The success of the 2020 indie video game Hades owes much to the enthusiasm of its fans. Hades’ intense, fast-paced gameplay, which challenges players to complete multiple levels of rooms filled with dangerous monsters and bosses in a single life, undoubtedly played a role in the game’s popularity and critical acclaim. However, the reason the title has endured in the cultural landscape for so long is because we can’t get enough of its sexy, tasteful characters.
It looks like Hades 2, which centers on the princess of the underworld Melinoe, is following in the footsteps of its predecessor when it comes to character design. A recent livestream from developer and publisher Supergiant Games provided players with a first look at some of the characters that will be included in Hades 2. Screenshots of the character portraits—created by illustrator Jen Zee, who also worked on the original Hades—quickly made their way to the Hades forums on Reddit, and user comments echoed what many fans have no doubt noticed about the game beyond its recently revealed gameplay elements: these characters look hot.
The horniness in the gaming community is nothing new; it’s an industry that has a long and disappointing history of cashing in on fan service and bikini-clad girl games to attract customers. While that aspect of the industry still exists, the trend toward becoming a more mainstream hobby has led most big-name video games to take a less sleazy approach to sex. It also helps that the established player base for video games is now more openly diverse, and straight, white, cis men in their twenties and thirties are no longer the only demographic they’re targeting.
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While some video games simply avoid including sex or sensuality altogether, others take an approach that looks at sensual character design from a more thoughtful perspective. Even when artists and designers don’t intentionally design a character to be sensual, they can still end up having that effect on fans because attraction is so subjective. We all have at least one fictional character that most of society wouldn’t consider conventionally attractive, but then there are characters that make hundreds or even thousands of people go gaga over them—many of these characters are found in the Hades franchise.
It's an incredibly boring and heteronormative belief that characters need to have certain elements in order to be classified as attractive. A big reason Hades has become a series so associated with sexiness is that its character designs offer a wide variety of shades of attractiveness. There aren't just muscled guys and women with big boobs (although those appear, too). There are muscled women like Hecate, skinny men like Hypnos, fat men like Hephaestus, and even whatever the hell Chaos is.
For the most part, the board game industry's approach to sexy character design is either non-existent or Conan the Barbarian-style pulp.
Beyond the physical, Hades’ designs do a fantastic job of conveying aspects of each character that players can grow to love: Artemis’ honest smile, Nemesis’ confident gaze, and Selene’s serene gaze. I like Aphrodite not only because she has a plump figure, but also because she exudes a glorious femininity that I’m irresistibly drawn to, and I like Moros because I love stoic dad characters with long, shiny hair.
This tasteful, measured approach to sexy character design is something that’s been severely lacking in the tabletop gaming market. Fantasy has been a popular theme for tabletop games for a while now, ever since the 70s and 80s saw the rise of games like Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer, and HeroQuest. While it’s a popular theme for lighter adventure-style games, like Descent: Journeys in the Dark and Mice & Mystics, there are plenty of heavier strategy games that embrace a fantasy aesthetic, like Gloomhaven and Root. As it’s such a broad genre, fantasy styles in tabletop games can range from the adorable animal vibes of Everdell to the more traditional fantasy of Terra Mystica. However, there’s a clear difference between tabletop games that are clearly designed for a family audience and those aimed at an adult male audience.
At Dicebreaker, we often joke about the sheer number of crowdfunding campaigns for topless female miniatures on Kickstarter. If you scroll through the search results for games on Kickstarter, the number of campaigns there are for dead-eyed female miniatures with often comically exaggerated body shapes is mind-boggling. While the tabletop gaming space is generally a more welcoming space for people who aren’t straight cis men than the gaming community (especially in the diverse world of indie tabletop RPGs), it still has plenty of examples of games for which the intended audience is clearly no one but straight cis men. There’s a section of fantasy tabletop gaming that looks like this, the section occupied by games like Sword & Sorcery and 2015’s Kingdom Death: Monster, whose artwork and miniatures feature the classic bland busty female warriors that will no doubt put off most people who don’t have an unsavory view of women.
It seems the assumption that board games are a purely family pastime still lingers in the industry like a spectre.
In general, the tabletop gaming industry’s approach to sexy character design is either: nonexistent for the sake of a family-friendly or serious fantasy setting, or Conan the Barbarian-style pulp that’s incredibly unappealing to all but its narrow target audience. There’s no middle ground where a wide range of players can be drawn to genuinely sexy character design, à la Hades. The tabletop RPG industry absolutely fills this space, with titles like Monsterhearts and Thirsty Sword Lesbians putting their themes of sex and romance front and center through their artwork. Even TRPGs that aren’t as focused on romance and sex have artwork featuring attractive characters – I still remember Maddie and I looking at the artwork for the Borrowers-style TRPG Household because it featured men in beautiful road gear and women in glittering finery.
One major difference is that while the tabletop RPG industry has its larger studios (like D&D creator Wizards of the Coast, Pathfinder creator Paizo, and Star Trek Adventures publisher Modiphius), it is, for the most part, a community-first environment full of indie creators, many of whom are not straight, male, or cis. The tabletop industry has diversity in parts, particularly smaller, up-and-coming studios, but the kinds of companies making fantasy tabletop games are either respectable, family-friendly publishers like Disney’s Lorcana and Villainous creator Ravensburger or smaller outfits that rely on a straight, cis male audience to crowdfund their tit-fuck fantasy games. Where are the girls and gay guys making sexy, tasteful character designs for tabletop games? The closest thing I've seen in recent memory is Dance of Muses: a board game inspired by ancient Greek mythology that features beautiful illustrations of the Muses that frame their beauty and grace in a way that exudes a queer female gaze.
It seems the assumption that tabletop gaming is a purely family-friendly pastime still lingers around the industry like a spectre, to the point where anything attempting to provide an alternative either forgoes the inclusion of sexiness altogether or has to wade into that fetid swamp of being only for guys who like to play Dungeons & Dragons with their crowdfunded topless barbarian miniatures.
Some of us wish there were more board games with character designs that were clearly created by artists who get it, who understand that a compelling character is all about including those unforgettable, sumptuous details; those memorable markings that will make players of all kinds gravitate toward them. In other words, we need more artists like Hades' Jen Zee to be given the chance and the green light to run wild in the board game world.