Written by Anshuman Iddamsetty tracing the ways that representation of fatness is worrying, how it's tied to who is making video games, how their creative choices are structured and motivated by commodification and capitalism, and perhaps the answer to better representation lies in the working conditions and the economic framework of video game development
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Preston brought up one of her first experiences in the motion capture studio. "You walk in and your character is being told how worthless they are for having a large body in this intense torture scene ... As a fat person in real life, you have to have a healthy disinterest in what others think of you to get the job done."
What Preston alludes to is the opening hour of Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Wolfenstein: The New Order and reboot of the wildly popular anti-Nazi series. Preston's likeness was the literal scaffold for Sigrun Engel, the fat queer daughter of the chief antagonist of Wolfenstein II. The abuse Sigrun endures at her mother's hands is a mirror to the abuse your character — the handsome, white, straight William "B.J." Blazkowicz — suffers from his own father. Domestic violence, the game argues, is where fascism takes root.
"When fat women appear they're almost exclusively never player controlled actors," said Todd Harper, an assistant professor at the University of Baltimore's program in Simulation and Digital Entertainment and an advocate of fat acceptance, over Skype. "The only one I can think of is Fat Princess… and you don't even control her in the Fat Princess games! She's the football!"
Burns acknowledged that AAA teams often employ people from marginalized groups but few could risk their careers being branded, "a troublemaker." "It's hard to describe just how much forward momentum it feels like there is, how much sports-team 'hoo-rah, go us!' attitude that big AAA teams can have. The people who notice the problems often feel like they don't have allies or won't be taken seriously or might even get in trouble. So they keep it to themselves."
While the repercussions of being a troublemaker (or to a larger extent, a whistleblower) are real, I'm reluctant to place the onus of change on the few and powerless, as is Burns. I mean, I've observed this behavior myself, at times been the troublemaker, too — not in video games or software development, but during my time working in publishing.
What if the fault lies in the nature of the corporate product itself?
"Games often reflect the culture they're made in," wrote Kiva Bay, a fat activist and writer, in a conversation over Google Docs. Before Trump and the Alt-Right, we forget that one of the largest and most naked displays of hate was once a subreddit devoted to terrorizing fat people. Although r/fatpeoplehate drew from the same well as Gamergate, its scope was wider. In the subreddit, pictures of fat people — almost exclusively young women — were shared for open ridicule. Many were doxxed, others targeted for prolonged campaigns of abuse, subject to the terrifying and detailed fantasies of people who genuinely believe fat bodies should be exterminated. For a time it was Reddit's most popular and most toxic sub — 150,000 subscribers strong at its height and who knows how many lurkers — and was shut down only after intense public scrutiny.
"I think we just haven't seen a mainstream project that truly tackles the experience of fat embodiment in a way that is humane or compassionate towards fat people," Bay said.
But few things suggest cancelling the human project and starting over like Darlene Fleischermacher, a psychopath from Dead Rising 3. Darlene makes her entrance riding a mobility scooter, burping and farting and eating a turkey leg at the same time. The camera lingers on her exaggerated features to accentuate the horror of her design and I find myself wondering about the person tasked with modelling her feet, which are too big for her heels. Her weapons include projectile vomiting, of course, and an oversized... spork. Once defeated, Darlene is pinned by her mobility scooter and drowns to death in her own vomit. This unlocks the 'Gluttonous' achievement.
Dead Rising 3 would go on to sell 2.5 million copies according to Capcom's Investor Relations data. (The previous titles sold 1.8 and 3 million copies, respectively.) Of the millions who bought any of the Dead Rising games, how many would honestly interrogate the fat characters they encountered? If I were to hit my head and generously claim that 80 percent of Dead Rising 3's audience found Darlene objectionable, that's still half a million people who did not. How many do you need to scale a lie?
Think back to Darlene — briefly — or King Hippo from Nintendo's Punch Out (1985), a boxer whose weak point is inexplicably his belly; Earthquake, from SNK's Samurai Shodown (1993), notorious for his signature farts; Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance's (2002) Bo Rai Cho, who, same; the lumbering Boomers of Valve's Left 4 Dead (2008) with their exposed bellies and blinding vomit; Bob from NAMCO's Tekken 6 (2009) whose moves are all named after food; Rufus from Capcom's Street Fighter IV (2009), his belly rigged with its own jiggle physics to make him a single lethal breast; Roadhog from Activision Blizzard's ferociously popular shooter Overwatch (2016), shirtless and leatherbound, huffing strange fumes to up his health.
"The most common mode is fat as a stand-in to show that a character is greedy, to show that a character is slovenly, to show that a character has low moral fiber," said Harper. In other words, fatness a universal shorthand that ensures a player can both read and read into the systems of a particular game without alienating them. And so we get the qualities we've come to know about fat bodies in games, their lust for food and drink, their greed and corruptible nature.
What fascinates me is how these inhumane portrayals of fatness find their way up slide decks, creative briefs, and vertical slices — a polished sliver of gameplay created for PR purposes — without anyone questioning them.
Visibility, of course, matters, but not if it ends up being another feature on a product landing page, commodified the way body positivity means absolutely nothing now. What if the fault lies in trying to appeal to an audience of millions in the first place? Imagine a game meant only for a few thousand players or a few hundred. Let's take a step back — imagine a game made by diverse teams working sensible hours? That's the problem, isn't it? The economics of a neoliberal project as vast as AAA games development means that whether it's a workforce, an identity, or a certain silhouette, people will always be exploited. And what comes out of that cruel logic isn't a video game — it's a spreadsheet.
More at the link: https://theoutline.com/post/3032/fat-people-in-video-games?zd=1
