i saw the game Motorslice recently, and i can’t say it doesn’t look perfectly good at what it is setting out to do—though i have not played it—but reflexively i asked myself this question i seem to keep asking myself over and over again the last five or six years: why is the player character so conspicuously fuckable? i understand that sex sells, and i so too hate to knock someone for being true to their vision, but my main gripe about the material, from the critical perspective of a game designer (thus a narrative designer and a character designer and so on), my main gripe is how utterly obvious all these indie gamedevs are getting about sex appeal, without any of the thematic justification needed to make it work. why, again, does the upcoming DoubleShake feature yet another doe-eyed, inoffensively curvaceous young anime woman, graciously stripped of any of the interestingly dissonant design elements present in her parallel Marina, protagonist of ancestral Mischief Makers, herself already a well-likeable, mostly unchallenging design? don’t we think it would be more interesting, daresay more subversive even, as this trend continues, to star in her place a big, burly, hairy, Mike Haggar sort of gentleman, or an old fat woman, or christ anything else at this point? try this exercise: any time you see one of these games, and there are many, imagine all the sexy anime creatures are Mike Haggar. it’s almost always an improvement.
speaking of Big Michael: though his parents Capcom themselves are known for leading the industry in designing gorgeous video game babes, even going so far as to rework our own stupid superhero designs into items so fascistic in their beauty it feels uncomfortable to even acknowledge them as part of the same lineage as our own shoddy scrawls, yet they also, evidently, possess an incredible mastery over that which above all else great artists value: contrast and restraint. if you simply make everyone maximally cute and sexy, there is no dimension to it. there’s nothing to hold on to. one would quickly lose awareness of Psylocke’s beauty, of bawdy Felicia’s outfit and conduct, without the presence of the hunchback Zangief and his disgustingly bulging, scarred muscles, of the inhuman Shuma-Gorath, of savage Wolverine, of whatever the fuck is Amingo. the key aspect is balance. to its credit, Motorslice achieves this to some effect by contrasting the character against her huge, dirty, mechanical environment, but can we agree at this point that the “beautiful woman versus ugly world” trope is at least a little played out?
i am fully aware of how easy i am to disregard here. my foremost artistic achievement is stick figures. but you don’t need to be a particularly skilled character designer to come up with a character more interesting and thematic than a silent woman who is attractive. i only humbly suggest to the budding indie developer to try something interesting instead of something boring