Dear Video Game Devs: If a species doesn’t lactate, you can’t give the females boobs. Mammals only.

— Minerva Zimmerman (@grumpymartian) November 14, 2012

Earlier today, I tweeted this. This actually garnered some comments about my “boobist” thinking.

I just want to set the record straight.

Boobs are awesome. They can be a pain (literally) to tote around one’s self, but I am firmly (perhaps jiggly?) in the pro-boob camp.

My complaint has to do with bad science and boredom. I am not suggesting we take out all boobs in games. I’d love to see more variety of boobs in games, sexualized male characters, and gender-neutral characters in games. I think sexy has its time and place, and I have no wish to do away with it. I am not a fan of games where stuff is done TO female characters rather than BY them, so I don’t play them. Likewise, if someone makes a sexy male vampire who gets nearly naked every time he transforms and the camera lovingly pans across his muscular thighs, I am not going to force brodudes to play it at gunpoint.

Much the way that most gamers want realistic physics in their games, I tend to want realistic biology even in mythical or alien species. There is a biological reason for boobs. That biology doesn’t make them less awesome, but there’s world-logic to them. If you break the world-logic by giving an avian species breasts, I want an in-game reason for it. Does that species undergo body modification for fun or profit because the universe is human-centric? That’s an interesting reason for non-mammalian species to have breasts.  There is a whole gigantic non-human world of species out there to draw upon for ideas.To simply make “breasts” the default for “female” is boring, not to mention LAZY game design.