This week saw the publication of two sharp pieces on the casual sexism of much of video gaming culture. At Kotaku, LaToya Peterson responds to comments a Comic Con panel titled “East Meets West, Art Direction for a Worldwide Audience” in “The Tits Have It: Sexism, Character Design, and the Role of Women in Created Worlds.” And, at PAX Valkyrie, Nicole Leffel writes about the disappointment of not only sitting through a deeply sexist, objectifying discussion on game design, but watching as her male friends — and assumed allies — fail to intervene. The piece, titled, “No Flat Girls: How Allies are Born” has gained Leffel, herself a game designer, a fair amount of hate mail.

There is resonance between the pieces, both of which engage directly with what has come to be one of the distinguishing characteristics of women game characters: breast size. In the incident Leffel recounts, a male college student says he selects playable characters based on breast size:

Yeah, I mean, it’s all about the bouncing, right? Like huge tits everywhere. … Jiggle factor, y’know? The number one rule of game design!

His personal preference is translated into a guiding principle of game design.

Peterson’s piece is a response to comments from established game designer Jonathan Jacques-Bellêtete. While Jacques-Bellêtete is less interested in “huge tits everywhere,” he stresses a need to “always trying to have very beautiful female characters.” (He goes on to talk about breast size in game design.) And, as Peterson recounts, for the designer, this means including female characters that look like women he would find sexually attractive. Peterson’s summary of the principle embedded in this line of thinking is scathing:

And there it was, the truth about character design that so many players know but most designers wouldn’t usually articulate: most of the egregiously sexist character designs are based on fuckability, rather than playability.

The prevalence of this demand — that female characters be “fuckable” before all other things is disturbing and disheartening. It demands a violence of representational exclusion and encourages the wanton objectification and dismissal of women, not only as gamers, but as people. This representational violence is especially noticeable in the case of black women characters. Peterson manages to count five playable black women in video gaming, four if you’re unwilling to count a reflection.

Leffel’s piece has been met with much hostility — much of it from men who insist she should have spoken up for herself, that she wanted only to be rescued, not acknowledging that the conversation she recounts had already made clear that those engaged would be more than willing to dismiss her and her concerns.This kind of hostility is propagated and implicitly approved by the kind of thinking Peterson points to as so exclusionary and abhorrent.

I do not want to suggest that sexism in video gaming begins and ends with game design; there are numerous factors that contribute to sexism in gaming and in geek culture. The dearth of women working in the industry, and the insistence that gaming is and has always been a male enclave — even in the face of industry statistics that argue otherwise — certainly contribute. And, none of these things happen in a historical vacuum; indeed, the impetus for my own study of the history of gaming culture came from wondering how gaming culture had become so male and how that maleness had been naturalized.

But, the wantonness with which designers both established (as in Peterson’s story) and aspirant (as in Leffel’s) engage in the objectification of women is disappointing, even in the context of a culture so rife with casual sexism. It also speaks to why increasing the number of women– particularly women of color — working in the game industry, and raising the visibility of those women is critical. The imaginative potential male fantasy worlds, as seen through the characters created for games, seems to be clearly lacking.