Comments on: The Realism Defense

By: Rabboleth

Rabboleth — Sat, 17 Feb 2007 08:28:08 +0000

The trouble with games like Oblivion is that the realism intended to justify sexual dimorphism in the game is not supported by the game itself. In that game, you can give a woman not much bigger than Jessica Alba a twenty-pound hammer, and she will swing it at high speed without tearing her own arms off. Then the little Breton girl can strap this same ludicrous weapon to her back and run back and forth across an entire country for weeks on end without food, water, or even breaking a sweat. We already have here someone could kick a Navy SEAL’s butt. None of them could do all that.
Might as well let her be a strong warrior from the start, and forget making her train like mad. After all, you can gain muscle mass, magic powers, and neural connections in your brain just by being asked by some guy named Baurus what you do for a living. Anybody who’d allow that kind of drivel pass by should never, EVER be allowed to even SAY “realism.”

By: Benjamin

Benjamin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:00:23 +0000

-Im not anti-feminist if anything im pro. But this whole thing about realism in games your taking a bit too serious. Im a gamer I’ve played Oblivion and the so called penalties are like 10 points. You can make that up in one Lvl advancement. Also morrowind DID have defferences when it came to men and women. You would get entirely defferent dialogues and women NPC’s would be more open to you You would have to play both female and male to get the whole story. I noticed that Collie says that:
-”The problem with the â€œrealismâ€ argument is itâ€™s always used selectively, to bolster conventional social prejudice. If game designers were really dedicated to realism in their games, Lara Croft would be built like an athlete, with small breasts firmly restrained in a good sports bra.”
-Tombraider was by no means a realistic game. On the other hand Oblivion is actually trying to recreate reality as much as they could in a video game FANTASY.
-GregED if people made games the way things should be then there would be no blood and death or sickness.
-The average male body has larger more powerful upper body frame, While women have a far more efficient lower body. So in a game that is attempting realism it make since that a male would have more strength for swinging swords and body slamming. While a woman would have much more endurance and be able to stand and fight for much longer periods.
-This doesn’t mean a man is better than a woman it simply means we are defferent. Im in a wheelchair naturally that means im not going to do so well in the long jump (lol….. I could give it a try)
-However I play other games that are obviously objectifing women and that angers me. WoW the female characters are half naked and God knows what the perv on the other end of the server is doing while he stares at your avatar. For God’s sake if they want to have scantly clad armor at least give the option to put some kind of clothing under it or over it to conceal the goods. When I play a Fantasy RPG i like to have a beautiful faced woman in there every once in a while. Remember the Elves in Lord of the rings would they have seemed so mystical and magical if they weren’t beautiful and im speaking of the male elves too. But they werent wearing string bikinis ether and I assume thats one of the things you are concerned with as well. I understand where you are coming from guys and I hope you find a solution to this issue but please don’t take it to war pardon the expression thats the worst thing you can do with an Ideal because when you do that you just hurt your own cause. I wish I could help with your causes but I have disability rights issues I must contend with i was denied my rights because the school thought access ramp and wheelchair accessibility was an unecessary expense. Good luck.

By: GregED

GregED — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 22:52:17 +0000

Fascinating breakdown. I find it highly irritating that Oblivion penalizes female characters where - as I recall - Morrowind did not.

And excellent conclusion. No more passing the buck. Screw realism…if your an artist, and your medium is games, then lets make games that reflect the way things should be, not the way they are.

By: Collie

Collie — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 20:42:54 +0000

Wow, you mentioned my article — I’m delighted! Thank you so much, and I hope my comments here are of interest to you.

After reading your article, I’d like to say that I wouldn’t have a problem with the game designers portraying realism — if they actually did so. For example, in first edition D&D, where female strenth is penalized, let’s equally penalize male endurance, since studies repeatedly show women are sturdier than men. Yes, this is a horrible generalization — but so is generalizing that men are always stronger than women. I see no reason we can’t similarly penalize males in The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

Or in Arcanum, let’s recognize “Victorian convention” is as poor a basis for game design as it is for social convention today — which is why we no longer labor under those conventions. Then let’s have at least one of the species be parthenogenetic (since that’s part of reality), where the female gives birth to a genetic copy of herself, and the species has no males whatsoever. In fact, while we’re at it, we should recognize the repeated studies which note there are more human women than men in the world today, and make several of the species reflect that “reality” by having female-only options to play them.

It’s not adherence to “reality” that brings us Lara Croft’s breasts — it’s simple male horniness. It’s not even equal-oportunity horniness. If it were, we’d see guys in games with crotches that bounced as much as Lara’s breasts. Sounds painful, doesn’t it?

The problem with the “realism” argument is it’s always used selectively, to bolster conventional social prejudice. If game designers were really dedicated to realism in their games, Lara Croft would be built like an athlete, with small breasts firmly restrained in a good sports bra.

I rather liked one of your closing comments: ‘I guess when the games are being specifically targeted to you, thereâ€™s nowhere to go but down’ — well put, and I hope it encourages those individuals to ponder what going up might look like. I also think your reply to Kunan was right on the money.

Also, remind me never to play Oregon Trail with you!

By: New Game Plus » Realism and Objectification

New Game Plus » Realism and Objectification — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 16:00:50 +0000

[...] Jeff, who recently joined us at Shrub.com, responds in a post called The Realism Defense. He discusses how women being penalized in games is defended as realistic in a backlash against being “politically correct” (which I don’t consider myself, but that’s another blog post), and that he enjoys games that are fun rather than realistic. He writes: The realism thatâ€™s being defended in the above examples is selective at best. Some elements get focused on while others are ignored entirely; itâ€™s not so much that these design decisions are expected as it is that they â€œfeel rightâ€ to the perceived core audience of male gamers. Gaming, especially fantasy role-playing, has been a â€œboysâ€™ clubâ€ for so long that these little touches of sexism have become cliches that players take for granted. If an area is poor, the reasoning goes, it will have prostitution, and that will invariably take the form of female streetwalkers, no matter what the rest of society looks like. In a multi-species society like Sigil, why would all of the prostitutes be human women? What the realism defense ignores is that any game - indeed, any narrative or documentary medium - is limited in scope. The game designer makes a conscious choice about what to model in the game world; including sexism under the guise of â€œrealismâ€ makes a statement that sexism is sufficiently important to be included in the world model. [...]

By: jfpbookworm

jfpbookworm — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:31:37 +0000

While I agree that many of the male characters in Planescape: Torment are also “bonded” to The Nameless One, I think there’s still some fanservice in how attachment from all the female characters is expressed as sexual/romantic, and attachment from the male characters is not. The choice to make all the males, and only the males, “basically asexual” (although it can be argued that Ignus burns for The Nameless One in more ways than one) is another design decision.

Showing how the women are “in character” strikes me as simply another form of the reality defense - a mimesis defense, more accurately, since there’s no external reality for these characters. It ignores that the characters are themselves designed. In the case of Fall-From-Grace and Annah, designer Chris Avellone has said that they were inspired by Betty and Veronica from Archie comics - i.e., they’re created to be The Nameless One’s girlfriends.

This sort of ubiquitous attraction isn’t unique to Torment, either, which is why I think it’s worth mentioning. Torment is merely an extreme case because of how far from conventionally attractive the lead character is supposed to be.

By: Kunan

Kunan — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 15:04:55 +0000

I’d just like to point out, suitably enough given the subject of the post, that the reason all the important women in Planescape: Torment are attracted to the Nameless One is that part of his natue is to attract miserable people in every sense and relationship that he can. Dak’kon sees him as oppressor and mentor, among other things, because Dak’kon’s personal issues make these roles that are central to his internal conflicts. Ignus is much the same way. Morte relates to him as a failed responsibility and source of guilt for something he contiues to do.

The four major female characters have such vectors that make him suitable as a love interest. Annah has spent her entire life ostracised by everyone except one old man that she /knows/ has largely been using her as a human resource all along, and sees love as something carrying the acceptance she craves. Grace is a creature created for sex that feels she has to contain that aspect of herself in order to maintain her self-respect. Ravel is, if anything, miserable for the lack of the usual female objectification - someone who has lived practically forever and has always been wanted for her abilities and her knowledge, always feared and mistrusted, never loved, never seen as a sexual interest or even a relatable person. Dionarrah was already in love with the nameless one and exists in death knowing that her beloved used her to the point of getting her killed and damning her to life as a phantom, who resents that greatly but wants his approval so deeply that she continues to pledge her allegance to what is essentially the shattered remanant of him.

Really, the only reason the male characters aren’t also attracted to him is that none of them go for other men. (And actually, other than Morte, pretty much all of them are basically asexual.) He is, without a doubt, the most important person in any of their lives regardless.

There are, as well, much deeper questions you can ask about the unconscious elements leading to the formation of these characters than “Why must they all find the male lead attractive?”