Female Game Characters Photoshopped to Average American Proportions

[Redryhno]

Doing what everyone else is doing without adding anything new is a pretty textbook definition of being unimaginative.

Isn't this sorta what the battlecry of the indie crowd is supposed to be about? Fuck AAA because they're design by committee and making what sells? If it doesn't sell with indies or pick up steam there, why should anyone else do it?

 

[Rahkshi500]

But they aren't real people. They are fantasy depictions. And if someone is going to be affected by fantasy depictions of what someone looks like then they might just have more serious issues than eating disorders.

I would agree with you, though I don't believe this group is as concerned by individual depictions as much as a noticeable lack of alternatives.

It's worth noting that Bulimia.com does not condemn the developers behind the idealized source material nor claim that such bodies are impossible, rather that they are unrealistic as a standard.

Now I don't wish to doubt or flat out dismiss your claim, but can you point out where Bulimia.com says that they don't condemn the developers behind the idealized designs or say that they aren't impossible but just unrealistic as a standard? Because I read through the article myself and I can't seem to find it where it says those.

As for the article itself and for the main message behind it, I can understand the point behind the lack of creativity around the prevalence of the common build female characters are given and I do certainly like to see more different body types as well in gaming, but at the same time given my personal disdain with all manners of developers trying to make things look "realistic" as possible, I tend to some favor more radical, unrealistic designs in general. It could because I've been rather adverse to the whole idea that people have to look certain ways in order to fit into this or that. Not to mention that even when accepting that fiction is a reflection of reality or can have some degree of influence on people, I don't think that it should rule out escapism, because a major aspect of fiction is to take us away from the real world, not recreate it. So yeah, you can say that I do wanna see more different body types, realistic or otherwise, in fiction, but at the same time, I do also wanna see those kinds of builds in a lot of the same or different roles as well, whether it is someone with the build of a supermodel in the role of a warrior, or someone with the build of a sumo wrestler running as fast as a champion athlete.

 

[ecoho]

so let me get this straight they took a bunch of characters who live in a world were they are constantly fighting and made them the same size as the average American woman......hers a thought how about we compare those girls to say female MMA fighters or hell half the medics in the US military(I believe they still have the largest number of female service members in there)
the only one in those pictures that seems legit is the GTA girl who could actually look like that, the rest lead too active a lifestyle to ever look like that.

That wouldn't be a bad idea. But then you'd have people complaining about how "butch" the women are made to look, failing to realize that professional MMA female fighters tend to have flat chests and broad shoulders and aren't, first and foremost, conventionally sexy run-away models. Some of these average versions look closer to real athletes then the originals.

not quite cause most of the women you see on TV actually have b to c cups they're just wearing sports bras with wraps as its a lot easier to fight without those things flying every which way.

 

[ZiggyE]

Now that I think of it, since Tifa is a part of the dystopian Midgar's underclass, it's very likely she's probably been through a food crisis or five since moving from Nibelheim, and has probably starved on more than a few occasions. It could almost be classed as offensive to portray her as overweight to appease the sensibilities of overweight, privileged American girls who've never had to worry about getting a meal in their lives rather than seeking a more accurate portrayal of what a girl living in the slums of Sector 7 is likely to look like (i.e. not well fed).

 

[Thaluikhain]

Impressive amount of missing the point going on. Yes, there are people who are thinner than average, but not everyone is, by definition. Yes bulimia might seem a strange disorder, but that doesn't mean it isn't a serious and widespread one. Yes, you can try to "encourage" fat people to lose weight if you want to avoid the issue, only people have been trying that nonstop for many years and it hasn't worked.

 

[Tilly]

There's a serious point buried beneath all of the confusion and silliness here I believe.

Perhaps they would've got closer to touching it if they'd compared the average american to the average in other countries as well?

 

[Alar]

The thing is, these characters aren't supposed to be 'average'. They're supposed to be fit, or athletic, or muscled, or seductive heroines. These are the roles they play. They're not just someone who got up off the couch and decided to go adventuring.

Snip

Way to oversimplify everything.

More like "They do the exact same thing that everyone else does without an ounce of creative thought"

And point out where I called developers bad. I said they were unimaginative. Because they are if they struggle to come up with original character design. But if gets the point across better, this is a small part of a very big problem. I'm just focusing on this small part because everyone seems to agree that the big problem exists, but not this part of it. And I said half.

See, this is why you don't oversimplify arguments into strawmen like you just did.

It's not unamaginative.

There aren't fat soldiers, there aren't fat gymnasts, in order to do the things most these characters do they need to look like they have bodies capable of that.

no one would buy the idea of a fat lara croft.

Doing what everyone else is doing without adding anything new is a pretty textbook definition of being unimaginative.

I don't think anyone was asking for fat soldiers or fat gymnasts, so kindly put the straw man arguments away. We're asking that women be allowed to have more body types than just runway model. Hell, men are allowed to be ugly, drop dead gorgeous and everything in-between in video games, how come whenever people ask for more body types on women there's so much push back.

You're talking about women (albeit fictional women) who are very active people. They don't eat 3000+ calories and then sit around. They're fighting, running, climbing, training, carrying, riding, and all other manner of physical activity. It doesn't make sense to use the characters from these franchises. If you want some overweight females represented in the game industry, come up with new ones, don't promote sabotaging ones that already exist.

 

[EbonBehelit]

Australia long since overtook America as the fattest nation in the world by ratio. That is, America has the most fat people by sheer virtue of population size, but Australia has a higher concentration of fat.

http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/australias-health-at-a-glance-were-fat-depressed-and-battling-cholesterol/story-fneuz9ev-1226765535472
http://www.smh.com.au/news/health/australia-pips-us-as-worlds-fattest-nation/2008/06/19/1213770827371.html

Well colour me informed! Thanks for the update. I'm a little surprised by not shocked.

That's old info. The most current stuff I could find actually has neither Australia or the US in the top ten.
Mind you, both countries are still in pretty bad shape regardless.

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/these-are-the-most-obese-countries-in-the-world--gyEoNT9Esx
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/22/youll-never-guess-the-worlds-fattest-country-and-no-its-not-the-u-s/

On-Topic though:
This attempt at 'normalizing' the bodies of videogame women is a bit misguided, since none of these women could/should be described as 'average'.
The issue in my mind is not about how much fat is on the bodies of these female characters, but rather the amount of muscle they (don't) have. It creates a huge dissonance between the way they look and what they're supposed to be capable of, since supermodel arms can't really throw a punch.

 

[Damien Granz]

Maybe people should be encouraged to lose weight rather than making their fictional characters fatter.

Well, that's kind of related to the concern that the group has, that the ever presence of this kind of body image represents an unattainable ideal for the average person, the pursuit of which could result in the development of the eating disorders they provide information about.

Not to mention that even physically fit characters do have some body fat and muscle mass. Like the the original Naru from Legend of Zelda, is literally an hour glass shape that would crack open if she bent wrong. That's not fit, it's ridiculous. Nobody can 'lose weight' to be that shape without a disease or something crushing their bones and organs, and they sure as heck wouldn't be doing any action fighting in that shape. That's the article's point.

 

[Ticklefist]

My take-away:

Heroes are not of average weight. Heroes are ideal.

 

[Redryhno]

Impressive amount of missing the point going on. Yes, there are people who are thinner than average, but not everyone is, by definition. Yes bulimia might seem a strange disorder, but that doesn't mean it isn't a serious and widespread one. Yes, you can try to "encourage" fat people to lose weight if you want to avoid the issue, only people have been trying that nonstop for many years and it hasn't worked.

It's had pretty mixed success sure, but I don't see how making imaginary characters heavier with "soft" fat and not muscle or even "heavy" fat is going to change the self-motivation problem at all.

If anything it seems like it's just trying to make it seem like it's ok to be that size(which it is honestly, if you truly want to be like that I'm not going to stop you,much like smokers, they know the risks better than most people, but most people in that situation don't) and it isn't healthy to have that kind of mindset in a country where most of our food has copious amounts of corn syrup and is heavily processed to begin with.

 

[Damien Granz]

The thing is, these characters aren't supposed to be 'average'. They're supposed to be fit, or athletic, or muscled, or seductive heroines. These are the roles they play. They're not just someone who got up off the couch and decided to go adventuring.

You're talking about women (albeit fictional women) who are very active people. They don't eat 3000+ calories and then sit around. They're fighting, running, climbing, training, carrying, riding, and all other manner of physical activity. It doesn't make sense to use the characters from these franchises. If you want some overweight females represented in the game industry, come up with new ones, don't promote sabotaging ones that already exist.

The thing is that, the body shape you see, it's not even fit or athletic, it's morbidly thin. Active people don't look like an hourglass about to break in half if they leaned forward, with 100% of their body fat and muscles in their breasts and butt only. That's the article's point is that it gives people the impression that being 'fit' means being morbidly thin, especially ironic when people here are arguing and thinking having a BMI over 1% being overweight.

 

[Redd the Sock]

Is there a point to this? We know damn well fictional characters are idealized, and the vast majority like it that way, while the rest seem to be ignoring setting, game mechanics, visual styling, characterization, lore, and other facets of game development so that game developers can focus on making characters look slightly different as that's the most vital element to originality.

 

[ZiggyE]

The thing is that, the body shape you see, it's not even fit or athletic, it's morbidly thin.

No, it really, very sincerely is not. Morbidly thin is if they look anorexic, but they don't. They look fit. They look healthy. At best you can say that some of them look a little unrealistically proportioned, but none of them look "morbid".

 

[Alar]

The thing is, these characters aren't supposed to be 'average'. They're supposed to be fit, or athletic, or muscled, or seductive heroines. These are the roles they play. They're not just someone who got up off the couch and decided to go adventuring.

You're talking about women (albeit fictional women) who are very active people. They don't eat 3000+ calories and then sit around. They're fighting, running, climbing, training, carrying, riding, and all other manner of physical activity. It doesn't make sense to use the characters from these franchises. If you want some overweight females represented in the game industry, come up with new ones, don't promote sabotaging ones that already exist.

The thing is that, the body shape you see, it's not even fit or athletic, it's morbidly thin. Active people don't look like an hourglass about to break in half if they leaned forward, with 100% of their body fat and muscles in their breasts and butt only. That's the article's point is that it gives people the impression that being 'fit' means being morbidly thin, especially ironic when people here are arguing and thinking having a BMI over 1% being overweight.

This does not strike me as morbidly thin. She's skinny and athletic.

Also, being underweight can be more easily compensated with supplements, vitamins, and more water intake. That alone takes care of a lot of the health issues with being underweight. The same cannot be said for being overweight. That is a much longer, more arduous road to combat. I should know, I am overweight.

 

[someguy1231]

You know, whenever someone says "A majority of gamers want X" I find that they usually don't have evidence to back it up.

My counter-argument has not changed. Limiting yourself to only beautiful characters when you write is like writing a novel where you're not allowed to use one of the vowels.

That's pretty limited. Especially when your argument claims that "most players" will do it. You need more than three games for most players. That's what I have to say for all of your in depth arguments about these games, you're looking at a small isolated part of gaming and trying to make a statement for all gamers.

I wouldn't call games like WoW, Guild Wars 2, and Skyrim "a small isolated part of gaming". They're all among the most popular games being played at the moment. I feel like you're moving the goalposts. I provided evidence to back up my claims, and now you're claiming that it's not enough. And you pretty much admitted later on (with your Skyrim survery remark) that it's pretty much impossible for me to provide enough evidence.

This is the same way opinion polls work. A sample is taken (usually of 1,000-1,500 people) and then extrapolated to an entire population. This is widely considered a legitimate way to gauge public opinion of social and political issues. Why should the same principle not apply to gaming? Hell, my "sample size" is FAR larger than the ones typically used for opinion polls, yet you continue to dismiss them.

Hell, even with the statistics you bring up a good chunk of it comes down to speculation as to why the players picked what race they did. On a random note for Skyrim, I've also heard of mods that remove breast plates for armor. There's room for both in this world.

You're really grasping at straws. I wouldn't call it "speculation" so much as "deductive reasoning". Have you heard the saying "If I'm going to stare at an ass, it might as well be a hot girl's ass"? It's more than just a saying. Tons of male gamers, when asked why they play as a female character, gave that saying (or minor variations of it) as their reason.

I'll ask you again: do you really think the most popular female races also being the most attractive (according to the game's players) have no connection whatsoever to each other?

As for Skyrim mods, there are mods for that game for practically anything and everything you can imagine (I speak from experience). The mere existence of a certain mod proves nothing, especially if it's far less popular than other certain mods.

Yeah, but the problem is that two of them are MMOs and MMOs appeal to a very specific type of audience. What's more, Skyrim mods are only good on PC, so all the mods you bring up can only apply to one third of the people who play Skyrim, so really you are looking at a very small part of gaming and trying to make industry wide claims. Yeah they're popular games, but Call of Duty is also a popular game, and I'd get lynched if I tried to make a claim about all gamers soley off of Call of Duty.

All games are made to appeal to a "very specific type of audience". It's just that some of those "types" are much larger than others. CoD's character customization is far less detailed and thorough than many other games, and even the largest characters possible aren't that fat. CoD is irrelevant to this discussion, since the

The big hole in your argument is that you only talk about character design when it comes to character creator, and there is a wide massive world out there when it comes to character design outside of what the main character looks like.

The reason I focused on character creators is because they're the only opportunity for the player to decide how a character should look in the game. This character is the one they're going to be seeing by far the most frequently as they're playing the game.

Of course there's a "massive world" regarding character design, but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about the type of characters the players themselves want to see and play as, so the best way to gauge that is to see what characters they create. All of the female characters that were photoshopped in the original subject of this thread are protagonists or co-protagonists in their games. This isn't about whether generic NPC #752 should be fat or not.

You keep saying things like "Most gamers" and "they're a tiny niche" without any hard numbers to back it up. I don't have numbers either, but I'm not making any claims about ratios. They're a tiny niche? How do you know? Stop saying vast majority, unless there's a survey about every single character who ever played Skyrim saying what they did for a character, you can't bloody prove that.

Putting the aside the fact that I did provide "hard numbers", let me ask you this: how do you know that players who want to play an ugly and/or fat female character are not a "tiny niche"? Go ahead and name me one game in which the player can create such a character, and those characters comprise at least, let's say, one-third of that game's female character population. Go on. I'll wait. If there really were as many "chubby chaser" gamers as you seem to think there are, we'd be seeing alot more fat women running around in games where the player has the option to create one.

Don't tell me what I do or do not know. I'm well aware of this.

Oh, so now you're telling me not to tell you you're wrong when you claim you can tell whether a fictional character is suffering from a real-life medical condition just by looking at them. Yup, that's definitely a sign of someone who is confident in themselves...

REQUEST DENIED!

Well there's Akali from League of Legends who has twigs for arms

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/champion/splash/Akali_4.jpg

Riven also has twigs for arms

http://ddragon.leagueoflegends.com/cdn/img/champion/splash/Riven_0.jpg

Fuck, half the female characters in that game are dangerously thin, like Leona. Christie as shown in this article. Lara Croft's waist looks dangerously thin.

http://media.bestofmicro.com/D/Y/93814/gallery/laracroft1_w_500.jpg

Jill Valentine's arms look like they're ready to snap under the slightest pressure.

https://widowslure.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/jill-re3render.jpg

Tifa lockheart in this gallery looks rather thin and flat in the waist for someone who's supposed to be a bruiser and...ah that's enough. You've already declared I don't know what anorexia is, I have my doubt that any number of examples would convince you otherwise.

For the record, all of this women look like twigs compared to my average height, fairly in shape but not ripped mother. Who's in her 50s.

Those characters are not "anorexic". At all. I've known plenty of real-life women who looked very much like them, and their weight and BMI was perfectly healthy. You know absolutely nothing about what "anorexic" looks like. Post as many "examples" as you want. It'll prove nothing but your own lack of understanding.

You're just proving something I've known for a long time: on the internet, "anorexic" means "thinner than me".

Uh...considering I said "thinking" so obviously I thought that games could do better...was that supposed to prove something? It's not making an objective claim like half of your arguments did. Oh don't worry, I was just calling you out on saying that "we wouldn't be talking about this if America wasn't so fat" This fat American ass would.

So stop assuming you know how other people think. You're very bad at it.

Look, I've played a ton of games with character creators, including many where the player can make their character fat. And in every single one of those games, fat characters were very rare, especially among female characters. If I can't make an assumption about gamer's tastes from that, then how could I? I can't interview every single gamer about their tastes and preferences. Nor does every game make the preferences of its players publicly available.

 

[Thaluikhain]

It's had pretty mixed success sure, but I don't see how making imaginary characters heavier with "soft" fat and not muscle or even "heavy" fat is going to change the self-motivation problem at all.

I don't think that was the point. I think they were just saying "Hey, most female video game characters are skinnier than average", only with some photoediting thrown in. They aren't going to change anything that way, but I doubt they intended to.

If anything it seems like it's just trying to make it seem like it's ok to be that size(which it is honestly, if you truly want to be like that I'm not going to stop you,much like smokers, they know the risks better than most people, but most people in that situation don't) and it isn't healthy to have that kind of mindset in a country where most of our food has copious amounts of corn syrup and is heavily processed to begin with.

I don't buy that at all. Fat shaming is not going to go away just because we've got some not skinny video game characters. And fat shaming doesn't make people not fat anyway. People keep trying it, and it keeps not working.

 

[Erttheking]

Snip

I'm sorry. Athletic? Fit? People keep trying to frame criticism against these bodytypes as being anti-healthy body, but that doesn't make any sense. You see, these women have nothing to them. Not just fat, but muscle either. It's especially hair pull inducing when it comes to characters like Tifa and there is not an ounce of muscle to her despite the fact that she's supposed to be a brawler. I want to see muscular women in addition to women who are larger and aren't built like fashion models. Gaming is pretty poor at delivering both of them.

 

[ZiggyE]

You see, these women have nothing to them. Not just fat, but muscle either. It's especially hair pull inducing when it comes to characters like Tifa and there is not an ounce of muscle to her despite the fact that she's supposed to be a brawler. I want to see muscular women in addition to women who are larger and aren't built like fashion models. Gaming is pretty poor at delivering both of them.

It's very rare for women to grow muscle at the rate of men do. Tifa looks fine for a brawler who lives in obscene poverty. None of these girls look like they have "nothing" on them at all. You're position is ridiculous. They look more or less like normal, fit women. This is just typical skinny or fit-shaming by the pro-fat crowd who are unable to see that obesity is a serious health condition, to the point where you believe normal is anorexic.

 

[Redryhno]

It's had pretty mixed success sure, but I don't see how making imaginary characters heavier with "soft" fat and not muscle or even "heavy" fat is going to change the self-motivation problem at all.

I don't think that was the point. I think they were just saying "Hey, most female video game characters are skinnier than average", only with some photoediting thrown in. They aren't going to change anything that way, but I doubt they intended to.

If anything it seems like it's just trying to make it seem like it's ok to be that size(which it is honestly, if you truly want to be like that I'm not going to stop you,much like smokers, they know the risks better than most people, but most people in that situation don't) and it isn't healthy to have that kind of mindset in a country where most of our food has copious amounts of corn syrup and is heavily processed to begin with.

I don't buy that at all. Fat shaming is not going to go away just because we've got some not skinny video game characters. And fat shaming doesn't make people not fat anyway. People keep trying it, and it keeps not working.

"Skinnier than AMERICAN average" you mean...which is quite a bit heavier than the rest of the world, and alot of it has to do with our food and preservation methods.

And when did I say that fat shaming needed to happen? All I said was self-motivation needed to get to a self-sustaining point. Shaming CAN work with certain people, hell that's what most interventions are based around after all, but it's not a recommended approach at all and I did not even mention it. All I said was that we shouldn't tell people that being quite overweight is a healthy approach to life. So you stop that crap right there.