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, 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.