There has been some interesting news coming out of GDC this year and it makes me sad that I wasn’t able to swing a visit to SFO, but next year….
Now that being said Todd Harper (Univ. of Baltimore) gave a talk at GDC yesterday where he talked about how games treat fat people. This is not a new discussion around here. As a woman who could be classified as “fat” (though my kid says fluffy) I’ve often run into this same issue as a gamer. One of the most startling moments happened when I first stepped on a Wii Fit board about 7 years ago. Mind you, back then I was playing racquet ball and working out 4-5 times a week and was nowhere near fluffy. I was fit, but not thin. I stepped on the board to up my yoga game and the voice on my t.v. declared in a cheery tone, “You’re obese!”. I was stunned I stood there not knowing what to do next. It pissed me off so much that I turned the whole dang thing off. What if I had been an impressionable child? That could have been some scarring shit. And I have to believe that this is the reason that I never actually used the Wii Fit for actual exercise programs but for games that just required you to move in general.
While the Wii Fit was the worst and the most personal in it’s fat shaming there have been other games that have been equally offensive in their treatment of fat folks. The game that comes to mind first is Titan Studio’s Playstation game Fat Princess (2009). Fat Princess is a tower defense game where you must defend the castle and keep the princess safe and of course one of the keys ways of doing that is to feed the princess pastries until she becomes so fat that no one can carry her (read that no one would want her).
So, Harper is pretty much spot on with his declaration that games don’t treat fat people well, not as gamers participating in games physically or as gamers playing characters who are fat (and undesirable) or only possibly thin (and desirable). All too often we see games that allow you to customize characters, but only to a certain degree. You can usually make bigger characters, but you can’t usually make obese characters and in some cases (I’m looking at you Saint’s Row) where making your female characters fat just gives them impossibly large breasts.
When will game designers recognize that some folks really do want to their avatars to look like them and that not all of us think that fat is a bad thing. And even if we aren’t fat (or “fluffy”), some of us want to be able to play characters with diverse body type. Why can’t I have a fat female badass in Saint’s Row? I don’t need my games telling me that I am fat or that fat is bad. Body types are different and one thing that we should all know is that thin does not mean fit. Fit comes in all shapes and sizes. So I’ll stick to doing my yoga in the studio and use my booty shaking dance games to get in a bit of next-gen cardio from time to time.
