"He almost called it subversive. Then he realised as he was sitting there: no, that's exactly the attitude we're trying to dispel."

Games critic Jenn Frank is recalling an article covering the event she has organised – the Boobjam – an ongoing competition to make a game about breasts. The writer Ben Kuchera gave his feature the headline: "Why making games based on the experiences of half the world isn't subversive". But why would anyone think it subversive, for women to make creative works about their own bodies?

"What if you had to watch a sexy video game character also buy bras, cry softly when she can't find one that fits, and go in for mammograms," Frank mused on Twitter, back in July. This one thought, articulated, started a phenomenon: Frank's followers immediately welcomed the idea as a way to reclaim breasts from the straight male perspective. "It shouldn't be such a steep challenge," she says. "Which is why I think reactions from people who maybe feel left out or marginalised or angry or confronted by the Boobjam message are interesting. I hope I've gone out of my way to say that everybody is welcome just so long as it satisfies this one challenge."

I tell Frank I'm inspired by the variety of game suggestions she gets on Twitter, and that in another guise as a game maker I plan to make one about Wonder Woman forgetting to put a bra on in the morning. "There's so much here," she exclaims. "I can't believe how much is here: I'm surprised constantly by the tweets that I see or the emails that I receive. I don't even know who was first to hashtag Boobjam [on Twitter], but I finally started following the #Boobjam hashtag myself, and you could just take a peek at that and see what other people have announced they are working on."

She's right: just a cursory glance at the hashtag reveals a devlog for Grand Titons, 'a cross between metroid/mega man/another world/oddworld … and is a weird abstraction about being trans'. There are suggestions about a game where you figure out the best way to put on a bra, while Mike Bithell, maker of Thomas Was Alone, even speculated on a 'Bravissimo store waiting room awkwardness' simulator.

All these ideas, and yet breasts in games are often relegated to two little cherries on top of a violent masculine-coded pie. The Dead Or Alive series of games have whole physics systems dedicated to breasts, as do many fighting game series (Ivy and Taki from Soul Caliber, and Poison from Final Fight are key examples) and the God of War series has a main character who not only gets to ogle many breasts but also battles a woman whose breasts are literally mountains. Duke Nukem 3D had a part where you could spend money to see strippers flash you, and in the Japanese title Asura's Wrath, players can even earn an achievement for looking at the breasts of a serving girl.

Recently, the portrayal of a sorceress in fantasy role-playing game Dragon's Crown led to an argument between a writer at US game site, Kotaku, and the male artist at Atlus who had drawn her. Noting the character's very large, jiggling boobs, Jason Schreier suggested she seems, "designed to be ogled and leered at as a sexual object". The artist claimed to have exaggerated both the male and female models so that the visual design would stand out amid a crowded market of Tolkien-inspired fantasy titles.

Dragon’s Crown’s unrealistic depiction of a sorceress in the game

Tits happen

Jenn Frank then wrote an article to reclaim the subject:

Too much of the ongoing 'character design debate' seemingly hones in on what the breasts mean. I hate this. People, tits happen. My tits aren't 'communicating' anything. They're just fucking here, you know?

Claire Hosking has also written lucidly on this issue: "The implication that larger boobs are a liability to well-presented, deep characters makes me nervous because, well, how many stacked women get to have complex stories in popular media? I can think of Joan Holloway and …?"

Hosking goes on:

Video games have certainly fed the first part of the stereotype, that 'e-cup women are playthings', but wouldn't only giving empathetic roles to C-cup-or-less women just reinforce that? (It's also implying small-boobed women can't be objectified because they're insufficiently sexy. The beauty of this system is no one wins!) ...This is a call for better character design, better character criticism: Just as we should avoid establishing a new category of 'serious and therefore worthy' games, we should avoid establishing a new consensus on the body type of a deep woman. Every body type deserves to have a deep and nuanced parallel in gaming. And it's not enough that characters are seen as noble in spite of their bodies. Games if anything, so mechanically based on constructing the abilities of characters and allowing that to dictate their approach to the world, should understand that bodies aren't separate from characters. Growing up with a particular body interacts with a character's own personality to inform their destiny. That's something that's understood for male characters (it's a large part of Chief's story), but still patchy for female characters. For all I know, Lara was a talented gymnast whose dream of Olympic gold vanished when she grew into the wrong body type, and, sick of the side-eye she got for being too bouncy whenever she ran or danced or jumped, said: 'Fuck you all' and decided to use her talents to kick ass. And given how hard it is to navigate women's clothing choices to pick something that's attractive but not too sexy but still friendly but professional enough but not too expensive or I'll get bashed for vanity, and the sheer waste of time this takes up for me, if I had a choice I'd make like Cortana too.

"I wondered when it would happen," Frank says to me. "The Boobjam was finally discovered by an MRA (Men's Rights Activist) forum."

Poison, from the 1989 arcade game Final Fight. Image: Gamespress

Reversing straight-male rhetoric

A light suddenly comes on in my head: we are steeped in the old ways, the ways of classifying women's behaviours and bodies, attitudes that were solidified and compartmentalised in the Victorian era. The cultural conversation is dominated by a straight male rhetoric that suggests that the conversation about how women's bodies relate to sexuality should belong to men. Existing in western culture, you'd think men's desire for women is the only desire that exists: there is no gay desire, there is no women's desire for men, there is just breasts and how men can interact with them sexually. What breasts mean to men is all we ever talk about. My colleague Tom Hatfield complains of how he is forced to take part in this conversation unwillingly, as a straight male, by the video games he plays.

Why don't we listen to other perspectives?

Boobjam is about what boobs mean to everyone: especially to the people that rarely get a platform on which to participate in this conversation. Trans women and their relationship to breasts is a complex and important thing we never discuss: Anna Anthropy has submitted a game called **(o)(o)** to Boobjam, a game about what it is like to have sensitive nipples as a side-effect of taking oestrogen (music, aptly, by 'Nippleback'). Frank tells me she is making a 'Jenn Frank simulator', in which she investigates how to choose the most insulting comment about her sizeable rack to elicit the win state of having the character Jenn Frank, leave in tears.

"One thought I keep coming back to," Frank says to me, "is our overwillingness to overpolice even fictitious bodies. And straight men's overwillingness to do that, especially. And you see that in healthcare legislation … There was this wonderful viral YouTube commercial – it was an advertisement for a tampon delivery service specifically aimed to little girls."

"So in the YouTube comments, under this absolutely adorable video people who are mostly men, are calling the advert disgusting, and complaining that the little girl who narrates the ad doesn't look to be old enough to have her period. Which is astonishing to me that somebody would make that judgement, since the little girl is obviously somewhere between the ages of eight and 13. So we can't even stop ourselves from policing how young we think is too young to have a period … When a woman tries to tell another woman about her body, a man arrives to kind of mediate."

This trend of men co-opting the discussion on women's sexual health is political. It reaches into the upper echelons of US state legislature on healthcare. One Boobjam entry, The Curse, is a roleplaying game written in the Danish freeform style by US author Lizzie Stark – it's about BRCA mutation (a proponent of hereditary breast-ovarian cancer syndrome), hereditary illness, and preventative mastectomies. It is about having to negotiate health options.

Reality check

As Frank explains this Boobjam game to me, I express to her my worry: that should BRCA mutation be detected in a US citizen, the cost of having this monitored regularly by a doctor would be astronomical under US healthcare insurance. This game would not be easy to play, both the Lizzie Stark version and in reality. "Or go to a free clinic," Frank tells me. "But you know, we have this war on free or low-cost clinics because those are the ones that also provide birth control services and family planning services. And as soon as you say 'family planning' to anyone in the US, a significant portion of our population is immediately up in arms, because 'family planning' is code for an abortion. So there's no way to talk about the rest of women's health without …"

Frank sighs heavily.

"The US is very strange," she elaborates. "PCOS [polycystic ovary syndrome] affects 10% of all women of childbearing age: it's a significant and really very common problem. And the first best defence, any doctor will recommend, is birth control. But we are so accustomed to sexualising women's bodies that you can't even treat a legitimate collection of symptoms without people wanting to keep you away from birth control because you're obviously a slut. That's how much we sexualise the human body. I just want my hormones to be fixed … I've never had a prostate exam, but I'm not sure as soon as you walk through the door, someone says, 'So, you're sexually active?'"

Boobjam isn't about stifling anything, just broadening the conversation. Allowing people whose bodies these appendages really affect to be heard, and understood. Watching Texas state senator Wendy Davis's filibuster an anti-abortion bill for 12 hours in front of a whole room full of men really brought home the idea that women's bodies need more representation by women themselves. And traditionally that conversation is co-opted or ignored. Perhaps the first place we can try to address this is through creative works.

But there's still more inclusion to be welcomed: Frank also tells me that there is an interesting tack on Boobjam that she initially skirted, which was the issue of male boobs. "From the straight male faction, the question of gynecomastia as a possible subject of Boobjam … Increasingly I am feeling that this might be something that is more commonplace than I realised – that is something that is not culturally discussed. Now I'm just going on the record as: yes, that is absolutely a suitable subject, because there's a lot of overlap there, with gender dysphoria or discomfort with one's own body."

So there you go. Boobs for everybody, by everybody.



You can follow Boobjam's progress, and submit your own games on the website. Jenn Frank is also on Twitter here.