Video Games Still Have a (Body) Image Problem
You knew this gif was going to be here somewhere. We may as well get it out of the way early.
I like men. The games industry likes men too, considering over 80% of the lead video game characters from the last five years are men. And while that is an excessive amount of men, the excess doesn't seem to extend far beyond one archetype. The buff hero. This is silly. Men come in many shapes and sizes, and they can all be heroes. The time has come for the industry to leave the outdated body standards of the past in the past, and start to explore narratives without six-packs.
Even the hero of time gets chilly!
I’m a pretty skinny guy. Take Link from Breath of the Wild, add a few inches and some ginger hair and you have me. In most cases, when a lead male character isn't a buff dude, they look like me instead. Examples include Link, Prompto from Final Fantasy and literally every elven race ever. This, to me, does show a slight willingness to shift away from the ‘perfect male body’ that has been pushed by pretty much the whole western culture for the past few decades, but this isn’t exactly a great leap in representation.
The main issue with the ‘twink’ archetype, for me, comes with the lack of variation. A pretty obvious one would be body hair. Most men naturally come with a little bit of fluff. The sheer lack of any kind of body hair on any of these guys is wild. Is there someone who travels through the multiverse with a waxing kit and an armpit vendetta? People have hair! Even scrawny lads! If someone is in the wilderness for weeks on end, their hair is going to grow back, it may be somewhat patchy and nowhere near a Seal Team Six beard but it would most certainly be noticeable. On top of that it isn’t like this is a case of ‘oh, well, they shave!’ - they’re trying to save the world, grooming wouldn't really be top of the list.
Two points:
1. DmC: Devil May Cry is still great. Don’t listen to people that say it isn’t.
2. DO NOT GOOGLE “TWINK DANTE” WITH SAFESEARCH OFF!
As I said, I am a skinny human. A pretty common thing for guys like me is a little pooch of fat on my belly - pretty much everyone in the world has one. It's a super common place for fat to sit…Unless you happen to be a video game character. None of them have this. Again, this may seem like a small thing, but when you present an unrealistic body lacking in imperfection over and over again, it causes issues for the people you are representing. It caused issues for me, that I can attest to. When you see it over and over and over, things like this can subconsciously go from being an unrealistic representation, to you feeling like you’re the one out of place. Every time I see this in a AAA game it feels like a knife in the back of realistic body standards.
Every character is this image is so incredibly loveable… Especially the doggo with the bandana.
Games have a diverse audience and it would be healthy if they started showing more positive diversity in their character’s bodies. A great example of this is the dating game Dream Daddy. If you never got the chance to play this wonderful game, it's the story of a man moving to a new city with his daughter and finding love with one of seven hot dads. Utterly beautiful game, and that summarisation of the game extends to its character and body diversity. My favorite dad is Brian - he's a big, loveable, bearded dude and the whole romance is based around your ‘dad rivalry’. There's also Damien, who is a trans man, who is more on the skinny side.
The key here is how these characters are treated. Too often in games are men who are not the stereotypical buff guy fall into some other stereotype that aligns with their body; the fat guy is comedy relief or the skinny guy is shy and quiet. In Dream Daddy, these men are not only equal to their buff counterparts, they are characters beyond their dimensions. Using a character’s body to portray something negative is something I am not a fan of - for example, in Cyperpunk 2077, Finn “Fingers” Gerstatt is presented as a creepy, queer-coded minor villain. He is also very skinny, which is used as a way of reinforcing that queer-coding theme of the character, as some have an association between a lack of masculinity with queer men, hence the lack of muscle. His body is being used as a weapon to characterise him, and it’s a painful trend found in lots of different games and genres. This poor technique was recently employed in Resident Evil 8, with the Duke and his creepy mannerisms, poor hygiene and ill-fitting clothes all to bring attention to his size and paint it as some kind of morally wrong thing. The message here is pretty clear; don’t use people's bodies to vilify them.
*googles Finn “Fingers” Gerstatt*
Oh… That is WAAAAAAAY worse than I was expecting… And I was expecting some regressive stuff from CP2077.
All of this is directly tied to a wider issue - the over-sexualisation of video game characters. This has been a massive problem for female characters since games dragged themselves into the polygon era and decided a cylindrical-pyramid was a great shape for Lara Croft’s boobs. A similar issue persists within the presentation of male characters which I think is a key factor in why body representation is so poor in games. Games, like most media, are pressured to adhere to the western view of beauty, which leaves little room for body diversity. The constraints are less on men than they are on women, but you can still see the system at work in the startling lack of plus-sized male protagonists in the medium.
This circles back to my previous point about the ‘twink’ archetype. I know that the reason my body type is appearing in video games is because it's profitable. Look no further than Genshin Impact, a gacha game where pretty much every playable male character could fall into the ‘twink’ mould. Am I happy to see my body type turning up in popular games? Sure, I just wish the only reason it came to be was not because a suit thought it would turn a profit. Diverse body types should be in video games because they exist, not because they can fill pockets. Once you start including body types because they are common in the world, then you start to present even archetypes more realistically and don’t just paint caricature.
We probably could have saved some time by just reposting this image instead of writing all these words, huh?
Video games need to move away from only portraying one-dimensional body types, especially when those body types are often unattainable and unrealistic. Games are a place for everyone, and everyone should get the chance to see themselves in them. Heroes come in many different forms, regardless of age, build, height or physical ability, and if any medium should be primed to portray this, it should be video games.
