Girls of Castlevania

This is the very notion where I think people have it wrong... not everyone plays videogames for escapism, people who do are only a fraction of gamers. There is no escapism in many games like minesweeper or theme park or simcity or civilization or tower defense, etc.. In addition, a game which features first person or third person cameras are still not even necessarily built for escapism, they merely are a point of view that better enables players to enjoy a certain type of game play. Now some people play these games for escapism yes, but only a fraction, and it's simply incorrect to assume that everything was made for escapism...Even games that were DESIGNED to cater to people who want escapism can entertain people who have no desire for escapism.

Frankly I find it kind of like how older generations would frequently think videogames were toys for kids, it's just a patronizing kind of view that I'll never agree to, especially when I became a gamer in the 80s, when virtually NO games had escapist elements to them due to hardware limitations.

Now, the rest of this post is in response ixbran's fairly lengthy one talking about comic books.

Pretty much the entire post was about comic books, and then you just slapped on 'and videogames' at the end like they were uniform. I don't know much about comic books, so I really can't argue or support your views on them. But I do know videogames enough to know that what you're saying doesn't really ring true. It's possible that you might be able to cherry-pick examples that would support what you're saying for videogames, but even if I TRY to cherrypick examples of videogames that support your opinions, I can't... Here's my efforts in trying to do so.

Tomb raider is probably the highest profile intentionally overtly sex-appeal for horny teenage boys  videogame, not the modern one, the old one (who said she became a sex doll? She was WAY worse before, seriously).


As you can see, she's got a vacuum-tight spandex top, but I don't really see any form of genetalia on here... I've looked at the whole series, and her figure gets more ridiculous each time yes but still, I'm not seeing any nipples or crotch detail or anything.


I cannot think of a western game that was more shamelessly catering towards boob-maniac boys than tomb raider. But let's go Japanese, a country/society NOTORIOUS towards being perverted to many, sexually confident to others. The largest skin-tight spandex wearing girl-tastic videogame series I know from Japan is Hyperdimension neptunia, a game that got absolutely BLASTED by the media because anime girls who don't wear burkas make journalists drop dead.



Very obviously they make no efforts to make the girls modest. However there is still a complete lack of genitalia visible. Not that I'm complaining, I don't really think such things are nice to look at myself, in fact sometimes I see fan-art of characters such as above, and the fan artist adds them in and It kinda makes me go ick =P.

Future games in the series also lack these things. Also incidentally, that art you see got CENSORED in the west, and the media STILL bashed the game for being too 'creepy'. Bonus points from gamespot, she bashed the game to no end, and afterwards, someone pointed out that her psn profile lacked an achievement you get about 40 minutes in the game... she didn't even play it for 40 minutes and she mauled it. The game has alot to complain about, and I would be lying if I said it is objectively good (though it is easy to enjoy if you play it with a light hearted visual novel mindset instead of an rpg).

Now before you mention male-sexified box art. I'm not trying to argue there is as big as a scene featuring sexy men as there are women. Many games ARE male-oriented after all, and so yes you will see some skimpy women more often. But my point is when there are men in videogames, I don't think there's a double standard, they are often fantastically well built as well. This isn't about quantity being equal so much that there is no double standard or hypocrisy in games IMO. If devs want to make a sexy mantastic game, I have no issues with that. But I don't think that is likely to happen not because people will be outraged or offended, but because it's just kinda a sociological norm where women tend to be less open about their desire to oogle sexy men while men kind of are open about how much they like oogling sexy women. I'm not saying they don't, but that's just kind of the general viewpoint.

But really, I really really did TRY to cherrypick the absolute worst offenders in the videogame world, and they just don't hold true to your argument for comic books, and even if they did, cherrypicking isn't even a good argument.

edit: I also would like to point out I have absolutely no issues with people who want more conservatively dressed women. I think Miriam looks great, and having more girls like her in games is completely fine with me. I just don't like voicing it in a way that seems to shame people who may enjoy skimpy characters too.