/grin

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheeplass/4191290149/in/set-72157623016344124/

(Also, re: needing to design art for multiple sets — aren’t they already in game, but mapped to male character models? I can’t imagine that they have to design a skin for every possible race/gender combination; I always assumed that they just designed one male skin and one female skin. So — the male skin is already in the game. You’d just need a little code to hook up the male skin for items to female models, and vice versa, and then have the option to pick either one. Not much harder than adding in three different sets for shamans, it doesn’t seem like. Happy to be corrected on that.)

As games go, I think WoW is above-average in terms of depiction of women, if only because we do get to choose whether or not to wear the sexualized armor. You don’t get options for covering Chun Li or Lara Croft up. But the bar is pretty goddamn low in the game industry, so Blizzard gets only the tiniest of cookies.

I agree, there definitely should be all available options. Seeing as I’ve played “tons” of games, it is actually NOT *gasp* that hard to do. The last game that comes to mind is Star Wars: Galaxies (mmorpg i think it is dead though). You could have all shapes/sizes/colours/etc. I don’t think it takes more money per se. It takes the willing and want to actually improve your game beyond what you have and to please people.

Great site by the way. I’ll keep getting lost and heading this way on occasion.

He is right, but he’s also part of the problem. It’s going to take one heck of a lot longer if people like him decide it’s a bra-burning feminist issue that they don’t have to deal with.

Look, my husband loves his skimpy gear on his female characters. I love it on one of my characters and hate it on the others, largely for RP reasons. I don’t LIKE it when one my characters is so busy being unhappy about her clothes that she’s distracted from other things, like staying alive or paying her school fees or whatever her current thing is.

In the short term, making a slot on the paper doll for “long underwear”, along the lines of the shirt slot, would go a long way towards making me happier. Because while Sorcha has her moments of loving the dominatrix look, Nahyomi never likes it, and Rheyna is just flat out ashamed to be seen in that kind of gear.

But in the long term, giving people the ability to be comfortable with their game avatar expands the customer base. More choices, and less forced objectification, please.

P.S. I imagine Schramm doesn’t like having his work be dismissed by people with a limited and cliched stereotype in their head about computer games. He might consider that perhaps his stereotype of romance novels is just as limited and just as insulting to people who create them. Plus it’s a bad example. “Romance novels” is such a huge genre that it allows its readers to pick and choose between the objectified alpha male heroes and the more nuanced ones, or even to play in the lesbian version of the romance novel. When WoW offers me as many choices for how to conceptualize and visualize my female characters as romance fiction offers for who should be the romantic interest of the main female character, I’ll be more interested in his dismissal of a genre he clearly knows nothing about.

What kind of coding and testing would need to be done? We already take our tokens and decide at the vendors which spec we’d like to purchase gear for. We can purchase the same piece of gear several times and enchant/gem it differently for PVE vs PVP if we’d like. I’m not snarking, I’m genuinely curious how this would present a technical problem.

I can see where someone would have to be paid for doing the art, but so far, Wrath’s theme for gear seems to be “create a plate set, a mail set, a leather caster set, a leather melee set, and a cloth set. Now take those six skins and assign different colors to them for each class that might wear them.” So why not create some alternative sets that can potentially share skins?

And $50K a year for art/testing/coding etc? LOOK, MA, I CREATED JOBS! /dances

“falconesse, saving the economy and clothing characters in one fell swoop”

That solution is a /lot/ of money to spend. And by a lot, I mean upwards of an extra $50k minimum per year in development costs. MINIMUM. That’s adding one artist to do separate textures. Let alone the other dozens of jobs required to code it in and test it appropriately.

Does Blizzard have the money? Hell yes. But it’s one of those places where I would have a really difficult time quantifying how much it is worth to the player base as a whole to a boss.

I don’t necessarily disagree; Just speaking to the realities of things. I’d love to have less bikiniplate, but luckily Shaman have gotten incredibly lucky at not getting shafted like that.

Objectification, folks, is a real issue.