1000 Game heroes
Posted on October 07, 2002 @ 21:56 in Research
As I'm researching the construction and representation of gender in computer-mediated environments, I bought the Digital Beauties book almost a year ago. For the best part of last week, every time I passed the bookshop on my way to work, I looked at the new Taschen book 1000 Game Heroes in the window, but the shop was always either not yet open or already closed when I passed by. Today however I finally got to go home a bit earlier and I picked up a copy of the book.
It's basically a coffee table book, just like the Digital Beauties book, which means lots of beautifully printed full color images and rather little in terms of text. Unlike the Digital Beauties book which, as I complained about then, is unashamedly about displaying female digital creations and nothing but, this book at least isn't as biased and features a good deal of male game characters. The book presents the game characters in various sections such as Fighting Heroes and Funny Heroes, subdivided by the actual game titles. Most games feature with some ingame shots, mixed with concept art or specially rendered 'publicity' material. For most games this works rather well, but for some of the games like Unreal (just the widely published promo-material and some concept art) and Tomb Raider it is a bit disappointing. Yes, the specially rendered images of Lara are definitely more attractive than the ingame shots, but do you really have to fill four pages and a two-page spread with suggestive images of Lara?
Some games are given much more attention than others that have to be content with one full-page or two half-page shots. I can't help but feel that this was at least in part simply because availability of material. Warcraft for instance gets three pages plus a two-page spread, but it's concept art only and there's only one page with a concept art collage devoted to Phantasy Star Online, as compared to six pages of faux revolutionary/propaganda flyers and hardly a character in sight for a game like Civilization. Ah, but the Commando's section more than makes up with real WWII photographs of soldiers and their digital counterparts side by side. It also must be noted that the selection of games and heroes is very diverse and the editor has chosen to include non-organic gamer heroes such as Mechs, the fast cars from Gran Turismo and some planes from Flight Simulator and Crimson Skies. Kudos also for including a wide range of both 'Western' and Japanese style games and less well-known or less obvious titles Ico, Ecco, Space Harrier (from a long time ago) and Amerzone.
So how about the construction/representation of gender? I really have to think this one through some more, but with so many characters next to eachother it at least becomes clear that gender is constructed differently in the markedly different Western and Japanese styles. Looking at the differences and similarities it's really interesting when the Western game-designers try to incorporate Japanese style elements and vice versa. It's also going to be interesting to figure out how a rather apparant aspect of a character such as "toughness" is exactly being constructed for both the female and the male gender. For the male characters it appears that broad facial features (broad, slightly flattish cheekbones, broad nose and chin and pronounced jaw lines) are even more typical than a bulky chest and thick neck... but that's not all that revoluationary, isn't it?
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