Sexy vs. Sexy
“Aw, quit struggling. You’re only in this game for four minutes anyway.”
Everyone knows that sex sells, but that doesn’t necessarily make it safe. The games industry in particular is borderline terrified of crossing any real lines, knowing that so much as an exposed nipple or openly gay character will have the moral guardians leaping at it like an angry bear. At the same time, few industries are so eye-rolling when it comes to fan-service, to ridiculous outfits, and supposedly sexy scenes that frankly make you wonder about the creators.
This makes for an interesting culture clash – often eye-rolling to the point of pathetic, sometimes borderline offensive. More often, it’s a ridiculous, but ultimately ignorable reminder that gaming is still firmly considered a boys club, no matter how many studies come in about the number of women who like to game. Even top quality developers usually screw up here, and it’s hard to think of many characters specifically designed to appeal to women – with the exception of fluffy animal mascots and gung-ho girls running diners in casual games. But that’s another post.
Even with the many problems in mind, there’s more to creating a sexy character than simply creating an appealing 3D mesh. Sadly, it starts with remembering that blonde, brunette and redhead aren’t personality types – and even that’s already several steps more enlightened than most of the industry’s digital harem. Buckle up. Dangerous curves ahead…
Designated Sexy
“Blade, before I kill you, are my feet okay? Haven’t seen them in years.”
When creating a sexy character, the first problem is that everyone has their own definition. For some, it’ll be a geeky girl with glasses, for others, a muscle-bound hunk. In games though, there’s a pretty standard template – giant boobs, vacuum formed buttocks, inflated lips, and as little wrapping as necessary, no matter how ridiculous it looks on a medieval battlefield.
By far the least effective are the characters who are simply there, standing around. The free-spirited elves, the pouting paladins, the nameless aliens, the girls at the bikini bar that the whole criminal underworld likes to hang out at because while they may murder a hundred people a day, they still have standards. Or to be more accurate, they have Wal-Mart’s accepted goods list and don’t want to risk the dreaded AO rating. The bunch of wusses.
These characters are rarely of interest. They’re designed as eye-candy, nothing more – just another half-naked girl serving the same emotional purpose as a Playboy centrefold or blow-up doll. They impress nobody, but they give a bored marketing department something to help sell a game they don’t care about, and a month later, everyone’s forgotten they even existed. Love ‘em, hate ‘em, or just sigh in resignation and wish everyone would grow up, the main problem with these isn’t that they’re crap, but that they’re the most visible sign of what the games industry considers hotter than magma. Dead eyes, pending backache and embarrassed kids trying to persuade their mothers that Santa will approve. Or that one day, it’ll be seen as art. One or the other.
If this is all a character is meant to be, well, fine. Whatever. Usually though, there are wider ambitions. A character might be intended as the mascot of a series, or important in their own right. They might have an epic story attached to them, or be the face of a radically new game that would amaze everyone, if only they played it. To have any chance of achieving these goals, the impression that a game is selling on sex is typically a bad thing. Gamers are a conservative lot, especially when it comes to admitting to being attracted to a character. In short, a heroine needs more than a couple of beachballs down the armour. And personality is only part of the equation.
I still want to play a Tomb Raider game where she goes back in time to leave all those shotguns and medical packs for her younger self to find.
Lara Croft is the obvious poster-child for all this, but this isn’t going to be a rant about her. Quite the opposite. The Tomb Raider series certainly has its problems, and plenty of things to kick at, but a lot of the criticisms of it are either out of date, or at least misplaced. The last three games for instance have gone out of their way (albeit with varying success) to get rid of most of the stupidest stuff, spend more time on the story and character, make her outfits and proportions more sensible, and put much more focus on the environments. There’s still a ton of fan-service in there, but it’s not objectionable, and nobody’s likely to be turned off by it, unlike sleazier games like Sin.
Even heading back to the original games, it’s worth remembering that the whole Lara Croft as an icon thing didn’t happen overnight. Go back to the original reviews, you’ll see how little thought most gave it. PC Zone hired the first actress to dress up in a cheap costume, while the most ambitious Core and Eidos really got was crediting the character (a truly horrible render) like an actress on the front cover. The big fuss made was that she was a female action star, not some low-polygon sex goddess. That side of things only really ramped up with Tomb Raider 2 and its sequels. You can almost see it develop through the medium of desktop wallpapers. The original Tomb Raider focuses mostly on pretty shots of the character swimming, shooting and acting like an action hero. Later renders focus far more on her posing in bikinis, lying topless on the beach, and doing more overtly sexual gestures, like shushing the unseen player with her finger.
On the one hand, you take all this as simply proof that sex sells. In practice, it didn’t hurt, but it’s pretty evident that there was more to it than this. Nobody remembers, say, Red Lotus (Deathtrap Dungeon) or the digital Julie Strain from FAKK2, or Kimberly Stride (Blam! Machinehead, also from Core Design) or whatever the hell the girl in Excalibur 2555AD was called. Lara was notable because she became the personification of her genre rather than because of her gender, and everything stemmed from that. No amount of fan-service would have mattered a damn if Tomb Raider hadn’t been an exciting, innovative game people wanted to play.
Supposedly Sexy
“Ah, Yakecan. Almost remembered to get dressed today, I see.”
But stop! All this is very hard work. What do you do if you just want to try and get some sex appeal into a game without risking it all? Easy. That’s what supporting characters are for…
The most embarrassing characters are rarely the leads. The main reason for this is while many games sell themselves with a bit of exposed digital skin, anything more than that tends to get shunned. Look at Leisure Suit Larry for more on that subject. The usual fix is leaving the hero more or less alone, in favour of sticking the villains and supporting heroines into outfits that make them look like they lost a bet with the art team. Amusingly, in most cases, there’s a straight battle-line drawn between that side of things and absolutely and everything else. Not only does nobody ever acknowledge that their wingman showed up to help save the universe after apparently getting their laundry mixed up with a stripper’s, their lines and character profiles typically go out of their way to make them stern, no-nonsense combat chicks, even to the point of misandry.
Although let’s be honest, in the circumstances, that’s totally understandable.
The problem here is that all too often, a character intended to get the player drooling ends up having the exact opposite effect. Most women typically don’t want to have another woman’s bra and g-string constantly forced down their throats. As for guys, we like to choose the people we find sexy instead of being ordered to simply because of our gender. Strange, but true.
What this doesn’t mean is that sexy characters are bad. They’re fine, done properly – and by ‘properly’, I don’t mean ‘hot’. The key is that however they look and sound, it has to be supported. Jessica Rabbit would be the classic comedy example here, with her reverse-bouncing breasts and sultriness all part of the joke. The same goes for the traditional femme fatale, or a party girl, or someone from a tropical island rather than the middle of a city under siege from Hell Itself.
“I also enjoy Sudoku. Call me.”
Jeanette from Vampire: Bloodlines is probably the closest to a Jessica Rabbit type on PC. The context is somewhat unfortunate – the fact that she’s even interested in sex is seen as a character flaw and used as a symbol of her insanity – but still manages to work due to excellent writing, fantastic voice work, and a well executed bit of storytelling. (Her use as the game’s covergirl and the main early screenshot, that’s just regular fan service.) Cate Archer from the No-One Lives Forever games is another one, with her ridiculous outfits fitting just fine in the swinging 60s vibe, as is her contemporary Eva, the Bond-girl pastiche from Metal Gear Solid 3.
Even Elexis Sinclaire can probably get away with all this, even though she’s one of the more fan-service focused characters in recent years, simply for being such a vampish cartoon that you can quite easily see her dressing the way she does just for her own amusement.
Me, I want to know if she attends board meetings in that outfit.
A final, more ironic one, would be Delphi the Sea Reaper from Giants, who started off completely topless due to being a twist on the classic sirens/mermaid legends, only to be forcefully shoved into a bikini due to American stores’ sales restrictions. The result was to actually make the character seem more sexualised, turning her from a character who simply wasn’t particularly bothered about her breasts into one who specifically dressed in skimpy swimwear.
Death By Sexy
Prince of Persia. More Lucozade than Scheherazade.
On the plus side, while overt fan-service characters may or may not work to draw people in, they’re usually laughable enough to be ignored. Sometimes however, the attempts to make sex sell have backfired, and badly. Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was one of these, when the initial villain Shahdee’s insane steel bikini came to symbolise the new ‘dark’ version of the story that the developers had to backpedal on… not to mention raised many questions about her boss and creator, the Empress of Time, the Prince’s eventual love interest. Compared to the truly excellent relationship between the Prince and Farah in the first game, Warrior Within felt like outright betrayal. A newly scantily-clad Action Girl Farah in the next game didn’t help.
Planescape Torment was another, originally selling itself to magazines with pictures of a random girl (the thief, Annah, it turned out) wearing little but a few strategically placed leather straps, and some nonsense about the main character being a corpse with incredible sexual charisma. Any other details were lost in the eye-rolling over this, ultimately resulting in one of the PC’s greatest ever games slipping onto the scene with an undeserved ‘meh’.
And then there’s Sacred. Original box art. Updated box art. Nuff said.
Beyond Simply Sexy
Regardless of context, characters usually look a hundred times better if you can imagine they chose their own wardrobe.
Overt fan service is the shortcut to sexiness, but it never lasts. A few minutes after a character walks in, whatever they wear and however bizarrely proportioned they are, it just becomes part of the army of bikini-clad ladies that nobody remembers. Sexy moments work much better when the context allows for contrast, and physical manifestations of emotional journeys. Alternatively, they don’t have to be there at all. If a player likes a character, that’s often all it takes. Often, a more restrained design coupled with a decent sense of humour and proper backstory is enough, making it possible to relate to them on a human level instead of as some insane testosterone fantasy, and whereas simple visuals lose their impact, a fun personality ages like a fine wine.
(Humour in particular tends to be one of the most successful, and often oddest methods. Final Fantasy VII has one of the most bizarre, when in the part of the game devoted to Cloud and Aeris building their relationship, much of the action consists of her taking great delight in dressing him up like a pretty girl, complete with wig (won by beating a group of strongmen in squat-thrusts) and a trip to the local brothel. More… ahem… conventional games are more likely to stick with good old fashioned sexual tension and lots of snarky dialogue. Broken Sword is one of the most successful at this, despite every single game having a new actress playing the heroine, Nico. The fourth game would have been an exception, but there was no fourth game. Ever.)
As with overt sexiness, most games take shortcuts to do this – typically by use of one of a handful of default archetypes. In the ‘girlfriend’ camp, you normally get the princess, the spunky engineer girl, the caring healer/summoner, and the wise-cracking action girl. For the most part, Amazons, femme fatales, mission controllers and dominatrixes tend to stick to the fan-service side of the line. But as with everything, there are exceptions to that rule, like Katrina in the Quest for Glory games.
Unrelated: Isn’t it interesting how just about every major female character in gaming has some form of hair accessory?
The general key to getting these relationships to work is that if romance is part of the picture, it needs to be between either NPCs, or between an NPC and a protagonist with a clearly defined personality, rather than between NPC and the puppetmaster with the Xbox controller. This allows the romance to flow, with the player making a personal call on where they stand. When that line gets crossed, and emotions are ascribed to the player, the house of cards can easily collapse. Much as we don’t usually like being told who to find sexy, we don’t like being told who to like.
Half-Life 2 offers a great example of this. In the main game, while Alyx was a fun character, it was the moments where she and Gordon acted like friends that made their relationship – particularly playing catch with her robot, Dog. Valve uses humour to build the connection, as well as to add a specific human face to the horrors of the Combine invasion. And it works really well, even though Alyx herself is a pretty generic spunky-engineer character, albeit a well executed one.
Later in the game however, there’s one line where she says (and I paraphrase here) “You came to rescue me, even though you didn’t have to!” complete with firm subtext that you did this because you’d fallen for her. For many people, this was a roadblock. They weren’t there to save her. They were there to save the world. The narrative clash wasn’t a big deal, certainly not in the great scheme of things, but it was noticeable. And true to form, in the Episodes that followed, Valve pulled it back considerably. Alyx is still clearly besotted with Gordon, but there’s no hint of an implied response. On the one hand, this is faintly ridiculous, especially when old friends of his from before we took up residence in his head start dying and he remains a blood-soaked mute with a crowbar, but the quality of the writing means that it really doesn’t matter too much.
The main advantage on a narrative level is that your engagement is up to you. If you just want to treat Alyx as a glorified wingman, that’s fine. If you want to imagine Gordon grinning back and planning life on a farm somewhere post-invasion, that’s fine too. In a similar way, the ending, featuring one of the main characters being killed off, very specifically revolves around her emotions and response as opposed to your own. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to be moved, but it’s your call. The result of all this is one of the most effective relationships in gaming, simply because whatever emotions emerge from it, they’re both true, and unquestionably yours.
Not that it stopped people making nude patches, mind…
Did you really click on that? Oh, for shame…