Lara Croft gets a "realistic" redesign from eating disorder support group
377 replies, posted
[QUOTE=catbarf;48354919]Can you point me to where this is happening? Because if you take, like, thirty seconds to read the OP, that's not what's going on here in the slightest. The link in the OP is showing examples of game characters if they had average proportions as opposed to the idealized figures we're used to in gaming, and it's for a bulimia support group. It's not accusing the developers of being insensitive to fat people or something, it's giving visual examples of what these characters would look like if they were reflective of the average. That's pretty meaningful in trying to talk about a disorder that stems in part from the prevalence of unrealistic standards in media.
But Facepunch is being reactionary and triggered as usual because how [i]dare[/i] they imply that videogame characters tend not to be representative of real people. Something something feminists something something SJWs.[/QUOTE]
[img]http://www.bulimia.com/wp-content/themes/bulimia-child/assets/images/video-games-realistic/Rikku-Final-Fantasy-X-2.png[/img]
If that's average for a 15 years-old girl in the US, that's rather alarming.
Bulimia support groups should promote being healthy, not being "average" when the US has a rampant obesity problem.
Not to mention that it's not going to help anorexics to show them stuff they'll just find ridiculous, especially if they have a skewed view of what a healthy body is to begin with. What's wrong with remaking these characters to be athletic/in shape but with realistic proportions? They would be taken more seriously and girls with eating disorders will have actually healthy characters to look up to and emulate.
I just think its hilariously that people think that game developers and concept artists create the art that they want. Coming from somebody who's close to indistry and interning at a game development company, training to be a concept artist I can tell you right now that you hardly get to choose what you want to make.
Good example would be that I personally like to draw female characters with varying body types (Only because drawing the same body type gets boring for me) but what happens when you work with a company is that you have to bust out at least 20 variations of concepts for whatever character you are given. Then the Art Director decides which he believes will convey the meaning behind the character and generally choose what is marketable.
You will almost always have your generic characters chosen over anything else because that shit sells aparently. This works for the movie indistry as well.
Of course it sells, who wants to see fat Rikku, come on.
isn't it also unrealistic to have an out of shape character perform physical exercises for dozens of hours non-stop?
I'm pretty sure having what is essentially a fat character (male or female) engaging in a whole lot of physical activity with zero issues is [I]more[/I] unrealistic than a very slim figure with no noticeable athlete attributes.
Why has this thread dipped in to a ten page debate? Are there really people delusional enough to believe the shit in the OP is "average" for most of the world? Do people think it'd be more realistic, accessible or (although much less of a concern because it's a fucking video game) "promoting healthiness" to have fatter characters? Surely thin but not athletically built characters have a higher sense of verisimilitude compared to fat characters when it comes to all of the physical exertion the average video game characters goes through?
Shit, when did it become so bad to be thin? Sure, a lot of characters are unhealthily thin if compared besides an actual human, but then again they also tend to have whack out of shape proportions because they're often [I]video game characters[/I] that aren't real and are only rarely designed to actually stand up to anatomical comparisons to actual humans, like in games such as GTA, MGS and TLoU.
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