Gaming
Female Game Characters With Average American Body Shapes
Female game characters are often ridiculously misrepresented. Video games often exaggerate their characters’ body shapes, sometimes to ridiculous extents (I’m looking at you, Dead Or Alive). Bulimia.com, a site dedicated to providing support and information on eating disorders, has reverse photoshopped some of the world’s most iconic female game characters so that they have the average American body shape.
“Video games have grown increasingly realistic over time,” the site says. “Some gaming studios boast their hyper-realistic lighting techniques, touting natural cloud movements as the latest features of their games. And with that kind of attention to detail, it makes us wonder, why can’t they accurately portray the female body?”
That example of Nabooru from Ocarina Of Time is actually quite disturbing. The original makes it look like she’s starving to death.
Of course, video games are not the only culprit here. The media overall has a tendency to depict women unrealistically. Video games do, however, tend to be among the worst offenders. It’s also important to note that games depict male characters unrealistically too. Male characters tend to be overly huge and muscular and that equally creates an unrealistic standard for men. However, the misrepresentation of female bodies in the media is arguably more harmful, since it can lead to health problems and eating disorders.
“The perpetuation of unrealistic body imagery in the media can have decidedly negative repercussions,” the site says. “One could argue that the social pressures to obtain perfection are reinforced even through the depiction of video game characters. Girl gamers – especially young ones – could develop a skewed image of how the female body should look. This might mark the beginning of obsessive thoughts about their own bodies, and self-questioning as to why they don’t align with their perceived ideal. When dangerous, compulsive eating behaviors develop alongside these negative obsessions, young women can quickly find themselves struggling with an eating disorder. Whether it’s the drastic restrictions in food intake seen in anorexia, or the relentless purge behaviors of bulimia, all types of eating disorder are tragic end-points potentially exacerbated by body image issues.
“The incidence of eating disorders is markedly higher in females. Furthermore, the average age of onset for various eating disorders spans from the late teenage years through the mid-twenties. The health repercussions of eating disorders are amongst the most severe of any mental health condition, with alarmingly high mortality rates if left untreated. If you are concerned that compulsive and maladaptive eating behaviors are negatively impacting your life, or know someone close to you who might be struggling with an eating disorder, help is available.”
It’s not all bad news, however. The example above of Lara Croft is from the original Tomb Raider games. The new Tomb Raider titles are an example of games that are moving towards a more realistic depiction of their female game characters. “If you look at how her form has changed from the original, it’s clear developers are listening to feedback from consumers. They’re definitely moving in the right direction,” a bulimia.com spokesperson told Motherboard.
Lara Croft from the new games, featuring a more realistic body shape.
“If video game creators are going to pride themselves on accurate digital representations, then it’s time for them to get real about women.”
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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