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The portrayal of female characters in video games represents something of a dichotomy. On the one hand, any increase in the active role of female characters is an improvement over the early days in which virtual females were literally nothing but part of the game's 'eye candy', cheering bikini girls or princesses fit only to be rescued. On the other hand, anyone familiar with video gaming knows that the the typical pixelated woman is like a 16-year-old's wet dream come true. The improbable proportions, the bee-stung lips, the outfits that hover on the quantum boundary of respectability. If Bloodrayne or Lara Croft is more than just a pretty face, it's clear that a great deal of effort has gone into making the face - and everything that goes below it - graphically appealing (pun intended).

Samus Aran, heroine of Nintendo's blockbuster sci fi adventure series Metroid, goes a long way toward illustrating this dichotomy. In later editions of the series, Nintendo has made much of Samus as a 'strong female heroine', subtly feminizing the cut of her power-armour and showing facial details and reflections through the helmet's trademark T-shaped visor while maintaining a tasteful portrayal. In the original Metroid however, Samus was just as sexless and burly as any Mario or Simon Belmont - unless the player finished the game with a 100% score, in which case he was 'rewarded' with a shot of an unexpectedly sexy Samus, stripped of her armour and poured into an obligatory 8-bit bikini. In the same way, game designers in attempting to build the prominence and involvement of female characters have often merely painted the same patriarchal assumptions in a much broader palette (with much more detailed rendering).

Why is this? The basic answer is simple, and as old a humanity itself: 'sex sells'. Part of it, of course, is that video game developers have traditionally targeted their product primarily towards the demographics of adolescent boys. This has its roots in the development of gaming culture, which revolved around groups of teenage (and later rejuvenile) computer whiz kids, overwhelmingly male, with few social skills and a stake in proving their masculinity; but also in the attitudes of society towards video games as a meaningless diversion fit only for adolescent boys. Girls have traditionally been a marginal part of the gaming community, and much of this is attributable to the reflexive sexism of gamer culture and its ingrained masculine values (though this is changing,

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