Gaming Norkers: I find your jiggling inaccurate

If you were to believe that the laws of gaming physics were based of those of real life, you would be forgiven for assuming that I am writing this piece using my own bountiful bazongas. Thankfully reality is still reigning in terms of how certain parts of anatomy do and should move.

I just don't quite understand how it is so difficult for game designers to create breasts that move normally. But then again, breasts don't move much, unless you're extremely well endowed and bending over or running. They certainly can't move independently of each other, by the mere action of giggling into a perve cam prior to an upcoming fighting match. I know this is a shock to many of you.

I’ve been playing a relatives copy of Hitman Absolution over the break, mainly because there’s not much else to play. I’m surprised at how not-so bad it is, given that I’ve never played a game from the series before. I’m not going to review the game, but the reason I bring it up is because I noticed something in one of the levels, something that prompted a tweet.

Now we all have seen and probably been mentally twatted by, the insane swaying, bouncing, hip hop dancing breasts that appear in Dead or Alive 5. I can safely vouch that neither my own girls or those of anyone I know have ever swaggered in separate directions at one time, due to the lightest movement made by the ‘ladies’ they protrude, like an eyesore, from. It’s actually quite amazing to watch, in the same sense as watching a strange alien like slug repopulate with itself. My fear is that some younger males will play this game and genuinely think or worse, want, boobs to move like that and then be sorely disappointed. Don’t get your hopes up that porn stars with large augmented breasts will provide the cosmic sideway jiggle you so crave, because those things don’t even move under manual force. They’re rock solid and the only real usefulness they have in life is small scale demolition.


This was a happy home, until the girls from Silicon Valley came

Remember when Lara Croft did a Madonna, only to be honest, looked better than her? Triangle boobs, the boobs of the future, the polygon baby feeders of tomorrow. Now that was probably due to the tools that Core Design had, which is fair enough, but even 8bit babylon’s looked more close to home that Croft’s.



The thing is, I am actually beginning to be convinced that developers spend a lot of their budget and time primarily on boobs more so than they do on the overall game. I bet there’s scores on gaming soundtracks wholly devoted to just boobs. I’m all for praising them, but to such a degree and to portray them in such a wrong way, is not really doing anyone any good. I don’t even think you can truly have worthwhile alone time just by glancing at some of these characters (if um self loving via the images of a computer game is your cup of tea). I know I don’t.

In games like Dead or Alive or Hitman Absolution, is the point (if you can use that word at all) of the way breasts move, purely meant to be comical or entertaining? Or is it suppose to cause some other feelings? But why on earth does it have to be a source of entertainment at all? It’s easy to start getting far too serious about what is essentially fleeting moments in games or moments that aren’t as evident of topics such as sexism within the industry. This isn’t about sexism, it’s simply about the thought process behind the depiction of female breasts in games and why there’s such an emphasis on them. It could be purely the obvious and that’s the tried and proven method that boobs sell. You know when you hear or see the tagline “sex sells”, well a lot of the time it isn’t sexual acts that sell, but merely something connected with the possibility of sex.


Yes she is teh sex, but she isn’t what sold the game!

A game can be plastered with naked bodies and yet will produce not one scene of coitus (what a horrid word) in either the game play or cut scenes. In fact if sex sells then the games that do have sex scenes in them, never market that on their advertisement images or game covers. Mass Effect and Assassins Creed II being some examples.

There’s clearly something about boobs. It’s not likely to go away and I’m not even saying it has to, but it would be interesting to find out why they’re designed in some cases to be so prominent in a game that garnishes nothing from them in terms of game play and story value and why they’re designed in other cases, to look so ridiculous.

Lollipop Chainsaw featured a sexualised lead character, but at least the glorious baps upon her chest weren’t works of basement dwelling fiction. There wasn’t really anything subjectifying about that game from what I can see and don’t mistake me for someone who is blind to how things are. The world is misogynistic and still so sexist it’s far from ever being acceptable, but within the realms of gaming and comparing games that are just downright abhorrent (looking at you as usual Duke Nukem Forver) Lollipop Chainsaw is an example of a game that was pretty harmless and it had boobs that looked like boobs.

You don’t really get much male crotch variety - a bulge is a bulge in pants, whereas boobs come in different shapes and sizes beneath any cloth that keeps them modest. Maybe because most designers are male, they don’t want to put much effort into male genital physic madness, perhaps it’s more offensive or less comical that dangerous stripper orbs flying everywhere. I’m not sure why though. Then again I’m the sort of girl that finds a scene where a dainty girl farts like a horse, instead of bounces like two super-glued epileptic hot air balloons, to be more entertaining.

Boobs...BOOBS FLYING EVERYWHERE

In short, this is a little bit of advice to game designers from somebody that owns a pair of boobs and enjoys their company. They’re not sentient beings with independent goals in life. They don’t want a nice cushy 9-5 job and to go skiing in the Swiss Alps with their friends from the cupcake club. They’re round lovely parts of the female body, which serve actual important functions in life. They’re occasionally bounce, but why you make female characters so redundant and absurd with your foolish designs is beyond me and not really funny or innovative. I don’t see you focusing on the intricate movements of the human earlobe. They be bouncing, ballin’ and swinging.