Like other forms of visual storytelling, narrative video games rely heavily on story characters to derive an emotional response from their audience. Visual artists have long tailored characters' physical appearances in order to manipulate audience perceptions and reinforce implicit personality traits as required by the narrative. Separately, clinical psychology research has demonstrated the existence of a culturally-conditioned attractiveness bias, indicating that the possession of physically attractive traits elicits ameliorative emotional responses within the mind of the beholder. Yet many of today's commercial video games fail to portray characters with classically attractive features, instead relying on sexually objectified depictions of the female form to appeal to the libidinousness of the male gamer demographic. This thesis proposes that undue hypersexualization of female video game characters impedes players' ability to form the empathetic connections essential to the cathartic experience that defines drama. Original character art is developed using clinically-identified principles of attractiveness, intended as a proof of concept for maximizing potential player empathy while deemphasizing the role of the female as sex object.
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