Why Fashion in (Most) Games Sucks, and Why You Should Care

[Music] I'm Victoria and welcome to my talk about why fashion and most games sucks and why you should care as far as I know there haven't been any in-depth talks about fashion in GDC so I'm trying to cram as much as I can in less than 30 minutes so if you think I've skimmed over anything please submit your own talks do your own discussions contribute other things I would love to just see more people talk about fashion in games and I would totally attend your GDC talk when you do it next year so a little bit about me before we start I'm Victoria I'm the community developer at Kitfox Games a little bit more about that later I previously worked on a ton of other games maybe fashion related maybe not fashion related things like Omen site be buffeted the mobile app episode and more I have been drinking a disgusting amount of bubble tea and I don't know why I put

that in there I just thought it'd be cool and I'm also half of a game development culture comic called peach buck comics and that's on Twitter you can also find me on Twitter at the V Tran all my shenanigans there yeah so a little bit about kit Fox kit Fox is a small independent studio in Montreal Canada where a team of eight we do a bunch of things but we've our most well known develop game that's out so far is called moon hunters it's a personality test RPG we're currently developing a game called boyfriend dungeon which is a dating simulator dungeon crawler mashup and we are yes it's it's beautiful please look it up and we are also publishing two games which is really exciting we're publishing them to steam one is six ages which is the spiritual successor to king of Dragon Pass and we're also publishing the legendary Dwarf Fortress 2 steam which is very exciting but yeah but we're here to talk about fashion and briefly I wanted to talk about why I thought it was a worthy topic though obviously if you are all

here you probably think so too but when I was a teen I was one of those really annoying kids that was determined not to be one of those girls I thought makeup was dumb I caring about your looks who's dumb anyone who cared about their hair was done you know it was it was a bad time we all judge teenage Victoria cool cool cake good we're moving on but secretly ours were sunk into playing every single boy world game the my scene games online the barbie games online doll makers what a time yes thank you what my gosh I look okay I'm not gonna get into it but I love dress-up games I love them so much and I hit it because I thought it seemed like a weird girly thing I shouldn't be caught doing and it wasn't cool in my mind for the reasons that I feel a lot of people have told me about which was there's a lot of games out there they're like yeah shooting and steel and eSports and whatever okay that didn't exist back then but anyways area

it like in reality though it was a way for me to frame my perception of myself and how I wanted to appear to the world and why and I feel somewhere along the way when these games were kind of popular we lost them like all too soon so right now games have typically been stuck in two major ways of thinking about play domination and force what I think fashion does for games is that it breathes in the power of expression and aesthetics how it explores a different type of play and how that affects players so I want to quickly go through a few definitions just to clarify some things I'm not here to necessarily talk about what good fashion is I think that's not a really accurate description of fashion but I want to talk more about how we've ignored it as a serious mechanic or information-rich piece of storytelling and fashion isn't just clothes this is closed and this is fashion and fashion doesn't mean high fashion right like all of this technically counts as

fashion I'm not here to talk about what good fashion is again it's we're not all fashion designers and I think that's okay you don't need to be one okay so now that I got that out of the way one question I got when I told people I was doing a talk about fashion was why and I get it but the reasons you should care about fashion is actually the reason it usually sucks so Bill Cunningham once a fashion columnist for the New York Times said that fashion is the armor to survive the reality of everyday life and I think that applies both online and offline in a real life context fashion matters more than you think even if you think you don't you don't care they do have significance right like skin friendly I would like all my clothes to be skin friendly I don't know what that means but I want it to be but I get it you know caring about clothes can sometimes seem really superficial great games continue and do exist and become hits without runway looks and that's fine but I think we

should consider new possibilities in games and why limit ourselves when games are one of the most exciting mediums out there all right so before I get to my first point pretend you're meeting this person for the first time BAM yes okay so if you don't know who that is which maybe I should have picked a less well-known character what opinions have you formed from that brief meeting right so it only takes about two seconds to form an opinion on a person or character and you can get a lot of information from it age sex socioeconomic status occupation personality and so on it's the first impression and to be honest is usually flawed but it's unavoidable nevertheless so for example regardless if you knew this character or not you can probably tell she's a doctor from the white coat except she isn't a doctor you're normally used to because her shoes are a little bit off it's very stylish but not really a doctor thing the black dress also kind of strange for a doctor and of

course the accessories so you're getting like a very very rebellious vibe about her and then this other character gives us a very different message sir she's probably a student judging from the skirt but the fact she's covered in tights and a turtleneck means she might be more conservative or you know obeys dress code if there is one so fashion can be seen as its own complex language it's codified it's meaningful its symbolic with different contexts and moods so the first reason we should care about it is that fashion really increases our understanding like it can call Bacchus or an era that you want to draw attention to describe the setting it's in make or break the that you've made it can send different signals deep and understanding of your world without having to rely on walls and walls and walls of text which I honestly hate in games and it can say like where's your character from what happened in their past if they've made it what they're doing now how do you denote a villain versus a hero what if you use clothes as an indication of something meaningful like a festival or a culture or a beloved childhood shirt

how can you basically tell their story clothes are clues to tell your players how to feel about characters so you need to maximize your two seconds and when things go right you create a world that is deeper and connects more with your player basically so when it goes wrong is when your fashion kind of lacks context in other words it's meaningless to me a lot of fashion and games falls under this they don't bring anything to the games and they don't make your character significant in design or feel in other words it's information poor fashion they're the kind of the moments that may go like what happened here like in this next slide don't I've practiced this talk for so long and I still can't figure out what it is right so if you don't know Rex here is a diver it doesn't look at like a diving outfit right like if I didn't tell you this you couldn't you can't get any sense of what this character is so again it's not even necessary that's bad with it's weird

boots and shorts and whatever else there is but it doesn't tell you really anything about it same for gel Valentine so she's supposed to be a cop and I know it's kind of an old game but like she's the main character but she doesn't look like one she's not memorable in any way and also just as a personal thing tube tops fall down not fun not a good outfit for zombies and then this is not the outfit you would expect post-apocalyptic and I understand it's themed but like like it doesn't like if I took this completely out of context and showed it to someone it doesn't make any sense excuse this bad photo of my sim that I took couldn't find it anywhere else but one of the things that really bothered me was in The Sims 3 which is supposed to emulate real life I didn't find fashion outfits that worked with me or like that I thought I would actually wear which seems strange for a game and again made it sort of pointless and of course I have to include something from Final Fantasy here the princess is a

particular pain point for me because her design could be good but she's like wearing a pink plastic napkin and it's like a Bluebell from the 2000s and it almost works for the you know character clash she is and what wet world she's in but it just kind of breaks you out of the world and it's like you hate consistency it's strange but even if we ignore how bad fashion provides nothing in games that they are part of it also takes away from it in fact they might counteract the mood or feel of the game providing a really drawing experience like there's been numerous times wherever I've had boss fights and I've been wearing a ridiculous costume and it didn't give me like kind of like deep sense of like doom or like anticipation because I was wearing like I don't know a chef's outfit but there was no pants I don't know I always so my next point has to do with how game and fashion has real-world meaning whether it's internal external fashion is personal expression and that expression has both individual and communal power so here's a study from

Kwan check foundry who interviewed gamers about their primary gaming motivations you'll see that for both women and non-binary people fantasy plays a huge role in what games they choose to play fantasy here is defined as being somewhat being someone or somewhere else and I argue fashion plays a huge role in this and fYI for men fantasy is the fourth highest motivation and this makes sense right you want to feel connected to the character you play the role you're in whatever you're doing you want to be able to express who you are or who you want to be in a fantasy context even if you're not playing yourself necessarily obviously this applies to many different games like Halo reaches customisation was wonderful where you could customize each piece of armor and when people first saw a peek at Halo 5 they kind of hated it or what I saw they hate they hated it it kind of looked like a plastic recoloring of various armor sets and you want to feel powerful in these games right you want to feel like you're the best at shooting things I suppose and clothes capture

that it matters to any type of gamer and personally it has effect on self-expression for me when I was too afraid to wear sexy outfits I would kind of wear them in games to explore how they made me feel did I actually like this did I want to dress more cute did I like more masculine clothes and did that make me feel more comfortable it's a powerful feeling that fashion gives and dressing up a character helps you aspire to something personally they give you a mission and incentive to explore that feeling off screen if you choose to so the personal aspect of fashion can go terribly awry because it is so personal due to the cultural meaning it's easy to mess it up sometimes even more so because the industry doesn't talk about clothes much so I don't necessarily think misuse of clothes comes from an ill attention or harmful mindset but if we're talking about why clothes matters can't ignore it yeah so of course I have to talk about

sexualized fashion I've come to actually have very complicated feelings about it by now and I recommend reading Maddy Meyers fantastic piece about the inexplicable sexiness of Ivy Valentine on Kotaku as she writes these outfits don't directly tell us anything about the characters wearing them sometimes they contradict the stories and personalities of the women in them and this is true and I'd love to see games move away from this she does mention reclaiming sexiness for ourselves so I find the problem with this is that it's hard to feel empowered when this is your option or whatever else right it's clear when a male character gets a perfectly acceptable costume for the context they're in well the female one is wearing the coverage equivalent of a band-aid or a belt I guess in this case to be clear sexiness isn't inherently bad but that doesn't mean it has to be used all the time or that it has to be used at all right it doesn't mean a sexy outfit it's the only way to show female empowerment I'm glad

you're liking this it was a fun time looking them up okay so that's kind of like the sexiness in terms of like self-inspection expression but another thing that can go wrong is that I need you to first imagine this world with me so this is another way fashion can be misused imagine with me a new world for a second where Americans are only ever shown where in cameo or the US flag in all forms of media fashion TV movies games you literally cannot do anything without seeing an American wearing the flag and like work through this with me it sounds funny right now but after years of depiction how bored how annoyed how dumb would this eventually look this is the simplest most reduced reductive way I can try to describe this and relate it to what I'm going to talk about clothes reflect culture and significance issues of culture approach appropriation go far beyond the games industry and diversity but that doesn't

mean we can't make a difference so get sensitivity readers hire diverse people for your project video games can be fun and power so I just really wanted to talk about this just using clothes as a means to really introduce your players or your fans to something new to something way beyond what we can normally do I really think that this makes a difference and I've seen a lot of things go wrong with it and that's why I think a great example of using fashion for cultural understanding is the geeky Bayou project this artist car lock has been reimagining Southeast Asian garment design for various clew movies and games her aim isn't to directly convert a character's clothing into local outfits but to express their personality their beliefs in history using textiles motifs and silhouettes she mentions that when the characters from existing sci-fi and fantasy titles are interpreted through

garments from the other side of the world issues of race and culture often emerge because the people creating them aren't from the culture and these designs are not only fun but they're a way to learn about the history behind traditional outfits especially for southeast southeast asia in this case which is often forgotten about in this way again clothes are significant and it's still videogames you can still have fun you can still credit people and have fun with it and you're allowed to learn things from other people alright so moving on fashion is business and marketing as a community manager I'm always looking for something that can hook in players hooks for video games are basically how you capture a player's attention and get them to want to learn more about your game and there's a lot of different kinds of things like art music description but overall it's an emotional attachment and fashion can do that for example I've never wanted to play League of Legends then I started seeing pictures of this all over my Twitter timeline and that's how I found

the pop stars music video unfortunately i've heard the artist wasn't treated great but at the time i legitimately spent an hour researching lore kDa and sent it to all of my friends and if you want to speak in business terms synergy and stocks and profits and stuff you can make lots of money on it right the strength you feel in videogames makes you want to embody the heroes you see whether that's online or offline and fashion is one of the best ways to do that and we want to get more physical about it Red Dead has a clothing line there's that cool thing between Final Fantasy and Louis Vuitton but not even that there's the whole thing about you know loot boxes and overwatch it's massive financial success with seasonal scale and skins I don't have time to get into the ethics of loot boxes so we're gonna move on from that but it's good business and it sucks because I feel like there's no fashion games or mechanics there are so many different ways we have learned to shoot

someone with various guns and I'm confused as to why now fashion games are mainly hidden behind microtransactions for mobile games which isn't to say they aren't fun to be clear but I'll talk about that later like there's not even a fashion game section on Steam I was trying to find some nothing comes up I'm just saying this is a whole market out there that someone can get in on just go into that but like even googling like triple-a shooters and that's a ton of results on Google fashion gets nothing I was really I was trying really hard to find some fashion games and the ones that do show up are web-based they're super old or again they're mobile but if we're trying to talk about mobile fashion games and things that are done right I do want to talk about love Niki so love Niki is has problems with its own depictions and certain respects but in another respect it's highly appealing and complex in its own way clothes can

be obtained via a story quests drops events shops and crafting and you can actually evolve your clothes which is the most satisfying feeling to me and you can get into style battles that kind of pit you against other players or AI and it's one of the most satisfying designs I've seen for fashion games and I'd love to see that more but where it really lacks in terms of fashion is Triple A games sure they're usually cosmetic which I totally support and it's totally fine but that doesn't mean we're nearing a point where we can't do more with it right integrating clothes as an actual mechanic could create a whole new world of gameplay the Hitman series has been one of the nice exceptions to this where agent 47 can sneak across using different costumes there's UKUSA zeros minigame featuring the hostess makeovers and stats but my point with this is that fashion games has been seen as a more feminine interest but I'd like to challenge that much like how many people have said they're not interested in dating Sims until boyfriend dungeon that we could develop a fashion game that tracks tons

of people and isn't hyper focused on one gender bottom line fashion is fun and it's games which is primarily fun so they kind of just go together and it's beautiful and it's a marriage so let's say you're just not stylistically minded which is totally fine I just want to recap kind of what we went over and also some things for improvement that I've seen other people do or that we've done so this is a recap for what games can do and what fashion can do for games the three main reasons we talked about fashion is that it's informative its expressive and provides fun keeping these in mind as you design characters work on customization choices or mechanics will help you think about what style brings to the table or how you want the player to feel in your game so for example this was the original design for one of the main dateable weapons in boyfriend dungeon looking at this what are his personality traits based on the clothes he wears and once you kind of

figure that out this is his redesign it's a very different feel even just from this right son so to kind of describe it his original character Direction was described as attractive long hair a little shallow owns a nightclub and we knew he worked out a lot so he kind of just gave him gym attire because you're like that's what people who work out wear please exercise it's very healthy but the problem with this is that it really gave the impression that his primary character trait was going to the gym and maybe that's not very fashionable especially if he owns a nightclub and kind of cares about that stuff so we revised it to be more in line with how he wanted the player to feel when they first met him right like how you feel when you first meet like the gym sunder versus shirtless leather jackets under is you know something different we think that leather jackets under is more brazenly flirty it's he's confident and he's interested in you and we think the new design is more effective at communicating that so another game that

kind of uses fashion as like a anchor is monster prom so I know they're two dating games but they're the two people that I mean one is our game monster prom dev let me talk about his game so thank you very much but cheers to them for sharing their design info with me monster prom has wild humor and a fantasy monster theme obviously which is great but their problem was that they still wanted it to feel grounded and real and close to young millennial everyday life so how they did that was through fashion it became their thematic anchor to really ground people to the theme and when you need to find style inspiration where can you go it's easy there's a whole bunch of people out there showing their personal style whereas on Instagram Pinterest YouTube lookbook etc and you can improve right so the monster prom team realized the three girls were always wearing shorts or skirts or dresses so it seemed like it was a bit limited in their fashion

design so they challenge themselves to research good DLC outfits and that's kind of how we got into this and there's other ways that you can do this right I highly recommend one day just looking at fashion shows it's great they play around with themes there's a treasure trove of inspirations pay attention and be curious about what certain clothes make the news wonder what you can do about the world of self-expression personality and culture and find new ways to celebrate art and of course another way you can learn to integrate fashion to games is hire more diverse developers more diverse team means more diverse options ideas and interests which interns and track attracts a more diverse audience so again overall to me fashion is excitement found through exploration and self-discovery it finds power and aesthetic appeal and fantasy and it's a whole new style of play worth doing well thanks

cool I don't know how much time we have for you we have five minutes for questions please go to the mic and ask questions if you have them if not I will be here sorry if that was not a photo no questions if you're shy it's okay I will be here hanging out oh is that hello yes I was wondering what you think a good idea would be for starting fashion games right as far as body image goes because obviously in the world of high fashion that is a lot of the place we could take inspiration from it's dominated by a certain body type and I was just wondering sort of what your thoughts are on that yeah there's actually a lot of fashion designers now who have started

to embrace like more full-bodied figures I suppose and there again I I would highly suggest looking on lookbook knew and in Instagram and there's so many fashion bloggers out there who just embrace like you know whatever body type they have and don't fit whatever like runway fashion and you can learn a lot from them and they are fantastic which is a better hiring question other wiser or designer running of washroom sorry can you repeat so which which is which is better the one option is a hiring of a strong design teacher okay okay yeah or designer learning mushroom learning about fostering yeah yeah a game designer sorry game designer learning about fashion learning about question

yeah okay um I mean honestly to be completely honest with you I don't know because no there's not enough games out there who have kind maybe tried doing that I think anyone can get into fashion or just dress or like learn about it if they're interested in it so if you have someone who's interested in it and wants to learn more about it I would say go with the game designer who's interested in fashion which which roles on the team would you normally think would would need this expertise like I said artists character designers everybody I mean not everybody but that'd be cool if they did I think what usually I've seen is important is that our art director is quite interested in it the creative director the creative lead I mean maybe this depends on each team because for Kitfox were quite small so it's really easy for us to communicate and for me personally like

I'm not technically a character designer but I love fashion so I'll look and I'll say how I feel about it but I would say probably at least the art director in the creative director thank you thank you overwatch and which is well known for its its monetization being around skins mm-hmm do you think the monetization of skins and of fashion limits the players ability to express themselves do you want to see less of that I mean personally I would like to see less of that I just like customizing my character however I want but there's so many layers to making money and profits and other things like that sorry not a great answer but anyways personally I think it does kind of limit it it gives you a you know it gives you that rush it gives you that excitement but I kind of just wish that we didn't have loot boxes for customization but

that's a whole other thing that I can't do but thank you to hear your thoughts on is something that we see a lot in games is future worlds being imagined and some of them result in really interesting and unique fashions like with things like Deus Ex and others often not so much and I was curious on your thoughts on basically imagining future fashion and how to address that yeah so there's so much about fashion is drawing inspiration from different things like Deus Ex looked gorgeous because it almost looks like an Alexander McQueen runway and there's fashion designers out there who basically create clothes that look super futuristic and kind of make worlds on their own with their clothes I want I would personally say if you're trying to create like a futuristic world and you're not really sure how you want it

to look one it's okay to make mistakes everyone makes mistakes but to just find those like fashion designs find the inspirations find inspiration in anything really that you can look around and but yeah I think that's probably why I just I personally feel like when I saw the Deus Ex clothes in particular that it was just perfect so do your research I would say hi how do you feel about the sort of balance between customization and immersion when it comes to creating the worlds that have a specific look and more importantly showing gameplay through clothing like does late-game armor need to look like late-game armor or do you think that customization should be more important so I mean it really depends so I'm part of it is that I think it depends on the kind of game you want

obviously but it doesn't I don't think it needs to really look like late-game armor if your game is basically so okay so let me try to frame this better so if your game is like it's the end of the world and now your late-game armor is like you looking all badass shooting stuff I don't know then maybe maybe that is what you want and you want to be able to customize it so that the player themselves feels like they're at their most powerful I think that would be really important and I I've seen a lot of games like do immersion and customization together like really well and you would probably want to look into that I can't really think of games now I'm gonna think about it and get back to you sorry I think about this yeah sorry I live in Japan and most of I mean some of the game you sure are from Japanese companies like your personage in oblate and so on and in Japan yeah we've got those games and there's a cosplay scenes and people go to cosplay shop and that's

a huge thing and they go to anime convention and they buy some goodies such nuts it's not just about games but about like a war ecosystem and says the Lolita I mean everything and I would like to know what was the situation in North America is it just about like fashion in games or is fashion also some things that could build some bridges and links between you know I don't know comics and you may among everything you know so just to repeat your question you're just asking your fashion can be a bridge between yeah yeah I think that like fashion is something offline and online right like that's why we love the merch that's why we love the t-shirts that's why we love dressing like cosplaying and all that so I think it can bridge understanding or just interest between people thank you thank you like how cuter clothes might have

less effective defensive options and I've been I've been in that boat before um honestly I don't I see I don't I don't want to say it's bad because I can see interesting things coming from it but maybe like you like in Diablo that I've played like your you can customize the how you want your clothes to look Diablo figure any way you can customize how your clothes looks even when you get the like you get the drops I think that it's difficult but I don't mind stats being attributed to clothes if that's important to you or if that's how you want to try to like make your game but I would love to still be able to customize it again because I think how the player feels in those clothes is

really important thank you unfortunately that's all the time we have we do have the breakout space across the hall if you would like to continue the conversation Thanks [Applause]