Guild Wars 2

I was browsing the wildstar beta information that has been coming out and was interested to see that when they initially came out, the wildstar small race, the Chua, had no gender selection button. Though there was apparently a small amount of feminine options to choose from, they chose to eliminate gender from the race altogether (which may still be the case).

Asura have single gendered clothing, though we at least get a gender and voice choice, but when I saw that the latest game to have a small race was also treating gender as bad it got me thinking – why is this phenomenon affecting new games to come out?

Are game designers now so afraid of the childlike race issue that they are simply choosing to neuter small races? Are we, as players of small races, soon going to find that we are labelled as abnormal or unwanted in some way?

What are your thoughts on this and what can we do to reverse it?

chronometria.3708:

Are we, as players of small races, soon going to find that we are labelled as abnormal or unwanted in some way?

The only ones who are abnormal are the ones who are actually believe the asura resemble children too much and make changes to them for this very reason.

I mean come on, Just because they are small they are not child like..
And even if they resembled children, so what? That never stopped anime, and 80% of the characters in anime look under age. “cough” final fantasy “cough”
I think game developers shouldn’t worry so much on this subject.

The problem is some have the smaller races, and those races get the ‘sexy’ option, yet physically they are very much like humans. Halflings from D&D sometimes get this.

IIRC, there was a HUGE debate and disgust about some recent MMO (I forget the name exactly) which had what seemed like very sexualized animations for female characters (armor was a given) and then one race basically looked physically like human children of a young age. And they got the sexualized swaying and such as well.

So yes, sometimes ‘small’ races get smacked with that whether it is warranted or not. Asura are sufficiently different from human children that it’s unneeded. Playing small races is no worse then playing huge races.

It’s definately a fear of sexualizing child-like characters, which our society is understandably touchy about (although a bit too much to be sure). Given that sensitivity, the problems it creates follow automatically.

There are a series of ‘markers’ well call them for a humanoids’ sex. There’s another set of markers for young age. Some of these markers are real and used by anthropologists, and some are used by artist’s convention. By their nature, a lot of these easily overlap in small races.

Gender markers (female):
Breasts
Hips
Waist
Small size (compared to males)
Narrow shoulders in comparison to head
‘Gracile’ body constuction (actual scientific term. slender bones, more obtuse angles in jaw line and other joints, less overall bulk, etc)
Hair
Large (or dark) Eyes
Long legs in proportion to body
Stance and movement (swaying hips, legs forward/back when standing instead of square, raised heels, arms held at waist level or lower, etc)

Child Markers:
Small size
Large head in proportion to body
Large eyes in proportion to head
Gracile body construction
Round or indistinct facial shape
Long legs (pre-teen > adolescent)
Short legs (younger then pre-teen)
Hair style (flowers, pigtails, etc. often subverted to show childish or adorableness in adults)

In fairness, there’s a corresponding set of male markers as well- look at the ‘gorrila’ physique that pretty much every game has these days.

Now, from those two lists, it should be obvious that there’s a lot of overlap. Head size and body structure in particular. Avoiding those markers tends to result in a sort of Hobbit effect- short and stocky and generally not attractive. Thus a lot of short races tend to be very non-human (Skritt) or have some distinct non-human attributes (Asura- oval head for example) in order to move the image away from both sets of markers at once.

As for how to reverse it- Step 1: companies need to hire better artists. Step 2: Customers need to stop demanding that everything without a kitten be sexy.

You make good points Rhyse and on reading what you have put, your final line does raise an interesting matter – the demand for attractiveness, which, in theory, is something that we as players have an influence on.

Since even the early days of games like everquest, there has been a set of races to balance the “small race” and that tends to be the “large race” or “ugly race”. Trolls, ogres and other giant types. Bringing those into the discussion is important.

Another element is that size often equates to intellect. Thus the small races, gnomes, goblins, chua from wildstar and asura from guildwars, all tend to be scientist types. By contrast the large races are often primitive in their mindset, often being tribal but having a sort of earthy wisdom. Shamanism, in most mmo’s, is the province of a large race, much as it is with our norns, warcrafts tauren and everquest’s ogres.

It’s unfortunate that there are so many dug in stereotypes for mmos that we need to break out of. How much of this is demand from players, though and how much is simply following the herd of mmo development?

I think the reason most “small” races tend to be better engineers/scientists/etc is because… well, their size.

Remember how they described as Asura farmer as sitting on the fence/under the shade with his golem control gauntlet, while the golem did the plowing? Stuff like that. It’s harder to have a small race be taken as seriously and on equal grounds as others in terms of strength, maybe even agility. A Norn or a Charr you can see hefting around several big logs at once, or tackling an orge/Jotun and causing damage. An Asura… it’s just hard to picture. So they give the small races the intelligence bonus so when they take down those big enemies, it’s because they did it smartly (or had built something bigger then themselves and had it take down the enemy).

Course, it would be rather interesting to see a ‘larger’ race of scientists/engineers (strong, but not really focused on it) with a small race (maybe not strong) who is capable of taking down most foes. Maybe through agility, hitting fast and often while avoiding attacks.

Course, the focus of having everything be attractive is bad. Example being like WoW (Worgen, etc) all having very human like qualities. Compare to the Charr where Anet went “You know, these aren’t humans. We are going to design the females to match the race, the culture, and the ‘style’ of being they are based from.” And boom, we got awesome charr females who are just as tough, look good, but also have unique things separating them from the males. (fluffy tale being the main one :P)

I’ll gladly take more races approached like the Charr then the WoW Worgens or other races (WoW seems to have that a LOT. Males range from decent to ugly/huge, while females are almost always done up sexualized/emphasis on certain areas.)

i have been doing commission work elsewhere on these forums, and I’ve actually run in to this problem a few times.
i do my best not to overly sensualize the asuran female, but there are times when there are no visual markers for asuran gender.( ie; barbaric armor on female asura is identical to the male version )
so i try to feminize the frame to some degree, no I don’t give asura female D cups and thongs, but i do thin my lines out in certain areas, streamline some of the frame, and so on….

as for the ’ child like ’ aspect, it’s easy enough to ignore, assuming that you can look at asura as non humanoid ( try thinking of them as bipedal shark / mice )