Tbh, I don't really consider TERFs as proper feminists either but I get your point. It's still assholish either way.
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Former Telltale personnel anectodes about objectifying character design practices
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It's an issue all the way up and down the industry. I've seen women in games get bugreported as being 'using male rig instead of female' because the character wasn't designed with a thigh gap.
Thigh gaps are 100% genetic lottery and have minimal connection to the fitness level of a woman for being present or not; you can be a peak female athlete and have no thigh gap. But media/male gaze artists keep giving every single woman them, so guys assume every woman has a giant thigh gap as shorthand for "fit".
that's true, I just never think to do that. One is that ERA can have huge gigantic threads and I'm not going to click a bunch of users profiles
Second is that I'm not a curious/nosy person in general real life, so I don't care about the details of other people. if something doesn't directly affect me, I leave people to their own business
The only reason I'm participating in this thread is because I do have some interest in the topic. Hypothetically -- if there ever came a point in the video game industry where all sexy/revealing women characters are eliminated, then like I mentioned above I would be pissed. That would absolutely reduce my enjoyment of games in general
Same with media in real life. If to use one example, the annual Sports Illustrated Swimsuit pictorials ever got shut down because of reasons, I would be pissed too.
Which brings a side topic, if mods want me to use a new thread I can. I only read two internet forums: ERA and a subscription college football forum (for the specific university that I went to).
The difference in the personalities of the demographics are so completely polar opposite, it's hard to fathom. To continue the example, let's say I created a thread with links to new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit pics that year. If I did that here on ERA (even in the Off-Topic section), I'm guessing most of the replies would be negative and upset and saying how it's very inappropriate. Even with no nudity, just bikini pics.
But on the football forum when someone creates that thread every year, all the posters love it.
And also, because it's a subscription only forum which costs $120 per year, the demographics of the posters are heavily 30s to 60s. There's almost no kids or teenagers (also because it's for a university, so most of us are alumni age). Most of them are married too, tons of businessmen who donate a lot to the university... it's not like a bunch of no life losers.
Anyway, it's just interesting to see how different the demographics are between the only two forums I read
I don't keep specific links, I'm talking across all the countless topics on both ERA and GAF in the past on sexualization in video games. You probably know there's been tons of threads about it
Also, do you mean Hollywood is less diverse?
To get to the original Tweets, specifically the one about "fuckability"--this is also something I've heard folks say while working in the industry, and this gets thorny because it implies that there's a business case to be made when it comes to sexualizing female characters. I'm going to be very vague about this because I don't want to point fingers and get people into trouble, but I've seen very specific examples of sexualizing women being a business decision--as in, tests were done, data was examined, and charts were plotted.
Another of the root issues that results in this is a lack of representational diversity. I have a strong suspicion that the more women characters there are, the more diverse women you'll see. When generic AAA mass market game features 10 male characters and 1 female character, that female character is expected to be representative of a female ideal. When generic AAA mass market game has 5 female characters, you can and should expect to see more diversity. This is one of the reasons ensemble games like Overwatch some diversity in body types, but I still don't think they should get that much credit because it's an ensemble game. You expect diversity in that setting, even if it's already a step above Team Fortress 2.
It's not even that women can't look good, (which, btw, is entirely subjective, not everyone thinks (only) women with extremely fit, thin bodies & huge boobs are attractive), it's also that what they wear doesn't fit the context. Games' female characters often look like they're from some porn parody of the franchise in question while men look like they fit the setting (i.e. bikini armor and high heel metal boots on women vs heavy plate armor on men in 90% of fantasy themed games)
I definitely agree with you, in regards to this bizarre prerequisite for women soldiers to be at all attractive, but all I can see in the old face is Eddie Izzard.For a long time now I've been a little miffed by that same kind of subtle sexualisation in practice with Rainbow Six: Siege's character designs and I've harped about it in the OT from time to time to some others' distress, probably. If you look at the vanilla characters, they're all more armored and their faces are concealed. Almost every female DLC character has foregone a mask or other protective headwear when anonymity is extremely important in the special operations groups these characters belong to. In addition often female DLC characters completely forego bulletproof vests, which isn't excused by their light armor gameplay rating, because many characters with a light armor rating wear vests. All the male ones do, in fact.
Here are pics of obvious examples that hopefully make what I'm talking about clear.
Vanilla:
DLC:
Technically, the face thing applies kind of to every character because vanilla Siege had pretty primitive facial animation. Since it's been upgraded DLC character designs have much more often been without concealing headwear, but that aside, there is a trend of female characters foregoing concealing headwear alongside the male counterparts of their DLC pack who come with them wearing masks i.e. Dokkaebi & Vigil, Finka & Lion.
They've also gone back to vanilla and old DLC characters to make them more attractive. The first character used as an example above, Twitch, has been wholly redesigned.
Note the slightly thinner, tighter, brighter appearance.
Valkyrie's old face was complained about and memed on enough for them to redo it. Solemnly tell me that's a bad face model. It isn't. It's not an attractive face by typical standards; I don't find it extremely attractive. It's a strong face. But it isn't a bad face model. C'mon. Therein lies the issue—these characters are the highest level combat forces operatives, attractiveness isn't really a requirement. Not that they can't be pretty, but pretty is all people out there want and all creators out there give. And how important is pretty for Siege? A game ostensibly about soldiers tactically destroying and killing in a semi-grounded setting. That isn't a pretty thing by most standards, is it?
It's funny that we still get "there are more important things to worry about" posts even after a year. You'd think that people who really believe that and haven't been perma'd yet would know to just not post shit like that.
No. It's (mostly) not terrible either, but there isn't a single thing it does as good as or better than the original. People mostly just question why it even exists.
People blaming Telltale going under on SJW leadership? Seeing this shit pop up every time anything fails. People so obsessed with SJW's and how evil they are that they see everything through their fucked up lenses.
Something really creepy and disturbing about how subtle they were with their objectification.
Something really creepy and disturbing about how subtle they were with their objectification.
Jesus dude no one is taking away your "sexy women" we just would like it if 95% of female characters weren't designed for the male gaze.
Also if not being able to ogle at women in games would reduce your enjoyment than that says a LOT about you.(none of it good)
How's it any different than the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit comparison? It's the same thing, both media formats. And plenty of guys like looking at that type of stuff, I'd say that's pretty normal from what I've noticed.
But your mileage may vary, depending what generation you're from and what type of people you hang around. Like I mentioned in my two forums demographics examples. I grew up in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s and in a state in the South. I'm used to a different demo than what most ERA posters seem to be. But I love video games and play them basically every day/week since I started in 1985
I have no idea why you bring up a football forum to make your point. Maybe this place is a boys club, and that's their prerogative, but Era isn't that.
Honestly, the only interest you appear to have in these topics is to dismiss the views of the women who post in them and post incredibly tone-deaf comments over and over.
Just because Era frowns upon posting (half-)nude pictures of women, that doesn't mean anyone here wants a society wide ban on your sexy magazines.
Just seems you do not realize that insistence of having these overly sexualized women in everything just for your pleasure (really, your enjoyment of gaming diminishes if there aren't enough sexy women?) has a real negative impact on society in a wide variety of ways, most of them a burden on women.
What a bad post. Of course it's just '1 source' saying something. It's a fucking twitter post. Way to be completely dismissive of everything two people are saying about a company just because...reasons?
except no one in this thread expressed that at all, is the thing
so it looks like you came into the thread to fight against an imagined "enemy of sexynes"
We live in a world where the good looking people make more money, get hired more often, get shorter jail sentances, and even get more attention from their parents than ugly siblings because we as a species prefer good looking people to the ugly, and youth to the aged. It sucks, but what can you do?
What is this gamergate-level "they want to take away ALL my fictional boobies and I will have none of it!" bogeyman constructing? And defending posting pictures of women in swimsuits for other dudes to ogle with "my fellow affluent dudes at the football forum are OK with it!"?
The fuck?
A lot of things actually, starting with actually demanding better representation for everyone, rather than throw our hands in the air and saying nothing can ever be done.
By the way, your flimsy argument conveniently doesn't explain why this homogeneization and beautification only affects female characters while male characters regularly run the entire gamut from beautiful to absolutely hideous.
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Yes, men like jerking off to pretty women they see on the Interwebz. That doesn't mean everything and anything needs to be infused with as many sexy women as possible. Just because men enjoy sexy women doesn't mean that should be put above all else. You know what? Women can enjoy seeing sexy men. You know what they don't do? Make it an industry standard to make every man run around in Borat mankinis in everything from Band of Brothers to Lord of the Rings type things.
Like, personally, I think it's pretty demeaning towards men too. As if we cannot enjoy anything without as much tits and ass being shoved in our faces as possible.
What argument? My point was, in the real world, looks matter in the most fundamental ways including how parents respond to their children, both male and female, and that sucks. And I dont see how you can change that irl.
So basically your post is a list of dismissals that looks like this:
- Weak justification.
- Pretending to know more than an actual employee.
- "They're probably lying".
Seems legit and entirely non-agenda-driven.
You don't see, or you don't care? There are plenty of ways you can change and minimize the impact of ageism and discrimination based on looks, both in videogames (which is what the thread is about) and in real life. Saying "it sucks" and then doing nothing (and saying "nothing can be done") isn't going to convince anyone that you actually care.
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The difference is for the magazine it's only a once a year thing where in games that's the normal and if you can't see why that's a bad thing than we have nothing else to discuss.
(There also a discussion about the problem with the swimsuit issue themselves but that for another thread)
Yes, you can lessen the impact by having such things as having blind job applicant evaluations and acceptance initiatives and more representation in media. That, however, is a different thing to actually changing it.
I am somewhat of a pessimist in that I see humans as just one animal species amongst many, subject to irrational drives and instincts just like all of the others. And part of that is prefering the beautiful to the ugly, the young to the old. Maybe when we can change our dna, or when we bequeath the world to our final invention, true AI, then all of this shit will be left behind.
And no, I am not here to convince anyone that I care about anything. Im just here for fun and to exchange ideas and be challenged when someone disagrees. Thanks for disagreeing by the way.
Look. What this essentially means is that you're making arguments up to create a narrative (of you, the poor innocent dude unfairly oppressed by eeeeevil women taking your porn away).
The real question you should be asking instead is "why should all games be porn". You would likely be the first to scream bloody murder if every male character ran around in a leather string thong and a ripped shirt only covering half of their nipples, and nothing else. Makes sense in porn, sure, but not in every damn game.
So why treat female characters solely like your wank fodder? Doesn't that say a lot of bad things on how you view women, if you think women must always be wank fodder, with no deviation? If any deviation from it is instantly treated as "waaaah, the feminists are stealing my porn"?
And yes, this is exactly what happens. See with the new She-Ra reboot. Gets slightly less sexualized designs, is a show aimed at teenage/pre-teenage girls, and still men complain it's not 100% porn designs. Maybe the problem isn't feminists, but men wanting everything to be porn solely catering to them?
It's so bad that this thread has dudes genuinely asking if women can have strong jawlines. Like, some of you guys don't even have any idea anymore how real women actually look like. That, perhaps, shows that the portrayals in fiction are a bit of a problem. You're so confused by photoshopped models and the porn shit in your media that you've lost all sense of reality concerning half the population. That's kinda awful, honestly.
The character rig sounds more like incompetence than anything. Just because a rig is set up for heels doesn't mean the animations become sexy by default. They either didn't want to make another base rig for the animators to work off of (too cheap to pay for another or too busy to make one) or it would literally break their engine making another one (transferring animations to the engine or sharing animations with other characters). The design one sounds blatant and realistic though.
This is so gross and yet I entirely believe it, it sounds just the right amount of slimy
They could never, their character designs just aren't interesting enough
Nah, that's because she is Toriyama's waifu. It was all his doing, and it has kinda reach a level of obsession. An example of this is his favorite FF game quote:
I feel like the last few seasons of walking dead had women walking normal in flat shoes. Animation was never their strong suit, like this season when clem sits at the bench you could tell they clipped her through it and lowered her body into the ground. You could tell they cut corners to make deadlines and budget. This seasons cast seems to hit all the wants in the quoted part of the tweet too.
So, to recap, we have 2 sources saying Telltale had sexist practices. Basis: 2 people having worked there.
On the other hand, we have 1 source called A Dog saying it isn't so. Basis: he's having a hunch.
Compelling.
To be fair, "dude has a hunch" is usually the reason why "x has sexist practices" is immediately dismissed - men having vague hunches based on what they want to be true is generally valued more than women having actual experiences.
It is highly complelling evidence, in other words. I'd totally buy a bridge based on such fascinating, perfect, flawless evidence.
from wikipedia:
"Nomura explained that she is essentially a "cool character", in that she is serious and unforgiving. However, he could not make the character too masculine for fear of losing player empathy."
Toriyama wanted Lightning to be a type of female character previously unseen in Final Fantasy games, one with an athlete's body and a less feminine nature.[2][31] His guideline to Nomura was to make her strong, beautiful, and "like a female version of Cloud Strife from Final Fantasy VII".
The article mentions the Returns model was rebulit from "the ground up", but it doesnt say who wanted the breasts bigger and the outfits more feminine.
Honestly I think that a lot of posters in this thread would be ecstatic if video games followed the Sports Illustrated model. Think about it, SI publishes a new issue every week, and they reserve the titillation for just one special issue every week. That would mean that the standard for all video games is going to be non-sexualized representation, and that only one in 50 games would focus on it.
So neither tweets are correct.
And Nathan is just straight up lying. He was never privy to any art direction changes. Kate was originally a blonde girl with short hair, but was later changed to have brown hair wore it longer. Her face and outfit never changed.
The rigs were never "pre built" with heels either, and we had many women character that never wore heels. The rigs for Male and female were mostly the same as you may have seen people animation swapping between the male/female characters. The only thing done internally was naming conventions to separate male,female and children
And Nathan is just straight up lying. He was never privy to any art direction changes. Kate was originally a blonde girl with short hair, but was later changed to have brown hair wore it longer. Her face and outfit never changed.
The rigs were never "pre built" with heels either, and we had many women character that never wore heels. The rigs for Male and female were mostly the same as you may have seen people animation swapping between the male/female characters. The only thing done internally was naming conventions to separate male,female and children
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What else is there to say, really? If kaf's word is true, then there is a good bit of confirmation bias on display in this thread, and I'd cop to it. As it is it's just his word vs. theirs; it's all conjecture we just have to decide what to believe about ourselves, if anything. Unless there is elaboration from both parties, of course. I think this is a good example of how the industry's intense secrecy hurts the public's perception of it. If we had greater information sooner we could probably say more of substance, and I could choose to believe one party.
User Banned (Permanent): Trolling, junior account.
Please don't call me he, those aren't my pronouns you asshole.
I think what disgraced said sums up my thoughts, that this may or may not be a load of nonsense or being vague about grievances at work. Sadly, the OP seems all but believable with some of the characters designs that get churned out.