Body confidence campaigners try to redesign video game women

[Napoléon]

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/lara-croft-red...ml#t2fvZPZ

Female video games characters, including Lara Croft, have been redesigned to look like real women, thanks to body confidence campaigners.
Ten popular female characters have been altered in Photoshop to give them more realistic body dimensions, replacing the unrealistically idealised versions of women that they currently represent.
The new character images are the work of eating disorder site bulimia.com.

...

“Some gaming studios boast their hyper-realistic lighting techniques, touting natural cloud movements as the latest features of their games. And with that kind of attention to detail, it makes us wonder, why can’t they accurately portray the female body?”.

[Exian]

Lol They've given them all the same body type. That's much more representative!

Remember ladies, if you're skinny, you're not a real woman,

[Faith No More]

Gamers definitely needs to address the issue of the objectification of women in gaming, but this is just an absurd way to tackle the issue.  They want to make characters look average, but the reason we play as those characters in games is precisely because they're not average.  They're super-humans that can do things we can't in real life, and their character models reflect that.  What's really stupid, though, is they're trying to make these character models out to be an objectification of women, but the character models of men are just as absurd.

Please, it's fantasy, people.  It's not meant to reflect real life, and I doubt seeing a pixelated skinny woman with huge boobs on a video game does near as much damage as the magazine and internet ads of real woman peddling beauty that are marketed directly at young, impressionable females.

[Dystopia]

Correct me if I'm wrong but in the new Tomb Raider game and with the obvious transformation and evolution of the gaming industry's technological and financial capabilities, hasn't Lara Croft and other videogame characters been redesigned and made to look more realistic? I mean, the few times I played TR 2013 I was under the impression that her boobs looked considerably smaller and she looked less like a doll (like in previous games) and more like someone I could meet in real life.

I don't enjoy the barbie type with unrealistic bodies, if anything it looks excessively pretty and since games are required to cater to what's realistic specially when it comes to graphic quality it seems contradicting to use similar body types all the time. It is possible to create attractive and athletic characters without going for barbie types, and it's an idea I fully support.

[Napoléon]

The whole point is that all of these characters are meant to be skinny/fit/good looking. It's like complaining that batman doesn't represent the 'average' person because he's buff. It makes no fucking sense and is just another excuse for the PC social justice Tumblr crowd to whore for attention.

[Nope]

Because Laura Croft would be toned, they need to use a real female athlete as a basis. I don't think that most women care that their characters don't look average. I'd be happy with a happy medium or at least a female character whose waist is not smaller than her head.

I've played almost all the Tomb Raider games. How does someone with that small a waist and those large of breast stand up? The average female head is 21 inches(Yes, I looked it up) That means that Laura's waist is maybe 19 inches and her breast are double D's and perky. I know she is a fantasy but she isn't my fantasy. Maybe they could make her more like the athletes in the link below. I don't really like the second woman because she looks too much like me and, take my word for it, I can't jump from platform to platform. Plus, I don't want to play as me-if that makes sense.

http://theathleticbuild.com/the-top-50-h...s-of-2015/

[robvalue]

I think this is all overblown. Computer games are an easy scapegoat, especially for people who don't play them or understand them.

Games aren't necessarily meant to be realistic, nor are they educational. Anyone who is forming opinions about women based significantly on computer games has many much more serious problems going on in my opinion.

Pretending everyone is the same is hardly the answer either!

[Pyrrho]

Although I agree that it would be good to have more realistic choices (and certainly that there should be less objectification of women), I think many people fail to realize why things like Barbie look the way they do.  When looking at something in miniature, it is harder to see detail, and so characteristics are often exaggerated to make them more apparent.  Barbie is not intended to be realistic; she is intended to be obviously female.  She is also way too small to be a real woman.  If she were realistic, she would be several feet tall.  But that would not make her suitable for her intended purpose.

The same idea applies to anything viewed on a small screen.  To make it easy to distinguish between male and female, characteristics need to be exaggerated.  If we were looking at life-size images, then no exaggeration would be necessary to have the normal ability to distinguish between male and female.  But in miniature, in order to have the same immediacy of being able to distinguish between male and female, distinguishing characteristics must be exaggerated.

[Regina]

^Exactly

Part of the reason Lara Croft had such large breasts in the early Tomb Raider games was because the graphics were really bad and they wanted to make it obvious she was supposed to be a woman. I can't see how it was about sexual gratification if I'm honest, she was just pixels, she never looked realistic enough to be sexually appealing at least until it got to Tomb Raider Legend anyway.

A lot of female characters in recent games actually have been going down a more realistic route anyway. If you look at Lara Croft in the last Tomb Raider, her figure was still athletic (which makes sense, she's an athletic character) but more realistically proportioned and practically dressed, and the same goes for the females in the Uncharted series and the females in The Last of Us. Hell, the main female character in The Last of Us was a teenage girl who obviously wasn't going to be sexually objectified, outside Japan anyway. I think it's a broad sweeping statement to accuse the entire gaming industry of perpetuating body consciousness.

[Nope]

Although I agree that it would be good to have more realistic choices (and certainly that there should be less objectification of women), I think many people fail to realize why things like Barbie look the way they do.  When looking at something in miniature, it is harder to see detail, and so characteristics are often exaggerated to make them more apparent.  Barbie is not intended to be realistic; she is intended to be obviously female.  She is also way too small to be a real woman.  If she were realistic, she would be several feet tall.  But that would not make her suitable for her intended purpose.

The same idea applies to anything viewed on a small screen.  To make it easy to distinguish between male and female, characteristics need to be exaggerated.  If we were looking at life-size images, then no exaggeration would be necessary to have the normal ability to distinguish between male and female.  But in miniature, in order to have the same immediacy of being able to distinguish between male and female, distinguishing characteristics must be exaggerated.

That is an interesting point. Also, the first Laura is from an earlier version of the game. The current Laura is still beautiful but doesn't look so extreme.




This Laura is still fit but her proportions are within the realm of possibility.