Action Ladies in High Heels: This is way worse than just a possible broken ankle.

So something’s been really stickin in my craw lately. Enough to get me out of my posting hibernation even!

I really, really hate seeing female action characters running around in heels. It screams objectification to me and really just turns up the “HEY LADIES YOU CAN BE STRONG AND STUFF, BUT FIRST YOU GOTS TO BE SEXAY” message to 11. And it’s freaking everywhere right now.

Black Widow in the latest Cap Movie went into multiple situations where it was known before hand that the likelihood of seeing some action was very high. AND SHE STILL WORE HIGH HEELED BOOTS.

This is during the long action sequence in which she literally jumps off a bridge.

Sexual Dimorphism, Multimorphism, or Omnimorphism? – Character Design in MMOs Part 3

Previously we talked about the not-actually-real gender binary and how it’s represented in MMOs, with a particular interest in gender identity.  Today we’re going to talk more about this false binary but with a concentration on the genre’s insistence on extreme sexual dimorphism between male and female characters of a given race. Some games are notorious for the drastic differences between male and female characters and some games have races that flip the script or avoid it altogether. However, confining ourselves to two body types is, by definition, keeping us stuck in binary thinking. What are our options for breaking out of the boring binary and have any games attempted something like this before?

Depicting Gender: Character design in MMOs – Part 1

With the announcement of Everquest Next this weekend, I have been thinking a lot about how MMOs handle gender presentation in their character designs. Not that I don’t think a lot about this anyways, but I have been thinking about it in the context of how I really want to see a next gen MMO handle character design and customization. Character customization in games has always run the gamut from single player games like God of War with a single protagonist with a defined appearance and personality playing through a predetermined story line to games like SPORE where the player literally creates the character by taking them through the evolutionary path from single celled organisms to inter stellar system civilizations. For MMOs though, it’s all about creating you, or at least an avatar or character you dreamt up, and playing them within the world the game designers have built. That’s their bread and butter. All the raids, gear drops, quests, and class balancing that they’re always going on about are all just in service to that one idea: getting you, or the character you want to play, into their game world.

They said they were going to give you the choice between bikini armor and full coverage armor and maybe they will. But experience from every other game says this will not end well.

But what happens when the game design limits the player on who they’re allowed to be?