The news circulating in gamer circles this week is the newly-researched stat that 91 percent of  kids under 18 play video games. And yet the common perception that games are and remain something “just for kids” continues to be more wrong than ever. The most recent ESA data says 82 percent of players are over 18, with nearly 30 percent being over 50. And of all those game-playing, game-buying adults, over 40 percent are women. Just a look around gaming communities tells me, anecdotally, that these numbers come from somewhere: I am not alone.

And yet, gaming as an entertainment medium and as an art form continues to have an image problem.  Or rather, an images problem.

This illustration has been circulating via Tumblr (I don’t know the original source, unfortunately) quite a bit in the past 48 hours.  Ms. Croft here is a memorable and lingering representation of the issue. One of the earliest and perhaps most famous female lead characters in gaming, she has long been renowned for her …assets… rather than for her physical or mental ability or strength of character writing.

As this chronological look at a single character shows us, though, female character design has indeed gotten more realistic over the years. No longer is each individual breast larger than her head, and a full ribcage and complement of internal organs are now being added. (I mean, look at that TR V image. Really?) The upcoming 2012 incarnation of Lara Croft clearly has a body that could actually exist. And indeed, this is a trend in current games: women’s proportions, if still often built on the “swimsuit issue model” type, are at least often now trending into the realm of the physically possible.

Sadly, that isn’t to say that what games do with those more-plausible physical forms is any better.

Eva, world-class spy and agent, Metal Gear Solid 3.

Madison Paige, investigative journalist, Heavy Rain.

Miranda Lawson, observer, liasion, & agent, Mass Effect 2.

All three of these are screenshots from big budget, big studio, games that wish to have their stories, plots, and characters taken seriously.  Throughout most of the narrative of each, that’s easy enough to do.  And then the moments like these appear…

How does the larger gaming design and game playing community reconcile the continual reliance on the male gaze with the changing demographic of their consumers? Well, they don’t, mainly. Not yet, anyway. Even a franchise like Mass Effect 2 that leaves so much room for possibility with its lead character, can do this with Miranda. BioWare is arguably the most aware of any major studio right now, but even so is still marketing to the same crowd.

The good news, though, is that gender representation and diversity issues are starting to see the light of day in more mainstream gaming talk (transcript here). The Extra Creditz crew have tackled similar discussions.

So while 2,000-4,000 word essays (my specialty, alas) tackling the history of gender representation and the male gaze across visual media are always going to be a bit of a niche area, the conversations about women in gaming are indeed finally spilling out into a wider, mainstream, primarily male audience. And sometimes, that audience is getting it.

And meanwhile, I’ll take whatever conversation, whatever venue, and whatever allies it takes to get more of this:

and less of this:

into gaming.

Of the many Johnny Depp projects in the pipeline, the one I think has the most potential to be genuinely interesting is a biopic of Theodore Geisel, better known, of course, as Doctor Seuss. Geisel’s work is both wildly commercially successful and intensely political, and his political cartooning (which I highly recommend) veers between contradictory impulses of anti-Japanese racism and condemnations of anti-Semitism and racism directed at African-Americans. He both created great entertainment for children (The Cat in the Hat is the result of a challenge to see if he could write an educational book using only 250 words important for young readers) and never had any — in fact, a long-term affair contributed to his wife’s suicide. I don’t really know that I think Depp is the right person to play Geisel — he runs the risk of being purely wacky — but Geisel is an enormously fitting and interesting subject for a biopic, and not merely because I’m so manifestly pleased by anyone who manages to make great entertainment out of serious political ideas.

Real Steel, otherwise known as Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots: The Movie, is in theaters now. Battleship, otherwise known as “there’s no way this alien navy movie had to justify itself by claiming to be based on Battleship,” is out next year. Transformers already stunk up the joint, not once but three times, and don’t even mention The Smurfs. Obviously, there’s a vogue for toy and board game movies, probably due to Gen-Xers getting a taste of adulthood and concluding “there is no *(&#%*@ way.”

So what other films should we be expecting in the next few years? I’ve got some ideas. You can have these for free.

Mousetrap. In this Saw-style torture porn, a soft-spoken psychopath (Mark Ruffalo) ensnares three studious young women (Olivia Thirlby, Amber Tamblyn, Lily Collins) inside a fiendish device of his own invention. In order to survive, they’ll have to shed their inhibitions to roll, flip, and swing at his command. But what’s the final goal — their liberation? Or some more nefarious plan?

Uno. Uno (Viggo Mortenson) is the protege of mob boss Gianni “Crazy Eights” Gambino (James Gandolfini, DUH). When his friend “Skip” (Giovanni Ribisi) suggests that he could hasten his rise to the top, Uno is dubious — until Skip starts taking matters into his own hands, and Uno’s rivals fall like a pack of cards. But reversals and double-crosses mean Uno doesn’t know who to trust.

Chutes and Ladders. Evangeline (Lena Dunham) is at ease in her suburban life with her much older husband, Perry (Jeff Daniels). But Perry believes he will lose his wife’s interest if he doesn’t keep endlessly climbing — corporate climbing, social climbing, and finally clambering onto the roofs of their subdued exurb in the middle of the night. Will Evangeline be able to convince him that she’s satisfied before he seriously pisses off the neighbors by sliding down their gutters?

Magic 8 Ball. In this emotional and comedic heir to Bridesmaids*, Georgina (Mindy Kaling) is convinced she can clean up her life with the help of a psychic (Rashida Jones). Georgina’s relationships with her boss (Catherine Tate), landlord (Scott Adsit), and ex-boyfriend (Cheyenne Jackson) improve, and she reconciles with her stupid-hot brother (Sendhil Ramamurthy, just because I like to look at him), despite lingering recriminations after their parents’ death. But her best friend Penny (Amy Poehler) doubts the psychic’s abilities and sets out to unmask her. Will her meddling undo everything Georgina has gained? With Alan Cumming as Georgina’s personal trainer.

* This just means “comedy that passes the Bechdel test,” as it will for at least the next 12 years.

One of the things that’s struck me about the interviews Vince Gilligan’s done after this season’s finale of Breaking Bad is the extent to which they reveal not just that the show has all of these meticulously planned and executed episodes (it may be the most beautifully shot show on television right now), but that these meticulous episodes are coming together really fast. As he tells James Poniewozick:

Season four was pretty close to that in execution. In other words, we knew what had to happen at the end of the season. We knew that Walt would have to finally defeat his nemesis Gus and while we didn’t have every single detail nailed down, we talked about it. We would spend time every week in the writer’s room talking about where we were going. We would take breaks from where we were at that particular moment on any given episode and we would jump ahead to where we were going with the story. So, yes, we had the the plot of the last episode figured out probably three or four episodes in advance.

And in his conversation with Maureen Ryan, Gilligan reveals it wasn’t actually clear going into the fourth season who would live and who would die:

Back in the early days of plotting out Season 4, we did indeed realize that this was the season where it would all have to come to a head and there would have to be some resolution one way or the other. And we even briefly discussed, “What if it is Walt that gets killed”? We got to realize pretty quickly that we couldn’t actually go that way. But we try to make the writer’s room a safe place and let all ideas wind up on the table at some point or another, even if only for 10 or 20 seconds.

We discuss every possibility. We discussed, “What if Walt dies or is horribly wounded?” Or “what if” [scenarios involving Hank, Skyler or Jesse]. We do try to discuss every possible permutation that we can conceive of. But at a certain point we also have to choose between the least of all evils, I suppose. I’d hate to think of this show without Aaron Paul on it. Obviously, I don’t think we’d have a show without Bryan Cranston.

I’m intrigued by this, because it offers an intriguing insight into how fast the show has evolved from a significantly realistic show about health care, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and the thin veneer that separates the middle class from the working poor in Albuquerque into a full-on horror show. Listening to this week’s TV On the Internet podcast, I both agree with Libby Hill that the show has evolved in concert with its main character, becoming more monstrous as Walt does, I also share some of Todd’s concerns about the show going slightly off the rails.

I guess I’d feel comforted if I knew which story the fifth and final season of the show was going to tell. It makes sense that we’re going to have to see what happens with the networks left behind by the cartel’s decimation and Gus’ sudden death, but I think somehow I’d be disappointed by a show that’s so intensely about morality giving Walt the chance to go out as a kingpin. Instead, wouldn’t it be more fitting the show’s worldview to have Walt stuck running the car wash, which, as some folks pointed out on Twitter, would be a fitting forced return to invisibility for a man who is desperate to be recognized for his greatness? But in either case, I’d really like to know that Vince Gilligan knows how this is all going to end even if he isn’t going to tell any of us yet.

Reflecting on it, I don’t think the manner of Gus’ death, which felt a bit like the show calling on the makeup crew for The Walking Dead just because they could, was an actual shark-jumping moment. The show’s always pitted the wildly grotesque against the realistic, particularly in the defeat of the Cousins by Hank, a crude human potato with remarkable, but not totally implausible, panic-fueled resilience. But I do think the end of this season, from the wild cackle that closed out “Crawl Space” to the literalness of “Face Off” raises questions about how Gilligan is going to deliver his moral coup de grace: through crushing banality, or through operatic shock?