Double Agent
Squall's Jacket by Polo™ - April 18, 2001 - Chris Jones

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. Oh I wish I was in Austin, in the chilly parlor bar/ Drinkin' Mad Dog margaritas, and not carin' where you are. Don't say we didn't warn you.

I can't get too freaked out about the Game Cube delay announcement - on the one hand, it would seem to indicate that the US release will also be pushed back further (I can't see a mere 2 month period between the Japanese and US releases), but on the other hand, I have no idea what to think about the Cube until we see what it's capable of at E3. It's all about games, games, games, and Nintendo's silence on the matter could indicate that it's either woefully behind in the software war, or about to unleash a surprise attack of stuff that'll make MGS2 look weak in comparison.

Onward.

Methinks the lad doth protest too much
I prefer designs that reflect the setting. I like how FFX's characters like in an Okinawa-like setting and sport some traditional Okinawa-style designs. I do not like clothing designs that sacrifice reality for sexuality.I hope this isn't too much to ask, but I would appreciate it if skimply-dressed party members would put on some clothes whenever your party visited a frozen mountain/ice/glacier/refrigerator location. Even Lara Croft wore a jacket when she visited the northern Andes.

-Fares

Disclaimer: I only played Tomb Raider for the Prince of Persia-like gameplay, not anything else. I did not play any of the sequels. I am not making any of this up.

The problem is, as graphics get better we start thinking of game characters as real people, and as such expect to see them do what real people do - change their clothes, get muddy, bloody, have bad hair days, etc. But from a developer's standpoint, characters are much more like their counterparts in comics or animation - not so much a picture of a person but a symbolic representation of a person. This means two things: a game character's outfit isn't just something they wear, it's literally who they are, and because of this, changing the outfit changes the character. Speed Racer is his gloves and scarf, Cecil is his dark helmet or Pantene-fresh hair, depending on where you are in the game.

As characters start acting more realistic we can expect the focus to shift over towards the person and not the clothes, but for now Squall's stuck with his jacket and Tifa's stuck with her skirt, and all that implies.

This outfit makes a statement: "I am a raving psycho."
Greetings Chris.

Personally, I'm a big fan of flamboyant and mystical character designs. They help convey the message that these characters and the land (region of space, alternate dimension, whatever) they come from is apart and alien to our hum-drum world. I think a lot of people will agree, it's amusing and entertaining to see people doing things, such as fighting, in clothes and outfits that would never, ever be practical for anything of the sort. Legend of Mana's Elazul is a good example of this. It's a wonder he can even walk with all that cape and headgear, yet he manages to be a deadly swordsman. This also helps support the feel of being far removed from reality. Most of the games wherein I particularly enjoyed the character designs (such as Chrono Trigger, and Xenogears) had fairly impractical and/or unlikely appearances. Finally, because a large amount of a character's personality and mindset is (often, not always) tied into the way the character looks/dresses, it helps us to feel that the characters are truly the heroes the game makes them, above and beyond "normal" people.

Super Saiya-jin.

I love all female character designs. I can't help it.

It's funny for a while, but it's also annoying when you're trying to take the story seriously. There's any number of otherwise great stories marred by the fact that characters are wearing the least practical thing possible. Vagrant Story's a perfect example of this.. and I don't think I have to explain why.

She doesn't love female character designs
Character designs. I have only one thing to say about character designs, and that is to ask how all of the stereotypical 'chick-in-chainmail' RPG girls tend to have on either a) a miniskirt, b) a metal leotard/bikini, or c) a *leather* leotard/bikini; yet they NEVER-- through all their struggles to aid the protagonist in his quest to destroy the Evil Empire (tm), find out that the Evil Empire (tm) was in fact controlled by the Evil Emperor (tm)'s Evil Henchman (tm), then discover that the Evil Henchman (tm) was in fact being controlled by a Far Greater Evil (tm), and then to defeat the Far Greater Evil (tm)-- find the time to shave their legs. As this is a question that will stay stuck in your head once you ask it to yourself, I have been wondering about it for quite some time, but haven't been able to come up with any answers. I mean, they stay in inns for about two seconds, and when you actually DO see them sleep, they just walk into bed and sleep the whole time that they're in the inn. Would they even have time to take baths, much less shave their legs? Is there a hidden magical spell of some sort that shaves your legs for you in RPG worlds (and incidentally, is that why magic users are mostly female?)? What do you think?

-Katie-

P.S. Oh yes, sorry for warping you for life. This thought is guaranteed to change the way you look at Tifa, Yuffie, Rosa, Rydia, Ayla (well, it won't really *change* the way you look at her, but oh well), Lenna (and Faris, in some of those outfits), most of the cast of Chrono Cross, all those people in Legend of Dragoon that I only played partway through the first disk, Rinoa, Selphie, Riesz, and Celes. Now I'm through rambling my insane thoughts. I hope.

There's obviously no satisfactory answer to this, so I'll suggest that the two seconds of sleep you see hide an arduous night wherein the female characters wash their clothes, shampoo, condition, dye, dry, and comb their hair, undergo full body wax jobs, put on makeup, get manicures and pedicures, and feast upon their daily rations of celery and diet soda. And when it's all over, they have just enough time to get into bed and pretend to wake up, looking exactly the same as they did the day before.

Just to be fair, we're trashing FF and DQ at the same time
As far as character designs are concerned, I have two mortal enemies:

1: Akira Toriyama. All of his drawings look the same. ALL of them. And the person he draws looks stupid. The only good thing I've seen him do was Chrono Trigger (which was fantastic), but a one-hit wonder doesn't deserve as much patronage as he gets.

2: Tetsuya Nomura. All of his drawings look the same, and even worse than Toriyama's. I'm sick of that Japanese boy band wash out we keep seeing from him, and Square's insistence on using him recently instead of Yoshitaka Amano is baffling. It's like choosing Pantera over Bach. Or KISS (which sounds like Christian rock, for fsck's sake) over Uematsu.

I am a bitter, bitter man.

- Zen

At least it's even-handed, I'll give it that.

Interlude: the literacy thing I

I had to respond to the following, as my credibility seems at stake:Because of this egregious inaccuracy, I also find Reitz' statistic that only 60% of the population are functionally illiterate. Try like 5%. I've never seen any statistic list american literacy below 90%. Be skeptical of everything you read (including this).

Mr. Pilky is correct, I was wrong, the actual CURRENT literacy rate is around 51% of the American population, not 60% as I reported. My information was some 15 years out of date, so I decided to verify it. Here is one of many links relating to this topic, in this case the text of the overview of the National Center for Education Statistics study on literacy for December 1993.

http://www.nald.ca/fulltext/Report2/REP15-01.HTM

15 years ago, indeed the number was actually above 60%, clearly there has been some improvement, though apparently, literacy is dropping once again.

Lastly, yes, my statement about 'Coffee Table Books' was indeed sarcasm representing crap, crap such as, in point of fact, books on diet, and anything recommended by ridiculous television celebrities. Sarcasm, I might point out, is a form of humor dependent on abstract, higher brain functioning. I submit that reading dieting books may not be the most efficient way to achieve this lofty goal.

Jennifer Diane Reitz
UnicornJelly.com

With all due respect, Ms. Reitz, I must suggest that you're actually missing the point of the survey you're quoting. The study goes out of its way to avoid pigeonholing people into "literate" and "illiterate" categories, by providing a broad spectrum of ability classifications. Based on your numbers I'm guessing that you consider people in Class 1 and 2 illiterate, although most were listed as being able to perform "simple, routine tasks involving brief and uncomplicated texts and documents." This isn't the traditional definition of illiteracy. Furthermore, based on other information in the study, it's possible that many of these participants were simply in jobs where their literacy skills had atrophied to these levels. A corollary of this might be that given significant practice and motivation (say, a bitchin' new text-heavy RPG) these skills might be brought back up to par.

Let's look at this in the context of video games a bit more. Nearly all genres aside from RPGs would be playable to people with the abovementioned skills - even sports games with complex controls often have on-screen tutorials with graphics demonstrating what buttons to push for what actions. Heck, with voice acting, even MGS2 would be playable for an illiterate. As for RPGs proper, yes, there are some games that would be out of their reach... but not all. The traditional NES or SNES level game largely consisted of text boxes containing one or two sentences, and most of these statements could be ignored, since only a few were directly relevant to the plot or what the player should do next. Of course, an RPG is a pretty boring experience without the little asides that flesh out the game world, but I can't agree with your assertion that "gamers that prefer RPG games must, by the nature of what is required of the player, be more intellectually capable and advanced than 60% of the population of America".

Interlude: the literacy thing II
"This is the post-literate era folks, make no mistake about it."

AHHHHH! I hate it when people say this. It makes it seem as if there was some mythical "literate" age when duck farmers went around quoting Socrates and read obscure Greek writers in their spare time. We probably are more literate now than ever before, the only difference is that the no one used to expect the unwashed masses to dirty the hallowed halls of learning with their presence. Our expectations have been increased, which is a good thing. However, many people think that historically people were more learned than they are now, forgetting that the history books only showcase at the top two percent of the population which had the leisure time and resources to devote to study. The success of books like "Thin Thighs in 30 Days " and all those other bestsellers are indicative of the fact that literacy has finally reached the masses instead of just the elite. We have more leisure time and literacy (in developed countries) now than in any other historical age. In other words, we're living in the literate age now. I'm not saying that there isn't room for improvement, but don't look to the past to provide the blueprint for success.

Washington Irving , realizing that this is completely off topic and sounds vaguely like Marxist propaganda.

P.S. That thing about Princess Jemmy really depressed me. I like to live under the illusion that everything is sweetness and light within the sacred gates of the GIA. Thanks for shattering a poor innocent's dreams.

Well said... I suppose the "post-literate" comment is the result of a brief period during the 20th century when it was understood that everybody needed to be able to read to function in society, coupled with the realization shortly afterward that for many people, this was not, in fact, the case, any more than it had ever been.

As for Jemmy, well...

Interlude: the literacy thing III
Chris,

Jennifer Diane Reitz's argument that RPG players tend to, on the whole, be more intelligent than other gamers is invalidated not so much by her overstating illiteracy rates (the rate of functional illiteracy in this country is much lower, at about 28%, or 60+ million people), or by her statement that people buy mostly coffee table fodder (I find most contemporary novels light reading, for example, but that may or may not mean I'm a typical reader, that's all).

Where she does go wrong is in her underlying assumption that literacy, or knowing how to read, implies intellectual capability. Intellectual prowess may be correct, but intellectual capability certainly isn't. Many use the words 'intelligence' and 'knowledge' as if they were interchangeable, though they are not. It is possible to be an intelligent person and be functionally illiterate. Just because one has the potential for intellectual prowess, it does not mean that said person would be compelled to, or have the means to actualize said potential. If you would, literacy rates go pretty much hand in hand with relative poverty rates. Most people living in relative poverty (i.e., persons who barely earn enough to satisfy basic needs) are concentrated in urban areas; functional illiteracy also follows that pattern. I'm not going to argue that either caused the other (it's likely they're two results that obtain from the same cause).

What's more, I tend to agree with Drew that the preference towards reading text is just that, a preference, not a measure of intelligence per se. I've known plenty of people throughout college whose time was wholly absorbed in the fine arts. They were comparably as smart, if not smarter, than a literature-oriented crowd. Likewise, I know people who object to playing RPGs as a waste of time, preferring to read actual books instead, but have no qualms playing games in other genres.

Princess Jemmy

P.S.: I'm going to pretend you didn't call me a harridan, but only this once. >_<

Getting the boring stuff out of the way: true, but a few anomalous cases aside, it's not unreasonable to draw a (very) rough correlation between literacy and intelligence, all other factors being equal. My main beef is that simply being able to enjoy RPGs is far too limited a test for "more intelligent" or "less intelligent". However, I suppose that, were such a test needed, the ability to read and enjoy this column (and recognize me as the genius I am) would work just as well.

Second, I'd like to publicly apologize to Jemmy. My post yesterday was meant as a joke, seeing as how she'd written in to me for the first time in a long while, but she, and many of you, took it at face value, which is my fault. I've apologized to her in private (after which she was kind enough to even write in again), and now I'm doing it in public, and hopefully that'll be the end of it. Sorry again, madame.

Although if you feel a need to balance the scales even further, I guess I could yank the lever back hard the other way from yesterday: will you marry me, Jemmy?

Double edges swords, and why they clash with Japanese stuff
Mr. Jones -

The issue of character models is a bit of a double-edged sword, really. On the one hand, the level of detail we get nowadays is (surprise!) amazingly better than that of generations past, which means this: heroes get to look nifty! A picture's worth a thousand words, right? With modern character models, the designers' image of the character is presented immediately, and with a visual flair completely unavailable to 8-bit and 16-bit RPGs, and in many cases, even to modern PC games like Baldur's Gate and Diablo. I know a lot of detail was put into the creation of those characters, but they're so small on the screen, I feel much of it is lost. Not so with Tidus and Yuna: we may not know much more about them than what Square tells us, but we certainly know they're colorful and complex in design. While this might not be a pro in and of itself, detailed character design can add that third dimension to more archetypal characters, delineating them from the stereotypes they were born in. Of course, that runs the risk of making a new stereotype of its own, the Colorful Variation on a Traditional Theme. But maybe I'm just rambling.

The problems with character design, at least that I see, are twofold. First, as Tomb Raider shows us, a game can be developed around and make money solely off of a single character design, and I doubt that's a good thing. If games of this sort keep getting produced, I would guess it will be much harder to find games of greater substance, if only because of the larger pool to slog through. Second, there's the culture problem. Among many gamers I know, their seems to be a tendency prefer the distinctly "American" character design - muscled, square-jawed, the sort of guy you expect to see in action movies; more "Japanese" designs, whatever that may mean, are uniformly shunned. I won't even go into the issue of female character models, since I think they are mostly covered with my first point.

I think I've said all I'm going to say on that subject. Sorry for the sporadic letter; I can't have had more than five hours of sleep in the last three days.

Abundantly Obsequious,

Jason Love

Problem is, there is no "American" style in illustration or design. There's a fairly generic action hero type of design, the same way much Japanese animation has a baseline of "big eyes and interesting hair", but even within both camps there's a significant amount of diversity. And then we get into the question of what actually represents the culture in question...

Why American stuff sucks
Hey Chris,

I'm glad you bought this topic up, gives me another chance to dirt American art. Anyhow, just so you know, I'm an avid anime fan, an otaku--which I typo a while back and was sarcastically poke fun of by you for some reason--if you will, and thus, I tend to look down on American art as being vastly inferior. Now, I don't know if you may agree with me here when I say American art flatout sucks, but I've noticed that you, as an American person and a journalist, tend to be a bit bias toward Anime recently. Well such biases are perfectly understandable, but, frankly, uncall for. Let's be honest here, you know as well as I do that Americans can't draw damnit, and I'll even go so far as willing to bet an arm and a leg that if and when it comes down to what you'd prefer overall, I'll say it's a good chance you'd sway over the doujin manga pendulem rather than the crappyass, "The Uncanny X-men", or whatever the hell the current incarnation of that horrible series is now, am I right? Anyway, with this cynic art bashing and personal taste analyzing aside, my favorite character designer in a videogame/anime has to be, Kunihiko Tanaka--past work includes all time favorite Xenogears and some very obscure anime I'm sure no one has heard of outside of Japan. I tend to prefer his style due mainly to the fact that he can capture the emotion into his characters in a somewhat subtle fantasy but also realistic way. Well that about concludes this letter. Good day sir.

yours cruelly,
-Weltall, whose isn't sure if copying puns is considered infrinement

This is, frankly, nuts. Superhero comics are no more representative of "American art", or even American comic art, than Sailor Moon is of anime. Serious American comic artists range from Michael Zuli to Dan Clowes to Will Eisner to Art Spiegleman to Alex Ross, none of whom have a damn thing in common with each other stylistically. In comparison, an awful lot of Japanese manga does look very similar - there are several very noticeable exceptions, true (Amano being just one of them), and a lot gets said in the small details, but to an outsider, there's a definite homogeneity to the whole enterprise.

Note that I'm NOT arguing that one group is any better or worse than the other group, but it's just foolish to say that any group as a whole "sucks", and I'm certainly not showing any bias when I don't bow down before the obvious brilliance of all things Japanese.

All warm and squishy inside
Chris,

When I look at a chara design, the first thing that comes to my mind is the art itself. The art has to look remotely pleasing. When I looked at Nomura's art for FF7 and FF8 the first time it was nice, and it piqued my curiosity about the game. As seen by my reactions below:

First look at Cloud: Cute. Play game.
First Look at Squall: Even Cuter. Play game.
First look at Tidus: Run for life.

How in the world can I get excited about FF10 if Tidus freaks me out (never mind that I'm a girl; I have my prettyboy standards)?

Ever read Saga Frontier 2's Perfect Works? At the back of the book they had these big stylistic sketches that match the game's sprites: Big simple details with funky limbs. There's really no big determining factor for liking the chara designs; either it catches you the first time, or it grows onto you.

And Akihiko Yoshida's art style is the best, no question. One look at Sydney made me wait for the game.

And yes, we need stupid clothes like Ashley Riot's and Sydney's and the whole FFT cast. Last thing I want is my stupid-looking hero wearing overalls with bermuda shorts with hair that easily looks dyed.DMJ.

And here's one last point about character designs - people get emotionally attached to them. The standard image of this kind of behavior is some pathetic teenage guy getting all hot and bothered about Lara Croft or Tifa, but proportionally speaking girls are at least as attracted to Sydney or Vincent. And that's ok. I have my doubts about games that are entirely, or even strongly driven my how the characters look, but there's nothing wrong with having some characters look cute, or sexy, or badass, or whatever. Otherwise, what's the point of playing?

Closing Comments:

Between Ms. DMJ getting all hot and bothered for Sydney, and a topic suggestion I got in the mail today, I think it's time to bring this up: "gay and transgendered RPG characters", in the words of the writer in question. Not something I've thought a lot about, but stuff the bishounen style of many male characters suggests that it might have fairly widespread ramifications. And what the heck, I'll try anything once, so send in your thoughts. See you tomorrow.

-Chris Jones, No, I didn't mean I'd try that. Or that.

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