I just want to point out that this conversation is rather one-sided in its focus:
...
Boys get cold too.
This nicely illustrates why I'm not the world's biggest fan of the "it's impractical" argument against women in skimpy outfits. Without going on a detailed feminist rant that I suspect few of you would be interested in, impractically in fantasy art is near-universal. The gender difference is sexualization, not whether a sane person would wear the outfit in question into combat/snow (hint: probably not).
This nicely illustrates why I'm not the world's biggest fan of the "it's impractical" argument against women in skimpy outfits. Without going on a detailed feminist rant that I suspect few of you would be interested in, impractically in fantasy art is near-universal. The gender difference is sexualization, not whether a sane person would wear the outfit in question into combat/snow (hint: probably not).
I think it depends on the game. The Infinity Engine games do not have much of a difference between genders in the "outfit skimpiness factor". Games like Guild Wars 2, on the other hand, often have stuff like this:
(The above characters are wearing the same armor set.)
I'm not sure I can explain my point without going full rant-mode, so... wall of text incoming.
Of course, Adul, your example is pretty blatant. My point isn't that I think that's okay, far from it, but rather that neither outfit is exactly great for fighting in. Yeah, the man's would offer better protection, but you'd trip over both of them. And yet there's something pretty clearly off going on here. Something more than combat practicality. That thing is sexualization. The female outfit is supposed to make the wearer look attractive and sexually desirable. The male outfit looks like it's maybe going for mysterious. And this is a fairly consistent pattern. Male outfits/characters are made to look powerful, or mysterious, or just cool. Female outfits are overwhelmingly made to look desirable.
Now, I should note that there's nothing wrong with a character being attractive, but there are two reasons why this trend is a problem. The first is that it's a trend. Not every woman in games is sexualized, and not every man isn't, but by and large there are a lot more sexualized women than sexualized men, and even the women who aren't heavily sexualized are almost universally attractive. This is bad because it compresses the space of available design options for women. Male characters can be a wide variety of things. Female characters, by and large, have to be sexy. We're not allowed to portray as broad a piece of the female experience. The second problem is the difference between being sexual and being sexualized. Without going into a ton of detail, sexuality is focused on the desires of the character in question, whereas sexualization is focused on the desires of the presumed audience (in this case, straight male). How many skimpy outfits have you seen that were really about the woman, as opposed to the viewer/player or the men around the woman? Not many, I'd venture (possibly Bayonetta? maybe?). Sexualization robs its targets (women) of their own sexual power, by bending their sexuality to the wills of other people. Which, you know, is bad. Sexuality, by contrast, is not bad, and in fact tends to be empowering when portrayed well, but is dwarfed in gaming by sexualization.
Now, as for the IE games, I agree that they're not as problematic as most, but we still see some of the same trends. Paperdolls for female characters (especially pre-EE, and especially in BG1) tend to wear less than their male counterparts (the long tunic with no pants is especially common). Female portraits tend very strongly to be young and attractive (although male portraits are only slightly less-so in general). Planescape: Torment cranked up the sexualization pretty strongly, unfortunately.
Anyway, examples (warning, both genders showing lots of skin):
This
is if anything less practical than this
but the woman is made to look attractive and the man... isn't. Someone thought that the male portrait would look badass if he had a bare chest. Someone also thought the female portrait would look hot if she had cleavage. Both these lines of logic led to similarly impractical conclusions, but they send very different messages, because they were designed impractically for very different reasons and it shows.
Normalizing for gender, we get the difference between
and
or between
and
EDIT: Hm. I seem to have left the images visible as attachments, and when I try to edit them away I get an error. Mods? Help?
@Jarrakul the impracticality of your example armors is astonishing. Except perhaps the second one. Apart from the cleavage, I always thought she was dressed remarkably chaste for a female character in fantasy gaming.
I would like to put forward the Dragon Age series as an example of games that "did it right". Or at least better.
By the way, the huge swords I've never understood either...
I don't have any great dislike for example 2, honestly. She's certainly a comparatively conservative example. But the cleavage doesn't make a lot of sense, and I was looking for IWD examples for the first pair. Most of the women in IWD are either not wearing armor at all or are wearing more practical armor than that, so I took what I can get. It's certainly nothing on Red Sonja down at the bottom.
Dragon Age did a very good job overall, although the female light armor in the first game was a definitely less practical than its male counterpart. Morrigan was a little ridiculous, though, and it didn't really seem to fit her character. DA2 did an even better job, but this time Isabella stands out as the weird example. I actually think, writing-wise, she's a great example of sexuality rather than sexualization, but I have a lot of trouble believing her lack of pants.
Comments
This is the right approach.
My thief was 'ere...
(The above characters are wearing the same armor set.)
Of course, Adul, your example is pretty blatant. My point isn't that I think that's okay, far from it, but rather that neither outfit is exactly great for fighting in. Yeah, the man's would offer better protection, but you'd trip over both of them. And yet there's something pretty clearly off going on here. Something more than combat practicality. That thing is sexualization. The female outfit is supposed to make the wearer look attractive and sexually desirable. The male outfit looks like it's maybe going for mysterious. And this is a fairly consistent pattern. Male outfits/characters are made to look powerful, or mysterious, or just cool. Female outfits are overwhelmingly made to look desirable.
Now, I should note that there's nothing wrong with a character being attractive, but there are two reasons why this trend is a problem. The first is that it's a trend. Not every woman in games is sexualized, and not every man isn't, but by and large there are a lot more sexualized women than sexualized men, and even the women who aren't heavily sexualized are almost universally attractive. This is bad because it compresses the space of available design options for women. Male characters can be a wide variety of things. Female characters, by and large, have to be sexy. We're not allowed to portray as broad a piece of the female experience. The second problem is the difference between being sexual and being sexualized. Without going into a ton of detail, sexuality is focused on the desires of the character in question, whereas sexualization is focused on the desires of the presumed audience (in this case, straight male). How many skimpy outfits have you seen that were really about the woman, as opposed to the viewer/player or the men around the woman? Not many, I'd venture (possibly Bayonetta? maybe?). Sexualization robs its targets (women) of their own sexual power, by bending their sexuality to the wills of other people. Which, you know, is bad. Sexuality, by contrast, is not bad, and in fact tends to be empowering when portrayed well, but is dwarfed in gaming by sexualization.
Now, as for the IE games, I agree that they're not as problematic as most, but we still see some of the same trends. Paperdolls for female characters (especially pre-EE, and especially in BG1) tend to wear less than their male counterparts (the long tunic with no pants is especially common). Female portraits tend very strongly to be young and attractive (although male portraits are only slightly less-so in general). Planescape: Torment cranked up the sexualization pretty strongly, unfortunately.
Anyway, examples (warning, both genders showing lots of skin):
This
is if anything less practical than this
but the woman is made to look attractive and the man... isn't. Someone thought that the male portrait would look badass if he had a bare chest. Someone also thought the female portrait would look hot if she had cleavage. Both these lines of logic led to similarly impractical conclusions, but they send very different messages, because they were designed impractically for very different reasons and it shows.
Normalizing for gender, we get the difference between
and
or between
and
EDIT: Hm. I seem to have left the images visible as attachments, and when I try to edit them away I get an error. Mods? Help?
I would like to put forward the Dragon Age series as an example of games that "did it right". Or at least better.
By the way, the huge swords I've never understood either...
Dragon Age did a very good job overall, although the female light armor in the first game was a definitely less practical than its male counterpart. Morrigan was a little ridiculous, though, and it didn't really seem to fit her character. DA2 did an even better job, but this time Isabella stands out as the weird example. I actually think, writing-wise, she's a great example of sexuality rather than sexualization, but I have a lot of trouble believing her lack of pants.
Its possible I already posted that last one. If so my bad
Finally! YEEEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAH!
So... The Great Pumpkin gave us Icewind Dale EE!?
This Rescue Ranger would though