Sexuality, Pretty Pictures, Objectification February 23, 2007
Posted by Ian in Community, Cool Links, Long but coherent, Personal Reflection.add a comment
Okay, so there is this neat discussion going on over here at Yud’s Dice. It’s spread out all over the place, though, so I wanted to come back over here and think things through a little more coherently in my own space.
This is in part a response to what is happening over there and in part a response to a conversation with my darling wife in regards to what is happening over there (hey Kim;). For that reason, I’m just going to try and break this down into ideas rather than responses to individuals.
What I like most about the post is the emphasis on the volume of examples of objectification. It isn’t deeply problematic for an occasional bit of objectification to appear and may even be ‘honest’ in the sense that, like it or not, we are bodies and sometimes it’s nice to just have that pointed out.
However, for that to become common indicates something problematic. Like Nietzsche, we ought to find something unhealthy in any thing that seems to be repeated over and over. I also want to expand a little more on what is problematic about the forms of objectification going on.
Rather than look at the Conan covers, though, I want to look at those Exalted covers, the shift from 1e to 2e. To zoom in on the Jade Exalted Brand has already highlighted is revealing. Both versions display attractive, pleasing bodies. Both even present what look to be idealized and attractive bodies.
2e, though, reinterprets that body in a profoundly sexual manner. Her clothing, her curves, all are exaggerated to emphasize sexiness pure and simple. The sidebar images just drive that home, you see things like sexy elf lady. Moreover, their bodies are positioned so that their most sexualized features dominate the composition.
Medium and message talk is pretty important here. These are roleplaying games, and these are all supposed to be exemplars for the sorts of roles players could take. That the dominant female characters are displayed with hyper-sexualized bodies therefore sends out a certain message about the sort of female characters in the game. That they are the sexy first and foremost.
The slippage that occurs between 1e and 2e is telling. Both images are aimed at a viewer, are objects for a viewer. They are objects, quite literally, meant for visual appreciation. Both are of attractive and sexy women. However, in the 2e cover, her appearance is all about her sexuality, whereas in the 1e, her sexuality is a side-effect of her overall idealized body, not her maxed out T&A action.
The 1e version is also holding out her bow in a manner that suggests she is about to *do* something with it, that she is active and capable. This is very much in keeping with traditional representations of men in the genre. To the extent that they are objectified positively, it is as active and capable.
This is a good point to drive home. Male figures are exaggerated and objectified in the genre, but so as to emphasize what they are capable of. Rogues are willowy, suggestive of their grace and sneakiness. Soldiers are huge or armored or well-armed, suggesting their toughness and power. Wizards have white beards to show they are old and knowledgeable.
What does it say when the female character who is supposed to be their equal is exaggerated primarily in a sexual fashion? Well, if you apply the same tools you applied to the male figures, then it says the female character is really about her sexiness, really about what she has to offer as an object of desire.
It isn’t even a question of whether her body is being offered up to us or not for our fantasied consumption. It is simply a question of the values that are being instantiated in the presentation of these women. Why have we zoomed in on these very narrow, sexual elements to define these female characters?
They aren’t the only beautiful bodies out there, so it can’t be because we just want to appreciate the female form. Nor is that hyper-clingy clothing the only way to accentuate a beautiful body. Sure, nothing wrong with some pictures that playfully exaggerate sexy bits, but why so few exaggerating other beautiful parts of the body? Moreover, why so little variety on the covers, which are the ‘face’ the book presents to its audience?
[Old Thoughts] Memories of the Ol’ Hobbying Hole February 9, 2007
Posted by Ian in Applied, Cool Links, Old Thoughts, Personal Reflection.add a comment
[Someone, somewhere mentioned McCloud on Story-Games. I'm too lazy to pin down the source, but it made me want to dig this up from my old blog. While I was at it, I just decided to repost it in its not so glorious original form. First posted February 9, 2006.]
I spent a few hours the other day flipping through my wife’s copy of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. It’s a good book and the fact that it uses the comic book medium to explain comic books is just smart. You not only learn about comics but see the concepts illustrated in the explanation itself (we call that ‘performative’ where I come from).
Now, there is a lot to be said about this book, but I want to zoom in on a particular observation—that one way to maximize the empathy we have for a character is to make the character’s depiction as simple as possible. The fewer the details composing the character, the easier it is for us to put ourselves in their shoes, the more room we have to ‘live’ through that character. He cites a couple of major works like Tin Tin and Cerebrus that employ this technique, but you really don’t have to go any further than the smiling and frowning bubbles that populate Zoloft commercials to appreciate his point. How difficult is it not to feel for the little buggers? I have talked a lot about my intellectual interest in gaming, but this reminds me of another very important aspect of it—all the imaginative pictures.
When I was wee gamer in a city far away, I spent a lot of time hanging around my favorite hobby shop (Titan Games & Comics) poring over games and it isn’t the rules that I remember most clearly. It’s all the illustrations (interior and exterior) and the suggestive taglines that accompanied them. I didn’t buy games primarily for their rules, but for the hope that the rules would capture the magic created by the juxtaposition of text and word. They didn’t even have to be well-drawn pictures and well-written text to capture my imagination. They touched on an amorphous reservoir of dreams, a mysterious place occupied by half-formed beings waiting for the right invitation to enter my conscious mind.
McCloud also made me consider something else—if you want a good roleplaying experience, one in which the players get in character, you probably shouldn’t go overboard in getting them to describe their characters. The best characters to roleplay are probably iconic in one way or another, composed of a few basic characteristics that indicate something of their character—character description a la Charles Dickens, if you will. That leaves the player the most room to live in their character, to invest them with life. Too much description and backstory gives the player too much rope—they spend all their time trying to put all the pieces together and not living them. The intellectual exercise of that may be fun, too, but it is a different sort of fun than straight roleplaying. I suspect the same goes for plots and npc’s on the DM’s end. Use description to sketch a world, drawing in detail only where it gives the players more room to act, to extend their involvement in the world. Maybe just sketch out the basics and let the players actions determine what else gets fleshed out. This goes to the recent decisions by Wizards of the Coast to keep flavor text short.
Roleplaying by another name September 18, 2006
Posted by Ian in Applied, Cool Links, Theory.add a comment
So, I’m reading this discussion and thinking that ‘our’ games can offer plenty to this person. She is clearly involved in telling a story, even if that story is primarily of a sexual nature. She, too, clearly wants some sort of definitive substance to her stories.
I’m thinking that the sort of mechanic I have been working out for 3am could have application to a set of rules geared primarily toward freeform experiences like this one. With the right character sheet, with the right sort of narration rules, the token economy could totally regulate this sort of story. It isn’t high on my list of gaming to-do’s, but I think it is so possible.
Think about the kinds of narration–they could be retooled to focus on a story like hers. You rotate the sheet to indicate the kind of narrations you want to be having–this side for lead-in stories, this side for the juicy bits, and so on.
A neat link on immersion August 18, 2006
Posted by Ian in Cool Links.add a comment
Look at this thread at Story Games. It has a lot of cool things going on, not the least of which is the way it pulls out some incredibly nifty ideas about immersion and system complexity. I, of course, see a fascinating T-F triangulation thing going on. Gencon and a post-Gencon flu have me worn down, but I’ll be back posting soon.
