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Women are great. Soft, silky, smooth, and sweet-smelling (what a lot
of Ss...sex begins with s too - coincidence?)...well some are. Others
are hard-edged, smell sour, and just plain look bad. The truth is I don't
want to play games as/against the latter type, or even something in between
the two.
I want to have beauty in with my violence. I want sex appeal, and I want
the curves and appearance of softness, and I want the provocative taunt
animations, and I want the sexy sounds...I want so much in a player model,
and it's all about my personal sense of aesthetics. It has nothing to
do with how the models I use make the odd chick/dissenter feel, and it
most certainly has nothing to do with politics. It's all about fun, and
I've never had fun looking at the plain-jane who passes me in the street,
so I'm not about to inflict that on myself on the servers. I'll force
models if need be to avoid it. I want sexy women.
I'm not the only gamer who feels this way. Many gamers like eye candy,
and not only in female form. Many players prefer Razor, Bitterman, and
Sarge over less idealised male figures, or opt to be a monster, simply
because playing games is a form of escapist disassociation from the harsh
reality of how we are, as well as a pastime for entertaining and amusing
us. The subject at hand is the female gaming form, but the male models
are relevant, because many of the dissenters are crying foul over the
objectification of the female form. They ignore the macho, muscular bodies
of the male models, and the occasional appearance of the less then ideal
female model.
Also, in the context of the Bad Girl competition, to cry objectification
about an event that really affects nobody but its target audience (gamers,
modellers, animators, and skinners) is a tad asinine. The competition
was started so that artists could stretch themselves and have fun, and
it was spec'ed to enable judging to be along some sort of spectrum, so
avoiding the problem of it being impossible to compare utterly divergent
works. Also the contest serves the purpose of putting out on the free
art market a range of stunning player models for us to use, and lets face
it "us" consists for the most part of people who love the sexy
female characters. The spec' was that entries be £1500
face renditions of comicbook villainesses. Villainesses take many forms,
and though Steed himself encourages the modelling of beauties with unlikely
builds he doesn't penalise good work on less-than-attractive characters.
You only have to read his critique
of Gail Wahl's work to get an idea of this.
And it's not like Paul doesn't show women respect when it counts. I've
never seen any disrespect from the other guys around the PPM community
either, except that which wasn't perfectly innocent fun. Paul and the
rest of the artists who make these models are not sexist any more than
anyone with sexual urges is. Paul certainly isn't in his treatment and
attitude to women outside of game art. It's ridiculous, and typical of
a shallow 'convenient target' attack that Paul is being continuously singled
out as a misogynist. I don't think he is one at all. Quite the reverse
- he seems to be utterly in the thrall of our sex.
The Steed-as-a-sexist-pig-attack happens more than it should, because
it's the feminist element that tend to be most vocal about their tastes,
and he is renowned for his provocative female models \
Steed = target. His dissenters ignore the Bittermans and Lucys and Sarges
in his folio, despite the fact that they are either examples of similarly
idealised male or diametrically opposed female PMs. They ignore that the
market being catered to wants the idealised characters. They ignore the
fact that the Majors and Lucys are not idealised (I'm sorry, as much as
I love the Major model, her arms are way to big to allow her to be sexy
in the sense objected to). They target him because Paul, like a huge proportion
of game artists, likes to portray sexy, idealised, funky characters....and
because he's male.
To a certain extent we all objectify the sex we covet. Nobody I know
of, even the more politically correct, won't notice a beauty in the street
over all the ordinary-looking people, or be attracted to those blessed
with good looks. It's rare to find someone who is totally immune to sex
appeal, and just about impossible not to enjoy eye candy in the form of
the human body and face. I'm guilty of it, and certainly don't cavil at
admitting that - I see a babe and I rubberneck them...shamelessly.
I use the sexy females models because they're sexy. I think the trouble
with this ongoing argument is not that these people are wanting to encourage
the creation of 'their' kind of model. They're coming across as trying
to deter 'my' kind. That may not be the intent, but that's how it seems.
Additionally, the artists in question want to make sexy models.
What right do the trendy lefties have to dictate the subject matter of
any artist's work? NONE!
If you truly appreciate the physical experience that is a woman in her
prime you will be aware of these things:
• women have been blessed with aesthetic beauty in most cases -
a woman who is in good shape will flow well from limb to torso, from breast
to rib, from buttock to thigh. Her skin has a curious silky velvetine
sheen, that defies reproduction. A naked woman can be the most astoundingly
pleasing sight.
• women are objects of great mystery and appeal to other people
- a man will be ga-ga for hours after encountering a sexy woman. He will
glaze over, ruminate over her memory, and tell his fellow-men about this
vision of beauty he saw scratching her neck in a queue at the bank hours
after she's left his sphere of influence. He will perhaps build a masturbatory
fantasy around her some time in the near future. He will wish he could
wake up next to such a creature just once before he dies. He will wonder
if she's clever, would laugh at his jokes, minds boys' nights out, or
can field-strip her PC and rebuild in less than ten minutes (sorry, added
that last one to make myself feel good). He will remember the freckle
on her collarbone, and be buggered if he remembers what she had on her
feet, or why he remembers one such silly detail then forgets the other.
He will be in a thrall over the wonder that is our sex.
• men have ugly genitals. At least female uglies are inside.
• women will often move with an innate grace that you simply can't
ignore. The swing of the hips, the arc the ankle makes through a step,
and the pivot in the shoulders is pure poetry. Sometimes a fat girl, or
a chick with ankles like tree-trunks will earn admiring looks for her
grace, sometimes a man can tell his lover from two blocks away by the
gait she moves with that no other woman can imitate...and he'll love her
all the more for it, sometimes a woman just has to scratch her chin to
earn silent applause from those around her. It's poetry to behold.
These are all good reasons to prefer caricatures of femininity ingame,
over other types of model. I want grace, beauty, and T&A in my crosshair
and beside my name on the scoreboard. Actually I demand I get those traits
personified in my PPMs. Bring on the babes. The more sexy female models
I have access to the better. I prefer to skin them and I prefer to use
them ingame, over male models or plain-janes. My call-out to the dissenters
is this: if you don't like them then don't use them. It's not like you'll
ever see them unless you actually download them.
Another point, raised by mule, a Polycount
denizen, is that artists for ages past have rendered, in various media,
the human form to the ideal of the period. Rubens painted women so consistently
to the form of the day that a whole figure type has been named for him.
Michelangelo made extensive study of the human form in all its glory.
Every heroic comic book artist this century has idealised the hero or
heroine to the point where there is a form called the 'heroic' body, a
whole different set of standardised proportions for artists to use to
achieve a superhero-style character. Why stop now? No reason any dissenter
has given me yet!
Everyone needs creative outlet in some form, be it sculpting abstract
monoliths or putting together a kitset model, painting a mural or painting
by numbers, designing a PPM or skinning Steed's OOTB PMs. How, what, or
why a person creates, in whichever medium they chose, for whatever use
or audience, nobody has the ability to force modification of that creation....unless
they are paying for it. Everyone does have the right to create, including
those who don't like sexy female PPMs.
The fact is a huge number of the people complaining about bimbo-shaped
PPMs don't model, skin, or animate themselves the kind of game media they
want us to make, so it's all down to us to please them apparently. They
simply sit back and expect us to bow to their political and moralistic
standards. That's not going to happen. There will be artists who will
make art in the style the anti-rack brigade demand because they want to
despite the demands, but for the most part community artists have
limited time, around school, work, and other commitments, in which to
make their art, and it'd be a rare person who'd take time out from making
what they want to make in order to pander to someone else's expectations.
I've started modelling recently, and I'm making idealised forms. I'm
talking models that invoke all the virtues of feminity (and masculinity...mmmmmmbuff)
that I outline in this rant - pure, liquid, digital sex. I will ignore
objections from the feminist camp. I don't think I am answerable to them.
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