Feminism is the idea that female video game characters can kick a lot of ass.

Women and gaming is something I'm very, very interested in. I love to see women in front, in, and behind games. This is quickly becoming much more normal, but the stereotype that videogames are just for boys is going to persist for a long time.

There aren't that many games with female leads, but they run the gamut from acceptable (Faith in Mirror's Edge), to questionable (Lara Croft in Tomb Raider), to downright offensive (Princess Peach).

I just finished playing Mirror's Edge for the third time. I was struck be how well the female half of our race was portrayed. Faith is the game's main character, a "runner". Runners deliver packages in the locked-down dystopian future by running them over rooftops. This is because all other channels of communication are surveilled.

Faith is not a stereotype in any way. She's strong, and strong-willed. She doesn't have enormous breasts. In fact, she's not sexualized in any way. She doesn't even have a love interest. The story of the game is simple. Faith is trying to rescue her sister, who was framed for the murder of a prominent politician. That's it. No being rescued by men, no whining, no unrealistic bodily proportions.

*spoiler alert* The finale of the game has Faith rescuing her sister from a crashing helicopter. It's pretty moving because it's something you rarely see in gaming. No epic world-saving, just a woman rescuing her sister. If the character was male, you wouldn't think anything of it. By simply making the character female, it's pointing out all the expectation women are saddled with before things even begin.

I saw this a couple years ago and it made me furious. An asian reader on Kotaku adjusted the image of Faith (above), to this:

The reasoning given for this "adjustment" was that Western developers tend to define Asian beauty from their own perspective, and not from an Asian one. That argument seems fine for about 2 seconds, and then you wonder why a character has to be designed by ANY standards of beauty. Why does this female character need to be sexualized? Why can't her body simply be the tool she needs to perform her goals effectively? Hanging from ledges might be a little difficult with those huge boobs.

I was livid when I saw this. The developers made a very deliberate effort to downplay physical beauty and avoid inexplicably sexualizing the character (the story never calls for it), and here a fan tries to undo that progress completely. One step forward, two steps back, huh?

The original article that had me so hot and bothered.