Zen and the Art of Boob Physics

If it seems like the videogame community has been especially preoccupied with breasts lately, that’s because we usually keep the thought of them suspended in a safe space somewhere between consciousness and inattention. It’s a delicate balance. Most of us—not excluding the young, male hormone machines that some people (e.g. game designers) anachronistically assume are the sine qua non of gaming—treat breasts much like the sun: A near-constant feature of experience that it’s dangerous to look directly into. It’s not so much that breasts have exerted a greater claim on our attention these past few weeks, as that fewer of us are so quick to look away.

That happened, in part, because of a Q&A in which two Square Enix designers, Nobuhiro Goto and Motomu Toriyama, tilted the balance away from inattention. In talking about the upcoming conclusion to the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy, they acknowledged increasing the cup size of the game’s female lead, Lightning, since her last appearance. From there, they went on to joke about engineering the physics of breasts, being even so solicitous as to recommend ways that players might trigger more jiggling.

That prompted Wired writer Chris Kohler to declare the death of the franchise, a position which stirred debate mostly by hanging a fig leaf on the cultural preoccupation. “It’s tough to see a path back to relevance for Final Fantasy,” he wrote, “if the caretakers of the series are spending their creative cycles thinking about the particulars of breast physics.” You could almost believe that a respectful depiction of women is a common criteria for judging the relevance of videogames.

The fact of the matter is that breast physics have been part of the creative cycle from the very moment consoles grew powerful enough to support polygon-based graphics. Nor is there anything necessarily wrong with the goal of making bodies behave onscreen much the same way that they behave in life. Designers spend comparable amounts of time making hair flow and trees sway, don’t they? What makes breast design problematic is that so much of what is done in the name of anatomical accuracy is transparently about marketing, which often results in bodies that behave noticeably different than they do in life.

Despite the transparency of it all, Lightning’s growth spurt would likely have ranked as little more than trivia had Goto and Suzuki been less forthright about their work. Their banter—conducted, naturally, as part of a promotional event—has drawn attention to a fact that clearly makes us uncomfortable: that professionals, usually men, sink appreciable amounts of time, effort and money into making videogame breasts work.

For its part, Square Enix has been paying designers to sculpt polygons into marketable boobs since at least Final Fantasy VII, and to much the same effect. There’s no particular reason we should expect the practice to suddenly bankrupt the franchise now. It isn’t as though there was any deliberate secrecy about it. If we’ve thought about it at all, then we’ve known the role boob design played in earlier installments. Yet it habitually slips our minds. That forgetfulness not only allows designers to continue treating breasts as a marketing feature; it has also allowed some of us to conveniently ignore how pervasive the practice really is, even in the case of studios thought to have elevated the medium.

The trick is to ignore breasts even as you dote upon them. To do that, you must learn to see them out of the corner of your eye, as it were.

That need for indirection may explain why games that altogether abandon subtlety seem to vex us more. Take, for example, the newly released Dragon’s Crown, a hybrid beat-’em-up/role-player that has commanded critical attention largely on the strength of the vibrant, distended manga style of George Kamitani’s art direction. The game’s playable characters are rendered in a number of ridiculous anatomical distortions, making them look like ’roided-up bodybuilders vamping in front of fun house mirrors. In the female characters, those distortions combine with suggestive posturing to impart a hyper-sexual quality that has stirred the game’s early reviewers to adopt tones that alternate between defensive and scolding.

Over at Paste, for example, Andrew Vanden Bossche asks, “Why did Vanillaware go out of its way to ensure many people would be uncomfortable playing their game?” The simple answer, already confirmed by Kamitani, is that the company wanted to make the game stand out in an already crowded field. Amping up the secondary sexual characteristics of its characters certainly accomplished that. With a character as aggressively buxom as Dragon Crown’s Sorceress, how are we supposed to suspend the idea of breasts in that studiously subliminal space in our minds?

“Obscenity must be mated with banality,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote in an essay about his best-known novel, Lolita. Pornography, he meant, depends on the directness of slang, on the commonality of vulgar euphemism, for its desired effect. By wedding psychology to aesthetic, Nabokov had written a novel where style frustrated the reader’s desire for titillation at nearly every turn. Lolita is a licentious novel, make no mistake, but its onanism is linguistic rather than pornographic—thus: “Lo-lee-ta: the top of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

Many readers threw the novel down in disgust, but as Nabokov would have it, the object of their disgust was its aesthetic rather than its plot. “Thus,” he explained, “in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust.” In that regard, the great virtue of a style (if you can call it virtue) is its ability to get the hell out of the way. That’s part of what’s so confounding about the sexual displays in Dragon’s Crown. The physiques are so preposterous that the player’s attention is drawn past the bodies, back to the style in which they’re rendered.

That, in turn, has confused our sense of what those displays achieve. “Dragon’s Crown wants to be sexy,” Bossche insists near the end of his review, but how does that square with the game’s eagerness to stand out by leaning against the borders of the player’s comfort zone? There’s no denying that the design embraces the clichés of fantasy role-play coquettishness, but it stretches them beyond sexy, right past the point of embarrassment. The question is whether we’re embarrassed by the risque imagery, or by the attention it draws to prevalence of sexual fantasy in the mainstream fantasy genre? What distinguishes Dragon’s Crown from its genre kin is not the way it dresses and poses its characters, but rather its indifference to an underlying pretense of physical realism.

After all, realism is a stylistic framework—one that lends itself to the sort of banality that Nabokov associates with pornography. Excepting the nostalgic visual style of its ninth installment, each successive Final Fantasy has pushed toward an increasingly realistic (albeit idealized) presentation of human bodies. Most of the time, that allows the designers to adjust their characters’ physical proportions without the need for justification; it allows players to enjoy the game’s sexiness without having to think much about it. That, at least, was the status quo that held right up until American sites reported on Goto’s and Toriyama’s Q&A.

By comparison, Dragon’s Crown defies you to take its characters’ anatomy for granted. For good or for ill, we’re more inclined to think about the significance of that anatomy precisely because the game won’t let us forget it.

I’m not claiming that Vanillaware set out to make us reconsider our collective relationship to videogame boobs, mind you—just that the stylistic assault they created would be a pretty clever tactic if they had. It is, in that way, the perverse, fan boy version of the strategy behind Jenn Frank’s Boobjam project. The idea there is promote a diversity of perspectives by encouraging the creation of small games that share a thematic focus on the subject of breasts.

Unsurprisingly, the project very quickly drew the ire of some gamers. “I find it in equal parts intriguing and galling,” Frank recently told The PA Report’s Ben Kuchera, “that the very idea of a ‘boob jam’ could in any way be interpreted as confrontational or otherwise rabble-rousing.” It is precisely that, though—less by inviting feminist perspectives to challenge the male gaze than because, like Dragon’s Crown and the publicizing of Square Enix’s boob agenda, games about breasts violate gaming’s tacit understanding that the best way to enjoy videogame boobs is from the corner of your eye.