Gender and intersectionality in games

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’

Though I don't necessarily agree with the entirety of the article (much of the discussion being cisnormative and/or out of date), it raises some very valid points about the (presumedly heterosexual) male gaze, and the representation of women in relation to this, which I feel are very applicable to video games in general, particularly the triple-A sector of the industry. Games are often criticised for skimpily outfitting their female characters while men receive more practical and less skin-tight variations. To give an example, Metal Gear Solid V's Quiet is one of the most obviously tailored-for-the-straight-male representations of femininity in modern gaming. Mute, barely clothed and complete with jiggle physics, she is physically caged and on display in the game's hub area, performing for the viewer as she showers and sunbathes. This character is so exemplative of so many stereotypes that it's almost satirical, and yet the fact that there is in-game justification for her outfit (she requires as little clothing as possible in order to photosynthesise) suggests that developers knew this design would come under fire, and so knew exactly what they were doing.

Peggy McIntosh, ‘White Privilege and Male Privilege…’ 

McIntosh's article, though written many years ago now, is still very relevant today. Particularly in the triple-A FPS and action genres, but also in many others besides and even in film, it can be very hard to find a protagonist that is not white (or white-passing) and/or male. Lack of representation is endemic in games as a whole, and even when racial minorities are found they are often horribly stereotyped or used as props for white saviour plotlines. Assassin's Creed looked to be moving forward in 2012 with characters such as Connor and Aveline, but has since defaulted back to mainly white male playable characters, with the occasional non-white or female character thrown in, as an alternate option or in spin-off titles like Chronicles. Even seemingly innocent games such as the Animal Crossing series suffer from this, not allowing players to have dark skin without deliberately standing in the sun for several hours. Progress in this area is being made, but slowly, as there isn't quite as much pressure on the industry for race diversity as for gender diversity, although both are important.

Week Summary - BA1b Week 10

Damaged pillar

Seeing how long this process was going to take me, I cut back the pillar even further to just three cubes and a small section of tree. After decimating and retopologising the medium-poly damaged sections into the cubes, I retopologised the tree using the quad draw function to ensure nice, clean edge loops and to cut out unnecessary triangles. This took some time and I was glad of the fact that I had cut the model back so much - this section was only about a third of the original model, if that.

After this I UV mapped and baked each of the cubes and the tree separately. While the texture distribution wasn't perfect - I would have liked to assign more detail to the tree - it did break up nicely into four 1024x1024 maps. There were some brief issues I encountered where there were n-gons on the low-poly models that I hadn't seen, and another when maya was exporting .mtl files as well as .objs which confused me during the baking stage, but both were quickly resolved.

At this point I ran a little over time into the next week, as I needed advice on how to get the normal maps to work properly in UE4, the issue being that I needed to assign different materials to my models in maya before exporting. After that however it was a quick task to bring the assets into the engine and get everything working, including the third person character for scale, and I think the final model is really effective - especially after  I added some diffuse colours and adjusted the roughness values.

If I have extra time in the future, I would maybe look at making some more maps like albedo or ambient occlusion to pull everything together, but for the time I had for this project I'm very happy with what I produced. 

(I also had a look at some of the engine's particle effects to see how I could make use of them to make an effective scene.)

Life drawing

A fairly standard session this week, trying to focus on being more decisive with my lines and keeping things loose. To that effect I used charcoal for this session to force myself to commit to what I was doing, and I think I produced some nice work, although I still need to be faster with these quick sketches.

The next two studies were focusing on experimenting with mark making and being a little more expressive with the pieces. I found the first one to be enjoyable and it helped me to loosen up and stop being precious about my drawing, but the second study threw me a little, using only vertical lines. I usually start with a base skeleton and gesture lines when drawing, and not having those I feel like my proportions were very out. I also like to be fluid with my mark making, and this went very much against that. That said I recognise the merit of being pushed out of my comfort zone, and it did force me to think about how I draw and how I construct my figures.