The Methodology
To enable that the research that is carried out is unbiased, I chose to select the most played female character from the top three most played PC Games in the time period of May and June 2017. As you can see from the image below, League of Legends, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft and Overwatch were top three in both months. I then visited a number of sites to determine whom the most played female character of these games were (from left to right in header image):
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft - Valeera Sanguinar (Rogue)
Overwatch - Mercy
League of Legends - Ahri
Overwatch - Mercy
League of Legends - Ahri
I then sourced images of these characters original skins to make it fair as two of the games (League of Legends & Overwatch) allow players to buy 'skins' to alter their characters appearance. Most of these skins tend to be more sexualised outfits than the characters original outfit This selection of three characters gives a range of outfits for female characters - the least hyper sexualised character for this selection is Mercy from Overwatch, whose original skin consists of a figure hugging armour, where as both Valeera's and Ahri's original skin are equally hyper-sexualised focusing attention on the charactes chest and legs.
As the main goal is to create a design solution for the video game industry which addresses the hyper sexualisation of female characters I feel that is is important to focus on the initial design over the colours used on the characters as these naturally have gender connotations associated with them. Therefore I aim to produce three sketches of each character, hyper sexualised, neutral and natural and will document these changes not only through the images themselves but also through a time lapse video as I alter and manipulate the appearance of the characters.
(Bolk, 2011)
Finding literature for this topic is not difficult; there are a plethora of articles and texts on the hyper-sexualisation of woman across a wide range of media; however, finding art that challenged this topic is difficult. If you were to search for fan art of these three character selected for this project you are more than likely to find a range of images that have been further hyper sexualised than the originals. However there is one artist who challenges the hyper sexualisation of female characters with satyrical art , Kevin Bolk. Bolk commented "I couldn't help but notice that in most of the ad material, the guys are all in heroic stances but Black Widow is almost always in an impractical, curved-spine "booty shot" pose." Through this realisation he created the parody art (shown above) of this promo art for the Avengers movie. Albeit, this address the hyper sexualisation of a female movie character; it is still relevant to include this a reference point within the process of creating the methodology for this mini project.
Glossary -
- Hyper-sexualisation - To make extremely sexual; to accentuate the sexuality of
- Skin - a graphic or audio file used to change the appearance of a game character.
- Fan Art - is artwork created by fans of a work of fiction and derived from a series character or other aspect of that work.