Thursday, October 16, 2008

Article Response: OMG Bewbs!

The following is a response to an article written in The Escapist.

Let me preface this response by saying that, in case you haven't read the article, it's written in a fairly tongue-in-cheek manner. It gives a sparse history of breasts in video games, lauding them as units of measure for video game's technological progress, and ending with lamentations of their apparent doom. The article is missing a "/sarcasm" tag, but then again, The Escapist usually doesn't attract the type of mouth-breathing berks that would have trite sarcasm go over their heads, not their written articles anyways. Although, that's not to say that this article is anything high brow, quite frankly the quality of The Escapist has gone down from when I first started reading it, but I think that's another post altogether.

To get back on track, the article is more or less a fluff piece, but even still, I took two things away from it. First, it brings into question the industry's portrayal of female characters in game, and secondly, I generalize my first note and ponder what the industry's current state of "maturity" is.

I'm reminded by an article posted on 1Up. Top 5 Most Attractive, Non-sexualized Women in Games. It's somewhat of another fluff piece, if the title wasn't indicative of that, but it does half-confirm that the portrayal of women has indeed improved, if just by the simple virtue that the list was able to be created. Needless to say, it's certainly an improvement from the "Shake it baby!" era of gaming.

As for the question of the industry's maturity overall, the answer is more or less the same, it's improving. However, I lament the fact that there's a market for Gears of War-esque games, but at the same time, I also accept the fact that that's a side-effect of achieving mainstream appeal. Comparisons can be drawn to the movie industry, which get their fair share of bad apples that, for reasons seemingly unbeknownst to me, manage to achieve commercial success (*Cough* Beverly Hills Chihuahua *Cough*). But even with that, there are still "art house" films that release at the box office, and do fairly well.

That's not to say that the industry doesn't have it's fair share of "art house" games, there are a veritable ton of them. My problem is that not enough of them are achieving mainstream attention, I can count the few "art house" titles that have achieved this on my hands, the most prominent of the bunch obviously being Braid (which I will avoid discussing, for the sake of the length of this article). Other notables would be Echochrome, flOw, Pixel Junk: Eden, the upcoming Fez, among many others.

One could argue that there simply isn't the market for it, but as far as the enthusiast press is concerned, there is a market for "art house" games, the commercial success of Braid can attest. The average age of gamers is 29-36, not jockheads salivating over the latest iteration of Madden, or runty 12-year olds squealing to our mothers for chocolate milk while we play Halo 3, so it's high time that the industry at large quits pandering to us as if we are.

This coming GDC (Game Developers Conference) in March will show what's been cooking for the past year, and this goes without saying, but I'm excited to find out. I think the industry is ready for our "Watchmen", our "Shawshank Redemption", or what have you. A game that transcends the genre, but at the same time, resonates with a large portion of the populace. Yes I'm smoking crack, but I can still hope.

(Wow, talk about veering off course.)

Image stolen shamelessly from The Escapist.

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