By: Puyan Hao and Tianli Zhu
Well to answer this perfectly plausible
question. Nope, many women in real
life have big breasts, even without
having received surgical implants,
though granted Lara would have found
many of her attempts at acrobatic
stunts hampered by paralyzing back
pain, purely being a large breasted
female video game character does not
make her “over sexualized” because
lest we forget, Lara was also (the) ass
kicking heroine and female video
game icon of the 90’s.
Lara hardly ever used her
sexuality in order to get one over on
her enemies, and her
personality
was such that her resourcefulness and
intelligence was what lead to her
surviving many of her perilous
adventures, that right there goes a long
way to defining Lara Croft as an
acceptably sexualized female
character, as far as I’m concerned at
least ("Portrayal of Women in Video
Games: Acceptable Sexualization vs
over Sexualization. - Blog by
Dcdunham - IGN.").
And how, pray tell, are they
portrayed in video games? We
conducted a ton of research on a bunch
of different games and gaming
magazines from all genres and
publishers. We came to a rather
disappointing conclusion: we could
only find two female characters were
that were not portrayed in a sexualized
or demeaning manner, out of the 150
games or so Puyan has in his
apartment. Portrayals in magazines
were similarly disappointing: female
characters were either portrayed in
skimpy clothing or as subservient and
shielded by a strong male character.
Why are women portrayed this
way? We think part of the issue is that
the gaming industry is overwhelmingly
male. Designers, composers and
programmers are almost always men.
The only big-name female game
designer we can think of is Jane
Jensen, who put out Gray Matter.
Some staffs at certain gaming
companies such as Valve, are slowly
recruiting more women, but the
industry’s culture is very masculine.
The fewer jobs that are offered to
women, the fewer career opportunities
will be open for additional women in
the future.
Alyx might be the industry’s
exemplar for strong female characters.
Another example is Mirror’s Edge’s
Faith Connors. Though the story of the
game was not particularly strong. Faith
stands out in my mind as an example
of a tough female character. The game
sold a lot of copies, by the way. Both
of these games disprove the notion that
titles with strong female characters can
not sell. Faith can outrun helicopters
and beat up legions of S.W.A.T.
Mirror’s Edge did very well.
We reduce the sexualization of
female characters. It is a win-win for
everyone: female gamers feel more
included and represented, and the
gaming industry makes more money
by including those consumers. They
also write better, more immersive
stories because the characters are more
believable. If you oppose reducing the
sexualization of female characters,
then guess that is your call, but
consider the benefits. Wouldn’t you
rather have a story with stronger, more
realistic characters and stories,
especially with how expensive games
are these days? We are sure female
gamers would like to feel more
included in this wonderful story and
artwork world of ours. If you like
sexualized characters, that is what porn
and creepy fan fiction are for. “The
gaming industry can do better than
this, and [we] believe reducing the
sexualization of female characters will
move games ever closer to being
widely accepted as art” ("Art as
Games.").