RE5 Dev - "We're not sexualizing Sheva or doing anything sleazy with her"

[Queasy]

In an interview with MTV Multiplayer, RE5 Cinematic Director Jim Sonzero stated that they weren't trying to sexualize or do anything sleazy with the well-formed co-op character Sheva.

MTV Multiplayer: How much did you decide to focus on Sheva? I feel like a lot of games, not just ?Resident Evil 5,? have a focus on specific female body parts. How does that come about? My editor noticed in the first cut scene there was a lingering shot on her butt. Is that just a fan service thing?

Sonzero: I think I was very careful to make sure everything that we dealt with was in good taste. I had no interest in making her sleazy, and there is no sexual relationship between her and Chris. They?re both soldiers. They?re hot as hell, but we don?t play it up. He never does anything to insinuate or make any lecherous remarks toward her, and the camera is never gratuitous or sleazy; she?s just the hot chick with a gun and she kicks ass. There is that one scene where she enters the frame and you see her hips come into the frame, but I don?t think there?s anymore than that. I thought it was a cool shot and a cool way to reveal her. There?s nothing that is overly sexualized with her.

Kotaku just put up pictures of an unlockable costume for Sheva...jungle bikini and body paint. Completely not sexual.

 

[Kabob]

Originally posted by: Queasy
They?re hot as hell, but we don?t play it up.

"They"??? Hrm...

I will say, she's a well arrayed set of pixels but come on...jungle bikini? Yeah, totally non-sleazy.

 

[nakedfrog]

What, guys? It just provides maximum cooling and freedom of movement!

 

[Kabob]

And what happens when your random co-op partner is a horny 13 year old who won't stop staring at your character long enough to fight...

 

[Xcobra]

Originally posted by: kabob983
And what happens when your random co-op partner is a horny 13 year old who won't stop staring at your character long enough to fight...

Mature rating FTW...

 

[herkulease]

RE5 must be trying to push GTA aside or something.

Racism and exploiting women. waiting on the NAACP and NOW

 

[Ackmed]

Anyone who thought it was racist to start with was crazy.

 

[Newbian]

Originally posted by: kabob983
And what happens when your random co-op partner is a horny 13 year old who won't stop staring at your character long enough to fight...

Find better people to play with but then again age won't matter if it's a male or a lesbian. 😉

 

[Kabob]

Originally posted by: Newbian

Originally posted by: kabob983
And what happens when your random co-op partner is a horny 13 year old who won't stop staring at your character long enough to fight...

Find better people to play with but then again age won't matter if it's a male or a lesbian. 😉

"Durnit Jenny, I picked a girl to play with so you wouldn't have this problem!"

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: kabob983

Originally posted by: Queasy
They?re hot as hell, but we don?t play it up.

"They"??? Hrm...

Of course. In the early 1990s the video game industry began a dramatic shift in its representations of normative gender identities. Women, once the "damsel in distress" virtusous princess, now appeared with slender waists, full, pouting lips, a "come hither" stare and breasts that could float the Titanic. Men were increasingly portrayed, not as overweight mustachioed plumbers, but hulking masses of muscle with more firepower than all the ordinance deployed in World War 2 spouting off catchphrases that would make Schwarzenegger say, "you guys are overdoing it."

And it worked. Tomb Raider and Duke Nukem were enormous, and helped cement the idea that gender portrayals from an adolescent male fantasy were a great moneymaking tool for the video game industry. Which isn't hard to believe; video games are largely designed by men for men. It is an industry that has always been dominated by males. So it's no surprise that a masculine fantasy of giant, muscular men and hyper-sexualized women would emerge.

To hear a video game executive say that these characters are hot is not surprising in the least. They're supposed to be. They're the ideal. The male audience that Resident Evil is typically targeted towards wants to imagine themselves in the role of a fit, attractive young soldier, not some overweight, bald loser. They want to see an attractive woman running around half-naked kicking ass, not some frumpy, middle-aged woman. Video games, like all media, show us the ideal, the unattainable; they offer an escape from reality, not a reenforcement of it. That heteronormative gender patterns about the ideal from a male perspective happen to emerge is predictable. And, let's face it, awesome. Who doesn't want to see a hot chick in a leopard print bikini killing zombies?

 

[erwos]

Um, no. The (probably sexist) portrayals of men and women that Atomic Playboy describes pre-date the early 1990s. Take, for example, the TSR Gold Box games, which feature rather scantily-clad women both on the boxes and in renderings in the games. Hell, Apple II games could probably lay claim to the same, except their in-game graphics weren't even detailed enough to render such images.

In fact, I would argue that pencil & paper RPGs started the trend of hyper-sexualization with regards to gaming. Ever dig out old AD&D books? Let's just say the men are men, the women are women, and the succubi were fantastically-proportioned and stark naked. I think Tomb Raider is often pointed out as emblematic of the problem because it was one of the first "real" 3D-accelerated games and had a large-breasted woman in it, but pinning the hyper-sexualization of games on Lara Croft is giving her more credit than she deserves.

And, really, our society has always hyper-sexualized everything anyways. It was inevitable for it to go to gaming, just as it came to books (bodice-ripper romances), music (some rap), and TV (Playboy channel!). Soon, it becomes relatively accepted, and that's that.

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
That heteronormative gender patterns about the ideal from a male perspective happen to emerge is predictable. And, let's face it, awesome. Who doesn't want to see a hot chick in a leopard print bikini killing zombies?

Hence, Onechanbara: Bikini Zombie Slayers 😀

 

[RyanPaulShaffer]

Jill > Ada > Claire > Rebecca > Sheva

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: erwos
Um, no. The (probably sexist) portrayals of men and women that Atomic Playboy describes pre-date the early 1990s. Take, for example, the TSR Gold Box games, which feature rather scantily-clad women both on the boxes and in renderings in the games. Hell, Apple II games could probably lay claim to the same, except their in-game graphics weren't even detailed enough to render such images.

In fact, I would argue that pencil & paper RPGs started the trend of hyper-sexualization with regards to gaming. Ever dig out old AD&D books? Let's just say the men are men, the women are women, and the succubi were fantastically-proportioned and stark naked. I think Tomb Raider is often pointed out as emblematic of the problem because it was one of the first "real" 3D-accelerated games and had a large-breasted woman in it, but pinning the hyper-sexualization of games on Lara Croft is giving her more credit than she deserves.

And, really, our society has always hyper-sexualized everything anyways. It was inevitable for it to go to gaming, just as it came to books (bodice-ripper romances), music (some rap), and TV (Playboy channel!). Soon, it becomes relatively accepted, and that's that.

To a certain extent, that's true. Hell, prior to that Japanese rape game, Custer's Revenge was the standard for "holy ****, I can't believe they did that" in a video game, and that was back in 1982. But the thing that really drove the sexualization of video game heroines (and really just females in games in general) was the rise of American publishers.

If you recall your video game history, after the great video game crash of 1983, American publishers went bankrupt, and largely got out of video games. It was Nintendo, the Japanese company, that single-handedly resurrected gaming with the NES in 1985. And Nintendo's portrayals of women were anything but sexual; Princess Peach, Princess Zelda, Samus Aran (sure, she was scantily clad at the very end, but through most of the game she's assumed to be a man in battle armor). Sexualization started occurring at the tail end of the 80s and the early 90s when Sega became a genuine competitor to Nintendo by trying to push a more "adult" image. But it was largely the American game publishers designing this image; Eidos, Midway, EA, Activision, Acclaim, 3DRealms, etc. Sega's version of cool was a trash-talking hedgehog; it was Digital Pictures who produced the sexualized "Night Trap" (a game that ended up sparking a controversy so big it wound up in front of Congress).

So yes, the sexualized portrayals of women in games began with the first representations of characters in video games back the early 1980s. But through most of the 80s, while the games were dominated by the Japanese, these portrayals all but disappeared. It was the rise of American publishers in the 90s that saw the resurgence of these hetronormative gender identities (something found across all American media).

 

[Industrial]

We'll it's working for me. I feel some uncontrolled urge to buy RE5, and I don't even like the series. Played for 5-10 minutes in RE1 and 3 (?) and never really cared. But RE5 with Sheva! Oh yes, here's my $60.

But seriously, when I played the demo, I thought she was hot! This is not coming from some hormonal raged wet dreaming teen speaking (that was over 15 years ago) 😱

I think I even got some perv kicks when I kept having Chris call her "Come here!" "Come here!" "Come here!" "Come here!" and she's "ok" "ok" "ok" "ok" "ok"

LOL

 

[Kabob]

Originally posted by: RyanPaulShaffer
Jill > Sheva > Ada > Claire > Rebecca

Fixed. Sheva is pretty cool, Jill will always be the greatest, didn't care much for the others.

Question though, when did Jil become a ninja-skilled blonde? She had short brown hair in the first games...

 

[erwos]

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
So yes, the sexualized portrayals of women in games began with the first representations of characters in video games back the early 1980s. But through most of the 80s, while the games were dominated by the Japanese, these portrayals all but disappeared. It was the rise of American publishers in the 90s that saw the resurgence of these hetronormative gender identities (something found across all American media).

First of all, your attachment to the word "heteronormative" is becoming increasingly funny to me.

Second, you're missing the key point that the newly-revived console game industry was almost entirely dominated by Nintendo until the Tomb Raider time frame of the early 90's. Well, if Nintendo's running the show and they say no sex in their games, there's not going to be sex in video games, period. As an academic point, the existence of unlicensed strip poker games is also telling of demand not met.

Third, it's also probably more appropriate to say that the PC gaming industry was broadly dormant from the crash to mid-to-late 80s more than there was very little hypersexualized content for the platform. And, when it did come back, who did we get? Good ol' Leisure Suit Larry, courtesy of Al Lowe. Fascinatingly enough, when was Sierra's last big adult game? Softporn Adventure in 1981, same time as the gaming crash. I rest my case.

 

[oznerol]

You both need to get laid.

 

[Piuc2020]

Originally posted by: ducci
You both need to get laid.

It never fails, the "cool guy" comment.

:roll:

 

[Atomic Playboy]

Originally posted by: erwos

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
So yes, the sexualized portrayals of women in games began with the first representations of characters in video games back the early 1980s. But through most of the 80s, while the games were dominated by the Japanese, these portrayals all but disappeared. It was the rise of American publishers in the 90s that saw the resurgence of these hetronormative gender identities (something found across all American media).

First of all, your attachment to the word "heteronormative" is becoming increasingly funny to me.

Second, you're missing the key point that the newly-revived console game industry was almost entirely dominated by Nintendo until the Tomb Raider time frame of the early 90's. Well, if Nintendo's running the show and they say no sex in their games, there's not going to be sex in video games, period. As an academic point, the existence of unlicensed strip poker games is also telling of demand not met.

Third, it's also probably more appropriate to say that the PC gaming industry was broadly dormant from the crash to mid-to-late 80s more than there was very little hypersexualized content for the platform. And, when it did come back, who did we get? Good ol' Leisure Suit Larry, courtesy of Al Lowe. Fascinatingly enough, when was Sierra's last big adult game? Softporn Adventure in 1981, same time as the gaming crash. I rest my case.

I think we're arguing the exact same point, so I don't really understand your tone as though you're somehow proving me wrong... I think we both are in agreement that Nintendo was the dominant force of videogames throughout the mid-80s through the early 90s, and that they discouraged the sexualization of female characters within their games and the games that appeared on their consoles. I think we agree that it has largely been American production companies and American consumers who have driven the development of the sexualized female characters in video games, similar to all other media forms within our society. I think we can agree that the PC gaming movement was centered almost exclusively in America, while console gaming was ruled by Japan in the mid-80s through 90s, which helps explain the difference in the titles developed for the PC versus consoles in this time.

I don't actually see where we're disagreeing with each other.

 

[Auryg]

Actually he's right with the "they're hot" comment; I'm sure Chris Redfield is supposed to be the supremely manly looking man. It's entertainment - would all of the characters Tom Cruise has played necessarily been good looking guys if the movies were real stories? No, but it makes it more entertaining to watch, and the same goes for videogames.

 

[RaiderJ]

Well, if I had to nitpick, a special forces babe in a bikini would have way more muscle development, which I think is better anyway. Athletic chicks are hot!

 

[Industrial]

Oh nice! I was finally able to click the Kotaku link in Queasy's first post since I'm only on the forums at work, but Kotaku is blocked there.

Very hot and she's got a cute face without that bimbo ditzy look. My only disappointment is those sandals!! Grrrgghhh, silver gladiator heeled sandals? Come on, what a way to ruin the whole jungle outfit.

 

[Kabob]

I've unlocked all the outfits for the characters now...both of Sheva's are kinda ghey, Chris' original STARS outfit works I guess but the other is equally stupid.

Kinda of a pointless addition to the game IMHO, but hey I guess you can't have it all.

Originally posted by: Atomic Playboy
Men were increasingly portrayed, not as overweight mustachioed plumbers, but hulking masses of muscle with more firepower than all the ordinance deployed in World War 2 spouting off catchphrases that would make Schwarzenegger say, "you guys are overdoing it."

I agree, I really liked how "normally" proportioned Leon was in RE4 much more than the behemoth that is Chris in RE5.

 

[swanysto]

Women are portrayed as sex objects because that is what sells. Who wants to see mediocre looking women in a game? The other guys were right, it was always popular to an extent back in the 80's and 90's, but like everything else, the line between ok and not ok was much thinner. It really wasn't till the mid to late 90's when EVERYTHING started to get more risque. Games, ads, everything was starting to show more skin.

I don't see a problem with this. As long as men are infatuated with the female body, it will be used.