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Dexter

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An in-depth look into modern game design: http://www.gearboxsoftware.com/community/articles/1077

Inside the Box: Inclusivity 08.26.13 - Anthony Burch
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Inside the Box serves as a forum for individuals involved in the production of Gearbox Software content to share personal motives, methods, process and results. Gearbox Software projects are created by a diverse range of individuals spanning a spectrum of different backgrounds, interests, objectives and world views. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Gearbox Software or any of its individual members outside of the author.

Hi, I’m Anthony Burch, lead writer of Borderlands 2 and its DLC. And today I’m going to talk about inclusivity.

I went to the #1ReasonToBe panel at Game Developers Conference this year, and something Mattie Brice said stood out to me:

“…[developers] are not explicitly saying “you are welcome here,” and because not, we assume we aren’t welcome. That is such an easy thing to correct.”

Upon hearing that, I wanted to clearly state the following: you are welcome here. Regardless of your race, gender, religion or sexual orientation, I personally want Gearbox to be an open and welcoming place to you. I can only speak for myself, of course – I'm just a jerkbag writer who's been in the industry for less than five years – but I believe that you can see evidence of attempts at inclusivity throughout Borderlands 2.

A WARNING: It's entirely likely that this article will come off incredibly arrogant, self-congratulatory, and condescending. You're going to see a lot of "I wanted to do this" and "I feel that this is important," not because I want to take credit for all of the things mentioned in this article (the vast majority of coolness I'm going to discuss comes from our artists and the voice actors), but because I don't want to speak for anybody else. Discussions about inclusivity can get pretty hairy pretty quickly, and I don't want to put words in anyone's mouth. Again: this may all come off as irritating and self-congratulatory, and I'm sorry about that.

So, yes. I wanna talk about inclusivity in Borderlands 2, but I also wanna point out that the following examples aren’t perfect, by any means. After all, I haven't forgotten that Borderlands 2 was rightfully mentioned in Anita Sarkeesian's (extremely intelligent and important) Tropes vs Women in Video Games series and I will make it my goal to never be highlighted in such a context again. Like I said, I'm just a jerkbag writer – I still have a long way to go, and I need all the help I can get. Please feel free to suggest how I can improve either by hitting the forums or by emailing me at insidethebox@gearboxsoftware.com

Anyway! With those hojillion caveats aside: let's talk about inclusivity in Borderlands 2. Let's talk about characters like Ellie.

Ellie specifically bucks against the stereotypes that all female video game characters must conform to mass-market definitions of beauty (not to mention, if I can digress for a moment, the fact that even our more conventionally attractive characters like Lilith and Maya still have infinitely more realistic proportions than most games).



Her look, concepted by Matias Tapia, is considerably more realistic than most female video game NPCs. She exists not as eye candy for some assumed type of (heterosexual, male, 18-27 year old) player, but as a character in and of herself – a character who finds herself beautiful, and refuses to be the butt of anyone’s joke. Ever.

This is why when you first meet her, Ellie is squashing a guy in a car crusher and mockingly ignoring his insults as she pulls the lever. She definitely has to deal with insults about her body on a daily basis, but she refuses to give them any credence: she likes the way she looks, and that’s pretty much all that matters (this is basically the theme of the sidequest “Positive Self Image” where a bunch of bandits make hood ornaments of Ellie’s likeness in an attempt to mock her size, but she thinks the ornaments are so awesome that she asks you to kill the bandits and bring them back to her). Anyone who wants to argue with that, in Ellie’s opinion, is just plain wrong. She considers conventional definitions of beauty limiting, and ultimately pointless.

When I see cosplay like this, I feel stupendously happy, and ludicrously proud of the art team who created Ellie (Concept – Matias Tapia, Character Model / Texture – Kevin Penrod, Rigging – Ryan Metcalf, Animation – Dia Hadley, Jimmie Jackson, James Houchen, Josh Rearick). I love knowing that Hija found Ellie cool, inspiring, or relatable enough to cosplay as her.

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Axton the Commando

We also have a few gay or bisexual characters in Borderlands 2. Sir Hammerlock is gay – you’re given a quest to find some old audio recordings by Hammerlock’s ex-boyfriend – and had an entire DLC all to himself. I’m also happy to say that in Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep, we confirm that Mister Torgue (an NPC who also had a DLC named after him) and Axton (our playable Commando class) are bisexual.

In a slightly-related story, Axton had some bi-curious dialog in the main game due to a slight hiccup in the writing process. Initially, I wrote a bunch of character-specific reviving dialog so that if you revived Sal while playing as Axton, he might say, “on your feet, soldier,” but if you revived Maya, he’d say, “woah – do you, uh, work out?” We didn’t end up actually getting the character-specific code implemented but the lines all stayed, so in the released game you can revive any male character and Axton still has a small chance to hit on him. After we mentioned this in an interview and some people on our forums expressed a bit of disappointment that he wasn’t intentionally bisexual, I put some more overt dialog in Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep to confirm that, actually, yes – dude is bisexual.

Now, why are these characters gay or bisexual? The answer is simple: we wanted to make our cast more diverse and inclusive, and it cost us effectively nothing to do so. We’ve received only a few negative emails or forum feedback about these characters. In fact, the positive feedback far outweighed the negative feedback – how often can you say that on the Internet – and by being more inclusive, we’ve potentially increased our audience. In the future, I’d like to be even more overt in discussing the sexuality of gay or bisexual characters (as this blog post by Robert Yang points out, the “just mention that they’re gay but don’t make a big deal out of it” style of characterization can be limiting in its own way), but these first tiny steps are still worthwhile, in my opinion.

Switching gears for a moment, I want to point out this amazing email about a Borderlands 2 NPC named Karima, who is a chronic stutterer:

I was playing Borderlands 2 today when I came across the NPC Karima in the medicine man mission. At first I was a bit angry she had a stutter –I was hit in the head with shrapnel from an IED in al-anbar Iraq and have problems talking – because the stereotypes surrounding stutterers are not kind. Communication is one of the defining pieces of humanity and when you cannot communicate to those around you, they tend to view you as lesser. I can’t tell my daughter I love her without struggling through those 3 little words. I quickly realized the mission was written such and clearly illustrated just how evil Hyperion is. She was a very sympathetic character. Whoever wrote this went 180 degrees away from what I thought was going to happen in this case. Thank you. In a game where bat shit craziness is the norm – the writers injected a very subtle bit of humanity. For whatever reason, this really struck me. Thank you for taking the high road here. You skipped over cheap laughs here and in so doing made a big impact. Thank you.​
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Karima
Now, I’ll be completely honest – when writing the character of Karima, I did not intend to get this reaction. Karima stutters purely because, while you never meet her in person, we needed to give the player some sense that Hyperion’s presence had harmed her in some way. Giving her a stutter made her affliction clear, and allowed for an easy way to show the player’s actions had meaning – after the first mission, she no longer stutters. Nobody comments on it or mocks her for it because it honestly never occurred to me. In fact, the only mockery Karima receives are gendered insults from a misogynist named Dave, who ends the quest by dying violently (because, like the bandits Ellie crushes to death, I take great pleasure in making bigots and sexists pay for their douchery).

After reading this email, however, I can say with some certainty that if Karima ever shows up again, she will have her stutter back – permanently – and we will continue to write her exactly as we did before. The knowledge that something we did (however unintentionally) touched someone in this kind of personal way is, to say the least, pretty damned great. This email showed me the power of inclusivity in all of its forms.​

And just in case this article isn’t already too self-serving, I’ll close with a tidbit from Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep.
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Lilith

I’ve found the whole “fake geek girl” thing alternately interesting and depressing, so there’s a quest about it in Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep. It’s called “Fake Geek Guy,” because my writing is about as subtle as a sledgehammer. To the face. Of your grandmother. Anyway, “Fake Geek Guy” consists of Mister Torgue (a big, muscly dude) having to prove to Lilith (a woman) that he is a true geek and not just feigning interest in tabletop roleplaying because it’s popular. Though Lilith has her reasons for being skeptical of Torgue (“When I was a kid,” she said, “everybody made fun of me for two reasons: my tattoos, and my love of tabletop RPGs”), she’s incredibly mean and condescending to him. In the end, Lilith learns that Torgue shouldn’t have to prove himself and lets him join in the festivities.

My hopes – in my case my incredibly unsubtle summary of my incredibly unsubtle story didn’t make it clear – are twofold. Firstly, I hope some of the guys who beat the “fake geek girl” drum in the past will in some way empathize with Torgue, and therefore with any woman who has ever been on the other side of that argument. Secondly, I hope women – especially the ones accused of being fake geeks – will find something to sympathize with.

In the end, I’d like to be even more inclusive going forward – I want the casts of games I write to get even more diverse. I can only hope that the steps I've mentioned here are good ones, and that this article makes it clear that whoever you are – whatever your background, or race, or gender, or religion, or sexual orientation, or mental or physical condition – you are welcome here.

anthonyburch5isbt.png

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This guy is just the treasure-trove that keeps on giving: http://www.heyash.com/in-defense-of-arbitrary-diversity/
In Defense of Arbitrary Diversity
Posted by Anthony in Borderlands 2, Inclusivity, Videogames on September 21st, 2013

I’ve had a few conversations as of late about random things — Doctor Who, Borderlands, James Bond — that have all revolved around some version of the following argument/counterargument pair:

ARGUMENT: You know, it’d be great if more mainstream media had ethnically or sexually diverse casts.

COUNTERARGUMENT: Yes, that would be great, but one must not forget that one shouldn’t just throw in minorities for for no reason. Doctor Who/Borderlands/James Bond/whatever comes off phony when they arbitrarily start throwing minorities around just to show how progressive they are. It feels condescending and arbitrary.

I’d like to make an argument to the counterargument:

So what?


I’ve been told once or twice that the bisexual or gay characters I wrote for Borderlands 2 were arbitrary and forced. This is one hundred percent true. I did not have any particular stories to tell about human sexuality — I just randomly chose a few characters and decided that they weren’t heterosexual. I had no “reason” to do so other than the belief that a cast of sexually diverse characters is better than a sexually homogenous one.

Did it hurt the story? Maybe. Maybe it feels arbitrary that certain female characters mention their wives, or that certain male characters just happen to have several occasions to mention their boyfriends. I’d like to think that I knew this might have been a problem when I wrote the characters in the first place — that by making the cast more diverse and drawing attention to it, I’d be making the story worse.

On the upside, though — and this is going to sound tremendously arrogant, but stick with me for a few more paragraphs – while arbitrarily diverse casts might make the story worse, they make world better. Not the in-fiction world, either; I mean, you know, the world. The actual one. The one you and I are in. Real life.

I feel this way, quite simply, because of the following video:


Diversity is important not just so the groups you represent through characters can have someone to identify with (though that’s also pretty great), but also so the majority can see them in a positive light. It was important that black people could see Uhura and identify with her, but it was just as important that white people saw her as an equally talented, intelligent, important member of the crew. Pop culture is an incredibly ubiquitous and powerful tool that artists can use to shape their audience’s perception of the world in ways both bad (many parents think children are kidnapped and murdered with alarming frequency, when in reality your kid is more likely to be struck by lightning)* and good.

If you believe as I do that art can change the way people look at the world, then arbitrary diversity can only be a good thing (assuming the minority characters you write are positive and interesting in their own ways, of course, but that’s a different challenge). If a writer arbitrarily makes a particular character a transgender, homosexual woman rather than a cisgender, heterosexual man, and if that character has a positive effect on an audience’s perception of transgender women — no matter how small the effect — then that writer has made the world a slightly better place.

So what if it’s arbitrary? So what if you make your audience acknowledge that a character is black, or gay, or transgender? No one ever complains about the other 99.9% of media “forcing” heterosexual male whiteness down anyone’s throats, so why should a black Doctor Who be considered arbitrary and forced whereas another white Doctor wouldn’t be? Arguments like this imply that there are only two reasonable courses of action. One: make your story about meaningful diversity — build everything around the experiences of whatever minority group you’ve chosen and explore it fully. Two: don’t include any underrepresented groups and make all your characters “normal”, because to do otherwise would be distracting and forced.

To which I say: bullshit. I’d rather be arbitrary than maintain the status quo through inaction.

Now, non-arbitrary diversity is obviously way better than arbitrary diversity on the whole making-the-world-a-better-place front (I imagine it’s pretty hard to come away from Gone Home or Mainichi without a more coherent, specific, and empathetic view of lesbians and transgender women, respectively) , but Nichelle Nichols’ anecdote tells me that every little bit helps. Uhura’s role could have easily been filled by a white male — there’s nothing quintessentially black or feminine about the role she plays on the ship — but because it wasn’t, the world got a little bit better.

UPDATE: A few commenters have pointed out that Mae Jemison, the first black woman to travel in space, specifically cited Uhura as a personal inspiration for her decision to become an astronaut. Which is cool.

*Commenter Blaze has pointed out this is false. My bad.
 

Declinator

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This guy is just the treasure-trove that keeps on giving: http://www.heyash.com/in-defense-of-arbitrary-diversity/
I’ve been told once or twice that the bisexual or gay characters I wrote for Borderlands 2 were arbitrary and forced. This is one hundred percent true. I did not have any particular stories to tell about human sexuality — I just randomly chose a few characters and decided that they weren’t heterosexual. I had no “reason” to do so other than the belief that a cast of sexually diverse characters is better than a sexually homogenous one.

Did it hurt the story? Maybe. Maybe it feels arbitrary that certain female characters mention their wives, or that certain male characters just happen to have several occasions to mention their boyfriends. I’d like to think that I knew this might have been a problem when I wrote the characters in the first place — that by making the cast more diverse and drawing attention to it, I’d be making the story worse.

It's disgusting when people compromise stories because they want to inject real world issues in them.

I've never played Borderlands 2 and after reading that I surely never will (not that it was likely anyway.)
 

DalekFlay

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There's nothing particularly wrong with the first article there, it's just kind of a silly focus to have. He doesn't say you can't have parody or sexy chicks, which is my main issue with these people, he just wants to include more variance. I mean... I get why his tone and overbearing focus is annoying.

I didn't read the second one.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
And this is why gaming is going ever further away from being a valid form of art, despite all the claims of the idiot game journalists. No self-respecting writer would make a character homosexual just for diversity's sake and then let him mention this fact dozens of times throughout the story, when it is completely irrelevant to anything that is happening. It's just yelling "LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME I AM TOLERANT AND SHARE MODERN LIBERAL VALUES", any retarded hack can do that.

A much better way to do it is the J.K. Rowling style. "So, that Dumbledore character whom all you fans like and considered as a father figure... he's a faggot. Bye."
 

Machocruz

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If I were a layman, I'd think 'geeks' were the most pathetic creatures in the world after reading that article. Being called "fake geek girl" -- truly a pressing issue on this Earth. These wimps are going to be butthurt for the rest of their lives because someone said some not nice things to them in high school. No,they didn't make fun of you just because played you tabletop RPGs, they made fun of you because you were probably an annoying, obsessive social retard who wouldn't shut the fuck up about tabletop RPGs, even when the conversation had nothing to do with tabletop RPGs. And maybe if these "fake geek girls" didn't belabor the point of how they're so into Xbox and Doctor Who, they wouldn't come off as try-hard (ie fake) and get trolled by the boys.

And this guy takes self deprecation to all new heights (or lows may be more appropriate). Just comes off as a slimy worm trying to look the humble nerd while being highly opinionated and holier-than-thou. Smarmy little git. And a hack writer who doesn't respect the integrity of his craft or have any capacity for nuance. Gee, too many thin supermodels in games, let's go to the other extreme and have this disgusting fatbody character represent "realistic" women. There are no women in between these two poles, clearly. Oh, and if you're going to represent "realistic" women, how about hire someone who understands anatomy and can render a convincing looking fat person, instead of this Pokemon shitI see up above.

These geeks, or this particular breed of geek, want to lower the bar so that losers like them can be winners to. Has any culture ever celebrated mediocrity to this extent? They want everyone to come down to their level so that they don't have to do the work required to elevate themselves. And if anyone makes an effort to make themselves look better or improve their social status/skills, they're superficial and conforming to society's expectations. It's a cult of inadequacy.

I'm surprised people like this even dare leave their homes without their crash helmets on.
 
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Tehdagah

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There's nothing particularly wrong with the first article there, it's just kind of a silly focus to have. He doesn't say you can't have parody or sexy chicks, which is my main issue with these people, he just wants to include more variance. I mean... I get why his tone and overbearing focus is annoying.

I didn't read the second one.
Except this part:

Her look, concepted by Matias Tapia, is considerably more realistic than most female video game NPCs.
0023c4a19fcaa329c38b47f38c9c33ce7ddd0a62_600x338.jpg

"realistic"

Let's all sing "Hail diversity!":

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She exists not as eye candy for some assumed type of (heterosexual, male, 18-27 year old) player, but as a character in and of herself – a character who finds herself beautiful, and refuses to be the butt of anyone’s joke. Ever.
Characters can't exist for themselves; they are creations, afterall.

Ellie specifically bucks against the stereotypes that all female video game characters must conform to mass-market definitions of beauty (not to mention, if I can digress for a moment, the fact that even our more conventionally attractive characters like Lilith and Maya still have infinitely more realistic proportions than most games)

It's worth pointing that most videogame female characters have a healthier fat distribution than her. That evil mass-market definition of beauty! :mad:
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
It's worth pointing that most videogame female characters have a healthier fat distribution than her. That evil mass-market definition of beauty! :mad:

Do you have anything against people with an unhealthy lifestyle? Are you, by any chance, a healthist?
 

Coriolanus

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If I were a layman, I'd think 'geeks' were the most pathetic creatures in the world after reading that article. Being called "fake geek girl" -- truly a pressing issue on this Earth. These wimps are going to be butthurt for the rest of their lives because someone said some not nice things to them in high school. No,they didn't make fun of you just because played you tabletop RPGs, they made fun of you because you were probably an annoying, obsessive social retard who wouldn't shut the fuck up about tabletop RPGs, even when the conversation had nothing to do with tabletop RPGs. And maybe if these "fake geek girls" didn't belabor the point of how they're so into Xbox and Doctor Who, they wouldn't come off as try-hard (ie fake) and get trolled by the boys.

Eh, you don't need to flaunt your hobbies to be ostracized in mid/high-school. Just not being like everyone else and not hanging out with the popular group can be enough to get you branded as a loser and a target for bullying. Of course it differs from school to school - some cases may go to physical extremes to humiliate a kid who is rumored to have a "weird" hobby, others will have a very supportive and cohesive group of kids who actually fight to squish out potential bullies? At least that was my experience.
 

Machocruz

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Eh, you don't need to flaunt your hobbies to be ostracized in mid/high-school. Just not being like everyone else and not hanging out with the popular group can be enough to get you branded as a loser and a target for bullying. Of course it differs from school to school - some cases may go to physical extremes to humiliate a kid who is rumored to have a "weird" hobby, others will have a very supportive and cohesive group of kids who actually fight to squish out potential bullies? At least that was my experience.

You aren't wrong. But the constant complaining in their adult years is the thing that gets to me, and they won't acknowledge the possibility that some of them maybe had major character flaws that put them into that position. Some kids have serious issues that they can't help and wind up as targets because of that, but I'm not talking about them.

I was by no means popular in school. I had looks and muscles (which took concerted effort, btw), so I was probably spared some of the more extreme disrespect. But I was also a ball buster, a smart ass, stubborn, and sardonic. I did inappropriate, immature shit like read comic books in class. I carried my junior high attitude (from unresolved issues I had no way of seeing clearly, and was too proud to express my feelings to anyone who was able to help me) into high school. I had a chip on my shoulder towards girls because of a couple of rotten eggs, and was obnoxious towards and around girls in general. I accept my situation then as part of my own making. I didn't make any effort to meet society half way. I did what I wanted or was too laid back to care, and if anyone had a problem, I told them to fuck off, consequences be damned.

I see a lot of stubborness in these people. They think they shouldn't have to change a bit. They want society to conform to them. They have all this vitriol and sarcasm on the 'net, but in the real world don't give as good as they get. I loathe passive agressive cowards. They never pushed back in reality, never fought for respect.

Further, don't let some of these gamers/geeks/liberals/etc. fool you. They're social justice warriors online, but in real life they're as close minded, narcissistic, cliquish and bigoted as any other group they claim to be more progressive then. I've encountered straight up racism at places like Games Workshop when I walked in there with some of the blacks and Puerto Ricans I know who are into PnP, and no one can even tell what ethnicity I am, so that doesn't help.
 

Redlands

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The sad truth of the matter is minorities are going to get crap coverage in games because writers for games (and in general, let's face it) are usually terrible. Poor writers often make a bad situation worse. Either they're not part of the minority, and just end up using caricatures without doing any research, or they are and they think that makes them an expert.

One really good example is the difference in how gay characters are handled in two Agatha Christie TV adaptations: the Miss Marple series from the mid-80s to early 90s compared some of the more recent series of Poirot.

In at least two Miss Marple stories, there are obviously gay characters: The Moving Finger has a gay antiques dealer, and A Murder Is Announced has a middle-aged lesbian couple. It's never explicitly said in either book or adaptation that they're gay, but it's pretty heavily implied. And, in both the characters are pretty believable. The guy in The Moving Finger is a bit smarmy and effeminate, but he isn't totally odious and his gayness isn't shoved down our throats. The couple in A Murder Is Announced are some of the more amusing characters, and when one of them gets murdered and the other becomes extremely upset, you'd probably feel for the surviving one, especially when she learns who the murderer was. This doesn't even go into the fact this series had a black doctor, and quite a few black supporting characters in A Caribbean Mystery that all worked very well.

Compare that to the gay characters in the Cards on the Table and Five Little Pigs adaptations. Both have characters changed to be gay, which is a bit annoying, but in either case could have worked (the characters were changed in logical ways)... except the writing in the newer Poirot series has none of the subtlety or charm or attention to detail that the original series had, and the writing and acting quality have taken a huge downturn (even by David Suchet, which is really unfortunate as he basically *is* Poirot).

Unsurprisingly, minority characters written by good writers who put them in as normal people with actual backgrounds that go beyond "female/black/gay/disabled" tend turn out better than people shoe-horning in minority characters in place for reasons of fulfilling diversity quotas.
 

lightbane

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There's nothing particularly wrong with the first article there, it's just kind of a silly focus to have. He doesn't say you can't have parody or sexy chicks, which is my main issue with these people, he just wants to include more variance. I mean... I get why his tone and overbearing focus is annoying.

I didn't read the second one.
Except this part:

Her look, concepted by Matias Tapia, is considerably more realistic than most female video game NPCs.
0023c4a19fcaa329c38b47f38c9c33ce7ddd0a62_600x338.jpg

"realistic"

Ellie specifically bucks against the stereotypes that all female video game characters must conform to mass-market definitions of beauty (not to mention, if I can digress for a moment, the fact that even our more conventionally attractive characters like Lilith and Maya still have infinitely more realistic proportions than most games)

It's worth pointing that most videogame female characters have a healthier fat distribution than her. That evil mass-market definition of beauty! :mad:

Funnily enough, if I recall correctly in Condemned 1, the female companion wasn't a super-model, she was a bit plump, had glasses and an overall average look.. Which probably makes her more hot in retrospect. The main character wasn't much better as well, although at least he wasn't a ridiculously muscled space marine. Why didn't anyone mention her instead of that unhealthy ball of fat?
 

FeelTheRads

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She exists not as eye candy for some assumed type of (heterosexual, male, 18-27 year old) player

:lol:

What the fuck does that mean? When you turn 27 you're supposed to turn homosexual? Or you're supposed to turn "mature" and like ugly women instead? Or you're just supposed to lose your sex drive? I don't know, because neither happened to me and I'm afraid I might not have followed a normal path in life. :roll:
 

Redlands

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Messages
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She exists not as eye candy for some assumed type of (heterosexual, male, 18-27 year old) player

:lol:

What the fuck does that mean? When you turn 27 you're supposed to turn homosexual? Or you're supposed to turn "mature" and like ugly women instead? Or you're just supposed to lose your sex drive? I don't know, because neither happened to me and I'm afraid I might not have followed a normal path in life. :roll:

I think what they mean is that that is the supposed demographic for most of the big budget games like GTA V, MW, CODBLOPS, etc. Essentially the market for AAA titles is like Logan's Run: once you turn thirty, you get Red Ring of Death'd and no longer matter.

Unless, of course, you had some taste to begin with, in which case they bump you off early.
 

Bradylama

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An obvious question that could only be posed by a man who hasn't read enough hentai.
 

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