u­lar fan­ta­sy it epit­o­mizes: the “male power fan­ta­sy.”  That might well be true, but I sub­mit to you that char­ac­ters lose their believ­abil­i­ty or artis­tic worth when they become epit­o­miza­tions of any kind of fan­ta­sy, rather than actu­al char­ac­ters.

So, what I want to talk about is that par­tic­u­lar kind of game that is built almost entire­ly on epit­o­miza­tion, and explain why such things are bad art (at least with regard to their char­ac­ters and plot).

Definition of Terms

I want to make a quick dis­tinc­tion here between three terms: art, enter­tain­ment, and escapism.  These are not whol­ly unique enti­ties, and there is plen­ty of over­lap between the three, but I feel there is nev­er­the­less some dis­tinc­tion between them.

Art is pret­ty darn hard to define, exact­ly, but seems to try to do more than just enter­tain the observ­er– to teach him or her some­thing, or at least to make him or her expe­ri­ence some­thing beau­ti­ful.  This is not to say all art should be didac­tic or moral­is­tic, but there is usu­al­ly some­thing in art intend­ed to make the observ­er stop for a moment and say, “Whoa,” if noth­ing else.

Entertainment is not a bad thing, and, as men­tioned before, often over­laps with art, but it’s designed around “fun,” and a “good time.”  Most come­dies (though not all) are real­ly much more enter­tain­ment than art– they are sup­posed to make you laugh and have a good time, and if you leave any rich­er a per­son, that’s fine, but it’s hard­ly the point.  Many games and movies are also pri­mar­i­ly enter­tain­ment– as I’ve also men­tioned before, Gears of War 2 is a heck of a lot of fun, but fails spec­tac­u­lar­ly as soon as it tries to be art.

Escapism is a dif­fer­ent thing from either of those, and may be pri­mar­i­ly a func­tion of the observ­er, rather than the art itself.  Anything that pur­ports to help you “escape,” or “get away” from your day-to-day life, and live out fan­tasies or some such, counts as escapism.  The per­son who plays D&D because there he can be a six-foot-tall, 18/00-strength bar­bar­ian, where­as in real life he is a scrawny weak­ling, is engaged in escapism.  He may well also be engaged in art or enter­tain­ment, but that’s not all he’s doing.

On Escapism

These “epit­o­mized” games, like God of War, Gears of War and Darksiders (a game star­ring a char­ac­ter named “War,” just for the record) serve pri­mar­i­ly as escapism, what­ev­er artis­tic or enter­tain­ing qual­i­ty they may also have.  Why is it fun to be Kratos?  Because Kratos is unrea­son­ably vio­lent, can do what­ev­er he wants, lis­tens to no one, screws all the hottest chicks, and just gen­er­al­ly appeals to that part of most (if not all) men that “just wants to watch the world burn.”  God of War and its com­pa­tri­ots are thus not par­tic­u­lar­ly artis­ti­cal­ly valid because they serve pri­mar­i­ly as escapism, and not art at all.

This is not unique to video games at all, and nei­ther is it unique to andro-centric fan­tasies.  Who is Edward Cullen if not the epit­o­miza­tion of a cer­tain kind of stereo­typ­i­cal 15-year-old female fan­ta­sy?  A woman can lose her­self in Bella and enjoy her fan­ta­sy of becom­ing the be-all and end-all of some attrac­tive man’s life in the same way that a man can lose him­self in Kratos and enjoy his fan­ta­sy of mur­der­ing every­thing that looks at him cross­wise and hav­ing mean­ing­less sex with porn star-shaped women when­ev­er he pleas­es.  This is not at all to say that all women enjoy the Twilight fan­ta­sy or all men, God of War, but both fran­chis­es have sold mil­lions upon mil­lions of copies of their work, so, you know, there’s clear­ly some­thing in this that peo­ple like.

In Conclusion: Game Characters, or the Lack Thereof

I sup­pose it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly bad, as such, for some­thing to be escapism, or to allow a per­son to enact his or her fan­tasies.  But such things don’t seem to have much in the way of artis­tic qual­i­ties.  “Characters” like Kratos and War serve as the most extreme exam­ple of a gen­er­al­ly unpleas­ant fact about video games as a whole: a ten­den­cy to com­plete­ly ignore char­ac­ter and char­ac­ter devel­op­ment in favor of visu­als, mechan­ics, and/or plot.


Bill Coberly

About Bill Coberly

Bill Coberly is the founder and groundskeeper of The Ontological Geek, now that it has shifted over to archive mode. If something on the site isn't working, please shoot a DM to @ontologicalgeek on Twitter!