One evening, while playing Monster Hunter 4, I decided to ask my boyfriend which video game ladies he has a crush on. I figured we all have a secret little list of characters that make us wish they weren’t just polygons on a screen and who, frankly, we just fancy. My own selection includes, but is not limited to: enigmatic cowboy John Marston from Red Dead Redemption, spiritually-minded assassin Thane from Mass Effect, Alistair and Solas from Dragon Age, moody cop Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil (but only the Resident Evil 4 Leon with that jacket) and Link from Legend of Zelda – but particularly the Hyrule Warriors version of Link. Having admitted all this to my boyfriend, I wanted to hear his list of fanciable women characters. That’s only fair, right?
“I can’t really think of any,” was his surprising reply. “They’re nearly all designed to be sexy, but they … they don’t really have personalities.”
Undeterred, I fired a list of ostensibly desirable women game characters at him – and he rolled his eyes at every one of them. I kept telling him, it doesn’t have to be true love, you don’t need to be looking for a longterm meaningful relationship with these women – after all, my reason for liking the Hyrule Warriors version of Link is that he has pretty hair and eyes.
But no. Nothing.
Those of us attracted to men have a fairly varied selection of looks and personalities to choose from in video games, because male characters generally have more going on than skimpy armour and gravity-defying body parts. Sure, you’re probably over-catered for if you like, say, cynical young guys with buzzcuts and tribal tattoos, or grizzled cops/soldiers/space marines with gigantic chips on their muscular shoulders. But if you’re interested in women who offer more than titillation, the search is more trying.
Browse through any game collection and there are going to be a lot of female characters bouncing about the place, with little more to add to the story than a chainmail bikini. It’s an unavoidable and often embarrassing part of the hobby I love – the sense of shame when someone walks in on you playing Soul Calibur and you have to assure them that it’s a great fighting game and, yeah, all those clothes falling off is just “quirky design”.
Outside of games, my boyfriend is a big comic book fan – in this medium, he is able to point to characters such as Batgirl and Captain Marvel, characters with their own complex stories and multifaceted personalities, characters who are not just there to add support or to get killed so that the male protagonist has something to whine about while he’s punching people.
But when it comes to games, after a long think, he managed to come up with Tali from the Mass Effect series: an alien whose face you never see, with three fingers on each hand and legs that bend backwards.
I asked other friends about the female characters that got their digital hearts fluttering, and the answers were nearly always women who were intelligently written and who were not overtly sexy: Claire Redfield from Resident Evil, Alyx Vance from Half-Life 2, Faith from Mirror’s Edge. But these are the characters that always get mentioned. No matter how many interesting female characters you indignantly list in response to this observation, there are a hundred male characters for every one of them.
Even games that have intelligent writing and progressive character development just can’t seem to abandon trite notions of sexiness – often when it doesn’t make sense within the carefully crafted narrative universe the cast inhabits. Mass Effect 2 has Tali, a rounded creation who seems universally admired and fancied, but it also has Miranda whose good looks, we are told, are genetically engineered – a fact that doesn’t wholly explain why she must always wear a skin-tight suit and be subjected to endless lingering butt shots.
There is just this enormous gap between physical attraction and emotional connection that game designers are still having trouble navigating. Feeling true love for a fictional character is not a thing we’ll all admit to experiencing (although the vast online library of explicit fan-fiction suggests its pretty pervasive) but when it happens it involves something more than beauty.
I don’t think the paucity of truly attractive female characters comes from a focus on creating engaging men, it frequently seems to emanate from a desire – or a pressure – to create women for the sole purpose of obvious sexual allure. The seeming inability of developers to represent an array of female body types and identities perpetuates the idea of women as decoration, leading to stunted character development. If the default starting position is sex appeal, you automatically create a character whose looks define them.
Sexiness definitely should not be banished from video games – it can be an interesting character element. Bayonetta, Vivienne from Dragon Age: Inquisition and Morinth from Mass Effect 2 are all examples of how sex appeal is brilliantly effective when it makes sense to the character and the world that has been created around them. All too often, though, female sexuality in games seems to be stuck in some mid-90s lads’ mag purgatory, recalling the era when model Jo Guest advertised the sci-fi sim Battlecruiser 3000AD by straddling a boxed copy of the game, and when Lara Croft was in Playboy. At least she has moved on.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with beautiful game characters – male protagonists themselves are often a mix of rugged good looks and hulking muscle mass. But there is still variety in design that is often lacking in their female counterparts. The women characters that stick with us are rarely the ones that protect their sizeable body parts within thin strips of metal or lace – they’re the ones who are fleshed-out as characters not as character models. Sex isn’t just about “beauty”; without personality there is no appeal beyond hollow physical attraction.
The most frustrating thing is that objectification creates hurdles for genuinely intelligent and engaging writing. Games have reached a point of narrative maturity where they can make us laugh and cry, where virtual environments are places we can lose ourselves in for hundreds of hours. But the persistence of “sexy” female characters who don’t make sense in the carefully crafted worlds they inhabit is jarring. Meanwhile, television is now widely considered to be the go-to place for quality drama, producing a whole gamut of provocative female characters from the casts of Orange is the New Black and Game of Thrones to Diance in Bojack Horseman.
That’s what I’m asking for: characters whose sexuality makes sense and who have different things to offer. I don’t want fewer attractive women in games, I want more of them. As strange as this may sound, I want my boyfriend’s list of crafty digital crushes to be as long and varied as my own.