Last week, I shared some analysis of gender signifiers in character models from State of Decay, a game that seems to do a good job of presenting practically dressed and designed characters, while also featuring some diversity in body types and more. A commenter pointed out, however, that including some of those images alongside the research would be helpful for game designers looking to avoid overt use of signifiers, and we agree — we’ve added a new gallery feature to the site, so we can do just that. Not only have we included the main female story characters from State of Decay, but we’ve also here included selected female characters from a variety of other zombie games for comparison.
As I was putting these items together, I made a few observations, the most important being that I forget how diverse The Walking Dead is in general until I look at it again, particularly in terms of body type. Whatever other problems that game suffers, and there are a few (despite my love for it) in terms of character presentation, The Walking Dead gives us a wide variety of shapes and body types among both the women and men, something we don’t see often in games, as reflected in the other galleries. Of this set, I think that title offers the most in creating a realistic-looking microcosm of American society.
I feel we don’t often notice similarities in body types in games, but when we start looking at large sets of character pictures, the overriding sameness becomes obvious. There’s a lot of very similarly built women in the Dead Rising games, for instance, to the point it feels like exaggeratedly curvy women are the only survivors of apocalypse. This is one area in which I can praise Resident Evil, something I rarely do; while I feel Resident Evil often presents both its women and men in exaggerated fashion, fit, muscular characters do fit the profile of what they are trying to present — another reason I think the dominance of thin bodies in State of Decay makes sense. Not everyone is thin and fit in State of Decay, but the majority are, which is probably how things would shake out if we were all running from ferals who wanted to rip us in half and play in our entrails. I know how fast I can run, and I’ll tell you, it’s not that fast.
The new galleries are below. Let us know what you think of the feature, and if you run into any problems with it. We’ll continue trying to add new features and ideas to the site as often as we can — another good reason to support our Patreon!
State of Decay
The Walking Dead
Resident Evil
Dead Island
Dead Rising
