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What is the benefit of games portraying human demographics as if they were set in New York of today? You could argue that a game might go overboard with sex appeal and just look sillly, but I can't think of a game that would be improved with more of human races that did not develop it, being represented in it. In fact, the opposite is true: games that have no internal reason why racial diversity must be present in every village of 5 NPCs, still having it, for purely ideological reasons.
What is the benefit of games portraying women as if they're all gorgeous bombshells? Is making every woman beautiful a non-ideological choice?
Because people like looking at gorgeous women, the same way they like playing games that are fun. Is making games fun an ideological choice? You can argue such a case, and the more arty critics sometimes do, but it requires blinding yourself to a fundamental reality about what players want and how the world is.
The end point of this logic is that endless stream of Japanese media where all the characters are hot teenagers and everybody’s depressed their whole lives because media overfocuses on romanticizing like a 3 year period before adult life begins.
If games only feature hot young adults they miss out on telling stories about the middle aged, the old, the ugly, children, the disabled, and those are often some of the most interesting stories in any literary canon.
The end point of that logic is modern literary fiction and it's so laser-focused on 'realism' that they deliberately deprive you of any aspirational figure. Every book is about foreigners, cripples, trans, peasants, adulterers and the depressed, and nobody gets a decent plot or anything to look up to.
Taking off my cheeky hat, though, I would say two things:
For a non-sexy version of this question, I don't know if you've come across Hollow Knight: Silksong? The long-awaited sequel to beloved indie hit Hollow Knight. In this case they asked themselves "Should games be fun?" and came to the conclusion that their game is about a society that bleeds pilgrims dry pursuing a hopeless goal, and so their game should be really really hard and punishing and make you wonder why you're bothering. Unsurprisingly, most people really didn't like it. Fans of Hollow Knight like myself had waited a decade and got something miserable and unfun, and the very limited artistic merit of the scenario did not even slightly make up for the fact that the thing was viscerally frustrating in a not-good way.
Or:
is fine,
can be a fair tradeoff for the right audience,
is likely to go down badly. Especially as a sequel to something that was
Art: 6/10 Visceral fun: 8/10.Taking your game from being pretty & fun to less pretty & fun, without having a compelling (to your audience) artistic reason for doing so, is just shooting yourself in the face.
I disagree, a lot of modern literary fiction is, as a lot of literary fiction has always been, about beautiful and/or wealthy people. To the limited extent that it is about cripples and uggos, well, it always was.
As regards taste, maybe. But you might not be completely correct, either. Like I said, a hugely disproportionate amount of Japanese media focuses on the adventures of very beautiful high school students, including games, and a lot of them did very poorly for many years until the collapse of the Yen (and to some extent Dark Souls, which doesn’t have that many attractive characters) made Japanese non-Nintendo AAA game development viable again. A lot of people played Persona, sure, but a lot of people also played the Grand Theft Auto games, which have never had particularly attractive characters, men or women. (Interestingly, this year’s GTA revolves around a couple in which the man is more attractive than the woman; we shall see how it sells).
I think the comparison you draw between hot characters and gameplay is limited. There are games without much gameplay, and some are even quite entertaining (I have enjoyed a few walking simulators), but in 99% of games, the gameplay is supposed to be entertaining. Meanwhile, many of the most important stories in all of literature, film and television that you and I could both agree are actually very good would make no sense if everybody was a hot 17 year old Japanese high school student, which seems like the bailey of the case you’re making.
I see it like the difference between British and American TV. The former has a certain charm, a certain patina, because it doesn’t just cast hot people. It could, there are enough beautiful underemployed actors even in England. But it gains something by not doing so, for in American television the impossible hotness of everybody in a small town grocery store or police department or family on TV contrasts with the reality of those who know it to be laughably impossible, laughably unrealistic to the point that one’s sense of disbelief is tested.
FWIW I would definitely accept a "realism" deal when it comes to media (video games, television, movies, etc.). I find it really annoying when, for example,
(1) black people are inserted into a medieval European fantasy setting, or even an actual historical setting;
(2) with almost every husband and wife, the woman is always smart and wise while the man is a bumbling idiot;
(3) small villages in fantasy settings are presented as having the racial diversity of modern-day Los Angeles;
(4) street thugs are almost always portrayed as white men;
(5) women are portrayed as men's equals (or betters) when it comes to hand to hand combat;
I could go on, but I think you get the point. If I could get rid of all this woke nonsense at the price of losing hot women, I'd be pretty happy about it.
But I doubt the woke would go for it. Because I'm pretty sure that for them "realism" is an excuse not an actual motivation.
Yeah I agree with most of your criticisms, but my point was I don’t think the complaint about women’s attractiveness really falls into the same category as 14th century Hungary having the racial diversity of Chicago.
I respectfully disagree with your point very strongly. Because in my view, with flag-planting, it's the underlying message that matters. And that message is the same either way regardless of how subtle or blatant the flag is.
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