Late to the party too. Whoever shifted it to K-Town did a good job since it got pretty heavy in page 3. Heavy with a veneer of civility though. I wouldn't know how to describe it. Like arguing while trying not to argue. It's rare, at any rate.
Re: Bagheera's comic (that was rather interesting, but I'm not quoting it because it's LONG), I'll have to strongly disagree with one of the assertions in there. That is... when people know I studied pharmacy I get hit with hundreds of questions about random medications, combinations and whatnot - outside the realm of work. When people find out I can play X instrument, they also sometimes ask me to play X. Without offering pay, either. So if viewing sex as part of the profession in the context of sex workers, they are in no way alone in being hounded by people to give phr33 5t00f pl0x - it happens all. the. time. If you're a computer engineer, chances are someone has asked you to assemble a computer for hir from components.
Why pay for something you can get for free amirite... people will try to get things for free if you're not strict about charging for it.
Also, no idea how the topic even drifted to sex workers when the original context was regarding female analogues in games ('analogue' since sometimes it's frankly anatomically impossible for them to be human, let alone any specific subset).
Other random things to chime in on:
1. Morrigan actually wears a bra (black one, you can see the outline), so she has some support. Of course, there's no point for the rest of the outfit being there since it'd just generally get caught on random stuff and/or may choke her. There's a reason why most heavy machinery has safety procedures including instructions regarding loose clothing and overly long hair. You screw with those, you can end up dead. She's unlikely to have 'wardrobe malfunction' any more than women at the beach are likely to have wardrobe malfunctions if their bikinis are properly secured... though the rest of the outfit is, indeed, pointless. It's all right if she's walking around in Val Royeaux trying to look pretty. Not so acceptable if she's trying to hunt a dragon.
2. The vast majority of the time people complain about 'objectification of women', their actual concern is the humanisation of objects. Morrigan for instance isn't a woman. Ze's a combination of a woman's voice acting, polygons that approximate a female form and hir character archetype created by hir writer. The illusion breaks if any of these are problematic. Lara Croft from Tomb Raider 1 has issues if viewed by modern players... they might find hir horrendously low polygon count makes hir impossible to treat as a person. If hir character is written to be impossible (or extremely unlikely) for a real human to possess, one would not even think ze is a person, and therefore not a woman. And we've probably all heard horrendous voice actors.
Without the humanisation of objects, it makes it difficult to immerse oneself inside a game - something that is meant to showcase some aspect of reality in a not-so-real universe.
Objectification of people is an entirely different issue, and often is not sexual in nature. It can be as innocuous as forgetting the person who sold you coffee is a person, and treating hir as if ze was merely a goods purchasing interface. Part of the drive in many (cannot say 'all' because of how much people differ) people related to sex is also directly tied to the partner being a sexual being, a person. Reducing women to objects for sex is actually rare, since most people do not get gratification from objects. Rather, they attempt to
humanise objects, so that they can now replace a person with the humanised object. It annoys me mainly because of how often this terminology problem occurs.
Sexual objectification of women is a narrow issue that is very closely related with more indiscriminate sexual behaviour in the first place, which very often finds itself on the very wrong side of the law. Being able to derive sexual gratification from objects results in the kinds of jokers that attempt to have sex with a park bench and get stuck requiring medical assistance. Any form of actual objectification of people is bad when in a high enough extent though, sexual or not. We call people who objectify everyone 'psychopaths'. Treating people like objects tends to lead to killing someone sooner or later, since people are really quite fragile in comparison to most objects. Slam a stone against a wall, it's pretty much the same. Slam a head... it'll never be the same.
Because of how people usually repeat the term a lot I wouldn't consider it a straw man per se (as that term requires it be done intentionally), but it still is frustrating to encounter this because it conflates two things of vastly different degrees of danger to society. Some believe that blurring the line between an object and a person may also make a person treat another person as an object, though there isn't exactly anything to prove that that is a typical progression. We humanise pets too, but rather than starting to treat people like dogs, dog owners treat their dogs like humans - with more respect than they would accord a dog if they perceived it to be 'just an animal'. If humanisation and objectification cross, we might need to be quite careful of anyone we meet holding a leash.
3. An issue with gaming is that sometimes, overaccentuation of certain traits perceived to be sexual in nature causes a immersion break. Take for instance some characters given breasts that do not follow the laws of physics, and appear identical when the characters are lying down or standing up - it can cause an immersion break since 'if she's a woman, they must have created gravity defying implant technology'.
The worst breaks occur when 'decency' collides with sexuality. Take skyrim for example. All female characters are assigned a default bra and default undergarments, while all male characters are assigned only default underpants. However, some armor, like Aela the Huntress' Ancient Nord Armor or some Forsworn Armor varieties, are more revealing than the default bra ze is assigned - which leads to an immersion break, because while flash-stripping and flash-stripping is already problematic as it is, having the bra mysteriously 'phase' on when the armor is removed and 'phase' off when the armor is equipped makes it feel like there is a Moral God of the Gaps which automatically protects women's 'modesty' to avoid full nudity, but apparently is also enough of a pervert to allow everything short of it. It's enough of a problem that sometimes it's desirable to intentionally use mods that cover more of the body than the default just so that the mysterious teleporting bra doesn't make an appearance and remind me it's not, in fact, reality.
That bit is a strictly 'Western' idea - though I'm not sure which specific European subculture started the nonsense, or whether it was the USA that did. I mean, the idea that something is not considered as nudity as long as the nipples are not shown and jumps up to M rating the moment nipples appear. A lot of what passes for 'clothing' sometimes shows 95+% of the breast tissue should a woman wear it.
On that note, various cultures have different ideas of what they consider as sexual. While nearly every culture agrees regarding genitalia (for the obvious reason that they're required for sex, which is required for children, etc etc), not all agree regarding breast tissue. While mainstream 'Western' culture would believe that the female nipple needs to be censored, anatomically speaking this makes no sense as it is the thing most in common with the male - it's everything ELSE about the breast that is different between men and women.
In any case, I'd consider Morrigan's case as very mild in comparison to, say, heavy-armor characters in TERA.
4. Is it necessarily a problem that some people like looking at caricatures with anatomically impossible bodies in games? Because it often doesn't make sense (Especially for plate armor - why in the hell would you expose bare skin to weapons while still restricting your movements at the joints? If you were to attack the enemy completely naked you'd have greater exponentially survivability from having greater mobility - and whether you bare your chest or not, someone seeking to kill you is going to aim for your neck anyway.) those who play for immersion may choose to look elsewhere. There are games that have more logical designs (albeit not that many), games which are essentially 3D rendered pornography pretending to be games, and there are those which have armorskins ranging from illogical fanservice to workable designs, within which you can pick for your character what you wish. In the same way you might choose not to play some games, others might choose differently, and it is only in diversity that there is a greater selection of worlds for people to find a place where they belong.
P.S. Sexual drive is not common between people any more than musical, mathematical, culinary, linguisitic or physical traits are common between people. There are those who feel none whatsoever and only care about it because of societal obligations, there are those with urges they would literally kill for, there are those which are directed towards the same gender, there are those directed towards both. What someone finds attractive also varies greatly between people. Some like breasts, some like hips, some like genitalia, some like faces, so on and so forth. While what 'Western' societies generally regard as 'forbidden' is one thing, not everyone necessarily has interests in what is classed as 'forbidden'.
What I find most 'physically' attractive are in decreasing order the spark within a woman's eye, overall face shape with emphases on the nose, the hairstyle and lastly the dress sense - some of Gaga's outfits are so horrendous that even as the last priority, anyone wearing something like that would 'fail'. That does not, however, make someone who is more interested in 'T&A' necessarily more perverted than I am, simply because ze happens to cross an arbitrary societal standard of sexuality while mine does not.
P.P.S. They're not spelling errors. Ze and hir just work so much better than their 'he/she' cousins.
Edited by Hayashi, 27 February 2015 - 12:22 PM.
3
Bagheera, on 26 February 2015 - 01:49 PM, said:
