Body Image In Gaming
As a father, there are many things that I have to be concerned with when it comes to gaming. Violence, addiction, attention span, imitation, and social withdrawal being among the issues we have to be vigilant about. But whether or not you have sons, daughters, or both, one thing I think we should also be wary of is body image.
Media everywhere these days, of course, is bombarding us with images of beauty and sexiness that are impossible to live up to. Rail thin models, beefed up and ripped guys, all things that impressionable young people (and even older ones) try to aspire to. Where video games are worse, though, is that you are now in a fantasy land, and no longer constrained by the limitations of what the human body can be crafted into. Look at male characters like Marcus Fenix from Gears of War, many of the dudes from Street Fighter, or Kratos from God of War. All impossibly muscled up in ways you couldn’t achieve with all the steroids from body building, professional wrestling, and Barry Bonds’ medicine cabinet combined. They have muscles rippling on muscles. They don’t have six packs, they have 12 packs.
The lion claws might be the most realistic part of this shot.
It’s no secret that young, teenage boys, still growing into their bodies, are playing games featuring characters like these. You may not think that boys have body image issues, but how can you not be bombarded with Alpha Male characters like this and not want to be like them in some way? How many young boys are obsessed with gaining weight and putting on muscle? And what about girl gamers, who can only dream of ever obtaining a man with those physical characteristics? It’s gotta be disappointing going to the beach and wondering why all the boys don’t look like the Prince of Persia (except the dreamy Jake Gyllenhall, of course).
Of course, the girls likely have it worse. You typically find young girls are much more susceptible to body image issues than boys (even though I think it’s there in both genders). So imagine what young girls must think when they see Lara Croft, Bayonetta, or pretty much any female Dead Or Alive character with large, perky breasts, perfectly sculpted butts, tiny waists, and legs that look about six feet long. I know what teenage boys and younger men are thinking. (Heck, I know what 35-year-old men are thinking.) It doesn’t set healthy expectations for them , either.
It took a team of programmers hundreds of hours to make this butt. Where's your team of nerds, young Madison?
As a parent, how do you deal with this? Well, you could try and keep these games away from young impressionable minds (and in fact, most of the characters here appear in M-rated games, so really young kids should be spared this imagery for quite some time). But you can’t do that forever. They will lay eyes on these characters, or others like them, sooner or later. This is where your job as Responsible Parent comes into play. Just like you need to address the violence issue with your kids, where they need to understand that the things on screen aren’t real, you need to take the same tact with body image. These characters aren’t real. In some cases, they’ve been purposely designed to titillate (Really, Platinum? Playing Bayonetta with one hand?) in order to generate hype and sales for a game. Explain that if Bayonetta were real, she’d be about 11 feet tall. Explain that not even Heidi Montag could get enough plastic surgery to look like that Dead or Alive girl frolicking on the beach in that ridiculous bikini. Tell your son that to look like their favourite action game hero that they’d probably have to hit the gym for about 20 hours, eat about 5000 calories, and take five steroid injections per day.
Little known fact: Cody also went down in the BALCO scandal.
This might all seem obvious, but with all the other parenting challenges that video games can present, body image can get overlooked. Fortunately, all the same methods for talking to your kids about the other aspects are applicable. So when you have the “games are fantasy” conversation with your kids (and if you haven’t by now, why not?), explain that not only can you not “respawn”, kill anything that moves, steal cars, or double jump in real life (how cool would double jumping in real life be, by the way?), but you simply can’t look like the characters in them because they’re impossible specimens, just like the scenarios they find themselves in. If you can get them to understand this, you’ll be so far ahead of the game.
Then, when Mom walks in one day and goes “why is that woman standing there naked while one big monster eats another?” and your (age appropriate, of course) son/daughter replies about how the lady is a fictional hair witch doing battle in a fantasy world that contains all sorts of over the top, impossible creatures, she’ll be impressed with what a well-raised child you have. And you won’t get the evil eye. Or slapped silly.
C'mon. They aren't even TRYING to be realistic at this point. Quad-yielding double-barrelled handguns? That's SO out there.
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