I'm gonna be that guy...endtherapture said:Quoted directly from the lovely Ms. Sarkeesian I say?theSteamSupported said:In all sexual contexts, there are subjects and objects; subjects act and objects are acted upon. When it comes to sexual contexts in pretty much all fiction, including video games, it is explicitly the norm that men are depicted as subjects and women are depicted as objects. That is what is the actual problem, not that women in video games appear in a specific way, that has more to do with the fact that most vg artists are straight men or supervised by straight men.
All I have to say is the subject/object dichotomy as she describes it, is one of the most poorly thought out theories I have ever seen someone enact, a close second to her "The more you think are you unaffacted by something, the more likely it is to affect you".
I'd say this is okay in some games because what is Lara Croft known for back in the 1990s? Her outfits and being a female character in gaming.omega 616 said:The op said "where it makes sense", which I agree with but it doesn't make sense in most games. Lara Croft has outfits such as cocktail dresses! In the ice caves she is wearing booty shorts!
Yeah she's wearing shorts, but she's also put a jacket on, and you have to keep at leas one memorable aspect of your character in order for it to be recognisable to people. I don't know if there's an ice level on God of War but if there is I don't expect Kratos to put a top on for that.
It is all about context. You used Kratos as an example here and honestly he's a horrible equivalency to Laura Croft. No one expects Kratos to put on a winter coat, he's a magical demi-god on a murder revenge rampage. Meanwhile I feel like everyone expects Nathan Drake to put on a coat, so it isn't exactly one size fits all in the expectations department. In fact during the only snow level I can think of in Uncharted they make a pretty big deal about Nate starting to freeze to death and fall over because of a combination of the temperatures and the blood loss he's experienced up until that point after the train wreck.
Now I can't in honesty use Uncharted as a valid example, mostly because the Tomb Raider here is its predecessor in a time before certain technological advances gave rise to certain gaming aspects reaching for "realism" but that's okay, I have another example.
The one on the far right, yep fresh out of Tomb Raider 3. I agree with you that you want to keep your character recognizable, but at the same time it makes no sense to do so at the expense of the tone of the game or the details of the character. Tone is kinda everything here. People don't expect Adam West or Golden age Batman to care that there is no air in space, but have modern Batman breathing in space and people are going to be all over it and probably rightly so because the tone doesn't match their expectations.
Laura's tone for the most part is the same as your average Indian Jones movie. Realism (complete with the quotes because action movie realism) is more or less the standard until suddenly it isn't when a supernatural twist shows up. Shorts in snow really doesn't fit and I feel like that is why someone brought it up because it runs outside of the established tone. Well except for the using Laura as eye candy part which honestly while never a massive part of the games, still manages to bleed over into the tone from time to time, but then it feels kinda awkward because Laura is played straight until those rare cheese-cake moments which makes them feel out of place.