maninahat said:
If you honestly believe that the subjectivity of beauty excuses the way characters are designed, then you'd have no right to complain if, for example, every character was designed as semi-naked, wrinkly old person. After all, it's only *your* opinion that they are unattractive - perhaps someone out there might be turned on by old people, so it's totally fine as it is and you should stop complaining.
The point being made is that game designers rarely make a conspicuous effort to design male characters that are physically appealing to female gamers. Whilst what women find attractive tends to vary (and there is perhaps a woman out there who does find Marcus Fenix attractive), it isn't hard to figure out what most women tend to find sexy, and nor is it too much effort to try. But games don't, and few characters are made with any consideration to women. This is in contrast to female character design. Game designers seem to have no trouble in making them appealing for male gamers.
Sorry, haven't been at a PC for the weekend.
You're right, I would have no right to complain if all characters were to be designed as wrinkly old people. I don't design these games, someone else does. They design it in a way that appeals to them, if I happen to like it then that's great for me and also for the designer. If I don't, then so what? That is the way of art. If, however, I funded a game before it was made, then I would have a little more 'right' to complain.
Also, your analogy is quite far fetched. Comparing every character being the same to the standard of today's designs is ridiculous. They're far some being exactly the same. I don't deny that there's a lack of female protagonist in gaming, but to say that all characters are designed to look the same is madness.
I'm aware of the points that are being made, but they still don't make sense. In fact your whole second paragraph makes very little sense apart from line "what women find attractive tends to vary"
If you can honestly say "it isn't hard to figure out what women tend to find sexy" then you're a genius! Men have struggled to understand what women find attractive
or want since the dawn of time. Which is probably a good point to the discussion at hand, in itself, being that the majority of designers are male. I don't think women know what all women want either. It's a fairly regular occurrence between me and my good friends ( whom I've known for many, many years and are both male and female) where someone states that X celebrity is attractive and the rest laugh and say such things as "you what?!"
'Women' - and I'm grouping them together now for arguments sake,constantly voice, vote, state, poll, opinionate on people they find attractive within the media. Which 'celebrities', sports stars, musicians, film stars etc. they find attractive. As far as I can tell, a lot of AAA male game's characters are usually designed around this type of male, and
are aimed at the female demographic.
I sit on the fence with this argument towards sexism in gaming, as yes, there is a lot of it, but there is also a huge amount of opinionated dribble constantly floating around too.
The one thing that genuinely pisses me off about the debate is the fact that the word 'Games' is mentioned. There are literally hundreds of thousands of games out there, and this tends to be forgotten due to a fairly small handful of AAA games.
It's like saying "'reading literature' is sexist"! Well, yes. Look how much of it there is, some of it is incredibly well written, deep or pro-feminine and other aspects are just shite, awful, sexist Heat/Glamour magazines (which incidentally are funded, edited, written and produced mainly by women)
It's this sort of 'mom and pop' logic that leads to silly opinions of "Games are bad, (mkay) They make people do school shootings"
Captcha: that escalated quickly. Let's hope not Captcha.
