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Takeaway:
It is not good enough to design characters, outfits, or skins
based on white or Asian beauty standards.
Beauty is cultural. While some cultures believe that pale skin and very thin features are beautiful, others may feel that darker skin and muscular bodies are more beautiful. In other countries, the feminine body is taboo, and showing skin or voluptuous feminine shapes can be offensive.
Regardless of the taboos, we create characters that are personalized, diverse, and suitable for the target audience.
With the rise of the body positivity movement abroad, beauty standards are being challenged in media and marketing alike. This is especially important to female gamers, whose representation has long been limited to sexualized female characters and characters designed according to "conventional" beauty standards.
According to the 2022 Real World Beauty campaign launched by skin and beauty line Dove, "Female characters in games do not accurately represent the diverse gamers of the world – and are often heavily sexualized, and created within narrow, unrealistic beauty standards. 74% of girls wish the characters in video games looked more like women in real life.
Tomb Raider Series: Realistic Proportions
Tomb Raider Series: Realistic Proportions
Visually, Lara has gone through several changes over the years. The improvements in graphics technology also prompted the changes, as with more polygons the design could strive to be more realistic.
But according to the developers, they have also put in a lot of effort to make Lara have more realistic proportions to better suit contemporary audiences and "bring her down to earth".
More in The Evolution of Lara Croft
Lara Croft's changes over time: early designs on the left, most recent design on the right
The trend is toward more diversity, but there is a long way to go. In the fashion industry, 71% of cover models were white as of 2016, an increase from previous years, but a small one. Media industries are now slowly trying to catch up to consumer demands, and this applies to many forms of media.
The overall trend in media is toward more body diversity and representation, featuring a range of body types. Some examples of successful campaigns include:
Nike's "Dream Crazier" ad featuring powerful female athletes succeeding despite societal pressures and body shaming
Social media activism such as with hashtags like #EffYourBeautyStandards, which has been tagged on Instagram over 3 million times.
In video games, this means that character creation and NPCs are expected to show greater diversity in design and that the trend is toward less sexualized and more realistic. Whereas female characters used to be very sexualized and often scantily clad, nowadays these designs are heavily criticized online.
Japan and South Korea are also leaders in this trend, as consumers in those regions expect and accept a wider range of beauty standards, with many products more androgynous.
Overwatch 2: Female
Body Diversity
Overwatch 2: Female
Body Diversity
Zarya and Junk Queen are muscular, yet feminine. They also do not fall into the common trope of 'tomboy,' 'tsundere', and 'barbarian' stereotypes.
Overwatch 2: Male
Body Diversity
Overwatch 2: Male
Body Diversity
A good example of body diversity, as the characters have quite different proportions: short/tall, skinny/muscular, and lean/fat, all feeling unique.
Overwatch 2:
Age Diversity
Overwatch 2:
Age Diversity
This offers a good example of avoiding ageism, as older characters are not the stereotypical 'sage' or 'frail' — they fight alongside the younger ones.
Horizon Series: Ethnic Diversity
Horizon Series: Ethnic Diversity
The Horizon series has been praised not only for the renderization power of its Decima engine shaders but also for how that translated into the uniqueness and diversity of NPCs.
In a post-apocalyptic world where humanity collapsed, one could say it makes sense that the NPCs are racially mixed and their 'tribes' or 'nations' are not implied by their skin color or eye shape.
But the game goes even further. The writers explicitly and intentionally added this diversity to the lore: All characters descend from a batch of embryos that were purposely compiled to preserve the diversity of the human race.
Not only has it made the game more inclusive, but it has also enriched the game's visual experience and level of detail.
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