Why do non-mammals or non-humans need human characteristics?

[skywolfblue]

Because we more easily associate with them (things with human characteristics, not breasts per se). It's easier to make someone care more about something they perceive as human as opposed to just an inhuman blob monster.

its one of the fastest and initial things people identify as 'female' when seeing a species they have never seen before. simply put making the creatures have human body traits is a fast way of making players identify with the species and more easiely recognise which gender is which. sure its not realistic but id rather not have to flip an argonaian over and lift its tail to check its gender

I agree with these two^.

Whenever beast races lack feminine traits (aka boobs), people complain.
Whenever beast races have feminine traits (aka boobs), other people complain.

Nobody wins.

Take a look at WoW's druids for example. People have complained and complained for years that their cat/bear/tree/moonkin forms didn't have very distinct feminine traits (such as breasts), even though cats/bears/trees don't really have much sexual dimorphism at all.

 

[krazykidd]

Wait , these are fictional characters, developpers can make them however the like . If they want to put a pair of boobs or a six pack on their creations, more power to them . Who are we to say they can't or shouldn't.

Need to be more like Star Wars.

Humanoid AND multiple breasts.

Like this. Awsome , just pure awsome.

 

[someonehairy-ish]

I think its a holdover from the days when you couldn't really do complex alien effects in sci fi shows, so you just slapped some makeup or a fake forehead on a human actor and called it a day.

+ as you point out, boobs are fun to play with and pleasant to look at.

Simple really.

 

[Tyelcapilu]

Reminds me of how I don't like how there aren't enough bearded female dwarfs.

 

[NoeL]

I think the OP is very one-sided. I mean sure, take a look at all the non-human females and what do you see? Boobs (and hips, and general hourglass figure). Now take a look at all the non-human males and tell me what you see. They all have broad shoulders, slim hips, and defined musculature - distinctly masculine features.

The argument for institutionalised sexism isn't particularly strong. The best explanation, as others have pointed out, is that because of our familiarity with male/female physiques it becomes much easier to identify the genders of other races if those characteristics are ported across. That said, I agree that it's still totally possible to create a feminine form without adding on breasts, but let's be real - people love tits.

 

[MrPhyntch]

More importantly than all this...how many people are jerking off to pixels where breasts, or perfect abs for that matter, or a pretty face for all monsters really matters.It's like the argument of guys who play females who say they don't wanna look at a guys ass all day. It doesn't make any sense (beyond homophobia) because it's just a differently sized ass.

As a guy with a preference for female player characters, I gotta cut you off right there for a sec before I can discuss the rest of your post. Why is preferring a female ass over a male's instantly homophobia rather than standard hetero tendencies? Yes I've seen feminine asses on males (both in games and real life) and yes, I've found myself looking at them even after I knew they were a guy. It doesn't matter who a feminine butt belongs too, the fact that it has feminine features makes it attractive to me. And no, the ass isn't the only reason I play female player characters (my PC in Fire Emblem Awakening is female, and there have yet to be any butt-shots), but I do get sick of being called "homophobic for the tiniest little things. I prefer a female's ass, so what?

Anyway.

There are a number of reasons why this is. Yes, a lot of it has to do with sexism, but one thing anti-sexists need to realize is that we're fighting more than 10 millenia of instinct here. And it's not just gaming, most fiction does the exact same thing. No, that doesn't make it right, but it does invalidate a sizable portion of the general argument.

Keep in mind that sexual attraction is only a small part of the equation. Despite what Freudians would believe, not everything has to do with sex (although admittedly, reproduction IS the base cause of all of these underlying feelings I'm about to talk about). In all forms of art, all people have been depicted as the "ideal" versions of themselves. This means that the roles of evil people tended to be depicted as ugly (unless we're going for a moral on the attractiveness of evil) whereas the roles of good people typically have been portrayed as beautiful. Peasants are usually depicted as homely, shopkeepers as fat, etc, but they are usually depicted as side characters, in almost all of these cases there are one or two people of whatever race that stand out as the "idealized" version, from which all others are based. And these Idealized versions are usually shown first, as a sort of ambassador to the audience.

So these characters are idealized, and shown as attractive. Good characters (or seductive characters) are supposed to win the affects of the audience, and with so little time to show and/or tell how they are, the artists/designers will usually make a number of decisions to help us out, using standard attractive designs. Robes/dresses are showing elegance whereas pants show strength. Revealing clothing shows strong self-imagery, outgoingness, and boldness (although the opposite isn't always true). And breasts are a common female trait that men are attracted to, therefore any female intended to be attractive will have them. It's really supposed to be more of a subtlety than anything, a subtle audience manipulating design choice.

And then you have the cases, like you mentioned the Argonians, where there are technical issues. Argonians used to not have breasts, but in recent games have had them due to the constraint of remodeling everything for them on limited budget, time, and disk space. You also mention the Mass Effect games. Please know that Bioware is held by many as a pinnacle of character and universe building for a reason. Most designers don't put that kind of care into their product, they simply want something passable to put out later, whereas Bioware tends to want almost Tolkienian levels of backstory behind each faction to make sure everything makes sense. It's the difference between the Inheritance series and LotR. Paolini just wanted his universe and languages to sound good, he really didn't care too much about it (he made it coherent, that's all), whereas Tolkien cared more about making sure there was a history and motives behind every word of his writing.

tl;dr version: Breasts are there because they look good. Looking good isn't always a sex thing. Stop making things that aren't about sex about sex.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Seriously A BlazBlue game without Makoto would be a complete unplayable mess!

Yes, Yes it would.

O.T I agree that its an easy way to make a character look female basically if its male give it a heavy frame if its female give it a light frame (and usually breasts) thats how it goes and makes it easy to distinguish.

Its not always the case though look at Ammy from Okami you wouldnt know her gender unless you were told.

Breasts or no breasts dosent bother me as long as I think its a good character and it fits in the game.

As for Makoto she is a beastman (beastkin?) so it makes sense she has animal and human charateristics.

 

[SweetShark]

Oh what about Nami from LoL? She's clearly not human since y'know she's a fish but her scales go in a slight V shape down her chest which sort of looks breasty. The rest is just a cute fish mermaid thing.

Nobody plays Nami anymore... Fuckin' travesty.

Spoiler

I see your point........lol [on purpose].

Anyway, you have absolutely right about this and myself I had this problem I must say, but for entirely another reason, mostly about aliens being "aliens". No something to resemble a human being or act like that. Just something unknown to feel uncomfortable by watching the alien....

 

[barbzilla]

I was thinking about this because I view it as a logical design things. Let me explain with the example I am most focused on...

Note**Sure it's not a major part of the game, but I want to talk about it so if you have a problem with it go suck a nut.

Breasts.
I like them. I have a pair which are fun to play with. They can be pleasant to look at. However Argonians don't need them nor to Turians. It's not even about breasts or overt sexism(though I will mention that in a moment), so much as it does not make sense. Designers and writers go through the trouble of making a world as realistic as possible, and the fact that it is a minor detail makes it kind of jarring to me. To me it's just a really lazy thing to do. Sexual metamorphism is more than just breasts and body shape for some species. Even among humans there is variation. There are humans with barely A cups that are perfectly female creatures, the same as triple G tits. Body shape factors into it, but for example birds use different calls, colors, movements. It's just really weird, and almost insulting to the players to go "They're too stupid to know females" or "All our players are straight men who MUST BE SEEING BOOB EVERY 5.4 MINUTES OR THEY DIE". It would just be interesting to see biology taken into account when creatures are based on Earth creatures. Fictional creatures aren't exempt from reality when a world is constructed as a reality.

Now here is the sexism issue in it. I consider it Institutional sexism.
There is this reoccurring theme of non-human females looking significantly more human than their male counterparts. In society a woman's worth is primarily determined by her looks, ability to produce offspring, and her age. So it's not too shocking when people say "we don't want to look at ugly women", but then there's the fact that those same people look at the male counterpart and have no problems with it. The male turian does not have a six pack, so why give breasts? Maybe a chest bump so resizing things is easier but...I dunno it's just kind of creepy to put human sexual ideas on some of these non-humans...

Why does monster design have to be so appealing to human sexual senses? The thing I liked in Mass Effect two is the bachelor party background conversation that points out that each male enjoyed the Asari because it reminded them of the females of their own species. It wasn't the human characteristics, the breasts, it was things the human male out of the group never thought about. It's kind of what made the Garrus F!Shep romance so endearing, he didn't know how humans complimented each other or how they did things.



More importantly than all this...how many people are jerking off to pixels where breasts, or perfect abs for that matter, or a pretty face for all monsters really matters.It's like the argument of guys who play females who say they don't wanna look at a guys ass all day. It doesn't make any sense (beyond homophobia) because it's just a differently sized ass.

Even if you don't agree with my reasons, isn't it just a bit weird to put tits on a lizard? Or turn a troll into a pleasant faced skank?

I think you are over thinking it. I think it is done because of clothing and gear. All of the gear is tweaked to look the same and act the same on a bunch of varied body types. To simplify the procedure they just scale the mesh up or down rather than having to create a brand new one. It isn't about boobs or asses or anything of the sort, it is just about saving money.

I don't mean to sound like I am saying that it is acceptable, I honestly would rather see greater variety (and with less human characteristics). But, when it comes time to save money, meshes are usually stop number one. That is why most video game males all look the same, and most video game women all look the same. Creating individual meshes for the clothing would be super expensive.

 

[fat american]

I think the real question is... Why do people always wonder why aliens will probably want to kill us all?

I think Stephen Hawking explains that pretty well. He likens aliens finding us to Columbus finding the Americas. Let's just say it didn't end well for the natives of America.

 

[bananafishtoday]

I think the OP is very one-sided. I mean sure, take a look at all the non-human females and what do you see? Boobs (and hips, and general hourglass figure). Now take a look at all the non-human males and tell me what you see. They all have broad shoulders, slim hips, and defined musculature - distinctly masculine features.

Srsly? Take a look at League of Legends [http://na.leagueoflegends.com/champions]. It's a particularly good example because of its enormous cast of unique characters.

Want to play a female character? You've got a bunch of human women with similar body types and a bunch of non-human women with human secondary sex characteristics, almost all of them designed to be sexually attractive. The only "monsters" are a spider and a dragon, but those are alternate forms of humanoid women. Then you've got a couple dwarves, a child, a fairy, and a bird.

Want to play a male character? You've got a bunch of human men with very different body types. Sure, there's plenty of muscleheads, but there's fat guys, skinny guys, manly guys, girly guys, hot guys, ugly guys. Then there's a crocodile, a scorpion, a gargoyle, a yeti, a troll, a minotaur, an anubis, a centaur demon, a scarecrow demon, a shadow demon, a tree demon, a rock guy, a lava guy, a crystal guy, a short fish guy, a short mummy guy, a short mechanic guy whose head is a brain, two werewolves, two skeletons, a pint-sized FF4 black mage ripoff, a Big Daddy ripoff, a zergling ripoff, a cute pukey eyeless grub thing, a giant stabby stompy beast thing, a plague-infested rat, a spiky armadillo, a...

This is not unusual. The problem isn't that people need to see masculine or feminine features to identify whether a character is male or female. It's that in the absence of contrary evidence, they assume the character is male. There are deep societal reasons why this is the case ("male" is the unmarked gender, just as "white" and "straight" are unmarked in Western society.) Character designers for games can't be expected to overturn this prejudice, but they can at least do something to stop contributing to it.

(I will say though that LoL is a lot better than it used to be. Like a year or two ago, literally every single humanoid woman in the game was drawn as a sex object [save Kayle, with that armor... except her character bio describes her as a sex object.] Since then, they've added female characters with more varied outfits and attitudes, so I don't want to rag on them too much considering how deeply misogynistic the game used to be.)

 

[Neonsilver]

Breasts make it easy to convey the gender of a female character and this also allows to reuse models of human characters with new textures.
It's just an easy and cheap way.

Even if the human model isn't reused, it may still cost more money to design an unique design that is easily recognized as female.

 

[Diddy_Mao]

Now here is the sexism issue in it. I consider it Institutional sexism.

...In society a woman's worth is primarily determined by her looks, ability to produce offspring, and her age.

...turn a troll into a pleasant faced skank?

Pleasant faced = Skank.
And you're gonna lecture anyone about institutionalized sexism and appearance based gender rolls?



Anyway, from a character design standpoint familiarity and first impressions are very important. Doubly so in video games as the playable characters are the surrogates for the player themselves.

Regardless of gender and sexual preference, these games are designed to be played by humans which means making the world instantly accessible to the audience before dropping any additional complexity on them.

In games like Mass Effect, the player isn't burdened by an excess of choice when it comes to their avatar. Sure there's a great deal of customization to be found but it still boils down to male or female human. This does allow the developers to put a lot of time and effort into designing the world and setting of the game while designing the play in such a way as to slowly introduce the character to the various races and cultures.

So yeah, in those rare cases I'll openly agree that there's not quite as much need to fall back on the more instantly identifiable gender traits.

This is more prominent in games like World of Warcraft where a newcomer isn't going to get a lot (if any) of background or history when choosing their avatar. Since there's limited time and space to deal with character creation it's preferable to make things as instantly recognizable as possible for the players in terms of basic design and that does mean falling back on identifiable secondary sex characteristics (as well as recognizable cultural or racial identifiers...but that's a different post altogether.)

Learning about race, history, culture and biological similarities or differences will come with time, but a lot of players aren't going to take the time to learn these things if they don't find themselves attracted to their preferred avatar or are overly distracted by the dissimilarities of the playable races. (To be clear. "Attracted to" in this sense meaning more aesthetically pleased with the over all appearance of their character and not any kind of sexual or romantic attraction.)

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Snip.

If I'm not mistaken, the female models were redesigned based on feedback from female testers saying they wanted to identify with the character more. It had nothing to do with guys needing to see boobs on everything. This is just something else for people to shoehorn sexism into.

On top of that though, developers aren't all misogynistic maniacs that want women to all go back into the kitchen and it's far more insulting to make that sort of claim.

I'm currently trying to find the source, I'm certain it was on The Escapist a while ago.

I haven't got a legit source to the statement but here's the old thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.380821-Are-men-truly-driving-sexist-female-models-in-games].

 

[Quadocky]

I don't know. Men I guess.

Probably the same reason why there are people out there who put boobs on Rainbow Dash and upload it to deviantart.

When it comes to video games in general, there are always these crazy deficits and dichotomies when it comes to character designs. EVEN the animations are stereotyped and 'troped'. For example animations of the men characters are always stiff and joyless like a solider (or robot), and the women animations are loose and fluid and more relaxed (or in my opinion, 'normal')

 

[Proeliator]

Spoiler

[sub]Fucking terrible picture sizes I swear[/sub]

Seriously A BlazBlue game without Makoto would be a complete unplayable mess!

In best Yahtzee Voice: "That young boy has the strangest chest growths. He should get those looked at."

OT
I think trolls are mammal like, boobs actually make a little sense, feeding young milk and all. As for slimming them down, if the females are supposed to be physically smaller, like most mammals are (there are exceptions though), its not drifting to far off from what makes sense.
Aliens and lizard men? Artist's discretion. Though it does sometimes seem like a cop out just to make them obviously smaller (sometimes way too) and slimmer.

Well just imagine how painful breast feeding is for for trolls with the tusks and all.

I suspect the teeth and tusks come in later. Like most mammals. You would think, then again, artists discretion.

 

[darlarosa]

its one of the fastest and initial things people identify as 'female' when seeing a species they have never seen before. simply put making the creatures have human body traits is a fast way of making players identify with the species and more easiely recognise which gender is which. sure its not realistic but id rather not have to flip an argonaian over and lift its tail to check its gender

But why is that so important?
I'm not sexual dimorphism is bad, but it's the blandness of it. I just think it should be more than "slap a tit on it...maybe two". It's also kind of weird just because male non-humans can look completely without standard or specific gender appearances...going back to the Turian example, would we know that Garrus or Saren were male if we didn't have the voice acting or names, just the appearance? I dunno maybe I just want more interesting design

Snip.

If I'm not mistaken, the female models were redesigned based on feedback from female testers saying they wanted to identify with the character more. It had nothing to do with guys needing to see boobs on everything. This is just something else for people to shoehorn sexism into.

On top of that though, developers aren't all misogynistic maniacs that want women to all go back into the kitchen and it's far more insulting to make that sort of claim.

I'm currently trying to find the source, I'm certain it was on The Escapist a while ago.

I haven't got a legit source to the statement but here's the old thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.380821-Are-men-truly-driving-sexist-female-models-in-games].

Never said all are misogynistic maniacs, please don't put words in my mouth. I never made that claim, my statements were obvious exaggeration.While I think sexism maybe a factor, I also brought up general design laziness as an issue

I used the wow pic just as an example, and perhaps if you are correct about the feedback that was a poor example(source? Just out of curiosity). However that's only applicable to player characters than. Most people try to make them attractive, I get that. But I suppose my real issue was the fact that "female" monsters seem to always be so overtly female in the most obvious and lazy ways. Not every non-human female should look human pretty. A female half orc shouldn't be generalized human pretty. Even if it's a feedback thing that rubs me the wrong way.

-snip-

lol I call people skank all the time. Same with **** and *****. Men, women, children all of them are skanks at one time or another. I'm a bitchy slut and quite ok with that label, so I call people whatever I want. As the saying goes "Skanks, skanks everywhere, and not a drop to drink."...maybe I learned that one wrong.

Though I agree with you. I understand the mmo reasons of wanting to make things quick and identifiable, which is part of why I don't care for them (side note Neverwinter is going to have some crazy ass customization). But that's the thing I wasn't talking player characters alone. Side species and such any non-human creature in a game is included in the topic of this thread. People do make attractive characters, thats a given and thats fine. But in many games there are non-PC female non-human creatures that have no reason to be attractive(we could argue that asari or Desire Demons or succubus and incubus have story reasons). It's just odd to apply human standards to creatures that were not to be human.

 

[The Unworthy Gentleman]

Never said all are misogynistic maniacs, please don't put words in my mouth. I never made that claim, my statements were obvious exaggeration.While I think sexism maybe a factor, I also brought up general design laziness as an issue

It may seem to be putting words in your mouth but it's just reading between the lines. It's there with every post that claims the industry is sexist, they forget that the industry is filled with people like you and me, and not just an entity.

I used the wow pic just as an example, and perhaps if you are correct about the feedback that was a poor example(source? Just out of curiosity). However that's only applicable to player characters than. Most people try to make them attractive, I get that. But I suppose my real issue was the fact that "female" monsters seem to always be so overtly female in the most obvious and lazy ways. Not every non-human female should look human pretty. A female half orc shouldn't be generalized human pretty. Even if it's a feedback thing that rubs me the wrong way.

I still haven't got source on it, sadly. I'm willing to assume it's true but I'm hesitant about it now, I mailed the guy from that thread but he isn't the most active member so that might never produce results. I think the other side of it is that the more attractive something needs to be, the more human it needs to be. Depending on how attractive they want a race to be, and how central a character from that race is, they're going to vary.

I mean, it's good character design sometimes and it's other times it's laziness. It's one of the 12 principles of animation: appeal. The character needs to fit the role so the good guy isn't going to be ugly; that's the job of the evil guy. If that Orc is good or a Player Character it's going to be more human than would seem appropriate for an ugly ass Orc, but if it's an evil NPC then you're going to see it ugly as hell.

Most of the time it comes down to good and bad character design, not institutional sexism.

 

[rob_simple]

I think people are reading far too much into this. You could just as easily ask why are alien children usually small in games? They could just as easily have some strange birthing process where they swell to the size of a planet and grow smaller as they reach maturity.

That would require a lot of explanation, though, and it's easier for designers, who are already working to tight deadlines which are very expensive to run over, to go with easy identifiers of age and sex.