I have to ask.  Are there no women on the design teams creating these games?  Could we please have a few?

How this latest musing came about was I was grousing about the dresses at the Oscars — most of them were dead ugly — with a friend and fellow game geek, and we fell to talking about the outfits for female characters in games.  I mentioned how that black leather dress created for a female Shepard in Mass Effect 3 was really tacky and ugly.  And just be sure I remembered it correctly I went to take a look.  And came across a number of YouTube videos of Fem Shep in that dress.  In almost all the videos she was flashing a beaver shot every time she sat down!  There is one in particular where she is flashing Garrus with a crotch shot.  Now I know she’s supposed to be this bad ass soldier and all, but really, guys.  A woman in a really short dress is not going to sit like that.  Please, but her knees together.

And then there’s Miranda’s outfit.  That Asari mercenary wasn’t wrong when she talked about Miranda looking like a whore.  Clearly none of these male designers have ever worn high heels.  You cannot run and fight effectively in spike heels, and Miranda’s boots are ludicrous.  Add to that the fact that all the female characters go into an airless Geth space station wearing a little half mask and their normal clothes while the men are armored like robots.  We could take that as a compliment — that we are, in fact, the superior gender, but it’s silly and takes you out of the game.  In Mass Effect 1 the woman characters wore armor like sensible people.  What happened between game one and two?  Are there no women on the design teams?

Okay, I understand that the demographic is primarily young men so chain mail bikini’s are the norm, but seriously getting objectified in quite such an obvious manner is not a way to endear female players to these games.  This isn’t to say we don’t want to make our characters attractive, and get to play dress up, but have a range of outfits, and for god’s sake take into account how people actually wear cloths.  And if no one in the gaming industry is willing to make that change maybe we can have a little sauce for the goose — a way for us to  put the boys in tight pants and no shirts occasionally, and have them go into battle wearing nothing but a Speedo.  🙂