I like sexy people of both genders, and I enjoy seeing them in my games. I just have what’s apparently a bit of an old-school idea of sexiness that prefers to leave some things to the imagination. I also prefer my characters to be awesome characters first, and sexy (if appropriate for the character) second. So, one day, tired of paper-thin female game characters wearing their underwear on the outside, I made a silly vow. I vowed that I would not play games in which I wasn’t able to put some damn pants (or reasonable-length dresses or skirts) on my characters.
Since I am a fan of Japanese RPGs, I did have to pay attention to what I was buying in order to keep my vow, and I have occasionally had to break it for review assignments. However, after about a year, I discovered something interesting. My vow to play characters who wear their underwear under their clothes caused me to play the year’s best RPGs and avoid the worst ones. I didn’t even have to read reviews! I just had to play the games that featured pants! After that first year, I decided to name it my “pants-on policy” and make it an official, permanent part of my game buying habits. I haven’t looked back since.
Marketers like to think that gamers are a bunch of drooling heterosexual dudes who will buy anything with breasts and butts hanging out of it. Although plenty of us are neither heterosexual nor dudes, and plenty of het men are totally over that kind of marketing, there’s definitely a certain demographic that falls for these tricks. Just ask the creators of Wartune, a bland ripoff of a game that experienced some notoriety and popularity a few years back with its particularly obnoxious nudie banner ads. Other games are at least honest enough to look the way they appear on the wrapper, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be any fun to play. Sometimes this is a real shame – the Hyperdimension Neptunia games have a great premise (game companies and consoles come to life as cute girls and skewer the industry) and some hilarious dialogue, but they just aren’t any fun to play. Their gratuitous “fanservice” is a band-aid over a complete failure to design compelling dungeons or combat systems. My pants-on policy helped me skip these games while my friends were disappointed.
Instead of being tricked by marketing, you could follow the pants-on policy and discover what I’ve learned – games that know that sexuality is about more than just taking off your clothes tend to be better games in general . If you do enjoy scantily-clad characters, it’s not like you can’t enjoy the best of both worlds, either. Many games present players with a variety of possible outfits and armor sets, some skimpy, some not. These games are allowed under the pants-on policy, because they respect their player base enough to present us with a choice about how we dress our characters. I’ve also found that they reflect a level of thoughtfulness on the part of their developers that leads to them being higher-quality games in general.
And yes, the pants-on policy is gender neutral, but I rarely have to worry about that. Games with male characters designed to appeal to women tend to dress them fairly modestly, with only the occasional impossible 12-pack to show for nude appeal. The sole exception I’ve run into is Demon’s Gaze (pictured above), which includes pantsless male and female characters throughout. I played it because it was assigned to me for review, and I found a game with serious balance and pacing issues. It could have been an excellent dungeon-crawler if it had a bit more time in the oven to refine its systems, but instead we got a purely average game with a story focused on everybody’s panties – I think of it as the Piers Anthony novel of video gaming. Had I not played it for my job, my pants-on policy would have triumphed yet again.
Why am I trumpeting this pants-on policy? Because we deserve better. When games get sexy, it shouldn’t be at the expense of gameplay. I feel like my policy draws attention to the fact that the crassest forms of sexuality usually cover up bad games. Games that dress their characters appropriately for battle have a higher chance of being quality games, even when they include the opportunity for characters to pursue sexual relationships and include nude or partially-nude scenes. I also find those games far sexier than the ones that say, “tee hee, boobies!” but refuse to actually address sexual topics. So give the pants-on policy a try. You just might find that you waste less money on bad games – and you’ll be helping tell developers that you’re not willing to be tricked anymore.