Gender portrayals in video games are getting ridiculous

[Enraged Slith]

Because I'm a mouth-breathing basement dweller, I spend a lot more time thinking about video games than a stable human being would ever have time for. Something that has bothered me since I was a teenager is the sheer amount of sex portrayed in my hobby. I speak, of course, of the gorilla-esque neanderthals that pass for men, and the scantily-clad mammary cannons with legs that pass for women. Frankly, it's pathetic, and I'm embarrassed to be associated with it. I originally thought the industry was just marketing to the pubescent gamer's lower sensibilities, but it's recently occurred to me that many older gamers not only enjoy this trend, but have come to expect it. I'm not saying I don't enjoy looking at attractive women, but there are plenty of other venues for that hobby without mixing it in with gaming.

 

When I heard that Valve was making a sequel to the popular Warcraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients, I was excited to see what they would do with the property. Valve has a history of designing engrossing games with stylized graphics, so I was pleased when they released their first concepts for the game. This was their concept for the fire sorceress. This is what they eventually changed the model to after loads of negative feedback from the fans. The other female heroes in the game pretty much resemble her. These are the men. While the game has some of your typical herculean hulks of beef, the male characters tend to have a bit more variety and style than variation x on bikini/leotard. It's almost jarring when you put the two groups together, and I think it hurts the art and integrity of game.

 

Anyway, this is something that has annoyed me for a while. Am I alone in this?

[Lilith]

"getting"

 

also wait why did they name the sorceress after an anime character

 

and an anime character known for being flat-chested, at that

 

but yeah, the really sad thing is that by industry standards those designs are pretty reasonable. i've seen way worse

[Kreador]

What Lilith said.

 

Video game and RPG companies aiming for the mass market have never failed to underestimate the maturity level of their buyers, and have been handsomely rewarded for it financially.

 

When the game companies don't go that way (except for a few silly cut-scenes, most of the time Dragon Age: Origins has properly clad females), you see "make them naked" mods.

 

You're not alone in your annoyance. However, game companies know they'll gain more players aiming low than they'll lose. It's not unlike Hollywood. I recall a friend of mine talking about being in a development meeting about a serious drama when one studio exec piped up, "Can we get a bra shot in this scene?" They did.

[Alorael at Large]

Are gender portrayals in TV and movies substantially better? Distressed damsels, flat "love" interests present to get in the sex scene, women stuffed into refrigerators, and the list goes on. But why start there? You can get plenty of the same from pulp literature. Or keep going farther back!

 

But I'll disagree. It's not getting ridiculous; it's maybe slowly, unevenly getting better. There are female characters who are full characters, and who aren't particularly designed to appeal to the lowest common male denominator, and there have been for years. Samus has been a woman in power armor since 1986, and she's no longer alone among the protagonists. People talk about this seriously on the internet, yes, but also as designers and marketers and even as critics and academics.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't expect the problem to go away. It has too much traction, too many fans, and is rooted in too much cultural baggage that will take generations, not years, to fix. But there are more and more Erika Redmarks in games, female Commander Shepard only gets a couple of catcalls, and... there's still art like that.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: (Spike ball) (Rocket ship)

Samus has been a woman in power armor since 1986, and she's no longer alone among the protagonists.

funny you should mention that example since her portrayal in the latest metroid game was really, really infamously bad and misogynistic. people did actually complain about it at least but it remains to be seen what difference it'll make

but hey maybe we are all worrying about nothing. don't you know sexism is over

(content warning for heavily stylised drawn partial nudity i guess? there that should get people clicking the link)

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

pretty much resemble

Yeah, right. The pictures looks like identical twin sisters after and before breast implants.

Quote:

I'm not saying I don't enjoy looking at attractive women, but there are plenty of other venues for that hobby without mixing it in with gaming.

So treating women as sex objects is fine, just not in video games?

Dikiyoba.

[Enraged Slith]

Quote:

So treating women as sex objects is fine, just not in video games?

Yes.

[Tyranicus]

[Triumph]

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

Anyway, this is something that has annoyed me for a while. Am I alone in this?

You are not alone. I find it degrading and disrespectful to women in general that their bodies are regarded are sources of entertainment in media (whether TV or movies or games or whatever). Whether the women are real or fictional, the whole practice promotes an exploitative attitude toward women.

As a man I also find insulting the way such entertainment (or its producers) effectively presume that my main concern in life is staring at nude or barely-clothed women.

I do my best to avoid contributing to whole disgusting trade by not watching TV, avoiding movies that showcase the stuff, and not purchasing games the employ it.

One thing I appreciate about Jeff's games is that by and large, he DOESN'T do this. There are usually a couple character portraits that I consider objectionable, but on the whole his games stand out among modern computer games for NOT relying sex appeal.

/endrant

[Sudanna]

Quote:

So treating women as sex objects is fine, just not in video games?

People are sex objects. If you do sex, anyways.

[Alorael at Large]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: (Spike ball) (Rocket ship)

Samus has been a woman in power armor since 1986, and she's no longer alone among the protagonists.

funny you should mention that example since her portrayal in the latest metroid game was really, really infamously bad and misogynistic. people did actually complain about it at least but it remains to be seen what difference it'll make

And Samus's portrayal in that game was widely reviled for being character derailment. It's bad that such a game could be made, but isn't it even a little bit encouraging that people can at least recognize that trampling a strong female character into a weak one is a characterization problem, if not a social problem? (I don't know, really; I've never played any Metroid game. I just hear the scuttlebutt.)

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith

pretty much resemble

Yeah, right. The pictures looks like identical twin sisters after and before breast implants.

Quote:

I'm not saying I don't enjoy looking at attractive women, but there are plenty of other venues for that hobby without mixing it in with gaming.

So treating women as sex objects is fine, just not in video games?

Looking at people and appreciating their attractiveness is not the same as treating them as objects! Objectification is bad, but the only options aren't degradation and platonic neutrality.

—Alorael, who doesn't think excising all attractive female characters would be a good thing for games either. Or a possible thing, for that matter, without removing all hint of all women. But for parity, they should be given reasonable treatment as full characters. And for parity, there really should be some one-dimensional male characters there only to look pretty, appeal to a demographic, and get rescued.

[Dikiyoba]

Originally Posted By: Alorael

Looking at people and appreciating their attractiveness is not the same as treating them as objects!

Not always, but it can be.

(And if Dikiyoba were to choose the charitable meaning, then Dikiyoba would no longer be a cynic.)

[Aoslare]

The words we use to discuss this issue are important.

 

The issue isn't attractive or pretty characters. The issue is characters with obsequious amounts of directly depicted sex appeal. Attractiveness does not generally reduce a character to being a sex object. And characters can be sexy while being many other things at the same time. Erika Redmark fell into that category in the Exile Trilogy. And she was not a sex object.

 

But even in Jeff's world, where he deliberately chose to moderate his sexy content, no man was ever described with that level of attractiveness. In fact, while Erika's attractiveness seemed to be tied to her magic and her power, the powerful, magical men of Exile were overwhelmingly described as old and frail. Why is this?

 

I think the answer is that it has something to do with cultural archetypes. These archetypes are not inherently sexist, but they are very closely connected to sexism. That is why female fantasy sex objects are allowed to exist in a culture where blatant sexist statements tend to provoke a backlash: these female depictions toe the line, and depending on your point of view it is possible to see them as a part of the sexism machine, or simply as figures of a certain type. Some women love those sorts of figures, and I think it is possible for that love to be spontaneous and genuine and not the result of the influence of the patriarchy. This, however, is not an excuse to ignore their more obvious and widespread function as sexist sex objects that have all kinds of negative effects on our society.

 

(I suspect there is an even more interesting, and less clear, argument about these kinds of cultural archetypes and whether or not they are inherently cisgenderist, as opposed to simply being closely connected to the machinery, as above. But I think that one would take more space to get into.)

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: (Spike ball) (Rocket ship)

And Samus's portrayal in that game was widely reviled for being character derailment. It's bad that such a game could be made, but isn't it even a little bit encouraging that people can at least recognize that trampling a strong female character into a weak one is a characterization problem, if not a social problem? (I don't know, really; I've never played any Metroid game. I just hear the scuttlebutt.)

i kind of alluded to that already in my post, but, well, reviled? yeah. widely? i'm not so sure. there were definitely a lot of people who just didn't see the problem, or tried very hard to justify it.

[Kelandon]

Just so it's clear what we're talking about: is there anything objectionable about the women portrayed in those four images side-by-side other than the excessive cleavage? Or is the excessive cleavage what we're talking about here?

 

I'm just not good with this kind of visual analysis, which is why I ask.

[Lilith]

The poses and to some extent the facial expressions are problematic too. Note how every one of those poses is drawn to emphasise the breasts even further.

[Dintiradan]

I think that in the past few decades there has been a shift in the way women have been portrayed in fantasy art: they're still objectified, but they're active objects instead of passive ones. Take this post by the head designer of Magic: the Gathering. Women are still being used for sex appeal, sometimes solely for sex appeal, but at least we're moving away from the way women were portrayed in, say, the earlier editions of D&D.

 

Of course, this shift is what's behind the Strong Female Character syndrome, as pointed out by Beaton et. al. So yeah. Speaking of which, side question: is there a difference between strong female characters, and strong characters who happen to be female?

[Death Knight]

My favorite girl portrayal in rpg-Female agent Geneforge 1, 2, 3, and 5. There's something about that portrait that makes it cool to play as the agent.

[Triumph]

Hmm...so Mr. Rosewater is saying it's totally fine to show off women's bodies in sexually provocative ways as part of your product...just make sure the women are strong and not weak? What marvelous reasoning.

 

I don't buy the equal-treatment argument either. It would not be any more right to treat men this way than it is to treat women as sex objects. The problem is not unequal treatment. The problem is underlying attitudes toward people - are they "things" to used for one's enjoyment, rather like a nice slice of apple pie - or are they people who deserve to be interacted with in meaningful, respectful relationships? Not exploited for money.

[Dintiradan]

I think it's less him saying "it's totally fine" and more him saying "it's not the worst thing we could do and it sells really well".

[Sudanna]

Sex appeal does not make someone less of a person.

[Randomizer]

This isn't something new in the fantasy game arena. Back in the late 1980s Dragon magazine, before it became a complete ad for Wizards of the Coast, ran a cover with a sorceress summoning a dragon. One of the women in my gaming group objected to the low cut dress to emphasize the sorceress's cleavage and high cut hem to show off her legs. Looking at the cover I also pointed out she was wearing high heels (wedgies). She snatched the issue back because she couldn't believe it.

 

The only difference now is we are supposed to be better trained in respecting the opposite sex and not objectifying them. It just isn't happening in the industry.

[Alorael at Large]

There are a number of problems with female characters' portrayals. The one at the top of this thread is basically characters who, as best I can tell, aren't characters at all in any meaningful way, just player avatars in a game. They have plenty of cleavage on display. Why? Because cleavage pleases the male gamer base. It's pandering and objectification, pure and simple. Same with D&D: men in real armor, women in revealing chainmail bikinis solely to put breasts in the artwork.

 

Samus is a separate issue: a previously strong, independent character apparently became insecure, weak, and I'm not really qualified to say much more, except that it had to do with applying stereotypical negative feminine traits.

 

Then there are the endemic issues. Protagonists are mostly male; action protagonists overwhelmingly so. Women are too often the dead-weight characters, the frail characters, the squishy characters, the healers, and the victims in need of rescuing or killed off as plot points.

 

—Alorael, who sees the optionally female protagonists of BioWare as a small step forward, but only a small, optoinal one. When Bayonetta has a protagonist who isn't ridiculously clothed and God of War has a female lead, then there'll be something closer to video game equality.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Of course, this shift is what's behind the Strong Female Character syndrome, as pointed out by Beaton et. al. So yeah. Speaking of which, side question: is there a difference between strong female characters, and strong characters who happen to be female?

gonna respond to this question with another link

Originally Posted By: (Spike ball) (Rocket ship)

—Alorael, who sees the optionally female protagonists of BioWare as a small step forward, but only a small, optoinal one. When Bayonetta has a protagonist who isn't ridiculously clothed and God of War has a female lead, then there'll be something closer to video game equality.

i'm not sure that "dressed entirely in your own hair" counts as "not ridiculously clothed"

[Randomizer]

Or watch this video illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of female armor in the chicks in chainmail variety. Stay until the end to see the male version.

[Aoslare]

That's a terrific article.

 

(Although how do you have "That are depressed" and "Hamlet" in the same paragraph and not come up with Ophelia?)

 

Alternately, if they really want a female equivalent of Hamlet, I think Terra from FF6 is pretty close.

 

The article did make me think about how consistently 90's console RPGs had these sorts of good female characters (to the extent that they had any good characters at all). Tia from Lufia II. Alys Brangwin from PS4. Bleu and Mina (not Nina) from BoF2. Carlie from SoM2.

 

Square had a whole run of them. FF6 was notable not just for having a female lead in Terra, but for having the next biggest role be another thoughtful female character (Celes). CT had Lucca; FF7 had Aeris and Tifa. But then we can skip ahead to FF9 and you get basically an Ivy League damsel-in-distress in Garnet... and a few games later, you've graduated to an entire race of scantily-clad bunny girls. Geez. What happened?

[Tyranicus]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

But then we can skip ahead to FF9 and you get basically an Ivy League damsel-in-distress in Garnet...

Garnet was in fact terrible, but Freya was pretty awesome.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S

The article did make me think about how consistently 90's console RPGs had these sorts of good female characters (to the extent that they had any good characters at all). Tia from Lufia II. Alys Brangwin from PS4. Bleu and Mina (not Nina) from BoF2. Carlie from SoM2.

I dunno if I'd say that Tia was a particularly good character. From what I remember, she's pretty much just Interchangeable Bossy Anime Girlfriend Archetype #358, but maybe she has hidden depths that I'm forgetting about.

Amusing piece of trivia, since you brought up Phantasy Star: the lead designer of Phantasy Star 1 was a woman, and intentionally set out to make an RPG with a main character that girls could relate to. It's not a coincidence that the game has one of the best (and, well, one of the only) female protagonists in RPGs of the 1980s. Alis Landale is still one of the few RPG main characters (whether male or female) who clearly qualifies as an actual dramatic protagonist, in the classical sense of consciously choosing to shape the course of events rather than reacting to them: her brother is killed by the agents of a tyrannical monarch and she takes the initiative to avenge him by committing regicide, when nobody but herself would have blamed her for running and hiding instead.

[Dintiradan]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Of course, this shift is what's behind the Strong Female Character syndrome, as pointed out by Beaton et. al. So yeah. Speaking of which, side question: is there a difference between strong female characters, and strong characters who happen to be female?

gonna respond to this question with another link

Ha ha, I've read that article, and it's a good one, but it's not what I was getting at. I was thinking more along these lines.

We've listed a lot of good characters in this thread. All of them are female, but is it necessary for them to be so? Many of them could have been written as male, without altering the strength of their characters (likewise, many male characters could have been female).

Is that enough, or should writers also try making women where being female is integral to the character, like the link says? I'll be honest here: whenever I needed an NPC for a forum RP or for AIMhack, its sex was as much an arbitrary decision as its appearance and name. Should such things be arbitrary when writing characters?

(My first thought of a strong female character where being a woman was integral was Sarah Connor from Terminator 2. But on second thought, if you ignore the events of Terminator 1, the character could have been John's father just as easily. Or could she? Thoughts?)

[Lilith]

i'd suggest asking for well-developed female characters instead but that would probably lead only to even bigger boobs

[Student of Trinity]

My daughters are both pretty into games, though so far mostly on iPod and DS. I'm concerned about how they're going to grow up. I think I'm more concerned with subtler things, like this protagonist-or-not issue, than I am with cleavage prominence.

 

I'm also one half of an academic Dual Career Couple, and I've been dismayed for some time that we don't seem to know any other couples where both partners have equivalent careers. We know quite a few cases where the wife is doing some kind of work or study outside the home, but I don't think we know anyone else at all where it's not obvious whose job is the main one, such that if he moves she follows, and not the other way around. Our own awkward see-saw is, still, very unusual. There are too few female protagonists in the real world.

 

Of course it is much more possible now than it once was for a woman to have a career with prestige, high pay, long hours, or whatever. But it is still much more so the case for women than for men, that the choice of life is either career or family. It can still be hard for men to balance time with family and time at work, but by default men can routinely expect to have both a career and family.

 

Why is this? Well, that is quite seriously one of the great questions of our age. It probably has bigger implications for how human conditions will develop than anything else including global warming and the risk of nuclear war, since what is at stake is the efficient exploitation of half of our talent pool. The question is so important, in fact, that I am very impatient with blind passion on the subject. It really needs to be understood, not just decried. The problem is us; all of us; women as well as men. Half of the choices that maintain the current situation are made by women; half by men.

 

I'd be happy as far as this thread is concerned to confine this larger question within the context of video games, since game designers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

 

Why aren't there more women protagonists?

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity

Why aren't there more women protagonists?

Because most writers are male and they write what they know.

If you look at what's called chick lit, romance novels, and other book genres where the authors are predominately female, then you have more female protagonists and not so much of the damsel in distress waiting for a man to rescue her. But if you look at classical literature and the typical male author action/adventure/drama you generally have a male protagonist.

Greek/Roman mythology has very few women doing anything heroic unless they are a goddess or helping the hero on his quest. Even then you have Medea betraying her family for Jason, Ariadne who betrayed her father to help Theseus, Atalanta who gets tricked into marrying a man, plus the obligatory princesses needing to be rescued from monsters.

Classical literature has a few like Lysistrata who stops the war between Athens and Sparta, but that's written as a comedic farce.

Shakespear is slightly better with strong female characters like Portia in The Merchant of Venice, but usually it is a female disguised as a male. Even in the Elizabethan Age where you have a strong queen there wasn't a great number of strong female characters.

Then you come to modern science fiction. What my roommate called a typical Heinlein female protagonist who could save the world and be home in time to make dinner. While the self reliant male hero could save the world without worrying about making dinner. Princess Leia in the Star Wars saga needed to be rescued in Episode IV, and when she tries to rescue Han Solo in Episode VI gets captured and needs to be rescued again out of that scantily clad slave girl costume.

[Aran]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

Because most writers are male and they write what they know.

Fiction writers have little difficulty writing what they don't know; they can't afford to confine themselves to areas of expertise.
I suspect a far more significant factor is the assumption that most of the audience are male; secondly the assumption that the male audience is averse to female protagonists that aren't sexy (or male protagonists that are).

This belief is apparently particularly widespread in children's books (where boys are assumed to be averse to female characters/authors, period). For example, it's why Joanne Rowling went by J.K.Rowling.

[Randomizer]

Originally Posted By: Aʀᴀɴ

Fiction writers have little difficulty writing what they don't know; they can't afford to confine themselves to areas of expertise..

There's only so far you can go with what you don't know before you lose internal consistency. That's why you have so much literature where most of the characters are one dimensional or cliched.

[Alorael at Large]

No, I think experience has something to do with it, and the lens through which we see experiences. Men know what it's like to be men, or at least a man, and it's safe territory to write men. They don't know what women are like inside their own heads. What if women are totally different and they get it wrong? Unconsciously, I think, this is one of the reasons it doesn't happen. Another, of course, is that men will unconsciously fabricate male protagonists. It's a coin flip, except brains don't flip coins fairly.

 

Dinti, I almost posted before your post with the opposite perspective. I think it's very important to have characters, especially central characters, whose gender is irrelevant. Going back to FF6, Terra really could be male. Edgar wouldn't flirt with Terro, and his role as father figure to orphans would have slightly different resonance. But other than that? Same character, and I think that's a useful point to make: women can do these character things too.

 

For the roles were characters are strong and female, with emphasis on both, you get into the thornier mess of defining and trying to capture femininity. How do you balance it? I can see why writers would shy away... Except mainstream literature writers have gotten over this and game writers still struggle, badly. Perhaps it has something to do with the degree to which you must identify with a protagonist in a game more than in a passively-observed story. Maybe it's because of the skewed audience. I don't know. (And of course this is a simplification; the portrayal of women in literature is hardly perfect even now, much less half a century ago or more!)

 

—Alorael, who on the basis of limited and very anecdotal evidence is hopeful about boys and girls being less separated and prone to fear of cooties than was once true. His young relatives still tend to have more close friends of their own gender, but the imbalance isn't all that wide. Maybe there has been, or will be, a shift in children's literature to match.

[Lilith]

Originally Posted By: Randomizer

There's only so far you can go with what you don't know before you lose internal consistency. That's why you have so much literature where most of the characters are one dimensional or cliched.

also so much literature where most of the characters are frustrated writers

[Alorael at Large]

Sometimes it's a little fun at the author's own expense. Sometimes it's Mary Sue. Sometimes it's a little of both.

 

—Alorael, who really identified most with the protagonist of If on a winter's night a traveler. The hero of the tale being a dedicated reader helped. So did the constant use of second person pronouns.

[Student of Trinity]

Yeh, I dunno. I don't read anything like as much as I once did, but I have definitely collected a lot of sci-fi or fantasy books by female authors over the years, and there have been various periods where all of my current favorite authors were women. While they tended (and still tend) to have some reasonable female protagonists, they also wrote about men, maybe somewhat more often.

 

Just off the top of my head, though, I think there may have been a pattern of having male protagonists who were in some sense weak rather than strong. C.J. Cherryh, for instance, made a career writing stories in which some naive young man encounters a powerful and unpredictable female character, and the story is told entirely from the man's perspective. Lois McMaster Bujold invented Miles Vorkosigan as a brilliant dwarf and played him against a stereotypically macho setting, at least to a certain extent. J.K. Rowling occasionally makes Harry Potter out to be an unusually powerful wizard, but he is always woefully ignorant of the magical world, and generally well out of his depth.

 

Of course every author puts the protagonists out of their depth in some sense. But I feel (admittedly anecdotally) that the female authors may do a bit more to make their male protagonists be more out of their depth than the other characters, rather than having them be the strongest member of the team that has to pull off the impossible. So they need help from the people around them. Maybe the one consistent thing I notice is that the male protagonists of the female authors I know tend to listen to women, much more than those of male authors do. No doubt that says all kinds of things — if it's not a totally bogus extrapolation from a tiny sample.

 

In any case there is still something frustratingly first-generation about all that, that female authors stand out more for what they do with their male characters than for the great female characters they create. How many great female characters are there in popular literature, anyway? If we make any list of famous fictional characters, how many are women?

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

I dunno if I'd say that Tia was a particularly good character. From what I remember, she's pretty much just Interchangeable Bossy Anime Girlfriend Archetype #358, but maybe she has hidden depths that I'm forgetting about.

Tia wasn't really bossy. She was clingy, but this was depicted as a part of her psychological makeup rather than as a stereotype, and it was actually discussed and analyzed by the game's characters. Tia sees, before anyone else does, that things can't work between her and Maxim, but she persists nonetheless. Although I think Selan is a fairly lame character (one of the other characters jokingly calls her "the Magical Wife" -- and it's pretty accurate), Selan's neutral, nonreactive attitude allows for Tia to develop in interesting ways. Instead of watching Tia try to undermine Selan or become venomously jealous, we watch Tia pretty much implode under the weight of her unrecipricable love. It is unrecipricable because she loves a person who does not really exist: Maxim the domestic, not Maxim the hero. That kind of unrecipricable love is a condition that is found everywhere.

This does not really become clear until some time after Tia leaves the party, in the cutscene with her and Dekar at Maxim's wedding. But if you watch that and then go back and read through Tia's lines again, there is a lot more to them.

Lufia II is the first game in the series, chronologically, and it begins with Tia. That's not an accident. The game begins with the incarnation of this urge for peaceful, domestic life -- that has to be sacrificed, and cut out of the story, because it is not practical, and it has to make room for a heroic archetype instead. Tia herself has to come to terms with the realities of the world -- its pitfalls and its Sinistrals -- shown well by the story about her inability to cry that comes out in her post-party cameos.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan

Many of them could have been written as male, without altering the strength of their characters (likewise, many male characters could have been female).

Is that enough, or should writers also try making women where being female is integral to the character...

At this point, I'd like to make a distinction between what goes on with a character internally and externally, because I think the answer there is very different.

Let's use Terra as an example here. In terms of Terra's internal development, there is no reason she couldn't be male. Her story touches on foster motherhood, but that could work just as well for any gender.

However, in terms of how other characters relate to Terra, I think the fact that she is female is significant. Terra is exploited by a succession of men: first Gestahl and Kefka; then Locke, Edgar, and Banon; and eventually, at Thamasa, by all of them at the same time. Terra's gender is not relevant to her struggle to love, or her ability to save the world; but I think her position in the world as a quasi-messianic exploited figure is more powerful than it would be with a man in her role. In theory you could flip everything, and have a male Terra exploited by a matriarchic society. But as patriarchy is vastly more common in reality, I don't think this qualifies as an arbitrary choice.

Note, again, that this has nothing to do with her personality traits or romantic relationships, and everything to do with the world around her.

[Aoslare]

Originally Posted By: Questionable ATerafin

Edgar wouldn't flirt with Terro

Edgar would totally flirt with Terro. Please.

[Alorael at Large]

Terra's story would be a little bit different if she were male, because everything is tinged by the light of gender. I don't think it would be substantially different for male Terro to be used as a pawn by the Empire and the returners. She's naive (mostly in the ignorant sense) and she's lost, but it has very little necessarily to do with being female.

 

—Alorael, who agrees it would play a bit better if Edgar and Locke were at least somewhat older. But then, Terra's an amnesiac who doesn't remember much of anything. (And the game really never fills in most of that amnesia, except for the part where she's so young she probably shouldn't remember anything!)

[Aoslare]

The exact same story could take place with a male Terra, but it would lose some of its resonance with the history of our own world and poetic upsets of that balance. I think that qualifies as significant, although maybe it's not what Dintiradan meant by integral.

[Lauren CW]

Originally Posted By: Lilith

"getting"

also wait why did they name the sorceress after an anime character

and an anime character known for being flat-chested, at that

but yeah, the really sad thing is that by industry standards those designs are pretty reasonable. i've seen way worse

Defense of the ALLSTARS.
They use hero-types from several things, if I remember correctly. It's been ages since I've played it.

[Frozen Feet]

Yeah, it's kind of absurd how female characters in video games look like they're straight from Playboy when the males can look whatever. Ask yourself, when you've last seen an honest-to-god ugly female character who was a protagonist or at least held important role in the story or game play?

 

Because I can't think of any.

 

The closest I can think of from the top of my head is Meg in Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, who is stoutly build and round-faced, making her stand out amidst a score of other female characters who are supermodel thin (still far from ugly, though). She also wears full-body armor on the field, being near-indistinquishable from male characters of the same class.

 

On the other hand, she's just a side character and playing her is mostly voluntary.

[Erebus the Black]

Originally Posted By: Frozen Feet

Ask yourself, when you've last seen an honest-to-god ugly female character who was a protagonist or at least held important role in the story or game play?

Ultima 7

[Frozen Feet]

Ancient history, then.

[Necris Omega]

Hm. Should we count Shale? ...

[Dantius]

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega

Hm. Should we count Shale? ...

Not really, since IIRC you don't figure out that Shale is female until her personal quest in Orzammar.

[Trenton.]

Just to add my piece, as far into the gutter my mind is, I rarely look at pictures or graphics. I just play the darn game. We should all just thank god that the games are good, and not made by poor 20 year olds who dropped out of high school