In Fable 2, my character got real fat, real fast. It turns out that fattening food, in Fable 2, is plentiful and inexpensive and no one really explains to you how you're supposed to keep yourself slim and trim. It's a pretty clever encapsulation of real-world obesity problems, actually, and while I was somewhat rankled that I wasn't burning fat by doing all this exercise - you know, all these three-day journeys on foot, all that troll-slaying, that stuff - I really had no one to blame but myself for getting my character fat. The foods that fatten you are pretty clearly labeled, once you know what to look for, and the foods that slim you - just celery, it seems - are likewise easy to spot.

This is why thou art fat

It didn't help that, early in the game, I had realized that my default equipment lowered my "attractiveness" stat considerably. Lacking any other clothing at the time, I decided to maximize those stats by stripping my, ahem, female avatar down to her skivvies and basically leaving her that way for the entire game. Once, after I'd gotten pretty hefty, I considered buying new clothes, but the nearest store only carried these sort of Victorian-style dresses and powdered wigs... and can I just say? That stuff is godawful.

Look at that nonsense

It certainly didn't flatter the considerable carriage of my avatar, and by that time I'd grown sufficiently comfortable with my unfortunate physique that I decided to ride out the rest of the game in underwear as I slowly tried to slim down.

It's one thing to select a female avatar and make her run around bare-ass. I'm hardly the first guy to do that, and Fable 2 is hardly the first game to permit it. But the genius of Fable is the way it creates investment in the avatar's body. When I first started playing, she was just another person on the screen. Same as Mario, same as Cloud. She didn't become my character until the game started trying to take her identity away from me. I wanted to be a slim, athletic adventurer, and as soon as Fable 2 started holding me responsible for all the damn pie I was eating, suddenly I didn't have the body I wanted anymore. Over time I came to accept that I had this body because of the choices I made, and, given the option, I refused to cover it up.

By that time, I'd long since passed the point where you could accuse me of keeping my avatar naked because I wanted to ogle her. I was not a good-looking woman by that point, and if I'd wanted to maximize my aesthetic enjoyment, it would have been easy enough to cover myself up or start a new, pie-free playthrough. I kept myself naked as a reminder of the body I wanted to achieve.

As it happens, the thing that inspired me to finally play Fable 2 was an article on Gamasutra, written by a guy who complained that using long-range weapons made his (female) avatar increase in height. A dubious correlation, to be sure, but that wasn't his point of contention. According to him, he grew self-conscious about the way his avatar towered over even the tallest NPCs, going so far as to say that being this tall, as a woman, made him uglier, and lessened his enjoyment of the game. He didn't seem to realize - or appreciate, in any case - that the game was forcing him to wrestle with something some actual women have to come to terms with - something that real life would never force him to confront. That is the unique power of games. It's one thing to, say, watch a movie about a woman who's unhappy with her body. It's quite another to look at a character on the screen and say, That is my body and I am unhappy with it.

So did I go into Fable 2 anticipating that it would provide me with an ersatz understanding of what it's like to be a woman with body issues? Well, not really. I knew I'd end up being a tall chick, but that's not really off-putting for me. Becoming overweight, however, caught me off-guard and gave me an experience no other game has. Few games approach that level of depth and agency when it comes to the player's avatar, and while the Fable games may not be everything their players - or their creator - dreamed they might be, they're still unique and worthwhile.