In South Korea, “conventional” beauty is an aspiration, an ideal, a destination above all else. Want a good career? It’ll come with good looks. Applying for a job? You might be required to submit a headshot first, a practice that has only recently ended for public jobs. Its vibrant cosmetics industry markets beauty products toward children who aren’t even old enough to read. Advertisements for plastic surgery are everywhere and are not subtle about what’s “ugly.” So now we have Eve, the player character of the latest PlayStation 5 exclusive game being released April 26. She is a woman born from South Korea’s culture and philosophy. Her presentation, slender and shiny, has caused discussion in U.S. games press over objectification and the “male gaze.”
The discourse has been uncomfortable for me to hear, because on one hand, of course Korean standards of beauty are rigid and often absurd. Hundreds of thousands of Korean women took to the streets during “Escape the Corset,” a protest begun in 2018 against social structures that demand women serve “traditional” roles. My friend Elise Hu, who worked at NPR in Korea for four years, wrote a whole book about navigating “the most cosmetically advanced nation on Earth” (as Washington Post critic Becca Rothfeld put it). On the other hand, these are our unique struggles to address, and I’ve despised seeing a project from people who look and sound like my family used as a cudgel in a culture war that has nothing to do with this game. It’s awful to see Eve used as an argument against diversity, and it was disturbing when an IGN France article (which they apologized for later) said “Stellar Blade” looked like it was made by people who never met a woman, never mind that the studio is staffed with many women.
Game director Kim Hyung-tae has paid attention to the debates, and tells me he’s not surprised, especially since modern video games focus on realistic depictions of people. But Eve is meant to be a character whose expression of beauty is “with little restrictions and no constraints.”
“The game is a virtual reality, and I believe we need to have opportunities to see things not so realistic in the virtual space,” Kim said via an interpreter. “We’re already familiar with reality, we live in it. So when you play a game, I want to be able to see something that’s different from what I experience. There are many things more realistic, and that should also be respected. And I feel games like ‘Stellar Blade’ should exist.”
I think the discourse is missing that it’s exceptionally rare in the global games market to see a video game with a Korean woman as its lead. Kim confirms to me that he defines Eve as a Korean woman, one that’s designed by Koreans, modeled after a Korean woman, voiced by a Korean woman and in a Korean-made game backed by a gorgeous soundtrack (by master composer Keiichi Okabe of “Nier” fame) with Korean lyrics. She is Korean-coded in every sense that phrase could mean, and Kim is well aware that she represents only a singular, narrow definition of beauty.
“By taking this game to players, there is an opportunity for me to present to the world how Korean beauty and Asian beauty can be different, how Asians differ from each other,” Kim said, referring to a global games industry mostly dominated by Japan and the United States.
The discourse has especially been frustrating because “Stellar Blade” is a fantastic, if flawed, first attempt by the studio to…
This article was originally published by a www.washingtonpost.com . Read the Original article here. .
