Gritty Realism

‘To the extent that women have begun to appear in this shooter world, they do so as caricatures — with cartoonishly erotic bodies. The characteristic pose of Laura Croft from Eidos’s Tomb Raider is a straight-on view of her scowling face, skinny waist, pneumatic breasts, and two huge guns that she’s aiming directly at you. Like other female shooter games, such as Perfect Dark (Nintendo, 1999) and ONI (Bungie, 1999), the Tomb Raider series wants us to see the incredible buns and boobs, connected by a fragile Barbie waist, in motion’ (Lawrence and Jewett, The Myth of the American Superhero, p. 217).
Douglas Wilson