There has got to be a good reason why we, as a group of girl gamers, occasionally have grand fantasies about inspiring masses of non-gaming females to become the deadly, cyber-amazons of the future.  Maybe it’s as simple as wanting all the support we can get in such a male-dominated arena.  Or perhaps it’s as complicated as the feminist desire to show that gaming could be a professional sport in which physical boundaries are overcome and men and women can compete on equal footing.  I could probably write pages of analysis describing our motivations for seeing more female gamers in the world.  Currently, however, I’m interested in one particular form of resistance we encounter when communicating about our passion for gaming to non-gamer, female populations.

The question is common in theme:  how can you condone a form of entertainment in which the female characters are so blatantly objectified? The associated image is just as common:  female character toting breasts larger than her rocket launcher is saving/destroying the world while wearing nary enough fabric to keep one’s ears warm. While perhaps exaggerated, we can’t deny that the impossibly glorified female figure has made more than her fair share of appearances in the world’s gaming library. 

Certainly we know that we don’t have any intention of advocating the objectification of women.  Our mothers taught us better.  So how is it that we can justify our fanaticism for video games when the whole industry seems unconcerned about female sensitivities? 

I’ll admit that when these questions first came my way, I felt guilty about not previously being bothered.  The closest I came to even registering these character models as undesirable was when I decided not to play a wood elf female in EverQuest because I figured that using some developer’s wet-dream as my avatar would detract from the charming character I wanted to play.  Nothing against wood elves or the people who chose to play them, just not my style.  I chose a hafling model as the pixelated embodiment for my in-game identity.

My realization is that I don’t mind if developers want to create female characters from their wildest dreams because I consider video games to be art.  I don’t apply a generalized judgment to an entire genre if one particular artist or creation represents statements I don’t agree with.  Art is stylized.  Art is aesthetic.  Art is someone’s opinion or thought and they might even be trying to express an idea.  But in video games, I don’t interpret the use of impossibly, bodaciously-built babes as a statement by the developer that any woman worthy of portrayal or attention must be like that. 

Another example of an art form that frequently uses super-females is comic books.  I’ve always loved comic book art and the exaggerated content therein.  Rarely have I felt that the artists were necessarily trying to say something negative about women or, tangentially, about me.  And even in cases where I might have made such an interpretation, I would never have assumed this to mean that all comic books were designed to objectify or demean women.

Comic books, like video games, are also well known for displaying men as impossibly well-endowed freaks of sci-fi nature.  The men of the world, however, are not complaining.  Perhaps since both the comic book and video game industries are purported to be male-dominated, people figure that the creator’s can’t be trying to insult themselves.  My point is that I don’t see why we should assume that developers are sexist, insensitive, or out to disregard the reality of female proportions.

My EverQuest experience provides an excellent vignette of my feelings on the matter.  I may or may not care for the uber-perfect, gorgeous female models in a game, but I don’t take the creation of them as a personal attack.  Granted, an ideal world would present me with options:  the female wood elf, the female ogre, the female halfling, the female troll… and a game with such depth would be a preference of mine in almost all cases.  But in general, I don’t care if there are games being made that put 60% of their resources towards developing the world’s best breast physics.  Hopefully, as women become more invested in the industry, we will see greater diversity in game heroines and more female characters that portray some element of realistic world experience.  Until then, I will proceed to love the games I love and chuckle about (and probably not play) the latest iteration of DOA.