It's no secret that most of us are concerned with our appearance.
Television and movies have always been at the front of this war on the plain. It's a known fact that newscasters, primarily women, are pressured into surgery to keep their youthful looks (and their jobs) for as long as possible. Many actors and actresses are similarly known for their nip/tuck excesses, with some going to outlandish lengths. It comes as no surprise, then, that in a medium where we're free to create the very people who act out our fantasies, we tend to create very pretty people. But really, that's not new. I fully understand the reasoning behind a Lara Croft or a Samus Aran, a way to attract the targeted market with raw sex appeal.
(Incidentally, hasn't Samus's disrobing become disenheartening as the franchise goes on? Initially a way to surprise the player and turn his perceptions around when it came to video game heroes, it's turned into a congratulatory pin-up for beating the game a certain way. The concept was well used in Zero Mission for the GBA as a twist, but aside from that exception... I get the feeling Samus's nobility has been slowly slipping.)
Back to the topic at hand: mascots and protagonists will often be created to be appealing, and that's an approach grounded in logic. One demographic finds it easier to identify with a character matching society's ideals more closely, while another demographic is glad to see someone they find personally attractive as their guide through the game. What gets to me, though, and what I'm seeing in increasing frequency, is the touching-up of characters to artificially improve their (albeit already artificial) image. This is no longer a character created for this purpose; it's a character finding itself altered to better serve someone else's interests, even if that person is the original creator.
Case in point: Elena Fisher, a supporting character in Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Originally a ponytailed brunette in earlier shots, she's recently been made over into a spikier-haired blonde with a slightly more feminine chin. It's possible they just wanted to mess around and adjust the character a bit, but I can't shake the feeling that for this to happen so far into the production cycle, there had to be some desire to make her match more closely the societal ideal of the female support role. I just find this a shame, considering how easy it is in the video game industry to inject some diversity. Especially when you realize how diverse the game playing public really is.
Something else that's bugging me far more is the inexplicable hairline regeneration of Kane and Lynch in Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. The early screenshots showed the two protagonists as heavily armed regular joes, for lack of a better term. Kane had a receding hairline and a bald spot, whereas Lynch had nothing on top, hair everywhere else. Even posters showed the pair as such. However, the closer we get to the release date, the more those follicles slowly creep back to their respective foreheads.
First Kane got some hairline love, while Lynch remained unchanged. At the E3 booth, however, Lynch had nearly returned to his youthful head of hair. I could understand if this was somehow linked to the in-game story, but somehow I doubt it.
Are we really this vain? Are we so fixated with our image that we can't in good conscience cast a good-looking woman when we can cast a bombshell, or let the player see a bald spot from a third person point of view? I'd like to know what went on behind the scenes, what course of events led to this progressive photoshopping of video game protagonists. Who made the decision? The developer or the publisher?
It's bad enough we're bombarded with unattainable ideals of beauty on television and in movies, but as video games take a turn for the realistic, I'd like to see more characters I can identify myself with. Where are the sensitive guys, the average men, the strong women and the good-natured girls next door? If my only choice is between an uberbuff macho man and an anorexic bimbo, the only button I'm likely to press is eject.