I honestly don't think this kind of feature is harmful for anyone, unless your the kind of people who think video games is a mirror of real life like the people who though violent video games make people who play them violent too.
Personally, if I wanted to play an active, fat character in the game but it forced them to lose weight, I’d feel pretty irritated and judged, particularly if I were an active fat person in real life. I don’t think that’s equivalent to moral panics about violence in video games, particularly as (as far as I’m aware) there’s no evidence that playing violent video games causes violence, but there is evidence of the harmful effects of weight-related stigmas and the fact they often have the counterproductive effect of making people less likely to exercise or to lose weight. This feature would be about the game ruling out certain fat characters as invalid due to generalisations, and specifically fat characters that have positive traits. As I said, it would feel very like ruling out high strength female characters just because women on average aren’t as strong as men, and I would object
very strongly to that.
No one is going to debate that exercise and a healthy diet (alongside getting enough sleep, not drinking or taking drugs, staying off the roads, and tons of other stuff) are good for us, but if you read testimony from folks who experience fatphobia in real life, one thing that understandably gets their goat is that too often when a fat character appears in media their fatness is medicalised and/or the story becomes about weight and the need to lose it. Which of course is also what has happened in this thread. I think it’s totally reasonable for those folk to just want to play a fantasy game, or read a games forum, as a fat person without it feeling like it’s getting preachy about a healthy diet and active lifestyle. It’s not like anyone doesn’t know!
That’s one of the sensitivities I alluded to that we should be alive to and not trample over. My approach with stuff like this is always to seek out and listen to the folk who experience the prejudice in real life and try to understand their perspective, and where available (as it is in this case) read up on research that has been carried out on the topic, rather than assuming I can decide what is and isn’t harmful from my own experience when that isn’t relevant.
PS I do agree that there are sim type games where mechanics around diet and exercise would be in keeping with lots of similar mechanics for other attributes, and so not problematic unless done badly, but that’s not the context we’re dealing with here.
