I have thought of a way to get more representation of women in video games. I was inspired by the latest Feminist Frequency video, which asks “Are Women Too Hard To Animate?”
And my first thought was yeah, well, boob physics is really hard and requires adding lots more math to the code, if you want to be properly salacious.
And my second thought was gosh, game programmers must be really lazy.
And my third thought was that game programmers sure put a lot of thought into sexualizing their games.
And that’s when my new idea popped into my head. Have you ever seen a naked man running? There’s this small dangly bit that you can’t avoid noticing that is bouncing and flopping and twirling as they move, and it can even, sometimes, change shape in response to the environment. I imagine simulating penis physics is even harder than boob physics, and you can’t cheat and just have an immobile lump down there on a naked man, because all the viewers would see that as sad and sick (either that, or it’s really cold in the game environment), especially the male viewers.
So that’s my solution. We have to demand more male nudity in video games, and not just when they’re standing around — we must insist on full frontal nakedness in action shots. And of course, there must be graphical accuracy in the animation.
Imagine the design phase of games. Everytime the designers suggest a male protagonist, the programmers will say “Aww, man, that’s gonna be hard, I’m gonna have to spend weeks coding shape-shifting pendulums, and then we’re going to have to spend months playtesting his junk. Can we just have the hero be a woman?”
This is going to work. It draws on what are clearly entirely natural impulses in programmers: to throw in lots of sex, while doing as little creative work as possible.
Or they’ll just avoid using humans in games completely and just use more animals or amorphous blobs or simple round stuff like Kirby. Also a win?
I would imagine it’s the designers and directors rather than the programmers who are responsible for the creative direction in big-budget games these days. More’s the pity when they turn out to be creepy weirdos like Hideo Kojima…
I do think there are situations where not having any female enemies or protagonists are reasonable though. Particularly with historically-inspired titles. Take one of the two classic shooting game baddies – the Nazi (the other being the zombie, of course). I don’t think having platoons of gender-equal Nazi soldiers would achieve anything. Making the Third Reich a tolerant and gender-equal society would seem genuinely peculiar and jarring!
Playable female characters isn’t just a matter of having the different object geometries and animations – you need different speech tracks and potentially different dialogues speech tracks from other characters. It might mean booking speech actors back into the studio and re-recording stuff, finding a female martial artist and doing motion capture, etc. For a company that’s trying to produce a top-tier game, this is opportunity. It’s what separates a top-tier game from the rest of the pack, in fact. (I’ve been known to at least play part-way into the various Mass Effect games with female Shepherd just to enjoy how well the designers handled that aspect of the game) Ditto Skyrim, Dragon Age, and a few other titles. Ubisoft has made a run of bad choices on their Assassins Creed franchise and has bigger problems with awkward controls, stupid plots, and 3D objects clipping the players’ geometries. Sarkeesian is, of course, right: these games are embarrassingly bad.
Meanwhile, while Ubisoft is whingeing that “it’s hard” to produce female geometries, and Call of Duty can’t be arsed to do the audio and voice capture necessary, Bungie’s running away with gym bags full of money thanks to Overwatch. Once its cool-off expires, the Invisible Hand Of The Market may be dropping on Ubisoft and COD, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
It’s hard to do female geometries, right. That’s why Tekken does a bikini mode, where the characters fight in underwear. And I was /facepalming when Sarkeesian pointed out the Metal Gear Solid sexy girl assassin photo shoot wince-o-tron.
I remain optimistic that gaming won’t suck for too much longer. Gaming has evolved amazingly rapidly, since the line-art strategy games of the 70s and text-only adventures of the 80s. Some of these issues weren’t a problem because the graphical representation and even audio representation simply weren’t there yet. But gaming has a very high turn-over rate at the top end of the technology and this issue is on everyone’s radar screen who wants to produce a top-tier game. Given the kind of money that’s on the table for developing those, it’s probable that Ubisoft’s producers simply forgot (they are apparently idiots) to get playable women into the road-map, so it fell off the back of the feature-list. The result: another embarrassingly bad Assassins’ Creed game hammering another nail into that franchise.
Gaming is a buyer’s market right now and will be for a long time to come. Since women are spending half the money that’s being spent on games, it’s a safe prediction that the companies that continue to lock out half their potential customer base are going to experience financial hiccups, wind up on the chopping block and under new management, and that new management probably won’t be that stupid. It’s darwinian as fuck out there, and the selection pressure’s all about the benjamins.
cartomancer@#2:
Take one of the two classic shooting game baddies – the Nazi (the other being the zombie, of course). I don’t think having platoons of gender-equal Nazi soldiers would achieve anything
Yeah, but you could let players step into the pixels of Ludmilla Pavlichenko, Not that players could shoot nearly as well.
PS @#4: —
I hate hate hate historical “shooters” because they’re universally so horribly bad. Never in the history of warfare do we hear about someone going Audie Murphy to the max and singlehandedly winning the battle of Normandy, etc. It’s just ridiculously bullshittic and I want to scream in people’s faces when I see the future generations of imperial cannon-fodder absorbing lessons about “warfare” from these absurd games. Hey, kids, want to know what war is really like? Imagine you get one pass through Dark Souls 3 and if your character dies, you’re out of the game, forever.
And the nazis weren’t pushovers who just sat there inactive and waited to be mowed down by the player character as they dodge around a corner. I think that bothers me almost more than anything else: those games make their players become stupid because they come to believe that their enemies are going to be stupid. Of course, PVP arenas go a small way toward correcting that, but imagine the whingeing you’d get from the ‘hardcore’ gamer community if the in-game pop-up dummies were even close to as not-stupid as real humans are.
I think that’s a lot of why gaming keeps falling back on the horribly trite “zombies” trope. You can kill all of them you want and there’s no moral concern because they’re already dead. They can be gender-neutral and mostly non-sexualized because they’re gross. And they come with a built-in excuse for having a stupid combat AI that doesn’t coordinate like real live humans would. Zombies are the perfect generalized “other” that our next generation of imperial janissaries can practice on. And that’s why they’re shocked to find out that a 3rd world human with some gasoline, batteries, wires, and a cell phone is a whole lot more dangerous than they expected.
… I’m gonna have to spend weeks coding shape-shifting pendulums…
“Not a problem, bro – just re-use this baseball-bat code…”
I know I have linked-to this before, so apologies for the repeat, but it still seems quote appropriate, Breasts: the ultimate weapons:
Imaginary penis physics hasn’t been explored much (I think, keeping in mind Rule 34), excepting, probably, use as a WMD against females.
Will the Settings feature offer a toggle for Circumcised Status?
“The Beauty & Beast Unit can only breath through sexy poses. Don’t you feel bad about your dislike of my totally logical explanation now?” – Hideo Kojima.
Which is why Nintendo won’t put a female Link in Breath of the Wild.
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Now that you mention it, attempts were made to make the IA-controlled enemies less dumb than usual. It worked, and playtesters hated it
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“The thirteen years old secondary protagonist of my game can be shown to wear extremely revealing outfits, but in truth she inhabits a robot body modeled after a petite twenty years old, therefore the sexual innuendos are totally okay” – Tetsuya Takahashi.
I think their model needs to be that scene from the Alexander Payne movie “Sideways” when Paul Giamatti steals the wallet back.
laurentweppe@#10:
In order to combat this “unfair spawning behavior”, players would then tactically withdraw (run away) until they were in narrow hallways where the AI could not flank. There, the players could then pick off the AI at their leisure one by one, since they had nowhere to go.
They forgot to give the AIs grenades, apparently. Not fair.. In the very same game, a human would laugh and toss a grenade bouncing off that wall, down the hallway.
Also, so many shooter AIs move at walking speed all the time, even when under observation or fire.
In the Elite:Dangerous forums there was a great deal of rending of garments over NPCs cheating because the person who codes their AI finally gave the AI control over maneuvering jets – the same technique players use to adjust their ship’s attitude while maneuvering made the AI vastly more deadly and immediately many humans assumed the AI was cheating because everyone knows AIs can’t beat humans.
The problem with in-game AI is that it should be nearly impossible for humans to survive against them. We’ve got reflexes that are down in the hundredths and tenths of seconds. The premise of so many of these games is: “look here’s a starfaring alien species that’s part computer – now, you kick their ass.” The player ought to be vaporized before they even have time to register what happened.
This is why the Daleks scream Exterminate! Exterminate!! Exterminate!!! rather than just getting on with the extermination — to give the intended victims a change to run away, zap ’em with a sonic screwdriver, bash with a baseball bat, …
A chance to run away…
(Tpyos is wellfeed tooday.)
Depending on the game, the actual developers tend not to bother with that, but players of it, or, more accurately, modders of it, can be very unafraid of stepping into the breach. As one example, there is a mod called Schlongs of Skyrim which…well, you can pretty much guess what it does by the title.
Have you ever seen a naked man running?
Remember Corben’s “Den” comic series that was in Heavy Metal in the 70s? I seem to recall lots of great big bouncy stuff of all genders. Hm. It managed to be quite unerotic for me in spite of all the physics going on.
Hadn’t realized that laid down such vivid memories in my young subconscious…
That Ubisoft excuse was the worst. If they had just said that they didn’t want to, or that it didn’t make it to the final design, I would’ve had more respect for them than that lame-ass justification they tried to pull off. I doubt either of those other excuses would’ve blown up on them as much than the “It’s too hard!” one they went with.
Sexualization can be fine. Gimme the option of males in thongs or at least Speedoes. Perhaps programming physics of a single boob would work there.
Too bad Ubisoft feels the need to come up with idiot excuses not to deal with female player characters in their recent products. Their 2003 game Beyond Good and Evil had had as its player character Jade, who was not only a female character but wasn’t dressed in a chain mail bikini or other heavily revealing clothing.
While I know that this was not the point of the post, with such a long discussion of video game dicks I have to recommend that you look into the game Cobra Club by Robert Yang.
Also, if I may be permitted one more off topic post, the Kotaku article article about the game does have an interesting discussion about both the presence and lack their of, of frontal male nudity in video games. Warning the link is NSFW and contains many virtual dick pics and one non virtual.
In the game Dante’s Inferno, the final boss fight is against Satan himself and his, er, impressive flop physics.
I suggest you google Mount Your Friends.
The technology is early, but it’s the way of the future.
Knowing physicists and mathematicians, I’m pretty sure boob mechanics has been thoroughly researched and modelled. The game developers simply took a value for the ‘size’ parameter which was WAAAYYY out of normal bounds, thus breaking the entire model.
Presumably the work needed to add a female character is equal to the amount of work needed to add a male character.