Looking for something new to try, I loaded up a trial version of the new MMO Wildstar and played around with the character creator. I didn’t get five minutes in before I had to quit from excessive sighing.
The character pictured above is a Mechari, which the game describes as: “a race of highly-efficient killing machines that make it their business to eliminate traitors and spies on Nexus. Sense of humor? Not one of their strong points”. However, while they may be ruthless, brutal, and efficient, they’re also apparently still bound be ridiculous notions of sexualization and beauty.
The Mechari females have an extreme hourglass figure, bizarrely large breasts, and they are apparently built with a stiletto high heel as part of their physical form. Remember, this “race” is a group of constructed robot enforcers. The Wildstar wiki defends these design choices within the narrative of the game as ones meant to be aesthetically pleasing to other races. I don’t know about you, but it would not matter one bit to me if the scary robot cop meant to enforce peace and destroy subversives was sexy or not. In fact, I think sexy would be pretty far from my thoughts about scary future robot cop enforcers.
Of course, Wildstar isn’t the only MMO to apply exaggerated versions of conventional beauty standards where they don’t necessarily make sense- World of Warcraft has given us sexy cows, dogs, and pandas; Elder Scrolls Online gave us sexy lizards and cats. And that’s what makes me sigh—in these fantasy worlds, worlds where designers can imagine literally any culture, any race, any history, we continually see the same bodies.
I actually think World of Warcraft has (recently) done a better job of this than most games. The Panderan race do actually look like they’re from the same species in terms of size and body composition (as compared to the Draenei), and the female models (while still certainly hourglass-shaped) are no where near as exaggerated as the Mechari from Wildstar, and even less exaggerated than other female models in Warcraft.
Nonetheless, I still wonder: why, in a realm of virtually infinite possibility, do we continue to remake the same bodies, over and over? Or, to put it another way, why on Earth (or Tamriel) do lizards need boobs?
