I remember physically purchasing Boobielf at a store back in college. I was too embarrassed to make eye contact with the cashier. I'm a huge fan of digital downloads, because now I can buy games without looking like a massive dork.
It had me until it started talking about playing with celebrities. The ad that made me ask for a GBC for Christmas way back when I was 8 showed twin girls playing Pokemon Gold and Silver. I've looked, but I can't find it anywhere. Anyways, the fact that it actually showed girls (like me) playing video games was a big factor in me wanting it.
I think I'm more shocked at how pale she is more than anything else. These days it seems like bronzer is a given. Even in the expansion pack, the same character winds up getting slightly darker skin (and less clothes).
Did you also know that when women evolve (yeah we can do that like Pokemon), we lose clothing? (also lol @ "fight" typo)
At first glance I thought that bottom left corner girl's clothes were relatively decent. Then I noticed that her pants were see-through. *sigh* Hmmm, well there's relative degrees of "mattered". Having the choice at all matters a great deal to me as a player and makes me favourably inclined towards a game. Even more so if the game actually acknowledges my choice, i.e. not acting like I'm a dude with a female character model by doing stuff like focusing the camera on NPC T&A and having plot points that are very obviously designed with hetero guys in mind, like requiring me to seduce a temple maiden or something. The game I've played where your choice of gender made the most difference is Persona 3 Portable. It affects a lot of the non-main story content because your gender changes who you hang out with and form S.links with. However, I don't need such a drastic difference between genders when I play a video game. I just want my choice to play as a woman to be just as valid as if I had chosen to play as a man. I hate it when games give me a choice but then make it clear that male is the "default". It's alienating.
Different artists were used in all expansions released after Planes of Power (expansion #4, released in 2002). The example you give, Dragons of Norrath (expansion #9, released in 2005) was released many years after the artist, the late Keith Parkinson, had already moved on to co-found Sigil Games Online (along with a huge chunk of the original EQ team) and serve as art director for the game Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Keith Parkinson's Firiona Vie (and in fact her entire adventure party, if you follow the box art throughout the early expansions) remained largely unchanged (aside from thematic attire here and there) throughout the years he served as her artist (for the original game plus first four expansions). And given how utterly pale and white EverQuest High Elves/Koada'Dal were in general, his depiction of her was very much in line with the high elves of game lore (they being described as the very fair-skinned children of Tunare). Since his departure there's been a noticeable inconsistency with not only her presentation, but the quality of her depictions as well. I've been a fan of Keith Parkinson for almost two decades, since long before his work on EQ. He had a very distinct style that greatly appeals to me, so much so that I've spent hundreds of dollars collection various collections and productions of his work. If you enjoy EverQuest's box-art direction during those first several years, you might be doing yourself a favor by visiting the Keith Parkinson website, where his surviving family has put up for sale many of his original paintings, in addition to many giclee prints and posters: You can find the Keith Parkinson website here. Among my favorites are all the EverQuest box art for the original game (already posted above by someone else) & first two expansions (Kunark and Velious), The Druid Stone (Warning: classic skimpily-clothed female in fantasy setting) and Northwatch (dude on a dragon mount). Unfortunately, the site offers only a taste of his complete body of work, but it's still a pretty significant chunk, and there are still many good pieces there. Since people have been bringing up Firiona Vie (and classic EverQuest cleavage in general) in this particular thread, I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the time she was taken prisoner by the Iksar, for the EQ expansion the Ruins of Kunark.
There's something seriously wrong with the perspective in that last picture; boobielf is GIGANTIC relative to everyone else.
Very perceptive, but I'm sure you realize this is intentional. That image was created as box art first and foremost. What you're seeing was specifically designed as a three-panel fold-out for the expansion box, and custom tailored to leave just the right amount of room in all the right places for product information and other box markings. What the painting must sacrifice in the vertical, it must also add in the horizontal; which is almost certainly why is was necessary to toy with the perspective in order to best feature not only the entire cast and crew from the first two releases (FV and her party), but also the new Giant and Dragon races as well. Keith Parkinson applied the same techniques to his EverQuest box art that he learned while creating cover art (and other work) for the many fantasy novels, magazines and other media that featured him throughout the 80s and 90s. Here's how the front of the box looked:
Yes, now you can buy it without having to be embarrassed in front of the sales staff. Do we want to go down the "female characters in MMO advertising" route, because there are some very bad / stereotypical examples of lingerie armour... but I do think it kind of move away from the purpose of #1reasonwhy.
This reminds me of something I learned about myself while playing through some Dragon Age 2 DLC. I had to get a key from a dude, and after trying a couple of different ways to get it, you finally get down to two choices: Knock the dude out and take it, or seduce him and steal it. I learned that if I am playing a chick, if seduction is an option, I wrinkle my nose and do something else. If I am playing a dude, I cannot take his pants off fast enough. I don't know what is wrong with me.
"Wow, it's awfully cold in the snow, let me line what little clothing I have with fur, that'll fix it!" That said, I do like the art style, and I think she looks lovely with such fair skin.
Oh, is that what an anemic high elf looks like? Do you find that she looks unnatural compared to all the other High Elves/Koada'Dal of EQ lore? And what about the Dark Elves/Teir'Dal, does it bother you that their skin is so unnaturally blue, purple and onyx black (some of them have red eyes too, surely an indicator of another type of health problem all together)? Pining for a more human representation of these fantastical races? If you want deeper/more saturated flesh tones in your EQ elves you could also play a Wood Elf I guess, they always had a more earthy/woody hue to them.
Dat lion has his eyes on the prize. And by eyes on the prize I mean his eyes are locked in a death stare on those tits. Best of all? He's making this face in profile:
I don't agree, but then I married someone that same color. Actually the elf might have more of a tan.
Yeah, the tone looks fair to me but not excessively so. Incidentally, the guy farther in the background has the same skin colour.
I think you may have somehow wandered into the wrong thread by mistake, Kerzain. Contrary to what you apparently think, this is not the 'defend your favorite cheesecake artist to the death' thread, and it's kind of derailing and creepy. Could you cut that shit out, pretty please? And maybe not, you know, admiringly link to the pictures of girls in bikinis that you bought for your walls?
Yep, that's me, just a creepy bikini fan. Please return to the discussion that was at hand before I so creepily interjected, I think it was about the gradual change in flesh tones for "boobielf" or something. Tear that shit up.
God damn it, I forgot that existed. More damaging to women in gaming than the entire Imagine series. Kerzain, I respect your expertise in all things Firiona Vie but dude. I think you're actually demonstrating the problem here.
Then let's attack the problems I've demonstrated. To start, we'll get my creeper stuff out in the open and out of the way. I've demonstrated my twenty year admiration for (and limited knowledge of) a particular fantasy artist's work that was brought up here by going into some detail about how one of his more famous subjects was rendered throughout the years. This is an artist who was active from the early 80s on through to the mid 2000s, and one I discovered just after high school. As his style matured, his subjects did not. He was a fantasy artist through and through, and among his many varying subjects were also a significant number of scantily clad fantasy heroines; and since his job mainly consisted of painting to spec, it was his job to put-to-canvas all the characters and creatures his various employers would specifically describe to him for their book covers, game boxes, magazine layout, whatever. Because of the nature of his work, and because of the nature of the requests made of him, he was probably painting just as many scantily clad fantasy heroines up to the time of his death as he was nearly thirty years ago when he first entered the business. I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just saying it's what he did. Now, I have a small collection of his stuff, because I'm a fan of his style as it applies to almost all his work (not big on the sci-fi stuff), and also because of nostalgia. My collection includes four stand-alone prints/posters and a couple coffee table books that focus on his work. Most of these I purchased for myself, they being one of a dragon chasing a stage coach, one of a bunch of undead guys, and a giclee reproduction of the full three-panel Velious box art (linked above). Now, you'll notice the prominent display of half-naked women in the Velious artwork, but it wasn't the sex appeal of the elves and barbarian women that inspired the purchase, it's because of game nostalgia. I've always wanted to have at least one EQ box art print to hang on my wall, and I chose the Velious art because it seemed more epic than the original game box to me (and the colors were much less vibrant and better matched my office at the time), and I wasn't keen on plastering my wall with the whole S&M thing going on in the Kunark box art (linked above). Another downside to the Kunark box art is that the Iksar was the most dominant creature in that one, and I'm not a big fan of lizard people. The last poster I own is one my wife purchased for me back in our early years together in the late 90s, that one is The Druid Stone (also linked above). This one also features a woman in a bikini standing next to some sort of small dragon. it's one I described to her as being one of my favorites because it used to hang on the wall of a friend's game room. This particular guy was the friend that first introduced me to the world of D&D, and fantasy gaming in general. And The Druid Stone was one of a number of posters and such he had plastered all over his walls back during our gaming sessions. Though I haven't gamed with him in almost 17-18 years, I'll always remember how enthralled I was by the art on his walls, because his was my first introduction to any of this stuff. Up until I met him I thought elves were nothing more Santa's helpers, I had no idea what an Orc was (and even had my character try to eat one my first night gaming) and thought of D&D as nothing more than satan worship. The Druid Stone is certainly one of my favorites alright, but it's not because I'm sitting around masturbating to bikini women and dragons. As for the coffee table books I own, one is pencil sketches of Keith Parkinson's work throughout the years, and included in these sketches are not only bikini wearing women, but nudes as well. I've been known to extract pages from this book to hang on my game room and office walls, none of these have included any of the bikini shots or nude women yet, but I've been running out of pages over the years, so who knows what I'll hang up in the future. The other book I own is a collection of various book and magazine covers KP painted throughout his career, but I haven't extracted any pages from this one, as it was a bit pricier. Among its many subjects, it also contains the typical under-dressed woman here and there. But they aren't why I bought that book either. Okay, so we've established how and why I'm a creeper, now I'd like to tackle how I've further demonstrated the problem as you put it. I did this a couple ways, firstly by derailing the thread in the sense that I took the time to acknowledge my appreciation for both the artist and the game EverQuest when providing some background information to someone who had noted the stylistic differences between various incarnations of EQ's poster girl, I then kept derailing the thread by explaining away some of the design decisions for a particular piece of box art that looked odd to someone else, and finally I took the time to snark at someone making fun of some fantasy elf for not looking human enough. Secondly, and this one is probably most important, I failed to acknowledge the decades worth of sexualized representations of women not only in EQ's box art, but in Keith Parkinson's expanded portfolio as well. Though I took the time to share my appreciation for his work, and I took the time to explain away some of the questions and observations other members here had about some EQ artwork, I didn't take the time to explain what I liked so much about any of it, or why I appreciated it so much. This left a lot open to interpretation, and some folks obviously jumped to the conclusion it was all about something it wasn't. It's important to note that I never dismissed, diminished or rebutted anybody's opinion or concerns about the artwork as it specifically relates to it's thematic sexual suggestiveness either. I never defended it in this regard. The closest I came to acknowledging that debate at all was simply serving up the Kunark box art and pointing to it as being even worse. The fact that I didn't engage in a conversation about the misogynistic stuff specifically might paint me as nothing more than a shallow creeper-fan of boobs and snow bikinis to some folks, and to others it might paint me as the willfully uninvolved type who turns a blind eye to the real problems at hand simply because they might not affect me, or maybe it just painted me as a troll trying to yuck it up by admiring overtly sexualized depictions of women right in the face of those who have openly expressed their distaste for them; but none of that is true, and to suggest that it makes me part of the problem (or even creepy, if that's how you play the game) simply means I could have spent less time providing information dumps on peripheral topics touched on by others here, and more time directly engaging the primary topic at hand. The thing is, I actively try to avoid discussing the more sensitive type of stuff around here because I lose my cool too easily when things get heated, or don't go the way I like. Much like quatoria's tendency to forgo common decency in exchange for delivering personal insults and cruel innuendo when it suits him, I do exactly the same thing; and I don't like that about myself at all. So, in an effort to reduce this type of output, and because of my tendency to come off inappropriately in the delicate situations that tend to occur in threads like this, I've been following a personal rule to try and avoid getting too tangled up in the heavier topics, because it usually wouldn't be worth it for me or anybody else involved. But what this also means is I shouldn't join in and provide a bunch of background information on a tangential topic brought up almost 600 posts into a thread I have no plans to be a major player in. If anybody wants to discuss this stuff further, feel free to PM me and we'll all avoid derailing this thing even more.
I think you raise a really good point in that over the years the depiction of fantasy heroines used within the video games industry has not much progressed beyond scantily clad boobielfs in ludicrous bikini armor. You're also right in that this is a heritage of things like D&D and that style of male-dominated fantasy from 30-40 years ago. Perhaps some of what's hard to shift is generational - where the people who grew up consuming this stuff are now in their 40s and 50s, are in charge, and to them this simply is what women in fantasy (their fantasies, at least) are supposed to look like.
I don't think you're a shallow creeper, Kerzain - just that that specific discussion seemed disturbing and out of place in this thread, in specific. Was I a little harsh in saying that? Certainly - primarily, because I've seen so many conversations derailed, accidentally or intentionally, when talking about this particular subject. It's one that's very dear to my heart, and more important to me than you can possibly know. Can I be cruel and indecent? Sure, though mainly that's with the intention of making people laugh - but in this case, it was because I've seen this happen so many times that I just have no patience left for it, and watching the topic here drift into discussions of Firiona Vie - followed by full on aesthetic appreciation for cheesecake art, the same cheesecake that is omnipresent in fantasy worlds and frequently forced onto all female characters - the same art that can be so powerfully alienating, telling players that their enjoyment of the game is secondary to their function as aesthetic objects for male players - it made me see red. So I probably was a but more cruel than I had to be - but not without cause, I hope you'll understand. All the same, I appreciate you laying it on the table and being sincere about the thinking behind your posts, and your feelings here. That's a risky thing to do online, and I respect it. So, truce... and maybe let's not devote any more lines of text to this subject in this thread?
quatoria and kerzain Do the two of you specialize in pulverizing dead horses, or was this merely a fortuitous alignment of the massively boring with the agonizingly uninteresting?
vaguely on the girls as leads in games bit.. I have been on and off playing saints row 3, and though in many spots its quite obvious (because I have seen a good deal of the male story) that the female is just flat saying similar lines, it isn't always that way. The most sarcastic misogynistic comment I heard so far was made by my female lead about Shanni in a maid outfit. The male in that same situation just bumbles and tries not to get the argument to go further. I probably should hate the game for this , but I found it realistic. It is similar to jokes I have made to my own friends when they are already so pissed they can't see straight. The follow through has continued to be in jokes with the girl, the friendship with Pierce I think works better and overall I am enjoying being a bitch in that world.
