by Ravi Sinha
By now, many would have heard of the controversy surrounding the Sony Playstation Network game, Fat Princess but for those who haven’t: Fat Princess is about two teams consisting of about 8 to 32 people each who must rescue their princess, captive as she is in another castle… er, your opponent’s base. Your opponents can oppose you, however, by going into the forest to find cake and fatten your princess up with, hence making her harder to carry and requiring more players for the effort.
Assuming that all gamers are douches that would rather make the task of rescuing tougher for their opponents rather than going all Die Hard to retrieve their wannabe Peach, several feminist groups have come out against the game, stating that it encourages prejudice against obesity. Naturally, the reactions of the gamer community to the feminists has been as biting as it’s been ridiculing. But what do you expect when a feminist makes her case against obesity with an article such as the one Melissa McEwan created? Thus it is written, so it shall be… That overt flaming be answered with overt lambasting on teh Internetz (“Why so serious?” indeed, dorks). Other feminists have either suggested changes; some female gamers, like Abby McVay of Slashgear.com have denounced their outbursts, stating,
“So we can’t have an overweight princess, I’m sure a little twiggy princess would have you off on a rant that all games just went for the stereotypical cute skinny girls. What’s left then? I’ll tell you what, you keep pissing and moaning and maybe it’d make you feel better if there were no women in games. Right, that’d piss you off too wouldn’t it? The art director for this game emailed in wondering if it helped that the concept artist was a girl. Wait no, I bet she was skinny and hates all obese women or she’s just a traitor to her own kind. It couldn’t possibly be that it’s just an innocent game and you women are just looking for the latest and greatest thing to bitch about.”
But when you really think about, how many obese or even slightly over-weight characters, forget women, have ever had any role in gaming, besides probably in a villainous pretext? Remember the Pig Cop in Duke Nukem? The same one being mowed down by lean, mean, muscle-bound “bad-ass” Duke? Eddie Dombrowski in Silent Hill 2 seems to parody, in a horrific way, the psychological hurt caused by insulting the overweight. However, he dresses like a tot and wants to pump lead into the protagonist due to his immense mental instability, so the end doesn’t really defy the means of such gaming stereotypes so much as it’s unconsciously reinforcing them. Let’s not forget the Alma-abusing, sexual harassment-accused Norton Mapes from F.E.A.R.
When it comes to conveying disgust, what is it that makes fat people not just suitable but necessary candidates? Of course, even the slightest creeping of the scale needle qualifies for a no-go when it comes to main characters.
Final Fantasy, Tomb Raider, Half-Life (discounting the disposable Barnies), God of War, Heavenly Sword, Mega Man, Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, Quake, Doom, The World Ends With You, Assassin’s Creed… Every single one of these games is inhabited by characters who are either well-sculpted, thin and muscular or well-endowed, athletic and attractive. A little realism wouldn’t hurt when it comes to design characteristics — and no, making a Squall Leonheart drop-dead handsome but just plain emo doesn’t qualify.
Maybe gamers don’t have such incriminating tastes. Maybe they don’t care who or what they’re playing as, so long as the game is good. But then, if that were true, you wouldn’t have such an explosion of fan-fiction, pin-up posters and hentai. Characters that look physically perfect are the winning formula in more ways than one, it seems.
In the meantime, let’s hope this controversy doesn’t become any worse. And for that matter, let’s see a little re-examination of gaming worlds that are supposed to be “realistic” in their presentation when they can only seem to pull people from the Desperate Housewives universe to populate their games.
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