Returning from my favourite UK comic con of the year, there’s one thing I really like to do. That’s crash out and order takeaway food. Alas, I have to compile a list of our favourite thinky-head reading of the week for your delectation, while trying to avoid linking to the pop record which I destroyed my voice by screaming the key word when involved in mass indie comics dance-floor-ownage.
- Leigh Alexander writes about a phenomenon which is rarely talked about, but I suspect most of us recognise. Lengthy indecision at the character creation stage. While we all welcome the increased ability to customise our avatar, this is definitely the price.
- Contributing to the bloodbath of the World of Goo 82% Piracy Rate (ish) thread hasn’t been Cliffski’s only contribution to videogame letters this week. He’s also written a postmortem of his experience in making Kudos 2, which is – as is Cliffski’s general style – agreeably candid.
- Ooh – la,la (etc). Jim’s feature about game audio is translated to French. In case we’ve got some non-English speakers reading or something.
- Waitasec.
- More DRM fisticuffs with two new class-action suit against EA about their DRM, in the Sims and Spore.
- Popmatters speaks about Games as a Language System. The concept of games literacy is one of my perennial things I want to thrash a piece about, but never get around to. This makes other people better than me. Man!
- Over at the Guardian, Naomi Alderman’s writes about how her addiction with Diablo II helped her deal with the trauma of living in New York during 9-11. The utilitarian purpose of games is another those perennial things. At least I’ve written about that a few times. We do this for a reason, y’now?
- This is… well, interesting. Leigh Alexander (Who with two posts this week probably deserves some kind of prize) writes about issues of Style and Realism provoked by Kotaku’s earlier post showing an edited version of Faith from Mirror’s Edge tweaked to “Asian standards of beauty”.
- Dave Perry interviews Gabe Newell about getting into the games industry. I just wish this was longer.
- Talking Head’s Once In A Lifetime. The line in question being MY GOD! WHAT HAVE I DONE! If you ever get me in a pub, ask me my theory on what that line’s referencing and how it epitomises the Song’s whole point.
Failed.
The Gabe interview is good, but it’s a shame he didn’t come out of his shell a little more. Sometimes the questions are longer than the answers.
Re. Character Creation
I spent a long time in ME chargen. I think I did it about 3 times before settling, going through the entire unskippable intro each time before deciding to restart. In the end I began to suspect that I actually had recreated an ex girlfriend of mine, only with a more athletic body and fuller lips (I was never really happy with the lips tbh, but couldn’t face starting the game again!). I then proceeded to roleplay her like Kusanagi Motoko.
I don’t know what any of this says about me.
Also, isn’t Mirror’s Edge all about escaping a tyranny characterised by aesthetic perfection?
On the character creation note. Some games the stats (creating a weak character fears) cause me to obsess on the character creation. Notably baldur’s gate in which i rolled until i got 18 in most stats (for hours)them proceeded to walk through the whole game without a single challenge, a regret. But in games with visual character design i have a hard time resisting “maximum face”. That being a character with the sliders all as far as they can go to one side.
Ahh the ol’ Face: TO THE MAX! method eh Helio? When it comes to character creation I’ll usually keep it short and sweet, I’ll either make something that looks like what I want to look like (like me but better), make something that looks really hideous or I’ll just make something that really makes me laugh.
For instance in Mount & Blade I use a wrinkly old guy with big bushy beard, in Fallout 3 I use a pale guy with the Dead Man’s Hand facial hair (both funny and something I couldn’t grow myself) and in Mass Effect I made a black guy with platinum blonde buzz cut and matching handle-bar mustache (it was just ridiculous, so much so that I loved it).
I admit, the thing which throws me in the Faith debate is the subtext on the pro-remix side that Western Developers don’t understand the Eastern standards of beauty, when part of the remix is just giving her bigger tits. I think we all grasp the concept of bigger tits well enough, and someone not doing bigger tits on a character may be about something other than Just Not Getting It.
(Yeah, others have said similar things, but this is just the core piece of anti-evidence.)
KG
fight club was on last night.
“you are not your fuckin khakis”
sums it up quite well
@ Dorian Cornelius Jasper: I’m not sure why you’re so adamant that you know what the conversation is supposed to be about, and nobody else seems to. The topic of a conversation changes subtley as it progresses. Maybe it started off being about one specific thing, now it’s about something else. From most of the recent posts, the conversation has, indeed, become about the idealisation thing, not the cultural difference thing, and as such Faith, who is a woman in a videogame, is perfect subject matter for the topic at hand, which is now about unrealistic depictions of people in the popular culture, among other things.
“Generally speaking your average person is substantially less attractive than even the most politically correct entertainment-heroine.”
Ooh, now there’s an interesting thing to say. By my estimation, the “average person” (and by the way, who is this “average person”, exactly? Is there such a thing? Really?) is substantially more attractive, by virtue of, apart from simply being flesh and blood, having more (ironically) character than the kind of blandly, slightly offensively (even to my randy male sensibilities) sexualised construct that we as gamers usually have thrust upon us. And yes, even Alyx falls into that category, I’m afraid. She’s still just too airbrushed and cover-model for my liking, and there’s a bit of “ooh she looks a bit exotic and foreign, but in a politically correct sort of way” kind of sexual wish-fulfillment going on with her character design. Perhaps it’s just impossible to create a fictional character with any acceptable sense of realism?
Good character creation should impact the game’s story and overall experience, rather than just the player’s haircut.
Mass Effect’s character origin selection was nice touch, I felt slightly more justified in my ’shoot first, loot corpse, mock the dead’ approach knowing my character grew up ugly and tough in a urban hellscape. That way, when I went paragon later on, it felt like a proper character arch.
An intelligence 1 playthough of Fallout 2 has got to be the gold standard though for character creation influenced gameplay, you can hardly talk to NPCs or use anything more complex than a stick.
The assumption is that the heroine is supposed to be beautiful to the point of superhuman perfection. And while I’d like to throw that out as absurd, maybe there is something to the assumption. We’re talking about a character with superhuman physical performance (leap building in a single bound, take a can of 7.62mm to the legs and still run a marathon), why should the depiction be any more realistic?
On the other hand, the “assumption” falls down when you look in the mirror and see an unathletic 14-year-old with obvious eyelid and breast surgery, and say, “No way she could do that.” So perhaps she needs giant bulging calves instead?
Cliffski referred to “a journalist I know”. Not one to drop names, eh?
The GN interview’s major weird point seemed to be where the interviewer was trying to get Gabe to explain how he got into games as a viable approach for someone just starting out. (Make millions and millions of bucks, then start a company).
I didn’t particularly appreciate his conclusion, that it’s either Renaissance French Poetry or DigiPen. Consider, for example, the recent IP discussion in Gamasutra and picked up by Slashdot. One of the better arguments for the DigiPen “keep your best ideas at home” policy was made by a slashdotter claiming to be a DigiPen student: they’re college students, and they have academic requirements beyond making games. One of the big risks for a bunch of motivated students like that is that they’ll spend too much time on game design projects, and ignore their general requirements. You know, like Renaissance French Poetry.
So even there, it’s not all making games; sometimes you gotta take classes with Christ the Redeemer.
I don’t have the character creation indecision problem, as I’m completely unable to make a character look like anything/one in particular. I can’t begin to mentally translate multiple parameters for chin size or eye separation etc into a single “real” face. So I just end up plumping for one of the defaults or dragging the sliders to extremes to make the freakiest character I can.
Yes, why is Faith not a pregnant dick girl with knockers the size of watermelons? That is racism!
@Quater: “Is there such a thing? Really?”
Yes. There are many of them. I can see them from my window right now.
“…is substantially more attractive…”
This depends on the context. If I were having to pick between having sex with a commuter and sex with Alyx I would probably go for the commuter given that physically speaking I can actually have sex with a commuter, and choosing Alyx is unlikely to result in intercourse. However, if I were asked to rate commuters and Alyx, Lara Croft and Yoko on their attractiveness I think I’d probably (given the attractiveness of most commuters) rate the fictional characters higher than the real people.
I don’t think this is as unusual as it sounds!
On the website about studying beauty somewhere above they did tests where they asked people to compare super “attractive” computer manipulated images and also images of more normal looking people, and people selected in favour of the computer “enhanced” faces. I don’t think the “fakeness” of illustration, animation or CGI is necessarily a turn off. Attractiveness imho is an abstraction all if its own.
“…sexualised construct that we as gamers usually have thrust upon us…”
And in the game?
@KG: “I think we all grasp the [concept of] bigger tits well enough, and someone not doing bigger tits on a character may be about something other than Just Not Getting It.”
But her buffed bust isn’t the only thing the HIM changed. Her face is substantially reworked as well. Would it appeal more to the Asian audience? I don’t know. Maybe someone should POLL ASIA.
Either way, it seems uncontroversially obvious that aesthetic preferences in Asia might be different to those in The West. But even if they are it doesn’t matter. The devs wont have “failed” if they have made an Asian woman that is more attractive to the western audience than to the Japanese & Chinese – unless they had some pretty odd milestones on their design docs.
IMO the whole regional preference discussion is nonsense given that its all based on one random internet guy, who is probably a Naruto fan from Dundee, claiming to speak on behalf of all of Asia.
I think
So show me what this “average person” looks like. I want to see a picture of her/him, because I certainly haven’t met them.
My point, which I’m being purposefully obtuse about making in the hope that someone will pick up on it anyway, is that there is no such thing as the average person and that our perceptions of what’s realistic and what isn’t have become so skewed that it doesn’t seem to have occurred to a lot of people in this discussion that, in fact, there are women in the world who look exactly like Alyx Vance, Faith and Lara Croft. In what way, then, are they unrealistic? You may not see so many of them on the train to work, but you’re probably not a fashion photographer.
My problem, from an aesthetic point of view, is this: why are we constantly reinforcing, among ourselves and each other, this accustomisation to the ideal of everything, to the point where, rather than thinking of Alyx or Lara as especially attractive, you think of the real women you see around you as unattractive? Similarly, if Superman had a pot belly, would that make it harder to take him seriously? Why?
Yeah, while I think the reworking is more attractive than the original, I don’t think that’s the point. Faith is supposed to be a hard-as-nails outcast, not a Japanese booth babe. Unless the point of the reworking was “by cynically manipulating your images like this, you can make more money from horny Asian teens.”
eyemessiah: Yeah, but they *did*, and then presented the image as “Why Western Devs don’t get it”. It undermines them totally, and kind of shows why some people are on the internet doing fan art and some people are art directors on major videogames. It’s just a really good short-cut to dismissing him, y’know?
KG
“Similarly, if Superman had a pot belly, would that make it harder to take him seriously? Why?”
Interesting – since Superman has super powers, does he need a good physique? I mean, I understand why a fat fifty-something in Far Cry wouldn’t last five seconds, but if you actually have magic powers then maybe you don’t need a six-pack and massive biceps.
@gap gen
inner geek ahoy, its due to the way his metabolism reacts to sunlight (of the yellow variety) also as an alien changes in gravity etc could bring on physical changes and you know stuff…
Go on Kieron, tell us your Once in a Lifetime thing. They’re my favourite band, but I find ‘Lifetime’ a little tiring… I’m more of a ‘Buildings and Food’/'Fear of Music’ man.
I’m looking forward to creating my doppelganger in APB, that looks like some classy avatar-moulding (Mass Effect and Fallout 3 weren’t terribly inspiring. …And neither were their avatar-making widgets, har har). A chuckle when Leigh says she ‘kinda hates’ the element of choice in games — I know the feeling of having played through a ‘factional’ game with my preferred choices, and then having to bite my tongue and go against all my usual inclinations on later playthroughs to try out the other path (I still haven’t played for the Order in Witcher EE, and I scarcely ever join Duty in the STALKER games. And I’m always a pacifistic JC Denton). The extra possibilities being open to you, however, remains awesome (potentially, anyway — The factions in the Witcher were a nice ethical headscratcher (a heartscratcher? Ouch), and although the feud in STALKER is ridiculously petty, it’s not just pat good-vs-evil; Fallout’s “I’m a sweet guy”-vs-”I’m a JERK” branching doesn’t do nearly as much for me). Plus it makes for good conversation after the game! (”dude u got order in my scoiatel” “u got scoitael in my order” “tahts gay i like order why did u go with gayatel?” “ur mom said i shuld”)
@Qatar:”In what way, then, are they unrealistic?”
Just in the sense that they don’t resemble most of the people we meet in our everyday lives. I do agree with your obtuse point though, and imo it serves to demonstrate that realism or lack of it isn’t really the problem. I’d say Faith A is uncommonly attractive as well.
The problem some people have with Faith B, I think, is simply that they like Faith A (and all that she implies) better – I don’t think it “really” has to do with a failure of realism.
@KG
I’m not 100% sure that he’s wrong though, as I say the boobs aren’t everything (I don’t actually say that that often). If I wasn’t going out I’d spend the afternoon looking at pictures of Japanese Gravure idols to try and determine if Faith B is more in-style than Faith A.
But even if he is right, is that honestly troubling? Does anyone care if Asia has different taste in women than the West and that devs in the West might not be able to synthesise their product to perfectly fit the Asian palate?
I suppose he thought it was significant enough to make a point out of it though. I don’t.
That said I can see why it touches a nerve though, as I say I much prefer non-glamour model based character design and more than that I think it represents something that is politically-progressive, and I’d agree that Faith B as a videogame heroine is relatively politically-regressive.
But that has nothing to do with whether or not Western devs “don’t get” the Asian beauty conventions.
I was kidding about looking at Japanese gravure models by the way. I’d never do that.
The boobs are *something* though. I’m looking beneath his actual statement to see the real meaning. His argument was “Western designers don’t know how to make something hot in the east” while his real meaning was “I want my game characters to be hot”. His response to Faith-as-is was “She needs bigger tits”. This is the core issue beneath the race questions – It’s still the Male Gaze, whether it’s from the East or West.
KG
Oh the guy saying the new Faith (his new Faith, as I understand it) is more true to ‘Asian standards of beauty’ is demonstrably full of shit. Anyone could post any number of Asian women, well known and popular for their looks who, according to him, shouldn’t be and he’d have to alter.
He may have his finger on the pulse of fashion in anime cute aesthetics but that’s all. The implication that she’s some sort of anglicised image of an Asian woman is derranged. The whole continent ought to punch him for that one. You can even see in the various angles she’s got a rather flat, broad face; typically the first characteristic to go when westerners design ‘Asian-ish’ people for games/ comics/ whatever.
Character design is hard, particularly naturalistic character design. Real looks are all in the subtleties. There’s a lot of generica that acts as a shortcut to achieving a certain end that’s very easy to fall back on simply because it works in that first glance. Everyone with the vaguest experience knows if you want to make someone prettier you toy with the proportions; women- make the eyes bigger, neck narrower and more curved, bring in the corners of the mouth, wider cheekbones, heart shaped face etc. Most of these work for men too (although maintain masculinity by keeping the neck wide, the jaw strong etc unless you want FF bishounen).
For all the supposed vast insight the guy just proved he’s a hack.
Has anyone else thought about the physical problems with Faith B (I assume the B stands for Breasts)? I doubt she’d be able to carry out her job without a couple of black eyes unless her sports bra has some sort of nipple-shaped anti-gravity device keeping them in place.
I think the basic problem with the Faith thing is the assumption by whoever made the modded version that she was supposed to be “hot”, and that because she isn’t seen as such in Asia, the developers had somehow “failed”. I find that assumption kind of sad, and immature.
FWIW, regarding the two renderings, I think the fan-modded one is prettier, but the original is more attractive.
“I find that assumption kind of sad, and immature.”
Alternatively, it could be an interesting insight into the Asian games market. Or it could be the incorrect opinion or a random forumite, which is possibly more likely.
I’m not sure I could see the fan-made Faith landing a punch like that, for one.
Indeed, it could be an interesting insight, and I’m perfectly willing to have my mind changed – what I posted above was just my initial reaction.
If it is an insight into the Asian games market, what does that mean? Is it possible/right to consider the whole Asian games market as a homogeneous entity? Do Japanese gamers want the same thing as Koreans? Then again, do English gamers want the same thing as Americans, or Germans, or Norwegians?
Can I just say I love this place?
The original looks like Faith. The ‘asian’ re-doing looks like the boy out of The Grudge, with tits.
Maybe that is what makes it ‘asian’: girls have tits, boys don’t and that is the only difference the asian market can see without seeing genitals. If so, then Asia is apparently unaware of the ‘moob’ phenomenom.
Vote moobs for Duke Nukem when he next actually gets a release. He must be in his 50s by now, so he should have them.
@KG
Agreed, the regional preference issue isn’t significant.
You didn’t think that the changes to the face we more striking than the generic bust?
Lets consider Faith C and Faith D.
In Faith C I don’t think the generic bust changes Faith that much.
Faiths B & D on the other-hand seem like very different sorts of characters to Faith A.
If any of you think Faith D is the hottest then you must go to jail.
Yeah but Kieron, I’m not likely to bump into you in a pub, so, Talking Heads: isn’t “My God! What have I done?” that feeling that you’ve taken the wrong road in life? Or do you think he’s drowned his wife in the deep blue or something?
@Eyemessiah
…shit.
Well, I asked my wife (who knows about this sort of thing :) ) and asian (or specifically oriental) people definitely have different definitions of beauty and attractiveness to western (or perhaps caucasian). The first (original) picture of Faith is not particularly attractive (i.e. about above average) to oriental people, largely due to facial structure – particularly the eyes.
The Orientals, you see, share a sophisticated hivemind.
Yup.
;)
I agree aldo, and though I shouldn’t judge many based on a few, I came to such a conclusion after spending years as anime loving Japanophile and seeing the Magna Carta game for PS2 really brought it to light.
Reith and Eonis from Magna Carta – http://ui16.gamespot.com/1455/oxidemc2_2.jpg
No one in that game looks like the original Faith, in fact, in an anime based in a fictional setting – Faith A, would have likely came from some mock Asian ‘We must have faith in Honorable Grandparents’ country.
@Mrs Aldo, I’m a gonna talk to my gf and confirm this then, but if it’s true then you’ll already know what she’s thinking…
I’m honestly not that surprised at the idea that an Asian dude has photoshopped Faith for his own sensibilities, I mean have you seen what most women look like in Asian games? Have none of you seen a Korean MMO? MMOs which are invariably the many lands of giant muscly blokes and tiny women with huge…lower-back problems in later life, and a nation wide shortage of adequate clothing.
Which incidentally sheds light on Andy F’s point about whether Koreans want the same thing as Japanese in their games, compare say the Dead or Alive women to any woman in Granado Espada. Hmmmm, draw any parallels there?
lol, to clarify. Magna Carta is Korean made.
EyeMessiah: *claps* Good point on the whole “standards of realism being skewed.” I’d completely overlooked how “realistic” female characters actually match up with women one’s likely to meet in real life. But I think a pass could be given in comparison to other popular media, such as movies and TV. Compared to stylized presentations, Alyx and Faith definitely fall on the more “real” side of the gradient.
Quater: Sorry if I offended, but I was only reacting out of offense to you. You don’t italicise “you” in text without meaning to offend someone, it’s like pointing a finger in public. But, honestly, the question of whether or not men should feel offended by the unrealistic depictions of men in media is both an old “derailing” method of discussion whenever the issue of female depiction comes up (so much so that it’s entered the Anti-Comics-Feminist Bingo, albeit in a much more specialized form) and a bit moot. Because, honestly, there are far fewer offended men out there than offended women. And when you look at the messages portrayed by these unrealistic depictions it’s not hard to see why. But that’s a whole ‘nother issue entirely.
KG: On the bit on anti-evidence, you’re absolutely right. I still hold to the idea that the “East” is just more willing to pander. This is not a phenomenon unique to the male demographic either (see: Any popular Japanese or Korean media involving unreasonably attractive guys, real or stylized–there’s a stereotype about Dramas floating around there somewhere). That’s not a comment on the gender politics side of the discussion as much as it is on the geopolitics one because there’s a real divide between popular Western and Eastern media with regards to “skin deep beauty marketability.” The editing artist has probably gotten too used to the standards of media from over there and, in a manner that’s easy to do, tied up his personal reaction to Faith’s design with her apparent stereotypical appearance (Asian with a flat haircut being a factor, probably) with the presumption that she was the West’s idea of what makes an attractive Asian. There’s the Male Gaze there behind his intentions, and behind his reference material he’s using in contrast, and he didn’t notice it.
At least take comfort in the fact that Western popular media’s a bit less cynical in that regard. A bit, anyway.
I’m still a bit bugged that it was, of all characters, Faith was the one to be at the center of it. C’mon, Torokun, you’re letting the otaku side down.
As an aside, to Malagate and Klaus: Hah! Yes. Japan and Korea’s popular culture is a lot more similar than some folks would like to give them credit for. China’s a bit different, but mostly on material made for the male demographic–their comics look positively Western-non-continental-European at first glance. For the female demographic, things skew cuter and closer to what we’d imagine from Japan, though.
I happened to be listening to the album Stop Making Sense when I read this. Fantastic.
Now I understand why what appeared to be gorgeous Chinese girls would always be with the most bet-down Chinese guys – the girls were the ugly ones! I could have been so in there.
As far as the models debate goes, I’ve been unfortunate enough to see a fair bit of America’s Next Top Model, and trust me, the girls who got to the top tended to not be the hottest. Apparently it’s much worse with male models, certainly very few male models look like guys you’d see walking down the street, and most look like the vanguard of an alien invasion. But I’d argue that the remixed Faith is just a pretty girl with big tits, and if you got roughly 20 female first year college students together, there’d probably be at least one girl with similar enough looks.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that cultural relativism is all well and good, but sometimes your culture, or sub-culture, or fundamentalist looney wingnut culture, is wrong and stupid, and shouldn’t be tolerated or pandered to. Just to be clear, I’m talking about things like insisting on adult women being portrayed as childlike sex objects, rather than everyone having their own standards of hotness.
On an interesting side-note… any black guys out there with comments on beauty culture in games? Because I suspect many white guys would tend to rate black women according to how caucasian their features are.
@ Dorian Cornelius Jasper: Actually if you look back up, I didn’t italicise “you” (which, by the way, I had no idea anybody could possibly be so over-sensitive as to interpret as a serious personal insult) until you had already accused me of “nitpicking… missing my point… insults and implications of mutual ignorance”. Prior to that little tirade, all I’d said was essentially that, big tits or not, Faith still looks like a supermodel whichever way you cut it. I took the opportunity to expand the boundaries of the discussion a bit into other areas of idealisation in the depiction of people in general in popular culture. How you managed to infer any kind of personal attack out of that whatsoever, or how you can seriously justify peppering me with passive-aggressive belittlements and accusing me of “derailing” a conversation about idealisation by merely contributing my opinion about the topic at hand, is utterly beyond me.
I haven’t bothered to comment about the “East / West divide” aspect of the debate purely because A. I had my fill of that dualistic hogwash at SOAS and it’s just not interesting any more (and while we’re at it, there is no such thing as “The East” or “The West”) and B. it was based on the picture submitted by that guy insisting that he knew what all Asian men liked and that Faith’s character design was therefore a failure. That guy is clearly an outright moron, and his point is therefore not actually worth serious discussion.
Now, I myself am a sometime artist and I have been particularly interested of late in the whole area of idealisation and its role in the way people see, interpret and represent/reproduce the human form. Of course sexual politics is pertinent to the debate, and of course I, being a man, am entitled to be concerned about male representation every bit as much as the other way around.
If you are going to insist on being some kind of arbiter of relevance and argumentative integrity in this comments thread, you might want to start paying attention to who said what, when, and with what intentions before dismissing someone as a petty neanderthal “Anti-Feminist”, which is, as near as I can fathom and to my complete incredulity, what you appear to be trying to paint me as.
Oh. Right, then.
While Faith #2 appeals more as a potential boning target, Faith #1 appeals more as a competent, powerful protagonist. Faith #1 tends to call up qualities males are more likely to associate with other males, people that you may need to rely on while hunting mammoths or in war (strength, athleticism, bravery, etc.) As an airheaded sidekick who dies a lot in escort missions and spends most of her time stroking the protagonist’s ego, Faith #2 would shine.
At any rate, the whole “Eastern standards of beauty” thing is missing the point. It’s not that Faith #1 was considered more beautiful, it’s that the people who designed her realized that you’re twice as effective as an artist if both of your hands are free when you’re working. Or maybe they’re trying to evoke the qualities above, generally reserved by males for males. I’m pretty sure that #2 is more attractive in -every- market, despite the disturbingly exaggerated paedomorphic facial features (but to be fair, neotenic facial features in women are generally considered more attractive by men everywhere — just ask Wikipedia).
If you mean Faith#2 by ‘childlike’, I think you’re viewing that from a western or perhaps caucasian perspective. I should probably point out (because she won’t read this and give me into trouble for revealing personal info… hopefully) Mrs Aldo was born and brought up (mostly) in a south-east asian country, and lived with a few people from Korea etc at uni in the states, so I’d wager she’s had a pretty good experience of what’s considered attractive. And her first reaction was something along the lines of ’she’d be considered very attractive’ rather than ’she looks like a kid’.
I think it’s a question of cultural/physical norms. Features like bigger eyes et al are apparently rated pretty highly, to the extent of Japanese girls having eye surgery, simply because the general physical architecture of the asian body is slightly different (which includes tits, frankly). Pretty sure most ‘ideal’ women for any race are like that – notably different from the norm.
That said, Mrs. Aldo also commented that Faith#1 (i.e. the proper DICE one) was a far more realistic looking woman – just not one who’d stand out in a crowd. Which to me is pretty much what DICE wanted (and, of course, the whole argument could be negated if the original artist was asian).
The argument the image’s creator is trying to make fails because his version is stylized rather than idealized. He might have been on point if Dice were aiming for a stylized version of beauty, as I think Eastern and Western tastes do diverge there, but Dice was clearly aiming to create a realistic but perfect woman rather than a abstract but pandering lead.
There is definitely some interesting territory to explore in how different cultures abstract characters to appear beautiful. As random examples, the stylization of Akira Toriyama’s women differs from Rob Liefeld’s significantly, due to the way manga and Western comics are produced and how those differences have been magnified over the lifetime of the medium.
Would disagree with that, considering facial characteristics of a child are something that’s pretty universal around the globe and simply part of growing up process. There’s a rather interesting study of it, that lists these factors.
Now, there might be cultural differences which leads to stronger and/or more open endorsement of these factors in some locations, but that doesn’t really make these attributes themselves any less ‘childlike’. To use slightly absurd example, if the standard of beauty included the person being as short as possible, it wouldn’t make being short any less of characteristic that’s normally (and universally) observed in kids, no matter the child’s race. It works the same for less obvious features like large eyes, small chin etc.
So anyway, I’ve only reada bout three comments on this page, because I’m a child of modern times and there’s a good chance I’ll see something shiny across the room and abandon this comments before posting, but I just want to sa I wholeheartedly agree with this:
As a guy, I’m always a little disgusted when designers stick in big-breasted, scantily clad, flirty women for players to ogle at. Of course it’s demeaning to women, but it’s demeaning to men too, to think that all we care about is shooting shit and starting at 3D models with big tits.
Seriously. Thank you.
Also, thanks pretty much everyone else for being so interesting and mature in these here comments.