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.

Last month at Netroots, I had the great pleasure to spend some time talking to David Roberts from Grist, who mentioned an interview he’d done with an outfit called Hollywood, Health, and Society that’s a free informational resource for folks who are producing health- and climate-related pop culture who want to make sure they get their facts right. HHS director Sandra de Castro Buffington told him why she thinks their model works:

We hold panel discussions at the Writers Guild of America West on a regular basis. I have a climate change panel discussion coming up on March 9, so I’m going to bring together a small group of experts, a keynote speaker, and some writers and/or producers who have successfully portrayed climate issues in television or film. They can talk about how they did it, why they did it, what were some of the challenges, what are some of the opportunities. We get about 75 to 100 writers at these events.

We have long-standing, trusting relationships with the writers, so if I have an expert in town, I’ll call them and say, look, I’ve got this amazing person who has real stories I’m sure you’ve never heard before. Can we have one hour on Friday? Now, why do the writers trust us? They have every special interest group in the world hitting on them every day, but they don’t want someone else’s agenda being pushed on them. The reason they trust us is that we never push an agenda. We’re simply a free resource. We will get them an expert on any topic they want.

This strikes me as such an insanely smart model that I’m not sure why more folks aren’t doing it. Being a connector to experts and vetted information is a relatively cheap thing for foundations to support: it doesn’t require a huge staff, and it’s in the interests of a lot of organizations to make their experts available. Not every organization’s going to be able to pull this off—Focus on the Family, for example, is probably going to have a pretty hard time just putting themselves out there as objective efforts and convincing people to come to them. Anyone who tries to do this is going to have to be patient enough to put story ahead of their agenda, and to recognize that sometimes policy information or a policy agenda won’t fit neatly into the conventions of narrative. And for some folks, that may not be worth it, if they end up with compromised stories. But as this interview suggests, the increasing accuracy of health information in pop culture suggests that narrative drama and facts can coexist. And basic facts shape our expectations of what’s possible and what’s right.

I’ve complained in the past that nobody knows how to do the divine in movies and television any more. And Gods Behaving Badly, which involves a bunch of Greek deities hanging out in a Manhattan brownstone may not exactly inspire a sense of awe and wonder. But the casting sounds straight-up awesome, and for once, decently representational: Phylicia Rashad as Demeter is nice, as is Rosie Perez as Persephone. And Nelsan Ellis, who is far and away my favorite part of True Blood, as Dionysus is just genius. (Ditto for picking World’s Twitchiest Catholic John Turturro as Hades, and Christopher Walken, who will be the most dour Zeus ever.) It’s not perfectly proportional representation, but having three out of ten gods be played by people of color is a step up from pure tokenism.

I can’t quite make up my mind if I think the quest to make Hollywood’s outputs look more like America is better served by a focus on original content, remakes that racebend in the opposite direction (something I’m working on a separate piece about), adaptations, or historical dramas and biopics that shade in the country’s history so it’s not all white. The obvious answer is a combination of all of these categories, though I wonder if original content has an advantage because folks can’t have preconceptions about the race or ethnicity of characters they’re not already familiar with.