In class on Tuesday, we spent some time talking about the “skin” of video games. In particular, we highlighted Lara Croft. Does her changing look affect game play? Maybe not the functionality of the game, but it does affect the whether or not some players WANT to play. Here is a link to an interesting post of a long time Tomb Raider player.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I felt was the over-sexualization of the previous Lara Croft character. If you look at the evolution of Lara (here), and then the new version (here), I actually feel a lot better about the new version. Certainly not as much T and A, but a lot more personality, and I think she still looks great. This lead me to check out the wikipedia list of female video game characters. If you click around the images not all of them are sexy, and some of them are just plain weird looking, so it can clearly go either way in terms of female sexuality in video games. One last link: I thought that this video about sex in video games was very interesting and brings up a lot of great points. Enjoy!
Tomb Raiders was actually the first video game I ever played and it is still one of my favorites even though I haven’t played in a lot time. In class, we were talking about how she was over-sexualized and I assumed that because I was a child I must not have noticed it. But I went back and looked at her evolution and the only really big difference is between the new one and the rest of them. Sure she has big boobs, but the rest of her isn’t that ridiculous. If you are running around constantly shooting people and running out of crumbling tombs, you are going to be fit and therefore pretty darn skinny. A “normal” woman’s waist to hip ratio is 0.7. In her earlier ones, it looks like she is about 0.5, but in the later ones, its pretty accurate. I do not think she as that over-sexualized as people make her out to be.