A new rule of thumb:

If you wouldn’t look impressive holding a bunny, you’re not going to look impressive holding a weapon.

– wincenworks

(I don’t know how this tumblr quote thing works, forgive me if I’m doing it wrong but I really want this quote here)

from bikiniarmorbattledamage (x)

(via am1vf)

I’m thinking about running a contest where people swap out weapons or other props with bunnies to highlight the absurdity of outfits.

Would folks be interested?

– wincenworks

On “Video Games and Gender Selection”. Saint’s Row is kind of a bad example when considering the /entire game/ is made up of bad cliches and Shaundi’s lack of clothes is more like a character flaw/feature (Flaw in the sense of protection, I suppose). Shaundi’s over sexualization is also apparently a character feature. Otherwise, I agree with the point of the article.

I agree Saints Row is a terrible example of a game with gender equality… that hasn’t stopped various people from proposing that it:

  • Is totally fair to the genders it represents
  • Is an excellent example of how to do a multi-gender PC game
  • Is the answer to sexism *

It was however, really good for illustrating some particular points and I had the screenshots on hand to do it so it got mentioned in the list of franchises.  I probably won’t discuss it in depth on Bikini Armor Battle Damage again though – mostly because of the lack of armor.

– wincenworks

* Yes someone did link us to an article that claimed Saints Row IV is the solution to sexism in video games – with a request for BABD’s opinion on the matter.  Hopefully the article made that clear.

Video games and gender selection

So, until recently there wasn’t much commentary on video games on this blog simply because Ozzie doesn’t have the particular interest in the types of titles people put forward.

Since I (wincenworks) love arguing about these types of video games I’ve been going through backlog of messages regarding female armor and general sexism in video games.

The most commonly mentioned topic is video games that allow you to choose your gender and provide similar options in terms of clothing etc to both options.  This is, in itself, an awesome idea and my initial reaction to the announcement of such a thing, particularly when it extends into other factors like race, build, age, etc is always the same:

image

Some franchises that have been mentioned in regards to this:

  • Dark Souls (which is the only title in this list I haven’t played)
  • Mass Effect
  • Dragon Age
  • Saints Row
  • Elder Scrolls

Now, I will probably later do a more in depth write up on some or all of these games. However I feel that there are two common issues in both these titles that can be addressed in a singular post.  (Though since I haven’t looked into it enough yet, Dark Souls will be excluded from on the presumption of innocent until shown to be guilty.)

1. Similar but different armor

In Bioware (Mass Effect and Dragon Age) and Bethesda Studios (Elder Scrolls) games there exists this strange tendency where armour magically re-styles itself dependent on the gender of the wearer.  We’ve touched on how this happens in Skyrim.

How I look at many costumes in Skyrim

This re-enforces a variant on the Smurfette Principle (you may need to refer to this and this further commentary) where the female Player Character (PC) and even Non Player Characters (NPC) appear to be feminized versions of a male characters.

Often this is to the detriment of the effectiveness of the outfit. Even allegedly identical suits of Heavy Armor can be amazingly different:

FemShep is judging you, BroShep doesn't know what the fuss is about.

This is compounded when marketing focuses entirely on one gender option and leads the player to think of the female option as a novelty and highlights everything changed in their outfits and leads to the game feeling too much like this.

Sadly also franchises are notoriously unreliable for this.  Mass Effect 1 at least made everyone wear armor that looked like it’d provide some protection, Mass Effect 2 decided some female characters didn’t need all that armor… ‘cause boob!  

Skyrim provided pretty close matches with just the occasional boobplate or similar issue, but pkudude99 has advised us that it looks like Elder Scrolls Online is a massive step back in female armor quality:

image

The whole rest of the outfit looks fully functional — she even has a gorget to protect her neck!.  Why’d they ruin it with that cleavage window?

Image courtesy of Nomadic Gamers, April 3… that’s one day before the official open release date.  For those who don’t play the video games… this is what orcs looked like in Skyrim

If nothing else, we’re living in an age where there are massive sites for mods on pretty much all kinds of games (and that’s good).  The people who want the silly sexy super armor are going going get the silly sexy super armor, there’s no need for developers to cram it kicking and screaming into the core product.

2. The PC is fully customizable but the rest of the world…

Some video games offer you the chance to design your PC from scratch, and then to use shops etc to dress them how you like.  Sometimes however, the rest of the game world does it’s best to neutralise this benefit.  The worst franchise for this is, without a doubt, Saints Row.

Saints Row is a game where you… don’t really wear armour, you just wear clothes, but somehow still manages to maintain a sexist dynamic in relation to armour and battle costumes and a false dichotomy of allowing choices for male and female PCs.  This, naturally, overflows into the writing, level design and overall feel of the game.

image

Sure the PC can go gallivanting around in anything from a three piece suit with a stylish hat and leather gloves to their birthday suit (make up and tattoos optional) but the rest of the world still forces generic female gang members to dress in impractical clothes and gendered tropes.

Even when you do unlock an option to turn your gang members into soldiers (the only ones in the game who wear armor of any sort) – soldiers can only be male (even though a major antagonist in Saints Row III is a female soldier).

Sometimes the game may even start with presenting major female characters in a variety of outfits but then decide to up the sexy as the game progresses.  Like Kinzie in Saints Row IV, for example:

I'm sure if there's a Saints Row V they'll pretend there's an exciting reason behind this.

And there’s the after party at the end of Saints Row IV where everyone has their Super Armor (which does not make them invulnerable):

Noticing a pattern?

This sort of thing also happens to a lesser extent in Bioware games female NPCs will sometimes be ridiculously misrepresented by their costume (the standing character is fanatical about enforcing justice and has no time for interactions or relationships that’d get in the way of that… can you tell by looking?).  

Mass Effect shows us a world where we have influence and technology from half a dozen alien races – but a casino still looks like this:

I could not hit F fast enough

In Saints Row and early Elder Scrolls games the worlds are pretty much designed to cater to Male Gaze in every possible way.  (This is a NSFW shrine to the Saints in Saints Row IV, notice one of these things is not like the other.) Even Skyrim has some questionable costuming decisions that have already been highlighted on BABD. 

I can’t help but think that if your male PC and your female PC should dress with radically different levels of sexualisation to look equally at home in their world, then you’ve lost one of the real benefits of allowing customisation.

– wincenworks

Modesty

kristaferanka:

So yesterday, Kelly Thompson released an article for She Has No Head! where she discusses 6 recent Female Superhero costume designs that she feels are an improvement of what came prior.

Amongst the designs that were chosen was my Psylocke design, which is in the company of artists like Meredith McClaren, Ross Campbell, Mark Brooks, Jamie McKelvie, Phil Noto, and Jesus Siaz. Not a bad group of artists to be grouped with, if I do say so myself.

Basically the gist of the article was about costumes should be designed by artists who also know fashion and design, rather than just pencilers who will have to be drawing that character for their book, and how when the right person is tasked to design the costume that it will have a far better outcome. She went through and chose characters who she felt needed the update, and talked about how the redesign was an improvement. 

Characters like Psylocke, Glory, Poison Ivy, Ms Marvel, Jubilee, Valkyrie, and Domino. 

And as anything involving comics, hatred quickly followed the heels of this article. what else would you expect, right?

But within the comments, a few points were being brought up that puzzled me that I sort of wanted to address, Instead of my initial reaction which was to get into a comment war. Thankfully, that was a path I didn’t go down because I had things I needed to do with my day and I couldn’t waste it in what would undoubtedly become an insult match.

One of the ideas that kept coming up was the notion that there is a trend in current female costume designs that the designer must pander to screaming feminists by covering the character from head to toe and take away all of the characters sexiness and by result make them boring. 

Now I’ll be honest, I don’t like being yelled at by feminists. But I also don’t like to be yelled at by womanizers, or kids, or anyone. So I want to just rule that out as a motivation. No one wants to get yelled at. 

Secondly, sexiness is subjective. A character can still be considered “sexy” even if it doesn’t fit with your tastes. To say that by giving a Female character a piece of fabric to cover her ass cheeks up is ruining her sexiness, ALL that means is that YOU think that an exposed ass is sexy. There is absolutely no way to make a blanket statement about that. Some people think a baggy shirt on a girl is equally as attractive as an uber skin tight shirt.

Sexiness has NEVER been a factor when I design a character. Sex appeal ONLY comes into play when the characters PERSONALITY dictates that as a factor.

The CHARACTER must be first and foremost the inspiration and guideline for all the decisions made when trying to design the clothing. NOT what you want to see on a characters to get your rocks off. I find that frankly immature, and an insult to the character you are trying to do justice to. 

Granted, what is “correct” by the character is also incredibly subjective. Everyone see’s a character differently. This is Fact. This is the exact reason that everyone has different favourite characters, we each see something different that attracts us to them. The best a designer can hope for is that their interpretation can ideally appeal to the largest majority possible of that characters fan-base. No one wants to have a design that fans hate, but you can’t please everyone. 

And just to speak for myself, modesty was never a factor. I never approached storm’s, or psylocke’s, or spiral’s design with the sole intention of hiding their skin. The amount of real estate that ended up being covered or not was ENTIRELY dictated by my attempt to respect the character. There was no “psylocke has to be fully covered because it would be indecent for any of her skin to be showing”. I wanted to have her covered because I felt that a character who is performing stealth assassinations would want as little wound-able flesh showing. 

My go-to example of a character that should be showing skin is, of course, Emma Frost. Here is a character who prides herself on her looks. She is an incredibly confident character mentally, and likes to show off herself physically. Emma Frost flaunting it works because it works for HER. She likes control, she likes power, and one of the best tools for that is her body. She can turn heads with her body, she can command attention with it. She wouldn’t even need to use her telepathy to have someone lose focus. Emma Frost is incredibly intelligent, she knows what she is doing. There has to be a REASON for the skin. 

Even with male characters. Namor doesn’t need to cover up anything because he is indestructible. Armour would give him no benefit, and would probably hinder him. In fact, having Namor show off skin actually helps to tell a lot about him as a character. It shows his confidence, it shows he isn’t afraid to be attacked, and it largely makes sense given he lives in water. 

Colossus doesn’t need full covering, because all he has to do is become metal, and he has his own protection. 

There has to be a REASON.

To what tactical function would a spy need her cleavage hanging out? Does it help a character who is an acrobat?

There is nothing inherently wrong with cleavage, but it needs to be based on either the characters personality or by what they do. I cannot stress this enough. It cannot just be cause the artist felt like drawing a zipper down. 

Fan-Service is no longer a logical reason to do anything. The Story should be the Fan-service by being a good story and doing the character justice, and the art should support that. 

And, an Artist’s tastes are an entirely defendable reason for something, but dont try to pass it off as anything else. You can argue that it makes sense for psylocke to wear less clothing because she wants less covering her to hinder her mobility, and that does hold some water to it. It does make sense to a point. But to say the stripes of clothe on her serve any other function that just for appearance sake is laughable. There is absolutely NOTHING wrong about just saying something is drawn that way because thats what the artist likes. I do it all the time. There are things that I draw a certain way, that Ross draws a certain way, that Mark draws a certain way. It’s one of the weird double-edged swords about comics, but a lot of the audiences participation with the comic is determined by the artist and their tastes. It’s just one of those things where the artist holds a lot of power in their hands, and as such, there is a level of accountability that the artist owes the readers, but the readers arguments must come from a place of logic, rather than just “You ruined her because I want to see more tits!!”. No one has time for that

Covering characters works. Uncovering characters work. The character determines what will or will not work. There is no mandate. There are no threats. At least there weren’t for me when I designed X-force. I had incredible freedom to design as how I saw fit. As I assume how it went for the other artists that designed the marvel costumes. 

I find it funny that out of the 6 costumes in that article, 5 were designed by guys. I think that just goes to show that there isn’t this gender mental block that makes men unable to design practical costumes for the opposite gender.

Anyone can design any costume for any gender as long as they approach it with with respect and understanding. 

And thats my rant on that haha

Excellent commentary about priorities and goals in character design.

It’s baffling to me how some creators can spend time pondering over the exact history of a character, or how to compose a shot to homage to a classic work, then turn around and decide that it is VITAL that a female character has to be as sexy as possible even if it goes against all other aspects of her and her story.

I mean really, I would think the way they dress would be considered far more important an aspect about the character’s expression than the occasional line they drop about what school they went to.

– wincenworks

Took the liberty of bolding the most relevant parts for emphasis (and to break down the great wall of text that this article is).

~Ozzie