Perhaps the measurements of women in games instills unrealistic expectations, but so does every other form of media at pretty much all times. Games are a tiny facet of the real issue. Walk past the magazine section in your local supermarket. Examine the covers. You won't see a single normal person. All the women are perky, sculpted, athletic, elaborately made-up creatures, and all the men are improbably muscled Greek heroes (or, if your supermarket has wrestling/biker mags, improbably muscled Greek villains). I did this experiment myself yesterday and the most prominent cover featured a shredded, shirtless Hugh Jackman tensing every oiled muscle. A space alien getting its first images of humanity off magazine covers would have a very skewed vision of both sexes.
The melon-sized boobies you see on so many female characters are outrageous things that no woman should have. I think it's ridiculous that developers continually present us with females who gained their proportions after being bitten by radioactive porn stars. It's not attractive, it's just silly.
On the other hand, I find objects like Marcus Fenix equally ridiculous. Men don't look like that. Hell, bulldogs on steroids don't look like that.
Here's the thing, though: It's okay for characters to look and act ridiculous. To a degree, it's necessary for the medium.
How many people would play (or, more importantly, buy) a game where the protagonist was a dumpy, zit-faced nineteen year old, and the only action was working his shitty job at Burger Palace? No violence, no plot twists, no action, no discovering he had superpowers, just being unpleasantly passive-aggressive for two ten-hour shifts, then the game ends. I don't think that would sell (I could be wrong; Cooking Mama has sold over 12 million units.....)
Games give us giant boobies on women, but they also give us plasma rifles, giant robots, and all manner of things that don't exist. Games are fantasy. This fantasy appeals to us. Reality often does not. We buy things that appeal to us. This is what game companies are really out to do. They are selling a product. They do this by including features they think their audience wants. In most cases, they're right.
Marcus Fenix's appearance is fiction, and we know it. The player, whether male or female, is supposed to buy into the fiction. That's what the game is for: escaping into a place were we can be a gravel-voiced ass-kicker with power armor and a face like a lump of granite. Sports fans pretend they are their favorite quarterback, gamers pretend to be Spider-Man.
When we've finished, we put the fantasy down and go back to our lives. No harm done. I've run over more people than I can count in Steelport, and it has no bearing on anything I do in real life. I would never expect to murder two hundred people and simply hide in my house to make the police lose interest. I would never expect a woman to have perfect gravity-defying boobs and exist only to be looked at.
If women are going to be offended by a female character wearing a thong, they should also be offended by the perfect, taut muscularity and chiseled jaw of your typical male character. Women are bothered by female characters with proportions 99% of women could never attain. It stands to reason they should be bothered by male characters with proportions 99% of men cannot attain. I find this doesn't happen.
Case in point: I saw Thor in a crowded theater. When the big fella appeared sans shirt, the women gasped, whistled, made catcalls....I didn't hear a single woman's voice saying, "That is objectification, and it bothers me." The only person I know had a problem with it is a guy friend of mine who, quite frankly, sounded petty and jealous when he referred to Hemsworth as "man-candy" and said the shirtless scene ruined the whole movie for him.
Female characters wear less, are posed provocatively, etc. Yes, this is true. I'm not saying there is nothing to argue against. I'm saying argue against all of it. Or argue for the inclusion of scantily clad, musclebound male characters who exist to be ogled.
I think the real problem is loss of perspective. It's just not that big of a deal. Is the objectification of women in games a problem? Maybe. Is it a problem the way, for example, domestic violence is a problem? Not remotely. Does the existence of big-breasted female characters lead directly to serious problems? Does the lack of genuine personality, the failing of the Bechdel test, and so forth undermine the entire female gender? I don't see how. Again, you get much of this with males. Marcus Fenix is one-dimensional, Gordon Freeman lacks any dimension at all (and, I should point out, is accompanied by an empowered, realistically proportioned woman with real personality), the vast majority of male leads don't have any personality or desires beyond a couple clichés. I grant that we don't see these characters pole-dancing, but the idea that shallow representation in media is like a boot pressing down on all women, everywhere, all the time, is simply wrong.
