A friend of mine once noted that the prettiest girl in your high school would be the "plain Jane friend" who got three lines in many a movie or television drama.
We like to look at pretty people. This is universal. Being physically attractive makes your life easier in many ways. It makes people more likely to help you, more likely to do what you want, more likely to want them to like you, whether or not there's any sort of sexual attraction.
Like many things, we can kindasorta culturally counterbalance this, to a degree. We can say that it's what the inside that counts. We can highlight people's academic achievements, or their business achievements, or the struggles they've overcome.
We can say that physical beauty doesn't matter.
But it's a lie.
Perhaps a lie that it is beneficial to tell, sometimes. (Human society is like that.) But a lie, nevertheless.
Video games are not going change the course of that river, and it's not particularly fair to burden them with that expectation. You're not likely to get a game whose cover heroine is twenty pounds overweight and has a skin problem, any more than you'll see a man who looks like Steve Buscemi on the cover of a romance novel.
This is not to say we couldn't do with more diversity in our games. The character creation flexibility in games like Saints Row, Skyrim, Mass Effect, and many MMORPGs offers one route, but it comes at a cost- by allowing the player to make any character, you remove some of the ability to create a story geared towards a particular character.
I do not doubt- indeed, I hope- that we will see more video game characters who are female, or non-Caucasian. And there will probably be more modest dress for female characters in some games, as well.
But to be blunt, we don't want to embody unattractive characters. We might make characters in Saints Row 4 who look like us, or we might make obese, blue-skinned asexuals who talk like zombies and run around without pants on a lark. But we don't generally want to play unattractive people for much the same reasons we play characters who can lead armies, or do triple somersault flips, or fire sub-machine guns in each hand unerringly with a flagrant disregard for recoil and ammunition. The games that millions of people play are games more interesting than our lives, as people more remarkable than us.
We like to look at pretty people. This is universal. Being physically attractive makes your life easier in many ways. It makes people more likely to help you, more likely to do what you want, more likely to want them to like you, whether or not there's any sort of sexual attraction.
Like many things, we can kindasorta culturally counterbalance this, to a degree. We can say that it's what the inside that counts. We can highlight people's academic achievements, or their business achievements, or the struggles they've overcome.
We can say that physical beauty doesn't matter.
But it's a lie.
Perhaps a lie that it is beneficial to tell, sometimes. (Human society is like that.) But a lie, nevertheless.
Video games are not going change the course of that river, and it's not particularly fair to burden them with that expectation. You're not likely to get a game whose cover heroine is twenty pounds overweight and has a skin problem, any more than you'll see a man who looks like Steve Buscemi on the cover of a romance novel.
This is not to say we couldn't do with more diversity in our games. The character creation flexibility in games like Saints Row, Skyrim, Mass Effect, and many MMORPGs offers one route, but it comes at a cost- by allowing the player to make any character, you remove some of the ability to create a story geared towards a particular character.
I do not doubt- indeed, I hope- that we will see more video game characters who are female, or non-Caucasian. And there will probably be more modest dress for female characters in some games, as well.
But to be blunt, we don't want to embody unattractive characters. We might make characters in Saints Row 4 who look like us, or we might make obese, blue-skinned asexuals who talk like zombies and run around without pants on a lark. But we don't generally want to play unattractive people for much the same reasons we play characters who can lead armies, or do triple somersault flips, or fire sub-machine guns in each hand unerringly with a flagrant disregard for recoil and ammunition. The games that millions of people play are games more interesting than our lives, as people more remarkable than us.
