Rose Chapman walks with purpose, but not without fear. A quiet hero in video game developer Quantic Dream's Detroit: Become Human, from 2018, Rose is a farmer, a mother, and a woman who helps persecuted androids escape to Canada from the United States. She's also one of the few female characters in video games who is not straight size. Actor Dana Gourrier (The Greatest, Django Unchained), who performed the character, played her through her body only—no hair, no makeup, no wardrobe. On a motion-capture set, Gourrier had only her body and walk to rely on.
A lot of what you do in video games is walking, even outside the "walking simulator" genre, so getting this detail right is especially important. Also, it's immediately noticeable when something is off.
Gourrier flew to Paris to do the performance capture, where each morning, a makeup artist glued reflective dots to her face and Gourrier put on the mo-cap bodysuit. "Being a curvy girl in this world, I was supremely nervous to put the suit on, because it's a full-body suit," Gourrier recalls. "It has to be really tight; it's a fitted suit. I was so worried about how it was going to look."
But that fear lasted for only a few minutes, Gourrier tells Teen Vogue: "There's a job to be done," she says, "and they hired me for a reason."
Gourrier mastered the art of using her body to become Rose, embodying her character’s vulnerabilities and strengths with a nuanced performance—and she had the walk. Her performance, despite Rose not being one of the main playable characters, resonated with players. It may well have been the first time some players were a character with a bigger body and were treated with respect. Rose's body was simply her body, not a punchline or character flaw.
"I've never seen a character like mine," says Gourrier. "It's a rarity. It should be the biggest indicator or guidepost that so many people are moved by this one particular character. Why shouldn't there be more? Shouldn't [games] reflect the world around us?"
Video games are not known for showcasing body diversity. It's been eight years since Detroit: Become Human was released, and the number of female characters with fat bodies in video games is still exceptionally low. "Women characters in games are already underrepresented, and then fat women are almost completely missing," Todd Harper, associate professor at the University of Baltimore's simulation and digital entertainment program, tells Teen Vogue.
Of the 20 best-selling games of 2025, according to Circana, only five games have fat playable characters at all; and they're just options for the character creators in sports games, such as Madden NFL 26, EA Sports FC 26, NBA 2K2026, EA Sports College Football 26, and WWE2K 25. If you factor in the 10 top-rated games of 2025, as collated by Metacritic, this adds just one more larger body—and only if we're counting Donkey Kong.
The most progress toward body diversity has been made in character creators. Games like The Sims 4, Dragon's Dogma 2, and Starfield all allow players to choose from a range of body sizes. And some game studios have made an effort to include fat characters in their games, rather than solely relying only on a player's ability to make fat avatars in character-creation setups. Some playable characters from team-based shooters, like Overwatch's Mei or Marvel Rivals' Squirrel Girl, are a little thicker than the most common female body types in games.
“That might be as fat as women characters are allowed to be,” Harper says, speaking generally about bodies in games and not any particular character, "because the range of 'acceptable bodies' for women and femme characters is already so narrow."
There is often pushback, too, any time a character appears to be even slightly larger. For instance, when a sneak peek of Horizon Forbidden West was released before the game came out in 2022, certain segments of the gaming community were upset to see a rounder face for protagonist Aloy, despite her slim body, and called her "fat" and "ugly."
When video games do include fat characters, who are rarely playable, they're often relegated to secondary roles—sidekick, a source of comic relief, or an outright monstrous villain—the same way these roles are frequently shown in movies and television. One of the more egregious examples of this is the grotesque Darlene Fleischermacher from Capcom's Dead Rising 3: While riding a mobility scooter in stained clothing, Darlene gnaws on a turkey leg, burping and farting as she attacks, as writer Boarlord wrote in 2018. She chases the player around a buffet on her scooter; one of her attack moves, after charging the character with a boost of speed, is projectile vomiting. At the end of the fight, Darlene dies by choking on her own vomit, something that awards the player a “gluttonous” achievement.
More recently, in Capcom's Resident Evil: Requiem, fat bodies are synonymous with horror. One portion of the game features two brothers, naked except for stained boxer shorts, whose bodies can barely fit through the Rhodes Hill Chronic Care Center's doorways. They're called Chunks, and per their lore, they were disfigured in a medical treatment gone wrong. A procedure that was meant to "suppress the satiety center of the brain" instead caused excessively rapid weight gain. "The implication here is that the Jackson brothers were fat originally, sought medical help to change this, and got tortured and humiliated in return," Maddy Myers wrote in a piece published by feminist gaming site Mothership.
Over and over, the industry has made excuses, including that it's just too much work to make fat bodies in games (unless, apparently, the character is scary or fatness is shorthand for some sort of character flaw). Technology often takes the blame. In 2014, Insomniac Games founder and then-president Ted Price said as much when promoting Sunset Overdrive, a game marketed on the ability to "be anyone," unless you're fat. Insomniac Games made a game with a complex system for customizable hair, clothes, and faces, but body diversity is where Insomniac "chose to draw the line," Price told gaming website Kotaku.
There have been advancements in motion capture and animation technology since that game was released, but there's still little body-size diversity in games. In 2020, Battlestate Games, the maker of military shooter Escape From Tarkov, said something similar about women—another underrepresented group in games: "But there will be no playable female characters because of game lore and more importantly—the huge amount of work needed with animations, gear fitting, etc," the company posted to X from its official account.
In reality, though, it's not that fat people or women are harder to capture and create. Game development is hard, made up of myriad complex processes. Thin bodies are the norm, the starting point, and everything else is relegated to being extra work.
"It's not down to the technology," Alexander Counsell, University of Portsmouth's technical director of the Center for Creative and Immersive and Extended Reality and motion capture expert, says of game-design decision-making. "That's down to the people making the choices. Capture technology can capture the truth. What we do with that truth afterwards is where the problem lies with representation."
The video game industry is, indeed, in a difficult place. Video games take longer to make and are more expensive than ever. Thousands of developers have been laid off over the past several years, and dozens of studios have shuttered. There's little room for risk. Fatphobia is so deeply woven into culture and our games; Resident Evil: Requiem makes fatness into a horror story, or it’s something that just gets left out entirely, as with Sunset Overdrive. And that's just seen as normal.
"This is going to sound awful, but a part of me is like, ‘What reward do they have for positively or realistically portraying that character?’" Harper says. "I hate it, but I get it…. The people who pull all the switches and levers are like, 'Well, we have these body types. We can't feasibly do them all. Which do we cut?' They're going to pick the ones that are going to produce the most sales."
There's little interest in investing in things that are different, or on the fringes of what's acceptable, says actor Elizabeth Plant, who has voiced characters in The Forgotten City and Another Crab's Treasure. "There's such an inherent normalcy to thinness that makes anything else unacceptable, especially with the stakeholders."
This is a pervasive cycle that keeps roles like Gourrier's in Detroit: Become Human from being more than rare, and where creating and animating a grotesque, fat enemy is more reasonable than a female character whose thighs barely touch. Changing the conversation means creating more opportunities for actors of diverse body types, then treating those characters with respect.
Passive optical motion capture, which is the most commonly used way to capture movement, records a person's motions by tracking their skeleton. Actors wearing skintight suits, made of stretchy materials like spandex or neoprene, are dotted with reflective markers placed around their bodies, most notably on their joints. Motion capture sets are equipped with capture spaces called volumes, which have tons of cameras mounted all around—a full 360 degrees of infrared cameras, says motion capture specialist and Beyond Capture Studios founder Graham Qually.
"Those cameras blast out infrared light," he explains. "It bounces off those balls, goes back into the camera, and records them as 2D images. Then the cameras tell each other, I'm here, I'm there, and it reconstructs it into 3D dots, and that's when you actually see a person."
Animators, artists, and 3D riggers play different roles in translating an actor's skeletal movements into the animation of a character. The motion capture suits are intended to compress soft tissue to keep the markers in place, so that the skeleton is realized as accurately as possible. All humans have soft tissue, and, inevitably, the markers may move along with it. Everything that jiggles is added later, snapped onto the skeleton and its character.
Motion capture is used in video game cinematics, which are more like movies; and in-game, where players control movement. The motion capture experts who spoke to Teen Vogue say it doesn't matter what a performer looks like, that video game studios on a budget often use just a couple actors to depict several roles. More often than not, though, it's slimmer actors on motion capture sets.
It feels almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy: There are so few roles in video games for larger bodies, so there are fewer actors with that sort of experience. Then they have less experience because there are so few roles.
Victoria Atkin, an actor best known for her role as Evie in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, says when she teaches actors about performance capture, it's often "a very similar body type" that join her lessons. But it doesn't have to be that way. If you can run to catch a bus, you can do motion capture work, she says.
"Generally, if we put someone in a suit and in a space where the cameras are, we can capture their movement," Counsell notes. "The tech doesn't care…. In the most simplistic terms, you can drop the skeleton into the character, and the character can be anything."
Problems arise when there's a big difference in the skeleton of an actor and the body they're being tied to. Drop a short actor's skeleton into a tall character's body and you've got a "spatial problem," Counsell says. "A four-foot tall character takes five steps forward, they've traveled a few meters," he says. "A ten-foot tall character takes four steps forward, they've traveled tens of meters." A short character with an unnaturally long stride, or a tall character with tiny, fast steps, is just not going to look right.
It works the same with body size. But thin actors can, and do, play fat characters via a process called retargeting, which fits an actor's skeleton into a character that has different dimensions. What's lost there is the nuance of performance, says Plant: "I can spot a skinny girl in a ping-pong suit anywhere," she wrote on X last year.
"There's a physical difference between having a thigh gap and being a size 16," Plant says. "Even proportionately, I'm someone who has quite large hips and quite a large chest that really affects my posture. If I'm to walk [in a way that's considered upright] for someone who has a much smaller chest and isn't being weighed down by the force of a thousand suns, I feel like I'm going to fall over backwards."
Counsell explains that the process of transferring motion capture data into a character can be influenced by the data the software has been trained on. "Bias can creep in if the data is not trained with multiple body types," he explains. Say the actor playing a motion capture role has an amputated arm, Counsell says; unless software has been trained with diverse bodies, it might simply add in that arm when transferring the data. It's a similar issue for fat bodies, when software trained on thin bodies may require more work to get it right.
"The problem is that we assume [the default] has to be a lean, athletic body," says art director and character designer Loukia Kyriakidou, who has worked on games like Disney Illusion Island and Battletoads.
Iron Galaxy Studios, which released its now shuttered Rumbleverse in 2022, did it differently. The multiplayer brawler featured six diverse body types. Its fat male character, described as a "meatball-bellied champion," was a starting point when the team was experimenting with how different body types, clothes, and accessories would work, according to Iron Galaxy Studios character lead Steven Kosanovich at a Game Developers Conference (GDC) talk in 2023. It wasn't easy, Kosanovich also said in the talk, to make all the cosmetic items fit every body type. But it was a priority, and it made players feel seen. (Ultimately, Iron Galaxy Studios created an amalgamation of the different body types to make sure clothes and accessories fit.)
Kosanovich shared a message he said the team had received from a player during his GDC talk. "I recently started playing Rumbleverse and seeing all the body types made me so happy," the player said. "As a fat person, I hate how most character creators don't let you go beyond 'moderately chubby,' maybe. It makes me feel ostracized. So thank you and the team so much for giving me the option to make characters that reflect my body type."
Rumbleverse, which was free-to-play, shut down less than a year after its release date—but it wasn't because players weren't interested, according to former Iron Galaxy co-CEO Adam Boyes, who spoke on the video game podcast Kinda Funny Gamescast. Rumbleverse was downloaded at least 10 million times, he said, and the game maintained a "healthy" daily player base. But players weren't spending enough money on the in-game monetization, like subscription-based content passes or cosmetic items; there was no "path to profitability," Boyes explained.
Indie games are often where the most innovation in the industry comes from. As they're willing to try something new, it's where progress is most likely to be made. Not all indie studios, however, have the resources to use expensive technology like motion capture, but more and more are focused on creating unique characters—and that includes body size. "The people making the games are changing," Atkin says. "The grassroots of ‘who is training in this’ is changing."
Game studio Soft Not Weak, which released Spirit Swap: Lofi Beats to Match-3 To in 2025, made body diversity a core tenet of the game. Its characters' bodies (which are human-like despite being otherworldly) reflect reality, even when the characters have the colorful fantasy flair of witches and demons. Each character is memorable, carefully designed to shine within the joyful puzzle game. This approach seems to resonate with people, as the game doubled its Kickstarter goal of $75,000. The studio took care to create characters that made the team behind it feel seen, instead of relying on the stereotypes most video games cling to—and it worked.
"We're really doing a disservice to our audience. The same way that movies and magazines created problems for us, our generation, we’re perpetuating that," Kyriakidou says. "I don't want to make another teenager feel the way I was made to feel back in my day."
