Hawgh:
The boobs are dead, long live the boobs!

Holly crap, your scaring me. (you'll find out)

And here I was thinking this was a place of high literature, with your forum rules and all. I was doing an mock English exam for year 12 today and there was an article that we had to comment on called The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) (that's why I'm scared) which pretty much said that modern publication has lost all of it's intelligence and the "book-culture" - a culture based on ideas - is dead. I was tempted to point out sites such as this but the question didn't really allow for it. But it's probably a good thing because anyone not in the gaming community would take this and use it to rip the s**t out of us. And I know, stuff what they think, and yes it is a clever allegory, and it did entice me to read, but really? I'm not against it at all, I just though this community would have a bit more dignity. (I like the way the writer assumed that only men would read it; "Boobs brighten our day, make us chuckle as they swing with ludicrous motion and on occasion arouse us in ways we would never admit - especially to our significant others. We love boobs.")

Strangely enough, if the game is of Japanese origin the female characters will have larger breasts. Breasts should not be the main focal point of a game though if you want that you could just google some strange porn games like that on the internet. Its the internet, if you can search for it, the internet will have something like it.

This article was all kinds of amazing.

As if we needed more digs at "those perverted Japanese" on here, when every other thread is devoted to bashing Japanese games for some slight or another.

But anyway, I have a default bias against any game that implies that "realism" is something worth striving for. Fiction was invented to help people escape from reality, not to digitally recreate the boredom and drudgery of the real world. And anyone who claims that the "Real Is Brown" graphics trend spawned by Gears of War was a positive change in gaming automatically loses a few credibility points in my book. This demand, from elitist game critics who love trumpeting about how sophisticated their tastes are compared to "14 year olds in their basements," for "realism" isn't the be all and end all of what gaming needs in order to "grow up."

And yes, there is the objectification and exploitation factor and I'm with you as far as that, but there are already plenty of well-rounded female characters who don't look Hollywood Homely just because it's more "realistic." Oh, and claiming that Nariko doesn't look just as cartoonishly sexy as most female characters doth not a good example make. She is normal-looking only by Hollywood Homely standards.

But there's an even bigger problem with the article.

The writer fails to consider the Uncanny Valley factor, which is the main problem with how Mirror's Edge's main character looks. And it will be a long, long time before technology is advanced enough to push out on the other side, and in the meantime, this demand (from elitist game critics who, well, see my point above) for greater realism will continually push game designers to come as close as they can to the other side of the valley... and land straight in the middle.

Also, will you PLEASE stop having that stupid JPEG by every page of the article where you quote some snippet of the article in silly typeface? It's just annoying.

There are incentives to make girls as unrealistic as possible, too. A friend of mine complained that the girls of Virtua Fighter were unattractive because (as professional martial artists) they had visible arm muscles.

Soul Calibur, however, has crossed the threshold of "silly" into "grotesque." The first thing I did when playing as Ivy was to create a custom version of her, with smaller breasts. :-P

I think this article is horrific. Realism? Can you in any way view the breasts in modern games as real? Have you ever seen breasts up close, or is your idea of breast realism based on porn?

I don't find the idea of breasts in games as something horrible. Yeah, sure, it's sexist to show off breasts as much as is done, but it's just as sexist to show men as muscular heroes solving all problems with violence. Hell, this whole issue is called "Guns, Cars 'n' Tits" and is supposed to cause us men to dribble with testosterone and shout "HELL YEAH!" But that's all right, call me cynic, but that's what you expect when you play video games. As have I come to expect immaturity and sexism whenever female characters are introduced.

But to praise the photoshopped, perfectly formed, porn star tits which seems to glow whenever as much as a candle is directed towards it as "realistic"? Realism is stretch marks, different sizes, pimples, freckles and a LACK of bounce. Just look at the ad background. One of these people have realistic skin. Guess which one.

I am haunted by the ghost of Ivy's boobs. Really, they were quite alarming, and their very presence made me suspicious of Soul Calibur 4 in general - was it such a weak game that it needed them? Possibly not - it was alright, not exactly a thrilling step up from SC3, but that should have been obvious as Ivy's boobs were the whole topic of every preview article until its release. I preferred the fact you could re-enact Tom Of Finland pictures using parts of Voldo's outfit but that still didn't mean I played it for more than a week and felt a bit dirty afterwards.

I vote smaller boobs, they seem to indicate better quality. Anyone remember the slappable enormo-boobs from Freak Out/Stretch Panic? I do wish they'd settle on a figure for poor Lara though, I read she's gone up a bra size again lately. I could be wrong, she may just have a thinner waist. Won't someone think of the gameplay?

All in all, I actually don't want my sexuality to be nudged by computer games. There's something disturbing about catching yourself thinking dirty thoughts about them. Nathan Drake nearly crossed a very fine line for me; I had to keep him well away from waterfalls. I dread to think how heterosexual men live with themselves after playing Dead Or Alive or Tomb Raider. Do you just give in to it?

I will admit that boobs have been getting more realistic in games in that they are becoming smaller, but I for one am kind of glad. I am a straight man, and even I have been getting sick of it.

Ivy's fat boobs in Soulcalibur 4 look disgusting. They were fine in the previous games but now they're just... yuck.

I, for one, am glad SOME games are becoming a little more sophisticated and less retarded and childish in that regard.

Shushyne4np2ne:
If you want a boobs game, go to Japan. I like boobs as much as the next guy, but when it's the main focal point of a character, It gets old...

boobs NEVER get old.

Psychedeliasmith:
I am haunted by the ghost of Ivy's boobs. Really, they were quite alarming, and their very presence made me suspicious of Soul Calibur 4 in general - was it such a weak game that it needed them? Possibly not - it was alright, not exactly a thrilling step up from SC3, but that should have been obvious as Ivy's boobs were the whole topic of every preview article until its release. I preferred the fact you could re-enact Tom Of Finland pictures using parts of Voldo's outfit but that still didn't mean I played it for more than a week and felt a bit dirty afterwards.

I vote smaller boobs, they seem to indicate better quality. Anyone remember the slappable enormo-boobs from Freak Out/Stretch Panic? I do wish they'd settle on a figure for poor Lara though, I read she's gone up a bra size again lately. I could be wrong, she may just have a thinner waist. Won't someone think of the gameplay?

All in all, I actually don't want my sexuality to be nudged by computer games. There's something disturbing about catching yourself thinking dirty thoughts about them. Nathan Drake nearly crossed a very fine line for me; I had to keep him well away from waterfalls. I dread to think how heterosexual men live with themselves after playing Dead Or Alive or Tomb Raider. Do you just give in to it?

Lets just say alot of these titles are designed to be played One Handed. Or rather, thats how they wind up getting played. I confess to a little needless swimming in the opening level of Tomb Raider: Legend.

the worst imo, is the strip clubs in GTA:IV. not that they're any more realistic than the next game. but the lap-dance mini-game is focused on them, really distracting to my morning's GTA fix.
and it's not my fault, its Roman's. "Hey cousin, we're gentlemen, lets go to a Gentlemen's Club!" y'see! y'see!

I prefer real boobs. Pixels don't do anything for me. If developers put more effort into boob physics than making a decent and original game, then thats just kinda sad.

I much preferred Tira in SCIII over Ivy or the others.
That being said, I like Chell, Alyx and Jade (from Bg&E) because they are strong female leads that aren't sexualized. Even if digital boobs get smaller and less outrageous, then fine. I'll stick with real boobs.

Unbridled prudes vs. the depraved sexual deviants-- an America painted under the rule of the FCC. Don't know how many of you Americans out there had frontal lobes that chaffed under the wardrobe-malfunction thing.

Well, I guess you've got a point, although it's needlessly controversially stated - some people want realistic eye candy, some people want glamourised eye candy and some want massive udder-like appendages swinging in the breeze. And some can find their jollies elsewhere, of course. I don't think anyone was even considering censorship at this point though.

If the wardrobe malfunction thing made a glaringly prudish impact, consider the effects of the UK press - in the 90s there was a truly magnificent advert for Tango, an orangey soft drink, which featured an old lady standing at a bus stop holding a balloon. A little man runs up behind her with a pin, goes for the balloon, and the old bag explodes gratifyingly. The Sun newspaper ran some story about how offensive it was to old people and claimed that leading coffin-dodger charity Help The Aged were upset and the advert was pulled within a week.

Help The Aged later went on to announce that they'd loved the advert, largely because it was hilarious but also because portraying old people in 'youth' comedy can be a really positive thing. Didn't help the advert though, it stayed buried. I can't really believe even the American press cared about Janet's solitary and rather sad boob, much less the public. But I can believe in the amusement they must have gotten from publicising the 'shocking' event over and over and over until everyone in the world had seen it.

MorkFromOrk:
Really, we put a man on the moon in the 60's and here we are in 2008 still fixated on female breasts and more so female nipples.

Are you suggesting that the more technologically advanced the human race gets, we should become less interested in human sexuality?

There's interest in human sexuality, and then there are video games. If you need to play a video game to get it up, you've got a problem. A big one. And I'll.. I don't see why people think video games, sex, and boobs really need to be in the same sentence. If I want tits, I'll ask my fiancee to take her shirt off. When I was a teen in the 90's, I rarely ever thought twice about what the women looked like in a video game. I preferred cute girls who looked more proportionate and normal, however, to the massive juggernauts that people apparently want to see in video games. If that means that realistic graphics is forcing people to reduce the size of the breasts, then so be it. I don't particularilly care for realism in video games, insofar as you can get up to a point that is, but I'll definitely be behind it if it forces people to stop oggling the women and get back to design decent games.

I've been pretty darn depressed about the current state of the video game industry and its fascination with breasts and sexism in general. Even characters like Samus Aran, who I thought would be immune to it all, have slinked down the road of eye candy for the little boys (and men who think like boys). To read this article and be told that all of video gaming has been about making better tits? I find that understandably hard to believe, considering I never really cared much for this obsession with higher graphics. Some of the greatest games out there are not only 2-D using sprites, but on older consoles where they designers focused more on the actual game, and not on making the sweat glisten on perky breasts just right to make the average man creame his pants.

I actually find it insulting that the game industry would even consider that the sort of thing I want to see. I muchly enjoyed characters like Jade and Chell because they were attractive (in a realistic, down to earth sort of way), and their characters had depth... well, okay, not so much Chell because she never said a word. But I loved the games they were in because I wasn't having to watch pixelated boobs bouncing up and down every time they moved.

As a straight, heterosexual male.. I found this article both interesting, yet offensive. However, I did find it interesting even more how many people in here actually share my sentiment on the subject.

This articles lack of pictures of digital boobs and real boobs for comparison is disturbing.

Fail.

There is nothing wrong with looking at breasts. You just sould not forget the rest who counts to it too.

Hiroshi Mishima:
If I want tits, I'll ask my fiancee to take her shirt off.

Who says romance is dead?

So I have to wonder what some of the commentators in the thread think of WoW's females? Does it just feel a little too ridiculous that they're marching around in steel-plated lingerie? I know some women that are bothered by that, and others who like their characters to look sexy. How does it differ in a game where the player makes the character (when they're basically representative avatars, like most MMOs) from a single-player experience?

I think you _can_ present an interesting female character that is also attractive in a cinematic fashion, but that so many times, designers won't bother.

Hiroshi Mishima:
...If I want tits, I'll ask my fiancee to take her shirt off. When I was a teen in the 90's, I rarely ever thought twice about what the women looked like in a video game. I preferred cute girls who looked more proportionate and normal, however, to the massive juggernauts that people apparently want to see in video games....

Boobs on demand, 24/7? Must be nice to have such a compliant SO! In my experience, it tends to be a little more complicated than that.

Your sentiment seems to indicate a lack of wanting sexuality to feature in any sort of entertainment, to which I'd say puts you solidly in the minority. If you really just mean to say that you don't want them in games, what makes games different than, say, movies or comics? And is it that you only want 'realistic' boobs (to go along with all the other realism in the games, I know), or that you just don't want any at all?

I find some of the faux offense and self-righteousness that pops up whenever this subject is raised to be pretty amusing.

Uhm....UHM!!

Wow.... Did no one play Duke Nukem 3D. That was my first introduction to boobs! Giving those strippers some money and then a little flash. Oh how interesting that was!

I think you guys missed my point. I'm extremely romantic and used to be a very hopeless romantic before I found the woman I love. My comment about "if I want tits I can ask my fiancee" was to mean that I don't go looking for it in games, or on the internet. If I want to see something like that I can get intimiate with her instead of playing out some fantasy involving game characters.

And actually, I wouldn't say get rid of the stuff altogether, but I'd like to see it heavilly toned down. When I played Rogue Galaxy, for instance, and I discovered almost every main female has huge breasts, it kinda made me a bit sad that they went so far as to do that, while the regular NPCs are attractive without needing massive melons.

I want to be able to play a video game where there is a female character, and not be reminded constantly about her chest or other parts of her body. Back on the NES and SNES, you didn't have this obsession with breasts that you seem to encounter these days, and if it was there, it sure wasn't apparent to me or anyone else I knew. My whole point is that I think the video game industry has become fixated on sex for a lot of its popularity. The fact that the Zero Suit (a horrible non-canon creation) was a playable character means that Nintendo HAD lowered themselves to the point where selling out a character like Samus wasn't beneath them.

As for "faux offense and self righteousness" I fail to see where you're getting that. In the 27 some-odd years I've been gaming, my disinterest in sexuality in video games has been pretty constant. I find it vulgar that with the advant of 3-D graphics I had to deal with other guys in high school babbling on about Tifa and Lara. I got shown more pics and fanfics than I thought possible at the time. Maybe you didn't have to deal with that, or maybe you did and enjoyed it. I certainly didn't. It's objectification of women insofar as I'm concerned.

DamienHell:
boobs make every game better!

Only some times, other time they feel like they were a last minute thought just so we would pay attension to an otherwise boring character.

Nikral:
Uhm....UHM!!

Wow.... Did no one play Duke Nukem 3D. That was my first introduction to boobs! Giving those strippers some money and then a little flash. Oh how interesting that was!

Your lucky, my first introduction to boobs was when i found my dads penthouse magasines... at the age of 5.

I agree with the writer, the lack of boobs in today's games is unnerving to say the least. I mean if games like Gears of War are going to market themselves directly to homosexuals (those who are out, closeted and in denial), that's fine I guess - I mean the homosexual community have been gameless for a long time, but where are the cutting edge games for red-blooded men like me who like chicks?

As for me, I personally would like some more realistic bewbage in videogames. My wife is a D-cup, so I guess that makes the usual large-breasted videogame babes a little bit 'run-of-the-mill' for me. I like a little variety, so since I'm married to a big-boobed gal, the only variety I'm likely to get is in searching for online porn or in videogames. Look folks, there's nothing wrong with nudity in games or outside of them, and one of my goals in life is to see as many nude chicks as I can possibly see in my lifetime - real three dimensional nude girls, two dimensional photos of nude girls, video porn, magazines, art nudes, paintings of nudes, and yes, even pixellated models in a video game. Why? Because I'm a heterosexual guy and like to look at naked women. Of course I suppose this will bring out the "Oh God you sicko!" comments from the terminally prudish folks who seem to cluster around online debates about nudity in gaming, but so be it - if they don't want nudity in games, that's their problem. I prefer to see nude girls everywhere and I'll be damned if I'm ever going to apologise for that.

I have to admit that I prefer playing as female characters in games when I can. It's not like a transexual thing, I just like watching them more then I like watching burly men. I think that's understandable.

Yeah, I don't understand why so many people think it's 'gay' to play a 3rd person game as a woman. Personally, when the options are to see either a guy's butt or a girl's butt jiggling up and down on the screen in front of me, I think it's kinda gay NOT TO want to see the girl.

Radelaide:
From a female perspective, I hate the double D characters. They make me feel self conscious. (Please don't ban me for this next comment) Personally, I'm a 14B (Australian) and I think they're perfect. I would like to think that the next generation of good game developers make a good lead female who isn't really skinny and has huge boobs. She'd have trouble fighting bad guys when she's giving herself black eyes all the time.

I'd like to see a realistic lady, like Alyx from HL2, in more games please!

First, congratulations on accepting your body without feeling inadequate or silicone-deficient. Larger is not necessarily better, and most mainstream sex symbols today are probably 'B' cup or smaller.

Second, as an old man who only plays FPS games, huge and bared breasts are jarring and pull me out of my immersion in the game unless they have a damn good reason to be there, such as strippers in Duke Nukem. If a woman is not a stripper, there's no reason she should have huge breasts. If she's a warrior or athlete, there's a good reason she should NOT have huge breasts. This was acceptable when characters were so crude as to make sex almost indeterminate, but modern hardware coupled with a good programmer or artist are fully capable of rendering a smoking hot 'A' cup. If a female character is to be taken seriously, she should not be a triple 'D'.

And the Japanese obsession with huge breasts on what appear to be eight year-olds is really, really creepy. My grandson had DOA: Beach Volleyball when he was younger. Those programmers are some really messed up people. Or maybe some really lonely people. Or both.

From a female perspective, I hate the double D characters. They make me feel self conscious. (Please don't ban me for this next comment) Personally, I'm a 14B (Australian) and I think they're perfect. I would like to think that the next generation of good game developers make a good lead female who isn't really skinny and has huge boobs. She'd have trouble fighting bad guys when she's giving herself black eyes all the time.

I'd like to see a realistic lady, like Alyx from HL2, in more games please!

We all think they're perfect too :D

I personally don't like those huge unrealistic boobs... Ivy scares the f**king shit out of me, because thats when curvacious crosses over into "morbid" and disgusting for me. Perhaps more then a little hypocritical as I am the stereotypical american fatty boy, however I find nothing attractive in all that loose jiggling flesh.

I like Alyx- she doesn't distract me from playing the game constantly, she's realistic, and I still catch myself looking at her ass from time to time while playing.

I also liked Lara from Tomb Raider: Legend. "WHAT? LARA CROFT? SHE'S THE SPOKES WOMAN FOR UNREALISTIC SUPERMODEL HEROINES!" Alright, hold your horses. Yes I admit Lara is still unrealistically gorgeous and hourglassed, but her bust is signifigantly reduced in size from the olden days (she dropped at least a cupsize or two), so, babysteps. I liked that game. Of course I've yet to see a sequel/follow-up to it which irritates the hell out of me.