FireDr@gon said:
Yes i thought this thread would get bombarded with examples, and said as much. I don't own and have never played most of the games you state examples from, but i knew that there would be exceptions. I agree with mitchell271, it's still the exception not the rule. However, thanks for the contributions and those examples should stand as beacons for devs to gravitate towards.
I also want to say for the record that although the title of my thread was about women - i ended it saying that i wanted BOTH genders to be fairly represented. I also want to mention that i said bizzare or outlandish female characters did not count as they are still not average.
I thought that Half life 2 did a great job at representing female and male characters alike - this should be another benchmark for future games.
I think if everyone thinks hard they can come up with a "standard model of beauty" for either sex. I still hold to my opinion that developers are too concerned with making attractive, unrealistic models for characters, rather than fleshed out individuals which no small number of people wish to see in games. For immersions' sake alone.
I think devs could even take a leaf out of literatures' book (har har).
Fiction books (barring obvious exceptions) need to rely heavily on good dialogue and solid characters to keep someone interested. Game designers that are tempted to make a hasty, two- dimensional character could learn that it's essentially a waste of time if it doesnt keep someone immersed.
I think you are wrong. Let me tell you why.
You ask "why are there so few unattractive women in video games?" You receive many examples of unattractive women, but dismiss most of them because "bizzare or outlandish female characters do not count because they are not average." It is with this bit that I disagree.
Video games are not movies or books, they do not need a good story to be good. They can stand on their gameplay alone. Street Fighter, for example, does not need a good story and I would even go so far as to say it would be worse if they had tried to shoehorn a deep story into the game. Not every game needs a deep story, not every game should have a deep story.
What every game does need are interesting characters. But if you are not going to have a deep story, there is no point to having deep characters. There is no payoff and that characterization becomes time wasted that detracts from the game.
Because of this, developers are often tasked with creating interesting but shallow characters. This is accomplished by making the character outlandish, especially on a visual level. They need to stick in the mind from the moment they are seen. This basically means they need to be notably strange, ugly, or attractive. Notably ugly is generally not used because no one wants to look at an exceptionally ugly character for any length of time. This leaves us with notably strange and notably attractive. Visually uninteresting characters (average looking) only work when they can be fleshed out by deep story and engaging dialog, which is often not possible.
Even when a good story and engaging dialog are possible, average looking characters will always be in the minority because they are boring. The only time it is good to have such a character is when their lack of exceptional features contributes to their character, such as Lucca in Chrono Trigger (setting her apart as the only average looking person in a group of freaks,) or the setting, such as Alyx Vance. Otherwise the developer is passing up on an opportunity to put something interesting in the game for no reason and the game is worse for it.
In summary, average looking characters will always be the exception because it is a really bad idea, with a few notable exceptions.
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